by Andy Graham
“After the gods were banished, they deserted us.” Her voice was a rustle of wind in a graveyard. “We were left bereft, godless, unholy. And with no gods there is no hell other than that which we create for ourselves or for other people. You made my life hell. Maybe we should honour your dead Captain Brennan by making your death hell. I’m sure he’d appreciate the symmetry in that.” The Famulus rubbed her hands together like a fly rubbing its legs.
“No, I—”
Benn’s razor across Randall’s throat silenced him.
“Would you like me to tell you a secret, Randall?” This wasn’t a question. This fell somewhere between a gloat and a threat. And as the woman moved closer, the bittersweet stench of the Famulus’s flesh washed over him. It choked the answer in his mouth: no, he didn’t want to know.
“Around about the time Benn Tate became Benn John, former president Edward De Lette planned and plotted his own downfall. He fomented the Silk Revolution so he could retire but rule behind the scenes.”
“That’s just a rumour! There’s no proof. How can you know what I don’t?”
“Many people came to my Ward. One of them was even more important than you used to be. She told me.”
The fight drained out of him. He had suspected for a long time that this was the truth behind the Silk Revolution but finding hard evidence had been impossible. He’d had more success catching moonlight in his hands as a child. Whenever he had broached the subject with Bethina, they had somehow ended up talking about something unrelated but pressing. It appeared that she had one more surprise to spring. Even from the grave, her spiderweb of manipulation was tugging at him, teasing him, playing him for a fool.
“I’m not sure why Bethina told me. Insurance, binding me to her, a game, or a moment of weakness? But I doubt the woman could even spell that last word, at least as it applied to her. She told me how De Lette bullied the twisted mind of Luke Hamilton—”
“The paedophile,” Benn spat.
“—into being his toy president. The puppet who misled a nation, the paedophile who famously fronted a National Paedophilia Awareness Week. And any society that needs reminding of things like that has already rotted through. But the hypocrisy of that particular stunt was even more rank because Luke Hamilton, the president-in-nothing-but-name, tormented young Captain James Brennan in a way that no child should ever be treated.”
Her hands were on the chair arms now. Close enough to kiss him. Close enough to see the flesh on her skin weeping clear fluid. “Brennan, to his credit, killed Hamilton, but the captain’s overprotective nature drove his sister into your bed. And then I killed her to get back at you for what you were doing to my people. And so on and so on. There’s so much to remember! So many twists. Too many turns. Brennan working for you, Wu-Brocker working for you, and they broke me as I am about to break you.”
Randall held his breath, teeth rattling in time to his heartbeat. “Break me? No. You—”
She leaned in, her breath warm on his skin, pinched his bottom lip between her teeth, pulled, almost gently, and let his lip flick against his teeth. Randall had done this to Brennan’s sister. He had drawn blood, then. Hers. Now, he was seconds away from wetting himself.
“As for the Ward I ran, the secret society for the wealthy and worthy of Ailan?” The Famulus pivoted away from him, thrust her hands up in the air and her voice took on the resonance it had always held in her ceremonies. “The four lesser elements: earth, air, fire and water. The three higher: space, time and consciousness. Death, the Great Deceiver and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, updated and rebooted for a modern audience: Ignorance, Intolerance, Fear and Discrimination.”
Her voice broke as she burst into a cackling laughter. “Lies. All of it. Overblown symbolism which is tedious at best and dangerous at worst.” She thrust her hand into her pocket and closed it around something. “You see, Randall, Edward De Lette was right to ban the divine. Religion is a soapbox and a security blanket, a shield to hide behind and a reason to make barbaric behaviour palatable. It’s the same tactic your government used, repressive laws enacted in the name of national security. Just like salt in food — when you taste it for what it is, it makes you thirsty for something else. Too much will kill you and the little we need occurs naturally in the world. The elements?” Her lips puffed out in a huff of air. “I’m past that now. I’ve found something else to believe in: dead Brennan’s little gods of Symmetry and Balance. De Lette’s government killed my Aunt Aerfen and her father Deian, children of Mennai. I, a child of Mennai, will kill you. Captain Brennan would approve.”
She swept over to the torturer’s toolbox and pulled out a vial. A green liquid clung to the inside of the glass. The underground room seemed to be shrinking as Randall’s naked skin did. “Poison? That’s fake. That’s the stuff we used on you.” His mouth was drier than dust.
