Fiction Friday
Something Somehow Worse
by James Ashelford
*This story continues from my previous Fiction Friday submission*
Michael Kurtz sat hunched over with his elbows resting on his knees in the uncomfortable formed plastic chair the hospital provided for visitors. As uncomfortable as the spine-mangling vacuum formed bowl he was sitting in was he knew he was in considerably less discomfort than the woman in the bed. The newspaper he’d just been reading from hung limply in his hand, the corner very nearly brushing the floor.
Uncomfortable silence and the smell of antiseptic hung in the air, broken only by the sound of heart monitors further down the corridor.
‘Give me your pen knife,’ Justine said, stern determination showing around the dressing that covered half her face.
‘I don’t have it,’ he told her.
‘Liar.’
He could argue with her, of course, point out that she was in no condition to do anything about the situation they’d been following in the papers the last fortnight. A broken leg, two fractured arms, her hands encased in plaster to immobilise seven broken fingers, a cut the length of her face deep enough to expose bone and uncounted stitches binding wounds across her body.
Which was why she needed his pen knife.
‘You can’t do it on your own,’ he told her, flicking open the blade as he stood. Making his way over to the bed he took hold of the little tip of flesh that poked from her casts, the end of one of her three undamaged fingers. With a swift motion he sliced the bade across her fingertip, the pain going unregistered under the effect of the painkillers.
With great effort, Justine dragged her finger across her sheets.
‘This is desperate,’ Michael reminded her. ‘Blood magic. You won’t even be able to do anything when you get there.’
‘That’s why I sent Percy ahead,’ she told him as her bloody finger began to describe a circle around the complex sigil she’d sketched out on the sheet.
‘No!’ Michael yelled, lunging forward, hoping to stop her hand before she completed the–
* * * * *
The body of Reverend Gene Baxter stood alone and watched the policemen guarding the house through the bulletproof glass of the living room window. Under one arm he carried a copy of the same paper Michael had just finished reading from in the hospital room a hundred miles to the north. With one last look and a satisfied smile at his own mugshot on the front page, he cast aside the paper and lit a cigarette.
‘He doesn’t smoke,’ the voice came from the shadows, an unoccupied chair across the coffee table from where he was standing. Taking a long drag, he turned to face his visitor. ‘And he would never smile at a headline like that.’
‘Maybe I’m not the man you knew,’ the man in the priest’s collar said, causally exhaling the smoke into the room, distorting his features behind the vapour. ‘Maybe the stress of being found out has driven me to this,’ he flicked ash from his cigarette, ‘and maybe finally being discovered has caused me to drop the façade of goodness and piety that has cloaked my crimes for so long.’
‘You don’t even speak like him,’ Justine sighed, closing her eyes and steepling her fingers before her face. Irrational though it was, she’d even hoped it might have been him. Despite the crimes he might have committed she had hoped that the man she’d known was still alive. Even in spite of the consequences, she had hoped that. ‘Know this: you have taken an old friend, ended his life and ruined his name and for that–’
‘Justine,’ the man sighed, hand on heart, his voice wounded and filled with false charm. ‘I’m exactly the man you knew. But I know how hurt you must feel so I will assure you my crimes will not go unpunished. That poor little girl, it weighs heavily upon my conscience and though I stand now in protective custody, first thing in the morning I shall present myself to my protectors and make a full confession, every sickening detail laid out in black and white and when my day in court comes I won’t deny a single thing.’
‘I’m going to make you pay long before then!’ Justine hissed and in that moment the world flickered from what appeared to what was: the woman in the chair became the woman in the bed, hospital gown and casts and bandages and truth seeping out past the illusion and the priest mirrored that truth.
It was a sight more sickening than even the thought of the crimes he’d been accused of.
‘I see,’ Justine said, looking at the man before her with new eyes. ‘You could have just told the truth, that was sickening enough.’
‘Oh yes,’ the thing inside the priest agreed, ‘but one must play to one’s audience. Cannibalism isn’t a crime fit for the front page of the Daily Mail, its a horror from another time, another world that housewives and men in suits don’t inhabit. Oh, a hundred years ago, yes, in the body of a heathen foreigner my true crimes would have done just fine, a basement of grizzly trophies hewn from human bone and sinew on display for my captors to see but not today. Such horrors are small in comparison to the violation of innocence and trust your world has come to expect, nay demand from its monsters.’
‘The unidentified animal bites on the victim,’ Justine sighed, the light dawning and a look of acute revulsion on her face.
