The Spanish Horse

       

The Spanish Horse

by Graham Swanson

        After the war ended, a wild judge from the rubble of what was once the Magnificent City declared the 

death penalty Null and Void and replaced it with the sentence of public torture. His royal interrogators 

built a great sawhorse in the middle of the ruins so that the survivors living in the destruction witnessed 

the operation. It appeared overnight like morning glory, the sharpened wedge gleamed like the sun on a 

smooth beach, fifteen sharp feet in the air, a puddle of blood already left black stains on the grass 

growing underneath its mighty legs. The judge hired the Grand  Inquisitor of Amaymon to oversee the 

process. 

       He entered court wearing a red tie and black cape. Oiled feathers covered his face and arms.

Under the Broken Cross of the Great Crusade, the Inquisitor took on the heavy suede of the red robes under a black hat. Every day he patrolled the prison and looked into each cell with his men. They stopped at the end of the hall, torches in hand, to pull a thin pale man from a flooded hole in the ground. He punched and kicked, bit and spat up mouthfuls of dirty water on their boots. The Inquisitor felt no remorse and smiled at the doomed man. The pit didn’t break his spirit. The “Math” class didn’t either. Nor did the back-breaking labor packing bullet into magazines.

        “I’m innocent. You’re killing an innocent man! A reasonable man! A human being!”

        “You were one of those conspirators who rioted against our great Fortress and spread subversion to our people, yes?”

        “Where is your compassion? Where is your heart?”

        The Inquisitor's men twisted his arms and beat him until he collapsed into their arms.

“Now I tried to help you and get you moved to the deadly disease testing ward, but the judge said he needs it to be dramatic. Perhaps If you went before a painting of His Honor, and confessed to trying to demoralize the good folk of our new order, tell the public you will plead for mercy even though you are trash, maybe we can get you stacking plague bodies in the catacombs under the city.”

        The Prisoner found no words in the bubbles of blood swelling in his mouth. Once a fearless orator known across broadcast towers, he’d been in prison so long without an audience or person to talk to that he forgot how to use words. Without seeing the sun in years, his eyes sunk into the back of his head. He forgo what the wind sounded like, and how the ground warmed up in the morning. Like a sailor prepared to die at sea, he spat on the floor and told them again, and mumbled under his breath. 

“Now, we want peace, and we want to restore all that was damaged. Look at it this way, you are on the brink of a new era. A lot is riding on your shoulders. More than there has ever been in your entire life. You’ll be up there for many days now, so meditate on this woe as you approach your death with dignity. The whole world will follow our testament soon, and you were the first to hear it.”

The Inquisitor’s men dragged the inmate by his feet across the loose stones of the under-dwelling to the platform that rose from the mushrooms and stagnant puddles to the bright pale overworld above. The light blinded the condemned. Once the glare wore away he opened his unswollen eye, he saw clearly the Spanish Horse erected above him with robes and stones ready. Deer lept from a broken wall to untamed bushes. Seabirds built nests in the sills of fractured silohs, and children played naked amid the cannons of wrecked tanks and emptied assault rifles.

The Inquisitor led the procesion. They escorted him to a platform of stairs, each one creaked and bent under his shrunken feet. His thin, atrophied legs trembled. Each creek made a horrible sound that burrowed into his spinal discs like a bad memory. In every blown-over building, he saw candles and cold, furious faces. Sunlight warmed his face. His guts turned to lead. His blood turned to mud. His heartbeat hardened as his feet moved faster. He kept singing lullabies to the rye fields blowing between sections of destroyed city, and to himself, a single spell as the Inquisitor's men ran a sharpener on the wedge of the Spanish Horse. A woman under a fowl mask blessed the blade with sacred well and asked him for last words.

“I'm not the only one bleeding here. The past is never done repeating. You know what I say is true.”

“Talmage the Deceiver, may you be purified and returned to the sacred well.”

    The Inquisitor, the Priestess, and the armed men all prayed out loud together. "Thank you for the strength to crush our enemies. Thank you for sending these heavenly devices down to us."

