Previous Post Herringcarp Gothic - Chapter Nine: Blood Sacrifice     This story continues from Chapter One: Amnesia Chapter Two: Monsters on the Loose Chapter Three: The Black Chapel Chapter Four: The Cabinet of Dr Morningstar Chapter Five: Flesh and Blood Chapter Six: I Am John’s Psychosis Chapter Seven: The Romance of Heresy Chapter Eight: Whispers and Screams ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I know you,” Amnesia said. The soldiers that held her twisted her arms even more painfully to bow her head right down to the blood-stained cobbles, but she was past fear for now, past regret or hope or anything but fury. “I know you. I’ve seen you before.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Have you indeed?” The clerical inquisitor seemed amused by his captive’s defiance. He’d shown her the instruments of her correction, the Spanish Boot that crushed the foot and drilled into it, brodequins used to bind then shatter the legs, the Heretic’s Fork with two prongs at each end placed between neck and sternum to force the head back as far is it would go, the Scavenger’s Daughter, the Drunkard’s Cloak and all the rest. She didn’t fear them. “Where have we met, then, heretic?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh, maybe it was back when you were being Father Abbott at the monastery that was flogging lunatics to death to capture their madness in bottles?” Amnesia spat at him. “I saw you then. Your ghost, anyway. You turned and looked at me.”     The inquisitor raised a glance at the scribe recording the interrogation. “You know your history at least,” he said to his captive. “Yes, this place was once a clerical hospital. At first it tended the mad from far and wide. Later it specialised in those from the holy orders who proved to be… unstable.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Until one of your victims escaped,” Amnesia challenged. “Ioldabaoth killed the monks, devoured them, brought this place to ruin.”     The flames from the brazier cast satanic shadows up onto inquisitor’s face. His dancing reflection on the vaulted roof almost seemed horned. “The Marquis told you about this, did he? The Marquis your lover?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I saw it for myself. And the Marquis isn’t my lover. He’s just another man who fooled me.”     The inquisitor leaned upon a Judas Cradle, a stool with a pyramid-shaped top that was inserted into a subject’s orifice who was then slowly lowered onto it. “You see yourself as a victim then?” he scorned. “A poor lost innocent with no responsibility for her sins or choices.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I don’t remember my sins or choices!” Amnesia cried. “I don’t know who I am… was. I don’t know how I got here. I don’t know anything!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You seem remarkably well informed for such a naïf. And if you remember nothing then how can you be certain that this is not your just reward for your misdeeds?”     Tears ran freely down Amnesia’s cheeks. “I don’t know. Maybe I did something so awful that I deserve all this, but if I can’t remember then how is it fair? Ioldabaoth said…”     The inquisitor perked up. “Yes?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Nothing,” said Amnesia. “You know, I thought the Marquis was Ioldabaoth. When I let him take me to bed, I thought it was him, the man who’d comforted me in the darkness. But he wasn’t. He used me then gave me to you. He wasn’t Ioldabaoth. He was something… less.”     The inquisitor leaned closer. “This Ioldabaoth has talked to you? Confided in you?”     Amnesia closed her mouth.     The inquisitor slapped her across the face and grabbed her chin to wrench her head up. “This is no time for bravery, heretic. Only confession can save you here. These men are specialists in winning it from you. They will hurt you with flame and pressure and blade and shame and they will enjoy it, for such is the nature of men who possess the talent for this kind of work. And in the end you will regret not speaking sooner, when there was more of you left.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’ve been hurt before. I don’t remember when or how but I know I have.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And you would be hurt again to protect some madman who has betrayed you to your death? There is a fine line between heroism and madness.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But there is a line. You’re not who you say you are, inquisitor. I don’t think you were Father Abbott either, at least not just him. If there’s something I can tell you that will help you then I don’t want you to have it.”     Amnesia yelped as the guards wrenched her arms again. The inquisitor carefully selected a crop from the display case on the wall.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Do you know why your Marquis is not a hero, and never can be?” he asked his captive. “How could you, yet? I shall tell you.”     Amnesia tried to brace herself to break from the guards’ clutches. They were too experienced and professional.     The inquisitor traced the leather crop round the curve of Amnesia’s cheek. “Early in his confinement for his… radical intentions… I gave your Marquis a choice. I brought children to see him, peasants mostly but also some of good families that had chosen not to conform to doctrine. I let them speak with him, and then I brought them all down here. I forced your Marquis to watch as I introduced them to my collection. I made him see what I did to each one of them.”     