‘Yet somehow enough evidence remained to prove the rape,’ the creature wearing Baxter completed the thought. ‘Depriving me to a decent meal but one must make sacrifices for art.’
Justine looked away from the creature then, her eyes drifting to settle in the shadows.
‘He begged me t keep him out of this life, to allow him to fight the human evils of temptation and greed, focus his faith on the needs of his parish and fulfil his oath to the church and God. I honoured that even when I needed a man like him. I should have kept a closer eye on him, should have thought that he might need protecting from things like you.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘I’ve never met a man with such a rock steady faith as Gene Baxter. How did you get in? How did you break him enough to take control?’
‘How rude,’ the creature chided. ‘Do I ask you your age? Does it even matter, the effect is still the same whatever the method.’
‘I thought I’d give you one last chance to confess before you died.’
‘I follow the broader path of the Church of England,’ the creature reminded her with a reptilian smile. ‘I confess only to God.’
‘I wish I had time to make you pay for what you’ve done but I have to be quick,’ she told him, a real dark regret in her voice. The creature laughed at her.
‘And what shall you do to me, impotent wraith? You sit there, an insubstantial reflection of a woman who can’t so much as walk five paces without collapsing. What have I to fear?’
‘That old sculpture in the garden next door. The crude clay model of a man left behind to be covered in weeds when the neighbours left. The statue I put there.’
A hand, cold, rough and large, wrapped itself around the creature’s neck from behind. A moment’s pressure, a sickening crack and the creature who wore the form of the Reverend Gene Baxter knew no more.
* * * * *
Justine looked down at the body of a man she had once called her friend, the first truly good man from a family whose vice and corruption had tainted her life and those of countless others. A man whose death she had failed to prevent, who had been targeted entirely because of the friendship they’d dared to share.
The man who had killed the creature stood motionless behind the body, naked save for a length of rope he carried wrapped over one shoulder. In the darkness of the room it was almost possible to miss the roughness and crudity of the man’s body, the artificial quality of his anatomy.
‘What are your instructions?’ the man asked, quite impassively.
‘String him up securely,’ she told him, ‘make it look like the drop broke his neck.’ She knelt on the floor, running her finger through the carpet, mirroring the shape of the sigil that had brought her there. ‘Go back to the garden next door after that and wait a few days before you return to London.’
With that she was gone and Percy set to work, following her instructions to the letter as he had no choice but to do.
* * * * *
Two days later the police released the details of what had happened (in their view) and the papers ran the story that the Reverend Gene Baxter held in protective custody pending trial for the rape and murder of a seven year old girl had hanged himself. No suicide note had been left and the police were not actively pursuing any other suspects in the case.
* * * * *
‘It wasn’t Gene,’ Justine tried to explain as Michael looked at her with accusing eyes from the foot of her hospital bed. ‘What died in that house was a thing, a monster that took our friend and destroyed him.’
‘I know,’ he told her, voice firm and eyes focussed on her with laser intensity. ‘I know and I don’t care about that. It was a thing from another plane and you sent it back there. It killed our friend, just like you say so don’t be thinking I have any sympathy for it.’
‘Then why are you angry with me.’
‘You used Percy like the weapon we always told him he wouldn’t be.’
‘I had no choice.’
‘You had no choice,’ the young man echoed, clearly unimpressed by her defence. He stood to leave, picking up his crutch from its resting place by the door.
‘You’re angry, that’s fine,’ Justine said without venom but with definite force, ‘and if you need some time away to be angry with me then take it but for God’s sake, man, go to the coast.’
‘What?’ he asked, taken aback.
‘Go up the coast, find Lysette and Vincent and tell them we’re being targeted. Think about it, Michael, first me and then Gene. The most experienced and the most isolated in rapid succession. We’re all in danger and I can’t get out of this bed to warn them. Go.’
He left. Before she drifted back into sleep and the embrace of the sedatives, Justine said a silent prayer for the soul of Gene Baxter just as she knew he would be doing for her.
End. Something Somehow Worse
*WRITER’S BOX*
This story was prepared for Write Anything’s Fiction Friday challenge of 20th March from the prompt (which, I admit, I did not fully use): ‘A priest is attacked for being a paedophile. He is innocent of the crime but guilty of something far worse.’ The story sort of moved in its own direction after I started it but here it is. All feedback gratefully accepted as I seem to be following these characters more than I thought I would.
