The Darkest Hand Trilogy Box Set

by Tarn Richardson

  Suddenly, Salamanca stopped and thrust an arm across Tacit’s chest. “Which, of course, would be an extremely foolish thing to do. The last thing we want to do is give the initiative back to them. The only way to win this war is to keep up the pressure. No remorse. No hesitation. No weakness.” He looked at the jailer, grinning fiendishly alongside. “Is the witch prepared?” he asked and the jailer nodded eagerly.

  The smell of rot and putrefaction was almost overwhelming in the stinking claustrophobic corridor, lined either side with wooden doorways, filled with a persistent wailing from behind most of them.

  The jailer pushed past Tacit and unlocked the door in front of them, heaving it open on creaking hinges. A squeak of alarm came from the gloom beyond, along with a stench like an animal’s cage. Salamanca stepped inside and a heavy hand on Tacit’s shoulder coaxed him inside a stride behind.

  “Restrain her, Inquisitor,” Inquisitor Salamanca demanded, as he stripped beneath the waist and fondled at his crotch. The jailer laughed wickedly as he took Salamanca’s clothes from him. Tacit was aware of sweat on his brow, on the top of his lip, a fear and trepidation like that he had felt once before, long long ago.

  “Who is she?” he asked, peering into the far darkness of the rank, stinking cell. The bleached white form of a naked woman scampered weeping across his vision, her greying long hair trailing behind her as she ran.

  “Does it matter?” Salamanca called. There was a lightness in his voice, as if he took great pleasure from his work. He caught hold of the woman and manhandled her to the table in the centre of the room, ignoring her blows, pushing her over the length of it. “She’s a witch,” he hissed. “That’s all that matters. Take her hands quickly!” he demanded, his eyes flashing at Tacit, his weight on top of her. Without question, Tacit did as he was told but there was doubt in his eyes and fear in his face as he held onto her hands. “She’s created armies of bastard warlocks,” the Inquisitor hissed. “This is the only way!”

  The witch’s imploring eyes were on Tacit’s. He closed his own as loathing built within him. He saw his mother, and then almost at once, Mila.

  “Inquisitor Salamanca!” he muttered. Nausea washed over him. His head was spinning. He could hear cruel laughter. He opened his eyes. Froth and blood, everywhere. He removed his hands from hers. “Stop!” he implored. Freed, at once the woman turned on her attacker, rending deep scars in Salamanca’s face.

  “Stop!” Tacit cried again, this time at the woman, at the chaotic scene, as Salamanca roared in pain and anguish at his wounds. The woman was on top of him, biting and tearing with her teeth and hands, the Inquisitor’s face resembling a torn knuckle of meat.

  The door to the cell was thrown open. Guards rushed in, cudgels suppressing the witch almost instantly. Tacit watched in revulsion as they crowded around her, their blows only ending when she lay lifeless on the floor.

  Salamanca held his face, his wild eyes turned on the young upstart.

  “She’s now dead because of you, Tacit!” he hissed, reaching out to the table for support. “You put those cudgels on her body. You took her life. Instead of being cleansed, she’s dead.” He raised a finger, drenched in the blood from his raked face, and pointed.

  Tacit stumbled backwards against the wall of the cell, lowering his head into his trembling hands, the vision slowly passing away from his eyes.

  SIXTY-NINE

  12:43. THURSDAY, 15 OCTOBER 1914.

  THE FRONT LINE. ARRAS. FRANCE.

  The rain fell with unrelenting vigour, quickly drenching Tacit and Isabella, turning the trench floor to a clinging bog. There was a stink about the place, of defecation and decay, a putrescence which was as thick as it was fetid. It embraced you like a rag, filling every pore, every orifice, clinging like a parasitic layer, a thing neither gas nor liquid, a spectre of death become real.

  If there had ever been any drainage in the trenches, it had long become blocked with the detritus of war. Puddles had become pools which, after heavy rainfall, became running rivers. The pair of them tried to walk either side of the river but always found themselves slipping back into the filthy brown water. Eventually it was easier to splash along it rather than try to avoid it and risk twisting an ankle in the mud. Any shelter provided by occasional small sections of corrugated tin roofs directed the falling rain into the trench.

