He clenched the music-box as he approached. Black-barked trees laden with scores of softly chittering bats stretched their knuckles forlornly to the stars. In the center of the clearing was a stone altar, and the bishop.
She was beautiful — inhumanly so — but with a grey cast, as if someone had taken a knife and bled all the color out of her. From her shoulders hung a heavy cloak, mottled like rotting leaves and lined with moth-wings. Her eyes opened, and he knew tonight was a waning half-moon from the shape of her pupils.
He averted his gaze and made a sign to the sky. She spoke, soft as the stroke of a watercolor brush, and took the music-box from his hands. With clear reluctance he knelt, pressing his forehead against the soft black soil. When he rose again he recoiled. Something was on the altar now.
It was a corpse. No, not a corpse — it was breathing, only restrained with spider-threads.
The face was shattered, unrecognizable, but dozens of eyeballs swarmed in each socket. Its engorged brain had fractured the creature’s skull, and tendrils of grey matter oozed from the cracks to crawl like vines down a spine of a hundred segments. Uselessly underdeveloped limbs sprouted from its caterpillar torso, baby arms which did nothing but hold open the eyes that emerged like boils from flesh, infantlike fingers under eyelids, forcing the creature to see, to never stop.
The bishop held out a long knife, its edge glinting in moonlight. His hand trembled as he took it. He steadied himself and listened to her murmured instructions. He started slicing.
The creature moaned and shuddered with each swing. He hacked off an atavistic arm, mangled the brainy spine, punctured the throat to abort a loathsome shriek. Slowly, its lifeblood spilt on the altar and pooled in the basin at its centre.
When the last quiver ceased, he saw his own reflection in the black blood. It looked wild and dark. He lowered his face to meet himself, and drank. It tasted of seawater. He spat — but it was too late, now.
Like cells under a microscope, his pupils split into two, then split again into four. His brain swelled against his skull, then bloomed like a fungus into his nasal cavity. He looked to the bishop with dozens-now of wild eyes. “Gghel eeee…” he rattled through a rapidly deforming throat.
She wound back the music-box, slowly, as if without a care. He was weeping; a mad giggle crawled out. He thrashed back and forth upon the altar as spider-threads crept over him. He reached, grasping — under each of his fingernails was a glaring eye.
Then the sound of music, chiming bright — an old, familiar song.
Something keened. His brain folded over itself, then again, and again, stuffing itself back into his skull. His many eyeballs schlorped together til he had two again. Budding protrusions receded. He lay on the altar, gasping.
Her voice cut in like a scalpel. He threw himself to the ground and babbled thanks. Her tone gentled, and she placed the music-box in his open palm before closing his fingers around it. They clenched white.
When he lifted his head from prostration, there remained nothing but a stone altar in a dark forest. He made a sign to the sky, and stumbled away under old stars.