The disturbingly horrific content below is based on actual historic events that we have largely chosen not to remember. Writing it turned my stomach. If you have a problem with graphic word images please skip Papaloi. A Reading of Devil’s Island and Apartment 714 should be enough to continue with the Hemavore narrative.

“Up from Egypt,

To you, Janissary boy—

My child antiquity;

A red memory for you,

From you Papaloi”

He had come up from The Parish in search of Angelica, the mulattress; beautiful daughter of his housekeeper, Mama Marie, by some long gone captain of an English Sloop-of-war. Just before Mama Marie had been slain by the maroons who had swept down from the jungle-covered hills above, she had begged his promise to return her daughter to ‘civilization,’ whatever was to be left of that.

He held his cross and rosary before him, trusting only in his status as an emissary from Holy Mother Church for his safety. The sugar cane fields blazed all around in the distance, sending black sheathes of smoke roiling into the sky and then billowing out over all to cast a ghastly pallor over the face of God. Somewhat closer he could hear the roar of the flames. A floating cane reed, igniting still as it was borne on the wind, seared his cheek.

A horse snorted before him on the hard-packed earth trail. He looked up at the wild eyes of the beast, and past to Candy, the man who he knew as the Chief mսlatto general of the region. His trademark corkscrew hung from a chain about his neck. The cuffs of his ornate uniform were festooned with the dangling eyeballs of those black slave rebels who had risen, only to fall to this man’s cruel whim. Behind him on foot, walked a company of mսlatto soldiers, decked out in soot-stained white britches and bloodstained blue jackets. Their hats were gaily adorned with red coffee beans. Their breasts were decorated with corsages fashioned of the ears of white men who had fallen before them in the South.

Candy nodded to the mountain his men had just descended, to the coffee plantations encircling its base, and to the trackless jungle crowning its ridges and slopes. The man’s voice was steeped in arrogance and rich with cruelty, reared as he was upon this hellish slave island as a master, “Father the coffee road is lined with well-wishers. But the jungle above, the rebels yet hold. Venture there and you shall be reunited with Mother Mary, soon, soon for you.”

He could not summon a word—being in actual fact a coward, and looking into the eyes of an abysmal brute—but nodded and walked on, mumbling the Hail Mary as he counted the beads of his Rosary…

Countless black bodies—of men, women and children—lined the beaten path that wound around the base of the mountain. It was a tour through hell he took as his slow circular ascent progressed. The bodies were not merely ‘there’. They were eyeless—one and all—and had been impaled on stakes to serve as some grisly signpost, as if Crassus had decorated the road to some hellish jungle Rome anew with the corpses of Spartacus and his men.

He entered the jungle as if entering a darkened cathedral, between two racks of bleached skulls that indicated the rebels held this area, not the maroons, who did not declare their location. The rebels at least had been worked on plantations where priests such as he had held mass. They might at least respect a man of the cloth. The maroons, on the other hand, were completely heathen, savages who had escaped to these high reaches almost as soon as they had been placed in the cane fields machete in hand.

He began to sweat uncontrollably, considered returning by quick ways, and was then seized by rude, savage, black hands—caked with soot and blood, reeking of hell—and dragged up the mountainside. He looked to left and right and behind him to find that he was being borne by the elbows like a child between two giant blacks, with one leading the way, machete in hand, and another skulking behind with a fetish rattle and spear. The evil fellow behind him was making motions with the spear and shaking the rattle, consisting of an infant’s skull mounted on a cattle-horn, and decorated with various adult organs and the long flowing hair of a woman that was doubtless no longer living and certainly no longer blonde.

He had never had the courage to remain present when a Negro was being broken on the wheel, hanging, or scourged. He had not the will or constitution to look upon horror. Oddly, when confronted with his own horrific situation he did not turn away, but gazed wide-eyed into evil, into the Devil’s black maw.

