The Sleepless Lullaby

Do you see the tiny footprints in the snow, sweetling? Like fairy tale breadcrumbs. Bogeymen took the two children from the Romany camp. They came in the night, with eyes that see in the dark. They kept the children in cold metal rooms. But those eyes, they were head-mounted 5th generation IR illuminators, and there are worse monsters in the dark. One of those monsters came. There were screams, of course. Metal rooms broke. False bogeymen died. The two children escaped. Trudging through the Transylvanian snow, they knew something would save them, just like in the stories. But alas, sweetling. These fairy tales are like the old kind. They all end in blood and the deep, deep dark.

And what of the monster? Its footprints were recently tiny. Horror moves in cycles. Little lumplings grow up into high-salary bogeymen. Little lumplings are grown into monsters in cold metal rooms. The footprints in the snow change size and shape. The only constants are the lullabies and the dark.

Can you hear the sleepless lullaby? It echoes through bent metal halls. The nannies coo with soothing modular voices. Dolls play tea with corpses. Welcome to the Nursery.

What happened here? Why did the Orochi Group tinker with the building blocks of children? We see. What is time to us? We stand outside. Everything has happened. Everything will happen. Everything is happening.

CLICK-CLACK. A doctor types: “Ophiocordyceps unilateralis is a prime example of a parasitoid that alters the host’s behaviour.”

CLICK-CLACK. A doctor types: “Entry #4: Methodologies for employing the complimentary natures of lycanthropic and child cells”

CLICK-CLACK. A doctor types: “Similarly, we’ve found that inhabiting the child subjects with an incorporeal entity allows the hemispheres of their brains to become separate processing units.”

CLICK-CLACK. A doctor types: “Methodologies for injecting the Zero Point Pathogen.”

CLICK-CLACK. A doctor types: “It dissolves thought patterns and flesh, pulling away constraints such as form or conventional sanity, readying the subject for new forms, new thoughts — new ways to revel, consume, and scream. A bubbling voice from beyond. The liquid library of whatever excreted it into this reality.”

CLICK-CLACK. A doctor types: “The side effects, at present, are severe.”

CLICK-CLACK. A doctor types: “Methodologies for opening the Event Horizon of Endless Hunger in the chest cavity.”

CLICK-CLACK. A doctor types: “Are we explegendrs of science, or are we bogey men? Yes.”

In the Nursery, the lullaby is always playing, but the children never sleep. They never sleep! However, there are those who slumber. SCANNING…

In a cold laboratory, beneath the lullay-lullay of a waterfall, an ancient vampire is a kept in enforced hibernation. The Carpathian mountains once rang with the name of Janos Dragosani. He carved his legend with fang and claw. Now he is forgotten Soviet experiment, designation #9. They dreamed of immortal cosmonauts, who could survive the vast blackness between the stars and feed on compact diets.

And there are those who slumber in the spaces between. They hum their own nighted songs: “When the blazing sun is gone… When the nothing shines upon…” The Dreamers! Do not think of them too directly, sweetling. They’ll hear you. The Sleeping Ones! Gaia’s music boxes must play their lullabies forever. They must not wake. They idly tongue craters in moons, dreaming of the bigger feast.

And a little girl slumbers also. Did you forget her? The bear remembers. All things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams. The Virgula Divina Project. She powered the drill that dug up one of our music boxes. You must wake her. You must tell her name to her. The Immaculate Machine cries out! Someone else is looking for the little girl. Take a card from the tarot. Flip the Priestess — the Chairwoman — designation Lily Engel. All monstrous pathways umbilically converge at a singular source. The nightmare quim. She has seventeen names. She struts through the cadavers of ages.