Cradle of Filth - Midnight Shadows Crawl to Darken Counsel with Life

[Narration by Doug Bradley]:

"Sometimes I beheaded them
With daggers, with polearms, 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"


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

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 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
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 has sucked the hour

There, 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 horrors in the glades of man
Were 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 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