by Ross Turner
The two figures, one illuminated by the candles, and one darkened by the dread night that had descended upon them, stood and stared at each other unmoving and locked in place, as if they had been there for all eternity.
Father’s Peter’s audience held their breath, but no one dared move.
Finally, drawing up his will and his courage to break the dreadful and ominous silence, Father Peter spoke in a voice that held not a trace of fear whatsoever.
Instead, his words were accepting and understanding, compassionate and caring, and even forgiving and regretful, all at once.
His tone held a hint of finality to it, and even as he spoke, Johnathan felt something building inside of him that was desperate to break free, and for some reason, this time, he chose not to fight it.
“Have you finally come to repent your sins, my son?”
Chapter Twenty Two
The shadowy silhouette surged silently forward and barged straight into the elderly Vicar, forcing him back without a sound. Water sprayed in all directions from the struggle, as the dripping wet shadow knocked Father Peter violently to the ground and, carried by its own momentum, sprawled down on top of him.
Even before the soaking wet figure, robed entirely in black, climbed to its feet, the pool of rainwater that seemed to pour from its saturated clothes, mixed on the floor with a thick pool of blood, swirling red and black and viscous on the cold stone floor of the church.
Rising slowly to stand, the figure revealed its face for the first time, separating slowly from the blackness.
Richard.
His eyes looked wild and crazed as he glanced around, his head jerking left and right in a paranoid frenzy. Mixed with that crazy expression, was a deeper, much more subtle hint of something else entirely.
Something focused and determined and decidedly evil.
Below him, between his feet, lay the body of Father Peter. A blade protruded from his chest, bloodied and bent, and his eyes were closed, never to reopen.
Even in death, the look upon Father’s Peter pale face was sympathetic and understanding, as if forgiveness had already been granted.
Richard’s expression changed then, and the wild eyed look he’d had about him faded and receded, replaced by something that came from much deeper within him: from his very core.
Now he looked around harshly, seemingly uncaring of the corpse that lay at his feet, and that subtle hint of evil that had just about been present before now surfaced entirely, and bathed him in the full darkness of its menace.
His gaze settled upon Johnathan.
The young boy was stood in the very centre of the aisle, in almost the exact spot where Father Peter had begun delivering his Service, only a few paces further forward.
How he had gotten there, nobody knew.
Somehow he had stood up, without even Maddie or Emily noticing, and positioned himself ready for this moment, and the unwavering look on his face suggested that he had known all along that it would come down to this.
“JOHN!!” Maddie cried desperately, leaping to her feet and almost throwing herself across the pews towards her brother.
Panic gripped her, for even she knew what was coming next.
“Maddie! NO!!” Emily cried, racing after her daughter and rushing to her son’s side also.
But when they reached him, they knew not what to do.
The two of them cowered next to Johnathan in the aisle, as fear rippled through the church like a disease, moving with a mind of its own.
Suddenly, feeling the dread and sensing the imminent danger, feet began to scuffle and scrape, voices began to murmur and hearts began to race. The crowd was preparing to flee.
“Wait!” Johnathan’s voice commanded them then, and instantly his aura was present, overwhelming everything else, and as is such, his command was automatically obeyed.
The murmurs stifled and the scuffles ceased, though the racings hearts did not quieten.
Nonetheless, all remained where they were, bound by the young boy’s command.
Fight, flight, or freeze.
They had already done the latter.
Johnathan had just forbidden the second.
All that remained was the first.
And he was most certainly ready for it.
Arthur Knight had been preparing for this moment for a very long time.
Johnathan did not cower. He was not afraid, and it was all too clear to everybody in the huge hall that something was changing within him. It was something vast and great and powerful, yet also unseen, all at the same time.
He leant down and kissed his wife on the forehead, and then in turn his daughter also, catching each of their gazes for but a mere moment, but once more speaking volumes in those brief exchanges.
Rising slowly to his feet, Johnathan strode forward, his pace measured, meaningful, and purposeful.
His eyes fell upon the bloodied body of Father Peter as he moved, swift and silent as the darkness. Then his gaze swept fleetingly over the throngs to his left and right, all at once taking in their fearful faces, but at the same time seeing nothing.
Finally, settling upon their prize, his eyes bore upon his false father Richard, seeing everything now.
The blood on his hands shone and glimmered in the light of the candles still lit, and the evil grin on his face filled Johnathan with a rage so deep that it could not possibly have been his own.
He was too young to even know such anger.
No, this belonged to his father.
His real father.
Now, finally, he understood, and he looked upon the malevolent face of his demon with eyes afresh.
To his onlookers, as Johnathan strode forwards, it seemed to them that in one stride, in one moment, he was a boy, and yet in the next, he was a full grown man. He seemed to flicker between the two so rapidly, and their figures were so interchangeable, that they were eventually indeed simply one and the same person.