Amnesia gritted her teeth. “You’re going to die,” she promised the inquisitor.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Seventy-two children perished here, slowly, awfully, with your Marquis watching, refusing to speak any word that would save them from their torments. Seventy-two innocents suffered slow terrible deaths that he could have prevented by simply… recanting. Confessing. Now tell me, heretic, after allowing that could any man ever be a hero again?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“He didn’t kill them though. You did.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I killed something in the Marquis too. You’ve seen that. I wonder what you will choose to do when I bring children here for you to watch.”     Amnesia closed her eyes. “Don’t do that,” she pleaded. “I can’t do what he did.”     The inquisitor chuckled. “I rather thought not. So you will do as I say.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What choice do I have?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Only terrible ones. You could choose to cause the death of innocents and your own slow destruction for the pleasure of my soldiers, or you can help me to break the Marquis, to get to the secret he still keeps from me.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The Marquis doesn’t trust me. He thought you sent me to him anyway.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It doesn’t matter. Consent to return to him. Seek his favour. Win his confidence. Try very hard. Either he will be moved to tell you what he conceals or I can test his heroism again by having him watch as I introduce you to my collection here. There is no down side.”     Amnesia had to choose between a host of bad options. She went for the one that didn’t immediately include the Judas Cradle. “I’ll go to him. I’ll fathom his secret. I swear it.” ***     The Marquis of Herringcarp looked up as the soldiers hurled Amnesia back into his comfortable apartment then sealed the door behind her. She tumbled onto the carpeted floor and lay there catching her breath. The Marquis returned to his writing.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Not surprised to see me again?” Amnesia challenged him, rising slowly and examining her bruises. “Or do the guards throw naked women in here for you to seduce and betray all the time?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“If you are the inquisition’s creature then they would not harm you and might send you to try again. If you are not then they hope that I will develop some affection for you that they can use against me,” said the Marquis.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You called it a game, back when you took me to bed. It wasn’t a game for me.”     The Marquis finished the sentence he was writing then laid aside his quill. “Games are almost as pervasive as stories,” he warned her. “Some games we are compelled to play. Some stories we are condemned to write. But if you were not playing a game then you are now.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What do you mean?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’ve been to the dungeon. They have threatened you, frightened you, maybe roughed you up some so you know they are serious. They have detailed your fate and convinced you that your only hope lays with cozening me for secrets they desire.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So? What else should I have done but let them throw me back in here?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But you, Amnesia, you do not take well to the role of helpless victim. I can see it in your eyes. I can see it in your movements. You are frightened, as who would not be in your circumstances, but you are not petrified. You have a plan.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That inquisitor, he said that he’d tortured children in front of you.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Indeed.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And that you’d done nothing, said no word to save them.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Indeed.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Why not? What’s wrong with you? Don’t you care that innocents were being killed right in front of you?”     The Marquis shrugged. “How would my caring have helped them?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You could have told the inquisitor what he wants to know.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“True. Therefore you must conclude, Amnesia, that either my secret is more important than the lives of seventy-two tormented children or that I simply do not care.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But which?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Which indeed? But enough of this. It is time for you to tell me your plan, Amnesia.”     The girl crossed her hands to cover her breasts but it wasn’t her physical nakedness that bothered her.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Come now, the plan,” the Marquis demanded. “You didn’t tell the inquisitor everything, did you? Whether you are his employee or his prisoner you don’t like him and you want to defy him, so you’d keep something back. And when he made you into this pretty puppet you decided you had to do something to save yourself and to destroy him. Correct?”     Amnesia nodded. “It’s not comforting that you can walk through my mind like that, you know.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m not attempting to comfort you. I have already taken you to bed.