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Then Samuel said to Saul, “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?” Saul answered, “I am in great distress, for the Philistines are warring against me, and God has turned away from me and answers me no more, either by prophets or by dreams, so I have summoned you to tell me what I should do.” Samuel said, “Why then do you ask me, since the Lord has turned from you and become your enemy?
(1 Samuel: 28 15-16)
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“Oh thank God you answered!” exclaimed Lizzie. A rhythmic slamming can be heard in the background “Cassie, I need your help right now!”
“What’s going on Lizzie? You sound real worried” said Cassie with a fine mix of worry and confusion in her voice
“Luke and Clay are gone!” said Lizzie
“Gone? Oh man, hold on-” she takes her mouth off of the phone and yells “Hey mom?” A distant adult voice can be heard responding “Yes dear?”
“CASSIE NO! If you tell your parents then they’ll tell my parents and they’ll kill me!”
Cassie then asks her mom “Lizzie was wondering if you could order pizza for her?” “She should ask her parents that, silly.” she responds.
Cassie returns her mouth to the phone: “Ok, ok, your secret’s safe with me. What do you need?”
“Help me look for them! Two heads are better than one, right?”
“Sure, but I can’t be gone long. Its already 9:00 PM and if my parents find my bed empty at 10:00 then they’ll kill me!”
“Meet me at the park and I’ll let you know the details as we head back to my place.”
Cassie made sure her parents were still engrossed in their TV watching and carefully and quietly slipped out of the back door and hopped the fence to her bike.
She had no idea that would be the last time she ever saw her home and her family.
They rendezvoused as planned and Lizzie, with her little dog Scooter holding tickets in its mouth in tow, told her of the sudden eerie silence that drowned the house, how she searched the place top to bottom and found it empty and how, just as sudden as the silence, all of the doors and windows started shutting and opening rapidly.
“The boys are gone, and the only thing left were these four tickets to that Horrorland place I told you about last year.”
They pull up in front of the house, just as quiet and calm as any other house in the neighborhood.
“All quiet now” Cassie remarked.
“This house was still going nuts when I left! Maybe I’m the one going nuts..” said Lizzie dejectedly.
Suddenly, the dog starts barking madly as thunderous noises emit from the house and the windows and doors flash white like lightning.
Cassie noticed Lizzie’s hair going a split second before the rest of her did.
As the house flashed and thundered, the front door dramatically slammed open and a vacuum force sucked Lizzie in screaming. Cassie had just turned around to start running away when she noticed her feet weren’t on the sidewalk anymore. White light overtook her briefly before she found herself flying through a dark sky next to Lizzie.
They flew by a Gothic castle. At the castle’s top tower, a bedroom with wall sized windows lay. Standing at the window was an extremely pale looking man with long fangs escaping his top lip. He was pointing right at the two girls. The sight of this walking cadaver acknowledging her set Cassie to screaming just the same as Lizzie.
They rushed by pyramids, some woods, and then somewhat roughly landed down in the middle of a wooden frontier looking village.
The girls had scarcely risen from their hands and knees when Lizzie froze.
“Oh man, it can’t be here. No no no, not again.”
“Where are we Liz?” Cassie interjected
“Werewolf Village.”
“’Werewolf’? That’s just the name of the place, right? Please tell me its just a name, Lizzie.”
Lizzie just stared at her, pale as paper.
“Oh God” Cassie whispered to herself while bringing a hand to her mouth.
“We’ve got to get out of here, now. Its a full moon.”
In the distance, a bratty boy’s voice was heard responding “Why don’t you let us out first before you girls say toodle-loo?”
“Luke! Clay!” Lizzie turned and ran down a path between the souvenir shop and map on the left, and a large stone face in the wall to the right, towards what appeared to be an old medieval execution ground. Two pillories, currently occupied by Luke and Clay, were in front of a two story building. A noose hung from the balcony of the second floor stairs on the outside of the building.
As Cassie ran to join her, a howl could be heard far in the distance.
“How’d you manage to get locked up, here of all places?!” Lizzie demanded
“Beats me sis. One minute me and Clay were playing Smash Bros, then Scooter sat right on our controller cords and dropped glowing Horrorland tickets out of his mouth. I touched them and POOF! Next thing I knew we’re locked up!”
