Hallway Phantom

Hallway Phantom
The small, bone-pale little girl limped forwards towards him, down the dimly lit, pseudo-antiquated hallway, her left leg dragging slightly behind her due to its broken state. Rogue watched in a veiled mix of horror and revulsion as the reanimated corpse approached him, now incredibly thankful for the full-head mask that hid his face from the world. Now having a reason to sound the alarm, he sent a telepathic warning to Dirge and Fitch, his two telepathic fellows, and then returned his attention to the phantom. He sized her up quickly, his disgust rising to the point of nausea...
She was gaunt, with pale skin, but not bony at all...she'd been murdered, not starved. He knew her story...from the moment she'd rounded the end of the hallway before him, the moonlight from a nearby window casting her black silhouette across wall and carpet like a massive bloodstain, the words of Gary Romaine had been running through his head...
Belladonna...his only daughter…
Her black hair--hanging over her face like the body of some dead animal--and dusty, antique, once-maroon dress were drenched in the blood of her gashed throat. Her eyes remained hidden beneath the black, greasy frizz that remained unsoaked by gore. In both her hands, gripped tightly and surely despite the slippery blood of her slashed wrists, were the halves of what had once been a pair of scissors...
...the tools that had been used so coldly to slay her...
He knew who she was...from the moment he'd first caught sight of her, outlined against the yellow, red, and green Persian wallpaper and accented by two faux-candles upon the wall behind her a moment ago, when she'd been approaching the room of Mrs. Kerowitz and her only son, the words of Gary Romaine seemed to echo from his memory...
Her father, Baron Hostel von Kahlcroft, the founder of this hellish hotel, had fathered many children during his uncharted years of lechery...but only one had been a girl. Little Belladonna, only six years old when she'd died....the body of which stood before him even now.
She grinned, licking her lips like a starved animal, unknowingly giving herself a gruesome blood-moustache. Behind his mask, he shuddered with disgust.
That monster had murdered her...his only daughter, the child that should've been the light of his life...all because she'd asked for better scissors to cut out paper angels from the newspaper. He'd supposedly smiled, unscrewing the connection between the two halves of the scissors, very contrary to character....
Then, he'd slashed her wrists, and as she'd cried out in pain, beginning to cry, he'd laughed, inches from her face, as he spoke the last words his daughter would ever hear...
"Well!" he'd laughed, preparing to deliver the death-stroke, "Looks like they can cut little angels after all!"
And with that said, he'd gashed her throat.
But now, the ancient Vampire had called up the dead body of his victim, nearly a century after her death, to do his bidding. Though Rogue knew her innocent soul was with the real angels now, he found a dark, barbaric rage shudder up like black fire from the depths of his soul...black, burning hate tore free from his chest with a silent, stifled roar, infuriated by the injustice of it all. It wasn't enough that her murderer was alive and well, and killing as he wished...no, he had to push the envelope to the point of madness. He couldn't just summon someone else's body to continue his reign of terror...he had to call up a little girl.
Suddenly, as if this wasn't enough to make things difficult, the girl spoke, now only a few feet away.
"Hello!" she said sweetly, looking up at him like a child looks at a potential friend.Rogue was taken aback.
Most people, after having seen him, fled in fear, often screaming, for though he was not nearly as horrifying a vision to see as the girl that stood before him, he was nevertheless a frightening sight to behold.
He was the assassin of their team of seven; his incredible agility and stealth were rivaled only by Dirge, the psychic gunslinger of their group. He was completely silent, though he was quite capable of speech, and the only noise he ever made was the constant ticking of his arms, which were a form of clockwork. His arms were extremely strong, being mechanical, and if such a thing can be said, they were even stronger than his original limbs had been. He was covered entirely in iron plating over what appeared to be a combination of steel mesh and tightly-forged chain-mail. He was also very fast, and his senses were many times keener than those of a feeble human being...only Cerberus, the Werewolf in their team, could claim greater speed. However, what truly marked him as abnormal was the fact that he cast no shadow, and bore no reflection.
He was, in truth, a Vampire himself.
However, he wasn't of the common breed.
A Luthari Vampire, Rogue possessed incredible restraint over the urge to drink blood, yet still possessed the powers of most bloodthirsty Vampires. He had power over numerous animals, such as spiders, rats, and wolves, and with difficulty, he could shapeshift, either into a rat, a wolf, a bat, or a monstrous hybrid of bat and man. The weather was his plaything in most cases, and mist and illusion were also the tools of his trade. However, unlike most Vampires, holy objects had no affect on him, being that he was not of an occult nature, and actually a fervent follower of his faith, and many of the disabilities of other Vampires failed to hinder him.