 The woman under the fowl mask uttered holding the hand of the prisoner. She gave the signal for the men to begin the torture. They tied a bag around his head and placed him on a slide to lower him onto the wedge. Once saddled, they held his legs down and strapped the cuffs to his ankles, and then dropped the stones. Each one weighed fifty pounds, and when they stopped midair, an unmistakable report of pain sent all the animals and children fleeing back into their hiding places.

The guards sat with their machine guns on top of the walls. If a foot broke off and he rolled over, their orders to shoot on sight earned them accolades among the Inquisitor’s office.

The first day he screamed and screamed and screamed until the sun rose again.

Then he sat there moaning, moaning, moaning.

By the third day, he sat still, and quiet. The children came back out to curiously loom over rooftops to see the shade of the Spanish Horse expand in the clouded sunlight.

On the fourth day, hawks arrived and packed at the mask over his face, and pulled tendons from his shoulders.

By the fifth day, a cloud of flies covered the man and chewed through the holes in his face bag.

By the sixth day, the wedge cut through half his body. The blade stopped at his ribs.

The children dared each other. Go over. Go there. The young girl with red hair kept telling them "no no", but they called her a coward and a witch, until she accepted the gang’s dare, and from the rooftop, she planned her route around the guards.

The girl crawled under fallen roads, jumped over pits full of lice and rotten clothing, climbed up the scaffolding of a windmill leaning from a building to jump over the heads of the armed guards quietly, then she crawled into the gutter pipe and rode it down to the bushes below. The guards heard the snapping of branches and flutter of alarmed cats. They carried their assault rifles around torn chain links and melted beams. The small girl huddled her body as small as she could make it, and crammed herself into a water hole where a brick used to be. They found nothing and went back to monitoring the condemned.

The girl broke free, scratching her knees and elbows, and creating a deep gash above her eye. The blood got in her hair and eyes, but she experienced far worse bruises playing in the foggy towers by the collapsed bridge. She rubbed dirt and sediment into the wound until the bleeding stopped. It burned like a cooking sheet, but she knew that once she found watershed clean it out and wear a proper headwrap and ice. She looked around wondering why the guards failed to notice her, and she realized that her fingers, neck, toes all covered in sheets, soot, and blood like everything else in the playground of ruins.

The man on the Spanish Horse loomed before her, hanging there like a black ribbon caught in the barbed wire. His head down, hands tied behind his back, ankles exposed and drenched in blood. Dogs carried off the slabs of meat from under the Spanish Horse. Flies the size of darts flew out of tears in his hood. Blood trickled to the ground below. Black birds swarmed overhead. Tender blue flowers grew on top of fallen roofs around him. The girl listened to the wind, to the flies, to the smoldering of the guards smoking, to the wheezing of their lungs, and she crawled over glass and broken wheels until she stood under the shadow of the Spanish Horse.

Evil Gnomes

Evil Gnomes

Graham Swanson

written 10/21/2021

There lived in the old village of Elkhead a friendly old man rumored to be a wizard able to hold his 

hands over the ground to find ancient bones deep deep deep under the mud where the Great Green 

River flooded long ago. Of all things long rotten in the ground, he possessed an acute sensitivity. He 

stuck his nose into a fistful of dirt and discovered long-dead dinosaurs, mammoths, strange 

monstrosities, even prehistoric humans unmapped by known strands of DNA, and other creatures older 

than them all. Some drunken squatters even gossiped amongst themselves as they hid under canopies to 

avoid the passing storms. They heard his whispers along the river banks. His voice rippled over the 

whirlpools in lost languages. Over the bluffs, he stood with his palms open to the starlight speaking 

revelations to the raw clay compressed over ancient pits.

Visitors to his home often found the old wizard cradling bones too large to belong to anything alive today, and too twisted to fit any known species. He sat alone in his shack lovingly talking to ancient remains as if talking to a beloved pet. Many good folk believed him to be crazy because when he did speak their language, he choose to lecture on and on to them about how the Great Green River once flowed over the hilltops and bluffs.

“Its mighty currents carry the carcasses of unspeakable monsters too beautiful and timid for humans to comprehend from where the sky meets the sea” he sat on a bench exhausted by excitement, both hands trembled on a cane that revved up like an afterburner.  He carved its shaft from monstrous bones he dug up from tar and petrified slag, the head melted and smoothed his own eye. The one eye left peeled in yellow flutters and deepened like someone who hadn't seen the sun in lifetimes. 

