The Darkest Hand Trilogy Box Set

by Tarn Richardson

  Sandrine crouched in the corner of the room, her head bowed and buried in her hands. She drew back her hair with them, pulling the cascading dark river over one shoulder. Then she looked up and stared hard at Henry.

  “We’re not as we appear, to normal people. I know how that is, how we are viewed by the civilised world.” She feigned a laugh and said, “Civilised” again sarcastically. “We’re not monsters, Henry,” Sandrine insisted, standing in the middle of the room, “not unless falling from your faith makes you a monster?”

  “But …” Henry started. Sandrine shook her head.

  “Let me speak. Throughout the ages, since the founding of the Catholic Church, the damned have walked the land.”

  “The damned?”

  “Whom we call wolves. Outcasts, Catholics excommunicated from the Church in a most terrible way. Not satisfied with simply turning them out of the Church, those with the power and the authority cast some of the most senior and important of those excommunicated into the abyss of lycanthropy, condemning them to a tormented and terrible existence on the very fringes of society, cast out by their faith, spurned by their people, cast out by their families, their friends, their villages and towns, to be monsters, desperate and pitiful souls during the day, half-starved and tormented by their shame and their eternal insatiable hunger, vengeful and driven mad by their rage at night under the moon. The true werewolves. Hombre Lobo.

  “Across all lands where the Catholic Church has taken root they can be found, hiding in their lairs, cast out, on the edge of civilisation, surviving as best they can, every day agony, every waking hour tortuous for knowing who they were, what they have become and what they are compelled to do. Their rage drives them and it is their rage which disgusts them so. Every painful hour of daylight is beyond measure, every moment of night-time horror agony to themselves, cursed to perform such barbarous acts in order to satiate the insatiable. Their endless hunger.”

  “But you,” began Henry, finding a chair and sitting in it, intrigued and enthralled by her utterly, “why do you say you’re not like those wolves at the front, those wolves you mention, driven insane by hunger when night comes?”

  “As I said, I am a half wolf. My rage and the wolf lies within, but I have control over it. I am not at the mercy of the moon’s cycle, I am not corrupted by the agony of daylight’s rays.”

  “And yet you are still a werewolf?”

  “A half wolf,” Sandrine corrected.

  “But must you … do you feel compelled to fly into a rage and become a werewolf? Must you feed as a werewolf to survive?”

  “No. I can control my rages. I am not forced to feed like the wolves to satisfy my hunger. But there are times when controlling my rages is a severe trial. Like the fault lines of the earth, sometimes they give and the resulting anger is terrible.”

  “As Pewter found out,” muttered Henry coldly.

  “Indeed.”

  “So these wolves of Fampoux, they are not alone. There are others?”

  Sandrine nodded, pulling out a chair from the table and sitting herself upon it opposite Henry. “As far as the Catholic Church has reached there are werewolves. Some of us within Fampoux, we knew of the wolves. Of course, my father was one of them. We would feed them, do what we could to lessen their agony during the night-time with offerings and food that we could spare. But when the Germans came, our errands to their lair were stopped. And then the wolves, half-starved, came for them.”

  “Are all werewolves, true wolves, cursed?”

  “True wolves have been cursed by the Church, true Catholics who have lost their faith and been excommunicated. However, there are some people who are foolish and admire the might of the wolves and the strength and cunning it gives to the individual. These people have sought to choose the path of wolf themselves, thinking it will give them power that they desire, that they believe they can control. Power, yes, it does give them, but they are unable to control it in any way.”

  “How would they become one of these werewolves?”

  “By drinking water from the footprint of a true wolf. But by doing this you are only brought misery and pain, held for ever under the control of the wolf from whose footprint you drank. Some within the clan here at Fampoux have chosen such a route, and they are the most wretched and broken of them all. There are others who can adopt the appearance of a wolf by donning the skin of a werewolf. These are rare items, for they must be taken from a werewolf whilst the wolf is still in werewolf form. Great is the pain and great must be the determination of the wolf to withstand the rage and the pain as the skin is cut from them. For when in werewolf form, the wolf’s only desires are food and survival. To stand as a wolf and allow yourself to be skinned alive, few are able to endure such a task.”