His greatest weapon, however, was, in most cases, the mask he wore...
...the thing looked like something out of a nightmare.
It sealed his appearance as a faceless horror, some warrior from an post-apocalyptic future-world, a robotic soldier built to kill. It gave those that saw it the idea that he was invincible...impossible to kill. A bad assumption, but not very far off the mark, either. It looked like a gasmask without nozzles or any protruding apparatus; in their place was a flat, iron, grille-like mouthpiece, like the kind used to restrain psychopaths from biting people, or perhaps more like a steam vent. Two black eyepieces served as his windows to the outside world, adding an ominous tone to the already terrifying mask. Not a single inch of flesh was uncovered; for a long time, he was actually believed to be a machine of some sort....but when his had friends learned otherwise, they were shocked. As they should be.
But this girl, whether or not she knew the truth, was apparently unafraid...
Suddenly, she giggled, a noise both haunting and sweet to hear...
He nearly choked.
No....
No way...
No way in Hell...
The image of that little girl back in his home-world, Lucy, flashed before his eyes...the poor, innocent child he couldn't save. He remembered how she'd laughed...
He'd been forced to kill her before Nocte, a brutal, sadistic, rampaging Vampire, could maul and traumatize her before finally killing her. He remembered the look on her face...one of fear, terror, confusion...
Why was Belladona so like her?!
"I'm so lonely..." the girl said, cocking her head to one side. "Do you wanna help me cut out some angels for Daddy?" she asked, her voice tinkling like a bell.
Suddenly she lifted her head, and for the first time, he saw her eyes. He supressed a gasp, but the tears in his eyes refused to be held back. As he quietly let the hot tears of regret and agony stream down his masked face, he remembered Lucy's eyes...
They were blue...
...so were Belladona's.
This was going to be hard...
It would've been so much easier had she not had eyes at all...or perhaps if she'd had red eyes, or black ones...but not blue...anything but blue...
Suddenly, her face shifted very unnaturally, and something seemed to glint in those eyes, and he suddenly remembered the truth...that this wasn't a real girl. This was the cadaver of a girl, powered by a Demon from Hell...a husk. A shell, hiding the image of the monstrous fiend within from the eyes.
She was a facade...a facade meant to rip apart his sanity before ripping him apart, period.
But now, she was one that, to his good fortune, no longer worked against his conscience.
He drew his blade, now firmly set on destroying this monstrosity as swiftly as possible. No more did he think of her as a little girl...that innocent soul was long gone...all that remained was one of Hell's finest actors.
"Oh, you want to play..." she said, crossing her arms behind her back as she did with a smile, still feigning innocence. He nodded slowly, then spoke into her mind, halfway consoling himself.
I'm afraid so...was all he said.
She gave him a sad look, which, despite her gruesome appearance, reflected the innocence of the soul that had once inhabited the body...
...but then, to his alarm, his weapon flew from his hands and behind him, leaving him visibly unarmed...
But as the little Demon-girl would soon find, he was never unarmed...
She looked up at him while facing the floor beneath her feet, like a psychopath staring up at an incarnate, robophobic child's nightmare. She grinned, baring a mouthful of demonic, razor-sharp fangs.
That's too bad...she suddenly spoke, breaching the shield he'd spent decades building over his mind with frightening ease...we could've been friends...my daddy says I'm a little angel...
Rogue shook his head, knowing the truth.
Not the kind of angel I'd like to be friends with...Rogue remarked.
She shrugged.
Suddenly a horrific pain ripped through his torso with supernatural ease, and he gnashed his teeth to keep his true agony from being heard. She'd come at him far too fast to stop....
He looked down through his mask at the place he'd been impaled. To his silent surprise, her scissors were now the size of swords, and much sharper than before. Silver blood dripped down from the hilt of the weapon (for she'd stabbed him up to the handle of the scissor-blade), onto her hand, and after switching hands to hold the blade that impaled him, she licked it off her hands, giggling foully as she did. She then quickly raised her other blade to eviscerate his jugular, ready to finish what she'd started. However, as he looked back down at his wound, his resolve swelled. To his relief, she'd missed his heart...badly. She hadn't even aimed for killing...just to torture him with pain.
He could still move his arms, if not his legs...
