Chapter VI
Vincent pried the warped image of himself in the glass, observing the doctor’s passing advice. Vascular feelers slithered without rest through so many angles. Gaunt was his shape, withered by a penitent’s diet. He could hardly stomach food when his gut fed a furnace that charred all substance; seasoned with rancor. The flaked aurum in his hair resembled a sickly grain of tarnished yellow; the crop ruffled with mange; scythed by a hand of grey that reaved his wheat to ashen strands. The stranger ogling him back was a foreigner. From the mirror in his study an alien mien ambled into what was once the country of his own body. What unholy animation compelled this fetid creature to still roam? What gleamed into his soul from those languid orbs ringed with weary sickles was a dead star, imploding from within rather than bursting in plumes of rays. How could this thing be so unaware that it trespassed the natural hour, rotting away in a pasquinade that carried no spirit of its own?
Rapping at the aperture of his study wracked Vincent’s embattled poise. Choking down the quakes of his nerves in another goblet of gin, he crept to the window. Lingering fires in his emerald eyes lanced the gloom, hunting from where hung his sweat-addled brows, drenched in belligerence. A rival glint in air drew him to yet another angle of his eye, shined back from the opulent body of his bladed heirloom. His fingers ached to draw the sheath and greet the vandal with fury bared. What jesting hellion had come to mock him by tossing stones and meet his death for penance?
Another hailstone from the rainless gulf smacked his window. The moribund umbrage outside the stained glass proved too formidable to pierce. Rapt by starving need to curse this mischief, Gale split the latch open. Stygian bays roused revelry for their welcome, leaching the welkin as they cascaded down her wings. A midnight torrent swept in to burst the aperture wide, spitting Vincent several paces back. As quickly as he’d ushered in the foul breath he banished it, fumbling to seal the howling rivers.
A beam of moonlight refused to flee from where the wind had planted its spotlight. The curtains were drawn, denying the moon & her shadows entry, yet that stream of effulgence remained. The uncanny eye rested perfectly in the corner, granting ephemeral visage to an irksome silhouette that lingered between the oil lamps and that roaming pall. Something more material than ether swam in the rustled air of his tower study.
Upon his desk, illumed by that enigmatic blush, a mask now rested with flat but simpering gall. Filigree metal bore eerie recall through Vincent’s pseudo-amnesiac* sleeplessness, for the face of lattice and the horns & bells crowning it evoked his enemy of the ballroom spat. Fingers dug into his palms, preparing a fist to hammer this hexing visage. Before his weary force could muster adrenaline from anger to splinter the joker’s face Gale glimpsed a ribbon of parchment poking through the eyeless sockets.
Vincent snatched up the thread, spotting a flutter of faint scrawl on the unassuming yet terribly odd paper. Nothing obvious was on its thin body but when he held it under lamplight a mercurial note shimmered clear letters. ‘this befits your person more, lord’.
Howling fever answered the mocking scrap. Gale swung about; knocked glass; spilled shards across the floor, in pursuit of the devious prankster in every approach. This trickster’s message vanished amid the turbulence Vincent roused, peeling through the aperture, and immolating in the waxing dew of the night’s eyes. He shrieked after his servants, reciting murmurs and scathing interrogation of their lot. Yet, after his rabid frenzy expunged the brunt of its rebirth, no one appeared. He’d no help to count on even under the banners of his own House. Even so, he knew there was an enemy in the miasma intruding into his chamber which refused to avaunt.
As Gale patrolled his enclosure his periphery snagged on a darkling flare and, tilting his head to the glass from whence it stalked, he faced a presence in the mirror*. An impish other beamed through the space reserved for his reflection, with a fouler mien than his own could shine. The pall visage of Harrow towered above the echo Vincent’s own, stretching its body over and across his image. He swiveled back, ready to bash a bottle on this interloper’s skull, but found no such vagrant. Only the dross of his jagged hysteria and the whine of the wind’s scraping the pane answered his challenge.
Turning back toward the newcomer in the mirror, Vincent endured tremors resembling an alcoholic bereft of his daily dosage of poison for his liver. Madly he tapped the on the silver casing and planted his knuckles to the surface as though he could abrade the phantom image trapped within. “How in all hells of our conceit - and those we are yet to know - are you here, demon?”
For several protracted beats only the creaking of his fingers against the glass trappings and the restless night winds spoke reply. Then the sallow specter arose before him, from no angle Vincent could grasp him from, and gleamed an answer through gibbous eyes. Arden’s distorted shape satisfied his bothered plea with a hex that traveled into the marrow of his mind. Yet though the shade spoke, no corner of that bastard’s grin changed position or flexed a muscle. “You welcomed spite into your house with your hand. You’ll find no respite behind these walls.”
