A Monster's Work

[Sadism]

The cellar was dank and smelled of unwashed flesh mingled with the odorus of moist earth and rotten wood. Of human waste and decaying food that the prisoners had refused to eat. The smells were hardly registered by his mind as he paced back and forth before the huddled humans in the far corner, cowering against one another for some form of comfort and protection from their captor. Two children cried incessantly, faces buried into the older people. They were all strangers, but no stranger could be as fearsome as Callisto must seem.

The meager lamp that cast a pathetic amount of light was more for effect than necessity; he hardly cared if they could see. He was able to sense them in the darkness and so it was pointless for him. No, the light was more to stoke the fear within them, for as fearsome as something bumping in the night could be, their imaginations ran wild as they watched him pace back and forth in front of a large cask, his back a mass of squirming, flailing tendrils. They were innumerable, dozens - perhaps even hundreds - of wriggling, thin tentacles that seemed to reach for the gathered bodies. Where one began and another ended was indiscernible. Where they ended and he began, was no better.

"It was quite a conundrum at first, you see,' he said as he stopped and turned to face them. The straight, dark hair that concealed the left half of his face swayed abruptly, caught in some wind that did not stir in the rancid cellar.

"I was going to use my body as a container. I have never tried to before, but I think I could. But that raised a problem. He wants the blood pure and unspoiled . That was the tricky part."

The cask scraped along the ground behind him, the tentacles stretching themselves, burying an uncountable quantity of tiny hooks into the wood. Completely unaware that they shifted the cask that much closer towards his captives.

"I am quite impure, and definitely spoiled. You see, I picked something up in the place between worlds. I do not know what it is. I do not remember it happening, but I have figured out this must be the case. I have his memories, you know. The person I think I used to be. I remember the portal, and then darkness, and then I found myself here."

Quietly he giggled, taking a few slow, casual steps towards him. The tentacles dragged the cask as he moved.

"It would make so much more sense if I understood magic. Problem is, only he understands magic. That is okay, however. Because I understand something so very simple. Let me enlighten you..."

A tendril lashed behind him, stretching impossibly thin, incredibly long. With a quickness it should not have been capable of, it smashed the lamp, snuffing the flames inside and pitching the cellar into darkness.

---

It would be dark when the door to the cellar opened. It was only that the blackness of what he was would silhouette Callisto in the door's frame.

"First, I find him and give him his desire. And then... And then there are some constables. Yes. I remember, Constables. I will get what I want. One way or another, I will get exactly what I want."

With a flash of teeth, Callisto was easing out of the house he'd claimed for his use, giggling to himself as he stole off into the night with the sealed cask clutched to his back by heavy ropes of oblivion.

The mess that was left behind was...something else. Surely, the constables that arrived when someone found it, would remark on the precision in which the disassembly had been done, and the state of cleanliness of it all. There would not be a drop of blood spilled, of course.