A Child of the En-Witching Moon

Welcome again to my teachings, if this is your first encounter with my work,you should start at the first post and then proceed at your own pace chronologically through the subsequent. Should you reach this point, you will be the first; accepting of course my acolyte who dutifully commits my thoughts to computer.

I am communicating the decades of wisdom I have acquired, through a recount of an investigation of a haunted house in the North of England, during the summer of 2010.

Before I resume my instructional recount I must first wish my disciples a belated happy Yule. I have had access to a computer but not to my acolyte, who generously allowed me to stay at his home whilst he and his young family guested with relatives. I could not alas, manage to work the internet on his computer, preventing communication with all save those attuned to the realms psychic. However, the wheel of the year turns once again, my acolyte is back home and I am once again resting under assorted local roofs. I shall continue my narration of the events of last summer starting with some direct spirit communication I experienced in the cavern below the graveyard adjoining the house:

‘Feel it sir! Apprehend the freezing touch, it saps your still-respiring matter; this demonic touch, it ascends my sir, from the sucking marsh, the bloated bog whose mud and carrion-brood feast upon the dead, whose swollen forms flop into its grasp...’

A kindred spirit, I mused, as the voice splattered around me. A fleeting impression of slick, white flesh loomed at the corner of my eye and then swirled away again. I knew instinctively that an image of the presence whose despair lingered here, underground and the house above, was forming.

The wind now rattled the bones blocking the far side of the cavern with greater vigour and moaned into the unseen, dripping space beyond.

‘That which howls on the storm, which claws from the winds, that which clogs the flooding waters prior to their drainage into the bowels of the earth, that I heard sir, even whist it lingered at my very shoulder; when in the house of God, I heard the dead below us, speaking of the demon which haunted the wastes and the waters and I knew they spoke of that which now haunted me!’

The moan of the wind beyond the bones took on the quality of a discordant choir and the pulse formed from the passage of my blood and of the dripping in the cavern beyond the bones, became the time struck by a solitary, solemn drummer.

It appeared Aquinas sensed something as he inclined his head, listening and then edged toward the seated skeleton. Noz was also moving behind the stones but neither seemed to apprehend the voice of the spirit.

‘Yet I prepared myself, I endeavoured to protect myself and my family; faith alas, was a fortitude that would not prove impervious; although my will was strengthened by repugnance at the horror which hurled itself on the western winds to hang from the eaves and scratch at the masonry of our home, I had not the power of the Saints of Old; Hilary banished a demon but I could only repel it, binding it into the emptiness on the margins of our world. It lingers there still, adjacent to the world but not within it, this child of the en-witching moon and the frowning skies, growling and pawing to be readmitted to the world which bore it...’

The voice now creaked at my ear, whilst the wind from the deeper caverns grew into a shriek until its passage through the bones became a multitude of voices crying in anguish. Again, I saw the pallid shape, its slick, flaccid face gaping in frenzied animation.

‘It was a son of begrudging, vengeful nature, like any son made flesh it was subject to the vile drives of physical existence...’

The spirit was circling toward me, dishevelled hair and moustaches furring the looming face from which unblinking eyes bulged. I was then aware of Aquinas exclaiming and angling toward the heap of bones, where several small shadows seemed to emerge and rise slowly, as if on fragile, tottering legs.

‘Any son made flesh...’ I repeated to myself. The anxiety, dread and pangs of despair which had dogged me since entering this place where now divorced from my awareness and I could commune freely with this entity.

‘Flesh is sin, dead flesh will keep it bound, dead flesh, best that of the near-living, fresh blood that leaks yet...’ the voice spat at my ears.

The shadows took on a withered, featureless quality, as if sacks of dried skin lurched toward us, although they occupied only the periphery of my awareness for the pulse within and without me now thundered, seemingly echoing through the spaces behind us and below.

‘It comes; the dead have never been enough, blood will be required...’

Again the pallid speaker was glimpsed although this time Aquinas’ sweating torso lurched toward me as he filmed. Irritation flared within me and the voice spat again, ‘blood!’
The rhythm of my own blood echoed from the space beyond the bones and I focused upon its leap and descent. In answer, the image of the Goddess appeared again before me and I thanked Her for her return to my consciousness. I bowed before her, offering my blood to spill and congeal across the folds of leathery flesh with their thick, matted hairs.

The bloated body of the spirit now emerged fully into view, replacing the skeleton in the chair. Fully realised, held in the expansion and retraction of the pulse, I saw slick folds of skin mapped by blue veins and gorged by raw trenches; its dead face did not move as the voice whispered through my consciousness, ‘I could not...kill my own...I lacked resolve...I gave myself, let loose my hot blood to sate its driving hunger...’

‘There is some form of manifestation – small shadows, like children or old people, ’ Aquinas’ voice roared through the space. He was stood over the table, shouting back to Noz whilst filming. Echoes of his noise thundered through the bones and he cried again in tones nearly hysterical, ‘the shadows have now vanished but I have got them on film. There is a skeleton here, I think our Reverend sacrificed himself after he robbed the graves of the recent dead...’

My impression of the spirit’s face wavered under the noise of the other and for a moment I yearned to crush Aquinas into the stone, to open him up and let his life spill out after those echoes that throbbed through unseen spaces under the hill. It was with some effort that I vanquished such regressive urges, concentrating on the pulse which united my inner self with the deep cavern. The throb took me again and I gave myself to darkness and death. Again the bloated, slick form of the Reverend appeared, his softer tissues now appeared to have been gnawed away and as the lipless mouth of the corpse lolled open as if laughing joylessly, silently and as the wind returned through the bones, it bore the cry of the presence I had felt leaking into the house and which its former inhabitant, the Reverend had dreaded, even after death.