“No. I speak with a shadow.” Vincent tried clinging to sanity by cupping his forehead and affirming this visitant as no more than a booze addled delusion. “A fool’s ghost.”
“I remain.” Spoke the shadow. “A ghost of your wrongdoing that continues, unburied, no matter your trifling attempts.”
That blasphemous countenance persevered, ever smiling. The fiend’s visage cast itself upon each corner that Vincent’s eye chased through his crepuscular haze. How could he sleep when that face hovered over his bed, taunting his thoughts, and promising to return to reign over his dreams? The petulant crowing of newspaper fiends and the mongering of courtiers during daylight was enough to deprive him of rest through those hours. Now, the ghost of the infernal longing came out of the air, traveling into this mirror, to fetter him to gnawing fury.
“What? Can you not rest until you are granted the solace of hearing from ‘your’ woman again?” The apparition’s voice wove its sound through Vincent’s thought, hewing and restitching cavernous cords through his jittering cranium.
“Devil! Rake! May the gulch eat your eyes!” Gale snarled with impotent rancor. “I will outlast your hate. I shall become the honored son again. I can-”
“Keep acting the rabid beast, frothing at the maw.” Horrendous laughter burrowed into his brain, layering the phantom chatterer’s accusations. “I will be with you till the last. The deathless portend of your guilt. Unless you confess your crimes to those masses you would lord over.”
“Wherefore? What crimes?” Vincent spat into the mirror. The dewy foam of his spirited venom congealed over his face in the glass. “I have acted in my power, observed the law and all kind customs. All that I am held merit till your ghost swept the stage from me. I acted in my right!”
“Your right to act the fool, that is. Oh, how you have embodied that part. Made a show of your lack of humility by exposing that infantile hubris before the crowd you so hopelessly wish to court.” The semblance of flesh across the ghost’s countenance harrowed, flaying its mask until bone & sinew ambled in the glass. It soon retained only a fragment of humanity in its bony smirk, while it persisted in speaking through the worm in Vincent’s head. “Fool wyrm, you observed the law only when you yourself were observed. In all other aspects, you played the rogue.”
“Moaning over being beaten fairly? Even now, when you should be resting in the grave by my hand of mercy – that brought you to a peace your warlock’s soul could never earn.”
“Must I read you the fresh red history of your own House?”
“Nay. I must read for you the last rites of a reluctant shade who refuses to meet his judgement past the threshold!” Cried Vincent. “Halting for fear of the abyss your sins earn…”
“Say it. Speak what we both know and let these other haunters be freed unto the death you craved.”
“I will speak no lie though I talk with a liar. The wrong you wish to place upon me is only the marring of your own envy, o piteous mane.”
“O impious poisoner! We shall speak it for you: the fortune you were awarded came at the cost of your sire’s life. We know you contaminated his meals, dropped ounces of deathly chemicals – the nature of which you could hardly understand outside their murderous element – into your own father’s drink. As is tradition, we know. Your progenitor, the prestigious charlatan Daryon Gale, came to his part in the Gentwind fortune by marriage into the maternal line. And what fate befell her, that woman who was cursed by callous appetite to be your mother? She was tossed from her horse when jaunting with her husband, your vaunting father, by no cruel circumstance or blind misfortune but by thy villainous herald’s push.’
The unhallowed prophet stormed about Vincent’s consciousness, giddy in the reaving of horrid truth. Its soundless call then exchanged its vaporous parade to dress in the timber of the lordling’s own pitch. Reprimanding Vincent with an echo of his own tongue that lashed his dome. “Yes, that bloodthirst ‘earned’ you the ambition to prance about as though it were your birthright. Each step you steal, every breath you pillage from the world, continues the legacy of your filching line.”
Vincent recoiled for a flicker of a pulse before crashing a fist against the silvery wall in front of him. “Envious mare! Accusing me!? For the envy of what you could not accomplish in all your sorcerous existence?! My blood is pure. My faith is unscathed. My order, my kingdom, is yet to be!”
Something in the afflicted gentleman’s rejection belied a smattering confession. The chaunting specter preyed upon Vincent’s flaring subconscious, lapping that draught with delirious patois through bursting neurons. “Is treason now the height which your branch seeks to grasp for? Ha, ha.” The shadows chortled with their envoy. “Alas, tis all been for naught and shall become nothing more than gibbering disgrace. You acted the wastrel in the tide of crimson opportunity and now you drown. Flotsam from the withering tree, this despoiled star in you aches to be immured under the waves.”
