Chapter four: Death and desolation in a boneyard
Salutations to you my dear reader! Something quite intriguing occurred the other night. I had a bit of a bash, you see, a little soiree for some rather hirsute acquaintances of mine; somewhat boorish by my usual tastes, these particular individuals of note, but they were quite insistent that I owed them…well, let me just say that had I been forced to deliver upon the price these delightful associates demanded of my august self, I would have been in something of a pickle. Eternal youth loses its lustre somewhat when one is no longer in possession of all his limbs.
Ha! As it happened, I was able to offer my unexpected but well received guests a rather fine alternative…some annoying little vermin from the sewers of my marvellous Industrial domain had seen fit to invade my Millfields sanctum. Useless beggars could not sneak up on a corpse of course and even dear, stupid Barry was able to catch and cage the blighters. I was just deciding what to do with the wretches when my "guests" arrived. It all worked out rather nicely actually, for as it transpired my guests were not as discerning as I initially assumed. Apparently one man tastes much like another when one happens to be a ravenous metamorphic killer. In truth I am a little affronted by the notion that my own immaculate flesh should be compared to that of those measly rebels, but I suppose I should be grateful my darling guests lacked the refinement to differentiate between true quality and proletariat trash.
Anyway, the reason I am relaying this little anecdote to you my dear reader, is due to what happened after my bestial guests had glutted themselves on all but one of the rebels. Naturally sensing that keeping a ready supply of bodies on hand, should my guests become a bit peckish later on, would be a capital idea I sent word to my usual cohort that I was holding a masque. In no time at all I had a hundred wonderfully vacuous and alcohol incapacitated human entrees littering my mansion. Still I was just beginning to negotiate with my homicidally inclined guests of honour their expeditious departure from my home, when, lo and behold, more unexpected guests should darken my doorstep! Really the price one must pay for being fashionable, desirable and oh so popular. All the same the identity of one of my guests almost made up for the complications – and the unfortunate necessity of vacating my delightful lakeside property tout suite.
Sparrow's daughter; it was odd watching the nubile young thing gyrating about hacking sundry nasties to pieces while looking simply splendid in a fetching pale lavender gown; reminded me rather forcible of my dear friend the late queen. I was actually quite pleased the little minx survived my homage to the Crucible of old Westcliff. There is something quite invigorating about standing in the presence of another hero; gets the fires burning and the juices flowing, and such like. I'm rather hoping the little wench manages to oust her brother from the throne. I do so enjoy a bit of excitement after all and if she's anything like her mother…well, I did quite well out of that association let me tell you, even if my first meeting with Sparrow was a little, shall we say…rocky. Still the old queen was a good sport about that little Shadow Court sacrifice debacle, so I am confident that the little princess will be able to overlook a trifling attempt to kill her.
Ah! But it is times like these that one is reminded of how good it is to be alive.
Still as entertaining as I'm sure you found this little titbit of news, it is not what you wished to read about is it? I apologise for delaying the epic retelling of my own embattled youth, but I have always believed a bit of titillation demands to be shared with one's nearest and dearest, and I must confess to feeling quite warmly disposed towards you, my dear reader; perhaps because I have no fear of ever meeting you?
But! I have procrastinated upon this page long enough and a tease is only a tease so long before it becomes quite the bore, so we shall return to the tale forthwith. Onwards friends, let the carnage commence!
"Oi yer rotten wench - that hurt!"
The boy floats back to some semblance of awareness with almost languid slowness. He cannot feel his limbs and strange liquid warmth pervades his being, similar yet at the same time quite different from the wild fire fevers that regular afflict his frail form. Alike because he is overly warm when he has the feeling he should be cold, yet unlike his usual fevers, this particular sensation of drowsy warmth lulls and cajoles him toward deep, unending slumber. It is a struggle to force his eyes open.
"Norm, don't be a knob, just bash her 'ead in wit' this rock."
At first the lad can see nothing, or at least nothing his frozen brain can make head nor tails of. The red and orange dance of flame contorts and twists around the capering silhouettes of three figures. The two larger forms circle and harry the small one in the centre akin to wolves circling downed prey.
"Get away from me!" Sound is distorted as the poor lad's ears are as frozen as the rest of him, yet a child knows the sound of his mother's voice like none other. All the same it takes a moment to equate the bloody, battered heap of stained night clothes and slush soaked hair with the image of his mother the boy has enshrined within his mind's eternal eye. Initially all he sees is a thoroughly beaten woman being molested most indecently by two brutish men. He sees the woman bite and kick and thrash in a filthy furrow worn into the snow. He sees one of the brutes cock back a meaty fist and strike the woman across the back of her neck by the delicate join of skull and vertebrae. He sees the woman fall limp to the snow.
After this our hypothermic lad sees only red.
"Mam!" Through the night a child wails, a sound most hideous; hideous and pitiable. It will only occur to the boy years later via the wonderful filter of nightmares that this scream is torn from his own throat. In that time and place however there exists nothing but the exhilarating kaleidoscope of blood, fogged breath and a flurried rain of fire. The boy does not stop screaming even as he launches himself forward, a fistful of bloodied nails in one hand and madness substituting for the strength he lacks.