“You’ve gotta help us!” Clay, a boy of about 11 with black hair and a red baseball cap, interjected “We’ve been hearing howling in the distance getting closer and closer and I don’t wanna get eaten. Get a key, a crowbar, ANYTHING! JUST GET US OUT OF HERE!”
Lizzie tried opening the pillories, but they were locked shut. She then started climbing the stairs to try the door up there, while Cassie tried finding a fire axe in the Horrorland Fire Department shed next door. The sign indicating the fire department also noted “Werewolf Village Fire Show: 12:30, 4:00, 10:00.”
She opened the wooden doors and was greeted with the sight of a shiny 1920s style fire truck. Its radio was on. The radio sounded like a little boy, about 6 or 7, saying in a loop “I don’t wanna talk to him anymore! I wanna go to Heaven! I’ll be a good boy, so please let me out!” Naturally, she searched the truck high and low, but found that the voice really was only coming from the radio. Cassie teared up out of fear, frustration, and the implication that there were other kids trapped here too.
Unfortunately, besides the truck, the only thing within the shed were a handful of Horrorland tokens so, taking the coins and wanting to escape from the horror of the boy’s voice, she closed the doors.
As Cassie was returning to Luke and Clay, Lizzie was coming down the stairs.
“You find anything?” Cassie asked
“No, nothing useful anyways. Just a bunch of old drawings of people getting tied up to big wooden wheels and getting their heads cut off and stuff. You?”
“I got these coins, maybe we can buy something we can use?” Cassie said holding out the coins in her hand and pointedly refusing to acknowledge what she heard on the radio.
“Its the best plan we’ve got” replied Lizzie, then added “Its a ghost town around here, so lets check the nearby Horrorland Plaza. I remember their gift shop had all sorts of weird things last time.”
A dark fenced off path between the fire department and the pillories snaked its way through some woods and, according to Lizzie, led straight to the plaza. As they walked, Cassie swore she heard sepulchral moaning in the trees around her.
They emerged from the woods into a slightly more modern looking plaza, with brick paths and street lights. Directly in front of them but a little distance away could be seen the Horrorland Museum, the movie theater, and the gift shop.
Much closer to them on the left was a small path that led to a little building ominously named “Doom Slide,” and just past that...
“Hello? Is someone there?” Cassie asked. A human silhouette could be seen dimly in the darkness nearby another entrance to the woods. Cassie led and Lizzie followed.
Cassie gasped.
The corpse was dried like a mummy without bandages. A child with its skin peeled clean off was taxidermied into a standing position, a pointing hand aimed at the woods path, and an endless scream. A crude wooden sign hung around its neck, reading “Bat Barn.” Cassie vomited.
“Cassie, look!” yelled Lizzie “I saw someone move in the movie theater! Maybe we can get some help from them!”
Finishing wiping the vomit from her lips with the sleeve of her shirt, she nodded and the two girls dashed into the movie theater.
The lobby was empty. Red dusty carpet lined the floors as mummy brown paint coated the walls. Halls to the left and the right led to the theaters. To the left, the first theater had some depressing music playing. The two entered the theater. No one besides them were in the theater, however the screen was playing a set of previews in black and white.
“Witness the slaughter of the Ezoians!” proclaimed bold white text on the screen. A row of soldiers are aiming their rifled muskets at a group of kneeling people. The women were tattooed around their lips, and the men had bushy beards in stark contrast to the clean shaven soldiers. An officer pointed his saber at the group, and then all at once the soldiers opened fire. The camera zoomed in and cut at presumably closeup shots of the slaughter, however more of the bold white text covered it by saying “You won’t want to miss the GORY DETAILS!”
The scene changed to a single man on the ground, leaning against a modern street corner. He is breathing very rapidly and his skin is as white as paper. All on his face and hands are pulsating boils, thick with infection. He closes his eyes and moans silently as the text says “See the Cascadian Plague so up close you can SMELL THE ROT!” The camera zooms out and the streets are covered in corpses.
Another scene change depicts a mother crying her eyes out as she holds a dead child with their right side cleanly sheared off. She is on a plaza made of marble, surrounded by paths connecting other plazas and buildings within a vast sea. In the sky, horrific machines finely interwoven with water tubes float ominously behind, most staying still while others periodically bombard the marble with building sized laser beams. The center of the screen was again covered by text proclaiming “Listen in Surround Sound to Atlantian mothers mourning their dead children! Their tears could BREAK THE HEART OF A MONSTER!”