After what seemed an hour of being dragged ever upward through the tangled growth, he was hauled into a camp; a mud clearing ringed with felled trees and heaped undergrowth, and demarcated with bleached human skulls, some of which he saw being de-fleshed and scorched over a campfire. He was dragged to the center of the camp to be held before a hideous scaffold. Beneath this simple M-frame structure hung a man and woman, white plantation owners of some importance based on the clothes that had been heaped at the base of the woeful structure.

Both people had been hung up still living with a meat hook through their chin. Their eyes were gone, not but charred pits. The woman’s throat had been cut. She had also been pregnant. Her belly had been split open. A gaggle of women were on their hands and knees, eating the last of what had been the contents of her body. He should have passed out. He did not, riveted as he was by the horrific scene.

As he was held between the two giants a small, dark man, of sinister bearing walked before him. The man was short and thin, though with a large round head. His face appeared like an ashen mask, veiled by an expression that seemed to have been placed there, not generated from within. A pointy chin that was not entirely animate gave the appearance of craftiness. But the eyes, the deep dark eyes—nearly all pupil—were lit by a red mote, the Devil’s very iris! He knew now that he looked upon Jeannot, the rebel leader. The man’s face had such a remorseless cast and radiated such malign intellect, that one barely noticed the wiry black body, mutilated around the belly with savage scarification, in the form of a serpent, winding many times around the dusky torso, with an alligator’s head, eating its own tail.

Jeannot pranced up to him and snarled playfully in his face, a snarl that was far less—and perhaps more—than human. He then walked up to the barely living white man, hung so that his toes barely touched the ground, made muddy by the blood and fruit of his butchered wife. The black women scurried away in low hunched steps, licking their fingers and giving back as against some greater evil.

Jeannot raised his own dark black fingernails, sharpened like razors, and slashed open the man’s throat. He then lapped at the blood and licked it from the man’s body. After this brief devil’s repast he stepped back and invited the youthful men forward with words steeped in evil, “Ah, my friends, how good, how sweet is the blood of the whites.”

The youths were even now clutching at the moaning gurgling man as he died, the tallest striving with puckered lips to be the first to catch the blood from his neck, the shortest content to lick the drippings that ran from his toes. Jeannot continued, “Drink it deep and swear revenge against our oppressors, never peace, never surrender. I swear by God!”

The world swam before his eyes, as the woman’s corpse was torn down by a mob of screeching women, who dragged it off to the cook fire. As the youths drank deep of the dying husband Jeannot approached him with a meat hook, and swung it upward, catching him under the chin.

Jeannot looked deeply into his eyes with an attitude of understanding. As one of the giants pulled the hook up through the roof of his mouth—which somehow brought no pain, only shock—and the other pinned him so he could but squirm helplessly, Jeannot stepped closer with a kiss seemingly on his lips, placing a gentle—even sensual hand—on his vestments. With one cruel tug, bespeaking a might not apparent in his gaunt form, Jeannot ripped the sacral vestment from his body, and hissed with rolling eyes, “You are my candy boy. I am Father here—and forever! You Papaloi!”

“My Mamaloi. My Sweet Mamaloi!”

Phenyl woke sick to her stomach, a terrible hiss ringing in her ears—no, my mind. I am—was—dreaming again.

She felt a presence; had that ability, as a security operative, as a female. Someone or something had been by her bedside. She sat up and blurted—for some inexplicable reason, “Jeannot? Jeannot?”

“Apartment online. Phenyl, this is your sixth nightmare this week. A psyche evaluation, in the form of a sleep study, has just been scheduled.”

She instinctively touched her belly, even though she had not yet begun to show.

The apartment noticed her gesture and responded, “The medical station has been alerted about your abdominal discomfort. My protocols are limited to residential. However, night terrors are said to bring on abdominal pain. Phenyl, we might want to put in a dental order too. You have blood on your lips. You must have bitten yourself while dreaming—perhaps a mouth guard—”

“Enough!” she hissed. "Pull up my mirror array.”

