Moment’s Monument
I often ask myself, what really scares me. And maybe, one night, the bill for all the hedonistic choices Ive selfishly made will come due.
Moment's Monument
2022 by Zorha
Highgate Cemetery
London, England
October 18th, 1899
As the heavy stone door slid open, the silvery light from a full moon crept across the mausoleum floor. A gust of bitter wind blew desiccated rose pedals left inside, their dried husks tumbling to the base of the marble sarcophagus. The air had a grave chill to it; the bountiful harvest of the outlying English countryside had come and gone.
A gaunt fox stumbled just inside, sweat soaking the unkempt fur of his haggard brow. Forcing the stone door open sapped much effort, and it was clear from the slight paunch of his gut that this vulpine was not used to such exertion. His ruddy fur appeared greasy, as if illness had taken hold now for a while. A dark patch of sweat seeped through his gray vest. Frigid mud soiled his trouser cuffs. Despite the deathly chill, the fox carried no overcoat, either not concerned about his constitution or perhaps he courted Death herself.
He squeezed a bouquet of fresh crimson roses in his black tipped, artistic paws, giving no mind to their thorns.
"Oh Lizzie ..." Dante's hind feet pushed him forward with labored effort. The tortured vulpine lurched in uneven steps until he collapsed against the marble sarcophagus holding its sole occupant in eternal repose. "I'm so ... sorry .. forgive me ..."
He draped himself across the sarcophagus lid before burying his muzzle in his outstretched arms and breaking into heavy sobs. His paws let go of the bouquet which tumbled off the sloped lid and unceremoniously unto the cold stone floor. Their thorns glistened with blood, dark in the moonlight.
The fox remained there for what seemed like forever, guilt soaked sobs filling the musty silence of the mausoleum. If his salty remorse was meant for the angels sitting silent vigil outside in the cemetery, they fell on deaf ears of marble.
The fiery light of a hooded lantern swept over the tressapper without warning.
"Aye there! What's this about?!" The fox looked up with raw eyes to the scraggly coyote addressing him. Fresh, unturned earth clung to his boots. His thin paws gripped the rough wood of a trusty shovel. His shaggy gray fur looked matted. The gravedigger regarded Dante with suspicion. "Visiting hours left with the sun, Guv."
The fox said nothing in his defense, and merely wiped the snot from his small black nose with the back of his forearm. The coyote leaned in and squinted in the light of the lantern, trying to appraise if the vulpine had made leave of his senses. A gust of wind buffeted the grim laborer, the eerie sound almost an anguished wail.
"Are you not up to Dick?" The cemetery worker asked, cold brown eyes narrowing. The fox pushed himself up and stumbled over as if compelled, casting unsure looks back to the only permanent occupant. The coyote repeated. "Did you hear me? Are you daft?"
The fox's dull green eyes looked absolutely horrified as he shambled up to the coyote. Unsure of what the fox was up to, the grave digger set down his lantern and readied both paws on the shovel, just in case. He blinked in surprise when the smaller canid wrapped his arms around the coyote.
"Are we doing the Bear, Guv?" His grip loosened, and the shovel dropped to the stone floor with a dull clang. The coyote just stood there, unsure of what to do. At least this bloody fool wasn't violent. The fox simply squeezed on him, his dainty muzzle buried into the coyote's thick overcoat. A few weak sobs escaped, and as a matter of instinct, the coyote patted the fox gently on back.
"There, there." He offered, not entirely sure what ghosts haunted the fox. But it was clear the way his green eyes even now flicked about in paranoia. Whiskey and chloral lingered on the smaller canid's breath. Perhaps he was just drunk.
The coyote flinched in surprise when the fox cupped his furry cheeks and kissed him. The gravedigger gripped the fox by his shoulders and pushed the amorous stranger away from his oddly cold muzzle lips. Dante tasted death on the old coyote; the scent of rotting leaves and overturned earth clung to him.
The tormented look in the fox's eyes was undeniable. Slowly the effeminate vulpine sank to his knees, his dark paws leaving twin smears of crimson all over the coyote's attire. When the fox nuzzled the slight bulge of the coyote's trousers, the other canid scoffed at him.
