Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves
Saturday arrived too quickly for Wes’s liking. It was barely dawn when he started off, head clear as a bell, and by the time he got down to the poxy little parish where his kin flocked like spawning salmon, he was more awake but completely numb.
Hugo had woken up to kiss him goodbye, and every so often Wes touched his cheek on that spot, trying to recreate the kiss with the press of his own fingers, remembering what was real. Everything else, including the drive down the A road, was a vague blur, as if he’d been set to automatic.
When he got to Piddingdean he parked in a layby near the deconsecrated parish church and straightened his cravat in the mirror.
Showtime.
Christ, he missed cocaine.
Not that it was appropriate to snort a line off the back rest of the pew in front, but Wes had done far worse in far better places. All he knew was it was some kind of memorial service, and Jem had assured him everyone knew he was coming, and they were more or less fine with it.
He recognised the deadened look in a few of their faces, dressed the part in muted colours, but moving stiffly as if they’d just stepped off conveyer belts and were following some pre-programmed assignment. He, like them, flopped into his place in the pews with a sigh of resignation.
Some looked like they’d just given up. It was the first time he’d ever felt anything approaching solidarity towards them.
He sniffed sharply to keep up appearances, lounging back against the cold, hard wood, un-warmed by the afternoon sun, stretching his legs to keep anyone from sliding in beside him.
The coffin was already at the front, but it was only there for the ghoulish show of throwing names into it and committing them to the keeping of the Beast. Wes contemplated throwing his whole phone in, the address book its own memorial, too many numbers to go through and delete one at a time.
He shifted and spread his arms along the pew’s rounded back crest, the edging digging into his vertebrae as he feigned comfort. He bounced his foot on the floorboards, creating a constant creak.
People turned to stare.
He flashed his teeth and tongue inappropriately, clocking the demographic and the range of responses. There were very few elders in attendance, but that was because there were very few elders left. Mostly it was down to the middle-aged, and the newly appointed representatives of the next generation.
Some of them shot him glares that were pure hatred, and he didn’t blame them. They didn’t do anything, only turned away. Wes pressed his fingers to his cheek, reminding himself he had two loving reasons to go home.
He didn’t leave.
Kin crushed together in the narrow pews, filing in without music. Wes wished for something other than the awful dull murmur, echoing in the deconsecrated air.
He spotted Jem with some lithe, sandy-haired little twink who looked like he’d stepped out of Brideshead Revisited.
He remembered Archie in the King’s Head, and wondered if that was the brainwashed Theo Shaw. The lad looked like he didn’t have two braincells to rub together, but the one he did have was fully in service of Jem Foreman.
No accounting for taste, Wes thought uncharitably.
He didn’t try to attract their attention. They took their places on the other side of the church, several rows further down, and he lost them in the crowd of bobbing hats and veils.
All around him, the church seethed with the grief of the unholy.
By the time everyone was inside, Wes was already over the whole thing. It wasn’t just full of embodied family and the memories of their recently deceased nearest and dearest. It was full of ancestral ghosts, too.
This was where the Pendles had filled the pews since time immemorial, and where the vicar had gone insane in 1893 after a visit from the three Pendle sisters. The story went that Reverend Winborn recorded their sham marriages into the parish register, then flung himself from the bell tower and dashed himself to pieces on the gravestones.
Wes spotted the plaque of incumbents and vicars on the wall, where Winborn took his place between Revs. Starley and Allardyce. He wondered what they would make of this farce.
His attention wandered to the nineteenth-century stained glass windows, one of which was shattered, and shook his head as one of the Foreman elders approached the lectern with the soft, slow tread of the wedding march.
He rolled his eyes.
“Jesus.”
It slipped out, not quite under his breath, and someone in front tutted.
The robed elder was bloated with pompous self-importance despite his unassuming frame and godawful comb-over, a second-rate jobsworth in a second-rate suit. Wes lounged in his pew, curling his lip. Others were robed similarly to the old prick; he scanned the congregation and picked them out.