  Sandrine reached forward and took Henry’s hands into hers.

  “What of your mother?” he asked.

  “My mother?” Sandrine shook her head. “My mother is dead. My father, he killed her. They loved each other very much but such is the curse of the wolf. She would not leave him; she could not bear to be parted from him. Even on a night. Despite his most fervent protestations. She would rather die than be parted from him. One night, she left me safe within the village and stole into his lair, hoping that her love could cast the curse from him. He devoured her, an act which haunted him to his final days.

  “So you see Henry, monsters we are, yet we were made so by those who consider themselves most holy. It is the belief of all of us who carry the curse that perhaps the true monsters are those who wield the power in the Church to condemn and cast down, not those who have been cursed themselves.”

  “How did this all come to be?” asked Henry as he struggled to comprehend the enormity of what she was telling him.

  “No doubt the Catholic Church, who first created the mechanism and blended the secret rites to bring the curse upon the victim, would be able to say. But they have banned any mention of the tradition for nearly fifty years, burying it and its secrets deep within their libraries and vaults. They make no reference of it in public, deny all knowledge of the practice or even that they hunt and persecute those they have created. All historical documents have been destroyed. All but one. A story is told of a man, a werewolf, Peter Stumpp. Three hundred years ago, Stumpp, a Catholic, was cursed and thrown from the Catholic Faith for lying with a married woman who was not his wife. Afterwards, possessed as a wolf, his atrocities, if you wish to call them that, were terrible. He devoured many including his wife. Men, women and children, eighteen in total, until he was caught and brought before the Cardinal of Cologne.

  “After his short trial, he was taken and put on a wheel, where his flesh was stripped from his body with red-hot pincers. As a bloody, weeping thing, his limbs were broken with the blunt side of an axehead, so that when he was tossed into his grave his broken form could get no purchase in the earth to heave himself out towards the moon. This broken, torn thing was then beheaded and his remains burned on a pyre. As this punishment was being meted out, before Stumpp’s eyes his daughter and mistress were flayed, raped and strangled, and their bodies tossed alongside Stumpp’s in the fire.”

  Henry swallowed and gritted his teeth. But Sandrine had not finished. “As a warning to others, the Church hung the torture wheel from a mast for all to see, the body of a wolf set in the centre of the wheel and, at the very top, they placed Peter Stumpp’s severed head.”

  “Good God.”

  “Or not.”

  “How d’you know all this?”

  “We wolves have talked and passed on memories and stories. The hours are long for werewolves to sit in the silence of their lairs, waiting for the passing of the days and coming of the infernal moon.”

  “Is there nothing that can be done? Is there no way to reverse what has happened? To end the curse?”

  “There is a plan.”

  “What plan? For the salvation of werewolves?”

  Sandrine laughed thinly. “The wolves are beyond salvation. Bu
t there is a greater threat coming to the church. Revenge. Revenge for all the years they have forced my people to live in the wilderness. And when it arrives, all the foundations of the Church will be washed away for eternity.”

  EIGHTY-SEVEN

  1908. NAPLES. ITALY.

  “There’s a pony and trap coming up the track,” Mila called from the field, but Tacit had already spotted it. He leaned his shovel against the front of the trailer and collected the shotgun from the cab. He’d told Mila everything. He told her trouble would eventually come looking for him. It appeared that it had.

  “You’re not welcome here,” he called to the figures aboard the cart, as it drew to a halt on the track.

  “Inquisitor Tacit,” the passenger in the trap replied in greeting, looking down at him and feigning a smile. Tacit recognised him from the Vatican, one of the Bishops who used to clean up around the Cardinals. It was clear he was still doing the Cardinals’ bidding. The Bishop looked up and surveyed the farm. He spotted Mila and his eyes narrowed on her.

  “You’re on my land,” Tacit warned.

  “Your land?” the Bishop retorted, pulling a face in mock admiration. “My, you have come a long way since falling from grace, haven’t you, Inquisitor?”

  “Who said anything about falling?”