  It was a tortuous journey through that labyrinth of twisting and turning tunnels full of injured, often quiet, soldiers, filthy caked specimens, faces scorched by gunpowder and smoke. On several occasions, soldiers, numbed and senseless with shock, stumbled forward through the rain, blindly grasping out to the Inquisitor and Sister, pleading and praying for salvation, only to be shouted at by their Sergeants to “Get your filthy hands off them and get back into place. You’re beyond salvation, you infested little worm!”

  With every step there were objects to avoid, splintered pieces of wood, discharged and ripped clothing, cartridge cases, bits of equipment, a semi-buried limb, as well as deep hidden holes and the river growing ever deeper in the middle of the trench. Every now and then, a large rat would scurry across the trench in front of them, diving into a hole alongside the entrance to a dugout or an officer’s bunker, two wretched creatures living together, side by side.

  “You okay?” Tacit asked Isabella, as they eventually emerged from the far side of the complex of trenches, drenched to the skin and shivering. Ahead of them lay the ruined outline of Fampoux.

  She nodded, her teeth chattering, and drew her sodden clothes tight around her.

  “No place for a woman,” Tacit grunted, dispiritingly.

  Isabella shivered and gulped at the cleaner air outside the trench. One wouldn’t call the air fresh, for there was the lingering malevolence of rot and feculence about it, but to breathe away from those corridors of death was as cleansing as having the rain wash the dirt and grime from their clothing.

  “Come on,” muttered Tacit darkly, “we need to press on.”

  They walked, side by side, up the rutted and blasted track, to the first rubbled house on the outskirts of the village. Green foliage climbed up a spoiled wall of the house, its feelers finding plenty of purchase within the crumbled exterior of the building. Isabella stopped and looked down the length of a street where entire buildings had been blasted to piles of stones.

  Suddenly there came the sound of light feet running quickly in the rain-soaked ruins of the streets. They moved with a lightness and an urgency, incongruous with the weight of war. The boy with the broad white smile charged around the corner. Immediately, Tacit drew back, his body low and coiled, his mind instantly suspicious, fearing an attack. Isabella struck him playfully on the shoulder and strode in front of him.

  “Keep your gun away, Tacit!” she warned jokingly, turning to greet the boy.

  “Hello young man!” she called in perfect French.

  “Hello pretty Sister!” the boy called back. “Have you come to bless the troops?”

  “Yes,” replied Isabella. “That, and other things.”

  “So, you’ve come to get rid of the wolves as well, then?”

  The question struck her dumb, like a hard glancing blow. “The wolves?” asked Isabella recovering, sensing Tacit’s fierce eyes on the boy. “Yes. We have,” she said.

  The boy smiled more broadly than ever. He stood up straight, as if to attention. “Then follow me!” he called. “I will show you!” He dashed off up the street.

  “Wait!” Isabella called after him, trundling into a short – and within three steps – aborted run. The boy took no notice and flew from view. The Sister stopped and called again, peering back to Tacit with a shrug. “Youthful enthusiasm,” she said.

  Tacit grunted and clutched the handle of his case tight so that his knuckles turned white. He was too wet and cold to chase children. They would have to come back and find him. If there were wolves here, they would make their presence known eventually, in their own way. Wolves weren’t subtle in how they revealed themselves.r />
  He walked with slow methodical steps up the road, realising he’d not packed nearly enough bottles of brandy to sustain him, particularly in the cold. The realisation made him scowl and he muttered irritably under his breath.

  SEVENTY

  1906. PERUGIA. ITALY.

  All day the back streets roasted in the Perugia heat. Goats had plodded wearily from the scorched brush, seeking shade amongst the city’s outlying buildings, their bells clonking dully on their rusted neck ties. Lizards had scampered over hot stones in search of insects and little delicacies dropped between cracks in the road, whilst high above, buzzards had cut silent circles in the endlessly blue sky.

  But in the orphan-house dormitory, the temperature had quickly dropped to below freezing.

  Water froze glasses and shattered bottles in the sudden cold of the room. The sun which had streamed in from the many windows had been cast out with the slamming of the shutters by invisible hands, the room now thrown into almost complete darkness, but for the piercing shards of light from holes in the shutters and the vague radiant blue hue emanating from the restrained body in the bed.