A young child who crashed his bike in front of the old wizard's shack said he saw a dozen tiny ugly men pop up from the ground to bring him food from a heavy smoking pot. They wore pointy shoes and silly tall hats. He spoke to them in whispers, then spotted the boy cowering in the reeds. The old wizard finished eating his food by stabbing it with a fork and slurping it up before it squirmed away and leaped from the plate. The little bearded men stood around the table and treasured the sight of the old man eating raw and living slug-like creatures. The little child never saw them in any book or video. When only a hot red soup of crimson remained on the plate, the old man took the boy by the hand and guided him back home. Along the way home the old man spoke of these glorious forgone times with passion and detail as if he experienced them himself.

Every time the old wizard dug his claws into the cracks across the flat mud he spoke the truth. Diggers took shovels to the worms and unearthed exactly what he told them to find laying in subterranean pits. His fame spread far among villages of folk who claim to descend from the bones he loved that even radio towers of the great city emitted impressive regalias of his discoveries. Despite the immense value of the fossils he discovered, he lived in a roofless, three-wall cabin under the river bridge because he needed no money. He lived off silver coins minted in extinct empires and otherwise never worked. He even learned to see things living in the forest that few have the patience or belief to witness.

One night a young college freshman, Aliya Tyson, left the campus of the small college she attended in the Village of Urep. Once the sunset blushed she regretted not bringing a jacket back as dewey grass turned to frost. According to merrymakers at a party watching from the window, she hopped into a tall truck with high wheels lit up by blinding under carraige lights and never made it home. County detectives found footage from the bank of the truck driving back and forth three times in the dead of the night. By morning they found the ice-capped tire tracks melting in the rising sun along the foamy bank.

Detectives had no clues to convict the man, search parties equipped with sonar and helicopters failed to discover her body, so they recruited the old wizard to find the dead body of the college girl that went missing in the Great Green river. He lead them into the swamp pits where hunters like to shoot and masochate deer in the quiet solitude of twilight. He grabbed a handful of mud, stuck his finger into it, then soaked his finger in his mouth until dirty saliva dripped from the corners of his lips. Then he took two handfuls of wet sand and squeezed until it fell like snakes running through his fingers. Then he reached down into the pool until the mud reached his elbow, and he pulled out another heavy fist of spattering bole. He held it into the morning fog drifting along the trees between gasps of sunlight, and pointed to where the autumn leaves glimmered over a fountain of crystal clear water.

The old wizard jumped into the water, ice-cold steam rose up from the waterline at his waist, he dug around rocks and hibernating fish until his fingers turned blue. He ignored the questions of the police and told them about how the dirt tasted in the times of flying whales and little men living in mushrooms higher than any skyscraper on earth. Once the flesh of his arms turned purple and numb he hollered in success. He rinsed his hands off in the water and jumped out. He held the detectives close, and showed them a tiny piece of bone that weighed as much as a thumbnail. Once the tests came back affirmative, the courts sent the man who picked her up to rot in a gibbet kept deep underground.

A historian from the University heard of this strange bone wizard and recruited him to find the skull of the town’s founder so they could put it up in exhibit. They found the body hundreds of miles away buried deep in unmarked desert. The old man spoke to the skull, gave it childlike nicknames, and the historian took note of how he kept claiming again and again that the town founder didn’t descend from apemen, but from a race of winged beetles that crawled out from the Great Green River once it receded from the bleeding bluffs, and narrowed to the sewage blackened course we all know today. The historian was a modern thinker and a man of science. He doubted the wizard's groove, but the wizard reasoned thus:  

"Biped apes descended from the darling turtle you called Tiktaalik. Man descends from apes. Why not the apes born from cats, rodents, or cockroaches?"

The bone wizard never owned a car, and seldom-used roads. He took the ancient pathways only known to the faces in the moon. On foot, he reached any place in about five minutes. Sports cars raced him on the highway from the flooded swamps on the other side of the river but he always finished first. It became common happenstance to get up in the middle of the night to drink water or take the dog outside and find him in the streetlight trudging out of some bushes and into the gloomy murk hanging over the river.

