As they emerged from the stables a shudder of movement caught Aleister's eye. Huge jittering dark red lines, moving just beyond the house and disappearing into the absolute blackness of the tree line.
“Got you,” he whispered to himself as he started running, his huge feet thundering across the gravel. His lack of conditioning came second to his willpower – it always had done – and he covered the distance to the house in almost no time, scrambling over a low wall and crashing through a flower bed, before sprinting across the lawn and over the back wall to enter the woods, as his fedora fell away behind him. He could vaguely hear Sean yelling something behind him, but didn't have time to look back or explain where he was going. The old man wouldn't catch Aleister up; he was on his own.
The darkness fell across him, smothering and isolating. His torch light flashed across his surroundings as he ran, giving him snapshots of trunks, branches, dead leaves and sparse but damning blood stains. He was more concerned with keeping a rhythm in his steps than keeping the light steady, so the trees and bushes started to whip into him, cutting his skin as he drove forwards. The ground was uneven, causing him to slip once or twice, though he never stopped, never registered the pain. Another flash, conical spikes, a hideous swollen bulge, purple and black, webs of veins glistening and pulsing in the downpour... what am I chasing? He didn't dwell on it as the adrenaline was running rampant throughout his body, filling his exhausted mind with images of the dead, Lucas, Jacqueline and Thomas, the horses sacrificed in their stalls, blood and bone and... no more.
Willpower was only good for so long though, and soon the burning in his chest forced him to slow, as the trees started to thin and the black line of a road started to become visible ahead of him. His quarry had vanished, still managing to get away despite Aleister's best efforts, though signs of its passing still remained spattered on the ground.
As he passed a large beech tree a building loomed out the darkness to his left. It was overgrown with vines and weeds, its brickwork sharp and cold as if it were the carapace of a Cyclopean creature pulling itself out of the earth. As Aleister circled around the front, still breathing hard from his exertions, his torch picked out the details of the ancient stone façade and a memory suddenly fell into place. He had seen this building before. He shone his torch upwards and ran the light over the squat spire of the chapel, the same chapel from the photograph in Jacqueline's file, the one she had mentioned in the briefest detail in her messages. The stained glass windows had no colour in the shadows, sitting as dark and dead as the building, their illustrations lost in the night.
As Aleister moved closer he spotted a small sign to the left of the large front doors. It was caked with mud that was smeared across parts of the door frame and down onto the slabs that formed a small path that led to the road. He reached his hand up and wiped some of it away, though he wasn't surprised that his palm came away ruddy from blood that was mixed with the earth. The sign read 'Thomas Webb – Artist and Sculptor'. His mind drifted back for a moment to the converted church in the centre of town, which was now the library. Now that he thought about it, there was also a converted church in the grounds of the Kaspar institute. As far as he could recall, he could only think of one church that still retained its original purpose, which was The Keeper Church by the river to the southern edge of town. Although he was not a religious man, there was still something sobering about the fact that Wyldston was truly a town that had lost its faith.
In this moment of silence and dark potential, with his heartbeat pulsing in his ears and his soaked skin shivering with the chill of the increasing gale that shook the dead winter trees, he wished for nothing more than to make a break for the road and leave this sorry mess for the police to deal with. The last two days' events had sent him spinning backwards towards his past, when the rotten core of Wyldston had been purged, or so he had thought. Sebastian Temple, the man who had crafted the flesh of the poor souls he had preyed on, snatching them from their homes, from the streets, seemingly with no forced entry, had finally been hauled in front of a court with Aleister's help before being declared insane. His was a legacy of terror that had somehow stretched back for years, with no investigation ever getting close to finding him behind the high walls of his opulent mansion, although that was probably more down to the corruption of the police department than any eldritch force. He had been responsible for so many disappearances, many of which couldn't even be proved but were simply admitted to by Temple as he smiled that thin, nauseating grin in the dock. His eyes, that was what Aleister remembered most vividly, green flecked with red as if they were some sort of blood spattered emeralds.
To bring down Temple, it had been necessary to break the law himself, meaning that Sean had needed to use all his best efforts to keep Aleister out of prison, for his daughter's sake. Aleister had left the force before he was pushed, though he had no stomach left for the fight in any case...
Despite all this, here he was again on a threshold, again pausing to gain some composure, and once again reaching out...
The door slid inwards with some difficulty, crushing rotting leaves and twigs as it moved. They ran a grimy course across old flagstones that soon gave way to an elegantly patterned carpet that must once have been quite luxurious but now lay crusty and matted with dirt, like the fur of a dead animal. It was strewn with a great number of discarded clothes, thrown in random piles. In the torchlight the pillars that stood either side of hall seemed far larger than they must actually have been, reaching up towards the balustrade that ran around the second floor gallery. It looked like a recent addition, built on wooden supports and housing a huge assortment of boxes, art supplies, sculptures and portraits. A perfect maze for anyone to hide in. He would have to be careful.
The ground floor was dominated by several statues made roughly of mud and unfired clay. Several larger parts had fallen away and lay scattered on the floor as if the statues had been shedding their skin. They were shaped in roughly humanoid poses, the mud in their arms braced with branches and bound roughly with rope. They seemed strangely at odds with the glimpses he caught of the works of art on the upper balcony, which all leaned towards a fine art background. This was brutal, raw, and horribly familiar...
The largest piece was a mass of limbs, fused together with the same branches and rope but also metal, wide swathes of lead, copper wire, steel coils, springs, pulleys... a strange exercise in agony and ecstasy, a visual representation of the very monstrosity he had seen in the Temple cellars...