No veil overwhelmed the young boy now.
Not like before.
Instead, he stood proudly alongside his father, standing with him, and it was as if his rage and his fire was coming from deep within of himself.
Stopping short of Richard, and Father Peter’s body, by about six full paces, Johnathan, or Arthur, it was impossible to tell from one moment to the next, drew himself up to his full height, standing tall and immovable.
“I am Johnathan Knight.” He stated, and in an instant the flickering suddenly stopped, and it was clearly Johnathan who stood against his demon. “My father is Arthur Knight, a better man than you could ever hope to be, and you murdered him in cold blood.”
His voice and his presence radiated beyond belief, and was altogether overpowering. The sound of it even seemed to knock Richard aback somewhat, though his malicious expression and intent remained unchanged.
There was shocked silence in the room, aside from a few sharp intakes of breath. Hushed murmurs began again, but Johnathan only had to raise his hand slightly and they instantly quieted.
Johnathan received no words in reply, but the wicked grin that spread even wider across Richard’s face said all that words could not.
The demon reached his bloodied hand down toward Father Peter's body, his movements consumed wholly by some evil that neither Johnathan nor Arthur could possibly find words to describe.
They only knew that it was their responsibility to face this demon, and remove it from this world, knowing that if they did not, the further harm it would cause would be matched only by the terrible sins it had already committed.
Richard clasped his hand around the handle of the blade protruding up from between Father Peter's ribs, and slowly drew the knife edge out from the Vicar’s dead body, scraping metal against bone terribly as he did so, making a horrible grinding sound that churned the stomach of every onlooker.
He stood then and faced Arthur and Johnathan.
The impossible flickering began again, now that Johnathan’s words had been spoken, and in the s
ame space as the young boy appeared Arthur once more.
Richard looked confused for a second.
In one moment, he was looking at a boy, and then in the next, he was looking at a man he had already murdered.
After a few seconds, unable to focus, it even seemed as though they were one and the same person, and then in another it seemed as if they stood side by side.
He didn't know what to make of it, but then, it didn't really matter.
His thoughts were suddenly blurred with rage and frenzy and panic; he would simply kill them both.
He stepped forward callously over Father Peter's cadaver and stood off against Johnathan and Arthur, blood dripping still from the blade in his hand, staining the stone floor at his feet a deathly crimson.
Every footstep Richard took left the wet trail of footprints behind him, for he was still soaked from the rain. Their mark and their meaning was almost as bad as the blood that trickled beside them, mixing the blood of the Earth with that of man, consuming all demons in one great swirling mass, all caught up within that single moment.
Johnathan and Arthur both knew that now this was it.
The time had come.
It was now or never.
They welcomed their enemy, their demon, their great evil.
Their wills and their voices united as one, merging together, casting their ominous sound out to their enemy, ready to strike down the worst of their demons, or to die trying.
Either way, they would not be defeated.
“So be it.”
Chapter Twenty Three
For a moment there was silence, but only for a moment, before it was broken by Richard's shrill scream as he charged forward the last three paces to Johnathan and Arthur.
Lunging forward with the blade he held, gripping it with both hands, he drove the point straight towards the boy's exposed chest.
And not for the first time.
But the man expected this, and expertly evaded the attack, stepping deftly aside and kicking Richard hard in the side of his knee as he flurried past.
The evil man’s scream of fury turned into a shriek of agony as his knee buckled inwards with a gruesome crunch and he crumpled to the floor, carried forward by his own momentum.
He sprawled to the ground and rolled to his back, baring his teeth and growling like some sort of wild animal, expecting an immediate attack. But Johnathan and Arthur simply stood there, watching, their forms somehow existing in the same space simultaneously.
It was clear to them that Richard was losing his sanity, or perhaps had already lost it, in one form or another.
But regardless, the decision had already been made. His actions and his intentions were unspeakable; he was a demon that needed to be stopped, save endangering anybody else.
Richard clambered to his feet, but unable to support any weight on his one ruined knee, he hobbled precariously on one foot, barely able to balance to stand.
Nonetheless, still he came for them.
Swinging his blade wildly in every direction now, though only throwing himself more off balance with every sweeping movement, his eyes were crazed and seemingly now devoid of anything that vaguely resembled human intelligence. He had devolved entirely into the demon that occupied his soul.
Johnathan and Arthur both saw that it was time, and undoubtedly everyone else in the vast church could feel the presence all around change yet again.
Leaping from his one foot, pushing off with his good leg, the demon bore down upon the young boy once again, this time driving all of his weight behind the blade, cascading down unstoppably.
But then, of course, as had been his fatal mistake from the very beginning, he was not facing a boy, but instead a man, and with the strength of his father, Johnathan caught the demon mid-flight. Clasping his left hand around the wrist in which Richard held the blade, and catching his neck with his right hand, his right arm outstretched, he halted the evil man’s plummeting descent with an abrupt jerk.