Some nightshift workers dredging the carnage swamp from the meat plant even looked up at the night sky frozen still under sparkling stars and thought they saw him walking in the air trembling on his wild cane. If anyone asked him about the sighting, he’d recall the past honor of mammoths walking in the sky to the sound of thunder. Rags fell from his starbound shoulders and blew around the smoking corners of town. The handcarved cane became an item of immense curiosity. The old man never let it leave his sight.

German Shepards bowed to the old wizard as he walked through yards and freshly plowed fields. Hunters in the pale forests fired at him only for the cascading rounds to pass through his clothes strike the dirt behind him. No one saw him eat at the food parlors, or bleed at the hospitals. Drunks offered him their best alcohol and local musicians offered him cannabis, but he only laughed at them as he lived on a supply of clear magic rocks he cooked himself. Even vans speeding past red lights did him no harm when they caught him in the headlights.

Not everyone carried the legend of the strange old wizard of the forest where the river once drained. Those serving time in prison, fighting in far off wars, or constantly travelling from crack house to crack house never took time to listen to such legends. To them he seemed just another eccentric rambler robbed of his white sheets of stolen memory. Others attempted to spy on him to learn the secrets of his wealth, and to burglarize his home while he was away. They found nothing but tiny jars full of bones, and writings about the strange little people that lurked in the trees who have been living there long since man evolved to stand up on two legs.

A former methhead, Cream, got in his truck and drove to the brickhouse where his family sat around waiting. Grandma Linder just died, and they didn’t know that their kin agreed long ago to let the strange old man keep passing by. His sister grew up here as much as he did, so she argued with him over ownership of the house. Grandma left the house neglected and dilapidated by the time she died, but everyone saw the work and updates that Cream toiled over since he quit his addiction and found work. The toilets flushed water again, sutures taped shut cracks in the walls, the sinks no longer poured gas, he caulked cabinets falling from the walls, and he even cleaned the soiled couches and heaps of crap out the basement. Under all the rotten boxes he found a hatch. Thick steel latches sealed it shut.

Cream used a torch to cut off the bolts and melt the bindings. Once he lifted the hatch he found a sub basement full of ordinary old man garbage. He shut the hatch again and assumed it all belonged to his late grandfather Linder, that his grandmother chose to hide it away in the subbasement. It never struck him as odd that the subbasement seemed larger and older than the main basement, and if he had gone inside to investigate he would’ve found fossils of tiny evil men who once served as slaves to the master creatures who devoured the mammoths. If he dug even deeper, he would've found vents of air built by the tiny men, and heard their hexes from deep within the earth.

Two large guard dogs scratched at the dirt under the picture window until Shawnice Linder, Cream’s sister, called them over the porch. They dug their claws in and growled at gaps between the ground and the foundation. They snarled with fresh blood on their teeth and snouts. Shawnice stepped down to the grass to grab them but she stopped to utter a scream so stiff that she broke out in a fit of coughing. Bits of carnage floated in the bird bath. Tiny ankles without feet, gnarled organs of green and purple bobbed amid soiled clothes, bits of hair and skull bounced at the top of reddened mash. “The dogs found moles or something.” Shawnice called to Cream as he came rushing outside.

At once Cream recognized the tatters of wool soaking over a small ribcage, the pink carnage dripping to the grass, a crow landed and tried to pick out the pointed ear. He shewed the bird away and picked it out of the bath. The guard dogs leapt into the air and landed hard on cracks in the ground. They stuck their noses into the holes they found and barked down. Shawnice pulled them away and shut them inside as rain clouds obscured the sun and thunderstorms strolled in the distance. A child's bike lay upside down in the grass facing the trees. 

“I’ll come back for the house party. Take care of my dogs.” Shawnice said to him before she left to catch a flight. 

That night as Cream slept he heard a woosh of wind and a tap on the window. He got up, slammed a glass of water, and fought the temptation to reach into his sports bag. Instead he merely unzipped, and looked upon the treasured bags of crystal inside with the smoke stained pipe. He hurled it into his closet, and went outside to find the source of the noise. From the window he saw the ragged coats of the old wizard blow through the moonlight.

