The Creeper, page 24
His arm was suddenly wrenched downward, folding his leg and crashing his shoulder into the ground. In the stupefying seconds that followed, he heard Chloe cry out.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
They should have been moving. Every second counted.
‘It’s my ankle. I think I’ve twisted it.’
The voices were getting louder.
Ben imagined the feeling of wire slitting across his neck and the sound of bones popping out of their sockets like champagne corks. He tried to lift Chloe up. But she hobbled in his arms before letting herself fall back down.
‘Go,’ she shouted, pushing him away, ‘get out of here!’
So close were the Tír Mallachts now that their flames illumed the faintest outline of her face. Ben held her head in his hands and looked into her eyes. Only then did he realise that he was crying too.
The chase was over.
‘It’s going to be okay,’ he whispered.
Before she could shake her head, his arms were around her.
27
The villagers swarmed them like ants devouring their next meal. From their number they gleaned an impossible strength. Faces were even more frightening up close, leering and drooling as their many black eyes smouldered like hot coals amidst the flames. They gripped Ben from all angles, hoisting him up and dragging him wherever they pleased. He could hear Chloe’s cries but he couldn’t see her. All around them the villagers cheered and chanted, screaming at the night like a psychotic circus of horrors. There were children, too, and mindless idiots dancing outside the scrum, adrift in their own sea of madness.
Nobody knew where Ben was. Not his parents, not Jess, not a friend that he had ignored since signing Sparling’s contract. Nobody was coming to help them.
He thought of all those blood-spattered tools cast about that cottage. Would the villagers take their pick of them? There was no choice but to submit to the machinations of the inbred and deranged, even if that meant torture.
Night had fallen and, for what it was worth, they were still alive. But whatever death the creeper held in store for them couldn’t have been worse than what the villagers were capable of. In the sunlight they had masqueraded as victims of their own simplicity, eliciting from Ben a feeling close to pity. But the moonlight revealed the truth concealed beneath those elaborate layers of charade and subterfuge, leaving only their cruelty and their madness, and he pitied them no more.
His legs were suddenly kicked from under him. The many hands that held him up were now bent on forcing him down. Mud soaked into his eyes and mouth, blinding and choking. He tried to spit it away, only to let more seep in, gritty between his teeth. As Ben feared, they had been brought back to the village; that spider’s web unseen until it was too late.
The chanting ceased in an instant. It didn’t fade. It quit like the flick of a switch.
He saw Chloe for the first time since being overrun. She was wincing tearfully to herself, nursing her ankle with both hands. The villagers had formed a circle around them; faces were as skulls beneath their hoods. Ben anticipated the glimmer of tools in the firelight. He looked for a familiar face – for Mary or Nu, anyone who might offer some answer as to what was happening. But their bodies had massed into a single entity, an impenetrable wall of flesh and splintered minds.
He scrambled over to Chloe. ‘Are you okay?’
She shook her head, burying it into him as he reached down for her.
‘What are they going to do to us?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he whispered, holding her as tightly as his sore arms could bear.
Ben could hear the flames flitting on their torches. A few villagers were gasping heavily through their mouths. Somewhere unseen, the more mentally disturbed giggled like bold children at the back of a bus. Ugliness and oddity were everywhere, across all ages and genders. The taint was in the blood and they all shared it.
There was no escape. Whatever desperate hope they clung to had died with the sun.
The crowds parted to clear an aisle into the black beyond their flames. There was order to their madness; rules that even the simplest amongst them respected. Ben watched as the wasp’s familiar shape grew from the darkness with all the poise of a mantis. The circle closed behind him like bystanders at a bare-knuckle boxing fight. This wasn’t the same rough-hewn farmer from their first encounter. He carried with him a foreboding presence like an executioner carried an axe.
The wasp removed his hood in a slow, ceremonial motion and stood, staring down at Ben and Chloe as though he had just scraped them off the sole of his boot.
‘She spoke to you about him,’ he said as matter-of-fact. ‘She can’t help herself, that little one.’
