Unearthly Saviour
I do not own anything and I am not making money from this, it is just for fun. All rights and characters belong to Clive Barker and other respective owners and creators.
Kirsty had gone out that night. Not out with friends or for a drink, she had left the apartment she shared with her husband after a terrific fight. She had found him sleeping with a Goth girl from who knows where, when she had come home from her own employment early. He had in turn blamed it on her, saying that it wasn't any wonder he'd had to turn to someone else, when she wouldn't even share her past with him. Kirsty had yelled at him that it was over, spite and hurt in her stubborn damaged eyes and headstrong and impulsively fiery as ever, had packed a suitcase haphazardly with anything she really needed to keep, and marched out stubbornly into the night, tears and anger and betrayal melding with bitter spite that she couldn't even manage a normal relationship now. That fate seemed to have it in for her. With awkward stubborn determination she yanked along her suitcase. It wasn't much really, to value in the world. She looked behind her along the dark city street. She'd been walking for about twenty minutes now and she needed to work out what she was going to do, but right now she felt an all too familiar prickle of fear. Was someone following her? She pursed her lips stubbornly, and gave a slightly nervous chuckle. She was hallucinating again, great. She had forgotten her anxiety and depression medication. She didn't doubt it was her past experiences playing tricks on her. It always was. That was until she heard it again, a few seconds before someone grabbed her from behind and she felt the press of a flick knife at her throat and hot breath on her thin neck.
"Don't move pretty, and this can go easy," a slimy voice hissed vilely in her ear, and Kirsty tensed, closing her eyes in fear and revulsion. For once in her life the headstrong woman had no way out of this situation. Terrified, Kirsty Gooden realised, she didn't Know what to do.
He took her at knifepoint into an alley, the place run down and dirty with several pieces of furniture used to make it into a place for them to hang around in, and another four men. One of them was busy with something she couldn't see, another two injecting themselves with some kind of drug, and the last looking disgustingly interested in her.
"Please! Go! Go away and leave me alone!" Kirsty shouted, a mix of fire and desperate fear. Her hands were raised just above her elbows and her eyes flicked between the vile men. When for a moment the knife disappeared from her throat, she kicked the man behind her in the groin and ran for it, hearing him shout in pain and anger. It was only a few seconds before one of the others caught her by the hair and Kirsty screamed, in pain and desperate fire.
"Bad move princess" she heard the other man say, the one she had escaped from, and when she was a second later thrown to the dirty paper strewn ground, shard of glass sticking in her leg from a broken bottle, she felt the first kick to her ribs. It was many blows later when the stubborn beaten woman lost consciousness just as her eyes caught sight of what that first man had been doing. He was still hunched over a familiar object, unable to crack it's puzzle, gold light glinting off the lacquered surfaces. Once again the Lament Configuration had come back into Kirsty's sight. This time with her last conscious breath Kirsty prayed someone would work out how to open it. She prayed for an angel to save her. An angel with a halo of pins.
When Kirsty's eyes opened her vision swam. She felt the prick as someone withdrew a needle from her arm. Drugs, heroin perhaps. Whatever it was it blurred her already bruised head. She tried to shout but all that came out was a mumble. Her blouse was ripped and then someone climbed on top of her. She couldn't focus on his face and her head rolled back against the soft bottom of a dirty settee. She reached out randomly for anything she might be able to hit the man with, who with greasy, vile hands and breath that smelled like cigarettes and beer, was attempting to undo her belt buckle. The stubborn thin traumatised woman's slender hand brushed something within reach. Lacquered wood, square corners, gold plated patterns. Something familiar that somehow drew her hand towards it. Kirsty grabbed the Lament Configuration and pulled it into her fuzzy spinning focus, glazed over defiant desperation on Kirsty's pale face and large chocolate brown eyes, and she ran her thumb over it's centre. It rotated in her hands, up down then back, then she heard it's music just as the alley turned completely black, vague lights from the city streetlamps disappearing, then a white ethereal glow seemed to take it's place and an all too familiar bell tolled.
The first thing Kirsty registered after that was anguished screaming and the weight of the man on top of her suddenly lifting as he was dragged off her by a sharp barbed hook that pierced his shoulder. Blood spattered onto her half bare chest as he was yanked off her screaming in shock and pitiful pleas not to hurt him. They were not answered.
She heard over the spinning nausea in her head, more screams and the deep unforgiving powerful command of a merciless inhuman voice of cold judgement. Kirsty would know the Hell Prince's voice anywhere, and a small grateful smile of relief pulled on the half conscious woman's lips. Her eyes closed a little, feeling a surprising surge of relief, safety or maybe it was protection. She half lucidly wondered if she had gone crazy. She didn't know the answer. She just knew that he had come. And that she was grateful.
She heard more pitiful screams of agony, pleas for release. She knew they would find no mercy in the Prince of Pain's unbendable cold pools of blackness in that graceful otherworldly stare, unbending and piercingly transfixing. The cold Cenobite's austere beauty and mutilated deviantly warped reverent calm followed the Hell Princes presence like the black leather of his rended cassock which trailed along the filthy ground, sharp implements of torture clanking together lightly from the cord threaded through bloody flesh at his navel. She could see him out of the corner of her glazed over deep brown eyes. Hear the men's screams.