The elder used the liturgical bollocks that Gran had come up with for memorial services, and Wes mumbled his “blood and bone, branch and root” responses along with everyone else.
He flicked through the Order of Service lying next to him on the seat and time inched on, through pages and pages of utter arse-kissing shite praising Grandad and whoever the Head of the Family was now that Uncle Marcus was Beast-fodder.
Everyone stood on cue except him.
Wes let them all shuffle along to the front to fill the coffin with the names of their lost and gone, but he stayed put. He gripped his phone tightly, squeezing the casing hard. He hadn’t deleted the sibling group chat yet. Sometimes he scrolled back through it, and sometimes he couldn’t even bear to open the app to check his recent notifications.
He zoned out, stuck on vague memories of family barbecues in the summer and fights at Yule, the thoughtful little things his sisters did occasionally, and the way his brothers had looked up to him, or egged him on, or competed for his ‘party favours’ – Wes had gotten them to do all kinds of stupid shit for recreational freebies over the years.
By the time everyone returned to their seats, he was misty eyed and hollow. It took him a moment to register that some of them were bleeding; they had cut themselves at the altar rail, daubing blood on the empty coffin.
Wes rolled his jaw, scowling at the floor.
Finally, at long fucking last, they got to the part he was waiting for.
The elder leaned over the lectern. “Please open your Orders of Service, and if yours is bound with a red thread, please hold it up.”
Wes checked, but his was bound with grey.
He looked around the church.
Someone’s copy was held aloft.
“Who is that? Is that Daniel Wend?” The elder squinted out over the congregation.
The old goat must be two hundred years old if he’s a day, Wes thought. He’s more tentacle than torso by now, bloody hell. I hope Katy eats me before I get that bad.
“It is.”
Danny Wend was a gruff man in his fifties with an eye patch. He’d torn his eye out in tribute to Ricky a few months ago, so Wes wasn’t surprised he’d wound up in this gathering, serving the Death God. He was already pretty far gone before Wes’s video fucked with his head.
“Then the sacrifice is your honour, Daniel.”
Oh God.
Danny Wend was Cousin Layla’s stepfather, and counted her as his own daughter.
They’re sacrificing their own kids.
Wes heard Layla’s confused protests before she was forced from her seat, and realised she didn’t know what was going on. She was just here for the memorial.
The elder produced a ceremonial knife about as long as a machete.
Oh God.
Wes knew he should do something, but he couldn’t move. Nobody else was doing anything, either. He sat in rigid silence as Layla Wend-McVey started to scream.
She was a bloody good shag, I’ll give her that, Wes thought, but even though it was her fault he’d become Uncle Barry’s guinea pig and got hooked on Silver Lining in the first place since she’d ratted him out for stealing a bit of Uncle Barry’s Special K, he wasn’t there to watch her be gutted like a lamb.
He shot a quick text to Katy, which absolved him of responsibility.
Wes forced himself to appear relaxed, but couldn’t stop his foot tapping on the floor.
Layla, more outbred than most of the family, with her hair dyed ash-blonde and cornflower blue eyes, fought with everything she had as they dragged her down the aisle to the coffin and the knife-bearing elder.
Wes lost sight of her beneath a crush of bodies, and when she re-emerged, it was as a bucking, unwilling crowd surfer, held up and bound by thick tentacles, tendrils and hard, strong hands.
“Hold her,” the elder commanded.
“Uncle Danny, please,” Layla sobbed, but Uncle Danny had not followed her sombrely down the aisle to stop the sacrifice, but to do the deed himself.
He took the knife and raised his good eye to the church ceiling.
Layla tried one more time to free herself, and managed to make two people drop her, so she could at least twist onto her side while the others tried to force her to be still. Her glory ripped through her trouser suit, a prehensile tongue-like appendage from her navel, and the wicked mouth on its end slashed at Uncle Danny’s back.
He rounded on her and the knife sliced through it, severing her glory completely. It hit the floor.
Layla screeched in pain.
Wes blinked. He cut her fucking glory off? Holy shit, Katherine, hurry the fuck up.