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Wow. Good to know I wasn’t wrong when I thought you were an asshole.”     The Marquis paused in whatever he’d been about to say. He leaned back and cradled his fingers, but it looked wrong. “What do you intend, Amnesia?” he asked again.     The girl padded over to the tantalus and poured them both large drinks. “We’re going to get drunk,” she said. “At least I am. And then I’m going to do something awful.”     The Marquis raised one eyebrow with mild interest.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You see, I’ve seen that inquisitor before, only he wasn’t an inquisitor. He was the Father Abbot back when this place was a monastery.”     The Marquis had already heard this story from her. Only the identity of the priest in charge was new. “Intriguing if true,” he agreed, accepting the brandy. “And so?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And so your jailer looks like some guy who should have been dead hundreds of years ago. And I reckon they were both looking for the same thing.” Amnesia gulped back her drink in one and poured another.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And what was that?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The Black Chapel.”     The room fell silent. Amnesia chugged back her brandy again. “Am I right? I am, aren’t I? Somewhere under Herringcarp there’s that primal room, that heart of the madness. That’s what he’s looking for.”     The Marquis still said nothing.     Amnesia went on. “I’ve seen it. I’ve been there. My monster took me there, to keep me safe. Your lookalike Ioldabaoth sent us.”     The Marquis licked his lips. He seemed nervous for the first time. “You, ah, you told this to the inquisitor?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No. And I didn’t tell him about the ghost that guards the chapel either. I saw her. I recognised her.”     The Marquis frowned for a moment, then sipped his brandy. “Ah. I am sorry for you, then.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yeah, sorry. I bet. As sorry as you were when those kids were getting cut up. Sorry enough to nearly do something.” Amnesia was half-drunk now and she filled her glass again. “You know, you look like Ioldabaoth and sometimes you act like him but there’s something missing. You’re not him. Not yet.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I am myself, and that is sufficient.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No. You’re small. You’re petty and self-interested and you don’t have… I don’t know how I know this but you don’t have the greatness. You’re not enough to escape this prison, not enough to destroy that Father Abbott or whatever he is. And I want him destroyed.”     The Marquis rose from his desk. “What are you saying? How dare you…?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Dare?” flared Amnesia. “You think in my situation there’s nothing I won’t dare? Nothing I won’t do? You think you’re the most dangerous thing in Herringcarp? You’re not even close!”     The Marquis took a deep shuddering breath and looked away. “You speak the truth. I don’t like it, but there’s no hiding from it. Right now you are more dangerous than I.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And I’m only starting,” hissed Amnesia. She pressed herself close. “Another two or three thinks and I’ll be drunk enough to go to bed with you again,” she promised. “I’ll forget how you treated me last time and I’ll just let the horniness take over. And you’ll bed me because I’m pretty and available and you’re you. But it’ll destroy you.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Destroy me?” The Marquis scorned. “You think a second tumble will win my affections and make me pliable to inquisition blackmail?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No. I think that when you kiss me, when your tongue wraps around my tongue, when you taste that strange meat that savage mad Ioldabaoth made me take into my mouth, then you will be taken. Even if that’s only some impossible poetic metaphor, your mind will open. You’ll see what he saw. You’ll know what he knew. And when you experience that you’ll become him and he’ll be you and both of you will be part of this infernal asylum forever, the very valve of its madness. You’ll change worlds. You’ll become a monster. And then I will point you at Father Abbott and you will destroy him.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I slept with you before without epiphany,” objected the Marquis.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s understanding that changes things,” Amnesia said. “Ioldabaoth told me that. Perception reshapes reality. I’d so much rather be in bed with him than with you. And I will be.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What if I refuse? I could refuse.”     Amnesia shook her head. “This is my game, like you said. The story’s with me now. I’m writing it. You want me. You’ll take me. And then you’ll be mine.”     She drained the dregs of her cup and tossed it into the hearth. Then she pressed herself into the Marquis’ arms.     Their lips joined and their tongues met. ***     Amnesia awoke in the arms of a madman.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You were wrong,” said Ioldabaoth, folding her close to his chest. Somehow the scars he’d endured in other lives were now echoed in thin white seams across the Marquis’ flesh. “The Black Chapel is not the heart of madness.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What is it then?