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 Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2014 6:11 am
Still strained in the silence for any sound of Melody waking, Lawr froze, loosing his grip so Susan could breathe, sure he could hear something. Someone. Speaking.
Butch snarled, low, mental hackles raised, and the sound chilled Lawr further.
"I'm officially dead, so don't bother going to the police, they won't believe you. They won't ever find me. It was your fault I left back then, everything was always your fault."
She made a squeaking sound and he glanced at the window, suddenly full of tiny flapping bodies, and immediately dread sidled into his gut. He wasn't easily scared, but this was not quite right and when things turned for the strange, these days it usually meant it was about to careen off into places he didn't want to be.
"Now I am going to let go. And if you move. If you try and phone the police, if you try and run, I am going to cut you down with speed that will blow your mind. Don't think I won't. And you know well enough I do not ask twice." He released her neck. And she sobbed, only sobbed, whispering low now and then please. He let her shake the man beside her, to no avail and he moved a little nearer to the window, eyes narrowed, keeping both of them in his peripheral view, feeling Butch watching the two while he did not.
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Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2014 6:28 am
Through a shifting frame of small bodies, he'd notice that the house now sat alone in a single pool of soft light, the rest of the neighborhood obscured by darkness. On the lawn a figure stood, staring silently up at him.
There's a lightness on his body, where there was once something small and important, there is now a very distinct lack.
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Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2014 6:43 am
Something was undeniably off, outside it had been slowly breaking into morning, now it was nothing but a yawning sort of darkness. And there was someone out there, looking at him. There was nothing he liked less than to be looked at. Especially when he stood as he did now, without the safe shield of a persona to keep people at bay. Jan wouldn't hurt Susan, Jan had loved Susan and her money as much as it was possible for a fabrication to love anything.
Susan was weeping, a sad stifled sound and it took him back to when she'd told him she was expecting, despite all the precautions in the world, that she was sorry, it wasn't what they wanted right then. But it had been what he wanted, all the precautions in the world could not overcome sabotage.
And once again here she was, subject to his whims. Of course she was. He could not afford to be afraid of this situation, of this person, of the darkness, of the wrongness. Fear was where they lived and fear was for people who had the luxury of other emotions to keep it company. He curled his lip again and turned back to her, the sensation of something missing playing upon his thoughts. He made Butch check it out, making the canine be good for something at least while he spoke.
"It appears that we, most likely you, are in grave danger. You told me that time that misfortune seemed to follow me. I am inclined to agree."
She gave him a horrified look and spoke regardless, her voice ragged and desperate. "Jan, Jan, honey I never meant those things. You.. y.. you said it was fine. I'm sss..ss.s.sorry, whatever happened we - we can work it out. Me..melody.." he jabbed a bladed finger in her direction.
"I told you to shut up." he said brusquely,
The pendant?
His hand flew to his chest and came up empty.
He kept his cool. It was a problem, problems simply required solutions. "Anything that I tell you to do, you do, understand?" he stated calmly. She nodded.
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Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2014 6:49 am
The light changed yet again, and the next he glanced out the window, all was clear and expected, turning the previous sight into something from a dream. There was no darkness, no insects, no waiting figure. A waking hallucination.
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Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2014 6:50 am
The sound of the front door opening filled the house.
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Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2014 6:59 am
He shot a look out the window. The world was back, everything was normal, and for the first time since he'd first laid eyes on the creatures at Wonder Park, he began to doubt the veracity of his own senses. Even with Butch double checking things he could not be certain it wasn't his own eyes that were to be doubted, shared as they were. But he didn't crack his cast iron cool, maintaining his attentive command over the terrified woman and the weapon in his head.
He held up a hand to keep her silent, his own breathing shallow so as not to impede any sound.
When the front door opened he flinched, a full body recoil which startled him as much as it did the blonde woman in the bed. He wasn't used to being startled and it irritated him, made him inhale frustratedly through clenched teeth. Susan huddled closer to her stricken partner, eyes fixed on the door, on the hallway, on the route that lay between them and her daughter.
There was a piano-wire taut tension in the air and there was nothing Lawr could do but wait for the time being, running was not an option, too sloppy and unpredictable when dealing with whatever supernatural forces were at work here, when he had no idea from which direction they - if indeed it was a "they"- may come.
But he had no intention to fight them.
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Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2014 1:51 pm
The door quietly swung shut. Down the hallway, a little girl's voice asked a question, too soft and muffled to understand.
Silence.
Something scratched at the bedroom door, then fumbled with the knob.