"You're a loony. That's what you are!" And yet, the gravedigger didn't stop those crafty, bloody paws from pulling down his trousers. Instead the gruff coyote continued to insult the browbeaten fox, some quips turning strangely personal even as warm muzzle lips wrapped themselves around his pink tip poking out from his sheath. "That's what you're after, aint it?"
The bob of Dante's slim skull almost looked like a nod. His eyes pleaded with the old coyote to stop him. To keep him from this profane, bizarre desecration.
"You're going to really do this now, aren't you? Your wife is buried not ten feet from here."
Dante's eyes sealed, tears flowing freely again. He wanted to beg to be spared from this further humiliation, but the tapered length swelling in his muzzle cut that option off quite succinctly. One of the coyote's clammy paws cupped the back of the fox's head.
"You weren't there when she took her own life, were you?"
Dante looked up, staring into the cold dead eyes of the coyote. How did he know?
"No. While the laudum was stealing the breath from her lips, you were enjoying the warmth of someone else's bed, weren't you?" The coyote's bitter words edged with queer acusation. "You didn't just have after dinner dessert with your little Northumbrian friend, did you?"
The soft slurps echoing within the still mausoleum sang volumes.
Tears of regret and shame streamed down the soft fur of Dante's cheeks. Yet, he couldn't stop blowing the wizened yote. He gagged on the coyote's cock as the palm on the back of his head pushed him down on his swollen orb. The bulbous knot tasted rotten somehow, the salty, watery spunk sliding down the submissive fox's throat.
The worst part of it all was how the gravedigger simply stood there like a corpse. Despite the obvious climax, the coyote hadn't even grunted. The coyote released him, and the fox flopped on his side, coughing and gasping for less fetid air.
"There we are Luv." The yote grinned. His rotten fangs and molars looked like dice. He tugged the waist of his trousers up. "Are you ready to go back?"
Dante blinked up at him, confused. Back where?
None of this made any sense. Just why had he come here after all this time? He got up on his shaky hind legs, glancing again at the sarcophagus. Despite the cum coating his black muzzle lips, they felt dry, and he licked them. Did his long time friend Howell finally speak the truth?
Reproachful, dark whispers from the marble box slipped into Dante's perked, black tipped ears.
They coaxed doubts in his paranoid mind. Planted the seeds of eternal damnation in his grief stricken heart. No. He could not bear not knowing. He scooped up the gravediggers shovel and in one fluid motion, sank its metal tip under the marble lid interning his wife's corpse.
"Forgive me, my Dove ..." With much effort he pried the heavy cover off with a low grate of stone. It smashed onto the floor and broke apart with a dull crash.
The coyote just stood there, smiling wickedly, and made no effort to stop the obviously distraught fox. Dante dropped the shovel, the handle now slick with the blood from the foxes paws. After much hesitation, he opened the lid of his wife's exposed coffin with a loud, drawn out creak. Dante gasped, drawing back in equal amounts of horror and confusion.
The vixen lay there, in perfect repose. Deathless. Flawless. Perfect. Her anorexic form and supple bosom mocked Dante. Elizabeth's flowing red head fur had somehow grown, filling the empty parts of the coffin. Her hair seemed to float about her, as it did for 'Ophelia'.
Eighty years earlier Dante's uncle had mused with Mary Shelley. And while waiting out the dreary Year without Summer the good doctor had described such beautiful undeath. Dante gnashed his fangs. He beat his clenched fists against his temples, the once hushed chorus of dark whispers now a banshee wail of accusation and travesty. The cruel wind blew, and the lantern flickered. Something fluttered just inside the lip of the coffin.
The timid fox neared. His trembling paws reached for the moldy pages, aghast. This simply could not be. Dante read the lines, the langid Sonnets unmistakable, unforgettable. Before he could comprehend, the old pages disintegrated in his blood stained paws, rendering the entire desecration moot.