  Inquisitor Tacit stood at the foot of the bed, his chest tight from the cold and exhaustion, his breath billowing as great white palls in front of him. For hours he’d fought the forces within the room. He felt burdened down by weariness, but then again he could barely remember a time in the last four years when he hadn’t felt exhausted. In the dark of the room he was almost invisible, clad as always in his black cassock and full-length jacket, black bible clutched in his left hand. He raised up his colossal hands, bringing down God’s condemnation upon the creature in his fieriest and fiercest rhetoric.

  The small figure, tied tight upon the bed, hissed and twisted against its bonds. It spat and cursed venomously, the sound seeming to come from another voice, one from far away. Whilst its form and size suggested it was a little girl, the swollen mottled features, like those of a badly beaten dwarf, suggested something else, something far less innocent. It howled like a wolf, vomiting a putrid stinking stream of grey black pus across the bed.

  Tacit looked back at it, his dark eyes narrowing. Many Inquisitors disliked carrying out exorcisms. “Priest work,” they would call it mockingly. “Send a Father to tend a child,” they would say, whilst testing the weight of their weapons in their hands.

  But Tacit thought them wrong. When else was one afforded the opportunity to pit oneself against the Church’s ultimate foe?

  “You are finished, demon,” he announced.

  The figure began to writhe even more furiously, as if touched by an unseen fire. It pulled tight at the cords binding it to the bed posts, cutting hard into the scarred and scaled skin of its wrists.

  “Release the vessel!” Tacit commanded, looking up into the space above the bed and thrusting the wooden crucifix towards the figure, the moonlight squeezing through the shutters catching its length and giving it an almost holy glow.

  The body pulled back and cried out in an ungodly voice, the straps about its legs going taut. There was fear in the demon’s eyes, fear but a wickedness as well. It hissed at Tacit like a snake and its mouth widened to a ungodly yawning sneer. The demon glowered and smiled, showing a fouled set of broken blackened teeth.

  “What’s the matter, Inquisitor?” it croaked. “Tired?”

  Tacit put his eyes onto the wretched child. It was particularly strong, this possession. They often were stronger when they fell upon victims during puberty. He raised his forearm to pat his drenched brow and instantly the crucifix burst into flames. Tacit cursed his foolishness and threw the flaming symbol to one side. He’d been lucky. He’d seen Priests blinded by doing such a thing in the past, a momentary lapse of concentration allowing the bound wicked beast to strike. Exhaustion was a dangerous companion in an Inquisitor’s line of work.

  The demon sat staring at him quite calmly, mocking with an unerring smile.

  “Trust me,” it croaked, the smile unchanging, “it’s not going to get any easier. Did you think you could just work your way through your problems? It’s not that easy, Tacit. It’ll never get any easier, you know? This is your burden. It’s yours alone to carry.”

  Tacit ignored the figure and dug deep into a coat pocket, searching for his bottle of holy water. He always took great pleasure in burning demons with it, particularly when they had fought as hard as this one. It was the one weapon which would leave no discernible mark on the possessed once they had been freed from the possession. Bruises, cuts, broken bones inflicted by the exorciser had a tendency to carry through to the possessed, once the demon had been expelled. When explaining multiple injuries to a twelve-year-old child, excuses could sometimes run short. But holy water allowed the exorciser to unleash heaven’s furies on the demon.

  “Your mother, the rampant whore, she sucks Slavic cocks in hell.” If the devil was looking for a reaction, he didn’t get one. “She likes it when they hurt her,” the demon smirked. Its voice softened and, at once, it spoke as if Tacit’s mother. The sound of her voice struck Tacit like an uppercut. He rocked back on his heels, steadying himself on the bed post. “You failed me, Poldek,” the voice of his mother called. “You could have saved me, but you were too slow. You were always too slow. You’ve always been too slow,” his hardening mother’s voice said.

  Tacit glowered behind his eyebrows, an anger bubbling within him. The demon allowed a smile to latch itself onto its mottled face.