“Arden? Aldred? Who – what – is this wraith creeping upon me? Speaking chimeras from thinning air. I shan’t stomach it!” Vincent bent all his fury into the lunge of his arm and the bottle it clung to in liquid comfort through the face in the mirror. “ah – no matter.”
Glass splintered into hundredfold pieces, poking back through shattered teeth at the fist that carried its echoing visage into hasty erosion. The effigy of the assailant sprang to swallow itself alongside the angular fangs of so many shards. Vincent: awash in raw red alongside an engulfing gasp of spirits unleashed from the sacrificed bottle. Tearing lace from under his languishing sleeve, he wound the fabric about the fresh wounds his feckless anger incurred.
Arden’s apparition decanted itself from the cracked debris, manifesting behind the accoster of its image. Sallow fingers, like vulture’s hooks clamped onto Vincent’s shoulders; the shade impressed such chthonic gristle unto the fickle mass its claws sank into. “Come forth from these wasting hallways and combat me upon ground that serves no hearth for either of us. Test your teeth on this ghost.”
Vincent stewed beneath the grip of phantom talons, pleading against mercy & lucidity by thrashing bloodied hands. He sought to strangle and pierce this fiend of entangling fortune with splinters of the mirror imbedded in palm and interdigit. Dread vapors threaded his clutches, Arden’s matter decomposed in transient gas, leaving Gale to stumble toward the wreckage of his study floor in pursuit of a body to strike. “Face me in the flesh, that I may hammer it. Show me to your corpse and I will see it to finality. Grant mass to your taunts, these hexes, and meet your destroyer. I shan’t let my dreams, my being, be dammed by your wake, stubborn ghost. I shall bury your form in scoria and grant the ash of your envious soul to the nethermost winds!”
“I do envy you, in one manner. I remember when I thought my dreams were important. By the muses of night and the hammer of day did I dream; and met the soil beneath my soul in seeking their lures, those ephemeral irons.” Arden reappeared by the entry to the study, reformed in likeness of a man again. Casually he stepped through the door and meandered down the halls. His call prevailed in Vincent’s brine. As did the scraping of boots against tile, fingers to stone, echo proudly in mockery of the manor’s owner, its masonry, and each bas relief the fiend transpired to upset. “That naivety of ego, to claim those dreams are real and becoming of you, must be such a fine comfort. Surely, one of the last remaining to you. The rest you made slag of.”
As the resentful visitant hoped, Vincent rallied all bitterness in his sinew and abdicated from all reason to seek the sword. He hunted after a fanged heirloom hanging on the wall beside his desk, unhooked the sheath, and drew the naked blade. A scene from his honored ancestry was engraved on the flat of the sabre. Depicted there, flowing with the backsword’s curve: the silhouetted impression of his great grandfather Gale’s victory. A section of history, like a bas-relief in silverite steel, reminding the descendant of his forebear’s battle which won him the glory that allowed his descendants entry into the wider court, and soon after a branch entwined to the Gentwind line. The man there on the flat grinned over his triumph, gazing toward the point and the faint stares that streamed along the edge. Even smiling and embodied by a smith’s art (for lack of living form) a saturnine umbra ringed the stare of the weapon’s eldest master.
With the familial sabre in his fevered grip, Vincent chased after the wanton interloper. Leprosy of the mind shed the bark of sense & virtue within him. The surge of ire compelled his soles down the winding staircase and through the manor’s sprawling corridors the floor beneath.
No hint of the haunter winked at the pursuer, save for the stench of spectral decay and the sweat boiled by Vincent’s fuming temper. How hollow his hearth, how bare its stomach, with no soul there to call upon for aid. No guardian among his kin dwelt here nor their spirits to watch over him. He was alone with his blistering wrath, except for his grandfather Gale’s visage on the sabre; grinning like a leviathan and waving him onward in this fury-bound sea.
At the cross of the next corridor a servant wavered. The emaciated shape slaved to carry on the pretense of fastidious cleaning & inspecting, an attempt to avoid the unhinged and bounding eye of his master. Young lord Gale cared little for this want for solitude, nor whether his poise was ruse or real toil. A maniacal smirk glinted from the sabre as the wailing man leapt from the corner of lunacy. In the frayed span of a few seconds Vincent was upon the helot, clamping to the scruff of his neck. The blinding force plunged into the servant, who latched onto a nearby vase to steady himself only for it and the budding flowers to collapse on the tile.
“Where is he? Where did the ghoul go?! Aldred was here! Have you let him flee without protest?!” Vincent screamed. He kicked shattered pieces of the spilt vase while reeling the helot about, budging him against the ornamented wall.
