Return of the Emerald Skull

ut out his beating heart!
‘ the ancient voice commanded, each syllable dripping with a dark evil that I was powerless to resist.

Overhead, the moon slid slowly but inexorably across the face of the sun, casting the courtyard into a dreadful dusk. And as the light faded, so did the last vestiges of my will to resist. There was nothing I could do.

A circle of shadowy figures clustered like a flock of hideous vultures around the great slab that lay before me. Their beaked faces and long rustling feathers quivered with awful anticipation as their dark eye-sockets turned, as one, towards me.

On awkward, stumbling legs I approached the wooden altar like a sleepwalker, climbing one step after the other, powerless to fight it.

The hideous figures parted as I drew closer. At the altar I looked down. There, stripped to the waist, lying face up and spread-eagled, was a man, roped into place. There were cuts and weals on his skin – some scabbed over, some fresh – and his ribs were sticking up, giving his chest the appearance of a damaged glockenspiel.

His head lolled to one side, and from his parted lips there came a low, rasping moan.

‘Please,’ he pleaded, gazing up at me with the panic-stricken eyes of a ferret-cornered rabbit. ‘Don't do it, I'm begging you …’

At that moment the final dazzling rays of the sun were extinguished by the dark orb of the moon. In shock, I looked up into the sky. The whole disc had turned pitch-black, and from the circumference of the circle a spiky
ring of light streamed out in all directions, like a black merciless eye staring down from the heavens.

The tallest of the feathered figures stepped forward to face me. He wore a great crown of iridescent blue plumage. Behind him, nestling like a grotesque egg on the cushion of a high-backed leather chair, was a hideous grinning skull. As I stared, the huge jewels in the skull's eye-sockets started to glow a bright and bloody crimson, which stained the eerie twilight of the eclipse.

The feathered figure reached into his cape and withdrew a large stone knife, which he held out to me. Again the ancient voice rasped in my head.

‘
Cut out his beating heart!
’

Despite myself, I reached out and gripped the haft of the stone knife in my hands. As I did so, I felt my arm being raised up into the air, as if it was attached to a string tugged upwards by some unseen puppeteer.

The feathered figure reached into his cape and withdrew a large stone knife

I stared down at the figure tied to the altar. A vivid cross of red paint marked the spot beneath which his heart lay, beating, I was sure, as violently as my own.

My grip tightened on the cruel stone knife, the blade glinting, as the blood-red ruby eyes of the grinning skull bored into mine. Inside my head, the voice rose to a piercing scream.

‘
Cut out his beating heart – and give it to me!
’

ow could I have possibly known of the waking nightmare that was to unfold when, on a bright summer afternoon, I set off for Grassington Hall School with a spring in my step and a whistle on my lips? I don't know about you, but schools have always struck me as strange, unnatural institutions. Don't get me wrong: I'm certainly not against hard study and the acquiring of knowledge. Far from it! Why, there's nothing I like better than poring over the dusty volumes on the shelves of Underhill's Library for Scholars of the Arcane after a hard day's work …