The skinless side of her face glistened redly. “Sure? Benn and I got your desk sign down here. What’s to say we didn’t find the real poison?”
He licked his lips. His tongue felt sandpaper.
“Thirsty?”
“No, not for that stuff.”
Benn stank of sweat, of revenge. His razor blade cut a thin, burning line into the VP’s throat as the Famulus held the now uncorked vial to his lips.
“No,” he screamed.
“Don’t move. The poison may be fake but the razor blade is very very real.”
He gagged. Benn’s fingers pinched the VP’s nostrils. And the poison slid down his throat in an icy lump. “I’ll kill you!” Benn removed the razor as Randall spat out strands of green phlegm, the pressure of the blade still burning his skin.
“How do you feel?” She had her arms folded, head cocked to one side, fleshy side of her face reflecting the light. “Are you sure you got the right one, Benn?”
Benn pocketed his razor and held up a hammer. The handle was faded and pitted with woodworm, cobwebs stretching from head to claw. He nodded, scratching at the scars on his neck with the metal.
“Good.” Her eyes glazed over. “‘The sickness starts with a few scabs. Then the dizziness and blurred vision starts. Your eyeballs go next. They rot in a matter of hours; the stench and the headache are blinding, apparently.’” She sniggered. “‘All puns deliberate. Then your organs start to haemorrhage. The blood leaks from every hole you have.’ Remember that? You said that to me, not that long ago. Now I get to watch you die.”
“There’s an antidote. In my office. You—”
She was laughing. A deep belly laugh that didn’t suit her frame.
“Water. You gave me water?” he asked, desperate and hopeful.
“Yes. I gave you water. I did to you what you did to me.” She was screaming now, any sense of control gone. “I did to you what you did to everyone. ‘Society is a meritocracy.’ That’s what you told me. That people like me deserved to be on the bottom rung of the societal ladder because we are nothing. Well, what do evil bastards like you deserve in a meritocracy? All you politicians and your conniving, greedy, spiteful, divisive ways?” Spittle sprayed across his face. The lines stretching through the red cheek muscle exposed by Wu-Brocker’s scalpel split and wept. “The world worked well enough before people like you decided people like me needed to be ruled, that people like you could make decisions to kill other people’s children to keep you and yours safe.”
“No!”
“De Lette is dead. Hamilton is dead. Laudanum is dead. You are next in line.”
“Others will take my place! There will always be more like me! I can help. I understand the game. I can—”
She pulled her hand from her pocket. In it lay a bent coin. “Benn found this in your clothes.” It was an old Mennai crown, bent and buckled, the one he had pulled off the neck of Rick Franklin under the mountain. “This is the symbolic silver crown De Lette paid the Mennai Separatists in the Silk Revolution, the blood money the former president used to betray his own people.” She nodded to Benn.
“How do you
know that? Bethina again? Who else knows? Wait! What are you doing?”
“Symmetry.”
Benn rammed his fingers into Randall’s mouth. He struggled and thrashed, but his hands and feet were bound and the old man had a grip like death. An iron clamp was shoved between his teeth. One cracked. The clamp creaked as it was wound open, forcing Randall’s jaw far enough apart for the joint to crack, for the skin at the corner of his mouth to rip. The Famulus’s scarred face was in front of his. The cold edge of the desk sign trailed up his body. The back of his head was bloody from where he was banging against the chair his father had wanted to pass on to him.
“‘I am the chairman. I get the chair,’” she read. “Cute. You can have the coin, too. Only fitting that the coin that started this whole infernal saga should end it.” She dropped it into his mouth; it tasted of soot and blood. Placing the end of the desk sign on the coin, she took the hammer from Benn’s hands, and raised it high above the desk sign. “Oh, I almost forgot. On your way to hell, don’t step on the Cracks.”
Randall screamed. The hammer fell and the lights went out.
Want to read more?
Interested in the darker side of The Misrule?
You may want to take a look at I Died Yesterday — the first volume of my Dark Fiction Tales.
Sometimes doing the right thing brings out the wrong in people.
These five short stories are not happy, but they leave their mark. Some are set in our world; some are set in the world of The Misrule. This anthology combines dark humour, psychological terror, horror and a splash of brightly coloured gore. It packs an emotional punch made even more harrowing by the paper-thin divide between reality and fiction.
