Drip. Drip.
…………….Drip!
Luchesi opened his eyes and saw nothing at first. It was pitch dark in here, but wherever he was felt familiar. It was clammy; humid. His back was pressed into the cold stone of a slickened walkway, coated over with moss. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, they recognized that the point of illumination within this dark tunnel was the bioluminescence of another pair of eyes; yellow, slitted eyes. Cat's eyes. They were predatory like Luchesi's own. He was shivering the moment his full-body numbness wore off, and he stumbled as he stood and fell, and stood and fell again on feet that felt like they were standing on a bed of nails. A fumbling hand, liberated from his clawed gauntlet, touched the curved wall, like the slick masonry of a damp catacomb. Mixed in with the sickly sensations was a warped nostalgia for the wine cellar of Montressor's basement, from the pages of that old Poe compilation he drank from so long ago. He realized he was missing his claws, and felt naked. In fact, he was naked; little pebbles clung to his bare back.
Realizing he was defenseless, he shrank back from the murderous stare of the beast hidden in the darkness. As if timed to this revelation, it let out a booming roar, and a wave of the noxious odor of animal shit rolled disgustingly over him, puckering his nose. He saw the white glimmer of jaws bulging with spiky teeth. He could fit a watermelon in that mouth, it was huge, and the fetid smell of hot meat caught in its gums and on its breath struck Luchesi down with a crippling nausea. Then, the pale hand of the Faceless Man curled around the beast's head and scratched it tenderly under the chin, eliciting a purr that sounded like the gurgling of fresh lava sitting idly in an open cauldron of earth. Luchesi realized that his guide had been there the whole time, the cobalt cloak seeming vanta black down here. It gave the impression that his hands were cut off at the wrists where his sleeves covered them, and just floating there. He saw the emptiness of the Faceless Man's gaping hood by the impossible contrast of the circle of hood that was deeper than the darkness around it.
"You let that boy make a fool out of you. I suppose that fits your aesthetic." the figure said.
"That's not just a boy, he has special abilities, the girl too! They-" Luchesi began.
"Silence." the Faceless Man said - he neither screamed nor whispered it, but said it with just the right spell of soft coldness to make Luchesi's protest die in his throat. "Do you remember how we first met, Luchesi?"
The jester shrank back further and felt open air under his back heel. He gasped and tumbled backward down rickety iron steps, spilling him into a lower platform, face in the cold ground. He heard the thunder of rushing water, and knew he was below Station Bay. He felt as though his tendons had been cut, and he could not stand properly. He could barely hold his head up to see the wraith climb - no, glide down the stairs. Even though he moved like a shadow, a pale hand slid across a rusty safety rail anyways, tapping a single vampire-like claw along as he did so.
"You were filthy and torn, much like you are now. Your bare feet were bloody shreds, and your eyes were so empty and dull. I gave you a new lease on life. Need I remind you that it is only a lease?" the demon finished floating down the steps, and towered over Luchesi now. "I loaned you your power, and I can take it away. You think yourself invincible, yet couldn't even kill two rookie children? Did I take in the wrong street rat?" the man intoned.
Luchesi tried to make eye contact, tongue-tied and shivering.
"WELL?!?" he boomed, and the sewer shook.
Luchesi composed himself and knelt, his forehead pressed to the stony floor. "My liege. Forgive me for speaking out of turn. I do not mean to trivialize the gifts you have bestowed upon me. Without you, I am nothing. A tramp, lower than dirt. It was your dark wisdom that gave me the strength to rise from the gutter and seek the strength to make my will known. How can I better play the part your fatherly instincts have outlined for the stage upon which I dance to your waker?"
A skeletal arm burst from the floor, gripped Luchesi by the skull, and retracted into the ground instantly, slamming Luchesi's face into the stone and flattening his nose. The arm shot up and down like a piston, rapidly slamming Luchesi face-first into the ground until blood was syrup-trailing down his lip and from his nostrils. He had literally been made to bite his tongue too. His skull was a ricochet room for ping pong balls of dull aches and trembling swells of bruised brain tissue. Then the summoned arm was a tripod holding the dazed Luchesi up under the chin, forcing him to stand as blood pooled down across his neck and chest. The man in cobalt was standing right in front of him now, tutting like a disappointed schoolteacher.