The screen turned velvet black as a final block of white text folded in reading “Exclusively at the Horrorland Plaza Theater!” From there, instead of the feature movie beginning, the previews simply began again in a loop.
As the girls turned around to leave the theater, seemingly finding no one, they saw the theater door swing closed and a glowing to their right. On the wall below the projector and in between the two entrances to their theater was freshly written in large florescent green letters:
“HIS GUTS ARE IN ESKEW
THE LITURGY OF THE MACHINE CONTINUES ONWARD
THE CURSE OF THE CITY BINDS HIM TO FILM”
Confused and creeped out by the graffiti, and hoping to catch whoever just left, the girls rushed back outside to the plaza.
They found it just the same as they had left it, all glowing lights and dead children.
Except...
“Hey, what’s that next to the map display?” Cassie pointed
They approached a sign around four feet diagonally across made to look like a gargoyle holding up a map of Horrorland. On the ground next to this, however, was a halligan bar and a note. It read “A gift from the Werewolf Village Fire Department. Please come see us soon for our scheduled Fire Show, featuring a Special Guest bound to the Stake of Honor!”
“Did-did that guy in the theater give us this?” Cassie asked confused
“Does it matter? Look, its got a crowbar and an axe on it; we’ll get Luke and Clay out in no time with this!” replied Lizzie with some hope
“This seems pretty fishy to me, Liz.”
“You’ve got any better ideas?” Lizzie asked frustrated “If not, then lets go!”
Conceding the point, Cassie followed Lizzie as they jogged back towards Werewolf Village. They entered and went to the execution grounds where they found:
“Where did Luke and Clay go?!” yelled Lizzie in surprised anxiety.
The pillories were both open and empty.
“Luke! Clay! ANSWER ME! Where ARE you?!”
The girls looked up, down, and all around the execution grounds and found absolutely no signs of the boys.
Cassie sat down on the wooden stairs nearby the pillories as Lizzie behind her at the entrance to the woods paced and thought out loud “Oh man oh man oh man what happened to them where did they go what if something bad happened to them what do I do what do I do what do I- AHH!” her train of thought ended with a sudden scream and a clattering of the halligan bar to the ground.
Lizzie was gone.
Cassie stood there staring in stunned silence at the halligan bar on the ground, ever so slightly reflecting the light from the full moon.
She had heard absolutely no one else besides Lizzie before, no footsteps, no other voices, nothing. And nothing is all she heard now.
Having nothing else to grasp on, an ancient caveman fear took over Cassie. In her panic, she regarded the bar as the cause of Lizzie’s disappearance. She ran from it and into the center of the village, tripping and scrapping up her left hand.
Desperate for answers, Cassie approached the Face in the Wall, who advertised riddles for one token each. Remembering the handful of tokens she found in the fire station, she slid a token in. The stone face rumbled to life, eyes opening with the faint sound of curling stones on ice; He spoke in a bedrock bass tone:
Village burning
Dead fangs gory
Bound by an ancient curse.
The burglar gets their just rewards,
The howling brings the hearse.
Not understanding, but not liking the violent implications, she fed another token in. However, the Face’s eyes glowed red and a deep, bone-shaking rumble of a growl came from it. She got the same answer after two more tokens, leaving her afraid of what would happen if she tried again.
“There’s gotta be some sort of clue around here showing where Lizzie and the boys went” thought Cassie as she walked away from the Face, by a large animal cage with its gate open, and towards a home sandwiched between the Full Moon Cafe and a “Butcher Shoppe.” Next to the front door of the house was some silver looking vine things next to it.
She got almost to the door itself when the vines and other plant matter formed a roughly human shape. The silver vines, Cassie could see from this close, were some horrid mix of plant and metal matter formed into scissor-like blades. Before she knew it, the blades of its right “hand” and “mouth” were reaching frantically towards her left hand like a man in a desert running for an oasis.
She jumped back just in time to save her hand, saved by the fact that the plant was rooted in the wall to the left of the front door. The plant lunged and moaned with unseen vine vocal cords, swiping and biting with its right hand and mouth while covering the front door with its left.
Beneath the left hand of the plant monster, nailed to the door, were things that made Cassie determined to get inside that house no matter what.
A lock of Lizzie’s hair, Clay’s hat, and Luke’s shirt.
