Spawn of Man Read Online Free

was manufactured from human skin, stretched tightly over padding and dyed a deep red, as if it had been dipped in blood. Daniel had secured the material through a surgeon friend, using research as the excuse for its necessity, and had attached it himself.
    The high, angular back of the chair was carved into a plume of spindles that fanned up and out from the seat with every hideous depiction of human suffering laced into the columns. And this theme was mirrored in the arms of the piece with scenes composed of naked bodies subjected to heinous acts of butchery. The delicate engraving presented limbs severed from torsos and heads severed from necks by monstrous, bloodthirsty ghouls. The chair may have been Bartholomew’s work, inspired by architects from beyond the grave, but the addition of the generator and the cables had been effected by Daniel.
    Daniel approached the cell where Bartholomew was incarcerated and spoke to him. ‘Bartholomew, are you awake?’
    The man was huddled in the corner of his cell, coiled on the floor, but he replied instantly, ‘Yes, I am awake, doctor. I have been awake for three years. I dare not sleep.’
    ‘Why is that, Bartholomew, why dare you not sleep my friend?’
    ‘You know the answer to that question doctor. They still wait for me. I will not give them opportunity to take me, to pour their poison into me again.’
    ‘But I find it hard to believe you have not slept in three years. The human body is incapable of such a feat. Bartholomew, you are an intelligent man, you must know that yourself?’
    ‘Do not patronize me, doctor. I am an intelligent man, just as you believe yourself to be. But you are thinking like a fool now, like I was, seduced by their promises!’
    ‘Whose promises, Bartholomew?’
    ‘The dead! With their entire empty words and falsehoods. You must understand,’ the inmate said, shifting his posture so that he moved into the half-light, nearer to the front of his cell, ‘I am not insane. I wrote my notes whilst in a rapture induced by my exposure to a place far beyond your wildest imaginings.’ And he wept now, digging his long, broken, dirty nails deep into his forearm, gouging chunks of flesh from a self-inflicted gash than ran across the muscle there. The blood trickled through the dark hair and dripped onto his lap.
    ‘Why do you hurt yourself so, Bartholomew?’ sighed Daniel.
    The man smiled, a severe little manipulation of his mouth, that narrowed his eyes and gave him the look of a mischievous child. But there was nothing childlike about the man in the rest of his appearance, fully six feet with a wild shock of prematurely white hair and manic, dark brown, almost black irises that seemed to bore through one’s skin to read the soul.
    He began beating one fist mechanically against his temple, just in front of an electrode, inducing a bluish contusion that discolored the skin, and spoke in rhythm with the blows, ‘I-am-simply-reminding-myself-that-I-am-alive, that-I-still-exist-on-this-plane, that-I-have-come-back-from-their-domain.’
    ‘You mean from the afterlife, Bartholomew?’
    The inmate ceased his blows, ‘Yes, from the afterlife doctor. You have no idea what you are dealing with my friend. The chair is a portal. You must not contemplate its actualization. It is a means for them to rip apart the thin veil that separates their world from ours. That can never be allowed to happen!’
    The man’s agitation escalated, so that he clawed his bearded cheeks, drawing fresh threads of blood that leaked in crimson, vein-like configurations down his flesh.
    Daniel now noticed a single finger, cut off just above the knuckle, lay discarded on the stone floor of the cell. It lay bent and vertical as if beckoning, and a small pool of dark liquid seeped from the detached end. Bartholomew tracked the sweep of Daniel’s eyes to the grisly specimen. Daniel looked at the patient again and noticed an inordinate amount of blood blemishing his teeth and lips,