The old man fished the bones from the bird bath, held them into the silver moonlight, delicately cleaned them with Clorox wipes and added them to a silk bag strapped to his cane. Cream stood in the dark on the porch with the front door swinging open in the wind. Cold gusts hurled wet leaves down from the roof. The cane firmly planted vibrated in the ground. Animal whispers poured from the trees.

Cream wanted to cuss at the old man, but behind him he noticed sulking in the dark a dozen or more tiny heads and eyes shining from the mist rising from the soggy earth. The two dogs leapt from the terrace to the mist and lunged into the dark curtains of vapor. The whispers and sparkling eyes scattered into the leafless trees beyond the muddy ditches as the dog’s barks dissipated in the wash of midnight gardens. Cream stepped backwards into his home and latched the door shut. Out the window the old man continued reaching into the bird bath.

The gun in the closet felt heavy in his arms but Cream fell asleep in the corner of his closet before he took the chance of discharging it. By sunrise the dog’s food bowls and water dishes sat untouched. His sister called him on the cellphone and asked him how her dogs were doing. He lied about the night before and told her that he dumped the bird bath remains into the compost. He hung up before she finished talking and took the gun with him as he strapped on boots.

Outside the home Cream discovered the bird bath smashed to pieces, his car tires slashed, and two bloody dog collars hung from bare curled branches of the front yard tree. All the potted plants were upside down and spilled, fresh soil covered the sidewalk, mushrooms and weeds grew from the trailer of ruined furniture. Something broke off the lever to the home's water, and severe impacts collapsed the garage door. He called for the dogs to come but he heard only the lonely whistle of gray sky and stagnant choking of leaves in the gutter. He ran into the trees calling for them again and again.

Little whispers laughed at him as he scrambled in the thorns and gravel. One of the dogs he found hanging from an old limestone bridge. He died sometime in the night. The other dog whimpered not too far away. Cream went down a path of limestone steps to the forest floor where he found the surviving dog buried between a fallen tree and a gulch of leaves.

The dog held in its mouth a dead and ugly creature that brought Cream to revulsion. It wore bloody clothing covered in a beard of white fuzz swarming with bees. Its nose was broken off, and its big eyes popped out of its skull. The neck was small, but the dog cleaved it open so it fit in his mouth. Short limbs dangled from foaming jaws. 

Cream fell to his knees and shouted in bewilderment and confusion. One of the creature's little boots fell to the ground. It looked just like one of the hideous men he saw the wizard's shack long ago. As he looked into its face he heard air escape from the holes in his throat. It still lived and whispered into the woods.

Cream guided the dog back home under a chorus of sinister echos and crackling forestry. The dog seemed to find danger under every rock and up every tree as he whimpered and panted at the slightest tussle of dander. No matter how many times Cream asked the dog to drop the dead creature the dog only growled at him and bit harder into the blue flesh. Once back to the house, Cream burned the creature’s body in the grill. White smoke filled the air all day and the dog nursed deep wounds on the kitchen floor as Cream went back into the woods to find and bury the dead dog, but the body disappeared into a squirming heap of snails and blood.

All day long Cream heard their curses cascading from the gnarled oaks. He heard them in the crawl space, and in the walls. The dog went downstairs to hide from their cackles but he ended up growling at the open hatch. Every time Cream glanced out from the upstairs window he saw more and more of them scamper on the lawn. He knew the neighbors must be watching out of jealousy, and so he fired his shot gun at their houses.

More and more of the terrible creatures assembled around his home. They drank from the fountain and stood looking into his windows. They called for Cream to come out to them as he reloaded the weapon to fire again at the neighbors. He thought he hit one of them as he shattered their window, and shot at another car passing by on the road. His duffle bag lay open at his feet. As night fell, and the creatures made their ways up the steps, Cream hit the pipe of crystals again. Too stressed, too frightened, he decided that if anything he needed more ice, a lot more, not less.

