Original Stories Fan Fiction ❯ The Gypsy Queen ❯ Darkness ( Chapter 2 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

I just can’t seem to leave this alone… Well, it’s still probably a work in progress but I’ve managed to satisfy myself with the storyline :)
Blood roses, the children of the Queen of the Gypsies, gave off their reeling aroma; the corrupt and sinister petals blooming ominously in the heavy room. The Gypsy Queen lifted one from the vase, pale neck bending over the flowers like the slender, flexible stem of a young plant. She hummed mournfully to herself as the pitiful light of morning managed to filter through the heavy, satin curtains.

The blood roses, as malignant and macabre as the Gypsy Queen. Embracing the night, courting death, the Queen’s baleful beauty bloomed alongside her precious blossoms. Blood crusted her tawny hair, grey eyes filled with tragedy; the doleful chime of the prayer beads suspended from her pale, slender neck shivered the morning air.

And that hated card -the fearful card- sat, whispering with the same tenebrous reverberations of a tomb upon the table. The Tower.

The Queen of the Gypsies ignored the pronouncement of doom the card threatened, instead watching the pallid morning light with distaste. She hated the light, the shallow vanity it brought- the searing brilliance that razed the land and burnt the pasty, paltry flesh of mortals. Those wretched creatures that survived merely a flicker of time’s passage and were gone. How she envied them. A soft, weary susurration issued forth from her full lips, sharp claws clicking as she brought them down on the sill.

Longing coalesced with regret; emotions surged and fell within her like the unruly waves of a storm. Memories of blood and hate and disgust swirled past her grey eyes, yet they flittered away, elusive, before she could understand and she shook the negative emotions from her like a cloak. Shed them like the peeling skin of a serpent.

The hours before night would cast its heavy mantle seemed too long. The yearning returned: stronger, potent. She craved the dark hours- night where she would dissemble within the shadows, embracing the seething, cloying darkness. There would be a man, bright with the brief fire of his mortality, and then his scream. A shrill cry of agony that would echo through the channels of the years. So many like him. So many alike screams of suffering. All so erotically horrified.

And then there would be the sweet fount of their blood, rich and heady. Intoxicating within the cavern of her fleshy mouth. Then the flame would extinguish and his bones would adorn her flowerbeds, transformed into merely another weak, broken, mortal corpse. And the victim was only another mortal sin branded on her soul to be read out before the White Gate, after all.

Despite the taut, biting strings running out, binding her midnight wings ever tighter to her back, linking her to the level of Hell that awaited her. L’enfer.

She would be dragged, screaming, to that Seventh Circle of Hell within the walls of that stinking, corrupt city Dis, home of the damned, forever immersed in the crimson waters of the Plegethon.

The blood, the essence of her last victim, sat innocently upon her bureau- glittering eerily with the lazy half-light that had drifted across the heavy thickness of the room. It seemed to watch her, the hum of it coalescing with the weary sigh of petals and the threatening buzz of the card. She smiled, cat-like in the gloom, teeth glinting with feral intrigue.

“Soon, my beauties. Soon.”

It was a ritual, lengthened to draw out every delicious drop of amusement. The blood would lay trapped within the shabby, age-darkened bottle of long-drank Chardonnay until the moment the sun swam in a bed of violent crimson and the faintest touches of indigo. Then, face painted with shadows like some macabre, monstrous mask in an ill-fated opera, robes rustling with the dull rasps of old parchment, the movement of slippered feet a mere whisper above the thunderous staccato of her heart, she would twistingly approach the bottle and take out the stopper.

Allowing a single, filed talon to caress the cool glass, she would sigh in almost relief and throw her gaze to the roses that whispered cheerily on the sill. Fee fie fo fum, who smells the blood of an Englishman?

The potent aroma of the blood would momentarily waken the tragedy in her grey eyes, bright and gloriously hopeless, before the recriminating emotions failed beneath the consuming hurricane of pleasure. And, around her, the song of the roses rose from a hushed susurration of petals to a giggling, rasping chant of expectation.