“We offer our best to the Beast!” Uncle Danny intoned over her. “We sacrifice the ones we love to pave the way for the Great One to return to us, so that the Remnant may Ascend.”
How? Where’s the fucking logic? Wes shifted to the edge of the pew, nails scoring the wood. Where the hell is Katy?
The air rippled, swimming in a localised haze above the altar.
Wes exhaled.
“All hail the Beast,” he said out loud, and now it wasn’t only Layla screaming.
It burst from one reality into another, ravenous and wild.
Morsels of flesh prostrated or turned to run, their juicy meat sacks crushing together in their haste for the doors.
The Beast licked up as many as it liked, shredding them in its petalled maw and gulping down their prayers and pleas.
It had no preference, but in some it tasted something new, something its human-passing form had a name for; the citrus tang of righteousness.
“All hail the Beast!” an elder cried, on his knees.
The Beast honoured his praise by crushing him under its great clawed hoof.
There was someone else on the ground by the altar rail, a huddled figure aglow with shades of panic and agony, whose tears stank of the confusion of the betrayed. She was wounded; her glory lay on the ground, limp and bloody.
The Beast paused.
She was small, a kitten-like creature, curled in a ball, begging for her life. Her eyes reflected the impossible vastness of her god, warping the dimensions of the space around them. The Beast reared, expanding. There was nothing for its worshipper now but the grey seal-hide sky, which was its skin, nothing but the glow of the desolate twin suns flecked with constellations of voids, which were its eyes.
The worshipper swooned in ecstatic, perfect terror.
The Beast contemplated it for a moment, and finally, graciously, surprising even itself, had mercy. More than mercy. The Beast scooped up the unconscious titbit in the trumpet-folds of jaws, but did not swallow. It wanted to protect.
Leaving the severed glory where it lay, the Beast found the location of somewhere familiar and safe nestled in its passenger’s head, and jumped with her into the void.
a few hours after the memorial, following a few much-needed glasses of red at the country club and a fortifying vegan meal. He left his car there, and called a taxi.
It wasn’t just that he wanted to reinforce his newfound responsible side. The sight of the Beast, and the whole damn day, in fact, had triggered things in him he didn’t like, and he didn’t feel that safe to drive.
Wes waited for a minute until the taxi was out of the gates and gone, getting himself together, but the house only watched him with an unwarranted sternness. The windows seemed trained on him, reflecting a sky bathed in burnt orange and virulent fever-pink. He admired the whole effect for a moment, almost forgetting why he was there.
It was a truly gorgeous building, a sexy heap of local stone and seventeenth-century timber. If it only had a swimming pool and a tennis court, it would be perfect.
He briefly pressed his lips to the brass front door knocker as if to the back of her hand and the door creaked reluctantly open.
God, it really was too grand for a man who thought tracksuits were the height of fashion. He strolled over to the polished newel post and trailed his fingers over the smooth wood, stroking lightly up and down.
“I hope you are feeling properly appreciated,” he said, cocking an eyebrow at the bannisters. “Does he ever take you out? When you’re Carrie, I mean?”
Draughts gusted around him in a gentle sigh.
…What do you want, Wes?
“That’s a big question,” Wes admitted. “It’s been a really, really… messed up sort of day. I’ve had a few glasses of wine. Sorry. Ignore me, is my cousin in?”
…Yes. I had to remind him you were coming.
…Don’t wind him up.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
The living room door swung open in response, and he took this as a sign to wait there instead.
“Thank you.”
Wes didn’t have very long to wait, as if Ricky didn’t want him being alone with her for long. He stopped pretending to check out the mantelpiece when Ricky came in. He cast a critical glance over his cousin, who swaggered topless over to the sofa and threw himself full-length onto it with a lift of his chin in greeting. He was unwashed, of course, and the smell of sweat and death made Wes want to scrub his skin off in a boiling shower. There was an underlying hint of ammonia he didn’t want to think about – fuck knew when he’d changed his clothes. Didn’t Carrie normally make him do that?
