Part 8
"Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Eternal, and eternal I shall endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here…"
-Dante
Hollenbrooke 1989
"She has to die." The rich, smooth voice floated out of the shadows of the room and mingled briefly with the indigo cigar smoke, twisting like a writhing snake in the cool, damp air. "You know she does. This time she's gone too far. She is… threatening us." The voice- a young, ambitious one full of ebullience- lowered an octave and shifted, breaking into something more sinister and perverse. "She would destroy us all."
"I know, but she's so…" A short, balding man stood by the light of the open door, toying tensely with his lapels. He was perhaps fifty, or there about, and had the impure, diluted smell of a shape-shifter coating him like a contagious robe, disgustingly second-rate and filthy.
"She's so much trouble that could be easily eliminated. Without her neither of Them have a leg to stand on. You know that as well as I do." The voice was like a treat to the balding man, for whenever it spoke, the man's greasy, beady eyes would light up like twin candelabras, shedding a light of malevolent voracity out of their murky depths. "She must die- and die without suspicions. It should look like an accident."
"Not that I'm questioning you- which I'm not- but I would just like to point out that instead of killing Her, it would be so much easier to kill Them." The balding man shifted cumbersomely, looking hopefully into the corner of shadows where the voice was coming from, and smiled faintly, quirking his thin, yellowish lips up in vigilant relief. "I mean if you kill them, it would make it all go away. Just go away…"
The silence that met this hesitant response was deafeningly loud, hauntingly resonant in all of its cessation of sound. The balding man began to nervously dart his eyes around the room, and ran a thickly bloated hand through his non-existent hair, a habitual gesture of anxiety that he had never quite broken. With each passing second of silence his previous hope vanished and his perturbation heightened to a rabid pinnacle, intensifying with each dragging moment of soundlessness.
"Are you questioning me?" The voice that rose from the shadowed corner held barely restrained violence, which promised without question a deathly, horrific fate to those who dared to cross it. "Do you think I'm not competent enough to handle the details of this?"
"Not at all, Sir. I just meant…"
"We both know that it is not possible to kill Them. That would be a… gross mistake." The brutality in the voice had dwindled to near nothing, and the tone it occupied now was one of slight amusement, brought on by pleonastic malignity. "You know that as well as I do."
"I do. I…um…uh…well? W-w-what kind of an accident?" The balding man stumbled through his choice of words with an unreserved, awkward lack of dignity and culture. "Should she die painfully? Or quickly?"
"I'll leave that up to you. Be as inventive as you like. Fake a car accident, decapitate her and then stick her head on a pike and display it in your living room, or whatever else you have a yearning to do. I needn't remind you that you're the assassin. The only thing you need to do is to make sure nobody suspects or finds out." The voice was pungent with crystallized humor, and it was full of money, old, wealthy money.
"When do you want her…killed?" The balding man's frenetic agitation had increased three-fold, causing apprehensive beads of sweat to form and roll down the shiny, hairless dome of his forehead.
"I'll give you a week. By the end of next week she must die. If she isn't dead… serious complications could arise." The voice paused in its spiraling path for a brief moment, as if carefully choosing the next words that deserved to be spoken.
"Sir?" It was only after several minutes of the strained quiet in which neither of them ventured a word or emotion that the balding man dared to speak, lifting his bulky frame from its hunched posture to stand at unwarranted attention. "Is there anything else?"
"You won't be alone, you know. I have my man in London- as we speak- setting up the trap that will eventually lead her straight to you- and her untimely death." The voice continued on as if it hadn't even heard the balding man's questions. "All you have to do is kill her. That's all you have to do." The voice rambled onwards into the room and pressed themselves onto the simple, balding man, confusing and exciting at the same violent time.
"She'll be gone. You won't have to worry about her anymore." The balding man turned to go, curving his massive frame around towards the safe exit of the door only a paces in front of him, relieved and doleful to be out of the presence of the infinite voice.
"Wait…Williams." The urbane and polished voice called the balding man Williams back from the brink of oblivion and death by two inconsequential words, which lay heavily in the room like weighted stones.
"Yes?" Detective Williams contorted his hands together over and over again, the air singing with his cowardice and anxiousness.
"We both know this…job is my way of letting you prove yourself again. If this situation ends up anything like the 'Detective Paris' job I assigned to you before then I assure you that all will not end well. Do you understand?" The voice had lost its amused tone and took on a hard edge, which could not be described by the normal bounds of emotion.
"You won't be disappointed this time. I promise."
"For your sake, I hope you're right. But just remember, Jolie Reeves is dead by next week- or you are."
