A Parish Darker: A Victorian Suspense Novella

by Rhys Ermire

  The patter of hasty footsteps soon met our attentive ears. Their source was undoubtedly from where the others had originated moments earlier. Without delay, the Baron deafened his steps and made his way to the column by the stairwell where the suspected intruder would emerge.

  His bulk was highlighted by a faint glow as a growl emitted from his jowls. The Baron had left my sight, leaving only me to stare down the man nearly twice my own size in all apparent regards. I had little time to react as his weight brought him forward with great momentum toward my position. My mettle was tested, as were my reflexes, as I tightened my grip on the hilt of my only means of defense.

  I found myself ready, for the first time in my years, to take the life of another being. The feeling was frightening and invigorating, if only momentarily, in equal measure. My body aches in all too familiar ways as I recount this for you now and reminisce of a state of mind in which I take no pride.

  The mind in disbelief is a terrifying and fascinating prospect all the same. I watched in a dreamlike state as the man barreled toward me, raising a sizable blade above his head and readying to bring it down on my person.

  No sooner did he fully raise the blade did it fall limp along with the arm that held it. Both met the ground below as the Baron’s blade severed it clean. There, before my eyes, the man fell with an unfamiliar sentiment in his demeanor. It had not been the rage from before but a certain call for mercy. This had not been the way he expected his life to end, and yet here he was, on his knees desperately using his remaining arm to feel for the one lost in the darkness.

  As his head rose in some misguided eureka, an axe and sword came from opposite ends and left out the other side of his neck, leaving his head cleaved clean from the neck it had once found itself attached.

  Any relief from being able to breathe once more found short life as the Baron turned to face the gala window by the main entrance. The moonlight made no secret of a man standing by it with a not inconsequential object held high in his hands. With one heave, the rock came through the window and created an entryway that would not be easily resealed.

  “Edwin, stay back!” shouted the Baron, his words coming with some exasperation in a voice I once felt would never tire. “Do as I say! Do not come near!”

  I heeded his words and retreated, fumbling my way into the dark, unsure of where I was to land. The footsteps increased in number, suggesting more than one intruder passing through the newfound opening.

  The grunting and clinging of blades to one another suggested the fight had already begun anew as I found myself in the exit corridor at the rear of the house. Nonetheless, my exact positioning was a mystery to me. As if traversing a dream with too few colors, my steps in the dark felt as if they came on the tops of the dark clouds outside the castle. Reaching and tapping on the surfaces beside me gave no hint as to my location in that darkest of corners.

  With that, the battle seemingly ceased. All that could be heard were sparse footsteps on the decorative carpets decorating much of the entrance hall. As I listened, I could not shed the feeling the steps were approaching me. I could see nothing but my hearing felt heightened in that moment.

  “Baron?” I whispered, aware of the consequences. “Is that you?”

  No response came, but the footsteps appeared to continue.

  “Baron, are you there?” My whispers felt as if they echoed through every chamber and off every stone making up the castle’s foundation.

  Before my ears or my eyes could compensate for what soon thereafter happened so suddenly, I felt an intense pressure on my throat and chest. A force had enveloped my upper body as shards of a sharp surface pricked my skin and drew from it a familiar oozing that was already alarming all its own.

  The muddied soil and grass lashing upon my shirt left no mystery as to what had happened. The prickling sensation had been glass embedded in my skin when an unseen assailant pushed through the thin window with only their bare hands as tools and grabbed onto my person. The speed of the occurrence and the exhilaration my heart had already undergone left no time to react as I was pulled outside and began tumbling downhill in the throes of a figure whose bulk out-measured my own considerably.

  What was most telling was the lack of concern for the assailant’s well-being. We had been locked in a brawl, grabbing at one another in violent spurts between rolls upon the hard surface below. It was only when our fall down the incline began to cease that I realized the true extent of my predicament.

  Rain fell with incessant dedication, providing the only source of rhythm as haphazard bolts of lightning illuminated the back garden we had stumbled into. The rear entrance to the house was still visible up the incline, but what stood in my way was the very exemplification of rage and malcontent.

  Undoubtedly a man, comparable in size and brute strength to those the Baron had cut down just moments earlier, he gave no hint that he aimed for any retreat. While the Baron had been armed and possessed some familiarity with a weapon, I was now neither as I felt around in the grass for my sheath.

  The man pressed his knee onto my chest as I heard and felt the simultaneous cracking of one rib or many. The anguish only grew in intensity as he applied more pressure and wrapped both his hands around my throat. My hands instinctively reached for his own neck, of which my reach was only barely enough.

  Upon feeling my fingers squeezing on his neck, the man growled and it was then the ferocity in his eyes became apparent. He growled and grunted in tongues all too foreign to me. Despite his strength, I expected the air in my lungs to deplete at a slower rate than what occurred in that moment. The despair was immediate and my ability to fight back began to wane without any prior notice.

