Ben didn’t know what finish line now awaited them. Whether it were a strip of coloured paper or a serrated wire cut just as convincingly, he would charge right through it. The end was the end regardless.
Streams of sludge wept under their feet as they neared the hilltop. Behind the trees’ jagged silhouettes – black against a burning sky – stood Tír Mallacht’s church; deconsecrated, defaced, but by no means abandoned. Not on this night.
Through the church’s fallen ceiling the misty air was aglow.
There were voices chanting in harmony, and in the lulls between their lament could be heard the one leading the ceremony. The man’s words echoed too high and fleeting to make sense of at that distance. But his conviction was without dispute. No volume of voice could ever reach the heights of his faith.
The walls of the churchyard were a mass of briars, alive in the dying light of day when slight, insignificant things masquerade as something more, their wispy arms seeking to snag any who stepped too close.
Ben knew they couldn’t afford to delay. But until he knew what was happening, it was safer to remain undetected. The art of secrecy – the villagers’ time-worn mantra since their lives were cursed – was now their own safest option.
The path led his eyes within to where firelight flickered and dark bodies stood. The doorway was too narrow and the shadows too enlivened by the many flames that burned there to make sense of anything else. The last of the daylight was dying, like a candle’s wick without wax. Ben looked back at Chloe and pointed to the cemetery on the northern side. It was there that a section of masonry had collapsed outward, not far from the altar. He led the way, tugging aside branches and stomping down on clots of weed until eventually he tripped into the open.
The mismatched gravestones each held their own ungainly shadow. They loomed low in the dusk like an army of forgotten oddities. Ben crept by the church’s wall. The fallen rubble was lacquered in a thin gloss of firelight. It guided him through the darkness, inch by painful inch. Whatever bones he could still feel were pulsating as though their very marrow was being furiously churned.
The chanting intensified when they reached the fissure. Ben aligned his back against the cold stone and peered inward. There he saw the wasp, standing alone at the altar, his body wrapped in a black cloak or habit with a loose hood pulled over his head.
Ben drew back out of sight, convinced in that terrifying second that their eyes had met.
It was his voice they had heard.
The night was too close for the Tír Mallachts to observe their curfew. If the village in its entirety had turned out for some celebration, then surely the curse had been lifted.
Chloe held a hand to Ben’s shoulder, helping him stay upright on his haunches as he angled again towards the opening. This time he looked back into the roofless nave where the flames burned brightest.
There he saw their bodies thronged together; their faces all turned eagerly towards the altar. They were dressed as the one who spoke before them. Some held aloft torches of fire; wooden stakes with a lump of peat stabbed through the spear, their smoke billowing into the sky. Waves of light splashed across the high walls, leaving the church’s lower reaches in darkness. Shadows were many, feeding on the firelight and dancing everywhere like devils.
What Ben saw defied any Christian conventions he knew of. The wasp was no makeshift clergyman. And those standing gaunt and wild-eyed in front of him held no spiritual ties to Christianity.
They were, each of them, dressed as the creeper.
Ben watched as the Tír Mallachts removed their cowls. The impression of all those faces – ill-proportioned and malformed – was startling to behold. No single countenance had been born without some defect of the bone or misplacement of feature. Alone such flaws instilled a sense of pity, but together – unified and beaming amidst the shadows with rapturous zeal – they were truly terrifying.
Ben retreated as any one of their many eyes could have seen him.
Chloe’s face emerged from the darkness. ‘We’re out of time.’
Night’s awakening was complete. The dim glow by the wall’s debris was all that broke the black. Ben reached for her hand – fingers cold as his own – and held it tight. Squatted together, amidst the lank weeds of Tír Mallacht’s cemetery, they would await the end.
Was the creeper out there, watching them, savouring in their last moments? Chloe buried her head in Ben’s shoulder. The eerie chants echoed all the louder with his eyes shut.
There was a rustling, back from where they had slipped by the church’s corner. Somebody was there. Whoever it was, their step was silent, but branches could be heard to bend and whip.
They were getting closer.
The creeper was upon them.
This is it. This is how it ends.
‘Found you!’
It was the girl from the village. She sounded as though she were standing right beside them, but so lightless was the night that Ben couldn’t see beyond the glowing crevice.
‘They’re here!’ the child screamed, like a siren to all those inside.
In the merciless dark, Ben listened to the shuffling of their many bodies. They were coming for them. The firelight seeping through the wall’s weakness was suddenly blocked. The wasp’s long strides had brought him to within an arm’s reach of where they hid. There was a phlegmy growl to his every breath, like a hound searching for a scent. Not waiting for his head to crane around the corner, Ben hoisted Chloe to her feet. He could barely stand but his first instinct was to run. She was loath to enter the darkness at first, tentatively dipping her hands into the unknown, peeling aside branches as though each one held a tripwire with an orchestra of bells overhead. They felt their way along the wall, forcing through those invisible snares that toiled to tie them down.
Ben had acquiesced to the end. He had closed his eyes for what he thought was the last time. It was almost dignified. Should the villagers find and capture them, however, he knew what fate would befall him – torture, with the child responsible caressing his wounds with grubby, bloodstained fingers.
‘Hurry,’ the girl screamed from the darkness, ‘they’re getting away.’
Ben looked back just as the wasp’s head poked out from the breach. He couldn’t possibly have seen them.
‘Where are we going?’ Chloe shrieked, reaching back for Ben in the darkness.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he replied, fumbling for her hand. ‘Just run!’
There was nowhere to hide; no sanctuary from the storm of voices now thundering as one. These people knew every inch of that land. And in the absence of light, they could travel it without second-guessing a step.
Ben and Chloe dashed through the open gate. Neither looked back to see their pursuers, but there was no ignoring the glare of their flames as they crossed by the doorway.
The sudden sense of emptiness outside the churchyard was disorientating. They stepped off the world, into a lightless abyss inhabited by the horrors that called it home. It was too easy to get separated. Ben patted down Chloe’s arm and recaptured her hand.
‘Leave the torches off,’ he whispered.
‘How are we supposed to see where we’re going?’
‘Just hold on to me.’
The pathway rose and fell in ways that defied memory’s expectations. There was no knowing how far they would get before their inevitable collapse. It just had to be far enough so that the villagers would never find them.
The torches flared through the archway, merging into a living, breathing blaze of fire, chasing them like hell’s private army. The strongest legs amongst them led the stampede, their hooded silhouettes fighting forward, vying to fall upon their quarry.
Negotiating those windy laneways blind was too slow. The thought crossed Ben’s mind to divert from what they knew; to take their chances in the untravelled fields beyond. But was there anywhere they could hide that the villagers wouldn’t find them? Their tracks in the flooded clay trailed behind them like breadcrumbs.
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.