[PRP] Still on the loose (Lawr) (tw: horror)

[Baneful]

Leave.

It was February and a new set of days he could squander on whatever he wished now nestled in his grasp. Last month it had been spent using his hard earned wages to stabilise his personas and prepare himself for the long haul on this tedious island. This month, there was freedom and space to do as he willed, to test some curious theories he'd been nursing while perhaps settling some petty grievances.

He arrived at the portals at the time he had booked in advance, a single slot of free time, and the oh so helpful individuals manning the technology had set it up so that he could simply walk right through. He chose to dress as Jan that day, because it would be simpler if he did and because they would remember Jan. She would remember Jan.

The time he'd spent with America had roused stowed memories, memories of one of the many women in his life, one he'd almost managed to destroy entirely, distracted in the very heart of his machinations by those damnable fraud investigators. He'd fled and she'd lived.

Her name had been Susan. Or rather, it was Susan, in the sense she still wore that title. But she had been such an unimportant factor for so long, stowed on a dusty mental shelf that she might as well have turned it in like a badge when he left her. His daughter was called Melody, a name he chose because he had hoped - in error - that linking her to music would make it possible to love her.

When he'd left, gone to the US they both ceased to serve a purpose, no longer financially fertile or emotionally interesting.

But today, here and now they would serve one final function, a test of the severity and truth of what he'd been told about leaving. And a bit of entertainment besides.

He hadn't laid eyes on either of them in ten years, but he had kept track of where they lived, right up until Wonder Park, because he was nothing if not meticulous. He knew what school Melody went to, that Susan had found herself a new man and remarried and he wasn't angry about it, he didn't feel anything at all about her relationships. But the thought of what he was about to do brought him close to a emotion, close enough he felt like he could glimpse it through the numb glass that partitioned him from the rest of the world.

Butch asked, looking uncomprehending on the razor tangle of his hunter's thoughts ever.>

The corner of his mouth twitched in a smile, but it was simply a reply to the ghost rather than a genuine expression.

The bus wound its way through the quiet English town and he watched it roll by. He knew the semi-detached where she lived by heart.

The mortgage had been in her name after all.


 

[Baneful]

He missed the UK. He'd been gone so long. It had taught him to leap through hoops made of paperwork, taught him the value of fraudulent personalities, of a myriad of passports. He'd been invisible and yet entirely visible, a shifting plethora of unfocused identities, and they'd paid him. Oh they'd paid him so much. And he had never felt guilty because why on earth should anyone ever be guilty about being more than a human.

Getting off the bus, he felt like a god, the little people going about their day to day tasks around him, unaware that he could summon great talons and murder them any moment he felt. Simply the knowledge that he could was satisfaction enough. He moved on the face of the earth and felt more than ever that he could change it.

It was a short walk to the house, the hedges far higher than he remembered.

There was a pink bike unattended in the driveway.

Melody would be fourteen now. He wondered if she was still blonde, imagining ringlets and a smile and her mother's green eyes.

His heart should have been racing, but it was not. He was not afraid, there was no problem, he was declared dead. Doubly so. He'd been dead to them a long time, and yet here he was. Death was not the end, no one ever really got away from him.



 

[lizbot]

Come and see.  

[Baneful]

It was Sunday. They'd all be home. It was still dusk, the sun skirting the sky with pink and little else. The street lights weren't even out yet, casting everything with that colour sapping yellow glow that was somehow worse than darkness.

He eyed the front door. It would be locked. Double bolted with a yale and a chain. Families tended to take such precaution when they were protecting their precious children.

Butch said, an intensity in his tone, all quivering obedience and focus.

For the first time since he'd bonded with the weapon, he was inclined to oblige him. He opened the gate, sidling into the garden and closing it behind him with a click. He veered off of the path towards the garage and around, when he was out of sight of the street, summoning the lethal looking claws with their completely white runes and using them and Butch's natural combat talents to scale the building like a stray.

The bathroom window was nothing at all to pry open with the aid of the sleek blue claw blades and he desummoned the weapon the moment he set foot on the plush new-looking bath mats. The smell inside assaulted his senses painfully, too much air freshener and aerosol plug-ins. No pets. He wasn't sure why he knew they had no pets. It was just a clear fact.