Ben didn’t reply. He guessed that what happened next might hinge on his response and he had already caused enough damage.
‘How many times have you seen him?’ the wasp asked.
‘Three,’ Ben replied, siding with the honest approach.
He’d come to these people looking for help. But the man’s face lacked even the softest suggestion of empathy. Ben’s optimism seemed like an old joke that just wasn’t funny anymore.
‘And you thought what exactly?’ the wasp said, all those creases frowning as one. ‘Did you think that you would be safe here of all places?’
‘But you…’ Ben stuttered, looking at those surrounding him. ‘How are you outside after dark? Is it over?’
The wasp stared at him, contemplating the question. There wasn’t a whisper from those who only moments ago couldn’t hold their sanity together.
‘Is it over?’ he imitated before cackling to himself.
Such a scurrilous, cruel laugh that Ben shifted in front of Chloe to shield her from whatever the man was planning.
‘It will never be over,’ the wasp said. ‘As long as we believe, then he will never die.’
The villagers watched from the shadows of their cowls like a ring of gargoyles. Imprisoned for centuries, with every generation becoming something less as the years chipped away at their minds and bodies, until this was what they had become.
‘Sparling sent you,’ the wasp said, ‘always two, every two years. Never was a man so predictable.’
‘You know Alec Sparling?’ Ben asked him.
‘Know him?’ the wasp scoffed. ‘His family once counted amongst ours. He keeps hoping that one day we’ll all forget and that he’ll go away.’
‘Sparling told us everything,’ Ben said. ‘We know what happened here.’
‘It wouldn’t be like the man to speak of such things.’
‘I know that it was his family who exposed the creeper. He warned everyone who lived here. He didn’t know any better. He told them all about him. He doomed your families to this life.’
‘Doomed us?’ the wasp repeated, brandishing his mouth of maggoty teeth. ‘He opened our eyes to the truth. For so long he had led our families astray, reciting the lies of a false prophet, guiding our prayers towards a God that did not listen, one that did not care. No, he didn’t doom us, boy. Tell me, what does Sparling believe happened to his ancestor all those years ago?’
Ben had to brush the dust from his memory. Had Sparling elaborated on the priest’s death? He looked to Chloe for an answer but she shook her head.
‘How could Sparling know?’ the wasp sneered. ‘His family fled Tír Mallacht before the man met his fate. Let me tell you, no man of God has any place here.’
‘They burned him alive,’ Chloe said, staring the man down through her tears.
A sickening smile stretched across the wasp’s face. ‘Stories say he prayed until the end, even as the flaming thatch fell from above. He pleaded for mercy, to be forgiven, but our families had heeded his lies for long enough.’
‘The villagers killed him?’ Ben asked in disbelief.
‘We had to prove that our faith was true,’ the wasp replied. ‘And since that—’
‘Who did you have to prove it to?’ Chloe yelled.
His dark eyes locked upon her. The man was not given to being interrupted.
‘To the creeper,’ the wasp replied, raising his arms in celebration, to which those around him roared and screamed, baying at the moon like wolves.
Abandoned by the church, the villagers had turned to the creeper, revering it as some kind of deity. Their shepherd couldn’t keep them safe, but they could appease the wolf that threatened to tear their families apart.
‘Are you going to torture us?’ Ben asked. ‘Is that why you brought us back here?’
‘Why would I want to torture you?’ the wasp laughed mockingly.
‘We’ve seen him,’ Ben said, ‘the man over there, in that cottage. We’ve seen what you did to him.’
‘To be chosen is a gift,’ he said, straightening his back, letting his hunch gather around his neck. ‘It is the greatest honour amongst us. Bring him!’ he shouted.
The wasp studied Ben as though he were watching a child tear the wrapping paper from a present, gleefully anticipating their reaction.
The ring of onlookers parted and the tortured man was carried into sight. His wiry arms hung around the shoulders of the two carrying him, so long that his hands reached past their waists. He was naked, with skin white as the broken bones beneath. The man was – with each movement and in every moment – in indescribable agony. Each one of his wounds had been inflicted with care and precision, and he strained to stand without their help.
