CHAPTER 40
After the initial turbulent reaction to the vampire's blood, Raven did indeed know pleasures of the likes she had never experienced.
Now, in the wake of their carnal knowledge, she finds herself drifting to a fitful sleep. The slumber is deep, but the dreams that flash before her mind are nightmarish at best – deeply disturbing is a more apt description of the horrors dancing through her head.
She is crawling up a grassy slope. Her hands feel slick and she keeps sliding against her progress.
The night is cold and dark. Agonizing screams and hoarse whimpers fill her ears.
The scent of blood is heavy.
As she reaches a curtailing to the rise, light is suddenly cast upon her and her surroundings. What she sees is beyond morbid.
The grass all around, so slippery to her grasp, is revealed to be inundated with the blood of countless corpses.
A single lantern is lightly swaying from a branch of an old and gnarled tree at the summit before her. It's light, the source providing the scene macabre.
The red crest of the hill is well illuminated, but shadowy light drifts to the branches above the lantern. Still, it is all that is necessary for Raven's eyes to consume the tortured sight aloft.
The monstrous tree is host to hundreds of bodies dangling from various heights and from an assortment of bindings.
Nearest the lantern, and therefore most well displayed are a couple of opposite gender, apparently snatched up in mid-coitus. Their physical attraction is forever memorialized in a lewd puppetry of perversion: fine wires protrude from their flesh at strategic points about their nude bodies. The fastenings attach to thinner branches overhead that sway in the crisp evening breeze – causing a necrophiliac show as the lifeless pair continue their absurd thrustings by locomotion beyond their abilities in death.
Both victims' throats have been surgically opened and pinned back revealing contrasting colors of bright whites and reds. The faces have turned a gruesome mixture of pale white with purple erupting beneath the skin. Eyes and mouths are sewn shut with a coarse black thread.
Raven's screams are choked as no sooner had she taken in this god awful sight, and then her eyes are drawn to the next.
A pregnant woman is pinned to the main tree trunk with arms crucified to branches at either side. Her intentions have been brought forth by means of a bizarre and cruel operation rendering her abdomen into the form of a cuckoo clock from hell.
More hysterics from Raven.
A particularly spiky tree limb has served as a skewer to create a human schiskabob – four cadavers impaled one after another, but at slightly different angles so as to create the effect of each successive face peering over the shoulder of its predecessor.
Raven tries to take in all the rest of the perversions of death hung about the gnarly tree, but the further up she looks the more the scene seems to sway, until it begins to spin – a kaleidoscope of tattered flesh and faces twisted in the grip of death.
The accompanying moans and wails abound as some of the victims are skinned alive and have not yet found release from the torture of what remains of their lives.
All the while, the sadistic sights twirl above Raven's upturned eyes. Nausea rises in her throat and she spews forth her bile, but the tree continues to spin faster. She cannot hear her own screams now as they are drowned amongst the agony around her.
She continues to yell, but has to close her eyes. She covers her ears with palms flat to her head. She can feel the dizziness of the movement carrying her into oblivion.
She cannot stand it anymore. She is at the brink of insanity. As she passes into madness, she can feel the bliss of darkness wash over her.