The livid, deep scar along Ricky’s side made Wes wince. It ran from his chest to his hip in an angry, rough curve, and Wes got a glimpse of it before Ricky hid it from view by draping an arm across his belly.
He nearly said something, but couldn’t think of the right thing to say.
“Wesley.”
“Richard, darling. Honoured to be granted an audience with our most elusive deity.”
Ricky snorted and put an arm behind his head, feet up. “To what do we owe this pleasure, then?”
Wes eyed him. “Need to talk to you. It’s important.”
“Yeah, I got that.” Ricky turned his head and returned the critical stare, looking him up and down. “You sure you’re not still taking those pills after I told you not to?”
“That’s rich,” Wes snapped, but recovered. “No, I’m not. Still not. You can applaud if you like.”
Ricky wrapped an arm across his softened stomach, sulky. “What did you see this time? I assume that’s why you’re here.”
“Right.” Wes didn’t want to tell him. He paced, and Ricky watched him placidly from the sofa with growing scepticism.
Wes forced himself to a standstill, one knee practically vibrating as he faced his cousin. He took a deep breath, and took the plunge, things tumbling out in the wrong order.
“You die, long story short. In all three visions I had. New ones. I had new visions, of you, being killed. By some cult, I think. They had a memorial service today, did you know about that? They were going to sacrifice Layla, and they cut her glory off.” He chanced a look at his cousin, who didn’t look surprised.
“Saw that in the pigeons,” Ricky murmured. “Lots of death. And one that got away.”
“Bet you didn’t see yourself.” Wes was shivering, but it wasn’t cold. “Not like I did. And you were dead dead, unless you can come back from decapitation.” Emotion cracked his voice, and he wasn’t sure why or where it was coming from. Why did everything to do with Richard bloody Porter have to be so fucking complicated? “You die, I think, so that these robed cunts can open a portal to the Outside with a shrine and let Grandad through. And they… have a way to subdue you, each time.”
Ricky’s lips twitched in a smile that, to Wes, read like a slash of pain. He held up a hand and let the signet rings glint in the light. There wasn’t much of the gilt left to glint.
“Wyrd biđ ful aræd,” he said.
Wes closed his eyes. He only knew what that meant because it was Ricky’s favourite phrase.
Fate is inexorable.
“Fuck that. Fuck that fate shit. You can’t know. You actually want one of them to rip your fucking head off and use it as a football? I’m trying to join the bastard cult thing to keep an eye on them, and you’re here not giving a shit?”
“You what?” Ricky scowled, staring at him.
Get it together, Wesley.
“You heard.” He ground his teeth. “Should I not have bothered? I’m sure Jem Foreman’s something to do with it, but there we go, you do with that information what you want. I’m out.”
Ricky sat up, incredulous. “You shouldn’t have been ‘in’ to begin with, that was really bloody stupid.” He rubbed his face and covered his mouth.
“I did it for you, and Katy.” Wes decided to lay all his cards out, numbness reasserting itself. “And they’re offering some pretty tempting shit, like, you know, Ascension for all, so.”
“Stop it.” Ricky dropped his hands and looked haggard.
Wes let out a grunt of frustration that was mainly at himself. “Look, maybe you come back, I don’t know. I didn’t see that part.”
“If they chop my bleedin’ head off, that’s not likely to happen, is it?”
Wes couldn’t argue with that.
They rode out the moody silence for a while until Wes trusted himself to say something that wouldn’t piss his cousin off. He shook his head and came closer, closing the gap as much as he judged appropriate.
Ricky shifted his leg and Wes took that as permission to rest his back against the sofa next to him, hunkered on the floorboards.
He kept quiet.
Wes caught sight of a stain on Ricky’s trouser leg and didn’t want to think about what his cousin had been doing for what smelled like days. How could she stand it, him ripping things open down there, infusing things in the dark, letting things fester and rot on purpose?
He forced himself to breathe through his nose. “You can talk to me. If you want.”
Ricky rubbed his stomach as a small bulge appeared, shifted, and disappeared. “You said we never liked each other.”