  A bolt of lightning so close and so violent that it shook the ground beneath my back struck, revealing what my addled mind believed to be the full castle and its entire grounds. In that faintest of moments, I glimpsed my only grace just an arm’s reach away in the meadow to my side.

  To give myself an opportunity—a chance, even—to rid myself of the monstrosity atop me, I gashed and gnawed with my nails at the man’s throat and face with animal-like brutality. When his grip relented for that one second, I reached with my left arm into the brush. My hand slipped and slid off the leather surface as I continued grasping with the greatest sense of desperation my mind and body had ever known.

  My vision began to fade as my hand finally rested on the sheathe beside me. I began to see nothing and hear only the guttural utterings of a deranged voice greeting my ears between brief bouts of consciousness.

  I dreamed for a moment, perhaps two, of belonging to a different place and time. Whether it was a coping mechanism that my mind had conjured in a moment of great suffering or just a hopeful reminder of what may have been, I could not know. I saw happiness and glimpses of a bright future—Emilia…

  My eyes opened as if compelled when the man leaned forward to me, treating my neck as a vice and roaring just inches from my face. A renewed vigor offered me one moment of retaliation, and I took it.

  The effect was instantaneous. The man’s grasp relented nearly entirely for that one second that the hilt still encased in the sheath connected with the side of his skull. Blunt a blow as it was, it was enough to discombobulate and unseat the assailant from my chest—if only momentarily.

  I quickly brought the sheathe over my chest and wrapped my free hand around the hilt. I could not move from my back or even roll in another direction, but I was able to begin to pull the blade from its holster. As I did, the man regained his bearings and tightened his fist just within eyesight. With the blade only a moment shy of being free, he raised his fist high and came down with all his strength on the juncture between my bicep and forearm.

  The sheer force led to the bones in my elbow giving way and the blade, with my hand still wrapped around the hilt, falling just out of the sheathe and onto the ground above my head. I felt I no longer had control over my limbs but was fortunate the weapon would not be easily freed from my grasp
.

  With the struggle coming to an apparent close, the man disengaged momentarily, reached immediately beside him, and showed in both hands a stone that outsized even his colossal grasp. He regained his breath and perhaps his composure and wasted no time raising upward.

  My arm trembled, in pain and fear alike. I could feel nothing other than that raw, primal fear coursing through my body that ached and was in need of any sort of respite. I was not sure what could be done, or should be done, or how it could be accomplished, but I did not wish to die. Even if it meant doing what I had never wished or imagined doing, I did not want to die that day.

  The attacker paused with the rock above his head, his wild eyes illuminated in the bright, rain-stained night. His momentum shifted forward, signaling the rock was coming down, inevitably to meet my skull and end me—but it did not.

  My assailant was stuck upright, unable to move his large body in any direction lest the damage worsen. My hand shook and quaked as I did all things possible to keep the blade steady. It had gone through his stomach so easily, so much more so than I could have anticipated.

  The stone in his hands tumbled backwards as he relinquished his hold on it and I brought my left hand onto the hilt to push the blade further inside. I knew not what organs would be gored as my knowledge of anatomy was limited. I felt squirming and squishing from inside as I twisted the blade, realizing it would be either me or it would be him who would walk away from the encounter.

  His large body did not deceive. He was strong and his will was ironclad. The man wrapped his large hands over mine just as the blade had gone through and the hilt pressed against his ragged shirt. To my surprise, he began to pull the blade out, with only his own strength and despite my own resistance to the act.

  He had been phased by the strike—I had no doubt of that much—but he was ever slow on showing it. The blade continued to come out as I grunted with every remaining fiber of my being to push and keep it inside of his stomach. When his pulling and pushing of the blade out of himself was nearly complete, I put all of my strength into disabling him the only way I saw how.

  The short sword worked quickly and with diligence. The entrance point of the blade from his lower stomach was widened as I angled the blade upward, creating a vast chasm leading all the way to his sternum. The intensity in his eyes began to fade as he watched his innards begin to spill from his body. I knew not how to identify the blood and organs falling onto my chest. All that was apparent to me was that there was no return—not from this.

  The man’s hold on the hilt softened slowly until his hands fell by his side and his body toppled to the side of my own, with the blade still affixed somewhere deep in his torso and out the other side.

  I rolled onto my back and began crawling in the muddy swamp of a garden toward the castle. I called out to the Baron, in whispers and whimpers, for help. None came.

  My right arm felt broken, as did my ribcage. Pushing myself up from the ground was and remains the most vivid instance of pain my body has ever experienced. To this day, I suffer from complications sustained that night, and merely writing this for you now causes me to wince at the sharp memory of that moment in time.