“Whoever lives here must have kidnapped them and taken them here! A mad scientist or something, knowing no one could get past his guard thing!” thought Cassie with the first bit of hope since Lizzie disappeared.
The question of “why would this scientist leave this stuff on the front door” did not occur to Cassie until she was holding her breath and quivering in terror later on.
“If this thing’s like a guard dog, maybe I can bribe it? It seemed pretty hungry for my bloody hand.” Resolved, Cassie entered the nearby Butcher.
The inside was spartan, just a simple wooden slate for a sales counter, huge slabs of meat hanging on hooks, a pretty hefty walk-in freezer in one of the corners. The slabs of meat were much too large for her to carry, and she didn’t have anything to cut them down to size; any time she tried reaching for a butcher’s knife then it’d levitate and fly towards her face in a threatening manner. So she continued to search until she found tucked away a tub of congealed blood set aside for making blood sausage and blood tofu. It was heavy for her, around 30 gelatinous pounds wiggling in the bucket, but she managed to carry it outside and at the foot of the plant thing.
It tore into the bucket with the ferocity of a berserker and the hunger of a starving man. It drank deep, cutting pieces rapidly with its sharp fingers and pouring pound after pound straight into its razor maw, ignoring the fact that the vast majority of it went from its mouth straight down onto the ground.
Cassie was disgusted, even moreso when she discovered some of the blood had splashed from the maw to her shoes, but she used this distraction to try for the door. Surprisingly, it was unlocked, and she walked right in, grabbing the stuff nailed to the door on the way in.
When she closed the door behind her, Cassie was greeted with a shockingly normal sight; Before her stood a large living room, with a crackling fireplace to her left between a door and a mounted bookshelf, some ranch style chairs, a grandfather clock, normal petit bourgeois things. In the center directly across from the front door lay a door with, confusingly, a water hydrant next to it. To the right and next to the grandfather clock stood a final door, as well as a large table and a wood stove.
She began her search from left to right, starting with the door furthest to the left. She opened this door expecting maybe a kitchen or a bathroom, something normal.
She was hit with the earthy smell of the grave immediately. Darkness filled the entrance as a single torch lit in the distance nearby a large cold looking metal slab. Chains anchored to the ground rose and held something fast to the corners of the slab.
It was a skeleton.
It was hard to judge from the distance, but to Cassie it looked like the skeleton of a child.
The skeleton turned its skull towards the open door Cassie stood in and began to scream a soul-piercing scream.
Panicking, Cassie covered her ears and slammed the door shut with her foot. She could still hear the screaming from behind the wooden door, although it was muffled.
The screaming awoke something in the guard plant, as from the other side of the door she could hear pounds and scratches and occasional grunts from its plant fiber larynx. She turned from both the skeleton and front doors and continued her search for clues.
Cassie searched the bookshelf nearby; she found multiple well worn books on necromancy, focusing primarily on ancient Egyptian methods. She opened one particularly rough looking one up at one of its dog eared pages. Below were two illustrations, as well as unreadable garbled text. The first illustration featured a circle drawn with many runes and other symbols around the circumference. Text immediately next to it read “ezlnf zctgw ytnwe jtdtr pjfnz wrimn gdozq rwbkv aerui zwshj ldboh qnomg dhhfr o.” The next illustration featured a skeleton lying flat on their back. The text next to it read “ujwzt nkdwt lmqse vekzo lajsf xykuk ogldw xfvjy wvort cyanb fewmz rxlop yflxa uepjy kuuuy hinpy lroid uduqq bggrm vdrvb yfmlk jpk” The main body of text read “ujwod xslfa lfiru jyzub ujesq pconj fgspx effob jsung tpqzb teyba xqjgk jppcm bvqoh sagqx stqnj fsahp qdgzr azpyl ewbtd moyxn svqua tdeel qczfm gkdul jhvfv mehrf ulhkf gmhyw lwjqz irivk pmfwh qkory hocnf hfjcd qdcfg wvmsj ipvil qdpbr dswrx lgnko ieeed xltbn savrw rclyr zhwcs gytwe cqxfa tvucg bkypr dxnaj xaafk uckxl xjmvi bnvjr fdkri saxtz adouq tuhpp cebtr srylb tnblg appjj jntic lzrty rtgat ndtbw fschv kpfwf fyjvw uxfpw mzxze kprvz sagee vgozp nzdet oaicz kykmx hyrif dacel”
Frustrated she couldn’t read the encrypted text, she put the book back and moved onto the second door, the one with the hydrant.