He feigned weakly reaching for a knife, making a point to cautiously feel the end of the blade that pierced his heavy armor and impaled him as he did. To his pained surprise, it cut into the metal of his mechanical finger like flesh to a razor...
Those scissors were pretty damn sharp!
He generated an illusion of himself gagging and coughing on his own blood, with silver fluid dripping through the grates of his mask, to silence any suspicion she might still carry about his nature. He flexed his forearm slightly, and a long, silver blade, formed from a cross, slid out from his gauntlet with silent ease.
She swung her blade hard at his neck, far too fast for any human hand to parry...
...but to her surprise and utmost shock, the illusion evaporated before her very eyes as his right arm swung up at an equally superhuman speed and parried the blow. As her eyes widened in shock, he snapped his neck around--so as to face her--with a resounding crack.
You missed...he thought, letting the Demon feel his fiery hatred like a scorching, black oven as he did.
Then, flexing and sweeping his whole arm, as if to backhand and cast her aside, he gashed her across the collarbone as the numerous, razor-sharp, shark-teeth hooks along his forearms flipped out into use. Expelling the blade that impaled him with incredible ease, he whipped his arm out again, missing her head by mere inches. Again and again he continued his onslaught, desperate to catch her, to finish this agonizing task. But she seemed to dance out of his way like an acrobat, ducking and weaving out of the way of his deadly arms, which now included his other arm's blades.Suddenly she raised her hands, and her own blades came to her as if they'd been thrown. She lashed out, suddenly turning the tables on him, but now it was he that displayed unnatural agility. She couldn't get near him, so fast was his movement, so swift his parries.
Suddenly she slashed his arms, slicing off the long hooks he'd been using to battle her, and he leapt back, raising both fists beside his masked face as he did. With a slight flex, two shortsword-blades flipped out from within his gauntlets, and he lunged, allowing their ferocious battle to continue.
The clang and shrieks of their colliding, gnashing blades filled the air, and several times, their blades missed their stroke, and struck the ancient, wallpapered walls.
Suddenly the sound of terrified sobbing could be heard from within Mrs. Kerowitz's room, and her little boy could be heard screaming in terror. The little Demon-girl, apparently attuned to the presence of fear, noticed immediately, and relishing the hellish agony she was putting the small family through, roared, and carved a wide gash through the door of the room, piercing through the other side. The screaming nearly split his ears in its renewed volume, and suddenly the trauma this gruesome fiend was putting the small boy through was just too much for him.
With a loud roar only a Vampire can produce, he impaled her brutally, gashing her thorugh the chest and shoulder in the process. Then, gripping her throat in a vice that would break a mortal's back, he tossed her back several feet, his rage nearly animalistic, but before he could move in to finish her off, the corpse managed to regain her footing.
Suddenly she looked up at him...
...and ripped his spirit to shreds.
"You're just like Daddy!" she sobbed, her face now in her hands as tears streamed down her face.
Rogue stopped his approach, frozen in a psychological iron maiden from Hell.
It was so hard...
Suddenly she was back, grinning like the monster hidden beneath her visage, and slammed him against the wall.
Her hand suddenly expanded to the circumference of a trash-can lid, crushing him to the wall like bug beneath a ten-pound weight. He tried to break free, unleashing all his abominable strength to do so, but all in vain...not even his vicious, supernatural strength could break her grip.
She stared him in the eyes, glaring...
...and he gave up.
His arms fell limp, like the wings of a butterfly about to be nailed to a board for exhibition. She raised the one blade she still held, and leveled it with his head...
...lifted the pin...
And suddenly a voice thundered from the other end of the hall, like an angry bear.
"Hey!" the voice barked, tinged with psionic power. Belladonna’s corpse turned to face the speaker.
Suddenly a shotgun blast took off her left leg. In response, the monster's mouth swelled to the width of the hand that imprisoned him, and a bestial roar exploded from her throat. Rogue turned his head to face his rescuer. Only one person he knew was that accurate...
...Dirge.
The white-haired psychic-gunrunner in the black duster lifted his right hand, and seemed to clutch at something in the air, invisible and evasive. He glared at her the same way she'd glared at him, but this time, there was naked hatred in his eyes. He knew the agony the monster had put Rogue through, and he was furious.
He deftly twirled the lever of the shotgun with deft flick of his finger, cocking it in the process, then aimed; this time, at her arm.
"Get the Hell away from him, Demon!" he roared, seemingly glowing light blue on his outline. She laughed at his order.
"Make me!" she cackled, now trying to break her captive's neck. However, she soon regretted it...
