Chapter One: for we must all begin somewhere
Hello there, decided to join me for more did you? Of course you did, for who could resist such a scintillating and unprecedented opportunity to poke about into the nooks and crannies of a life far more interesting than your own. Unfortunately while I would love nothing more than to begin my tale with a ribald recreation of my last week long orgy at the old Bloodstone manor I'm afraid to say that one must follow one's own chronology and begin, alas, at the beginning. I apologise most profusely for the lack of any secret assignations with delightfully loose women and wonderfully caddish men, or even any good scraps in these next few paragraphs, but I assure you the juicy parts shall be all the more exquisite for having pushed through the dross.
Well in any regards let me set the scene; picture if you will a small farming village, rolling fallow fields, beasts of burden chewing cud peaceably while awaiting their date with the butcher's block, the scent of fresh cut hay on a warm and lazy summer breeze and meat pie cooling upon a nearby windowsill. There, do you have it? Tremendous! Now focus your inner eye's attention upon the mish-mash of thatched roofs, the chimney stacks and weathervanes twirling indolently and the stone steeple of the church rising into a cloudless powder blue sky above the rest of the village. You will hear the sounds of small children playing outside with bat and ball, kicking up little clouds of dust upon the beaten earth roads while good housewives peg up washing to line dry, and honeysuckle crawls over a moss eaten stone wall joining one house to another like a masonry artery throughout the town.
This is the town of Oakvale as it was some two hundred and fifty years ago.
Ah but this is fun, is it not? We are becoming such devious little voyeurs into mine own memory aren't we? What a delicious violation this confessional treatise is proving to be. I had thought I had forgotten Oakvale while it lived, but now I find that I can all but smell it. What a cruel tool memory is. But I digress again, how terribly remiss of me. Right then, let us turn our focus further inward, shall we? Much as one might focus the sights of a rifle I would bid you, dear reader, to zero in upon this marvellous mental vista I have recreated for you and look upon the rectory.
Right there, see it? That rather humble abode wedged in at the back of the church, set amid all those…delightful…tombstones? That's the place: the rectory. The place I once called home. Yes, my dear reader, you have read that right, I was once the son of a priest. The irony still gives me a shiver of debauched glee even now. The fact that I also grew up in a house set within the grounds of a cemetery does not however. Oh how I hated that house and that bloody graveyard…hmm but I believe we have reached a sufficient point to leap headfirst into this narrative, haven't we?
So let us begin at the beginning, which could so very easily have been my premature end.
On this particular day, which for the sake of a coherent tale I have decided shall stand as the beginning, there is a poor young boy, a puny lad of some ten or eleven years, trussed up in bed and grey as death under thin sheets. By his bedside sits his mother her bitten nails clawing at her skirts as she sits on a stool and watches each laboured breath her boy fights to draw in. Her eyes are dry but red, she has been in this position before, many times, and no doubt she is wondering if this will be the last time she watches, scant able to breathe herself, as her weak and sickly boy struggles to keep breathing.
This child is weak, you see, he is weak and wretched and utterly pathetic. He has spent almost half his life an invalid as his lungs do not work as they should. He cannot run about and chase a ball as the other village boys do because he is so very, very weak. He coughs and his lungs cave in, burning and choking him and he begins to suffocate. His eyes bulge, his lips grow blue and his fingers rake the bed clothes as he fights for life and begins to wish for death. Panic erupts in his veins, hot like fire and his vision shatters into weird and wild dancing specks of endless black. He fancies that death's grim visage leers at him from the corners of the room as his mother reaches for him, her voice the pure tone of helplessness.
"Joshua, Joshua breathe; you must breathe."