"I have ever only had a single commandment to give - do whatever you like." he said.
The propping arm nodded Luchesi's head.
"Every dark desire or sick, twisted impulse is to be your secret message from a guardian angel whispering in your ear, so close to you that you might kiss. Your highest calling is to be the messenger through which my word spreads. And how does evil speak?" the man asked.
"With action." Luchesi recited.
"Your baptism as a lamb of the Flower of Evil is only half-completed. You wear the mask of fear, but you do not sew it with a practiced hand. You make pretensions of your utter inhumanity, but you let such simple human inclinations as pride and self-doubt dull the assassin's blade of your feral animal instinct. What I want from you, Luchesi, is to commit. You have yet to sever the last tie to your own humanity, the final communion between you and your rebirth as a dark prince. You must throw away what remains of your human heart and welcome purposeless evil into your being, utterly. Whether you are consumed by it, or gestate in its shell to hatch as a fledgling demon will depend on your strength of will."
"What else do I have left to give?" Luchesi asked. "You told me it gets easier. And it has. Those mongrels in the streets mean nothing to me but empty sacks of straw to cut down for daring to dwell within my hemisphere. I am a wolf among the sheep, purged of love and empathy as you said would free me from the shackles of human bondage. I have sacrificed everything - memory, dreams, joys save for the satisfaction of the kill - I have given up every attachment to any goodness I could have had." Luchesi said.
"Not every attachment." the man waved his hand, and the ephemeral image of Luchesi's beautiful mother with her angelic blond bangs and her kind smile appeared before him.
"Mother?" Luchesi drawled, mentally regressed to a frightened child who had woken from a bad dream; one who had yet to learn that the boogeyman was not in his closet or under his bed - but in his reflection. In every reflection.
"The Backyards is the park of the divine, you can't have forgotten that a ticket is required to pay a visit. The longest stay at a resort must eventually end, and there is always the tab to tally. You have given memories of your life, snuffed every virtue from the quivering tenderness of a heart well on its way to stone. But yet you hesitate. You linger at the threshold between what you are now - and everything you could be if you just let go. I thought you were the angry boy rejected by the village, primed to burn it down to feel its warmth? You were going to see this shithole of a human pen go up in dark flame. That bonfire will be created. Will you be the spark - or just another heap of kindling with all the rest?" the Faceless Man said.
Luchesi bowed his head, silent tears streaming down his face from his angelic blue eyes.
"Because that is the only scrap of happiness I have left in my being. I decided of my own free will that there would be no going back, that I would make the world suffer as it had made me to suffer. There can be no innocents in a world of sin, only predators, set apart only by the magnitude of their success and the loftiness of their egos which love only themselves, the only true love a babe born into this world can ever be sure of… except for a mother's love, unconditional, given freely. That was the one and only time in my life I truly felt loved… safe… if I could only go back,"
"You can't." the wraith said. "You've come this far in your crusade already, you are far too gone to turn back now. Your species will not take you back after you disowned and condemned them, and demonhood will not accept you into their ranks if you refuse to escape the human pen. You must feel it - the likeness, between you and I. You grow closer to the Void every day, if you do not assert your place in it, it will claim you instead. You will be just another soulless shade, conscious only of its misery and half-remembered regrets. The Perfect World will be built on the backs of countless like that, but in every war there are yet more sacrifices. Few of the lowly grunts will make it to the other side to see my Paradise. We must go all the way. Death must precede Rebirth. Make your choice!"
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Luchesi closed his eyes, sighing. "I can't. Not her. I can't forget her."
The wraith tilted its head, and retracted the skeletal arm from its face-hold on the battered jester.
"I don't know what's more impressive, the strength of your last remaining noble sentiment, or the enormity of Evil potential you're shirking. Do you remember why the bedtime stories your sweet mother read to you, and the loving way she held you are so vividly remembered and lionized? Why,"
He thrust out a palm, and Luchesi was struck by a phantom blow that forced him like one stuck to a gravitron ride against a sewer wall.
"A light however faint flickers all the brighter in proportion to the darkness around it. You had two parents, you recall. One loved you, but the other, why… he hated you. Resented you. Destroyed you."
