prxteus

[prxteus]

~ Ulster, Ireland. 1609 ~

He’d been strung up in the village square, right before the church. Hung for heresy, as the English insisted. You hadn’t been in attendance, there was no way you could have been, not for his last wish or anyone else’s. To have that be the final way in which you laid eyes upon him, selfishly you knew the nightmares would be too great of a burden- as much as his death itself.

Your father had gone to the spectacle, a solemn pinch to his brow when he returned home to tell you that they were yet to cut him down. “Let ‘em come for this place” he’d sneered “over my dead body”.

Not a day later you found yourself standing in the square, unable to argue when sent to the village for an important letter. You did your best to avoid the church, to avert your eyes as you darted across the dirt road. But it didn’t matter, because he was gone, not even a sign he’d been there at all. You assumed his brothers had cut him down in the dead of night, carried him far away over the moors to bury him where his grave would be unmarked and undisturbed. You hoped that was the case. That his life wouldn’t be limited to the opinions of those who had come to these lands unwelcome, spouting religious spite and cruelty from beyond the Eastern sea, uprooting folk from their homes and lives.

He’d been the first of many slaughters that your village became witness to, but not all were in the name of the church.

Days pass, the mist lingers, shrouding the hills in a blanket of silence. A solemn air about the dead space between the farms and the village, hollow woodlands that whistle and whisper. Something in you tells you to whisper back, to answer the shrill screams you hear call out in the dead of night from outside your window.

The townsfolk would call you mad, hang you in the square all the same, shouting of witchcraft and devil worship - perhaps that was a better fate than starvation and exile from your one and only homeland.

Living becomes little more than breathing. Chores around the homestead; dusting and weeding and tending to the chickens, cooking what little there is to cook. Monotonous work that breeds resentment in you, a hatred for what life has become, barely more than surviving.

Then, one night, everything pulls apart at the seams.

It’s in the pitch black of midnight, that’s when you hear it. The screaming, this time it feels more visceral, it sounds real. Before you believed you were imagining it, had thought your nightmares had bled into your waking hours, just barely. Slipped between soft snores and the crust in the corners of your eyes. It frightens you, sends a chill over your skin. The fire had died hours ago, little more than embers humming a dull glow in the fireplace. Light is low, visibility even more so, yet you pull a blanket around your shoulders and will your memory to serve you well. Hoping to creep through to your father’s room, wondering if he can hear it too - maybe you are just mad.

When you reach the door to his room, it’s hard for you to notice the emptiness of his bed, but through the gap in the drapes the moonlight provides just enough for you to see that he isn’t sleeping, so you slip away further through the hallway, blissfully unaware of your fathers lifeless body on the other side of his bed beneath the window ledge, lying just out of sight in the shadows.

The silence reaches you then, as if the world comes to a halt, not a drop of rain hitting the windows or the dogs fussing in the kitchen. There’s nothing. No creak to the floorboards or beating of your own heart in your ears, even your breathing feels stilted, like you dare not take a breath and make a noise. You move slowly, taking each step downstairs carefully in the darkness, the wood is cold beneath your feet.

Suddenly, there’s movement, the faint noise of footsteps or shuffling. It makes your chest squeeze, your father would sleep through thunderstorms - what could have forced him out of bed at this hour if not for the screaming?

Your pace subconsciously quickens, violently aware of how your anxiety begins to grow, a cold sweat beading at your hairline despite the low temperature outside, its seeping through the cracks in the window panes. The pads of your feet hit the stone floor and the noise echoes, the slap of skin against cold floor, your pace is uneven yet rushed. Something rattles in the kitchen, then a whine, then you’re stopped dead in your tracks.

Framed by the moon as it pierces through the kitchen window, a figure is hunched over the sink, dark and tall and unmoving. There’s a coldness, like whatever it is isn’t really there. A spectre. A ghost. You’d pinch yourself or press your thumbs into your eyes to ensure you were awake if you weren’t frozen in place, eyes glued to the creatures back - or what looks to be its back.

