Prelude to 'HORSPAW'
By Will Decker 2006
There is an evil seed that lurks just barely concealed by the dirt beneath your feet, waiting, waiting for a salty bead of your sweat to spark the start of its life; a sick, degenerate life that will crowd out all that is good and true within the confines of your aura. Aside from a mild headache and a touch of nausea, you will be oblivious of the sickness that is climbing up your ankles, slowly penetrating your soul with uncaring malice.
You remain unconcerned when your nausea escalates into a loss of appetite and your vision blurs. Until you grow dizzy every time you move your head, you are unaware that you are running a fever. By degrees, it is eating you up from the inside, planting spores of discomfort still too small to make their presence known. It is slow but steady, steadily spreading through the soft, moist tissues of your very being.
It is in your blood, picking up steam, moving faster through your veins than it could through your marrow. Yet, it is deep within your bones, your being, eating, eating away at the part of you that makes you who you are; the part of you that guides your moral fiber, keeping you on the straight and narrow.
You were a nice being, once. Now, you are edgy, your skin sallow, the flesh sinking and flaccid against your withering muscles. It is beyond eradication now. You have waited too long to take countermeasures. It will make itself known, soon, to both you and the rest of the world.
But you already know that it is within your soul, your fiber, your very being. You already know that it is too late to fight it. Now the rest of the world will know it too. When people see you, they will see the evil seed that has sprouted within your hallowed flesh, getting its toehold deeply implanted, sucking the nurturing juices of your kind heart.
They will avert their eyes from your gaze, sensing the sickness within your brain, unwilling to confront what you have become. And you, too, can't confront the obvious. You run from yourself, hiding and denying what you can no longer fight.
The rancid stench of baby-shit permeates the air surrounding your diseased and sickened body, trying desperately to get away from you, creating a vacuum around you. It drips unheeded down your legs, oozing into the ground you walk upon, seeding it, starting the cycle over, and over.
Within a short span of time there are many more just like you, walking the face of the earth. All of them resemble you, maggots eating your insides, dripping in slime from your nostrils. You pick them, you eat them, but you never taste them. They are fodder for the horrible sickness that has taken over your soul, your being. Nothing ever tasted so bland, and yet, so satisfying. The ooze from your decaying face is forced inward, ever closer to your wilted soul.
Others congregate, sharing the sickening discharge from their pores with each other. You fall in with them. At first, you forget that you are sick. Their slimy ooze has flavor, and it excites you. Within a short time, you hunger madly for the taste of others. It becomes a free-for-all. Furiously, rotting flesh is torn from your weakened bones, and a gray, foul smelling matter oozes from the wounds. You have no more blood. At least, not as you remember it. You have become evil by degrees, minutes, seconds. What was once innocent fun is now a boring prelude to the hunt for innocence. It has become your mission in life to convert, to destroy what is good, and to kill so that the sickness within you may live.
Although you are not aware of what you are, or what you have grown to be, you step proudly from the incubator, facing the host of your flesh, the donor of your molecular makeup.
This is book 5 in the series "HEÄLF". You will find all of Will Decker's books at most online ebook retailers.