Always she implores the boy thus, as if he is not fighting tooth and claw to do just that. It is in these moments when death is before his eyes and terror thunders in his heart that the boy hates his mother, hates her for the cruel advent of his birth, hates her for lacking the power to make him well and hates her for being the only thing in his miserable existence to make life worth the fight. He clings to her hands, which flutter when loose like pale moths, and with herculean effort drags in one whooping breath after another. He clings to his mother and refuses to look anywhere but into her wet green eyes; she is his compass, his fragile harbour in a sea of pain and fear. The boy will live another day but death will be waiting for him on the morrow.
"Mam…it hurts." The weak child mewls as he always does after these moments and the mother, green eyes swimming, gathers her boy, all knobbly spine and heaving chest, to her bosom like a bundle of old rags.
"Shush," she soothes rocking them both for they are equally lost at sea, "rest now and I will make you something nice for tea." Then the mother leaves the boy, rising from the bed after first plumping the sweat soaked pillows in a futile attempt to make the child more comfortable. She retreats to the kitchen where she can cry unwatched, little realising that the boy can hear her every sob. He knows that she is not simply sobbing for his plight but her own. There are only so many times a mother can watch her child almost die, and suffer so for each extra day wrested from death, before she begins to wish the fight over simply for the closure. The boy, his body aching and his atrophied muscles burning from oxygen deprivation knows that at least a part of his mother wishes him dead.
Life for this boy is a very sorry existence indeed.
The boy will spend the rest of the day in bed, watching the clouds pass across the faultless sky while lying prone upon sweat starched sheets. He will hear the lark sing in the trees and the laughter of the other children as they run around joyous in their sturdy young bodies and whooping at the top of their healthy lungs. He hates the lark and those children so very much. They don't know how lucky they are. Yet the boy knows that jealousy is a sin in the eyes of Avo, his father has told him so. His father has also told him that sickness is visited upon the living to test the soul. For this reason the boy also hates Avo. He feels that he and his soul alike would be very happy, thank you, without such a test being visited upon him.
All the same, everyday the boy prays to Avo that the deity will find the time, amid the obviously arduous task of floating around all ethereal like while being revered by the rest of mankind, to heal him of his sickness and also to see fit to ask his father to visit him while he languishes alone in his bed. Avo has so far failed to acknowledge his fervent requests. The boy remains sick and his father remains absent. Father Terrence is alive, as far as the boy can deduce (he is fairly confident his mother would inform him should his father have succumbed to his mortality before his son) but the man does not come to his son's sickroom to wish him well. The boy knows why and he does not entirely blame his father. Father Terrence abhors death and fears the sick. The fact that he lives in a graveyard is perhaps partly responsible for this aversion, though disappointment that the only fruit of his loins should be such a weak and wretched thing has likely also played a pivotal role in fostering this neurosis.
Father Terrence is a miserable weak little man. It is no wonder his son should prove equally pathetic.
Aside from his mother there is but one other regular visitor to the boy's sick room; his uncle Stanley. Stan-the-man, as he is colourfully entitled by the rest of the village, is his mother's brother and, in the eyes of this sickly child confined as he is to watch life pass him by, could very well have been responsible for hanging the moon upon the night's sky.
"A'ight there Josh m'boy?" Stan bounds into the little room, a man of ill-fitted grace and too much liveliness, eyes alight and furtive with a cock-eyed mixture of ebullient good will and native mischief. The man's mildly moronic grin slips into something softer, hinting at that most hated of emotions – pity – as he looks over the boy in the bed however. "Well yer lookin' right pasty t'day, ain't yer lad?" Stan reaches over to ruffle the boy's hair and the child slaps his hand away.
"…I'm…not," he huffs voice creaky as an old gate from lack of use, "pasty." He glares weakly, for he does everything weakly and Stan chuckles rubbing the back of the hand the boy slapped away.
"Well yer reflexes are still sharp as ever, that's for sure." Stan shook his head. "Din't even see yer hand move that time."
There is a moment's silence as the boy wheezes like a bellows, his one exertion taking its toll on his wasted body and his uncle watches him with ill-veiled sympathy. The boy tries hard not to hate his uncle for that look because he does not want to have to half hate everyone he knows; such a fate would make his life completely unbearable and it is hardly a barrel of laughs as is.