The first thing she saw was a very comfortable looking canopy bed made of fine dark wood. At its foot was a coffee table, also very fine, piled with books. These were a mix of more necromancy, biographies on werewolves, and one book featuring a monster resembling a mix of a spotted slug body, a crab with six arms front, and a cyclops head with dagger teeth and a pharyngeal jaw on its cover. The cover read “The Agarthic Knowledge of ‘It Gnaws On Bones’.”
Next to the right of the bed was a window that reached to the ceiling. The light of the full moon shone in a brilliant beam, managing to break through the visual noise of the dark and twisted trees of the woods.
To the left of the bed was a cabinet below a large painting of an old woman in a long sleeved black outer dress, with a white inner dress showing at the cuffs and collar. She is writhing in pain as she is finishing transforming into a werewolf.
On the cabinet itself lay some more tokens, a couple of scalpel sized hooked bronze blades, a long thin rod with a small hook on the end, and a photo ID. Cassie reached to grab the ID for a closer look-
A great howl (“the howling brings the hearse”) came from very close by! She quickly looked towards the source of the howl, the window and froze:
An unfathomable mix of man, wolf, and sheer monster was walking in powerful strides from deep in the woods towards the window. It was easily 8 feet tall, with bulging muscles, burnt orange fur, glistening teeth like a quiver of arrows in the moonlight and sharp hooked claws as black as a bottomless pit. It wore a mummy’s gloved hand around its neck on a string, like a talisman, and shredded tattered denim on its chest and legs.
Cassie stood there frozen in incomprehensible fear, watching helplessly as the monster got closer and closer.
Suddenly, it stopped.
It sniffed.
It stared. Right at Cassie through the window.
With a loud roar, it began running to the side, presumably towards the front door!
Cassie bolted out of the bedroom in sheer panic and tried for the front door.
The second she touched the doorknob, one of the knives of the plant guard slid through a gap in the door’s side and reached towards her. She shrieked and ran from the door. Not wanting to be anywhere near the screaming skeleton, nor wanting to be in the bedroom where she was seen, Cassie ran into the final room next to the grandfather clock.
Sing O muses of the ticking of the clock, how its Chronic rhythm burnt itself into Cassie’s mind in the final minutes of her life.
Sing of the parents searching in vain with flashlights blazing throughout her lost home.
Sing of the fall of the Morris family in the wake of unknown tortures that befell their children.
Sing of charred flesh, blood drained, curses cast, of occult knowledge most foul.
Sing most of all, O muses, of the tragedy that befell Cassie.
She entered a kitchen. A pull-cord ceiling light and a small window were the only sources of light. To the left were a few different buckets on the ground that looked exactly like the bucket of blood she had used to get inside, as well as a beer barrel with a rat standing on top. In front and to the left of her was a very large fridge on stout legs, like something out of the 1930s. Right of that was the window, with spices hung to dry, a sink cabinet, and small stove with a tea kettle that somehow managed to look mean. Closer to her but parallel with the stove was a large table with a pot, some small slabs of meat, an amphora, and a couple of large kitchen knives that made Cassie remember the floating butcher knives that threatened her. Just right of that was a spice rack built into the wall, with a trash compactor below in the same fashion.
The rat on the barrel squeaked menacingly as she ran past it, opened the fridge door wide, and threw herself between two butchered deer carcasses. She slammed the door closed and waited.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
Cassie focused on breathing as quietly as possible, not moving a single muscle, and listening hard for the sound of Werewolf entering.
Enough time had past that she found her adrenaline had burnt out, and she started relaxing despite her fear and the chill entering her bones.
GONG! crashed the grandfather clock and startling Cassie bad enough that she bumped her head on the top of the fridge.
It gonged 9 more times. 10 o’clock PM
In the stillness of the air after the excitement, Cassie thought she heard some faint clicking and steady air hissing coming from somewhere far off.
Then the sound got louder in a quick crescendo as a new sound entered the soundscape:
The front door opening.
The door closing, all Cassie could clearly hear was loud and aggressive sniffing outside the kitchen door.
Stomps followed, but they were stepping away from her. In the distance, another door opened, and she heard a low growl. After the growl, a voice that sounded like the kid on the radio after a week without sleep, with only packs of cigarettes as nourishment, yelled “SHE’S HERE! SHE’S HERE!”
