As a man, he became a conjure doctor, working spells out of a warped riverboat stinking of rust and mildew. The deck was strewn with bones—some animal, some not—and the walls were scribbled with sigils written in blood that never dried.

People came to him desperate. Barren women. Crippled men. Lovers with knives behind their smiles. Remus never asked for cash. He took things deeper. Memories. Teeth. The last breath of a dying pet. The more painful the offering, the more potent the spell. Cade collected it all—bottling grief, sewing agony into wax dolls, distilling regret into powders that made the dead speak.

Pain wasn’t enough. Cade wanted something beyond suffering.

And so, he made a pact with something older than the river. Something that wore flies like skin and knew every nerve ending by name.

He took the knife and filleted his tongue and offered it to the dark.

It accepted.

Amber James had heard the legends whispered in late-night chat rooms and decaying forums that pulsed like digital necropolises. She’d seen the grainy videos—the choking screams, the clouds of insects, the way mirrors warped like boiling flesh.

She didn’t care if it was real.

She just wanted him to suffer.

Darren Holt. Her ex. The man who doxxed her, mocked her scars, posted revenge porn with captions like “witch bitch deserves it.” The man who stole not just her name but her silence. When the cops laughed and her boss fired her, Amber decided she’d stop praying for justice.

She would bleed it into being.

The ritual began with a sacrifice—her own. She boiled her toenails into a paste and rubbed it into the hollow of a voodoo doll made from shaved leather and her hair. She dug dirt from beneath a noose tree, roots thick with old guilt. She stitched a dead fly into her cheek so she could dream through its eyes.

In her bathroom, she stripped naked, lit black candles that stank like burned teeth, and knelt in a circle of used razor blades and menstrual cloths. Her tongue trembled in her mouth like a guilty thing.

She reached for the scalpel.

Three slices.

Jagged. Uneven. Deep enough that blood sprayed like arterial ink across the porcelain tiles.

“Edac Sumer. Edac Sumer. Edac Sumer.”

The moment the last syllable left her ruined mouth, she vomited flies—not metaphor, not hallucination—real, twitching things crawling out of her throat, swarming from her nostrils, tearing through her tear ducts. The buzzing shook the walls.

Something had heard her.

He came through the mirror like a boil erupting from reality. The glass didn’t shatter—it pulsed, bulged outward in glistening waves of silver pus, then tore open like a womb of knives.

What emerged wasn’t a man.

It was Remus Cade reborn—a prophet of pain, now something holy and hollowed out.

He stood nearly eight feet tall, skeletal and bloated all at once. His ribs were opened like cage doors, and flies spilled from within. Skin sloughed from his frame in parchment scrolls, revealing muscles that throbbed with carved runes. His face was a mouth of mouths, lips sewn shut in spirals, yet flies poured endlessly from the stitched-up voids.

He reeked of molasses and necrosis. Of funerals soaked in vinegar and the sweat of unwashed sins.

Amber tried to scream. Her vocal cords twitched like worms. The chains came before she could move.

They lashed from the ceiling—hooks carved from bone, cords braided with hair and cartilage. They punched through her back, her ankles, her scalp, yanked her into the air with a wet snapping of joints.

“You summoned me,” he said, though no lips moved. The words vibrated in her nerves, translated into pain.

“And now I’ll show you how beautiful vengeance can taste.”

He tore open a hole in her chest—not to kill her, but to open her. To make her a vessel. Her skin split into wings. Her intestines became strings on which the dead whispered lullabies. Her tongue grew new mouths, all screaming and grinning.

Amber became his choir.

Three days later, Darren received a package.

Inside was a single jar. It squirmed when he touched it. Inside, floating in brown fluid and fly eggs, was Amber’s left eye, still blinking. A note lay beneath it, written in blood and dead wasps.

“She sang your name into my mouth.”

He laughed it off.

Thought it was a prank.

Then the flies came.

They crawled from his drains, nested in his ears, laid eggs behind his eyeballs. Mirrors refused to show his reflection. His teeth began to rot from the inside, blackening into hives.

One night, he woke up gagging.

He looked down.

His skin came undone like wet silk flayed from muscle, folding inward, folding wrong—his body no longer shedding shape but becoming something else, something remembered only in nightmares the earth has buried. His tongue fell out first, wriggling like a slug, and birthed a fly that whispered: “We’ve only just begun.”

He tried to scream.

His lungs filled with crawling things that fed on his breath.

Now, it spreads like digital disease.

TikTok. Instagram. Dark web filters that glitch and flicker with fly wings. A new challenge: The Torn Tongue Game. Kids do it for clout. They cut. They chant. They bleed. Some vanish. Some return… changed.

One girl bit out her father’s throat during dinner.

A boy flayed his mother with dental floss while smiling.

And in every city, a mirror melts, and from it emerges the Man with the Mouth of Flies—offering salvation in agony, music in mutilation, a religion built on the poetry of human suffering.

About the Author:
Chris McAuley is an award-winning, New York Times Best-selling writer who is most famous for creating the popular StokerVerse franchise with Dacre Stoker (Bram Stoker’s great grand-nephew). This continuation of Bram’s work has proliferated from graphic novels, books, audio dramas, table-top games into the world of television and film. He has also created a successful science fiction franchise with Hollywood actress Claudia Christian (star of Babylon 5) called Dark Legacies. Chris has recently been nominated for the highest award for writing in tabletop games —The Ennies, for his Three Musketeers vs. Chthulu RPG, which has also become a comic book series. He is also known for his work on Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and Terminator franchises. Away from writing duties he is the co-owner of X-G3 Productions, a film company spearheaded by CNN’s George J. Giakoumis and Peter S. Giakoumis, as well as a multiple award-winning executive producer on The Stranded Warrior Sci-Fi film.