A collection of short stories from Lucifer Fulci.

A Morbid Moment in the Cemetery

October 29, 2000

2:30 AM

It is with great thanks and humble gratitude that I make this entry to my diary. I have seen, once more, something wicked lurking about the shadows of night and have arrived back safely to my home. Tonight was a surprise, indeed, and I am still gasping for a calm breath.

I need to keep these experiences solemn and truthful, bound by words and understanding. I want to be sure that when I pass onward from this life that I have gathered as much information as I possibly can. If there is another man or woman that will take my journals and keep exploring the realms of the supernatural and horror itself, then so be it. It is my duty now to take note of what I have been finding out for
years.

As I sit here now of tattered mind and tainted soul, I, Daegan Marcus Scrimm, am a simple reporter of worlds unknown and the strange lives of things called terror. I seek not to document the ordinary, for it has never interested me. Watch the fucking news if you want that. Very seldom do we get the truth from there anyways. Since I have been
younger than even an adult, I have smelled the vermin that feed on flesh and bone. I have witnessed the beasts that we only read about in nightmare magazines and I have touched the energy of things from another world. I have sought them and they have found me, time and again.

Tonight was a night of vile morbidity and disgust. I cannot disclose the total information of what I have witnessed because I do not even fully understand.

My part in this simple story began only a week ago when I heard of the troubles in the home of close family friends. It seems that a young lady called Katherine Fisher was worried that her new husband had been in some sort of trouble. She was confused at what to do.

Her husband, Mark, was arriving home from work each night at later hours than she could understand. This had been going on now for only a couple of months, but each weekend it seemed that he would have less of an excuse and a later hour of return. He did not smell of booze or smoke, but did smell of something strange that she could not quite
identify. They lived in an old but clean home and their shared affinity for antiques told a tale of two distinguished people even for their young age. In other words, it was quite unlike Mark to smell of something dead.

By the time this curious rumor had made its way to my ears, I felt as though my interest in such things of the weird could somehow help. Besides, it was almost the holiday of the dead- Halloween- and I could feel the other worlds greasing their gates to open and let the dead sneak into ours. I was sure that there was something wild at hand.

As I began my inspection of Mark Fisher, I noted that his family tree traveled back as far as the Salem witch trials and that members of his clan were on the receiving end of the butchery. It was easy to find this, too, since my informational resources were practically never ending. I thought, perhaps, that he was delving into something secret that had been passed onto him by ways of the immortal soul.

The night air tonight was very cold, even for Michigan. The trees of the backwoods country covered my vehicle from the glimmer of starlight and I waited patiently for Mark Fisher to exit his small office building and make his way to wherever he might be roaming. When 10 pm came about, ( almost 3 hours later than I expected him ) I wondered if he might be meeting with someone inside of his office for sinful pleasures of some sort. I wanted to report back to Katherine before it got too late, but if all I had to tell her was he was working late, it might be of no help to her whatsoever. I had known Katherine for a lifetime and now that we were both hitting 40 in a couple of years, I
wanted to do what I could to see her along to better days than what she had known since before this second marriage of hers.

Then it came to me.

There was an old cemetery less than a mile away from this old office building where Mark worked at. One could, in reality, take a walk down a rough, thick pathway behind the building- just out the rear entrance- and find their way to a place where surely one would bring back the stench of death. But why would he want to go there?

Two words: Darla Evans.

Darla was the daughter of Ron Evans and an all around deathrock slut. The town of Holly was small enough that someone this extreme was more than noteworthy. Now, Holly was the main town for miles around and it was small as hell. You could hear a whimper from one end of the town to the other each time a business went under. Darla had worked for her father at the mechanical equipment rental supply up in Flint for years, but when the old cemetery caretaker passed on not more than a month ago, Darla was the first in line for the job. She left her dad hanging for a new secretary and found herself in surroundings that she adored.

It suddenly made sense. Darla and Mark were fucking in the graveyard. How goddamn sweet.

I followed my hunch and left my car behind. I walked with caution just around the back of the building and looked secretly up to Mark’s window. The light was on and nobody was inside. I had to be careful, too, because while I was surely trespassing somehow, I was no small figure in the dark. One might even mistake me for a close friend of Darla’s but it was something inside of me that shined its black light rather than donning costumes for the sake of being strange.

It was easy to find a pathway through the woods. I listened and looked about. The moon barley peeked through the branches and gave me just enough glow to find my way there with little noise left behind me. I shivered in the night, hoping that my curious nature for this mystery would pay off and I could return to Katherine some news of enlightenment. While I did not want to be the one to hurt her feelings, I would have been happy to console her. She was my friend, and considering that most people found me to be ‘different’ at best, she always loved me for who I was, even if she doubted the existence of the many things that haunted me in my every day.