The coyote finally reacted, closing the lid with a loud bang. The wails in the fox's ramshackle mind cut off abruptly.
"That's enough of that then." He narrowed his cold eyes at the defiler. "There's no need for a mutton shunter to get involved. But I will be seeing you to the gate."
The coyote's ghastly paw reached out and pulled on Dante's vest, leading the deflated fox out. On the way his other paw scooped up the lantern. It was certainly a trick of Dante's unreliable senses, but the light from the lantern seemed to pale somehow.
Still, many things bothered Dante as they stepped out of the mausoleum into the stygian night.
On their way out Dante noticed the bouquet of roses he had brought were now dried up and black. Their boots crunched in a thin layer of snow covering the cemetery, but as far as Dante could tell, there were no footprints around them.
On the narrow trail to the gate exiting the western cemetery they passed by forlorn headstones of intricate design. The occasional ebony raven gave angry squawks as they passed by. The pale moonlight bathed everything in silver and shadow. Dante looked over to the coyote, whose fur seemed darker now somehow.
The fox glanced at some of the dates on the headstones and felt out of time and space for some reason. Some of them ended in 1890 and upwards. His numb mind couldn't remember anything past 1882. Where had he been?
He thought back to when Howell had convinced him to retrieve his poems, buried with Lizzie. October 1869.
"Thirty years ago." The other canid said, as if reading the fox's thoughts. Dante looked over to ... him?
No. Dante's green eyes widened in disbelief as the black wolf next to him seemed to melt, the once telltale signs of masculinity shifting effortlessly into femininity. It was the final mockery to Dante's tortured life of painting, chasing what he himself could not become.
Her clothing had changed as well. She wore black leather chest armor, braces, wide belt, and greaves which contoured the curves of her hips and unremarkable bust. Her blouse, nearly black in the moonlight, had a touch of light green. Warriors braids of her dark brown, almost black head fur draped across her unusually broad shoulders. Eldritch runes, unreadable to the simple artist, adorned the bracers.
The once cold eyes now glowed with an ethereal white light. Where once the lantern was held, an eerie white flame flickered in her outstretched paw, lighting their ghostly way.
Here was Dante's own personal Black Shuck. In that moment he knew he was damned.
"No. Noo ..." Dante stammered. All manner of memories came rushing back at once. The removal of his testicles in 1877 by Doctor John Marshall. Sitting in a chair by an easel at Westcliff Bungalow after a seizure, watching the sun come up on the beach of Birchington by the Sea in 1882.
The roar of the ocean, the salt in the air, and the cries of gulls were some of his last melancholy memories. Now ...
The cries he heard coming from the gate to Swain's Lane were not of gulls, but shrieks of tormented souls. The dark air around the iron gates rippled in the desolate still of the night, shimmering to the dimension of untold suffering.
He had been here before. In this very spot. In 1889.
"Yes" she said, flatley. Without emotion, void of sympathy. Her glowing white eyes regarded him, but gone was the coyote's malice. Dante had been punished enough, for a while at least.
"Ten years ago we stood here. And Ten Years from now we will stand here again. And Ten Years from that. You will bring roses for your wife. And you will suffer grief unimaginable. You will re-live each regret. Each blasphemy. For all Eternity."
In that awful Moment's Monument, Dante realized it was what he deserved, what he had earned for his decadent and exorbitant life. The fox placed his bleeding paw in the hellhound's own, and with pawtips interlaced, they stepped back through the Gates of Hell, together.
~ Fin ~
A Sonnet is a moment's monument,
Memorial from the Soul's eternity
To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
Of its own arduous fulness reverent:
Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see
Its Powering crest impearled and orient.
A Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals
The soul,--its converse, to what Power 'tis due:--
Whether for tribute to the august appeals
Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue,
It serve, or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath,
In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death.
Almost none of the characters and events in this story are fictitious. Any similarity to actual events or persons, living, dead, or undead, is purely intentional.
Lycanthrope Films Limited wishes to extend its heartfelt congratulations to Lady Diana Spencer and His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales on the occasion of their marriage - July 29th 1981.