After reeling in his breath, the flustered servant spoke; a response which flew faster than the portion of his mind reserved for politeness. “Sir, you are unwell? There is nobody here save us.”
“Did you not hear him batter my window? Flapping jowls with horrible speech and breaking glass with black ire? Tis Arden!” The rasping scion forced his inquiry. “He comes for slaughter!”
By the darting flares in the servants eye and the cloven tridents of confusion through his iris, Vincent knew that the man had only heard the frazzled yowls of his master. “My fair lord, the man is deceased. That soul is flown from the earth. His cousin would find it no less difficult to be here. The gate is guarded, the garden rifled, per your orders.”
“Feckless mongrels, all of ye!” Gale released his inclement hold from the helot’s throat. The servant was content enough to keep his eyes downcast while shuffling to clean up the soil & debris, so long as it kept him from the scrutiny of the mad tyrant of the manor. Vincent’s shrieking thundered through the hallways, dinning the walls to shrink back for fear of his lunacy’s contagion. “Hels! I was to be the military governor of Tulsine! To rule with arms and the aegis of our queen. Now I waste under the boughs of evil specters… confined from all corners by the stupid and the wretched!”
Derision from the revenant whose tongue was in his head beckoned Vincent to abandon even more. “Put that fetish of war to use if you have the thew. I tire of this gaudy cell.”
Another pair among frightful caste of gaunt helots conspired behind a cabinet, veiling themselves from their lord who acted in exile of lucidity. “He drags hell with his heels!” Whispered the one. “We are in need of a sedative from the doctor’s catalogue.”
“Our patron,” began the second with cautious scorn, “is as tireless as restless in this hex. I am not overeager to risk his teeth and what froths from behind by holding him back long enough to administer any such option. Safer now to let his mad spell burn itself-”
“He will engulf all of us in that flame before it dims! Damn the world, I might ask opium for myself to endure this mad issue.”
Vincent stole down another flight and pierced the hall. Wicked luminance peeked through the main door. The refulgence permeated from an astral body but was not of the moon. By that sickening sheen the way out was bathed in a sulky halo that cast the threshold as a gate to an otherworldly hearth; a realm that subverted the supernal to belch out a glow which only empowered the gloom to birth ripe apparitions. “Away, hellion! Lest this blade rend those lurking eyes.”
“Step forth from this gilt travesty. Meet me with that mettle and let it be your Augean toil. Slay this dragon in me which stands in the way of your resplendence. Otherwise, plunge that heirloom into your belly. Submit yourself to the biting truth that you cannot reach the glory you froth to bite. Admit that the one fiend halting your dreamt up fate claims its lair inside you.”
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Gale donned a brooding coat over his pleated nightshirt and fingered the sheath now tied to his snaking belt. “We shall hear you speak your true name in defeat, demon. You are that same shade, the jealous Lemure upset from the outcome of our contest. Here, a chance to cross claws and give your ruin to the finality you cravenly refuse.”
“I await you in the alleys outside, if only you dare true boldness for once and face the power of real risk.” Hissed the breath of the gulf beyond the door. In the angst-worn silk of nocturne, threaded with gnawing worms and bilious fragrance to belie the fusion of lovers’ sweat and erosion of skin, the breadth of the hour brought Vincent to its bosom. Arden’s pitch tempered keen licks through the depths of the excited noble’s lobes. “Come, patricide. You forces are indisposed. Those indignant brutes found for your employ cannot harm me. They are subjects of my House evermore. Only your arm remains to you.”
The wraith fled from its form, burrowing a haven in the murk between lamps, sconces, and vagabond beams that split from their mother, the moon, to seek ground they could claim as their own. But Vincent sensed his enemy among the throned mist, prowling as a gangrenous shimmer in the din of Gorgotha’s broad streets. When the outline of Aldred’s visage did summon an inkling in the heaving fog he just as soon swept back through alleys, guiding Gale with singed eyes past the high terrace toward the commercial district. Sweeping the way to the houses of squalor between each curse they spat under glum drapery. “Here, killer, my body is further along.”
“How can this hound of air accuse me? How this blaggard claim I poisoned my father?”
Caterwauling families of felines arched their backs atop pews, gates, and roof tiles, scratching their threnodies and adding toe choir of peasants and constables parading their rounds. Tenebrous fog swept back barricades, swallowing blockades of sullen sergeants and their grumbling underlings in obscuring maws. Through each miasmal palisade Vincent found his feet replanted on the other side, deeper into the ailing sectors. With each steep foot down the terrace, the harrowing chorus of those souls who found glee in the dark ascended in clamor. So too did the bodiless accuser’s voice enfold with greater vibrance, becoming richer in its taunts.