Butch growled low and pleased.

He knew the house. It hadn't changed. The wallpaper and paint had, the bathroom set, but the layout would be the same.

Susan's bedroom would be next door. Melody's bedroom down the hall. And somewhere too, likely the same place as Susan would wait this new husband without a face who had picked up the pieces and likely undone so much good work already.

 

[lizbot]

Somewhere in the world, the soft, hollow clatter of bones stilled and waited.  

[Baneful]

In the end ego won out. Susan was important, she had waited too long for her just desserts, but there was something fascinating and enticing about his daughter. He wanted to see if she looked like him, if there was anything of him left in her appearance. And part of him wondered too if she felt the numbness, the cold frozen distance that made the world feel like puppets on a stage he was weary of.

He moved slowly and carefully - unhurried because only fear held the reigns to haste and terror, and he was not afraid - opening the bathroom door and stepping into the hallway.

There, he paused, closing his eyes and truly listening to the numb ambience of the silence. In the master bedroom he could hear the steady bandsaw snoring of two people, rhythmic but out of sync. Humans made terrible compositions left to their own devices. But they were deep in sleep, slow and steady, not scattered with the stirring snuffles and snorts of the waking as they tossed and turned.

He went along the hall. The door was ajar, just a fraction and it made it all too easy to push it the rest of the way with his elbow.

She was asleep. And she did not look like him. Though perhaps that was because in his minds eye, he had no face. There was nothing but a blur of uncertain shapes and lines, prosthetics, makeup and wigs. Underneath he felt like he might as well have no face at all, smooth and shapeless, whatever it needed to be. How could he have hoped that looking at her might give him some hint of how he was supposed to look under all the masks?

All she was was a girl, and true she was blonde. But dirty blonde, not the platinum white he had been born with and still sported, though shorn down to the roots. She looked a lot like her mother, and that too made his stomach twist in revulsion, his hands dropping into claws.

But he couldn't dispose of them. That would taint the results, spoil the experiment.

Melody slept on, unaware of the danger she was in as Lawr sought out that void in him where love and affection should be, and in once again finding it numb lacking and vacant, wished to destroy that which had prompted him in any way to feel deficient. He was incapable of failing, something as perfect as him did not fail. If there was a void in him, evolution must have created it, to make him divine, nature had torn out the faults.

She rolled over and he froze, not breathing, and in her dreams murmured something unintelligible.

And then after a drawn out silence, resumed the slow steady breathing of the dreaming
 

[lizbot]

Street lights flickered on one by one, casting dim shadows throughout the house. One by one, they darkened again,  

[Baneful]

Lawr looked up at the surreal shift in lighting, startled out of his reverie. He looked up just in time to see the street lights go back off again and for the first time since he'd stepped through the portal, hesitated.

<> he checked. Despite the ghost's manic unpredictability, they shared senses. It was only sensible to confirm.

the canine rasped in response.

He filed it away for reference, giving the small girl, comfortable in her dreams one last look. And then he left the bedroom with its frivolous decor to slink along the hallway towards the master bedroom. Opening this particular door was no problem thanks to the raucous snoring from within, simply timing the creak to coincide.

Inside she lay, older looking now, though no different than he recalled, twined up in the arms of another man. This guy was unhealthy looking, wearing weight in all the wrong places, snoring unattractively, nude and splayed half out of the sheets. Weather-ruddy skin and shirt lines said he worked outdoors. He curled his lip in reflexive disgust, sure he could smell the man from here.

She had downgraded.

It was exactly as he'd expected, left struggling with no money she would desperately latch wherever she could, it was what he had wanted to prevent. In an ideal world he would have preserved her forever beautiful, forever hopelessly in love with him. Forever in his power.

But now she was fallen from grace, one of the sinners he had no space for. He couldn't tolerate her still occupying even a moment's concern in his thoughts.

She was a book he needed to close the cover upon.
 

