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.
‘Hold her down, damn you!’ he roared.
Ben couldn’t believe it. She had come so close.
The creeper stared down at the hammer, recalling perhaps the pain such a tool could inflict; how one so similar had shattered his own bones with ease.
‘Please,’ Chloe cried, ‘just let me go.’
The wasp paced over to the hammer. He was seething over the near miss and his scowl lingered on the one who had relinquished her arm. Only when he held the tool did he take notice of the creeper’s fascination with it. He looked to Chloe, held down on all sides, defenceless. And then he returned his attention to the creeper, crouching beside him as though consoling an upset child.
‘Do you want this?’ he asked, presenting the hammer as a gift.
The wasp closed the creeper’s fingers around its handle, securing them in place. The bones cracked like brittle branches. He drew his hands away cautiously, like a father watching his son cycle for the first time. The hammer stayed. Those long, gnarled fingers had clamped around it. The creeper’s eyeballs almost popped out of his skull. The tool was seen to quiver as he turned to face Chloe, her arms spread wide, feet held together.
‘No,’ Chloe screamed. ‘Ben! Please.’
The meaty arm around Ben’s neck choked even harder. He could feel the blood gathering around his eyes and thought he might pass out. He couldn’t get to her. Ben couldn’t do anything to stop what was happening.
‘Now,’ the wasp said, standing back, ‘do it!’
The creeper towered over Chloe, raising the hammer high with those monstrous arms. She screamed from fear and for mercy; for the help that wasn’t coming. Ben watched it all, as the wasp had wanted him to. With an ear-splitting shriek the creeper brought the hammer down on Chloe’s face, again and again, until blood and broken bone were all that remained. The horror of it was so savage, so brutal, so sickening to accept as real that vomit seeped through Ben’s words as he called out for her. But she was dead from the first blow. Everything that followed served only to destroy the beauty and life that was now no more.
She was dead, and the night was alive with the screams of those responsible. Adults and children, they had all watched the bloody spectacle. They had done nothing to prevent it. Ben stared in nauseous repudiation at the bloody fur of Chloe’s hood. The chorus of their voices was deafening but Ben didn’t hear it. If he was still being held aloft or strangled in place, he was oblivious.
Chloe was lathered in that black, slimy mud. She didn’t look like herself. Maybe it wasn’t her. There were no short, silvered hairs. No bright eyes or big smile. There was only that thing astride her body, flailing those hideous arms in the air to riotous applause.
It was over.
Kill me. Just kill me now.
There was no alternative. Not anymore. Since Alec Sparling’s email pinged in the coffee shop, their fate’s trajectory was hurtling them towards this horrific finale. They were his sacrificial pawns. And their time on the board was up.
Ben’s parents had been right. He had no reason to fear myths and monsters. It was the people. It had always been the people.
Aoife was all he cared about now. Only one person in the world could lead the Tír Mallachts to her – Sparling. And one of their creepers was outside his home night after night, waiting to be seen. And what happens then? Do they raid his fortress of riches for all its worth? What if amongst Sparling’s effects there was a diary or written record of their project?
Benjamin French has a three-year old daughter that he chose to keep secret.
A single sentence was all it took.
Somewhere, far from Ben’s thoughts, the celebratory din was dissipating. He hadn’t even noticed the change. He saw only Chloe’s bloodied, unrecognisable remains and recalled the sight of the creeper raising and dropping that hammer. But now he imagined Aoife’s little legs stretched out, lifeless, beneath him.
‘And now,’ the wasp declared with his beady eyes set on Ben like a hangman paid in advance, ‘we have the one with all the questions. I tried telling you to leave, but did you listen? Three nights you’ve seen him, and I think you know by now that this will be your last.’
Dying didn’t worry him. The pain Ben could deal with. His failures, those duties left wanting, were his only concern – Aoife’s safety and the loss of the one good thing he stood to leave behind.
Still the men held him down, their limbs coiled around him like hoops of steel.
‘Come now,’ the wasp said to the creeper, stroking his skull like a pet, ‘you aren’t finished yet. No hammer this time,’ he added to the men who had held him up. ‘He needs to do this himself.’
They each took an arm and lifted him tenderly up from Chloe’s body. The creeper was giddy now. His eyes were two gross eggs, their pupils a black dilated dot, ogling the next sacrifice. Ben no longer struggled. Any one of those three brutes anchoring him into the mud could have held him without the others.