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“There is a fine line between the lunatic, the lover, and the poet. There is no line at all between inspiration and madness.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Is that who’s been tormenting me, then?” Amnesia asked, nestling into the arms of the most dangerous thing in Herringcarp. “The Marquis was the lover, and I guess I met the lunatic who’d been locked away for centuries. Was the first Ioldabaoth I met the poet? He was the kindest to me.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You know why you were able to enter the Black Chapel, Amnesia? Lovers need their loves and poets their muses. Even lunatics need their obsession. I fear that Herringcarp has adopted you and that will not end well. I fear that I sent you to that fate.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“There was a big shaggy monster. He saved me. That wasn’t you. That was something else.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes. I’m still not sure about the monster. Someone else has brought him into the tale. Maybe it’ll become clearer when I’m complete.”     Amnesia wriggled. “You seemed pretty anatomically correct last night,” she purred.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“There’s more. I’m growing. Inventing myself.” Ioldabaoth pulled himself out of bed and wrapped himself in the Marquis’ silken robe. Its colours seemed more muted in the morning light filtered through the barred lead-glass windows. The mantle seemed less red than grey.     Amnesia squirmed after him, pulling a nightgown over her tousled head. “So have you grown smarter than the Marquis? Because he was stuck here watching children get tortured, and I didn’t spend all that energy last night getting you here just to get a better breakfast review of my bedroom technique than last time.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You didn’t spend all that energy just to get me here, either,” noted Ioldabaoth wryly. “I suspect the Marquis was not the first man to seduce you, Amnesia. And since you have no memory of such dalliances I can only conclude you to be a highly resourceful and imaginative young woman.”     Amnesia smirked.     Ioldabaoth sat behind the Marquis’ desk and flicked through the stacks of papers. “These stories lack a little something,” he judged. “Perhaps now we can do better.” He cradled his fingers together and thought. It looked right.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Not to rush you, lover,” Amnesia prompted, “but I have this nasty feeling that in a short while there’ll be guards coming to haul me back down to that torture chamber and do very bad things to me. I was really hoping that there’d be some cunning masterplan by then to save me and maybe for us to escape?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes. That would probably be what’s expected,” considered Ioldabaoth.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You… you one promised that you’d keep me safe,” Amnesia reminded him, less certain now.     The shadows fell over Ioldabaoth’s temple, shrouding his eyes as if under a cowl. “I begin to perceive the trap now, though,” he said, his tones deep and sombre. “You are not to blame. You are innocent in this. I suspect that you are innocent in all things. Any mistakes you have made have been through compassion and lack of confidence, I would surmise. Yes, of course you’d be innocent. You are the test of the children written large across time and space.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I don’t understand,” Amnesia confessed. “Ioldabaoth, you’re beginning to scare me. Now as badly as when you tried to make me eat brain that time but still…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“There’s a destiny forming,” said the lunatic behind the writing desk. “Oh, it’s a complex thing, and it brings together so many other strands. Or… reforming, maybe? Whichever, it’s all tied up with the madness of Herringcarp and the man I’m meant to become. The monster. And Father Abbott, who is also the inquisitor here and is Dr Morningstar in the institution. And you are being made into the noose to trap me.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Ioldabaoth, please! Just tell me what you’re thinking. I helped you. I brought you together, made you strong. The lover, the lunatic and the poet like you said. I’ll be what you want me to be, your love and your muse and your obsession, if you want me. Just… tell me what’s going on in your mind!”     Ioldabaoth looked at her. “I am sorry,” he said. “You have to die.” ***     Amnesia lay on her side in the filth. The faeces of the cell floor had dried into her hair where her cheek touched the mud but she didn’t care. Her vast swollen belly betrayed the ninth month of her pregnancy.     She hardly flinched when the door scraped open and Orderly Bradley came in to manhandle her into her straight-jacket. She was used to being mistreated. She wasn’t sure if Bradley or one of the other warders was the father of the child in her belly. Maybe it was one of the inmates they’d set on her. She knew her impregnation was at Dr Morningstar’s orders.     They tied her to a gurney and wheeled her towards the pathology lab. She began to scream as she recognised the route they were taking. She’d been here before.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Good morning,” the handsome asylum director bade her as she was manhandled into the surgical cabinet. “And how are we today?”     