filthy grey, confounding my search by stealing my vision.
And then there was a new voice amid the muffled twilight city sounds. It was quiet and familiar, but as cold as ice and as hard as steel; it raised the hair on the back of my neck and pierced my heart like a poisoned knife. I knew that voice.
“Flee, Sebring. You could not save us, but perhaps you can save yourself.”
I turned slowly, my throat tight shut in horror, unable to speak or run. It was well that I did not faint, though the ground rocked beneath me and the blackness threatened to fall like a curtain over my eyes. Oh, Christ, oh Jesus! I have prayed often since then that this memory be wiped from my brain, for even the recollection leaves me nearly hysterical, and the telling of it is far worse. She stood there, my Katherine, rotting from within, her green eyes shining like beacons from out her fleshless face. Seven months of decay had stripped her of her beauty, had drawn her gums back from her teeth and swelled her black tongue so that it was a wonder I could recognise her voice. There was no wind, but her black hair was whipped back from her shoulders as though by a tempest gale, and the white funereal shroud streamed about her like a banner, revealing her arms… Hundreds – thousands! – of needle pricks, tiny red dots rimmed with that netherworldly darkness which signified Rothers’ touch perforated her rotting arms.
I could not but stand mesmerised for several minutes, until the living corpse took a step toward me, reaching out her cadaverous hand, and revulsion forced me back. “Please, my love,” she begged, “Go! The demon must be stopped, but not by you!” I recoiled from her dead touch on my face, unable to see then what I remember clearly now: that there was my own Katherine behind the grotesque mortuary façade, that it was real concern had called her from beyond the veil to prevent my bungling of a war that was never meant for me. I saw only a devil, another machination of Evil that drove me still onward with sick repugnance, and I paid no heed to the desperate calls that quickly faded behind me.
If only I could have known then that it was Hell toward which I rushed headlong through the fog, blindly offering up my very soul toward what I thought was God, but was in fact the avatar of chaos. If only. Katherine’s mouldering face hovered before my eyes, joined shortly by Clarence. Both pleaded and begged in death that I should stop and go back, calling on the name of God, on all the saints and angels, on my love for each of them, but it availed them nothing, for I was so utterly convinced that these apparitions must be a ploy of the Devil that I ignored them completely. What folly.
Libera nos a malo. Libera nos a malo!
I did not know then what force propelled me forward like an arrow to leave me quivering, embedded hopelessly in my target. I know now it could have been naught but Satan. How did you fall from grace, Lucifer, Light-Bearer? What could have seemed so important that it was worth the forfeiture of everything that might have made the world good? It was perfect in His sight, so why did you descend to these black depths? What dreadful compulsion swept through your twisted mind?
I think perhaps in some way I can sympathise with those dark angels – once on my path, I became caught in a rut from which there could be no escape. I was a mast without a sail, a cart with no track, flying ever onward toward a vast, shadowy unknown. There could be no going back.
Ever onward I ran and ran, legs pumping like pistons. There was the young man, decapitated, lying prone in a pool of blood and liquid darkness, the woman and her infant, bruised and strangled like Clarence, the old drunk with the twelve parallel gashes across his face, already haemorrhaged beyond recognition. To none of these did I pay the slightest mind – it was Rothers’ trail, which I was doomed to follow to the end, so that I could have my revenge. That was what it really was, revenge, though I had truly convinced myself that it was something grander, like justice. It was retribution for those lives already lost, rather than a desire to preserve what lives might then be threatened.
It must have been Satan, drawing back the great bow-string and letting me fly like that. What else could have given me such wings, so that in my haste I nearly passed by the Rothers monster which had so eluded me before? It rounded on me, snarled and shrieked with a noise I heard only within the confines of my skull. The hideous scream sent me to my knees in terror and pain, and I realised suddenly that I had no means by which to repel the daemon. I was helpless.