One of those supporting the tortured pulled back his bandaged head, manhandling him like an animal. The wasp regarded the poor man with curious admiration. He examined his arms from the shoulder to the wrist and seemed strangely satisfied with their horrific length. Then he brought his eyes closer to the fingers, inspecting them one by one. The wasp pressed his palm into the broken hand and then splayed apart his own, comparing them. He was seen to nod his approval.
‘Show me!’ he said, taking a step back.
Another villager withdrew nervously from the circle. He approached the tortured. From what Ben could see, he looked to be cutting staples from the man’s bandages. These were slowly unwound around his head as the horde watched on. The more they were released, the bloodier they became, unravelling deeper and deeper towards his injuries. Such a feeling must have bordered on euphoria – to revel in those senses stolen against his will.
The wasp watched on as the man’s skull steadily shrank to a size more resembling humankind.
‘Now do you understand?’ he exclaimed, standing aside, revealing to Ben and Chloe the truth behind the tortured man who they had, only an hour earlier, tried to save.
He was – in horrifying reality, in flesh and blood – the creeper. His skull had been cracked; its bone remodelled. A blade must have been taken to his mouth, dragged through each cheek, where now crude fishing line held it together. The wounds were healing, retaining their ghastly new shape, mutilating the memory of what he once was – a man, and not the monster he had become.
Every tooth had been filed down to a point. Eyes beetled out of their sockets as though the very bone around them had been crushed in, squeezing them outward like balloons set to pop. Scabs glistened with a creamy pus where his ears had been hacked off, and his nose held no cartilage. Broken bits gathered like coral beneath the skin.
It was the creeper. But his disfigurement was not the work of some ancient evil.
Nu stepped out from the crowd. Ben hadn’t noticed her until then. She wasn’t like he remembered her. I don’t like wearing black, she had told him, and yet there she was. No longer crestfallen. No longer hiding her imperfections. The recesses of her skull were flooded with shadow and her once elfin face was wrought into the most devious illusion.
‘Now you know why the creeper would never choose me,’ she said. ‘I told you, I don’t look right. But he’s perfect. He’s the most perfect one I’ve ever seen.’
‘It was you all along,’ Ben said to the wasp. ‘All those murders, it was you.’
‘The creeper endures through us!’ he proclaimed.
The creeper was a man. He was many men. Each one chosen to carry out the curse in his name. He couldn’t magically appear outside his victims’ homes. Sparling had hidden away his entire life for nothing.
Aoife was safe. The Tír Mallachts couldn’t have known about her.
But the nature of their faith was deranged with contradiction. If the villagers deified the creeper as some otherworldly power, then why butcher their own into its image? Likewise, why hide away night after night, knowing that the threat was of their own making?
‘He’s just a man,’ Ben said, staring at the creature that couldn’t have looked any less human. ‘There’s no reason for—’
‘He is closer now to the almighty than you will ever understand,’ the wasp spat, cutting him off. ‘He is so much more than just a man. He has been chosen. It is fate, I know, that you should come here on this night to witness the festival of transcendence, when we stand safe beneath the stars, in the spirit of sacrifice, offering one of our own to the creeper’s eternal promise.’
Ben helped Chloe to her feet, crouching low so that she could reach an arm around his neck. Her foot hovered over the earth as she hobbled closer to the wasp, using Ben’s shoulder as a crutch.
Her fears were gone, ousted instead by a hatred for those holding them captive.
‘You’re all fucking psychos,’ she screamed. ‘It isn’t real. Can’t you get it through your stupid fucking heads? The creeper isn’t real! You don’t have to do this!’