"Here," Stan moves suddenly dropping a cloth wrapped bundle into the boy's lap. "Got yer a present," Stan grins vulpine and loose lipped revealing yellowed teeth as disordered as the tombstones dotting the grounds beyond the boy's window, "Figured this'd be summat you could play wit' right here in bed."
"A…present…!" The boy likes presents. Fumbling fingers tear at the cloth wrap, which is little more than a swathe cut from a burlap sack. His eyes widen to behold what lay revealed thereafter. "This is…" a fit of coughing chokes to death the rest of his utterance but the boy does not let this deter him. His hands shake as he fondles the simple toy crossbow with reverent care. Sunken and faded green eyes lift to fix upon Stan in awe and stuttered hope. "This is my present? You're giving this to me, uncle?"
"Yep," his uncle laughs, "It comes wit' a bunch of little shot bolts too, see?" The man's huge fingers dwarf the thin slivers of wood as he places one into the crossbow mechanism. "Yer can use matchsticks as well, figure they'll fit nice and snug in here." He grins at the boy. "Give it a go."
The boy frowns and looks around his tiny prison of a sickroom, "What should I aim at?"
"Oh yeah...right," Stan scratches the back of his sunburned neck in abashment and lumbers to his feet, capering like a scarecrow across the room to unfurl a rolled piece of paper with an archery target drawn upon it. Deftly the boy's uncle tacks the target to the far wall by the window and turns back to his nephew with another endearingly gormless grin. "See how close to the target yer can hit."
The boy frowns. He is a bed-bound sickly scrap of flesh, his arm shakes simply from the effort of holding the toy crossbow aloft, his vision swims as he attempts to sight down the curve of the toy weapon, yet as he squints at that target, a glorious ring of painted fire, something ignites behind his eyes and an answering fire kindles in his belly. He pulls back the mechanism, he sights, and he releases the bolt...and all the while his heart labours, lodged tight in his throat. The flimsy matchstick bolt flies through the air, singing as it slices in twain the stale atmosphere so omnipresent in this damnable sickroom and strikes right through the centre of the target, rupturing the paper.
"...Bullseye!" Stan crows pumping a fist in the air, "Aye-up lad, yer good at this lark, ain't yer?"
The boy laughs, for the first time in too long. He is enraptured, euphoric; his heart would sing if such an organ was designed to do such a thing. "I did it! I hit it."
"Bleedin' right yer did, Josh m'boy." Stan bounces back across the room, "Did yer hear the noise that thing made when you let it loose, eh?" He laughed and flopped back down onto the stool, his long spindly legs all sharp angles and too long lengths, his knobbly elbows propped on his knees. He is smiling at the boy but for once the attention starved mite does not notice for the boy himself is too busy staring down at the toy crossbow in his lap.
"It sang, uncle." The boy whispered. "When I fired that bolt, it sang to me. I heard it." Trembling fingers lift the toy, such a simple flimsy construct of drift wood and twine. "It was like I could cut through the air itself and make it sing for me."
Stan laughs and laughs some more when the child rearms the crossbow, eyes bright as he squints down the length at the torn target across the room. He fires again, and once more the paper is stabbed through the centre, the second bolt striking the first and sending both broken sticks to the floor in pieces.
"Bloody hell, that was clever." Stan blinks but cannot make further exclamation before the crossbow is fired again. The boy is laughing, shaking with joy as he fires off bolt after bolt until the paper target is riddled with holes.
"Bang, bang, bang!" The boy cries in joy laughing so hard his mother comes running.
"What the buggery is goin' on in 'ere?" The boy's mother is ready for anger, but her ire is forgotten when she sees the smile on her sickly lad's pallid face.
"Mother!" The boy exclaims, "Mother look what uncle has given me!" The boy brandishes the crossbow proudly. "Mother, watch me shoot...I am the best shot alive!"