It doesn’t move, not right away, and neither do you. Maybe it doesn’t know you’re there, you could slip away through the front door and run toward the village, hoping someone might open their door to you. Your eyes dart around the darkness and you spot four iridescent eyes staring back at you from a far corner, the dogs are pressed back against the wall, looking as terrified as you are. You step back, hoping to slip away, but in that moment the creature turns on a six pence. The same iridescent eyes as the dogs, but there’s a shift to them, almost reddish, you don’t know whether to scream or run. Either or would do, but as you continue to stare at this creature while simultaneously turning your body toward the front door- it leaps.

Before you can even blink it’s on you, your spine pressed into the wall and your body crushed beneath the creatures weight. It’s breath fans your face, a stench of copper invades your nose and you wince. It’s overpowering, it smells like the shed at the back of the property, the one where your father slaughters the chickens and hangs them for the blood to drain out. It’s sour, coppery and strong as the creature pants against your cheek. But through the stench of blood there’s something familiar, something that forces your eyes wide, finally looking the creature in the face to confirm your noses suspicion.

It’s him. It’s too dark to make out the finer details of him you so vividly know, but it’s him alright. The smell of ferns and rosemary, that hint of dust and wheat from the bakery he spent too many hours in, you’re not sure how it’s at all possible.

You say his name but he rebukes, you feel him physically recoil against you, his chin shifts against your cheek as he shakes his head. “Doesn’t feel right bein’ called that” his voice is hoarse, like he’s swallowed gravel, it doesn’t sound like him.

There’s so much running through your mind. How impossible all of this is. He was dead. Hung for all to see. In the name of his questioning faith, because he dared not believe what he was conditioned to - he was dead all the same. So how was it that he was standing here right before you? Breathing. Speaking. Smelling of death and ruin and the grave.

He startles when you touch him, warping the fraying shirt stretched over his chest between your fingers until the fabric screeches. Through the heartache and denial and questioning of your own beliefs, he was standing here now. This wasn’t a dream.

You feel his breathing shift, the swell of his chest grows, pressing more weight into you as you almost break through the wall. His nose presses against your cheek and you feel the smearing of sweat from his face against your own, especially around his mouth and lips. The tip of his nose traces down your face and to your chin, he pauses, inhaling deeply, but he doesn’t speak. You don’t let go of him, anchoring yourself to him incase he slips away once more, incase this is in fact the most vivid dream you’ve ever had in your life.

“Say something” you whisper, needing to hear him, needing to relish in the reality of him standing here with you.

He presses deeper into you, if it’s possible, crushing your chest, you can’t find it in you to tell him to stop. You don’t want him to go.

“You smell so good” it’s slurred, almost rumbles from his chest. Your brows furrow, but before you can retort there’s an immense pressure at your throat.

It’s unbearable. A fiery hot pressure that burns from the inside out. Like venom in your blood. Burning and burning and burning until there’s nothing but fire. You scream, a bloodcurdling sound that makes your own ears hurt, everything hurts. Your nails pry at him for relief but there is none, if anything he bares down harder the more you fight, like an instinct. Something akin to a predator.

These teeth aren’t his own. That of a creature like you’d thought before, a predator, a demon. A curse for none belief. They tear through the flesh of your throat like butchers knives to venison steaks, a practiced killer, a skilled hunter.

Heat blooms throughout your body despite the fact his tongue doesn’t let a single drop of blood fall anywhere but to his mouth, an insatiable hunger in him you have seen only once before. He’d made a dishonest woman of you and yet this feels worlds above that, as filthy and improper as you could possible imagine feeling. Yet, it swells inside of you, your own hunger, soon pressing yourself into the pressure of his mouth as his hands take root at your hips to keep you still - to stop your squirming away.

You close your eyes, revelling in the pain for a moment, for when you open your eyes again - you can seen clearly through the darkness. As if the sun has risen in the space of a second, now the darkness doesn’t interrupt your eyes, you can see clearly that the man who stole your heart is no longer just a man. He’s much more. As much beast as the dog’s still cowering across the room, as much a ghost as he was thought to be - as much a demon as the bible would state.