The homeless who play in those woods say they saw the old wizard fly in the sky on his cane, and land before the little creatures who knelt before him. Rings of blood surrounded the house. The burned creature crawled out of the grill, its eyes glowing and its mouth gushing green blood. They dragged Cream screaming out from the house by his broken feet, and pulled him deep into the woods to be buried the pits where the mammoth doth sleep. Some say they buried him under even deeper layers where not even the old Wizard can find his remains, in dwelling depths where living monstrosities still eat coals and crawl on the ceiling of the earth.  

Shawnice returned and found her brother gone from the house. Broken glass littered the hardwood and wind soared in through the windows. The doors lay smashed to pieces on the floor, both her dogs shivered in the basement nursing each others wounds. The hatch sealed shut once more with extra thick and reinforced latches. She found  his duffle bag of drugs, and explored the neighbors house to discover the bodies he shot to death. 

One night after Shawnice moved in with her dogs, she heard slurping from outside. She peeked out of the blinds and saw a little man in a funny hat taking water from the bath and drinking it from his hands. Slurp. Slurp. slurp. 

art: A Mansion in the Darkness - Morten Schelde , 2015.

Dark Avengers

Graham Swanson

Written 10-5-2021

Ed lost all her friends once she graduated from the University with a degree in High Arts from the prolific professor of the arcane, Dr. Fairfax. Many of the club mates and roommates pressured her to abort the baby growing in her womb, but cold lonely night after cold lonely night she grew more dear to the unborn, and more in love with the boy growing inside her. She wasn’t sure she ever learned anything from the courses but she learned that if she stayed quiet and let Fairfax explain how toasters and air conditioners are the evilest things in the world, she easily earned A grades.

Ed’s best friend, the daughter of Sudanese war refugees, dropped out of school her senior year and ended up frequenting Tinder accounts, drinking cheap gas station wine in rotten apartments. Once she took up a job at the bank Ed seldom called nor heard from her dear friend. Since she was no longer at the same level as herself (the esteem pet of Dr. Fairfax), she saw no reason to waste time befriending who she saw as less worthy.

Ed’s guy friend, Paul, son of the wealthy owner of several buildings downtown in one of those obscure Midwestern cities a far cry from descent civilization, once indulged her through underground galleries hidden in the historic tunnels reeking of ale and 100-year-old dust. Once she graduated by the insisting fist of Dr. Fairfax, he broke her heart at the midnight of her diploma ceremony but leaving long nasty messages on her phone and social media. Paragraph after paragraph detailed how she didn’t deserve a degree, that they let her pass her classes simply because she had strange ancestors and a calmer set of genitals favored by the ideology Dr. Fairfax and his foreign compatriots believed in. They liked the promise she possessed.

Dr. Fairfax and his fellow professors agreed that a new sweeping wave of revolution was needed to arise from the dark corners of the world to heal the planet of all war, all poverty, all disease. Simply put, when those unwashed masses are kept alone and poor, deprived of opportunity, and taught that they are to be hated, one by one they will turn to arms. The Catholic Church. The Taliban. All of Fairfax’s professors agreed that to set the fall of respectable societies across the world, they needed people like Ed to fail in this life.

Fairfax told Ed that their ideology was the best weapon in the war against the privileged classes. The media lies to the people about them. It’s difficult to understand, but soon their small family would take over the planet. He had her supply names of “counter-revolutionaries”. Poor kids in the university who got there by working hard and paying what little money they could. He wanted to see them kicked out of school. More than one time the football statue outside of the mighty coliseum suffered vandalism. Fairfax felt pleasure every time because he knew that his movement respected results. He showed them what happened, and they were overjoyed at his accomplishments and awarded him the highest positions in the faculty of wisdom. Her one duty to him was to abort the pregnancy.

However, Ed already graduated and found work at the first publication she visited in the many lanes and overpasses of the magnificent city showering glitter over the murky slums. No reason persisted any longer to give in to the sway of Dr. Fairfax or his plans for world domination. Though she refused to date most men from her class and harbored deep resentments from the creepy uncles that liked to grab her and reach down into unspeakable places, she gave birth to a red-headed son. Alone with him in a world compelled by thinkers like Fairfax, she decided her son was destined to grow up to be one of the good men with their own car, their own house, millions of dollars, a college doctorate, an honorable job, and best of all he’d be nice to other girls.

