Midnight Shadows Crawl to Darken Counsel with Life

"Sometimes I beheaded them

with daggers, with poniards, with knives

Sometimes I suspended them in my room

from a pole or by a hook and chords and strangled them

And when they were languishing

I committed with them the evils of the flesh"

The evening air laps thick about

The stagnant moat that Tiffauges claims

As dusk now slips away

Where taught to run, the rotten tongue

Of a hotter Götterdämerung

Has started licking like a flame

Whispers in the dismal mist

Are full of crystal promises

Black rites begun in earnest

Ignite Hell's hungry furnace

Behold the bold inauguration of the darkside

Demonic passions climbing

Ill-fated stars aligning

Tonight these sights are guaranteed to feed the master

The tide of blood is rising

His gifts will be providing

Unmasked, the phantom lord De Rais

Haunts the furthest tower

Wherein death has sucked the hour

There, throttled gasps tantamount to foreplay

And drooling razors next to come

Unspool red secrets from the young

The moon grinned full, the games were chaste

When the children first arrived

Now midnight shadows crawl apace

To darken counsel with their lives

Flesh and ecstasy as sport

Are immortal vices of the highest order

Wherein devilry holds sway

Behind blind walls where these cockatrice squalled

Their songs of Necronomicon

Spoke out of Gilles De Rais

Each murdered son, each frozen rose

Handpicked, was gently fed

To the sumptuous one in black and those

Whose lives were thrown in with the dead

The candles lit, the stage was set

As it was in sainted days

When censers swung and banners hung

On the Siege of Orleans on the painted Seine

Now the castle floats in the drifting fog

Torn from it's moorings

Like a shipwreck dredged from Hell

As innocents entreat a shifting God

Their voices soaring

On a silver tide to heaven

On a knife edge as they fell

The blade would plunge in virulent arcs

Such wounds would stretch away

By the fireside, warmed to creative sparks

Of the monster Gilles De Rais

Gilded Gilles De Rais

Comets vomited

The restless bells of crime

Peeled back skin from broken bones

Of angels cut from the nicks of time

Festering faces with painted eyes

The prettiest kept to be thrust inside

Gaping necromantic from the mantle-side

Caked in kissed goodbyes

Days faded in decay

The stench of perfume lied

No horror in the glades of man

Was left for Barron to provide

So unique was the beat of his poisoned heart

And it's sordid, morbid crack

No further atrocity could possibly surpass

Unrewarded, bored, he turned his back