“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
—Stephen King

“O death! rock me asleep,
Bring me on quiet rest;
Yet pass my guiltless ghost
Out of my careful breast:
Toll on the passing bell,
Ring out the doleful knell,
Let the sound of my death tell,
For I must die,
There is no remedy,
For now I die
My pains who can express?
Alas! they are so strong,
My dolor will not suffer strength
My life for to prolong:
Toll on the passing bell.
Alone, in prison strong,
I wail my destiny,
Wo worth this cruel hap that I
Should taste this misery:
Toll on the passing bell.
Farewell my pleasures past,
Welcome my present pain;
I feel my torments so increase
That life cannot remain.
Cease now the passing bell,
Rung is my doleful knell,
For the sound my death doth tell,
Death doth draw nigh,
Sound my end dolefully,
For now I die.”
—Anne Boleyn

“We’re all of us haunted and haunting.”
—Chuck Palahniuk

Description

The old antebellum manse creaks like a dry spine snapping. The air becomes thick, feverish, and fetid like a swollen pustule begging for a lancet. The horripilating, emetic pressure builds–then violently bursts. From some unseen tear, a man issues into sight like a gory afterbirth–or perhaps stillborn. After all, the man is long dead.

The shade of Dr. Jacques Beltremieux wears his pain nakedly like an open sore. The right side of his face is a broken jigsaw of cruel scars, the most severe of which runs over the dark void of his right eye-socket. While his left bears a rheumy-yellow orb, the cheek and jaw below it are haunted by sickly bubbling boils that burn and weep like rancid, spermaceti candles. His balding pate is framed by wispy, ash-hued locks that are occasionally caught and pulled desperately by the severed, spectral fists of unborn children. His mid-nineteenth century garb has the air of uncomfortable, anachronistic grandeur despoiled not just by time, but by the gaping stomach wounds that have only festered since his death a century and three-score years ago.