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Diabolic, sepulchral clouds swarmed around the city of Hollenbrooke, the rain of the night bursting forth from them in a massive streaming quantity, coating the world in a wetness that left everything singularly murky and unformed beyond any singing of it. The winds wailed in repose, each bitter moan screaming in a reverence that died in the face of something so magnanimously evil.
It was an unusual night to visit the Hollenbrooke cemetery; very unusual to brave the cold, vengeful winds to seek refuge in the desperate weeping willows and the cold, crumbling tombstones, and yet to Ana Spencer, twin sister to a young girl whose name had once been Claire, there was nowhere else in the world she would rather be. The cemetery, for all its' talk of death and other worlds, was safe haven for Ana, a place of hope and peace that fueled her warring soul like no other.
She was kneeling on the muddy, water-soaked ground; her tanned pantyhose and forest-colored skirt becoming more irreparably soiled the longer she stayed on her knees. A small, plain, granite grave stone stood before her, homely and modest in its' appearance, and unevenly cool to the touch. Elegantly engraved letters, fading after the distance of years and weather, dominated the face of the stone, simple and quiet; small, timid accusations set forever in the dreadful granite.
Claire Spencer
1931-1951
Beloved Daughter and Sister
May She Rest In Peace
It was true that Claire had been dead a long time, it had been almost thirty-eight full years since the night the State Trooper had knocked on Ana's door an hour past midnight, waiting to shatter her life into a million different pieces that could never be picked up or put back together again. Sometimes late at night, when everything was still and nothing could be heard except the forlorn melody of a lone bird, Ana imagined she could hear a knock on her front door, imagined she could hear the words of the State Trooper, circling over her head like vultures looking for a fresh kill.
I'm sorry to disturb you ma'am…Your sister Claire…She's dead…"
Raindrops fell across her lovely, ancient face like lost tears, mingling with her mascara and running down the length of her face in black rivulets. Her unpainted mouth was open slightly in unrecognized pain, as deadly as a knife pointed to the heart. Grief flowed from her like a river, a lost river trapped forever in an abyss of sadness and pain.
She clutched a folded picture in her small, narrow hand, a picture of a girl little older than seventeen with a cap of stylish black curls and looks more striking than attractive. Claire Spencer hadn't been beautiful or even, for that matter, really that attractive if you measured her by the staggering classical sense. Instead, Claire had a charming look to her, a look that was vitally alive and stunningly arresting, desirably eye-catching in all its charismatic brilliance. She had a smoky, piercing emerald gaze, which was at once innocent and seductive with the fresh look of the young and promising, and with the recent context of her death, the eyes that stared out from the beyond the grave were given a new dimension of disturbing eerieness.
Ana failed to see that in death the innate sense of purity and kindness that had once prevailed around her sister like a blessed halo was gone, replaced with darkness that had crept inside those sweet, guileless eyes and twisted that virtuous smile into something almost sinister. To Ana, Claire was still her sister, her blamelessly compassionate sister who never gave a thought to herself, but only to others. Ana didn't even fully realize that Claire was truly gone- there were even days when Ana would call out Claire's name forgetting for a sincere moment that Claire was wasn't there. Ana refused to see what a demon death had made of her dearest Claire.
Ana smiled to herself grimly, the lines of strain showing at her mouth and drawing the skin tighter around her cheekbones, and plucked a rose from her coat pocket, pushing against drenched, chestnut shaded tresses with the palm of her hand. She said nothing, but merely tangled the rose and picture together, accidentally pricking herself with a thorn. Crimson blood trickled from the tiny wound, dropping soundlessly at the foot of Claire's headstone. Ana firmed her lips together in a straight, thin line, examining the thorn-prick with absent interest as she placed the picture and the rose next to the small bloodstain that was already fading due to the voluminous amounts of rain.
A stab of foreshadowing sliced its' way through her soul, cutting her cleanly to the bone, and ripping her mind apart. She was a witch, a true and wise witch who never ignored what she felt in the deepest roots of her body and soul, a witch who always listened closely to the splintered heart that beat beneath a thin woman's frame. She could feel the whispering pangs of fate, slow and perfectly supernatural, reaching up and catching her, spinning her around in a vicious circle again and again and again…
Ana could feel it, could feel the gaze of her sister on her, those eyes boring into hers with a passionless disgrace, that mouth contorted in a black hearted laugh…
She could feel it, feel her sister ripping and slashing… ripping and slashing… dead… So dead…
Ana left, running all the way to the cemetery gate, her legs hindered by pumps and weighed down by wet material thrashing and driving, for the first time feeling the genuine threat. She left the headstone, she left the rose, and the picture of Claire, the dazzling, murdered Claire, to stare up at the raging sky with those brilliant emerald eyes, planning her revenge alone.
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