Wes licked his lips, caught off guard. “When?”
“When we was carting our Katherine around in the Outside, remember? You said—”
“Oh, forget that. I was probably talking for the sake of something to say.” By some miracle, his memory became accurate, and the conversation swam back into focus. He snorted. “And that’s not what I said at all, I asked you if we ever liked each other, and then I said we must have done.”
“You said, ‘The more I think about it, we’ve always been like this’.” Ricky shook his head. “So what exactly do I have to say to you? She’s better off without me, too, ain’t she? Not like I’m her master.”
“Blow me,” Wes snapped, giving up. “I genuinely considered joining a death cult for you.”
Ricky shook his head, this part clearly not computing. “You’ll join a cult for me, but you don’t bother to come round when you say you will?”
Wes remembered he was supposed to have taken Ricky out again the previous weekend, and hadn’t. He’d had the visions instead, and it had taken him a whole week to get around to telling him. He shelved this for later.
“Look, don’t ask me why, but I don’t especially want you to get your head ripped off by some wanky cult, that’s all I’m saying. Even though you’re pretty much asking for it most of the time.”
Ricky was silent, and Wes wasn’t sure he was even listening.
“I do mean it,” Wes said finally, a little softer. “I’m not great at – sticking to things, or keeping in touch, I guess, but I do want you around. It might not count for much, given it’s clearly because I’m a lonely selfish bastard, but…” He trailed off before he said something bitter. “Hey, it’s getting late. How about we pick this up tomorrow? No personal chit-chat, all business, stick to the topic, yeah? We can… Can we chat about what I saw? What d’you think it means?”
Ricky grunted. “Means you’re a bloody amateur.”
Wes rolled his eyes. “I think I saw options. If I saw three, maybe there’s one where you don’t die—”
“That’s not how it works,” Ricky asserted, heaving himself upright. He scratched the back of his neck, and Wes saw how tired he was, how he was weighted with it, how it tugged at his bones and his months-old skin. “What you see is what you see. Just you don’t… see it clear. I don’t know why. All I see is death. Whenever I look, that’s all the omens show me.”
Wes flicked his eyes up and down Ricky’s body out of habit, reading the softened contours and lack of stretch marks where the coils pushed and strained within him, pasty rather than merely pale. His abs were gone, but that was probably a good thing; he’d been gaunt and not eating right for months before his big crisis point, all skin and sinew and wasting muscle and bone. He didn’t exactly look any healthier now, though. Just different.
He tried not to stare at the scars.
Something twisted inside him. He impulsively grabbed Ricky’s leg to stop him walking away.
His cousin looked down and cocked his head.
“You alright?” It was a low, soft, loaded question.
Wes let go. “No. Are you?”
Ricky blinked and looked away. Silence hung between them again. Then Ricky ran both hands over the top of his head and stretched, as if it wasn’t important. He shot Wes a look that was hard to read.
“You staying the night?”
Wes shook his head. “I didn’t want to presume, so I got a hotel. Hope that’s not rude.”
“You can see yourself out, then. And I prob’ly won’t be here tomorrow.”
“So that’s that, then.” Wes stood up, antsy with frustration, as Ricky slouched to the door.
The man’s back was a mess of livid scar tissue and gouges, deep slashes across his spine and criss-crossing over his ribs.
Uncle George, what a bastard.
He knew he ought to leave well alone, but he couldn’t help himself.
“Hey, it’s none of my business, but can I just say…” He looked away, swallowing, as Ricky turned to fix him with a flat, dead stare. “I know a good thing when I see it. What you’ve got here, with her, whatever you want to call it or not call it, is… a good thing. And… and I’m pleased for you. Just saying. Forget all that ‘master’, ‘mistress’ shit. If you ever get the mad urge to give up, to throw it all down the drain for whatever stupid reason, don’t. She doesn’t deserve that. And neither do you.”
Ricky left the room.
Wes waited a while before venturing outside, the house warmer and kinder in the meantime. He called another taxi and waited on the porch, biting his nails in lieu of a cigarette until it arrived.