  “You don’t turn your back on the holy faith, Tacit!” he spat venomously, his eyes burning with an unholy rage. “You don’t simply walk away from the Inquisition.”

  Mila had moved a little closer in order to hear what the visitors were saying. The Bishop looked at her and scowled.

  “Who’s she?”

  “Turn this cart around and leave,” Tacit growled, ignoring the question. The Bishop looked down at him and shook his head.

  “Good heavens,” he swore. “Are there really no limits to your degradation?”

  One handed, Tacit broke open the shotgun and checked the rounds in the barrels. He flicked the gun shut and leaned it over his shoulder.

  “Murder’s not beyond me, if that’s what you mean?” he growled.

  “Cut the nonsense, Tacit! We need you back,” the driver called, his eyes shifting between the black of the gun barrel and Tacit.

  “I’m not coming back. I’ve had enough. My days with the Church are over.”

  The Bishop laughed. “You don’t just leave the Inquisition,” he said, looking over to Mila and back again. He wiped his brow, sweaty under the Italian sun and from the confrontation. “This is not a role you turn away from and leave. You gave your life to it.”

  “You took my friends’ lives,” Tacit spat back, his nose flaring. “All of them.” He fought hard against his rising anger. “You took my best friend, my only true friend, Georgi. You won’t take anything else from me.”

  “Inquisitor Tacit, we gave you your life,” countered the Bishop, shaking his head dismissively. “Before us you were nothing.”

  “Enough talk,” Tacit grunted, taking a step towards them. “Get off my land.”

  “You’ll be back, Tacit. You’re nothing without the Inquisition. It’s all you know.”

  “I know how to count to ten,” he growled. “And when I get there, I start shooting. One,” he began, but the Bishop had already given the order to turn the cart around.

  “You’ve stumbled from the path, Tacit,” he shouted, as the cart pulled away. “Damnation is all that awaits you!”

  Tacit watched them all the way up the track until they vanished in the cloud of dust kicked up by the pony’s hooves and the wheels of the trap.

  EIGHTY-EIGHT

  07:07. FRIDAY, 16 OCTOBER 1914.

  THE FRONT LINE. FAMPOUX, NR. ARRAS. FRANCE.

  Tacit was aware of a stinging pain in his head and the smell of wet coals in his nostrils. He could feel the damp of earth on his cheek and forehead. His mouth was dry, fouled with the metallic taste of blood. He grunted and tried to move. Hard fingers and hands held him down. He opened an eye. There was a fire in the middle of the cavern around which the filthy, pallid clan of human wolves had congregated, watching the Inquisitor from a distance. When he stirred there was a hooting and crying from the assembled.

  Bony fingers caught hold of his hair and pulled his head up from the ground, almost breaking his neck by the severity of the tug.

  “So, the Inquisitor awakes,” Angulsac muttered, stepping forward from the throng of gruesome white bodies, more like maggots with limbs than the men they must once have been. Angulsac’s matted black hair hung in lank clumps down his neck, across his shoulders, his wretchedly thin face drawn tight over his skull. “So good of the Church to have sent us one of its Inquisitors to bid us greeting. Tell me, Inquisitor, does the Church send you in regret and shame or anger and rage?”

  Tacit spat dirt from the corner of his mouth and stared on, silently.

  “Speak when you’re spoken to,” called the wolf holding Tacit’s head back.

  “Seems to me,” Tacit hissed, “the only ones with anger and rage are you. You should consider my presence a blessing. A gift. I offer you redemption and escape from your captivity, from your pain.”

  Angulsac laughed and a few wolves laughed with him, but there were others who hid their faces or turned away. “We have no need of your redemption, Inquisitor!” Angulsac hissed.

  “Then would you prefer to be left as you are, wolves, never at peace within these cold caverns of earth beneath the accursed moon?”

  “What sort of a question is that, Inquisitor? Of course peace from our madness is desired. For countless years we have lain here in the darkness or stalked beneath the moon, half mad with our anger and our shame. For too long we have been forced to live an existence more wretched than any sentence for a crime in the land of man. And for what, Inquisitor? And for what, tell me? For turning away from the Church, for turning our back on the Lord?”

