I remember the first time I killed someone. I didn’t kill them directly, but I knew what was coming for them and I did it anyway. It was an eight year-old boy named Steven Chester.
I had slipped into the house earlier in the day and crept up to the second floor where I eased down the creaking ceiling ladder that led to the attic. Haley had told me where the house was the night before, and had even given me a key. Apparently the family’s housekeeper was a member of the House in good standing, and she had told Haley when to expect them home and even warned about the creaky ladder. I had brought a small can of oil and sprayed down the hinges and springs until I felt confident they should be quiet later in the evening.
The boy was sent to bed like clockwork at 8:30, and while he piddled around for a little while, by 9:00 I didn’t hear any further movement, with the only noise coming from the parents watching t.v. downstairs. I eased the ladder down, wincing when it made a faint protesting groan despite the oil. Gingerly stepping down, I moved to the boy’s door and heard him softly snoring.
When I entered the room, I looked down at him for several seconds before taking him. Sometimes in life you can feel yourself at major turning points—at crossroads that you can’t come back from. This was one of those times. I believed in the House of the Claw and what I had been taught by them. I believed that by taking this boy and submitting him to pain and fear and death, I was ultimately helping to free him from a hellish cycle of reincarnation and push him closer to spiritual evolution and perfection.
But he was still just a little boy.
All my beliefs, all the trust and faith I had in Haley and Dr. Salk and the others, it was all untested faith. Words were easy. Actions were hard. And I knew if I took this action, I was down an immutable path that would either see me as a murderous, lunatic cult member or a champion of humanity that had finally found the right path to our ultimate destiny. It was be easy to just open the window and sneak out to the car I had parked right around the corner. They would never know how close they came to what they would view as tragedy.
But then I remembered what my mother used to always tell me. I said the words in a whisper as I stood over the small child’s bed.
“Most of the time the right thing isn’t the easy thing.”
An hour later and the boy was waking up as I was drawing close to the destination. The drop-off point was behind an old grocery store, and the timing worked out perfectly. The boy was looking around confusedly, asking where he was and who I was just as I was rolling to a stop to let him out. When I told him to leave the car, he didn’t argue, his eyes wide dinner plates of fear as he got out and stepped back a few feet. I drove away quickly, seeing headlights entering the far end of the alley behind the chain of stores as I was exiting. Dr. Salk was right on time.
It wasn’t until the following afternoon that I learned that Salk was dead and the house where I had spent so much time with Haley had been burned to the ground. That was one of the worst times of my life. I mourned Salk, of course, but I knew he had gone on to the next stage of his Ascension. We were now left rudderless as a group however, and Haley would barely talk or eat most of the time. We had been slowly building our friendship towards something more in the last few months, but she didn’t want to see me most of the time now, almost as though she blamed me for giving him the boy in the first place.
We knew that the boy had been killed in the woods, of course, but we had no idea who had killed Salk and burned down the house. Salk would visit us from time to time, but he was a private man. If he had any insights into specific enemies, he didn’t share them with us. Still, it left a large cloud of fear and worry hanging over all of us. If someone knew about Salk, they might know about us, and if they were able to kill him, how much of a chance did we have?
The next few weeks were terrible. Elise disappeared one night and we never saw her again. The following week we found David hanging from an extension cord in his bedroom. It was down to Bruce, Haley, and myself, and the times we got together it felt more like a wake than anything else.
But as with so many things, time passes and things change. By the next fall, Haley and I were dating and Bruce, who had looked for awhile like he might drink himself into an early grave, had bounced back to at least a pale shade of his former self. He would crack jokes and talk again, even if the wounded look in his eyes never fully went away.
As for me and Haley, we were largely happy. We would sometimes provide assistance to other nearby groups of the House, but it was never face-to-face, so it was more something to do than any kind of social interaction. Still, we had each other and we were in love. By the early 1990s we had a new Ascendant—a small woman with a short temper named Barbara Templeton. Her family had been raised in the House, and her younger sister Margaret was already an up-and-comer in the high ranks of the larger organization. Haley said that having her assigned to us was a real honor, and I’ll admit, for the first few months it reinvigorated our group with newfound purpose.