“Good sir, my little murderer, you procured those spurious reagents from one of my cohorts. From a fellow conspirator, if you will, in the scheme of advancing medicine.”
“Then you, fleshless fiend, deserve shame for your part! My heart is as spotless as the gloss of my blood. Only this barghest in you mars my mind. Snarling, ceaselessly! Where are your fangs! To tear at me with malformed threats that are as groundless as the spirit which refuses to come down from the court of chimeras and meet me as a man.”
His spectral assailant chuckled with the groan of nearby billows, spilling over to engulf the streets. “My part in what? Will you not confess and cleanse this haar over your heart?” Each step showed Vincent along the decay of Gorgotha’s brilliance, luring him into the gutty-works where the entrails of humanity coiled and sprang about themselves. “Of course, you would not have recognized my proxy in Raykin. What is any servant to you, besides more dressing for your luxury, your gloating convenience? As for us scientists,” wind & smog merged to boom that hateful voice through their ashen lungs, “without fast results for our valorous endeavors, we alchemists must still turn a coin to sustain our stomachs.”
“Your stomach should have spilt into the soil by now. Your legacy should be confined to that casket.” Gale hexed the air with his own, spouting acid from his esophagus. Changeling patterns of Gorgotha’s span reformed the labyrinthine paths, spitting Vincent into organs of the city he’d never deigned to affiliate with. Chamber pots seeped onto the street from quarters above, splashing boiling revulsion in his core for the creatures that carelessly sent filth & urine angling by his boots. The only constant remaining was the wild variable of the specter’s visage and tongue, forked with the billows’ cadence. “I know not how you subsist, but I know you. Arden. End this game and become mine, by the blade you asked to cross.”
An ambling moonbeam chased Vincent, staking him with the wan eye and the gravity of its stare. Arden’s venomous smirk wove itself from seams in the gaseous aura sent from an alien sphere in the welkin above. “Did you redouble your effort to chain me in a coffin for my professional understanding of your character, your virulent past?”
“I put a feral hound out of his misery. My hand acted in lawful mercy. Yet you so love anguish and ambition beyond your torn means that you shuffle back as a bargeist to nip the ankles of your betters.”
“No.” A skeletal tree bore aspects of Arden on the tendrils it twined from the shadows leaching the light which fed its seeds. “You were so confounded by the bountiful vision – striking through your odium – of lust for our Luci that you forwent all other reasons for pulling that hammer.” The ambling bower of gibbous eyes shuffled forward. “O! Bereft of that blood thou would hold even less and know what thou deserve as a dredge. Padded by fortune of birth, thou art sworn to be the last of thy line; to leave it in ignominy. Thy distant kin of the Gentwind branch have seen their boughs tipped by a rogue gale, delivering them unto pestilence. Thou wouldst be a worm now, if not for the writhing of thy mother.”
“O! If only thou wert born of blooded blue. Had thou been reared in the school deserving of the vocation and rank thou falsely aspire to - I would have soldered the beast in thee. Pressed sense & humility into this errant harrower to have him know proper etiquette. Thou would still be a man, not this mutinous specter.” Vincent furled his fury around the grip of his sabre, guarding the cringe which struck his face with an offensive lunge. His foe ripened into sinew from the convergence of dusk & glow. The trunk of Arden’s neck begged the blade to fell its bark. With the precision in his point, upon which his hatred perched, Gale swung his ancestral arm and cut the malcontent’s head from what should be bone, apple, fiber, & cord.
Wounded marrow elicited the sound of glass being scraped & splattered, parallel to the hum of silver rending meat. Arden’s head leapt up from the blow, stretching upon stilts of stubborn strings that refused to snap with the rest. Dangling feelers, reft by Gale’s hand, withered as they sprang to bind the animated muscle of the fiend’s mind to its greater berth. Bottled urine and sulfurous mist erupted from the maimed tubes. Rancid spurts surged out of the bisulcate injury onto Vincent’s gaping buds. Wellsprings of gore cascaded as the malicious sprite in the aether whistled through the gurgling spray to conduct the breeze to its tenor. A hydra’s serpentine laughter hissed through the decapitated tunnel, freed of stolen form.
Wings from the inlets above, where starlight decayed in the bellows of modernity’s grandeur, stole away with Arden’s mop. Mist seethed, like mercury, from the maimed font. Only the eye of Gale’s adversary lingered, bursting from the beheaded funnel; darting to observe with delight. Yet though Vincent had struck body with blade, the visitant’s mask dissipated from the mold he’d excised with militant haste. A severed porter slammed down against the nearest door, tripped back on the slight burrowing indent into the residence. His collection of captured urine and a few other signifiers of his filth-farming vocation spilled into the mixture of his mortal rivers.