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Posted: Mon Feb 03, 2014 11:06 am
Susan cried out at the sound of the little girl's voice and quickly covered her own mouth with a hand as the blonde man rounded on her, claws brandished, furious that she made it even harder to understand what was being said. Even with her mouth covered, she couldn't help the panicked sobs that shook her at the prospect of harm coming to Melody.
Lawr simply found her distress disgusting. Such loss of control was unfathomable to him, it served no function, no gain, simply set her at a disadvantage against whatever doom had infiltrated the house. Melody was just a girl. Children were nothing but dependent, they held little intrinsic value beyond parental investment and even that was a shackle as evidenced.
The silence gathered beyond Susan's sobs and as the door was scratched, Lawr felt Butch tense up in his thoughts, the ghost drawn to some vestigal memory of door scratching. It sent a wave of desperation and fear through Lawr's thoughts that was not his own and he grew even more irritable.
<<Heel.>> he snapped mentally and the sensation receded.
He took a measured few steps backwards as the doorknob wobbled, calculatedly putting the bed and its inhabitants between himself and anything that might come through the door.
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Posted: Mon Feb 03, 2014 1:38 pm
The knob finally turned and on the other side stood his daughter, staring straight ahead at nothing in particular for a good long moment, and then she opened her mouth to speak. A moth flew out and she paused once more until she began to make a thick, wet, choking sound. Her throat worked loudly around a visible lump. She coughed once softly and twice loudly, with a thick tearing sounds and dozens of mouths flew out.
Several landed on her unblinking face, the rest flew toward the figures Lawr held hostage.
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Posted: Mon Feb 03, 2014 10:40 pm
All Lawr could do was stare, everything logical in him icing over as the first moth flew out of Melody's mouth.
Susan's sobs twisted into a silent scream of horror, her hand to her face but not high enough to block what she saw from her vision. The sound she made was like nothing Lawr had ever heard before, words that were not words, a twisted rambling plea for mercy or recognition from the daughter she loved so much.
He kept his eyes on the girl as she coughed and once again reached out in his thoughts to see if there was pain, to see if he regretted any of this. But there was nothing but the numb void and a smug sense of satisfaction. He caused this. He had brought this, like a harbinger of nightmares, and it made him feel powerful.
"Jan. Jan help her." the desperate sounds coalesced into words he could recognise. "Help us." it hiked up a pitch as the newly freed moths flew towards the bed.
He helped no one but himself. Not knowing that had always been her downfall.
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Posted: Mon Feb 03, 2014 10:45 pm
The pleading grew quiet and then ceased as the moths gently covered her face, her body, the entire bed in a soft, shifting blanket. The girl stood and stared vacantly until finally she rasped, "Are there others?"
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Posted: Mon Feb 03, 2014 10:51 pm
Lawr's expression didn't change, the only movement when he removed the masks he wore the keen flickering of his gaze across the scene.
When he spoke it wasn't to console the distressed woman, or the girl who had once as a baby reached out and clasped his hand.
"Yes." he said coolly, his voice devoid of its American accent, hokey or otherwise, crisp and English as he went on. "But I don't know where they are. They went into witness protection." maybe this entity could find them, maybe it could not, it made no difference to him.
He hoped it wasn't asking if there were other hunters backing him up, because right now, there were none, it was the way it had always been, his own ingenuity his only tool.
and now, a twisted nightmare of a dog.
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Posted: Mon Feb 03, 2014 10:59 pm
There was a silence, filled in only by the soft fluttering of the moths. Eventually though, the girl lifted her head and stared up at him, pupils blown wide and edged in painful red, "Then I have no further use for you."
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Posted: Mon Feb 03, 2014 11:09 pm
That look and the words that went with it struck him immediately.
run.> Butch yelped, and he was inclined to agree. But he didn't just dash, running was invitation to pursuit.
"Then let me go." he said levelly. "If there are more I will happily lead you to them." Even as he spoke he found himself sizing up the jump from the closed window to the garden below, from there he had no idea if he would make it, the looming dark potentially swallowing him up and with no idea how he would get back to the island. It felt wrong speaking to Melody like this, something repulsive about watching a person who had the DNA of perfection tempered into their being puppeted in such a way.
Fighting wasn't an option, he didn't fight and judging on the silence where there had been desperation and sobs before, the moths were more deceptively powerful than they looked.
He didn't desummon the talons, if it moved even an inch he was going to have to use them to shatter the glass of the window and to shield him from severing arteries and breaking bones leaping from the first floor.
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Posted: Mon Feb 03, 2014 11:30 pm
The girl's body seized and then was immediately wracked with more of those thick, painful coughs. A moth flew out of her gaping mouth and fluttered gracelessly toward him. Another. Then five.
"Come."
She choked and retched around the insects.
"And see."
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