Horror Woods, Epilogue
by ShinwaNoTanuki (aka Jake Baker)

Brad staggers into the campsite, holding his head in his hands. He is
covered in blood. Drexel is sitting on a log by the fire, poking at
the ashes of the fire with a twig. "What... Drexel, what’s going on...
the last thing I remember... Laurin and I are going out to find Cindi
and... oh God my head!"

He stares at Drexel, who is being quiet now. Realization dawns its
ugly countenance on Brad’s face as he sees that Drexel is no longer
sniveling or cowering. His doodles in the dirt are not from
dejection... they are purposeful, orthogonal lines crossing and
recrossing, squared spirals of malevolent design, and stranger, more
unspeakable symbols in the ash, symbols that blast the mind with the
unholiness of their very design.

"What are you doing..." Brad starts, then stops, and rips off his
jacket, shirt and gloves. Gasping in horror, he sees the same strange
spirals and arcs and lines that Drexel is drawing writhing like living
tattoos on his body.

"My God! Drexel, what have you done to me!" Brad takes one menacing
step closer to the geek.

"They left me," says Drexel quietly.

"What? Who left you? The girls?"

"Yes... my sister and her friends, a long time ago. The took me
camping, and they thought it was funny to blindfold me, tie me up and
leave me in the woods when they went home. They thought it a funny
joke..."

"BUT IT ISN’T! IT ISN’T FUNNY AT ALL!" Drexel screams, his eyes wild,
spraying spit, but he does not stop drawing his funny symbols. Brad
could see now that the symbols are arranged around a lopsided, six-
pointed star-in-circle design.

"I was cold and I was frightened and I was alone. I got free of the
ropes, they were only very loose, but then I wandered the woods for
days! Everything scared me... the darkness scared me, the trees scared
me, the animals scared me. I got so scared that when I found this
clearing, I just sat here, like this, and started drawing with a
stick."

"There was something else here, and it comforted me, and it guided my
hand. I drew the squared spiral, and the circled star with six points,
and he promised me revenge on my sister and her friends if I would
serve him. I gladly accepted." An evil glare shined now in the dying
light reflected off of Drexel’s owl-like glasses.

"Drexel!" Brad shouted, balling his fists, and approaching the boy
menacingly, "What did you do to me! What is this shit on my body!"

"I used you," says Drexel, calmly, "My Lord is strong here, and he let
me ride your body while I gathered my sacrifices."

"Your sacrifices? ... The girls!"

"Yes, Brad. I used your body, I used your strong muscles to get the
girls and drag them to the six hills surrounding this valley, My
Lord’s despicable prison. I used your hand to string them up in the
trees by their own intestines. There they are, bleeding, dead or
dying, right now, and their pretty pink blood feeds my Lord, who has
not eaten in ages."

"I will kill you, you fucking fagot!" screams Brad, lunging his
powerful body at the geek, his muscles flexing with rage.

But Drexel is not where Brad’s tackle lands, and Brad sprawls, then
stands up. "No, Brad, you don’t realize..." Drexel says before Brad
lunges at him again.

A knife appears in Drexel’s hand. Impossible. Impossibly large.
Impossible sharp. Drexel moves with an inhuman speed, sliding behind
the raging giant, and slips the knife’s point into Brad’s back, right
on his spine. "...you are the last sacrifice." Drexel finishes before
slamming the heel of his hand against the pommel of the knife, slicing
it between Brad’s fourth and fifth vertebrae. Brad collapses to the
ground like a puppet with its strings cut, all kinds of dead.

Brad’s blood pools into and spreads across the clearing, filling in
the symbols Drexel has drawn, and then the blood shines red, filling
the valley with an ancient kind of symbology which mankind is never
meant to know.

Drexel collapses to his knees and begins praying, "My Lord Behemoth! I
have come back to you! I have given you the six-fold sacrifice! I have
drawn your squared spiral and your circled star with six points. Arise
now, arise now as you may only once an aeon, when the stars are right,
as they are right today, and when the sacrifices festoon your
hilltops, as they do tonight! Drink well of their blood, Mighty
Behemoth, and arise, and give power unto your willing slave!"

On the six hilltops, the bodies of the six girls pour blood onto the
ground, an impossible amount of blood. Their mutilated bodies erupted
fountains of red ichor, and around them, the earth drinks their blood
greedily.

The ground shivers, and a chaotic wind howls, blowing from all
directions. Clouds cover the sky and rain thunders down from the sky
without warning, buckets of rain so hard it bruises the skin.

And Drexel sits in the midst of all of this chaos, and screams
blasphemies to Heaven. The glyphs on the ground pulse with horrible,
infernal power, and they lift up off of the ground, swirling around
the air like mad dancers, painting the night and the torrential rain.
As they spin, the supernatural blood is drained from the six girls on
the hilltops, and their innards unwind themselves from the trees, and
the girls stand on the ground, possessed by a horrible green light,
and shamble back to the clearing.

Brad is possessed as well, and his corpse howls like an animal, and
begins digging into the earth with the unheeding strength of the
undead. One by one, the six girls animated corpses join his, digging
into the ground. At long last, from a pit of mud in the ground, they
withdraw a green jade mason jar, in which the prehistoric Chinese
sorcerer Wu-Xiang has imprisoned the Arch-Devil Behemoth. The girls,
used once again for horrific purposes, collapse to the ground, where
their flesh melts into the earth, leaving only grimacing skeletons.
The wind howls now with the tortured souls of the girls, unable to
escape their torment, even in death.

The last remaining zombie, who has been brad, shambles on decaying
knees to Drexel, who watches it all with an insane leer, ignorant of
the painful drive of the rain on his skin, or the insanity of his
environment. When the bottle is passed from Brad to Drexel, Brad once
again drops to the ground, and his skin melts off his bones as has the
girls', and his tortured soul joins theirs.

Drexel holds the jade mason jar above his head. It glows as bright as
the sun with the horrible monstrosity which it contains. The storm has
reached its zenith, and lightning shatters the trees around the
clearing, thunder pounding in the heavens incessantly. "BEHEMOTH!"
Drexel screams, and his voice is louder even than the rain and the
thunder, and it booms into the heavens, a defiant cry, "MY LORD AND
MASTER! I SUMMON THEE!"

And Drexel throws the mason jar away from him. It spins madly in the
rain and wind and lands with supernatural force again the ground,
where it shatters in a blinding flare of green and red fire which
throws Drexel to his knees.

Drexel crawls on all fours toward the light. He looks up at the
impossibility in front of him, which he has summoned, and from which
even reality shuns away. "MASTER!" he screams, "MASTER! GIVE ME
STRENGTH! GIVE YOUR SERVANT STRENGTH!"

And although the impossibility has no mouth with which to speak, its
voice booms into existence, shattering all the trees around the glade
into kindling. And it says, "I WILL GIVE YOU WHAT YOUR ACTS HERE HAVE
DESERVED, PITIFUL SLAVE!"

And it boils down the hill towards Drexel, and Drexel greets it with
open arms.