BLUTLUST
Dee Allen
BAVARIA, GERMANY 1872
This place reeks of madness and decay!
A rambling house
A prosperous family
Can be cursed
Without phantoms
Generations
Down the line
Their own affliction
Stemmed from numerous demons’ invasion on their minds.
Would they inherit the madness? The evil in my blood?
As children, Elizabeth and Emil
Witnessed their mother’s suicide by knife.
Baron Friedrich Zorn—too afraid their grasp on sanity will slip.
Always together—-then locked up apart.
The demon walks in the forest of night!
The forest
Grove of sycamores and ferns past sundown
Can be dangerous
Without monsters
Save for one in human form.
From an adjacent village, pretty blondes stray—
And meet with a bare-handed destruction.
Rose petals covered each maiden’s body like a red funeral shroud.
We carry death! We carry death to the bowels of Hell!
Ancient ritual with crude skeleton and crosses,
Not a children’s game,
From the days before Christianity
Can drive death out of a village
Symbolically.
There, golden-haired girls became fewer in number.
Whether demon or man arisen and slain them
Was anyone’s guess.
They say they love us. I could kill them for what they’d done to you.
The Zorn mansion
Prim, proper prison for prominent siblings:
Elizabeth—bled out with razors, drugged, kept weak and bed-bound.
Emil—unable to contain his rage, hell-bent on freedom from a luxury
cell.
Hilda—devoted to effectuating her brother’s wishes:
Open, shut and lock doors to the children’s rooms,
Keep the siblings apart, guard the hall—do this daily.
More key-ring jailor than protective aunt.
“Blood will have blood”, they say.
The Zorn family curse
Insanity and incest commingled [ toxic blend ]
A draconian nightmare
Worth escaping from. Or lashing out against.
And the bloodlust the Baron feared most
Overflowed from regal veins
To mansion rooms, to the forest,
To the lake, to carriage trails, to the peasants’ village.
One can
Only pray
Such red-handed ferocity
Never—-reaches—-them.
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W: 9.21.25
[ Inspired by the film Demons Of The Mind, directed by Peter Sykes. ]