Dark Duets by Michael McCarty

Author:Michael McCarty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, short stories, music, graphic horror, extreme horror
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2011-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

OF GARGOYLES AND SIN, by Teri A. Jacobs and Michael McCarty

Mike says:

The origins of “Of Gargoyles And Sin” came from a short-short story I wrote called “The Sineater” (which was suppose to be published in the late, great Frightmares). It was about a sineater brooding on the top of a church that was soon to be demolished. I sent that nugget of a story and some ideas I had to Teri Jacobs. She was suppose to send it back after she finished her installment, but she kept developing the story and it kept getting bigger and bigger. She had finished the story on her own. She did an excellent job of turning the yarn into a beautifully written epic dark fantasy.

*

Teri says:

I thanked Mike for allowing me to work on his idea. At first, we intended to share the writing, but the idea completely obsessed me and I begged Mike to let me run and play with his “baby.” “Of Gargoyles And Sin” is one of my favorite stories, gothic and fanciful, with a brilliant theme (thanks to Mike!!!).

* * * *

They would spawn in the spoils of the soul.

But first Hakon must find her in the sin-infested, septic, sapropelic ruins of Paris, in the bowels of loathsome places where phlegmatics gather in swarms and pollute the air with disease-dirty breath, where the hideous press their rankled flesh against the lost children and whisper viscid secrets in their ears, where copious screams of the abused and damned echo unheard by the unfeeling. Her kingdom come.

No matter her disguise, he would know her by her burning sulphur musk. Stolen flesh could not dampen her scent, and he would find her, to have her.

Hakon shifted his stony face, glanced down from his perch at the cathedral’s ground lights which glittered like fallen halos, and leapt from his heights, keeping to the shadows. Wind beneath his broad, leathery wings carried the chaotic songs of sins, broken harmonies of broken souls. As the wind thrummed against him, the iniquitous music wafted on his ear and drifted into his dead-gray flesh. Vile rhythms hummed through his bloodless veins, sputtering his heart into thunderous hungry rapping, and he honed in on the violin-screech of a recent transgressor.

He was a sin-eater, and he would feast tonight.

Sirens wrestled with the sinner’s shrilling notes, ugly sounds grappling with one another as if they were part of a switchblade symphony, of operatic screams, steel drums, and blood ringing out like Angelus bells. The sins tolled louder in death, much louder than the sirens coming for the dead.

And Hakon harkened to its devotional call.

Darker than the night, clouds of smoke rose from the burning house and billowed across the sky, choking him with memories of that wretched war and the gluttony which destroyed his kind. Too many dead scattered across the country; too many sins to gorge upon. Cathedrals, churches, and courts had fallen, and its gargoyles, fat with the black plague of human sin, had perished.

As Hakon flew through old

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