Chloe had stepped too close. In the swiftest motion, the wasp gripped her by the throat. Ben was immediately wrested away from her. She faltered forward, suspended by the man’s hand, choking for air, receiving none. The villagers had seized Ben like wardens in an asylum. An arm locked around his neck from behind, and two other men rushed in to ensnare him from either side. Stronger than any straitjacket. His heels raked through the mud as they dragged him from Chloe’s side. The wasp released his grip and she crumbled to the ground. No attempt was made on her part to buffer the fall. The air had been strangled out of her. The weak ankle collapsed first, and the rest of her followed like a bag of bones.
‘You’ll do,’ the wasp said, looking down at Chloe as she gasped for air, pawing where his fingers had embedded their mark on her.
‘If you touch her,’ Ben shouted, ‘I swear I’ll—’
‘You’ll what?’ the wasp spat, suddenly staring at him as though he genuinely wanted an answer. ‘I’ll tell you what you’ll to do, boy. You’ll watch. You’ll watch all of it. Hold him down,’ he ordered the men now forcing Ben to his knees.
The wasp returned to the one disfigured into the creeper’s likeness, still held aloft, his head slumped lifelessly forward. With the gentlest touch of his hand, he lifted the man’s chin so that their eyes met. Both were human. But Ben could barely bring himself to look upon the tortured one so blessed as to receive this gift.
‘Can he stand?’ the wasp asked the men.
They exchanged a glance. One of them shook his head.
‘No matter,’ he said. ‘He can still kill.’
‘What?’ Ben screamed. ‘No! What are you doing?’
‘Silence him,’ the wasp requested.
The man holding Ben’s left arm swung his fist like a battering ram into his gut. He had never experienced a sensation like it, so beyond his pain threshold that it almost didn’t register. Tremors rippled around his body. Through the spots that peppered his vision he tried to breathe, but nothing came. Ben could feel his body deflating. Still, his handlers held him up.
‘Hold her down,’ the wasp said, beckoning three from the crowd.
Ben recognised one of them from his interviews; the simpleton enamoured by the long summer evenings. He had spoken so softly in the half-light of the stable with a kindness that was now just another lie sold to Ben amongst many others. His hands seized Chloe by her skinny calves, while the other two each pinned down an arm.
‘Bring him,’ the wasp ordered, moving aside so that the creeper now faced Chloe, his ghastly smile tearing against its stitches.
Ben couldn’t speak. He could hardly breathe.
‘His first life will be taken on this night,’ the wasp bellowed, arms held aloft, turning in a slow circle to meet the eyes of all those around him.
Chloe wriggled and squirmed on the ground. ‘No,’ she shrieked. ‘Let fucking go of me. Ben,’ she called out, but he couldn’t help. He couldn’t even call back to her.
The wasp knelt and seized Chloe’s jaw with his filthy fingers, muting her cries. ‘I’ll show you how real he is.’
Their creeper was laid atop her. His head fell beside hers as he snarled through those pointed teeth. Naked bones writhed into her body. The wasp released Chloe’s face, but not before slamming her skull back onto the ground. The impact must have all but knocked her out. This thing was on top of her and there was nothing she could do to escape.
Ben watched in horror as the creeper’s face rose above Chloe’s, inches apart, spittle and bile trickling from his mouth like tree sap. She didn’t scream. She couldn’t. Terror had taken her voice. His arms moved by sheer force of madness, drawing those crooked hands to her throat.
But the creeper’s broken fingers wouldn’t close around it. They pressed clumsily into Chloe’s skin as she blindly jerked her head back and forth to escape them.
His frustration manifested in the most feral of shrieks, like a skulk of foxes being slaughtered. With all his will he yearned to strangle her but his injuries prevented him. He examined his misshapen knuckles more closely like a child seeing their hands for the first time. Those bloated eyes were quaking in their sockets as the rage rose within him.
Another vicious scream startled the one pinning down Chloe’s right arm, toppling him backwards. It all happened so quickly. Her free hand grabbed the hammer from the pocket of her parka, raising it, aiming for the vile thing too focused on its lame fingers to notice. The villagers gasped in all that cold air as they anticipated the impact.
But the wasp’s gangly leg kicked Chloe’s arm mid-swing, sending the hammer flying out of her reach.
