by Jeff Kamen
And as the drape fell to the floor, his eyes widened in horror.
For it was a boy, its broad hands hanging unnaturally on its skinny arms as though something had flattened them. Its pale scalp was bald and wrinkled, and as it moved, sniffing with its tiny snout-like nose, it turned its head from the fire to show its face. And as it did, he moaned involuntarily, for where its eyes had been there were two cavernous black holes.
‘Come to us, we beg you! Return! Eased with indebted blood, we beg you to break the chains ...’
It was naked, covered in filth and gore, its skin plagued with terrible lesions and puncture wounds that glistened on its body. From the top of its forehead there rose a huge pair of mounted horns, the strap fitting so tight it seemed to cut into the taut flesh of its neck.
He struggled again.
Its small shoulders were hunched and shaking, the dark wells of its eyes streaming as though it was crying with laughter.
‘Come to us! May your new birth begin in earnest. May blood beget blood, may soul beget soul, may new fires commence in the image of your splendour ...’
A curving dagger trembled in its soiled right hand. Maggots were dropping from its skin, falling in small wet clusters. Its feet as it climbed upon the bench were shown to be encased within hairy black blocks shaped like cloven hooves.
Clip. Clop. Clop.
‘Claim them, dear wonder, claim them well. Begin the opening. Begin the new and wondrous cycle.’
Standing between his feet, it let out a high-pitched mewl which sent him cowering with revulsion. He hauled at his bindings and tried to buck the thing away, but could not move.
‘Now,’ Paget said thickly.
Someone gripped his head. He was being made to face the front. Snorting wildly, he turned to Tilde. Her eyes were glazed, her mouth opening and closing in spasms. There was something on her teeth, grains of a dark substance webbed in foam. He tried to call to her, but his head was being held so that he was forced to stare into the eyes of the servant holding him. Then he felt the back of his costume rip. It was being cut open. Slashed at. He felt his upper legs being exposed, his lower back. With a shudder he felt the creature on his thigh as it trampled over him. The mewling came again and the shadows on the floor showed the creature raising the dagger, a sight he could only stare at as the dagger swooped. He screamed as it entered him, his tongue crushed against the cloth. Screamed at the cold wet burning as the creature slashed left and right across his back.
The first he saw of his blood was as it flew in a dark rainfall over Tilde. It spotted her face, her hair, ran from her earlobe and down her neck. He watched it spray finely across the floor. Watched in a trauma of anguished silence. Then, as the room throbbed back into hearing, he saw the shadow strike again, and a warm stream ran over him. He bucked his head, screaming in pain and outrage and in hatred for what Paget had planned for him, and in pity for himself and in sorrow for them all. The boy slashed at him once more, and he was screaming in fear at what else might happen while he was still conscious, for he knew there was no chance of mercy now, when, with a great bounding leap, the creature sprang away and landed on the neighbouring bench and began to slash at Tilde.
In seconds her costume hung down her side in tatters, soaked with blood. The creature scythed away at her, cutting streak on thin streak, cutting her feathered robe to shreds and sending slivers of it flying into the air like sodden confetti. She made no sound throughout the ordeal and her face was fixed calmly as she slumped forward, the drool from her mouth blackening as it thickened.
Still the creature attacked her. Moth lay sobbing, still hauling at the bindings, trying to kick, then he screamed again as the creature leapt back his way and stomped upon his legs, filling the air with a bitter waft of faeces and decaying flesh. He groaned into the rags, waiting for it to strike, to empty his life away in burning blood, but all he felt was the lightweight thrust of the blocks as it launched itself and went mewling over his head and landed on the floor. Once there, it fell to a strange little crouch and kicked the blocks from its feet and turned. It turned again, sniffing. Then with a wild mewl it ran at the servants, sending them reeling backwards and shouting in dismay.