Templeton was entirely different than Salk had been. Her and her sister took a much more secular and scientific approach to things, and her night soul form accommodated that. It looked like a shabby gray housecat in most regards, unless you looked at its belly. There you’d find endless rows of sinister looking red eggs, all pulsing slowly and out of rhythm with each other, like some troubled crimson sea. She could alter people if they ingested just one of those eggs. Nothing overly dramatic usually, they would just become more impulsive and paranoid, more prone to give into their darker, baser urges.
So she went one state over, found a small, isolated town, and shed four hundred or so eggs into their water supply.
Over the next year, that town and surrounding area saw over a 1000% increase in violent crime, including a 450% increase in sexual offenses and a 300% increase in murders. We have the figures, because Barbara and Margaret delighted in visiting the town periodically and collecting the latest data. It was ghoulish, like repeatedly checking the pulse of a patient you know is dying for fun, but they would have said it was progress.
There were times that I would agree with that…times when my faith in what we was doing and my love for Haley and our friends was strong enough to overcome the doubts and fears I still carried with me in the secret chambers of my heart. I didn’t talk about it with anyone, not even Haley. She might would have understood, but I was always afraid she would reject me for it. That I would lose her love.
When Barbara was killed three years later, it was hard, but nothing like Salk. The main focus was on how it had happened. We knew that they were visiting their little science project again—the town had now gotten three more doses of the eggs in their water over time and was on the verge of economic and societal collapse, with more wild dogs and cats on the street than people. Then we get the call that there had been an explosion. Their car had gone up in a blast of unknown origin, effectively vaporizing Barbara and badly injuring Margaret. Bruce had gotten along better with Barbara than me and Haley, and he volunteered to go and find out more information.
The news was grim. It was being called a freak accident, but the inside word was that it had been a shaped charge of plastic explosive. This news sent us into lockdown mode. There seemed little question that someone was hunting us now. When we next had communication with the higher orders of the House, I demanded answers. I wanted to know who was hunting us and what was being done about it. The silence I got in response was deafening.
“They don’t know.” Haley was sanding a chair she was refinishing in the garage. She had taken up the hobby in the last couple of years and only did it when she was nervous or upset about something. “I’m telling you, they don’t know who’s doing it either.”
I frowned. “How do they just not know? Are you telling me someone is that good at killing Ascendants? Are we somehow cursed and only ours are being taken out?”
She shook her head. “No, I hear things occasionally. With the internet and all, some people in the House are setting up semi-anonymous ways of passing notes to each other. Coded electronic message boards and stuff.” She glanced up at me guiltily. “I would have told you earlier, but I was worried you wouldn’t approve. I know you’re a stickler for the House rules and I didn’t want to put you in a bad position.”
I sighed and walked over to her, putting my arms around her shoulders. “You come first, you know? And right now we need to know everything we can before whatever group this is comes for us.”
She patted my arm, but I felt her tremble slightly. “From what I’m hearing, they don’t think it’s a group. They think it’s one man.”
I pulled back slightly, my eyes widening. “How would one man kill not one Ascendant but two? Or if what you’re hearing is right, even more than that? How could that be?”
She put the sandpaper down and turned to face me. Her face was drawn down into a mask of fear. “I don’t know. But if what I’m hearing is true, he’s killed close to two dozen Ascendants across the eastern part of the country.” She swallowed. “People on the bulletin board are calling him the Reaper.”
Fear and anger crawled up me, digging in sharp claws with every step. “Fuck that. Fucking boogeyman bullshit.” Haley recoiled slightly at my tone and I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I’m just scared and pissed off. But we need to be extra careful now. Bruce too. And if that fucker comes, we’ll be ready.”
Except he never did. And while we would still hear reports of things in other places from Haley’s secret network of House members, our lives were relatively quiet for the next few years. We would help the House when we were asked, but most of our days were filled with just living a fairly normal life together. We tried to have children, but apparently my swimmers only dogpaddle a little, so we set that plan aside. And our lives were very happy over all, with the shadow of some mysterious Reaper fading more into the background with each passing year.