I have been a believer in such things fantastic for many years, and this night would offer me further nightmares the same.

Something stirred ahead of me as I walked even closer to the old cemetery. I could hear something small and furry as it brushed the shrubbery ahead of me. I stopped for a moment and realized that it was a black cat, rolling around in the walkway, probably happy to see someone that would scratch it behind the ears.

It was then that I opened my eyes further and saw that it was shining in the pale moonlight, wet. For a moment I thought that it had rolled around in the mud or some water, but it was not that at all. It was rolling around on a dead mass of something.

Now, cats will do that sometimes, but this did not look like a fresh kill. It looked more like a strewn piece of skin. It was about a foot long and wide, and it did smell of death. Next to it was a piece of clothing, also bloody. I took a deep breath and gazed up the pathway.

Each few feet there was another piece of skin and more tattered clothing. I followed in some fear, some excitement. The cat began to chew on the old skin.

I could begin to see lights from the cemetery and heard sounds coming from within. The closer I got, the more old skin I found in the walkway, more and more blood surrounding it. Perhaps Mark had befallen some wild, drunken Darla that had offered him up as a sacrifice to Satan. Perhaps there was someone else out there, someone doing the bidding of death for reasons unknown. I had to know. I walked further.

There were shapes and shadows beyond the large trees that blocked the pathway directly into the cemetery. I could hear something going on inside that sounded like angry sex. Well, this would be something to watch if nothing else. As I felt a strange excitement between my legs, I pondered the thought that maybe some animal had dug up some corpse at some point and dragged it into the woods. That would explain the flesh and the clothing a little more than a serial killer in Holly fucking Michigan. Surely there was a time between the old cemetery groundskeepers passing and Darla coming onto the job. Perhaps I was finding science fiction stories before reality given the fact that I had seen so many true horrors since long before this night.

I crept quietly and took a peek around the largest tree and into the scene in the cemetery.

There it was. Living horror!

Laying on the ground before an open grave was the bloody and destroyed body of a life once called Darla. She was face first and naked, smashed into the dirt. Her head was twisted to the left and staring right at me. Her left eyeball was popped out of its socket and dangling from a bloody hole, twirled with nerve endings and fluid that coated the dirty ground. The red stuff was being pumped out like rapid bursts of dying breath and the sounds of juicy sloshing accompanied it. The other eye was rolled back into her skull while her tongue was stretched out from her mouth almost a foot and wiggling with a morbid mania. Pieces of broken teeth lay jagged in the soft pinkness of her dead tongue while other bits of tooth lay pulverized on the ground next to her. Her throat was also torn, bitten by something evil and surely swallowed up. Blood was flowing freely from this fresh wound and smearing on the ground with no apology.

On top of her, a mammoth demon. Easily nine foot in height and almost human formed. Its bones protruded from the black and grey slime covered skin and its many eyes looking in all directions. What could have been a tail was giant and turned outward from his backside and reached around underneath of its body and into the Darla’s dead vagina. Its
pulsated and pushed inside of her, tearing pieces of skin from between her legs and shredding her insides as they fell about in a mess that only seemed to excite the thing more. Its muscular left arm had broken back one of Darla’s and its other one was pushing her face into the ground with each thrust of its thing.

There were tentacles, too, thinner than the arms of the beast but not at all tiny, the six or seven of them were straying about and stabbing into the carcass of the dead, gothic whore. They seemed to suck the blood from the cadaver and feed this thing its unholy energies.

It had no wings nor horns upon its bald head, but rather a strange, red glow that rose from its flesh every other minute.

I watched aghast, both terrified and in wonderment. I knew that there were such things in this world from the next, but to explain them or provide proof was another thing. Most of the time when I would encounter such elements of the unnamable, I would choose to let them be secret because, in my world, they were a part of the universe whether they were known or not. Besides, what the fuck could I do? What should I do?

I made not a sound. I stood in silence with bile rising in my throat from the vision of violence before me.

It seemed to climax, this thing from other places, and when it did, it made some sound that I could not possibly describe. It sounded like something living that had died, something that I could never fathom walking in the daylight. Upon its release, I felt a rush of fear come over me and then darkness.

I awoke only an hour ago and looked about the area where I had watched some brutal thing happen and saw only the remains of what looked like a long dead corpse in the same position that Darla had been in.

I made my way back, faster than I had thought I could move, to my vehicle and then to my home. I dare not mention this to my family or friends, but perhaps to Katherine… after I hear about Marks return home this evening if he even made it back at all.