Text: Cradle Of Filth. Darkness Incarnate.

'Something thicker than despair
Rides upon the midnight air
The smell of blood, the taste of prey
We spy you hiding Gilles de Rais'


Under August swelter
After banquet and soiree
When spiced wine and song
Have further heated veins
To the ninth degree as tenacula
Hold another body in their sway
Gilles retires from the grasping fires
That will ashen the remains

Darkness incarnate

Demons in his semen
That once clung about the throats
Of children dragged from cellars to his rooms
Now permeate the castle
All who sleep dream of the goat
That dark eclectic harbinger of doom

Nightingales sang of tragedy
Whispers were made of blasphemy
Vain, insane, this brute aloof
Drew tainted veils over bitter truth

The stairs ran helter-skelter
His bedchamber besieged
By phantoms who sheltered
In it's furs, remorse
Sought to overwhelm him
Like a lantern of disease
That shone on rotten faces
Of those murdered out in force

Darkness incarnate

Fleeing ghosts so indisposed
To his Satanic love
Of children dragged from cellars to his feast
He rose, a carnal wind opposed
To those that sat above
Tearing out into the forest like a beast

The night wind sang of tragedy
Whispers were made of blasphemy
Vain, insane, this brute aloof
Drew tainted sails over naked truth

Madness clouded everything
Like a lycanthropic shroud
And through it's ghastly lineaments he saw
The trees become obscenities
Semen drip from every bough
As if he rooted Nature like a whore

Dryads tongued under skirts of leaves
Surrendering branches that slenderly pleased
The Mocking orifices and the forest on her knees

Then once besotted, knotted trunks now grew
Rotten, venereal, cancerous, blue
The clotting of his heart to a rank cantankerous tune

Beneath the sallow moonlight
In a wonderland of pain
Gilles fled back to the castle
Terrified and drained
He sought his deep red velvet bed
And the sleep it preordained
Exhausted, forced into the dead
The creep of nightmares came again

Madness clouded everything
Like a lycanthropic shroud
And through it's ghastly lineaments he saw
Hundreds of slain children
Some came crawling disembowelled
To where he stretched out howling on all fours

Corpses tore at his legs and knees
As he clawed to the cross, begging reprieve
From a Lord that soared above the awful scene

He sobbed and wept, no voice was left
To scream, the dream was not drubbed yet
He heard the horrors hiss beside him, 'Herod, you'll regret...'

'Who hears the tears of nightfall?
Who steers the spears so spiteful?'