The dagger plunged and scythed. One man fell with his chest torn open, and before his cold howl had reached the back of the chamber, another servant sat cupping the severed flaps of his cheek. The creature mewled and screeched, cutting savagely at the other servants huddled around the benches before springing after them as they dodged it or ran to hide themselves. Moth caught another waft of rotten flesh as it bounded past him, slashing and stabbing, and then he noticed something else. One of his cords was loose. He flexed his wrist and managed to pull his hand away, then reached down to his waistband, fumbling for the knife.
Dragging himself around to start cutting, he saw the creature continue on its rampage. The audience had stopped chanting and were backing away from it, stumbling into the furniture, knocking over trays and sending glassware crashing to the ground. Another scream tore across the chamber. He saw blood fire from a servant’s throat in an arching jet. Bodies were toppling one after the other as the boy leapt to and fro, slicing, thrusting, throwing its head back in a high mirthless giggle that was not the laugh of a human child but of something older, wilder, demented.
By now the onlookers were scrambling away in search of an exit, shrieking for help. As they dispersed, some running to where weapons were mounted on the walls, the creature launched itself after them. Servants caught in its path threw themselves aside. One hurled a plate at it and missed. Another charged at it with a raised blade and the creature stabbed twice and whirled round the body as it fell and sprang on again, sniffing and turning; and then it ran amok among the crowd.
As the noise rose, Moth pulled the last binding through the ring and slithered off the bench. He called to Tilde, but she was dead and grey. He rose up grimacing and loped off towards the darkened half of the hall. The screams were rising to a shrill chorus behind him, and as he left the orange glow, he looked back to see the stocky form of Kol lying among the logs in the fireplace. He was motionless, his skull smoking like a charred pumpkin and the blood from his throat rising in steam through his blackened fingers. Near to the Cage, he saw a bloodstained Paget squatting bow-legged like a huge bat about to flap away through the ceiling. People were falling over one another, limping, sinking down. Some were wielding sabres taken from the walls and there was furniture lying broken amidst the scattered food and dishes, and in the heart of the screaming crowd he saw a small horned figure riding the back of a woman gone insane with the horror of its hands over her eyes.
In the fireglow lay dark puddles through which the wounded were crawling as they strove to save themselves. With a sob he turned from the scene and lurched away, running to the sidedoor he’d come through and out into the passage.
Clutching his costume to his body, he staggered down the stairs, panting, leaving brownish smears on the walls as he went, and then on reaching the bottom he ran outside and into the courtyard. As he crossed the gravel, a group of servants came running past him from another entrance, armed with shields and pikestaffs and gleaming swords. People were calling down to them from open windows, begging them to hurry. The servants split into two groups as they approached that wing of the house and entered it by separate doorways amidst clashes of steel. Moth stumbled on, heading for the archway through which the carriage had entered.
Nobody stopped him as he ran through it and nobody stopped him as he ran headlong down the drive. The small stones hurt his feet and so he kept to the grass verge all the way to the property’s end, where tall palms and a high wall screened the grounds from the outer world. At the foot of the drive he saw servants standing about on guard duty, but if they’d spotted him he did not know. He fled towards a gap in the facing houses, one hand at his chest and the other beating like a wing as he struggled to go faster, get away.
~O~
Indeed ... what harm in it?
<
br /> The words as they floated through his mind kept him going, his newfound drive rooted in anger as much as his fear. He ran down alleyways and back passages and he stumbled into yards where dogs leapt at him yammering and set up a raw canine chorus that followed him street after street and which, upon fading, was replaced by a chorus of yells as a shrieking figure in the background rounded up a mob in the name of bloody vengeance. He fell into crates and fences, ran deliriously, bleeding out a trail of himself that curdled in the dirt and straw. Deep in the gloom behind him, a flicker of lamps and drifting cries spoke of the mob’s advance. He staggered on with people retreating from his path and headed into a smoky fog of lamplight where a run of dreary little shopfronts stood.
Some time later, he did not know when, he came out of the market area catching cool whiffs of the sea above the putrid drains. A group of men at a fire who watched him scramble away sat chuckling until they became aware of approaching voices, whereupon they jumped up beckoning and shouting to alert the mob as to which direction the wildly dressed figure had fled. These men then joined the hunt themselves, a few producing hooks and knives upon hearing a spreading tale of murder.