  “Like with your master. Like with Antonio. All dead because of you.” At once the voice deepened. Tacit’s father spoke. “And me. You failed me. It’s the story of your life, son. Never good enough.”

  Tacit knew they were just words, formed from memories which the demon was drawing out from Tacit’s mind, out of his presence. Nevertheless, the intrusion into his family, his mother and father, raked at his very soul. He wished desperately to step forward, to lash out at the beast, batter it into bloody submission.

  But then he’d be playing the devil’s game.

  Tacit pulled out a bottle from his pocket. The figure in the bed cackled. The Inquisitor looked down at it uncertainly.

  “What are you going to do, Tacit?” it shrieked mockingly, recognising the Inquisitor’s quarter bottle of Spanish brandy in his hand, its voice now ragged and bestial. “Toast me?”

  Tacit uncorked the bottle and scowled at the demon.

  “One thing I’ve never been,” he growled, lifting the bottle to his lips and draining it in a long and satisfying pull, “is slow.”

  “Ah yes, Tacit, that’s it. Drink your cares away. Redemption lies at the bottom.”

  He threw the empty bottle at the figure who, in return, vomited a syrupy stream of glass and iron shards towards him. Tacit wiped it from the front of his coat and retrieved the correct bottle from deep within his pockets.

  The demon’s face immediately dropped.

  Tacit unstoppered the bottle and raised it above his head, bringing it down sharply whilst speaking incantations passed down since the Church’s first battles with demonic possession. He showered the figure with spots of the water taken from the holy font at St Peter’s Square. The beast howled, writhed and smoked as the droplets touched its flesh.

  The guidance for exorcisms insisted that between three and five castings of holy water would usually be sufficient to unsettle the demon and sometimes be enough to force it from its host.

  Inquisitor Tacit, however, rarely read guidelines.

  He cast the bottle backwards and forwards at the squirming figure until the bottle was empty, the demon straining and tearing at its bonds, engulfed in snaking trails of vile stinking smoke from its burning flesh. Harder and harder it fought at the cords, scarred and enraged by holy liquid. It jarred its hands tight against the ties so that the skin tore from its wrists, drenching the bedsheets in black putrid blood. The bonds stretched to the limit of their capacity.

  Tacit’s eyes widened. He realised, too late, that the demon was about to rip itself free
of its bonds. The top right tie broke lose, followed by the left. It sprang forwards at the Inquisitor, screaming and hissing like a wild animal, both leg straps snapping at the ferocity of the leap.

  It fell upon Tacit, its hands and nails scratching dementedly at his face.

  Tacit caught hold of the beast by its neck and held it at arm’s length, the possessed child’s arms flailing wildly to grab hold of flesh into which to gouge its filthy nails. It spat and cursed and cried every obscenity it was able to dredge from the very depths of hell’s vocabulary. Tacit’s hand slowly tightened about the child’s neck, until the curses were squeezed into silence.

  A long purple black tongue, like the proboscis of a butterfly, flashed forward from the child’s mouth and lassoed itself tight around Tacit’s neck. Tacit grunted and felt at his belt for his revolver. He drew it from his holster and set the barrel of the gun snugly to the forehead of the demon. His finger whitened against the curve of the trigger. He closed his eye out of habit. He always did when he aimed.

  The demon’s eyes flashed and a grin spread across its face. At once Tacit caught hold of his senses. He loosened his grip on the trigger and threw the revolver onto the bed. The beast’s tongue drew itself tighter still around the Inquisitor’s neck. Tacit felt within the folds of his coat and drew out his silver crucifix, his most treasured possession. It had never failed him. He thrust it hard against the face of the child. Steam and hissing flesh drew up into the air as the demon rocked and convulsed within Tacit’s grip. Tacit cried out above the screams of the beast and the hiss of its burning flesh, repeating holy words and invocations to cast the beast from the poor unfortunate host, once and for all. Over and over he spoke them, each time his voice growing louder, his commands growing firmer. The writhing of the body weakened, the appearance of the creature’s skin softened until, moments later, in his grip hung the body of a young girl, pure and perfect. The only evidence that some evil had taken place was the child’s wretchedly soiled sleeping gown and a slowly rising trail of smoke, snaking out of the top of her head.