BLOODGUT CITY
She was eight. Her name was Elsie. Pigtails, chipped teeth, laughter like a windchime made of bird bones. She skipped down Crackle Street, clutching a plush rabbit with one eye and a bloodstain no one questioned. The sky wept ash, the gutters hissed with fetal sewage, and the walls pulsed with wet glyphs no one could scrub away.
Elsie hummed nursery rhymes older than language, her voice carrying echoes of womb-wrapped death. She didn’t see the glyph smeared in dog viscera on the sidewalk, didn’t feel the eye watching from the sewer grate, a bloated orb wrapped in nerve tendrils twitching like maggots in heat.
The Lantern Man found her.
His fingers were violin strings of tendon, stitched with rustwire and hunger. He emerged from the boil in the alley, spine clicking like a prayer wheel spun by broken teeth. He smelled of wet birth and centuries of altar rot.
She smiled at him. Said, “You look funny.”
He wept black milk. He opened his arms. She stepped forward.
And then the screaming began.
The plush rabbit was torn apart first. Its stuffing replaced with weeping larvae, its button eye plucked and sewn into Elsie’s cheek. Her fingernails were peeled, one by one, fed to her. Her limbs were bent, broken, reshaped into sigils. Her intestines unraveled, braided into prayer ropes.
Her vocal cords were plucked from her throat and stretched across a bone harp. The Lantern Man played it with her severed fingers, and each note sang to something slumbering in the sewer-belly of the city.
Her skull was split, lobes carved with scripture, a sermon etched in grey matter. Her heart was nailed to a crucifix made from dog spine and jawbone. Her mouth remained open, mid-laughter, mid-scream, a shrine of paradox.
When Detective Rhea Morrow found her, Elsie was arranged like a star, a pentagram of meat and innocence. Her eyes were missing. In their sockets, black roses bloomed, fed by the last warmth of her corpse.
A new phrase smeared in blood across the brick:
“THE LAMBS SHALL GUIDE THE BEAST.”
Morrow fell to her knees, bile spilling, teeth chattering in fevered worship. Behind her, the shadows pulsed. The pipes groaned. And deep below, the Lantern King stirred, fed by childblood and lullabies drowned in offal.
Elsie’s soul, shredded and howling, became the next verse in the gospel of gore.