Text: Cradle Of Filth. Midnight Shadows Crawl To Darken Counsel With Life.

Sometimes I beheaded them with daggers, with punyards, with knives
Sometimes I suspended them in my room
From a pole or by a hook and cords and strangled them
And when they were languishing
I committed with them the evils of the flesh [Incomprehensible]

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 Gotterdamerung 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 dark side
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 is sucking the hour
Their, 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, a sport to immortal vices of the highest order
Wherein devilry holds sway
Behind blind walls where these cockatrice squalled
Their songs of necronomicon, they spoke of Gilles De Rais

Behold the bold inauguration of the dark side
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 is sucking the hour
Their, throttled gasps tantamount to foreplay
And drooling razors next to come unspool red secrets from the young

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, 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

The evening air laps thick about
The moat that Tiffauges claims as dusk now slips away
Where taught to run, the rotten tongue
Of a hotter Gotterdamerung has started licking like a flame