  I yelled and groaned and snorted in agony, screaming at agony unfamiliar to me. I fell over and tried again, and failed again. I continued to crawl all the while, with the rain-soaked soil seeping into my mouth, my eyes, my ears, my hair. The rain washed it all away as soon as it stuck only to stick again.

  I at last made it to my feet only a few strides from the door. Limping and with my right arm being cradled by my left, I was in no condition to fight even should I have the element of surprise. It appeared I would have little choice in the matter, however, when another figure appeared in the doorway that I hoped would be my shelter from the storm.

  The nightmare had become endless. There was no conceivable means of surviving the night. I considered giving up and accepting my fate as I watched the silhouette in the doorway approach my position a few steps down the hill.

  “Is this not enough?” I said, exasperated. “What do you want? What more do you want?”

  No answer.

  The glimmer of light revealed him to be a male. Roughly the size of the others yet more nimble, he moved without issue on the increasingly unreasonable terrain the storm was creating beneath our feet.

  My foothold began to slip and I was convinced I would tumble backward, down over the man whose life I had no choice but to take and into some abyss below. I was ready to quit—to give up, to surrender to whatever fate that awaited me.

  That was not to be the day I died, however, and my great fortunes continued in the most unexpected manner.

  In an immediate reminder of what had happened with the assailant I had myself killed, a pointed end ruptured through the live man now on the approach. He stopped, staggered, and fell forward as a boot was put into his back that sent him plummeting down the hillside and into the expanse of the forests below.

  “Baron!” I yelled well beyond my physical means, ever-thankful to have been spared such a gruesome death.

  The figure now standing in the doorway, however, was not the Baron. Upon hearing my words, my savior only shook his head and turned to retreat into the castle without acknowledging me further.

  I knew not why I was spared other than assuming the man had spared me due to my present pitiful state. His attire and vestige seemed akin to the others in that ever-darkening night, but his demeanor was not all the same.

  Despite the inherent danger, I stumbled up the path and made my return trek back into the castle proper. All had fallen quiet in my absence—that is, save for my scrabbling against the walls as I tried with all my might to keep myself upright and moving forward.

  In the main hall, I was immediately greeted by three and four more bodies than before. A sinking feeling preceded my concerns for the Baron’s safety. In spite of his retaliations and the brutality of it all, it was still the two of us against whatever we may face going forward. I would not leave without giving him the aid he had given me.

  Though I saw no further assailants as I made my way back to the corridor leading to the study, my lack of coordination and control over my step was being masked by the torrential downpour outside.

  In that first hall to the corridor, two bodies immediately caught my eye and nearly my stomach. Lamps at the entrance and in the distance had been lit unlike before. I wretched at the sight of the death affront me—one man young, his torso sliced at such an angle as to nearly be divorced from his body; the other nearly split down the middle. Such sights were becoming familiar in ways I hesitate to mention even now, in this writing.

  Their blood had been splattered upon the walls, giving each surface ma color most appropriate for what had transpired in the castle that night. I pushed forward, cautious in my steps as I waded through the gore ahead of me. I knew not what awaited me at the end of the hall, but I felt compelled—for reasons still not entirely clear to me—to see it through.

  As I turned the corner and squinted, I peered through the remaining darkness toward the open entrance to the study. The doorway offered a narrow view of the expansive interior. When my eyes had adjusted to the distance, I saw yet another victim of the night’s violence slumped against the station that held the cages of rodents. The Baron stepped into view from the right, his axe in hand as he circled the room.

  For the briefest moment, his eyes matched mine. I saw relief in the Baron’s face in that moment. Through that look, I knew his faint smile came as a result of seeing I was still alive. He kept his eyes on me and shook his head as he centered himself in the room.

  Just as he did, a second inhabitant of the room came into view—this man equally alive. His back was to me at the onset, but he soon turned to face me as had the Baron himself.

  The man standing in the doorway allowed his hand to bring the sizable metal door to him. Before the room was sealed, I glimpsed him in better light than before and recognized his attire and his appea
rance and demeanor—it had been the man who had saved me from certain death just moments earlier.

  With the door closed, the seals around the entry made it nigh impossible to infiltrate without a key. The unmistakable sound of the latch on the other side of the door being fixed in place solidified my fears once more: I was alone, again.

  The clamoring of the door and the commotion therein left no mystery as to the Baron’s location. The tumult and footsteps that sounded from the entrance hall was the exact result I expected. I was left with no choice but to retread my path back into the corridor.

  A torch lit the way and shone the way ahead of the intruders making their way toward my position. Without being permitted into the study, my only other familiar option was to duck into the door nearby and hope I went undetected.

  In retrospect, I feel as if one more second in the hall would have been my end. Of the many fortunate turns my path took that night, that seemed the most impeccably timed. Within only two or three quieted breaths and muted whimpers inside the waiting room, three bodies rushed past the door.