And then Madeline came into our lives.
She was an Ascendant, and at 6 she was one of the youngest that had ever been recorded. Her parents had noticed the change in her a couple of weeks before, and after several troubled days, had seen her transformation. Apparently after that they had carried her to a rest stop and abandoned her there before picking up and moving to parts unknown.
It was their loss. She was such a sweet, intelligent child, and me and Haley immediately fell for her. We were being given a huge responsibility, as we were going to act as both her parents and House representatives. But we were ready for it. We taught her everything we knew, and she taught us so much in return.
Madeline would have strange and wonderous dreams, and when she awoke, she would tell us about them. Some of them were more traditional child’s dreams and nightmares, but many of them seemed to be something more. She would dream of traveling in strange lands, flying high above the dark twisted trees of a yellow swamp and among the blue cliffs of a small island chain.
And while for many children, dreams of flying would seem like a flight of fancy, not so for our little girl. Our Ascendant could fly quite well, and in another example of how extraordinary she was, she was a Binary.
Occasionally, though it is rare, the night soul of an Ascendant takes a form that is not just one creature, but two. These are called Binaries. There are a handful of examples of even more diverse forms, but most House members live their entire lives without ever seeing or even hearing about one. The point is, our baby was extra special.
As she grew up, we learned more about what she was capable of. The flying portion of her night soul could resurrect people it had previously stung so long as they had been killed by a person affected by the other half of the Binary. This smaller portion of the Binary would be released from her abdomen and could drive people into a focused murderous rage followed by unconsciousness and amnesia. This was not some random set of traits or gifts, but rather evidence of a new facet to the Grand Plan. For as the person was killed and brought back, they began to change. They began to Ascend in a new way that married the terrestrial soul and the night soul together.
Haley argued that this could not be. That Madeline’s abilities were useful and interesting, but the changes she wrought were not the same as ascending spiritually through the joining of the two portions of the Trifecta. But as I showed her time and again what our little girl was capable of, her protests grew weaker. We had yet to achieve full conversion, but however she did what she did, Madeline was growing stronger and better at it.
Then I came up with the idea of a mass test. She had just turned 13, and I felt sure that if we had a large group of willing participants, we could finally achieve a fully Ascendant individual. There were factions in the House that opposed such a large scale experiment with House members, of course, with Margaret Templeton being chief among them. And understandably, as subjecting dozens of members to Madeline’s gift with no guarantees that any would survive all the way to a full transformation was a costly proposition. But after a couple of months of discussion, it was approved.
The plan was to use one of Tattersall’s many holdings out in the desert—an old building that was remote and secure enough to allow for the necessary days of transformation. Based on past attempts, those that survived the later stages would become ravenous for live food, so we arranged to dupe a limited pool of people to arrive at the location for a “rave” during the latter stages of the transformation. It was an unfortunate but necessary cost of bringing such wonderful new life into the world, and knowing it was not only going to benefit the prey spiritually but also help my sweet Madeline achieve the acclaim she deserved…well, it made any guilt I felt seem like a very small thing indeed.
When I last saw her alive, Madeline hugged me tightly and said how much she’d miss me and Mama until she got back, but that she was going to make us proud and come back with new friends. A condition of the plan was that we, as her parents, couldn’t participate and potentially skew the results. It was hard to swallow, but if that’s what it took, I would happily accept it. I’ve never been prouder than when we saw her off to what was going to be one of the first big crossroads in our little girl’s life since she had Ascended.
The next time I saw my baby, she was broken ashes scattered across a blood and shit covered concrete floor surrounded by the burned remains of those she had tried to help. The Reaper had returned and destroyed our lives once again.
Haley was sobbing softly against my chest, and as we stood in the still smoldering ashes of the burned down building, I didn’t have words to comfort her or myself. I had cried all the way there, but seeing our sweet girl’s night soul burned and twisted like that, my sorrow was being scoured away by rage.
“He’s going to pay, Haley. Don’t you worry. This Reaper, whoever he is, we’re going to hunt him down and find him. And when we do, he’s going to pay for everything he’s done.”
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Credits
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