He ran down streets of homeless vagrants and open sewerage ditches and craters and leg-breaking holes, passing wretched tenements of the kind he’d gazed upon daily from his window. Then, in the night’s deep haze, he saw an outline of high crenellated walls, and knew which way he was headed. Further into the dark he ran, and with the salt air growing stronger, he noticed a flight of stone steps going up the corner of a wall. He ran to it and began his ascent to the ramparts, wheezing as he went.
At the top he limped out onto a torchlit walkway of cold stone, the black nightscape of the sea and the coastal wastes visible through slits in the masonry. Looking out at this glittering scene was a pair of sentries on patrol, sauntering idly, unaware of his presence. He rested his weight against the lowset wall adjoining the steps and stood panting, the blood-streaked mask of his golden face averted from whoever might pass by.
And as he stood there he gazed miserably down at the fuming city, its shimmering lights and fires, surveying it all with bitterness and mounting regret. A man utterly exposed and alone. Aghast and half-butchered. Seeing his life unfold down there as if it were playing on a long-ago screen; now that he’d lost all that was dear to him ... now that he had nothing.
Between long sharp sobs, he gained his first insight into his foolishness, the gullibility that had led him to give all he was to what stood empty and reeking in a bloodlet room along with the foul creature it had contained. He saw himself twirling and twirling ... a madman adrift in smoke and the cold laughter of the men who’d planted and watered him.
Slumping as he wept, he watched himself fly back through echoing skies to the pale mound of stones wherein the truth lay housed in a box, admitting at last, as the lid creaked open, that his father was dead, was dead, was dead, something there would be no remedy for. Not ever, were he to hold the keys to the world, time clanking in its vaulted chambers.
Nor would there be remedy for the damage he’d done to himself, and allowed so wilfully to happen to others. ‘Why?’ he croaked, ‘why?’ — speaking without hope to a man in a grave beneath a quiet clifftop rustling, speaking to the faraway woman that both of them had left; speaking to the blameless young girl he’d danced with all the way to her destruction ...
It was shouts rising from the streets that stirred him from his grief. With a groan, he raised himself and looked down to where the mob was gathering. ‘Up there!’ they yelled, ‘the murderer’s up there!’
Dazed, his face streaked and molten, his hanging costume drenched, he thought for a moment to throw himself down at them, possibly killing one of them as he landed; yet the more he saw of their swarming lights, the easier it was to arrive at another conclusion. He was the strongest he was going to be before they reached him. If he went now, he might stand a chance. Looking seawards, to where the walls dipped away, he decided to try the harbour. Even if he couldn’t hide there, he could end it all in peaceful solace, not be chased to his death like some brute beast. He would die among fishermen, as he had been himself, albeit briefly, in those pained but better days before.
~O~
He loped along the torchlit ramparts with the sentries looking after him quizzically, dubiously, muttering between themselves, and then on coming to a deep run of steps leading to the dock area, he took a quick look back, and seeing them coming his way, he hurriedly descended.
People climbing those same worn flickering steps shrank back at the sight of him, clinging to one other as they let him pass. He climbed down with a wet hand grasping at the rail, haemorrhaging, his back on fire and the wet feathers of his costume fluttering to the steps.
Stopping halfway down for breath, he saw cargo vessels moored along the quayside. All of it ashudder. Widening and narrowing. Distorting with each slam of his ailing heart. Further out he saw small fishing boats, the night crews aboard them mending nets, working dimly under their lamps. There were other boats too, some entering the harbour and some on their way out to sea, sailing in the bloom of light yielded by the watchtowers at the harbourmouth. He stood panting in huge cycles, tasting blood in each breath. Such a small portion of the world left to him. So few options. He forced himself on again, gathering the outfit in his bloody fist to keep from tripping over, then seconds later gasping as he heard a familiar voice scream over the rest: ‘Move! Out of the way, damn you! Get him! He’s the one! Him! He did it! Don’t let him get away with it, the nasty trull!’