The Enemy’s eyeball popped from the watery viscera of the mistaken porter, who’d been so unwise to be snagged by the fiend’s shade in the projections of Gale’s wrath. That foe bled out as oozing serpents from the man whose matter he’d borrowed as a screen, evaporating with the worker’s array of oiled spirits (of a sort). Jagged wounds from the lantern the victim held were loosed on Vincent’s feet with the cinders of their collapse. Stamping out the warlike fumes, Vincent patted the wroth stone and the smoldering grime with the headless coat of the poor animal. Joints creaking, swaying with the brunt of realization, the stunned killer took off on instinct; hurling his body away from the scene down whichever way his legs were pointed to.
Sprinting through the accursed hour, past domiciles and teeny chapels on corners devoted to a desiccated power, he fled. Errant gales, bent by lawless contortions, decanted gauze & webbed fog to bind Vincent’s path. He was thrust into a breathless monotony of direction, each street expanding only to be banded back into an identical shape. All roads he could fly upon were ironed into one, while breaking into thousandfold more by each spilling step.
By mercy or malice, the Styx of mist & matter he was thrown along poured Gale out of its bulbous maze into the green of a square where a night market bustled. The hub of black hour commerce blistered the scion’s eye, shirking this courtyard where all too many gathered for the fix of profit, pleasure, or less than legal necessity. Rogue militias enforced the order of these night markets, where all was permitted if the toll could be matched. But the killer could permit none to catch a glance of him and sulked to the rim of the bazars, sinking lower in posture than the tails of his coat. He felt, in simultaneous tumult, as trivially small as he was ubiquitously seen; hunted; hated.
Each face in the all too hustling square belonged to a ghoul. Vincent knew them by their pallor, their shallow smiles as they ogled him as much as their treasured novelties. Assassins lurked among them, only waiting to count the bounty on his scalp and for him to stumble onto their knives. Convulsions rattled under his coat, looking like a fiend of booze’s induction. His bowels craved release, or else to obey the garrot in his intestines and loose the knot by hurling out his innards. He could stomach no eyes; his soul could not digest being sieved by another’s fancy.
A discipline he’d long forgone reemerged in Vincent during this rupturing hour. Constraining his noxious tremors and the ache for swift escape with what remained of his unfurling will, he checked his pace. Jittering paranoias, that gnawed every person around until their presence was threaded with bone and sallow remnants of hunger death, could not be acted on lest they be affirmed as true. His eyeline anchored to the steps ahead, feigning absence of interest & recognition though the garland of the benighted festival and the clutter of bazars squirmed with auguries of destitution. Only when he circled back to the peripheral did Vincent tap the draught of urgency to jolt away to the first corner where no jovial lanterns or sentinel torches could burn his retinas.
In the furor of his flight Vincent sought the solace of recognizing a sign, a street-post, a house, anything that showed he was nearing the estate where this insipid trek had begun. He hadn’t even noticed the absence of his rowdy ghost that first spurred his mission. That purpose had been beheaded with the porter; left where the sod’s jaw bit the ground. But no prayer, no blind compulsion, nor angel in the night sky peering through the veil of sin and progress could grant his heart a compass by which to steer his wheeling soles. The weepy lunatic gnashed curses against gods, governance, and general humanity with each turn of the warren that sent him back to a nameless street, bearing fronts like any other of its kind.
Inevitably, the maze conquered the wayward noble, grinding his mind to dusty putty that spewed tears through each pore – but not his eyes, where frigid cataracts formed to deny all but miasma. Defeated, damned – oh, he knew it. The peak tide of evenfall bloomed, benighted in the ruinous splendor that drowned Vincent under the fallen sea from above the earth. Awash, the lone man gasped for breaths which his caged lungs would not permit. He sank low, against any part of earth and mankind’s construct of it able to bear his sallow weight. Propped up for a petty rest by whatever wall happened to catch him, the vanquished spirit waited for…whatever the Fates and the Fiend among their harvestmen thralls would spin for him.
Gale brooded blankly, allowing that film of apathy to stretch over one eye while apparitions of grief pooled in his other. An unfortunate vagrant skittered up and down the same stretch of soiled cobblestone. At first this strange conversationalist was of no consequence to the slumping gentleman. Engaged in a dialogue with himself that heaved weight of muttering thoughtfulness and enflamed passions, the roaming philosopher continued to lap around Vincent’s person. Each round the man inched closer as he passed him.