Movement to his left caught his eye, as flabby legs started taking shaky steps towards him from out of the shadows. As Aleister swung his torch around he saw that the man was huge, surely verging on thirty stone in weight, naked and covered in sweat, rain and mud, his skin bloated and purple. Tears ran in rivulets down a face that appeared on the edge of bursting, the skin actually torn in places and oozing blood. He had never seen the man before. It was most likely the woman's husband, somehow also infected, bearing all the same hallmarks of whatever had afflicted Thomas Webb.
“Help me,” the man groaned hoarsely, slurring the words as he stumbled and fell bodily into one of the nearest statues, which crumbled at the base and fell in a heap to reveal hair clotted with mud, rotting flesh and bone beneath the earth. Corpses... they were all constructed with corpses. Aleister felt his nausea rising as he stepped back, away from the huge man who was struggling under his own weight to move again. The words caught in Aleister’s throat, questions about the strange sight jostling for position in his mind as revulsion fought against it, willing him to flee.
“How?” Whether it was an answer for the man or simply a question for the universe that had sought fit to show these sights to him was impossible to say.
“From the river... the red legs... my mouth...”
The man-creature managed to finally stand, his eyes swollen to such an extent they could barely blink.
“The rain washed some away... but I... it made me eat, drink...”
“Just tell
me what to do,” said Aleister, feeling the situation start to wind up. There was a danger here past what he could see, something on the edge... he could tell the man was terrified, and finding out how to defend himself against whatever was causing the fear was more important than any other details. The question came too late though...
The man spasmed suddenly, vomiting a torrent of blood that splashed onto the floor. It was not the normal pattern of vomiting though but rather a continuous stream, impossibly large in volume, never-ending and terrifying. The fluid bubbled and seethed, stretching and moving as if it were a jelly, swirling and twisting into six cones that rose upwards and outwards, forcing Aleister to step back until he felt the cold stone of one of the pillars behind him. The cones formed rudimentary joints, platelet cartilage, before pushing their tips back towards the earth as the disgorgement still continued, the man's skin visibly sagging as the fluid was expelled from him. The conical legs pushed upwards, pulling the man up via a swirling stream of blood that seemed to be flowing both ways at once, forming a huge creature that wore the man's sagging body as if it were a swollen abdomen of a spider. Black worm like veins seemed to form on the somehow still liquid skin of the creature, stretching and slithering across its body. He had seen this shivering blood before, rippling over the dead boy's body in the doorway. The creature had been there, hiding, waiting... but why? What had been different? Why had it not attacked?
He had no time to consider the reason. Panic started to course through his mind at the sight of this thing, a fear he had not felt since being locked in that cellar in the warm embrace of the tortured. He tried to make for the door but the creature moved ahead of him, legs slamming down with blood spatters onto the carpet. Aleister doubled back, reeling in shock before escaping behind one of the mud covered corpses, posed and stretched as if they were no more than materials, to be used as any other. There was no way out.
With a shower of dry earth and necrotic flesh the statue shattered as a leg slammed through it, slicing Aleister's hand with minute barbs as he fell away. He dropped the torch and gripped his wrist instinctively to stop the blood flow as he scrabbled behind the largest statue, the nightmare dedication to Temple's work, as blood fell in a sharp stream from his wound. He glanced back to see the torch was still within reach, so he reached out for it carefully, eyes staring up into the darkness, hearing the thunderous tapping of the legs on the floor. In the light of the torch he could see that the drops from his cut had started to pool together like mercury and were running in a slithering rivulet towards the body of the creature, joining with its legs and flowing into it. The colossal spider started emitting a low moan, or maybe it was the man who still dangled like a broken mannequin, it was hard to tell. They were one and the same now, a bloody organism born of Hell.
He needed to put some space between him and this thing to give himself a chance at survival. With the creature approaching from the front of the studio the only way was up, for now. He managed to spot a spiral staircase near to where he had first seen the fat man, and he made a break for it, dodging a flailing leg that reached for him, the cone bending and swaying as it sought him out. As he made his way upwards, boots clanging on the iron, he kept his torch light on the creature, which was turning clumsily towards him. It seemed able to move quickly forwards and was hugely powerful, but not especially agile when it came to manoeuvring. Perhaps he could use that fact to his advantage. As the beam of his torch ran over the body of the dangling man, he saw that his eyes were less swollen but still wide with terror. Aleister could only imagine the sensation, the pain, the absolute helplessness, the blood flow in and out, his jaw distended horribly with the force of the fluid. The man's features shivered, before he glanced repeatedly upwards towards the corner of the balcony, at a stack of white bottles.
Aleister looked back towards the creature just in time to see it throw out two legs, wrapping them around the railing of the staircase. The metal groaned as Aleister finally made it to the top, just in time before the stairs fell away in a scream of broken metal. Part of the stairway collapsed onto one of the creature's legs, shearing its way through the joint. The severed limb fell away in a splash of red, losing its form almost immediately. Aleister crouched behind a stack of boxes and looked down as the creature flailed around on five legs before managing to place its severed stump in the pool of blood. Slowly the liquid started to move and ran back towards the joint, gradually re-joining and reforming.
Aleister crouched back down and started to make his way around to the bottles, using the opportunity to try and piece together what he knew and could deduce about the thing below.
It needed blood, that much was obvious... and it could rebuild itself with little effort. Even his own blood had flowed towards the thing, even faster than the remains of its own leg. Freshness, was that a factor? The body of Thomas Webb had been almost black towards the end, sluggish blood flowing in veins close to death... what had been the difference?
As he reached the bottles, the light of the torch picked out the words “white spirit”.
“Dying...”
Thomas Webb's last word.
God help him. The man below had known, and now he knew. He knew what he had to do.
Shred - Cuts of Flesh #1 Page 10