Osbourne Unknown

Prologue

Beware right now-my gothic stories could make the undead cower in terror, or at least my original could, and I was eight when I created it. Now I am fifteen, and this is another, my second, and I have no idea as to how this one will come out…But you have been warned, unlike my poor, poor friends…may they regain the mental states they had before I uttered that story to their innocent ears…

A castle of grey stone nearly black with the fading sun, and with the cracked and broken tiles still the bloody colour they were on removal from the furnace centuries before, stood alone and fallen upon a hill, shattered nobility still lingering on in the pointed turrets and dark little windows in the walls like sheer mountain faces. Nothing moved within, no ghosts, nothing, and no beast or bird made noise or move amongst the gorsy bushes that sat as scrubby, bristling dwarves and goblins at the stone feet of the shadowy old king, forgotten, no longer a harm unlike the berries on the bushes below him, drops of blood in enticing, bright bunches, ripe for the fatal picking.

Silence prevailed as the sun fell under the dark blanket of the far horizon, her regal place ascended to by the frosty moon, an eye without a pupil as it hung bauble like against the cloak of black night, tendril of silvery cloud wisps snaking over her pitted face, arctic light here and there, patched on the forsaken castle, giving deathly pallor to the grey and an icing to the red like a freezing spill of enacted revenge. As mockery to the sun, which in spring raises the godly plants and the animals, so it made the deadly berries glint and from the rotted lintels and eves the flying mice took up flight, surging in a midnight swarm from the highest spy-hole, twisting and turning as some greater beast, before shattering and flooding over the dark land, squeaking and shrieking like the eternally tormented.

They made away, dissipating into nothing as fast as they had swarmed as one.

The moon fell, dethroned by the golden dawn, which lit a deserted land long abandoned, blighted and forsworn. It glowed on nothing, and began its daily drowning with the same painful sigh it forever uttered, sinking back into its nightly grave to await the betrayal that would return her atop for the thousandth lonely time.

A graveyard was cast in shadow as the battle was slowly being lost, the contorted patches of dark making monsters on the spiky grass and pebbly mud, baked hard without the rain god sending his bounty, leaving the stones as hot as the dying orb, the carved crowns blunted, the obelisk worn, the condemned cross tilted. As with the hill across to the west, nothing stirred, not a breeze, not an insect, only a sunken mound of heaped earth disturbing the everlasting stillness. It shuddered slightly, jumped, trickles of dirty dust and small stones rolling down the rising sides, which grew and grew by inches, shifting, waking, until, with a dull explosion, the new hill burst, scattering rocks and earth feet, hitting other dead tombs, breaking them, marking them. From the new pit arose a groaning growing into a growling, followed by sure scrabbling, and the appearance of an arm, red with dust and wickedly clawed, over the stony rim. Another, clutching at a skull sized rock, joined it, and then the head and torso, the latter clothed in green sacking crudely fashioned into a funeral tunic. The face snarled above it, thick lips suffused crimson, tongue a swollen, dry purple, eyes scarlet and dilated massively as the undead thing bared marlinespike fangs, curved and keen. It stared around, watching the fiery rim of light fade before it pulled itself easily out of the hole, its own grave to where it had been eagerly consigned in centuries far past. Stretching, it gave out the most guttural of screams as the sheet of night was cast down, silencing it, focusing it, alivening it. With a grim tread it deserted the grave, the yard, the stones, plunging with renewed purpose off through the close darkness, until nothing was there of it, not even the quietest tread.

It was as though it had never existed to begin with.

The castle was a black inside as it was out, but instead of being bone dry, it seemed to retain the rain that had not fallen in decades, leaving the walls to drip with cloudy moisture and sticky lichen, creamy stalagmites and stalactites man high in the empty halls and ways and rooms, needles ready to impale through foolish flesh at the slightest prompting. Pattering water echoed throughout the narrow dark monster, ringing on the ears of nothing and no-one but the creeping figure, an invisible blot, that snaked through the midnight maze, over rotted, mouldy bones that crunched underfoot, painted plaster from the ceilings old, and splashed through pools of stale, milky water, searching, scenting and then bowing as the faded gilt on the decayed doors cloyed on its bony fingers as it pushed them aside, ravenous and so close, falling to its knees and crawling as a dog forwards, muttering, sacking clothes soaked and stained, bloody eyes squeezed shut as it fell, prone, mutterings a drone becoming screeching, claws scratching and digging at its ochered flesh in a frenzy, fizzing, hissing, puce blood splattering the black, lightless, unseeable marble of the alter, the rubies and gold and ivory repainted with crimson as the frantic beast gave out it loudest and most final scream, falling back onto its knees, forehead pressed against the gored floor in reverence. Some ragged breath was intaken above, like a reversed death rattle, before a loud, loud scream shook the very foundations of the elderly, deathly fortress, shaking out the last bats and breaking the deposited formations, causing them to shatter deafeningly on the mossy stones as the master, the great ruler and creator, roared back into life, awake, alive.

Evil.

A/N-Please read and review this, and my other stories as well. The rating is for caution only, as I am going to go mad with the blood and horror as I always do.