  “The most wretched of sins!” Tacit roared back in defiance.

  “So wretched that our very being was accursed from that day forward, unable to live, unable to die, unable to love for fear of what it might bring – only filled with hate.”

  “If you turn from the good Lord then you can expect nothing more than hate to be brought unto you!”

  “Turning from the good Lord? The good Lord, eh? So good that he would curse his flock in such a way, so good that he would enforce damnation upon all who turned from his path.”

  “There is only his path,” Tacit muttered.

  “Only his path, you say? Yet, you sound none too sure yourself.” Angulsac stole forward, crouching down on his knee so he was but a spit away from Tacit. The Inquisitor could smell the stench of him, excreta and blood. “Tell me, Tacit, now that you see us as we are, as poor unfortunates, now that you yourself are forsaken by your Lord and left amongst us, the fallen, tell me, do you still believe there is only one true path?”

  Tacit didn’t reply. Instead he tested the weight which held him down. Someone was on his legs, another on his back, as well as the creature holding his head. Difficult odds to free himself, but not impossible with the right manoeuvre.

  “I …” Tacit began, but Angulsac spoke across him.

  “It is there in your eyes, Inquisitor. I can see it. Doubt. Doubt as to your own Lord’s path, his salvation, his love. Look about you,” said the wolf, standing and holding his hands wide. “Look about you, Inquisitor. Look about you and ask yourself if you feel the shame of the damnation that he has brought down upon us, upon you, upon your Church. For every action in the name of your Church, there is a reaction of pain, of hate and of heartbreak. When you curse to uphold your Church’s laws, you tear open another hole into the world of lawlessness that you and your Church are creating.” Angulsac turned and stared hard at the Inquisitor. “For too long we have suffered whilst you and your fellow Inquisitors and Cardinals have tried to wash your hands of the horror you have created. No more. The time has come for the truth to come out. You ask why we wish no redemption from you? Because we wish to stand witness to the downfall of your fait
h. The end is nigh for you Inquisitor, and all of your kind! But before that it is high time that the Inquisition tasted the pain and revulsion that we feel every day of our waking lives.”

  Angulsac dug at the ground with his foot, churning the earth aside to form a large footprint in the dirt. He turned to another within the clan and nodded. The figure, a woman, bent double with age and disease, came forward with a bowl clutched in her claw-like grip. She handed the bowl carefully over to Angulsac, who, after looking briefly at Tacit, sank to the ground and poured the water into the print.

  “Bring him!” Angulsac commanded.

  Unease gripped the Inquisitor, as hard as the firm hands which held him. He knew the ceremony. He knew what it was they were planning to do, to turn the hunter into one of the cursed and hunted. Tacit fought against the hands which held him but their grip was unyielding. They half-carried, half-dragged him to the lip of the puddle. Tacit well knew what drinking from the puddle would mean, a curse set upon him, for ever casting him under the power and control of the wolf whose footprint it was he drank from. Under Angulsac’s control he would be a whipped and pathetic dog at the foot of his master, thrown the carrion of his master’s night-time hunts, forever tormented. He wrestled and thrust like a fish on a line, freeing a hand momentarily. Just enough.

  “Hold him!” Angulsac cried, and more bloodless bodies piled on top of him, his hand wedged tight beneath him.

  Angulsac lowered himself down so that he was mere inches from the Inquisitor’s face.

  “So, Inquisitor,” he hissed, “this is when you stumble from the path of your Lord and find yourself on another very different one. Let us see how walking in the shadow of the moon fares with you after having stalked the shadow for so long?”

  Angulsac looked up and nodded. The hand which held Tacit’s hair now ushered his head downwards, pushing his face towards the surface of the water. Tacit fought with all his might, but the hand, whilst wretched and shrunken, possessed all the strength and force of a werewolf’s, full of sinew and wrath. Tacit grimaced, fighting with every ounce of his might to keep his lips from touching the surface of the puddle. But, bit by bit, the strength in his neck weakened and his face lowered ever closer towards the surface of that insipid pool.