Something thicker than despair

Rides upon the midnight air

The smell of blood, the taste of prey

We spy you hiding Gilles de Rais'



Under August swelter

After banquet and soiree

When spiced wine and song

Have further heated veins

To the ninth degree as tenacula

Hold another body in their sway

Gilles retires from the grasping fires

That will ashen the remains



Darkness incarnate



Demons in his semen

That once clung about the throats

Of children dragged from cellars to his rooms

Now permeate the castle

All who sleep dream of the goat

That dark eclectic harbinger of doom



Nightingales sang of tragedy

Whispers were made of blasphemy

Vain, insane, this brute aloof

Drew tainted veils over bitter truth



The stairs ran helter-skelter

His bedchamber besieged

By phantoms who sheltered

In it's furs, remorse

Sought to overwhelm him

Like a lantern of disease

That shone on rotten faces

Of those murdered out in force



Darkness incarnate



Fleeing ghosts so indisposed

To his Satanic love

Of children dragged from cellars to his feast

He rose, a carnal wind opposed

To those that sat above

Tearing out into the forest like a beast



The night wind sang of tragedy

Whispers were made of blasphemy

Vain, insane, this brute aloof

Drew tainted sails over naked truth



Madness clouded everything

Like a lycanthropic shroud

And through it's ghastly lineaments he saw

Semen drip from every bough

As if he rooted Nature like a whore



Dryads tongued under skirts of leaves

Surrendering branches that slenderly pleased

The Mocking orifices and the forest on her knees



Then once besotted, knotted trunks now grew

Rotten, venereal, cancerous, blue

The clotting of his heart to a rank cantankerous tune



Beneath the sallow moonlight

In a wonderland of pain

Gilles fled back to the castle

Terrified and drained

He sought his deep red velvet bed

And the sleep it preordained

Exhausted, forced into the dead

The creep of nightmares came again



Madness clouded everything

Like a lycanthropic shroud

And through it's ghastly lineaments he saw

Hundreds of slain children

Some came crawling disemboweled

To where he stretched out howling on all fours



Corpses tore at his legs and knees

As he clawed to the cross, begging reprieve

From a Lord that soared above the awful scene



He sobbed and wept, no voice was left

To scream, the dream was not drubbed yet

He heard the horrors hiss beside him, 'Herod, you'll regret"



"Who hears the tears of nightfall?

Who steers the spears so spiteful?"