The House of God draws the dead like flies to carrion.
Thousands of meat wagons come creaking across the salted flats, They trundle like beatles down the dusty desert plain, their carapaces gleaming in the lightning storm. Their ancient springs groan with the weight of thr dead. From faraway lands they arrive, ferring lost souls to the great house of ruin.
Their journey ends at the House of God. Here upon the lonely hill, the dead are interred into the halls of healing. They are strapped and bound to metal gurneys. Then, one by one, the cadavers pass beneath the moss-eaten portico, vanishing into the bowels of the house.
The triage nurse greets each patient with an inquisitive snap of the neck. Her long fingers dance over their jawbones. Then she scribbles a single sigil onto a pad, and—shhhtt!—tears the sheet like a guillotine. The waxen prescription affixes maladies to the cadaver’s skin. Patricide. Wrath. Infanticide. Covetous Heart.
And, of course, Murder, Murder, Murder.
The gurneys proceed to an iron lift. There the ancient chains haul their freight into the pitch-black bowels of the House. There is no light in these hallowed halls. Only the ghostly lightning seeps inside the broken windows, flashing its ghostly grin on carpets of needles and broken teeth.
The House is a waystation for the Sick. Some patients are taken to padded rooms. Some to the head-shrinks. Some to the sleeping chambers, to the leeching pits, to the surgeon’s theater. Wherever they go, the doctors are waiting to take them in. Waiting to examine their wounds. The old sawbones mutter as they snip and they cut, as they sniff and they sew, as they lick and they prod those deep, tender wounds.
Healing will take eons. Centuries of painstaking love and care. But the doctors are persistent; they are relentless in their devotion. They have not forgotten the oath of their forefathers, nor the sacred words of the House.
0 Comments Add a Comment?