[lizbot]

Something small and light fluttered against the back of his neck. A clatter sounded at his feet, but looking down he was met with only bare flooring and whatever dark spaces the furniture obscured.  

[Baneful]

He froze once again, forgoing even breath as the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He looked behind himself briefly, before finding his gaze sharply drawn downwards at the clatter, only to see nothing at all. It was not fear but tightly wound caution that slithered into his mind, pulling his already drawn senses even tighter. He checked the room, but there was nothing and he reminded himself there were absolutely no pets.

On the bed the snoring juddered, halted and mercifully resumed.

He stepped closer, scanning the furniture for something with some weight to it. In theory he could knock the brute out and cover Susan's mouth with some claws before she could even make a sound. No one would believe she spoke to a dead man.

But still, he wasn't naive enough any longer to simply dismiss strange events as simply his mind playing tricks. His mind did not play tricks, it executed exceptional manoeuvres and that was all. There was something else at play here and he very patiently, very carefully moved to get a better view of the room before him just to be sure, his own breathing unconsciously lapsing in time with the two oblivious inhabitants.

There was a decorative paperweight on the night stand. One of those marbled rocks the unimaginative purchased on a whim. What a helpful whim that looked to be.

 

[lizbot]

There was a soft tap at the window, and once again a street light gently brightened the room. Against the glass, the small body of an insect fretted and flittered.  

[Baneful]

The room appeared to be clear, the street lights outside were still behaving oddly. That could also work to his advantage.

Slowly, patiently he made his way to the side of the bed and hefted the rock in his hands, it was even heavier than it looked. He flicked his gaze to pathetic mess of a man still snoring like a walrus before him.

He narrowed his eyes.

With a crack like a coconut being broken open, he smacked the back of the man's head as firmly as he could, and in the same fluid motion leapt forward like an attacking dog summoning forth the long, deadly claws that were Butch. He seized Susan's throat while she was still asleep and pinned her with his knees it was with a startled yelp she opened her eyes. The man by her side did not stir.

"If you say one word. One solitary word." he said levelly, his voice soft untainted by adrenaline or anxiety. "I will slit your throat. And then Melody's." Her eyes went wide, all absurd whites as she recognised who she was speaking to.

"You get to be part of a little experiment I am executing. Hah. Executing. And you said I never had a sense of humour."

He didn't smile.

 

[lizbot]

Tap. The light began to fill with small, frantic shadows. Taptap. Two more insects joined the first. Tap. Three.  

[Baneful]

He could feel her shivering in fear and he felt nothing but disgust. It made no sense for her to be shaking like a captive deer, one was either alive or one was not, it made no difference to behave undignified in the intermediary. Jan had been afraid, and he had learned how to emulate it from her. He could see it in her expression how he'd stepped out of her nightmares and into her room. It wasn't like she was wrong, he could kill her if he wanted to, but he had no intention or reason to here and her weakness irritated him.

He let go with one of the lethal claws but kept one around it, thumb pushed against her neck. With the other he reached up with one of the blue blades and wiped away a tear. First shaking now crying, people were truly pathetic when they were afraid, it turned his stomach.

"Now I am going to tell you some things and you are going to listen because I want you to know them. I am still alive. I am the man you think I am. And I am more now than when you ever knew me. These claws aren't just for decoration." his features were lit oddly by the reflected light from the white runes and the strange light at the window.

Movement caught his peripheral vision and he dismissed it. "I never intended to leave you." he said, his voice low, leaning in close to her features, close enough to brush his lips against her cheek as he spoke. "I wanted to keep you forever exactly the way I wanted you. But it was ruined, and now so are you. It is your own fault you are old, your own fault I have had to come back."

She tried to speak and he tightened his grip, strangling it off. "No. Don't speak. Don't speak until I am gone."

Her eyes darted sidelong to her husband and Lawr smiled, a rare gesture when it wasn't tied to any emotion at all. "He's probably still alive. I just gave him a little knock. But I am no surgeon."

 

[lizbot]

The window began to fill with small, jerking forms and their dull taps were soon accompanied by the rustle of hundreds of little wings, joining together in a rasping chorus that whispered against every window of the house.

Come and see.