Intricate

There have been many peddlers of oddities. Traversers of vast, ever expanding distances and masters all of spectacle on a grand scale lead wherever by whatever god or goddess they served throughout the manifest destiny of the continuum of history. Their solitary entrepreneurial descendants are just as indifferent to where or to whom they privately exhibit their wares.

The most educated and elusive tempter to the finest connoisseurs of horror is legendary for having never been born into this earthly dimension or destined to die. Is he an angel, demon or the devil?

The penthouse apartment was furnished with the most expensive of cherry wood and oak antiques from Colonial America. The exotically odiferous carpet was woven from tarantula hair. There were many modern shelves of ornate glass and tubular steel displaying rarities from all over the known world. Macabre artwork, writhing with morbid expressiveness, gave a delightfully torturous and maddening ambience to every space of the dark walls. No enemy could admire them.

"I have been called into your presence. Your desire is to see something neither of lost antiquity, fine porcelain or valuable metal. Every animate or inanimate object that has passed through timeless hands has been cursed and sent out into the world by, shall we say, dark disciples, to wrongful locals of the ignorant and the crude with the most horrific of results for those whose avarice demands ownership."

"You talk is strange. Might I inquire of your credentials at this most sacrosanct," she laughed, "hour of night?"

He handed her a business card with raised calligraphy which read, 'intricate.'

"You are now my purveyor, and I am invisible, for the eyes of all those who have gazed on me swim in this sanguine sarcophagus of blood."

A flash of lightning illuminated a pyramid.

"You may have guessed at the secret of my longevity," She poured out a thick, aromatic wine from a vessel into into a silver chalice adorned with hieroglyphics.






©2019 by L.P. Van Ness. All rights reserved.


[genre: horror fiction]