But he wasn’t done. Not yet. In his surrender he saw his only shot at redemption.
‘Just let me go,’ he said, barely above a whisper. ‘I’m not going to stop you.’
The wasp strode over to him. His eyes pinched tight. All those vile etchings on his skin coalesced into that smile Ben had come to detest.
‘What did you say?’
‘Just fucking kill me, you asshole,’ Ben replied.
The wasp’s gaze lingered on him, considering his conviction. This was what the bastard wanted – for his creeper to kill without weapon or assistance. His bloody rite of passage.
‘You submit to your death?’ he asked.
Ben spat in his face. ‘Fuck you! Just get it over with.’
The men held the creeper not ten feet away from where Ben was pinned down, looking to the wasp for their signal. That naked monstrosity was salivating at the sight of him; this man who Ben had tried to comfort. Chloe had even hoped to somehow save the bastard.
‘Release him,’ the wasp said, ‘but tie back his hands. We don’t want him doing anything stupid.’
They did as they were told. Their fleshly shackles were released. Ben gasped for air as one breaking above water. His knees sank into the ground like two pillars. He cracked his neck musically from side to side and stretched his arms as though loosening up for a fight. But the fight was over. All he had to do now was make sure it hadn’t been for nothing.
The ring of bodies surrounding him had loosened. Escape obviously wasn’t a possibility anymore; even the idiots knew that without being told.
In the mud, Ben finally noticed the ridged tracks, flooded with rainwater, where a tyre had been rolled across the common. Of course, they’d had the means to follow them. Their creeper couldn’t appear, like Sparling believed. The villagers knew the route that his perfect candidates took every two years.
Ben had known the truth all along. The certainty that such horrors weren’t real; the lesson his parents had taught him as a child – the same one that his fears had made him forget.
He dabbed his neck as he always did when he thought of his Aunt Patricia. He finally understood what she had seen all those years ago. And then, voluntarily – as though he had a choice – he brought his hands behind his back. There was no technique to the knot. But it would hold. Not that Ben ever intended to break it.
The wasp knelt in front of him. His long legs would only bring him so low. Ben still had to tilt his head to meet him in the eye; squinted like the slimy innards of an oyster.
‘If you try anything, I’ll kill you myself. And it won’t be quick, do you understand me?’
Ben just stared at him. What exactly did the man think he was capable of? Hands bound and surrounded, only a miracle could save him now. And only a miracle could save his little girl. With all that desperation exhausted, Ben had finally cracked open the hope. Corked or not, he wasn’t going to waste a drop.
‘Bring him,’ the wasp said.
Ben expected to die as Chloe had – on his back, his face like a nail waiting to be hammered into the earth. But he was wrong. The creeper’s bones were adjusted to mirror his own. On their knees, facing one another, it would kill him. And not with a hammer or some tool handpicked from the selection box in the nearby cottage. He would die by the creeper’s bare hands.
‘Stand back!’ the wasp shouted. ‘Everyone, back. He’s doing this alone.’
Ben knew that this was it. His last chance. He focused on those swollen eyes, ignoring every other ungodly feature on the creeper’s face. As mutilated as he was, he was still a man underneath his wounds.
‘Remember what I told you?’ Ben whispered, tears now racing down his cheeks. ‘It’s going to be okay. I’m sorry that they did this to you. But I need you to do something for me. Please, promise me this, and then you can kill me. I won’t stop you. You can give them what they want.’
The creeper’s smile was indifferent to his pleas, his face forever fixed in an expression conceived only to horrify. But the eyes locked with Ben’s. Through those pits in his skull that once held ears the creeper was listening.
‘Go to Alec Sparling’s. Fuck the rules. Kill him and burn his home so that nothing is left. Can you do that for me? I would have saved you if I could, but you can still save me.’
Ben may have imagined it, but the creeper seemed to nod his head, so subtly that even the ever-vigilant eyes of the wasp must have missed it.
‘What are you waiting for?’ he shouted. ‘Kill him!’
It was Ben’s turn. He took a deep breath and held his head high, exposing his neck. The creeper’s long fingers slowly wrapped around it as Ben closed his eyes. In his mind he saw his daughter for the last time, asleep and safe, dreaming of the beautiful life that lay ahead of her.