“I don’t know you, sir. I – I – did not mean to offend. It’s just that the world weaves itself through us. It wove me a rug of filth-ridden tailoring, heh heh. The wool, cut from some dead species. Yes! – gone from the earth before she spat it out from her womb!” The vermin’s boastful neurosis ascended with his volume. “Yes, sir! Tis the way of the world, sir!”
Too many rambling loops snagged Vincent’s attention. As gently as he could (in his not all too dissimilar condition) he watched the man, paying greater heed to his gait and scourging whimpers. With a yelp the scurrying pest halted his trail. The man froze over, crippled by a gale only he served witness to. Though those juggling eyes gawked at the presence which spoke to them, Vincent felt – he knew – that those overlarge eggs nocked an angle back to him.
The figure turned, jerking itself a few meters back without stretching its head to match the steps. Lumbering up to Vincent, the mumbling gaunt greeted him with a fair view of its countenance. Cephalopod orbs encroached over the rest of his skull. Flakes of petrified mass trickled from his fingers, now shaking up to its receding humanity then reaching to the eyes that witnessed him. Cephaloid buboes conquered much of the derelict’s scalp, displaying pews of surplus heads over his scourged one; happy to replace the last shreds of follicles.
“You – you! Did not see you! Oh, I apologize.” The leper thrashed about as though puppeteered by drunken goblins; animated by the inebriated geists of plague. Mildew mold between his grin and a lake of lichen harbored in his brain, the disaffected animal belched its desire. Depreciated bones, absent of tissue and glove, shook as fingers loomed over the huddled stranger. “He says it, he saw! We need that coat, mister red. Or is it blue? We need his coat, to curtain the shade. It’s not yours, it’s ours! Give us here. Let us hide. We need to cover it, what you have done!”
Three chimes from the high cathedral tower. Thrice the thread of the hour rang. In the knell all sirens were conjoined to a murderer’s key, begging death in a shrill soprano that soared over the bass of the pale drum. What was time but a trick? What else was here for him, the witness, but this vagabond fiend without a hearth but the hell he trapped in his chest and nurtured through those bulbous scars. The alarum lacerated its grand proportions, shredding its signal by the dead thew that forced its hollow hand and bid it shout. Within that stern mouth, lips smacked against the clapper, but the evocation butchered all meaning of sound by the din of emptiness which consumed it.
As the third peal sang its lament, it announced a hex for Vincent’s arm. The strike congealed and burst in unison with the echo’s demise. Gale ran the wretch through. Blade bit past shreds of cloth, clumps of mesh, and the tender nausea of a split gut to impale the ridden creature.
“As he said.” Sibilated the wound of the leper, oozing gargled speech as blood rushed from intestines to mouth. “Peace has come. A piece for a pound.”
The beast of disease tumbled down, another soul to Vincent’s claim. Again, the symphony of bells began. The belfry gaped with the voice of false hours, yapping on repeat, past any scheduling man would account for. He felt many ages older by the torturous span between each evil ring. Sanity crumbled as the boisterous siren bleated for the end of time, by her incessant recurrence of clamor. Gale reached for the sabre rooted in the fallen, pustuled, trunk but although the fatal hole remained, the blade fulminated against retrieval and disappeared.
...
The shadow, victorious, swept back to the lair of the man it had inlaid in madness. Though the shape’s ire had bled sanity dry from the ersatz gentleman’s skull, it had not fed on the blighted veins. Triumph’s taste was evermore nourishing than the fatal bite. Spring heeled, spry with demoniac gaiety, he leapt over chapel spires, barbed gates, and broken bulwarks, to fulfill the last task of his evening goal. Sabre tucked betwixt his smirk, the gleeful demon took wing here and there for intermittent meters on bouts of abyssal gales.
Descending from the atmosphere, the hunter sought the joyful fruit of its mission. A working woman of the late hours stepped into the street to ignite her come-down torch of tobacco. In the flare of stamped embers, the woman was carried up to a roof. The vengeful Fury plunged fang into throat, suckled the soul from marrow, then went about the work of ripping. Grim labors began on her body. The fiend struck artwork from the subversion of beauty; by wielding the sabre as a chisel, knife, and scalpel; cutting cords and restitching tendons in places they did not naturally belong. Predation perfected! A glorious culling and the most beauteous framing he could demand from the waning night. Now: a gripping of one corpse and the seizing of another!
Sweetling libations, drawn from a basin heated by carnal friction and mortal need, sloshed about in the dusk fiend’s gullet. With the torso bundled in a repossessed trunk, the saurian revenant strode as a man. He approached another proprietor of fleeting passion in the night, disguising his meaning as a business position. The lamprey eased the woman’s coat from her delectable neck, wriggling feigned warmth through to her as the tongue lashed her ear with promises of liberation. Daggers jutted from his rows, displaying pre-Cambrian incisors that punctured through immurement of reptilian nature to siphon her hope. He made good on the offer to free the lass from her prison, doing so by unleashing her pulse into his digestion. The rest of her vitae, he chivalrously lent to the ground by way of the sabre’s carving rivers.