"Oi, Greg, the whelps not dead yet," In the face of a rampaging small child more ice-sculpture than warm flesh, the two bandits are singularly unimpressed. The first stands before the child slack jawed and supremely confident in his dull-witted cruelty. The second does not even bother to stand up from the woman he mounts against her will, kneeling in the dark snow like a beast.
"Then slit 'is throat an' stop statin' t'bleedin' obvious y'twat."
"Heh, alright," the first bandit lunges forward, knife sweeping lazily. The child moves with surprising swiftness around the inexpert knife swipe. The bandit, too stupid to realise that this is no ordinary child snickers and stabs sloppily. "This is gonna be fun – urk!"
Five nails imbed themselves in the man's thigh, the child having threaded the nails between his fingers like claws and now he drags his fist upward so the nails trail five, inch-deep runnels through the man's flesh from just above the knee to just below his hip.
"Get off her – get away from my mam!" Our violent little hellion does not even feel the clout around the head as he yanks the nails out of the man's leg and aims a spiked punch towards the man's groin. The howl as soft, dangling tissue punctures and deflates is immensely gratifying. Forgetting all else save the extremity of his own distress, the thug collapses into the snow in a near foetal ball, clutching at the ruins of his family jewels. Our murderous young protagonist, all afire with the desire to protect his dear beloved mam snatches the man's dagger from his hand and wheels around towards the last man.
"What the fu -!" the second brigand, preoccupied as he was, had no time to do much more than whip his head around, face contorted hideously and flushed puce from his disgusting exertions, before the appropriated bandit's knife finds a comfortable home through his bulbous neck. Blood fountains upward and outward as the child wrenched the blade back out and the scalding wash of crimson near burns his face as he is liberally covered in the stuff. Joshua shoves the dead man off his mother's limp form utilising a wellspring of strength the origin of which the child cannot even begin to imagine.
"Mam?" The child's strength leaves him with the abrupt and unpleasant swiftness of water rushing out of a holey bucket. He falls to his knees and, small hands shaking, grasps his mother's night gown sleeve, shaking her arm. "Mam…please Mam…wake up."
The arm he clutches is thin as a winter stripped tree branch and sways lifelessly in reaction to his desperate manhandling. Somewhere in the rest of the world the church is still burning, the snow still falls and the dull wisps of cascading embers tumbling from the sky reflect with obscene clarity in the glassy panes of his mother's unseeing eyes, yet for this child there is nothing but the immediacy of his own horror.
"Mam?"
Blood has dried as a dark paste across his mother's face, congealing around her shattered nose and torn lips. When the boy tries to lift his mother's head he feels something wrong and broken about her neck and her head lulls against her shoulder unnaturally. He cries out, a strangled sickened little noise and the body drops to the snow. His mother's dead eyes stare apathetically up at him. Small guttural whimpers escape the boy's lips in a continuous, almost mindless mewling. He begins to scramble backwards through the snow, choking on screams he no longer has the breath to release.
"…nonononono…"
All his short life Joshua has considered himself engaged in a one-on-one battle of wills with the grim spectre of death. The pitfalls of his own mortality have dogged his every pained breath and stumbling step for almost as long as he can recall. On the rare occasion he has seen his reflection (mirrors being something of a luxurious rarity in Oakvale) he has seen death lurking in the dark hollows of his gaunt cheek bones, the shadows rounding his sunken eyes and the greyish pallor of his skin. In all bitter truth death has been more of a presence in his life than Father Terrence, the only father he has known, and he had begun, with the wonderful self-absorption possessed of all children, to consider death his own personal cross to bear. He realises now that Death is far bigger than he is and this is no war. This is a massacre. Death has stolen from him his mother and left him alone in a world ablaze and thrown into chaos. If his mother can be defeated by the reaper so easily what chance is there for him, with one foot already in his premature grave and every breath a battle?
Running through a graveyard, the very territory of death itself, the boy flees. Before him rears up an inferno of skeletal remains, the church nothing more than a hollowed out husk of char-wood and flame. The roar of the fire echoes the pounding of his heart and the twisting eddies of ember and snow dazzle his eyes, yet the boy runs on, knowing as he does that Death chases his heels. He can still feel the weight of his mother's empty eyes upon his back. He will forever remember the feel of her dead flesh against his hands and the sickening looseness of her dangling head upon her poor broken neck. Death is abroad this night, riding roughshod over the tiny lives of those the boy loves, devouring as the all-encompassing cold of night devours…and there is nothing the child can do to stop it.
Heedless of all save the wild tumult of his mind, the child falls crashing to the ground, sliding over slurries of brown leaves and slicked ice. He careens head over feet and gashes his forehead against the plinth of an angel whose broken stone fingers point down at him in silent accusation. As blackness speckled red with the blood pumping freely from his scalp conspires to drown out the world the boy thinks he can hear Death's rasping laughter echoing from two hundred cold and lonely graves beneath him.
All flesh is grass, all life wheat to the chaff, the child hears the dry intonation of his nemesis in his mind, No man may conquer me, for I am that which conquers all.