The Hell Prince's voice was merciless austere and unbendable, and held an undercurrent of anger over his otherworldly calm, the words a powerful, cruelly direct deep echo.
"Gentlemen. Did you believe there was not a price to be paid for the lives you have deemed to lead. Did you think pleas would save you from the eternity of damnation which you have brought upon yourself. NO!There is a price to pay for the suffering which you have caused. Especially to one such an interesting creature. Oh yes, there is a price to pay, for the darkness that taints the lives you have led and now poison's your pitiful souls, and I, WILLsee to it PERSONALLY that you receive it. FOREVER! Pain, gentleman, is to become your eternal reality, and down the dark decades of your torments, this sweet suffering will seem to you like memories of paradise."
Kirsty heard a tearing, ripping sound and an increase of screams, and then a wet splatter. Silence all but the slight clink of metal. A shadow fell over her. She knew who it was. She knew it was her dark otherworldly saviour, a familiar terrifying angel of pain who had once again come to her rescue. She felt cool graceful hands and hard leather-bound arms pick her up with a gentleness that would have surprised her if she didn't know him better. He straitened stiffly, strait backed with graceful slow serene movements, austere and calm, but not quite. What had happened to her, and what could have happened, had the Lament Configuration not been once again in her grasp, had affected him. It did not make him happy.
Kirsty could somehow tell, even with her eyes glazed over, and the austere calm of his exterior, forced upon himself by the disciplined serenity and order of his own mind. The Prince of Pain gathered Kirsty's half lucid and glazed over beaten frame against the rended leather and opened flesh of his chest with a careful austere gentleness. Kirsty fuzzily curled a little closer to his chest as she held onto him, eyes glazed over and her bleeding scalp resting lightly against his leather-bound shoulder.
"Mm, thanks, for coming for me" she murmured with a tiny smile of gratefulness and mostly closed eyes, only vaguely conscious. It was only a whisper, a barely inaudible utterance, but the cenobite prince heard it, a slight turn of his head towards his left, head still strait as a die and a minute inclination down of his eyebrows as he focussed on her voice. Sharp cenobitic attentive ears heard every word. His face did not convey this, a mask of solemn austere calm. His voice was a sombre echo, almost soft and certainly gracefully beautiful, somehow both devoid of the inclination of feeling, and deeply echoing those feelings to a secret volume that kirsty had not really heard in anyone else besides the austere Prince of Pain. A beautiful contradiction of the senses like everything else about her grave, darkly terrifying savoir.
"Ah yes. You are welcome Kirsty. You always are." His cassock trailed grandly as he began to slowly, gravely, carry the broken, stubborn, woman away, the fiery spirited creature that captured, captivated that cenobitic curiosity of his the first time she had opened the schism all those years ago, the girl who's fire and tenacity and skill at bargaining has quickly gained his respect. Not a task easily won. This creature, he cared for a very great deal, and so he carried her solemn and gracefully away from the horrors of what these pitiful mortal souls had forced her to endure. Kirsty. He spoke again his dark deep infinitely beautiful voice icy and pitiless yet also filled with calm grave sorrow.
"Oh. What has happened to you, my fascinating Kirsty. Sleep. This place is not for your eyes, nor are the horrors which it holds. Kirsty. You must rest. All will still remain when you return to this worlds reality of consciousness. Sleep Kirsty. And you will be safe from all."
He took her to the entrance of an accident and emergency hospital, doorway glowing warm orange light which reflected almost gold off his regal horrifying halo of mutilation. In her broken, intoxicated fog Kirsty thought he looked the most beautiful thing in the world, perhaps she would have done anyway, she wasn't sure. She just knew her dark angel of pain had saved her. He laid her down with inhuman care and austere graceful gentleness. He brushed hair from the captivating, headstrong woman's face, cold, leather clad and free, pink stained by the constant contact with blood, graceful, calm, strict and gentle fingers traced the injured woman's scalp, and he placed the Lament Configuration gently into one of her limp hands. He stood, stiff postured and grandly, gracefully terrifying. His voice was sombre, knowing, calm, sad.
"Oh kirsty, you shall remain safe here. Do not forget. I await the day when you will, open the box willingly to join us. Oh but I understand that that day is not, now. I have forever Kirsty, and forever I shall be waiting, until your inevitable choice is made. Until you realise your own self denial. Until you do."
He left to wait in the shadows, watched from a distance. Calmly austere and grandly, serenely beautiful. It was not even a minute before people came and took her inside to safety. His task was done. And he returned then through the otherworldly schism and back into the labyrinthine domain of his lord, Leviathan.
When Kirsty Cotton awoke in the hospital, safe (although her husband had not come to find her yet) she remembered the feeling of cold white fingers and leather on her cheek, and his deep otherworldly voice. And Kirsty Cotton smiled.
Finish
So... Kirsty Cotton has been saved by the Hell Priest. Somehow I am not very surprised. I hope anyone reading this liked it. Please I would love it if you could review. Many thanks
-Lament1921