Filthy Lambs

Writer/Letterer: Pallie Paul Allor
Artist: Chris Evenhuis
Colorist: Sjan Weijers
Cover artists: Chris Evenhuis, Meghan Hetrick and Caitlin Yarsky
Editors: James B. Emmet and Jon Moisan

In the basement of Grimaldi Manor, the family patriarch says a prayer and stabs himself in the throat. Blood falls. The demon watches. A woman tries to scream.

Upstairs, three generations of the Grimaldi family and a snapping turtle fill the house with unfulfilled promise and joyful childhood shrieks.

These are tremendous, terrible times for the lineage! The Grimaldis hold a contract with Their Lord Below for ten more years of prodigious wealth and glory.

But old contracts can sour. Monsters can misbehave. And a filthy little lamb can still have teeth.

Writing Filthy Lambs, I wondered if the woman in the basement could hear the children laughing. I knew she could smell the candles burning and feel the rope digging into her wrists. But could she hear the children? The birds screeching in the conservatory? Could she hear the family matriarch telling her children that the family is blessed?

The family is not blessed. The family is haunted, not by ghosts, but by a contract forged in hell. They’re haunted by every warm and comfortable night they’ve spent in a house splattered by decades of blood.

Lambs are sacrificed because they’re soft. Because they’re frightened. Because their throats open easily. Because they’re animals.

But the Grimaldis are animals too. They bleed. They panic. They make awful, hideous, pathetic sounds. And they’ve built their empire in a slaughterhouse.

Welcome to that slaughterhouse. It’s a horrible place. Chris, Sjan and I built it for you with love.