Found one of my attempts at a not-1st-person short story. Weighing up whether to polish it off and finish it or not.
Lieutenant Calais had always done his duty. He worked his family stables as a child, because it was his duty to his family and he loved the animals. He joined the military when the Great War begun, because it was his duty to his country and he loved his country. He cared for his mother after his father died of a heart attack, another duty to his family and he loved his family. He married Susan after a chance tryst left her pregnant, he cared for their son when she died in childbirth, and he buried his son after a fever claimed him before his third birthday. Duty and love defined him.
This mission was another duty for his country, though he did not love it. Calais sat in the back of an old Yorkshire church on the edges of a dying village. None of the worshippers in the aisles paid him any mind, just another man in a grey suit and tie. Blond hair, green eyes, and an utterly forgettable face. He was just another good Christian attending his local Sunday Service, head bowed in prayer as the parishioner rambled on. The revolver inside his jacket pressed into his stomach. He should actually say a prayer, he thought, would need to ask someone forgiveness for what he was about to do.
Father Jonathan didn’t look particularly special as far as priests went. Short graying black hair, dull brown eyes and a monotone voice. Slightly overweight but not off-puttingly so, Calais suspected he may have been considered attractive once, but could not bring himself to see anything but the devil within the man. He had seen the depths of the real soul, the tome bound in the skin of flayed children in his attic. He had found the remains of the choirboys, chained and raped in his basement, tears still dry on desiccated cheeks, skin stripped with loving care from their backs. One. Calais counted to one, waiting for his cue as the Father continued the sermon.
“He is the Lord, the Father and the Son, the dreamer of this endless ocean dream born in...”.
That wasn’t the sign. Not yet. Most of the church-goers didn’t appreciate the sermon at more than a surface level. They didn’t know it’s real meaning. Father Jonathan was just the local priest, and whilst he had more of a fondness for more obscure verses and the gnostic side of theological writings than the last preacher, he was all they had. For better or worse, he was their gateway to the Lord. That amused the darker corners of Calais’ mind. They were closer to a truth than any caring deity would allow.
His eyes drifted to the front of the pews, to the bald man in the brown suit jacket who sat against the left wall, his peeling skin bulging over a too-tight collar. From the front, Dr. Aaron Watson was a happy man. Laugh lines traced his face, and the thick grey moustache did nothing to hide them. A face of kindness, a large red nose, and hands still calloused from beating his wife to death two summers ago. Her body was hidden in a gap in the walls of his living room, and Watson could often be found sitting in front of the wall with the morning newspaper and a pipe, remembering their last night together, adding more laugh lines to his face.
Calais had spied on the event many times. The Doctor lost in memory, tobacco smoke filling the room and staining the cheap furniture yellow, playing the scene in his mind. Images of his wife’s hair, her eyes, her smell, her screams as he wrapped one hand around her throat mid-coitious, gouging her eyes out with the other and chanting, thrusting and undulating for those things to grant him -
- Calais caught his breath. Nobody noticed. Two. Why had he read the book? He knew better than that. You never read the book. You send it away. You get one of the brains in the department to read it. Let them burn away their sanity. Let them wake up screaming of sunken cities of mathematics and alchemy that devour men and create birds that swim through the earth, and whales of black smoke and ash that haunt the gaps in the walls of their psyche. Let them take the bedlam and opiate retirement when they can’t stand the dreams any more, when the the voices calling out to them in their waking hours from the corners of shadowed rooms grow too loud to ignore. That was not Calais’ job. So why had he read it?
Because you wanted this, the dark corner of his brain replied. And he knew it was truth.
Would he have enough bullets? He remembered chambering the rounds before he left. Not enough for everyone here. Not nearly enough. But hopefully, enough to make a difference. Six bullets. Every shot would have to count.
“.. and the Omega and Alpha shall rise up from the great sea of man’s wickedness, and bless those who have kept true to His name of Seven with…”
Alpha and Omega. Calais’ eyes found the twins, sat hand-in-hand in front of own seat. Taylor and Madeline Branson, lined up like ducks at the fair. He wasn’t sure they were twins, but he had suspicions. They looked to be approximately the same age and had the same eyes, cold and blue, framed by blonde hair. On some level, Madeline made him think of Susan. Calais pondered that thought, it did not disturb him as much as he wished.
To the villagers, they were a married couple in their mid twenties who moved in three years ago to escape the hustle and bustle of the city. They were quiet, kept to themselves, and openly very affectionate. Long walks through the nearby woods were a staple pastime, discussing nature and local events.
The Bransons had no children. When questioned, they revealed Dr. Watson had declared Madeline infertile, and they were not interested in adoption. The questions from the villagers had ended there. Calais had delved deeper, and found Madeline was regularly pregnant. And then wasn’t. Every three to four months, Madeline and Taylor would cycle through an unnoticed pregnancy and no child would be born and no pregnancy reported or miscarriage logged with the Doctor. The two were well fed, though both had a gauntness to their shadows that hinted at some long suffered ailments.
Calais had traced back through the holes in the public records at least sixty years before he stopped. He did not want to know how old those two truly were, how long they had prolonged their existence consuming their own aborted fetuses. He did not want to know how much history he was erasing. Three. Four.
“...and the great beast will crawl out of the pit. Honour the father and the mother, who bear the spark of the He that gifted the feet to the stones…”
The fifth one was late. He was always late, and the parish had come to expect this. His job kept him busy. That was his excuse. It was the paperwork, you see. So much paperwork for the only regular member of the police to frequent the quiet and sleepy village. The perils of bureaucracy provide an excellent place to hide for those with dark desires. And Eliot Hale’s desires ran deep.