The mob was charging down from the ramparts, along with them a squad of sentries, their weapons drawn. He leapt down the remaining steps two at a time, knocking aside the people climbing his way and almost slipping in his blood as he descended further, staring monstrously. On reaching the bottom he stopped a moment, caught between heading for the docks or the quayside. The quayside was quieter and he thought there was less chance of the mob securing help there. He went on at a limp, snatching agonised glances behind him to find the mob already halfway down the steps, steadily gaining on him. Paget was leading the charge with his fan of swinging hair, pointing and jabbing with a sword. ‘Don’t let him pass!’ he was crying, ‘stop him! Hold him there! Someone hold him right there!’
He followed the quayside along, and on passing the flickering boats he saw fishermen rising to watch him go. A few leapt up onto the stone waterfront as if to join the mob’s pursuit, and he veered aside like some werecreature caught between transformations, bloodcaked, his head lolling, growling at those who stood in his way. Then he noticed a darkened boardwalk a level down. He went to the steps and found other boats moored along it, small plankwood crafts nodding lightly in the swell. Just a few people were fishing here, mostly older men surrounded by lines and pails. He climbed down and ran past them in a whirl of bloody droplets.
‘Stop him! Stop the phagocyte! For pity’s sake, someone stop him! He’s getting away!’
On he went, snorting. He saw gulls wheeling orange and black by turns as they passed before the blazing watchtowers. He took their cries inside him and thought once more of what he’d come to, and of how; thought of the long and terrible path that had led him from grey nights of machinery underground to the hollow and bloody gaze of a mutant child. The agony of it. The shame. He heard waves washing against the deck posts, washing beneath the boards. He could hear his own breathing. His pounding feet.
‘Drazel! Pilliwink! Stop him! Stop the impostor! A very murderer of men!’
Ahead lay only the sea, the eternal sea.
‘You! You, sir!’
On he pounded. He could see a man talking to a woman in the shade of the harbour wall.
‘You! Look up, man!’
The man turned in astonishment, hastily parting from the woman’s company.
‘Spike him! Spike him, damn your eyes! You! You there! Do something!’
Turning, the woman seemed to grin as Moth approached. She was badly s
carred. Some of her teeth were missing. ‘Want business?’ she leered, and he lurched past her in a flutter of bloody feathers, the costume sagging around his hips. Glancing back again, he saw an army of hostile faces rushing in on him. Paget was just twenty yards away, slicing at the air.
‘Make him pay! This cannot stand! We are owed! Owed! It cannot be!
He turned away, and then the boards were gone and he was falling.
Falling.
‘Damn you boy!’
Plunging into the deep dark water.
He went under with the cold sea burning in his throat. It pulled him down with its vast mass weltering over him and his lungs clamped shut and bursting to open. Yet when the bubbles had left his roaring ears, the pain seemed to leave his chest; and then all things held a kind of silence. He was no longer struggling, was letting go. He felt his body easing into sluggishness. The darkness was absolute and immense.
He started to drift, mournful in his heart, and yet in spite of this he raised his hands as though to give thanks for his life, and as he did, he touched something. He tried to draw his hands away but his fingers were becoming ever more entangled. With slow, drugged motions he tried to pick himself free, to release himself and let his weary soul be washed away.
But still the weblike thing teased him, still it pulled. He struggled and thrashed his legs in panic, finding himself netted, entangled all the more for his attempts to unpick himself. Then he felt his arm lifting, and fearing that somebody had jumped in to get him, that Paget had dived in with others to haul him out and take revenge, he started to fight back. He fought violently, bubbles streaming from his face, and then his head broke the surface and there was a roar of shouts and slapping water and he looked about frantically, choking and spitting. He could feel the presence of something huge looming at his back, and he turned to see a dark hulking mass appear. Something that was blocking out the stars; something like a great hole torn from the sky.
‘Cypher! Maggot! Yes, you, boy! Sneak you little sneak not worth a penny of my time and all this for nothing you little shitzel! I’ll skin you alive.’