Luchesi was pinned by innumerable conjured skeleton arms that clung him to the wall and held him still about his arms, legs, pelvis, and neck, leaving his bare, but now pale, emaciated, and bruised frame exposed to coming punishment. Bony fingers dug into his eyelids and held them open to see his guide's advance.
The Faceless Man extended his true arm, and then his gleaming curved claws of bone were exposed and stroking Luchesi's pretty face. His eyes were wide with fear. Those were the claws he had seen in his dreams, under his bed, in the closet, and in his own dark reflection. The claws of the apex predator, one who takes and stands above all others who take and are taken from. The claws… of the Monster.
The claws he was inspired to replicate as the gauntlets now stripped from his cold, exposed hands. He had been declawed as an unworthy predator.
"There are no innocents, remember? That beast of a man who beat you both black and blue day in and day out was the instrument of your ruination, yes. But your dear sweet mother was complicit."
Luchesi bulged against the fleshless limbs restraining him.
"My mother tried to protect me!"
"She tried and failed. She lost her life, broken like a doll in the grip of the man she was stupid enough to give herself to. But, in the process, she brought you, a newborn - the only true innocents in this world - into a cold, indifferent reality. It was her duty to preserve the light in your child's heart and, oh… she failed. She died and was free of the nightmare, while her precious baby boy whom she gave her life for had to live a lie that ended only when he took blood for blood. Well, your so-called debt to your angel was paid, and what was your reward? Homelessness. Vagrancy. Degeneracy. Hatred. She died a martyr, content in her ill-founded belief that she had at least saved you, only to reserve you for a fate far worse than death."
"A fate… worse than death?" Luchesi asked.
"Why… you met me, didn't you?" the man retracted his claws and glided away the length of the room. Then he turned around and turned a palm upward. From it, a handful of compressed blood, like glowing crimson lightning or plasma, rose like a rigid tendril out of his lifeless flesh. “Let me remind you, how your loving father celebrated every anniversary of your clueless arrival in this world!”
A whiplash of the bloody stream broke open the burn mark on his cheek, and Luchesi screamed. The blood whip lashed open his chest next, and continued in erratic sidewinder patterns all across his exposed arms, pecks, stomach, thighs, and even under the armpits and at the tips of his individual digits, all while he could only hiss and groan and struggle hopelessly in his necrotic binds. Blood began to flow freely - his blood - and drip drip drip! just like the sewage condensation above their heads falling endlessly from the catacomb roof.
-
Luchesi was dropped from the wall. He did not move to shield his face as he landed chin-first on the cold ground. The bloody stream tangled around his wrists and lifted him, dangling him before the Faceless Man’s missing eyes as though the hooded figure was examining a hand-me-down garment. In Luchesi’s violated mindscape, dug in with the probing fingers of hidden shades, the whipping from the Faceless Man’s tendril of compressed blood began to overlap with the memory of the leather strap that had fallen upon his younger, softer body so many times he lost count, and the pain began to become almost a game in which his only small joy was the novelty that he could still identify feelings inside the pain. He still existed, he still survived. What would he be now if that pride was thrown away? If the memory of unconditional love he had frozen his heart to protect was the toll he needed to pay to escape that pain for good? To be forever the one to give pain, and never to receive it?
At the very least, he would not feel guilt.
“I…” he gasped, wheezing and trembling as he aspirated blood which he then vomited out. “...am not weak… like that vile man… I am not my father… I am the jester who brings the judgment of death to all, regardless of class or status… I will not forsake the inspiration to take up that mantle… Take everything else from me, but the memory of my mother. She alone may remain in my being. Everyone else… all other things… these I will kill.”
The tendril threw him, and when he recovered his senses from the tumble, he saw that the Faceless Man’s shadow had detached from his hidden feet, and taken on a bulky, muscled shape of its own - blasphemously in the shape of that vile man who took everything away from him, the father who shared the beer gut with the inept officer who should have arrested that man and didn’t.
The shadow punched Luchesi in the face, knocking a tooth out wholesale. Tooth fairy, is that you? An uppercut nailed him in the stomach, and he voided its contents over the sewer walkway. The shadow backhanded him across his other check, squirting blood from his nose and cracking cheekbone, dropping him onto the stone by the side of his head, striking his temple and making stars explode before his vision. The shadow - his father? - kicked him in the side while he was down, and he felt his liver lacerate. It stomped on his leg and cracked the thigh. It pounded him without mercy.