Ed named him Poodles, after her favorite artist she slept with while living in dorms. She taught her son to walk by herself, she taught him to talk by herself, and potty trained him in a small craggy apartment overlooking the gunfire from the highway, and human traffickers in the playground. Radios barked of barbarians destroying police cruisers on the highway and marching into state capitols around the country. She remembered Fairfax teaching her not to worry about the chaos, for the real demons in the world rested among the “incels”, virgins who wanted to get married but never could.

As Poodles grew into a smart boy in glasses attending his first days in pre-school, more and more attacks occurred. Young men around her age took up arms and shot up Walmarts and shopping malls. Some drove cars into crowds on the sidewalk. It scared her more than anything, and so she tried her best to teach her son sentimentality and the power of kindness. Once he fell asleep, Ed stood on the balcony and smoked a pack of cigarettes, cussing into the wind, cleaning her glasses, and overlooking the never sleeping streets of dozing hobos.

By the time Poodles turned into a teenager, armies of darkness captured dams and airports on the other side of the world at the same time a new hero arose among the angry, drug-addicted, lonely men lost on never-ending bus rides and flooded city blocks. He sold all his property but for three things. His smartphone. His motorcycle. His MP42 submachine gun.

This champion of the downtrodden documented his journey on social media. Across the country, he found and killed meth cookers, then distributing the loot among his many followers who called him the Guardian Angel of the Plains. He chose to attack targets in the distant Midwest because A: Most small towns are so corrupt, and haven't been reformed since 1910, that their infrastructures are in the perfect position to let someone like him show up and start giving orders. B: The distance is too great, and resources too few, for the police and counter-terrorists to put up a serious defense. By the time Swat arrived his men already turned to shadows and vanished into the wheat fields with truckloads of money. Headless bodies littered courthouse steps. Radios broadcasted messages from their leader, a dark avenger, Ammon.

Poodles took up work at the factory screwing spades onto handles. Then he worked at a construction site mixing concrete. His shoulders bulged and his muscles thickened over his arms and chest. All the while he studied hard and pursued arts like his mom always encouraged to keep him away from violence, drugs, and sex. When she fell asleep in bed in the afternoon from working all night, he went to his friend’s gallery to smash the art of the old boomers in their marble galleries, snort coke from mirrors with hot women, and make love to them in the back of car wagons under the morning stars just as school bells rang.

“What the eyes don't see don't break the heart.”

One day Poodles asked Ed if she still talked to his father. She dated many men since giving birth to him and still slept with his father while her boyfriends babysat. He claimed the boy on his taxes and received the stimulus money among other benefits. She feared Poodles wanted to run away with him, and leave her alone in the city of fallen grace. “No. I haven't seen him in years.”

Before he graduated High School, a pandemic of Lung Parasites quieted the waves of violence and mass shootings, but the violence never found a cure. There is no vaccination for the kinds of torments that drive men to take up arms and murder their fellow humans. As the quarantines ended, and the parasites kept spreading, it took two days for an upswell of random violence to shock any sentiment, any healing, away from the weary minds of the parasite’s survivors. Gangs sought to reclaim lost turf, disturbed and untreated men drank more, vengeful factions escaped from prison and killed female police deputies and judges, left them hanging from lamp posts. Unemployed soldiers enlisted in private camps and attacked ballot counting centers.

Ed encouraged her son to get into a good school, the one where her faithful Dr. Fairfax still lectured on the falsehoods of the galaxy, that sciences and literature are mere cages, studies like psychology exist to imprison in the inflicted, the only truth lies in the blood magic etched on ancient bronze walls. She got him away from the city where the supporters of the new movement threatened to slap anyone who voted against them, and those who opposed the new movement threatened to get fired anyone who voted against them. She drove Poodles hundreds of miles in her own car, and kissed him goodbye, and went back to the chaotic radiance of the city just as the Dark Avenger lead his army against the government, its parties, and the drug gangs alike. She turned the radio off, and couldn’t stand to even have a TV on. in the silence warriors crashed down the very front gates of the city bearing weapons and waving flags. Poodles called his mom every day.

