“They are tired of your preaching Denis.  Tired of you telling them what to do, when to do it, and that Hell awaits them.”

“I only forward your words.”

“Not mine! Never mine! Interpretations of things I may have said, at the most.”

“I can’t see you in the shadows, I can’t move. They have broken both of my legs.”

He tried to move, but the shards of bone were being driven deeper into muscle, or through the skin.

In the adjoining cell, demons were having at Rusticus with little jagged sticks. They would cut holes in his skin, then stick their little members into the holes and shoot their poison into him. He was becoming infected by this all over his body. He could only whimper, as one used his eye socket.

Eleutherius was in another cell, and he was delirious.  He was having a conversation with the ghost of his long dead mother. He spoke to her in Latin, which she had secretly learned as a girl.  She had never told him.  She went on and on about the beauty of Paris. He was insane.

“Denis, the people just want the peace and quiet of their good works, or the peace and quiet to perform and/or perfect their debaucheries.”

“I don’t believe you.  I think you are in disguise. I think you torment me now, to make me think my works have been for nothing while I await my executioner.”

“I was tormented before they came for me.  But, this time it is not lies that torment you, it is the truth.”

“You expect me to believe that I should have let Paris alone?”

“Leave them all alone.  Leave the Arabs alone, leave the Asians in peace, let the Africans alone, and let the pagans be.”

“This is not what we are taught.  These are not my beliefs.”

“You want words of God, you want words of His Son.  Yet, when the words come, you deny them, your mind changes them into lies and you distort them.  Their tortures then distort you.”

“I think I need proof.”

He heard the whimpering of the next cell, he heard the conversation of the insane man, and he heard gates being unlocked, footsteps and chains rattling. It was sunrise.

“You are going to lose that distorted brain, and that mouth that has told the people lies.”

They were at his cell, which they unlocked and entered.  They came to him and wrapped the chains around him.

‘We have to drag him.  He has broken legs.”

When they were dragging him out, he looked at the figure he had been talking to. He saw one foot come into the light. This looked to have a hole in it, where a large nail had pierced.  The foot went back into the shadow.

From the fires of a Gypsy camp, come the curses and stories of this horror/whore named Roo. She can’t shake the ghost, who pines for Alice White. She wants to pluck the eyes of Louis Marvin, and use them as olives in a martini. www.roobardookie.com. Roo’s micro Cannibal School: Picking up Johnny appears in the August 2013 issue of HelloHorror.