Another shotgun blast tore off her arm, which started to scuttle towards him like a spider. He twirled his weapon again, then obliterated the arm with another pull of the trigger.
Suddenly he crushed whatever invisible thing he was holding, and the girl shrieked as she was torn from the floor and sent into the air. Dirge twirled the gun again, still approaching, his footfalls thudding despite the carpeted floor of the hallway, and his short dreadlocks swung slightly as he approached her, throwing his captive into the wall behind her with a flick of his hand. She looked suddenly at her recent captive, and then, shrieked,
"Just like Daddy!"
"Shut the fuck up, Demon! You're done here!" he barked, fuming with rage.
"Go to Hell!" she shrieked in response, before he forced her mouth shut with a swift clamp of his fingers. Then, as he looked into her eyes, he twirled the gun one more time, leveled it with her head, and then, spoke.
"Lead the way!" he hissed caustically, gritting his teeth like an animal.
Then…
...he fired.
Suddenly a shriek, piercing and totally feral, tore the air, like the claws of some cruel, captive monster, and Dirge was tossed back like a rag doll, crashing into one of the small, varnish-drenched wooden tables and ancient vases that lined the sides of the ancient hallway as he did. He pushed himself up against the wrecked antique with his elbows, then froze as an arc of pure, crackling power pulsed through the hall like an atomic shockwave, his eyes fixed like welded iron upon the body of Belladonna von Kahlcroft.
The girl’s corpse was now enveloped in a blackening hurricane of dust and butchered dreams, her lack of face solved by the oozing of some horrible, black, tarry substance from the core of the wounded region. This horrible, demonic ooze coalesced as he watched, forming into a monstrously-corrupted copy of Belladonna’s face, armed with dull, glowing yellow sparks for eyes.
Suddenly her head seemed to split open, like a grapefruit to a powerful pair of clumsy, prying hands, and a monstrous shriek tore loose from the gaping, toothy gash, turning his blood to ice in his veins. As if answering this hellish shriek, the antique vases that had added to the once-quaint atmosphere of the Hostel exploded like glass mortars, and the whole hallway shook in answer.
Her body, too, shook, as if in the grip of Hell’s worst epilepsy, and as he watched, her skin began to splinter and crack, flaking off and joining the soul-dervish that threatened the whole floor like graying glass in a whirlwind. Beneath the shattered exterior, Dirge could see maggots of black ooze burrow beneath the ancient flesh, seeking to remain with the body or add to the terror of the failing Demon’s image. The Demon within the girl roared again, and as Dirge watched, blue flame and energy erupted around its convulsing host, screaming like the souls of the damned…and Dirge suddenly realized that this was exactly what the flame was. He could see their screaming faces, contorted in eternal agony, wailing and shouting in rage, in protest, in despair all around her in the flames, and he longed to look away, and to forget it all…
…but he knew he never could.
Suddenly a successive wave of power pulsed out, shattering the windows to the right and left of the Demon, as well as the lights along the hall behind them, welcoming in a sudden darkness, illuminated only by the eerie, satanic glow of the Demon. Bluish-gray light danced madly along the walls, flashing across his face like nocturnal artillery fire, and he stared in fearful, yet somehow pitying, wonder at the monster before him.
Then, suddenly, the hurricane sped up, and the voices and cries from the flames became more muffled—like they were coming from behind a helicopter’s blades. He looked up at the Demon’s face, and to his shock, the Demon’s eyes were already upon him…had been so for a while.
The Demon raised an arm of dark energy bursting free from the corpse’s arm with a loud crack—like he was breaking the corpse’s arm in the process—and her flesh, now little more than powder caked up in small chunks fell away like a politician’s lies. Its clawed finger pointed at him, and hellish energy sparked at its tip with a harsh bark.
You…the Demon growled, its maw a miniature barbed-wire no man’s land gleaming in the despairing light of the damned…yours is next, gunslinger…and my only regret…is that I won’t be there to see it…
No…Dirge thought…you won’t.
His Hell is over, gunslinger…yours has just begun.
Then, with a final, whipping swirl of the damned, flame, dust, glass, power, and forgotten misery, the hellicane ended, exploding from existence with a tremendous bang.
Then there was silence.

Dirge sighed, then crossed himself as he repaired one of the faux-candles above him. He twirled the shotgun once more as the light flickered back to life, before finally slipping it into the holster on his waist. Then, he sank to the ground, thankful that this horror, at least, was now over.

However, the silence was suddenly broken by the sound of sobbing.