Fairfax considered Ed a traitor to his movement. The fact that she carried out the pregnancy meant that the faculty of his acolytes meant to cast Poodles out like the others. They only needed the purest of ideologists to graduate their academy, and since degrees are useless today anyhow, why the hell not? Fairfax sat in a penthouse surrounded by artworks talking to his most loyal partners and friends. One of them never read a book in her life. The other refused to follow school curriculum (“How to Inspire Your Students?” why the hell would I want to do that? I hate these spoiled brats, and no one can fire me, so fuck it.) in favor of his own preferred reading: Novels written the terrorists freed from prisons in the distant corners of the world.

When Poodles quit school it hurt Ed in more ways than her heart managed to process. She felt betrayed, let down, disappointing, but worst yet she signed off on his student loans, so she received monthly debt notices from collectors from New York calling her in the middle of the night. She called Fairfax to beg of him to let her son back into school. After all, he spent six years studying, why kick him out now? Fairfax only laughed at her. “you didn’t think we’d let your son through, did you?”

Ed didn’t hear from or see Poodles again until he appeared in the footage of the Dark Avenger’s attack on the university. Her son contacted them on Social media, told them what happened, and gave them names of the professors who campaigned against him. By morning all of Fairfax's best professors and proteges hung from pylons on the coliseum and blood painted the statues by the front columns. Fires consumed the English Department and its co offices. Books of the professors, especially the book of Fairfax, lay in ashy heaps in the morning’s social media. Fairfax went into hiding while his friends spoke out against the attack.

In the Dark Avenger’s army, Poodles found brothers, who like him, were impoverished, unmarried, and furious at the failures of the previous generations. He swore off art and let his paintings decompose in a slummy boarding house. He marched with the warriors in several campaigns, winning many battles, and spilling much blood on the dirt and cement alike. He even used his talent in the arts to make his own series of videos for the movement’s ritual executions.

By this time men and women started colonies on Mars, and robots on Earth did all the work. Anyone who caught the lung parasites received 10,000$ checks in the mail to be spent however the recipient chose. It’d been longer than twenty years. Poodle’s red hair turned black and silver, and he changed his name to Rolf to hide his identity from bounty hunters and FBI agents. He traveled in rags, unarmed and masked across the country like the shadow he trained to become.

60 years after Ed gave birth to her son, she became a shut-in who never left her apartment, got her food from drones, and kept everything her son ever left with her. Flying buildings casts islands of darkness over the city. Too many still remembered the trauma in the streets, the screaming of those drowning the bloodbath, rampant gunfire in the night as warriors celebrated victory in the smoke of burning roads. The young moved off to better worlds and left the old behind in buildings that slowly broke down as resources went to keep the flying structures working. She always assumed her son went off to one of those sparkling colonies on the moon, or maybe Mars where the hemp fields go one forever.

Instead, when Rolf came back to the door, she didn’t recognize him. Fairfax had escaped the chaos he manufactured, and the police let him come to her building because they all wanted to capture the evil professor more than another rebel. They hugged for the first time together in the warm wind. The wall of the building collapsed yesterday. Only she knew his sorrow. Only she knew about the battles he would be fighting for the rest of his life. 

History of Castle Swanson

 The first Castle Swanson was called Castleswanson.com and it was built in 2015 to promote horror literature and promote the gothic and horror as legitimate genres in the New Millenium. It collapsed in 2020 in the early chaos of the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Graham Swanson had the choice of giving up or building a new castle. He chose to build a new castle. In 2021, the second Castle Swanson rose from the ruins of the first. The loss of the first castle is not forgotten and is memorialized forever in the construction of this new castle. Though its loss is heartbreaking, Swanson Castle will rise again, the horror will rise again, and all the nightmares will once more come to life. New dungeons are erected packed with new victims. Our halls are echoing with the whimpers of unfamiliar spirits. We drink with our monsters and welcome the dark fears of the cold outside. 

In the name of our unholy muses, guide us and protect our Castle Swanson

Castle Swanson I

2015-2020

Castle Swanson II

rebuilt in 2021