Changeling. Bastard. Illegitimate heir. The product of adultery that existed only in the fat man’s paranoid delusions. Not his son. Just a reminder of the disrespect his bitch of a wife had dared scar him with.
Meat. Lower than a mongrel. A thing to be hit and played with, and thrown in the dark.
An epiphany came to a young Luchesi once, for the first - but far from the last - time in his unhappy life.
I see. I am not human. If the golden rule of man is to do unto others as they would want done unto themselves - that is, to do good - then I must be exempt. I am not human. I am not a part of this race of warlike wolves who dress as sheep. The shepherd is a sad illusion - the greener grass on the other side of a hill that I cannot cross. What am I?
Homeless, eventually. After the case was closed on his father’s mysterious accident, the remaining estate funds were enough to let Luchesi forget his woes for a while. He continued his high-minded pursuits of theater and ballet - and the brutality of eskrima pit fights in the philippines, and the keen lightning reflex of the rapier in fencing that gilded over the primitive bloodlust with a veneer of class and elegance - beast and man, feminine and masculine, comedy and tragedy - Luchesi was the culmination of them all. He would become the icon reflecting the absurdity he saw in the world of illusions back in its two-faced face.
He vomited the first time he came to his senses, having buried the knife the mugger had pulled on him in the dirty hobo’s gut. He didn’t like that gut. It stuck out like his father’s. Like Wilcox’s. But still, he had killed again. God help him, what had he done? His daydreams and sleepwalking incidents became more and more blurred together until the gentle boy he thought he was had become the mask. Underneath - underneath was the jester. Underneath was what this gilded world deserved.
Why? Because they demolished his fucking park garden path. Slime. Scoundrels. Subhuman. Less than dogs. Monsters - monsters like him. To reign in Hell… he would be the devil.
But maybe…? Maybe he could come back from this brink? Maybe he could be shown the light of salvation, if his guardian angel found him?
Well, someone found him. Whether he was angel or demon was a matter of perspective.
The one who found Luchesi - beaten and broken and nearly an empty shell like he was now, trembling with blood both his own and of others on his hands - had been the Faceless Man.
…
“Do you remember what you are now?” the wraith asked.
“Yes.” Luchesi said blankly, devoid of emotion. “I am your claw. I am a messenger for necessary evil, to usher in Paradise fertilized with the blood of false innocents. I am a demon.”
“Not yet. Not until you take one final step.” the man gestured to the fading image of young Luchesi sitting in his bed, his mother sitting beside him, reading his favorite Edgar Allen Poe stories until he fell asleep to dream.
“She is the source of my rage. My hatred. There is a thin line between love and hate, and I would be a less keen blade for its distinction.” Luchesi said.
He would lose his soul on that hill if need be.
“Your conviction remains unbreakable, I commend you. We are who we choose to be.” the Faceless Man applauded. “Still, to return you to the Backyards that are yours by divine right, a communion must happen. If not a final memory to give, there remains but one way to transcend your feeble humanity.”
“I welcome it with an open heart.” Luchesi said, licking the blood from his lips.
“Then, drown and rise again from the waters of the Void itself!” the Faceless Man raised his arms theatrically, and a pit opened beneath Luchesi, dropping him into a boundless ocean of the demonic black liquid that Richie had seen in the pipelines, that Cuppy had seen seeping in through the furrows at the bottom of the reservoir, and that Richie again had seen when a cast-off fragment of the Faceless Man passed through the decorative fountain at some square in Tide Town.
Luchesi fell in, thrashing as if in tar, and sank like a stone. Like a stone, all other senses calcified. In the alien sky that formed the Black Rain sea’s horizon, a distant red galaxy shaped like a malevolent eye stared on, burning, bearing witness to bestow its blessing. And, under the malign light of that eldritch star, the silhouette of a death god in the shape of a winged man-bat hybrid, crowned with jewel-encrusted gold, gave his blessing to this new child of evil. The glow of the eldritch star filtered through the bat-demon’s shadowy face, and became the glow of his red, wrathful eyes. Those evil eyes in turn reflected across the endless black sea.