“I'm fine, just... get off,” said Aleister, pushing the paramedic's hands away from his face. The woman frowned, before packing her kit away and heading back to the ambulance. The cuts from the barbs of the spider were deep but regular in shape, so would heal quite well after a few weeks. His memories though, they were a different matter. Dark deeds darkly answered, the crushing of skull...
“There's a lot of bodies in there, in amongst all that earth,” said Sean, handing Aleister his fedora along a cup of coffee that steamed in the crisp morning light. Aleister put the hat on gingerly whilst wincing in pain, before taking a few sips of the drink, just trying to keep his eyes open. He had passed out from shock and exhaustion after the explosion, being woken to the sight of Sean's grizzled features. There had been no sweet moment of zero recollection though, every memory had flooded back immediately, too vivid to be hidden away even for a moment.
“I don't know how long they were there,” said Aleister, “I saw a lot of decomposition...”
“We've had soon missing persons for a few weeks now, I think they will account for some of them. As for the rest... there are always people who don't get reported, people that no one notices are gone. I don't know which is worse, to leave behind grieving loved ones or to leave no legacy at all. The disappearances have been going on for years though, not months. There must be more to it than this...” said Sean, scrutinizing the injuries to Aleister's face.
Aleister didn't reply, simply looking back at the smoking ruins, with the black suited firemen and forensic police officers picking their way through the rubble.
“Tell me what happened,” said Sean eventually, folding his coat around himself and sitting down on the grass next to Aleister.
“You wouldn't believe me,” said Aleister, setting the cup down on the grass next to him.
“Maybe, maybe not. That wasn't a request by the way. I can't simply explain all of this away. This is a police matter, pure and simple. There will be more questioning, but before someone else gets their oar in I wanted to hear what you had to say. You to me.”
“Well Webb was clearly the orchestrator here,” said Aleister, bending the truth a little. “The other bloke, the one from the horse farm...”
“Anthony Speight,” said Sean.
“Anthony Speight,” repeated Aleister quietly, looking up at the sky, though it held no answers as to why this had happened. “I don't think he was involved for long. Maybe he was a copycat.” He wanted to say that the man hadn't been involved of his own volition, some small act of remembrance to repay the fact that the man had saved his life, just long enough for Aleister to repay the act by killing him... except they would find the huge stains of horse blood in the carpet, the liquid remains of the spider that no one else had seen, and maybe still find some of it within the man's stomach. There was no point in stretching the lie further than it could go. He had been controlled by something that no one would believe had existed, there was no point even trying to explain it.
“A copycat of a killing that was never reported? Come on...” said Sean, his voice gruff but not unkind.
“Webb was emulating details of the Temple case, so perhaps Speight was too.”
“That's a worry... there's more though. You are... you're hiding something, I can see it in your eyes.”
“Everything you need to know is in that chapel,” replied Aleister, pressing his lips together tightly. A blood spider. If anyone would have described it to him even yesterday he would have doubted their sanity, but he knew what he had seen. If only someone else had.
Holly was out, a small mercy at last. It still took Aleister an age to turn the key in the lock though, as if his body was somehow shocked to return to such normalcy after his ordeal. As the door swung inwards, the scent of his house washed over him, as if he had been away for weeks. He was home.
There would be no return to how things were though. He had crossed a point of no return, and as his first footstep inside the house brushed up against the postcard, his heart sank with a feeling of utmost dread tinged with morbid fascination. The air felt charged... skewed, as if he were walking through an iron lung. He bent down and picked up the card with shaking fingers, turning it over as if it were some sort of creature that might spring to attack at any minute. The picture was of a natural, jagged window in a wall of rock that looked out over choppy blue seas, and it was printed with the words “Welcome to Sark” in a crisp nondescript font. There was a simple but unnatural message on the reverse, written in that same stilted style.
Aleister,
The blood was the first, the heart within the harbinger, poison drawn from the wound so that you might remove it. From tragedy is born beauty. Beware the Rapture. Four more.
L.
There was no stamp or postage date. The delivery had been made by hand, and he recognised the handwriting. It was Lucy...
Night began to fall once again upon the ruins of the chapel, adorned with the gaudy yellow of police tape, guarded by two men who knew nothing of what the once sacred place still contained.
A shape detached itself unseen from the wall and moved gracefully amidst the fallen stone and blackened timber, silent amidst the sound of the breeze rushing through the woods that surrounded the burned building. All eyes were looking outwards, as it moved unnoticed, purposefully walking towards the back of the building. A shifting movement within the earth and embers revealed what had been hidden, what had crawled, almost dead but not quite, not yet...
A hand picked it up, the spider, body swollen and red, shaped with two asymmetrical chambers, legs spindly broken and clenching. its power was gone, its energy sapped, and it was powerless to defend itself as another hand plucked its legs from its body one by one in tiny bursts of vital fluid, casting them to the ground where they still twitched among the ashes.
A glass jar was revealed, glinting in the pale moonlight that shone from above, giving colour to the centre of the spider as it was placed within the vessel. If anyone had been looking they would have sworn it was a human heart resting within the glass. They would also have seen the faintest shiver run across its surface, flowing from one side to the other and back. They would then have seen it slowly but steadily begin to beat. If anyone had been looking...
Aleister Ward continues his descent into darkness in the complete Cuts of Flesh series.
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Author Bio:
Jacob Prytherch has been making up stories since he was a child, even when he should have been paying attention in school. His influences include Ray Bradbury, William Gibson, and Neil Gaiman. His first novel The Binary Man, published in 2012, has since gone on to be the #1 cyberpunk bestseller on amazon.co.uk on two occasions. He currently lives in Birmingham with his wife and two daughters.
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