He held him there for a moment or two, raised high above his own head, suspended by the vice grip Johnathan had about his throat.
The demon gazed down at the young boy with hatred in its eyes, but it was not the boy that it saw now, finally, but instead the man. The man that it loathed with all its soul.
But, hard as he tried, the demon could not move.
It simply did not have the strength to battle this boy, this man, this ghost, this angel, whatever he was, somehow impossibly risen from the dead.
Eventually the blade slipped from his loosening grip as his body slowly failed him, gasping desperately for air that it could not find.
A demon though he might have been, he still had only the body of a feeble human, and without air, that body became useless.
Richard’s death was not swift. Nor was it painless. And neither Johnathan nor Arthur took much pleasure in watching the man’s life fade away.
They felt every last ounce of breath drain from his body within their grasp, and it sickened them to the stomach.
But, soon enough, the deed was done.
Releasing their vice grip, Richard’s lifeless body collapsed to the floor at Johnathan’s feet.
The young boy stood there looking down at what he had done for a moment, with absolutely no remorse whatsoever.
Arthur looked down too, his task finally complete, and it was clear to everyone all around the terrible weight that had been lifted from his shoulders.
But with that final success, as is often the way, came also great loss and sacrifice. For with every second that passed, Arthur’s presence became less, his aura reducing, and Johnathan's sole presence replaced it, filling the space that his father had occupied for so long now.
Finally, when it was done, the young boy turned and walked over to Father Peter's body, all trace of his real father gone.
Crouching down beside it, he placed a hand on the Vicar’s shoulder, in way of a silent thank you; not simply for what he had done for them in those few days, but indeed what he had done for them for their entire lives.
It seemed that there had only ever been two men who had always looked out for Emily and her family, and now they were both dead.
Johnathan rose to his feet with steadfast resolution and an unfaltering resolve.
Now that task fell to him, and he swore silently to both his true father, and to Father Peter, that he would uphold that task as long as there was a single breath left in his body.
He was a Knight after all, and so long as he lived, nothing in the world would stop him from protecting his family.
Chapter Twenty Four
In the months and years that followed that fateful day, who is to say what would have been the normal way for Johnathan and Maddie and Emily to go on?
Should they just continue with their lives as if nothing happened?
Should they mourn the loss of Arthur and Father Peter, and never move on with their own lives?
They didn’t know.
I don’t think anybody really ever does.
All they did know, was that Arthur had saved them, and undoubtedly countless others.
Johnathan missed his presence greatly.
Of course Emily did too, and Maddie longed fervently that she could have known her real father, but neither of them had shared their very presence with Arthur’s, and Johnathan felt decidedly empty in his absence.
For a long time Johnathan retreated into himself somewhat, struggling desperately to cope with the situation. And even, for a time, it seemed to the young boy that there was no way to escape the great cavern that had been left behind inside of him.
His only saving grace was his family.
He lived for them now, doing everything he could for them to protect them and care for them and keep them safe.
Indeed, he most certainly did look after them, just as his father had asked.
Soon enough they had built a new home, with help of course from the rest of the village.
Father Peter was given a most re
spectful funeral, and buried in the grounds of his church, so that he may remain there for the rest of time, until the end of days.
And so life went on.
As it always does.
Time is indifferent of the events and triumphs and tragedies of mankind, and really even, for the most part, of its own inexorable passage.
But then, one day, completely out of the blue, something changed, once again shifting the lives of the Knights in an entirely new and unexpected direction.
Emily sat at home, as she often did, cleaning and cooking and sewing, trying as hard as she possibly could to keep her mind occupied. But no matter how hard she tried, for some reason, on that particular day, she could not drive the memories of her dear husband from her thoughts.
As much as she loved him, and my word did she love him, those thoughts did all they could to drive her insane. The knowledge that these things that she remembered were done and gone and dead and buried, sought to ruin her, she was sure of it.
Most of the time the only thing that kept Emily going was her children, and even then, much of the time she also tried desperately to remember Father Peter’s words from his Services, for they helped to keep her on track.
‘Though at times, my friends, I know it may feel like it’s all too much: like there’s simply no way to handle the difficult days. But I assure you, with all my heart, that there are always better times ahead.’
That specific reading Emily remembered particularly well, and sometimes it helped. She just hoped that the understanding old man had been right.
‘The demons that haunt you today, will be your liberation tomorrow. This I can sorely promise you.’
Johnathan and Maddie were out running errands for her.
At the very least, she was glad that her children had each other for company, for sometimes the long days grew unbearable. Almost to the point where they were simply too difficult to endure.
The front door to their new home, another thatched cottage, suddenly opened, and her son, Johnathan, strode in, a haunted look in his eyes.