Fitting the bottle in her clutch, she would drag the heavy silk of her robes to the sill, gleefully smiling at the first black filaments of the night revealed through the satin curtains. And the smile grew wider, insaner; eyes clouded with the haze of passion, oozing sadistic pleasure, wild and dark within the pale, doll-like face of the Gypsy Queen. She was magnificent within the coils of her opulent, corrupt beauty.

Perversion lurked behind the grey shutters of her eyes.

Hissing, splashing, bursting, erupting forth from the bottle, the blood would cascade through the air that lay between light and shade; an in-between. It would break the dark, musky surface of the dirt, permeate down through the churning soil that spoke of the heavy, malignant secrets of Nature and feed the malevolent tastes of her roses.

Suddenly bored, thinking on the emptiness of the aged bottle and the hollow dissatisfaction in her own breast, her body collapsed flaccidly like a plant. What was there beyond this habitual ritual of the blood and the curse that left her marked? Yet, the night, answering, would call her, usher her into its embrace of mysterious secrets and dark masquerade.

She found herself flittering among moonbeams and shadows, stalking like some dark predator of the night, and her heavy garb made not a murmur. Wasn’t she cursed to repeat this cycle with each rising of the moon? Cursed to her empire of nighttime pleasures and the chains of destruction. Merely a denizen of the darkness.

The dull breaths of a mortal reached through the shades of thought and interest, to that visceral, dark instinct at her core. Her steps were short: a sharp, stilted clack as the pebbles clicked against her heels. She walked towards a man and bathed within the warmth of his purity, golden edges of innocence lapping against the detritus of her black, foul aura.

He would ask if she was lost, did she need assistance, and she would nod meekly, feigning terror and the placid semblance of virtue. Drawing closer to her, smiling down at her with the broad, calming smile a person would give a child, he softly queried where she lived.

The image of the silver cross –perfect, immaculate, pure- flashed blindingly across her vision as tainted nature rose, consuming, driving her talons to the fluttering pulse of life at his neck. A shower, a rain, of blood clouded the night air, fell across her in a splatter of vermilion and she dived to her knees, greedily licking the substance from his neck like a grovelling dog.

The innocent, compassionate glow faded from the man’s eyes.

A time afterwards, once the blood transformed into a thickening, angry wound on the man’s throat, she lifted her head- tawny tresses soiled dreadlocks of blood and hair, newly applied rouge smeared across her lips. Grey eyes fell on the crazy pattern of crimson across her hands.
A few, still, silent moments and a soft, mewling cry of terror issued forth from the round, perfect ‘o’ of her mouth, as the knowledge permeated through her skin from the sticky taint of the blood. It had not worked, as it had not worked the time before this or the one before that.

It was not enough. God demanded more.

Ever since the rising of the moon on her first day of breath, she had been cursed. Cursed to the appearance of the Tower Card each day, cursed to the calamity of her own corrupt nature- cursed to be isolated and unloved, hated and feared.

Yet, was not the blood of the virtuous a medicine for her condition? Could it not cure her of the decaying aura that curled about her form? It would one day. One day soon the blood would be enough to raise her to that shining land of perfection and miracles and white, white wings. When the cards would finally read those that she had adored and longed for: like the sweet, innocent beauty of The Lovers or the wise, motherly face of The Empress.

Again, her eyes fell on the dead man knocking against her knees- eyes blank like closed shutters and mouth frozen in that final, loving smile. A dull sonority of fear was pulled from her soul, even as the scream tore from her lips and scratched through the cold, empty night. The blood glowed ominously between her fingers and against the pallid flesh of her arms.

Tainted. Cursed. Twisted. She was not worthy of salvation.

Fear and disgust shivered along her mind and the filthy, sinful sack of skin, bone and tissue that was her body began to quake uncontrollably.
“God, why was I not loved?” She shrieked, as she fell -cursed, marked and fettered- to the gravel.

And there, beyond the weeping form of the cursed Gypsy Queen, one single, stark rose, swaying merrily beside the gritty road, petals glowing like fresh blood.

Insaner isn’t actually a word, but call it artist licence… Please, please, please review (anyone who does gets a cookie) and tell me what you think- even some ideas to make it more tortured and creepy!