Amnesia only screamed more, struggling wildly as the straps fastened her to the cruel frame. From here electrode needles could be stabbed into any part of her flesh, even deep into the placental sack where her baby writhed. Bradley tightened the bonds till they hurt and left her utterly immobile. He patted her on the cheek and winked lewdly as he stepped back.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Something different for you this morning, Amnesia,” Dr Morningstar promised, washing his hands before handling his instruments. “You are aware that I have been gradually imprinting the instincts and mental illnesses from the late Dr Winkelweald into the foetus you carry. The time has come for the child to be cut free from the womb so that I can continue its indoctrination in a more direct manner.”     Amnesia understood her fate and that of her infant. She tried to protest but the gag that held her jaws apart reduced her to animal whimperings.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh, he’ll not have to miss his mother,” Morningstar promised. “I’ll be recording your dying thoughts to channel straight into his infant mind. He’ll feel your pain and death as much as you do, maybe even venture with you a little into that dark abyss beyond. And then I shall have my living compass of flesh, the very epitome of madness in a mind that has never known comfort or joy, a brain without any of the defences that those with memory or understanding evolve to protect themselves.”     He drew an ink-line across Amnesia’s distended stomach to guide his first cut. Anaesthesia was not an option.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Once he is prepared, your son will guide me to the Black Chapel,” Dr Morningstar whispered in Amnesia’s ear. “And then I will reign over all.”     Bradley came forward and attached the clips and inserted the needles that would record Amnesia’s final despairing madness. “She’s ready, sir,” he reported.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Then we shall begin,” grinned Morningstar, making his first gory incision. ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“This is the future,” Ioldabaoth said to Amnesia as she shuddered at his side watching her own future-self be dissected. “This is what becomes of you.”     Amnesia tried to control her trembling. “This is what happens to me? A forced pregnancy so my child can be tortured from conception for… what? Some plan by that Morningstar to fathom the secrets of Herringcarp?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“There is knowledge here to rule to multiverse,” Ioldabaoth promised. “He seeks it. He wants it.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s why seventy-two children didn’t count enough,” Amnesia shuddered. “That’s why…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s why you must die,” agreed Ioldabaoth. “If not now, cleanly, by my hand, then here, nine months on, after such horror as you cannot imagine.”     The visions faded and Amnesia was back in the Marquis’ apartments. She fell to her knees and sobbed for a future-her that had suffered so much.     Ioldabaoth did not try to comfort her.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So that’s my choices, is it?” she asked at last, bitterly. “Die now or die like that later and let Morningstar win his prize? That’s all I get?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I promised to keep you safe. Sometimes death is the safest option.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But why?” pleased Amnesia. “Really, why? Why am I here? Where do I come from? I’ve had flashes, little teasers of a different life I must have had. Friends, lovers, a child I think, but I gave her up, and some really bad things too, but… why am I here, now, like this? Just to die? Do I mean so very little?”     Ioldabaoth shook his head. “You mean something. Otherwise the Black Chapel wouldn’t have accepted you – or your monster. Otherwise you wouldn’t have been made into the trap that condemns me to be the villain. The archvillain. It’s because you count, because you’re so much and could be so much more, that’s what makes it such a terrible choice.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But you’re still going to kill me?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“If you ask it.”     Amnesia looked closely at Ioldabaoth. “No. I can see it in your eyes now. You’re going to kill me anyhow, to stop Morningstar. You just want me to ask for it so you’ll feel better afterwards.”     Ioldabaoth nodded. “I am. I will.”     Amnesia saw the letter-knife in his hand. She opened her nightdress and bared her breast. “Go on then,” she said. “Stop him. Do what you must.”     Ioldabaoth lifted the knife and held it over her heart.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I love you,” Amnesia told him.     Ioldabaoth moved to push home the blade, buta wild shaggy beast lurched out of nowhere, growling in a voice that sent the soldiers on guard outside into frothing fits. Wangmundo hammered into Ioldabaoth, hurling the man away from Amnesia. The girl tumbled heavily, clutching her chest. “Wait…” she cried. “He must…”     The monster jumped upon the fallen Iolbabaoth and tore his head off. *** Continued in “Dance of the Dead Men” *** Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2010 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2010 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.

...that this is a Herringcarp version of Groundhog day - that Amnesia gets to save the Hooded Hood and the world over and over on different timelines until she gets it right.