Then I saw the boy. He could not have had more than ten years to his entire life, and that was being generous. His deep black hair had never been washed, his frame never nourished with more than scraps and refuse, his face far too gaunt for a child of his age. Still, he struggled in the vice-like arms of the creature, clinging to his wretched life with the tenacity of a bulldog, though his strength was fading rapidly. He turned slightly as he writhed, and his eyes locked with mine. Oh, Christ! Who could this child be but a living saint, the very soul of innocence and purity made flesh! Such eyes, so nearly crazed in fear, yet somehow tranquil and accepting at the same time. Here was a soul whose assurance of Heaven was secure.
“Not yet!” he cried with a voice like that of a grown man. “My work is not finished!” That was what he said, yet he said it with no words I could recognise, in no language I had ever heard. It was the tongue of the angels.
“Not yet, Sebring!” I startled to hear my name fly into the night from that child’s throat, yet I startled all the more to hear his scream of agony that followed. It was the most terrible rending sound, slicing straight to my core.
I cried out then, though I do not know whether I used words or not. It was more a simple expression than an articulation of my sympathetic pain and rage at the daemon’s repugnant hands defiling the Boy. In an instant, I was on my feet, oblivious to the Child’s cries that I stop, go back, leave him be, his work was not yet done. I launched myself at the monster, again becoming Satan’s arrow, shot true. My arms latched around its neck, and I could feel the unnatural searing heat that radiated from its centre. Rothers was no human anymore, if indeed he ever had been. His tremendous talons raked my chest, scoring twelve parallel gashes in my flesh (The old drunk! To think, so many cuts made by a single hand...) and drawing blood. My rage was all-consuming; I did not hear the Boy’s pleas, or the creature’s high, venomous laughter, or even the whistles of the police.
I did hear the tremendous rushing sound of the daemon’s dissolution as it left me alone in the dark street with the dying Boy and nearly twenty coppers. The snow had begun to fall again, and there was a charity band to be heard on the next street, making the scene into a dismal, vile parody of festive spirit. The Child looked at me with dimming eyes and shook his head, destroying me. “You don’t know,” he whispered, a bubble of blood bursting on his lips. “You don’t know what you’ve done.” Then he was dead, the police had me in derby irons, a nightstick descended upon my head, and all was dark until I woke here.
Hansen sent to me a psychiatric doctor, who proclaimed me mad despite my evidence that all witness I had given was true. Of course I thought my evidence irrefutable, but it would seem that human obstinacy and refusal to creed anything incredible must win even over rock-solid proof. Tomorrow I shall be put on trial, and the bar will give me over to the noose. The future is not set in stone, but I cannot foresee any other outcome but my death, for they see in me a murderer.
I have been given the opportunity to write this, though it will in all likelihood be destroyed as soon as I have been led from the cell. There is Rothers at the window now, glaring at me through the bars. ‘You’ve done my work for me,’ he says in that voice which can only be heard in the mind. I know I have, but I will not give him the satisfaction of knowing that I fully understand what I have done. The Child is dead, and I do not know even now what his mission was, but it is finished. Rothers lives still, if there is truly life in that burnished phantasmal body. There is no doubt in my mind who I would rather had won, and I can only imagine what catastrophe will come about from my ill-timed intervention.
There is a step upon the stair. Rothers
has fled, lest they see him and know that I spoke true, and I can feel death like lead in my breast. I do not claim to be capable of prognostication, but I know beyond all uncertainty that I will die now. Is my soul bound for Heaven or Hell, I wonder? Is there truth in either?
Here is Hansen, his keys in his hand, swinging the irons at me as though he means to knock out my brains. I must go.
Beneath this was written, with the same pen, in a different hand:
15 Jan 3 past noon. I know someone will come reading this sometime or another, because I’m not going to let them throw it away, because I know old Campbell was telling the truth and all the truth. I have known him for nigh eleven years, come May, and I know he’s the most stable and upright fellow this side of Yorkshire. And besides that, I saw his creature, this Ruthers or whatnot, and it scared the lights out of me. Wish I could have seen it before he swung, but what’s done is done. Nothing now will clear his name, and if I tried, they would send me away for mad.
And besides that, something funny happened, and I think it should be wrote down here, make of it what you like. I saw Campbell last night,