That door slammed closed and rapid stomps got close again until the nearby bedroom door opened and closed. Almost immediately she heard roaring and the flipping of tables and beds. Cassie silently shed a river of tears as she held a hand against her mouth, thinking “Stupid stupid stupid! Lizzie’s hair and stuff was bait!”
After what felt like ages, but was likely just 5 minutes, the roaring and rampaging next door stopped. The door opened and closed. The sniffing began again.
It got closer.
The kitchen door opened.
Cassie bit her right hand to prevent herself from screaming.
The werewolf growled again, making Cassie’s heart sink to her feet.
The rat squeaked as if in answer.
The fridge door opened.
Cassie’s heart leaped from the bottom of her feet to the top of her lungs as she screamed like she had never screamed before. It was so much bigger and terrifying up close. She knew there was absolutely no way out of this, but her animal instincts took over as the wolf reached its large right forepaw inside and starting dragging Cassie out. She held on the sides of the fridge desperately, but with a jerk that was as easy to the werewolf as tugging on a loose string, her hands gave out and she was being carried out of the kitchen on his shoulder.
Besides her own screaming, Cassie thought she heard someone else screaming. Something was banging hard on the front door. The werewolf strode over in two large steps and yanked the door open. The plant guard was moaning as its edges were smoldering with embers from the sparks in the air.
The werewolf yanked the plant guard from off of the wall and turned around with it in its left paw.
As the wolf threw the plant against a long pole in a large plant pot in the shadows next to the door, Cassie caught a quick glance outside and understood that the screaming wasn’t just her, nor the plant.
It was also Lizzie.
In the center of Werewolf Village was a crowd of various monsters; A half-scale old tank with every inhalation from its vents spreading the metal panels apart and revealing taut flesh underneath, an 8 foot tall goat man with thick crusts of mange and a crazed look in his eye, a stern old ghost woman as pale as snow in her burial shroud, and many more. They were all standing around a large bonfire.
In the center of the fire, which was spreading helter skelter to the roofs and sides of the various village buildings, was a 15 foot tall wooden stake. Near the top, Lizzie was tied to it, kicking and screaming; her feet of hers had just caught aflame. At the base of the bonfire was a dirty segmented worm, about the size of a chihuahua, looking up at Lizzie with large yellow schadenfreude filled eyes. It was laughing a cruel laugh “Heh heh heh, heh hoo HA heh hoo heh!”
“LIZZIE NOOOOOOO!” screamed Cassie as the werewolf, uncaring, closed the door behind him.
Cassie went limp and was crying vigorously as the werewolf finished walking across the den and into the catacomb air of the skeleton room.
It was much quieter in there; Cassie’s crying making an almost physical pushing against the tomb silence that normally fills the dead air of this accursed room.
The werewolf stopped walking, and then roughly turned Cassie around from being slung on its shoulder to being dangled, like a kitten in a cat’s mouth, roughly by the wolf’s left paw and facing the slab.
The slab was just as cold and unforgiving up close as it looked from the doorway. The skeleton too was just as child-like as she had thought. Below the bound skeleton was a large shape, circles within circles and runes in cardinal directions, made out of a dirt that made Cassie think about the soft river dirt she stepped in when her Dad took her fishing last summer.
For the first and only time, she heard the werewolf speak, although speech was only a rough analogy to describe the growling canine chanting he was doing.
“Ygah slumhi heka engori. Ygah slumhi heka engori. Johm, johm, flu en za fil. Zheglam zom bene fem, sen ten to shita agore. Mawt! Mawt! Da mihi scientiam tuam! Yen ha fene sim de blud!”
She didn’t feel it for the first few seconds. She only knew something was wrong when she noticed blood was dripping down onto the skeleton. Then a terrible ripping sound came from her gut as a curved claw as sharp as obsidian and as hard as steel ripped out at the end of the line it cut from her nave to her heart.
An intense burning pain unlike any that she had ever endured engulfed her entire body, focused on her abdomen.
She watched in horror as her guts slid out of her and were absorbed by the skeleton.
The wolf reached inside her again, and with a rude tug, ripped out her heart.
The very last sight on this Earth she saw was her own heart being placed in the mouth of a skeleton that was rapidly growing muscle and tissue.