I Died Yesterday (Dark Fiction Tales: Book One) available now on Amazon.
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Lust and wrath.
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Hope.
THE MORGEN TOWERS
A collection of stand-alone short stories from and inspired by The Misrule
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Dark Fiction Tales
I DIED YESTERDAY
(Dark Fiction Tales: Book One)
Sometimes doing the ‘right’ thing brings out the wrong in people.
Five stand-alone stories from British author Andy Graham that combine dark humour, psychological terror, horror and a splash of brightly coloured gore.
I Died Yesterday — A evening with an old friend becomes a morning after that lasts for ever.
Chopper — A young man’s pursuit of his dream unearths a nightmare.
A Decision at Dusk — If you could bring someone back from the dead, would you use the power to help or hurt?
Sunflower — When the establishment fights back, they break more than the rules.
A View — Some noises are best left uninvestigated.
Interested in dark fiction? Download now to discover tales of regret, respect and revenge.
AN ANGEL FALLEN
(Dark Fiction Tales: Book Two)
You don't send the kind to punish the cruel.
Mike’s eighteen. His family held together by gin, a politician’s need for good optics, and the patience of their maid.
Raph’s just wrong. His only friend is his hammer. His only pleasure? The pain of the animals he catches.
Mike runs with Raph because… well, he’s not really sure why. Bored, probably. Scared, too.
But on a night when biblical plagues are ravaging the land, the boys find something impossible. Something that can’t exist. But it’s there. Lying on the floor amongst broken feathers. Asking for help. So Raph pulls out his hammer.
Mike faces a choice – run with the human devil he knows or take a chance on this thing that fell from the heavens.
An Angel Fallen is a supernatural thriller full of vivid imagery and suspense. This stand-alone dark fiction novella from British author Andy Graham will keep you gripped until the bitter twist at the end.
What price will two teenage boys pay for their past? Download now and find out.
A CROW’S GAME
(Dark Fiction Tales: Book Three)
It’s just fog, only a scarecrow, nothing to fear.
What if a band drifting home in a van held together by hope and tape were to drift off the known highways and byways of living America? What if they were to pass through mists which lived and hungered, onto trails older than the world? Pathways which only existed on maps stitched together with nightmares. Roads which carried the Mark of the Crow. What if their life depended on a throw of the dice and rolling the wrong number would kill them? Would you take the chance?
This stand-alone novel from British author Andy Graham blends supernatural horror and urban fantasy with a twist of dark humour. Follow the trials of America’s Hardest Working Rhythm Section, their colleagues and enemies, as they drive through a night filled with wannabe vampires and insomniac zombies, covens of cheerleaders and precious few friends.
Some will survive. A few will emerge stronger. Many will lose.
Download now to find out who wins the game.
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The cast of A Lover’s Redemption
The Settlements/ Free Towns/ Bucket Towns
Tear
Ray Franklin - ex-captain in the 10th Legion, now a fugitive.
Rose Franklin (deceased) - Ray’s mother, former leader of the Resistance.
Donarth Taille (deceased) - Ray’s father (born in Axeford)
Frederick ‘Rick’ Franklin (missing) - Ray’s maternal grandfather. Former major in Sci-Corps.
Stann Taille - Ray’s paternal grandfather (born in Axeford). Former sub-corporal.
Lenka Zemlicka (deceased) - Ray’s neighbour & surrogate aunt
Axeford
Skovsky Senior - the Resistance’s chopper pilot and father of…
Skovsky Junior (deceased) - member of the 10th Legion
Tino Martinez - former 10th legionnaire, now a cleaner in the Kickshaw in the capital.
New Town
Baris Orr - ex sub-corporal in the 10th Legion, now in the 13th Legion.
David Prothero (deceased) - spokesperson for the unions
The Gates
Effrea (The capital city of Ailan) and other cities
Bethina Laudanum - the president
Verina Laudanum - Beth’s twin sister
Randall Soulier - the vice-president
David Prothero (deceased) - spokesperson for the unions (born in New Town)
Jamerson Nascimento - sub-corporal in the 10th Legion, now in the 13th Legion
Stella Swann - doctor/ medical researcher
Dan Swann - Stella’s husband
Jake & Emily Swann - Stella & Dan’s young kids
Lynn (deceased) - manager of The Kickshaw