The parting throes of consciousness, the thrashings of vertebrae and the bubbles in the veins, danced on his fangs. A few late additions to his conquests and the art was affected, nascent until canvased as spectacle for a wide-eyed audience. A deep-rooted mark from sword sheathed in flesh up to the hilt; a couple of organs extracted, a liver here, a heart there; some serrated markings of the blade enacting wroth gales with surgical mockery unto the twin corpses. Among the stolen pieces of the women, a portion would be used to barter with the hypogeal packs within the castes of the catacombs, as fleshy tax to repay his prior snatchings of their kin. The rest would be placed to imply the macabre puzzle he dreamt designs of.
Like a woodsman’s haul of timber for fire & forge, the nightcomer lifted his incarnadine art into the court above the rooftops with muscled practiced. Bereft of sweat even if those ravines could still be wet, the winged umbra parted the rime of the atmosphere, descending to drop the artful carcasses on his enemy’s doorstep. The Gentwind garden looked a ripe bed to plant these pale flowers. Iridescence through the gulf glinted in shadowed foxholes, gleaming prescience of discovery. How the jury of public assumption & simple proximity would perjure the murderous Gale with a few more corpses to his count. They’d assign these girls and their ends to the lethal insanity that had grown a tumor in the golden child of the genteel courts. How they’d gloat in gossip and gorge on the delicacy of a noble’s self-wrought ruination. Vincent, the slayer, would be illustrated as a paragon of descent, an icon of warning to the rest of the courtiers, while his breaths were constricted by lead from an asylum ward or fungus from an interment hold.
As he went to retire, Arden glanced back to the pal masks of the dead. Unmarred, above the slashed neckline (and ghastly eviscerations below), their faces blurred to a silver chorus; sharing features and portends in their lightless stares. In one courtesan’s face others were framed: an exhibit of an archetype. The mien of Hialeah, Lucilla, and his own mother calcified over the hoary palette. Each with raven locks and wan hue - once livelier than the moon. The tearing and draining was done, and though the fatal crimson quenched his dehydration, remorse wrapped him under wing. Their beheaded parade hovered at his flanks. With shame, Aldred slumped back to his hearth, sullen in Triumph; surrounded by refractions of the hydra, marching in broken stride with serpentine menagerie of the slain.
Cold scale and a coat of sulfur did a fair job of warding harm from him. But though the man’s heart had surceased from pumping, unless commanded to the ruse by manipulations of stolen life through his arteries, wounds of the psyche festered from the lashings he flailed. Labors of the mind were better relied on to shirk the needless guilt. He still had an hour perhaps to armor himself in mental strain before he must plunge into the barrow beneath the Harrow manor.
He had but a shred of time before Dawn’s rumor would be affirmed by the masses and her rose-crown over the horizon. Eos, goddess, would be realized. Her appearance would distort the happenstance of her sister in evening until all that occurred in her domain would be shed as falsity or revealed for the ugly state it chafed in. By the illumination which rose with her stare, some width of the cold would be banished; nightmares & dreams would be separated from cherubs & imps of phantasy’s reign; and the stain of vice would burn to show the virtues of horrors accomplished in the dark, now splayed in spectacle before the eyes that begged for sun.
Harrow possessed enough means within this hour to dabble with early theorems and new patients. Those thugs of Gale’s employ were strapped comfortably in Aldred’s basement, his shrine to imperfected but progressing medicine. They were arrayed as unwilling, yet content enough, subjects in uncanny experiments, sedated with nearly copious amounts of morphine to quiet them until their need appeared. He frowned at the loss of such a pristine substance. That messenger of bilious harmony still winked hope of pale euphoria and her piercing kiss. How he longed for the noxiously sweet embrace that raptured soul and its sickness from vein. Proscribed, denying enjoyment, from his roaming carcass.
Arden’s mind infracted unbiased method to linger on the morphine: could he not know it again? He had not tried, only assumed that it would bear no effect to an ambling corpse. Besides, the carrion appetite in his husk sought a richer daughter in mortal red. That wine, perfectly aged as to keep himself ageless. His new diet of kings and worms. Oh, but he had not yet dined on the crimson of a truly regal being. What power would be siphoned from that stream? The aftertaste of murder only had him craving the next throat. For this thirst, he entreated with time’s saturnine father to allow him another draft before waiting out the eternity bridging him to another dusk.