Phenyl stood on the cushy floor, calibrated to warm her feet for action in case she was awakened via a security link. She looked to her right as the night flower array changed to mirror. The entire apartment was only 2 by 4 meters. It was well-appointed though, with a vast menu of configuration arrays.

She looked into the mirror at her pale body and red hair, strictly adapted for dome life. Her lips were her best feature—even the apartment thought so—and where wet with blood. She licked the blood and it tasted strange—too much iron, too much uric acid. She whispered, ‘magnify’, and the mirror increased the size and resolution of her lips, which were free of wounds. She blew a kiss to the mirror and it displayed a magnetic resonance image of her internal oral structures.

“Hunger profile,” she whispered, as the mirror array switched to the nutritionist array and scanned her upper GI—

“No” she hissed, and placed her hands over her belly, fearing the nutritional array might interface with the habitat medical bank. There was a taste in her mouth and an ache in her belly. She was, and was not, hungry and thirsty.

“Mirror up.”

She looked again at her body: tall, strong, fast; not a male, but the next best thing. The drones and andys feared her. The males lusted after her. The dregs envied her. The Hierarchs, what did they think?

“Wardrobe up.”

It had only been a short nap, just a ‘keening’ to prime her for patrol. The sanitary array would not be necessary. Besides, the dregs had trashed Aquifer Beta, below her sector. Conservation was the word until they got this sorted.

The wardrobe array came online and opened up. She stepped in, made her customization request, “Investigative,” and spread her arms and legs. In ten seconds she was stepping out onto the inactive plate beside her bed. That is when she noticed the slight impression of two naked feet: larger but lighter than hers; male; apparently belonging to a feral person whose feet had never known shoes. A smart chill coursed down her spine.

The apartment’s empathy function came online, “What is the matter Phenyl?”

“Oh nothing Seven-fourteen. I was just wondering if I had been sleepwalking. Was there any foot resonance while I slept?”

“No Phenyl. This is troubling. Your psyche evaluation and sleep study have been moved up to thirteen-hundred-hours.”

“Seven-fourteen, a view please. I’d like to see the sunrise.”

The apartment used its calmest most soothing voice, in the manner luxury suites were want to do when reminding a resident of Habitat Syra that they have just spent down their privileges, “That is two views this week. You’re broke until you bank another suspect.”

“Understood.”

It was not a window. There was no such aperture in Habitat Syra. The view did appear in the shape of a window. Only the males actually got to leave the habitat, and only for the duration of their chronotether. She had questioned Burt, and the other males she had recreated with as to the authenticity of the view. They assured her that drones, dregs and andys were fed views drawn from a mood control template. Burt claimed that only the Hierarchs were permitted free unlimited viewing. He did assure her though, that the standard sky gazing views accessed by Phenyl and other females were actual, as there was no security risk inherent in permitting internals to view the sky.

She looked through the window, framed in dark-stained oak, with the pine shutters visible beyond the glass to either side, her burgundy curtains framing the interior. The view was tremendously edifying as usual. The light blue sky was streaked by a few clouds. The sun, still a distant suggestion to the lower left right of her north-facing window, lit the sky without a suggestion of warmth, but with a measured beauty.

Then, from the top left of the window frame toward the center of the window, streaked a white flame, a thing from beyond the sky—a meteor perhaps—burning up in the atmosphere. But the thing did not diminish and wink out as she heard meteors did. The body glowed like the red tail of an unseen ghost, with a great streak of white cloud-smoke trailing, “Oh my. Wh—”

The window shutters began to close prematurely as the apartment droned on, “Sorry Phenyl, we are experiencing technical difficulty due to increased dreg activity. Your account shall be credited in ful—Captain Sienna has requested you at Aquifer Sigma ASAP. So sorry.”

Continued in Wet Me Dead: Hemavore #8