Chapter Sixteen #2
At the same time, she imagined Terence as a boy, as gentle and kind and wide-eyed as he was as a grown man, if not more so.
Then she thought of that child being torn apart each night, replaced by an abomination hellbent on tearing flesh asunder, and swallowed down the lump forming in her throat.
The ache in her leg stuttered her growing sympathy.
“How can you speak so… sweetly about that thing?” Jane muttered, words wavering.
“Because I pity it, Miss Sterling. I pity him,” Mrs. Foster nodded to the windows.
A distant howl rang out across the night.
“He’s tried to be different from them, his father, brothers, grandfather.
They weren’t bad men, but they were… men,” she said with a grimace of indifference.
“Their afflictions let them give into their isolation and the coldness and lovelessness that tends to accompany manhood. Love, in every sense of the word, was a thing they dejected.”
Jane found herself thinking back to the visit to the university gardens in Cambridge, how Terence allowed her to ramble without ever interrupting her with his own thoughts on the matter until she was finished and seemed attracted to her company, the kindness he had shown to both her and her mother by what must have been a natural goodwill that’d resided in his spirit.
He’d shown himself as a man with the capacity to love, seemed so desperately eager to love, and yet the beastliness of his bloodline—the beastliness of their day’s expectations of his sex—kept him restrained.
“I think I pity him, too,” she said, her hold on the Winchester losing its security.
After finishing the rest of her tea, Mrs. Foster sighed. “Well, best of luck to you with this hunt, Miss Sterling. I think I shall return to bed for a little while more before trying to clean this mess.”
Mrs. Foster left both her and Jane’s cups when she left the room, and Jane didn’t release a breath until the sound of footsteps faded up the stairs and she heard the shut of a bedroom door.
The grim, pink-hued grayness of dawn leaked across the yard, turning the fog into a silvery mist that both hurt and soothed Jane’s eyes if she stared into its depths for too long.
From upstairs she heard movement as the rest of the house roused for the day, and she wondered if Ms. Hudson and Ruben heard the upheaval of last night.
Jane scoffed. How could they not have heard a rifle firing in their house?
And why did neither of them even bother to see if she was alive or if she needed any help?
She tried not to hold too much anger, for she didn’t know if she would be so chivalrous herself in a similar situation.
She, too, would wish to hide rather than risk the beast turning on her.
There was a groan that echoed from deep within the mist that jolted Jane back awake and her grip on the rifle suddenly tightened, prepared to fire at any shape that even vaguely resembled that of the beast. Her heart was thrumming and her tongue swiped across her chapped lips as she awaited for the thing to emerge.
A silhouette did come into view, but it was staggering and wheezing.
The beast seemed completely disinterested in its previous hunt from the evening as blood leaked thickly like mud from its mouth.
Its throat was still stained red and Jane wondered if it were just now suffering the effects of the wound and at last breathing its final breaths.
She only grew more confident in her suspicions as the thing began to mindlessly pace in the yard mere yards away from the front door. She wrinkled her nose as the distant, rosy hue of dawn began to wash across its form.
It was truly an ugly animal. Something bent and broken that ought to be dead.
The longer she stared at it, the more it started to adopt the shape of a prehistoric beast she could at last understand, even if only a little.
A gorgonopsid, perhaps, or some other creature that was too much of a reptile to be classed a proper mammal and too much of a mammal to be classed a proper reptile.
The thing doggedly pacing the yard had her imagining those beasts caught between identities and worlds.
She thought of Terence and the beast held within him.
It was everything he couldn’t let himself become: ravenous, violent, wrathful, soaked in blood, simmering with frustration of barely contained grief and being unable to secure his own identity in the world, just as Jane had been when vanquishing Mary in her youth.
He was a powder keg that burst every night as the sun set, only to have the cycle repeat again, and again, and again, never once finding peace or healing, for men were expected to bear their wounds and carry on.
With a huff, Jane lowered the rifle.
At last, the beast raised its head in a wounded, piercing whine that made Jane clamp her hands over her ears.
A pealing, hollow shriek of the dying. A sound seeking some savior or some other companion to join it in death—only to be met by silence as plumes of mist feathered from jaws stained with carrion.
Traitorous pity stitched at Jane’s heart.
As the howl rattled to its end, the beast collapsed to the ground, its sides deflating upon uttering a final wheeze.
Jane didn’t know how or what she was meant to feel upon the sudden defeat of the beast. But she did know that she didn’t feel victorious, only ashamed, especially as the corpse continued to twitch.
Her gut ran cold. She needed to go out there and finish this deed, either to properly earn a sense of victory or to put the creature out of its misery.
She kept a free hand braced against the wall as she hobbled to put on her coat and, using the Winchester as a cane every other step, went outside.
Mist cloaked her and she raised the rifle as she approached the wheezing beast. Blood continued to pool from its gaping mouth, and it whimpered in a way that made Jane falter in her steps. It whined with the pain of a wounded hound.
Jane held her breath and tried to will herself to raise the rifle to shoot.
But a thought stayed her hand. If she planted a bullet in the beast’s skull, would she also kill Terence along with it, just as Ruben did to Matthew?
The two were linked to one another, whether it be physically or spiritually, and if she could bite its paw and leave a wound on his hand, she could only assume a shot to the head would end them both.
The sin of ending a human life was a mark her soul lacked the courage to bear.
The rifle started to shake in her hands as one of the beast’s eyes rolled to meet her gaze.
There was no more time to consider the topic any further when the beast’s body jerked, and in her fright, Jane failed to raise the rifle to deliver a killing shot. She just yelped and backed away from the convulsing corpse.
The beast’s paws began clawing at the ground, flexing and grabbing at the grass in an action too much like one that’d belong to human fingers with human joints.
It was as if it were trying to grab fistfuls of grass in an attempt to drag itself through the dirt, across the yard, and toward the house—toward Jane. Then the skin began to peel.
Discarded pieces of hairy flesh were scrubbed away by the grass, the claws fell away like rotted teeth, until two human hands remained, sticking crudely from the beast’s body.
Something in its torso, between its ribs, began to writhe. Not in the rhythmic way of breathing, but rather from something wriggling around within a costume, a parasite wrestling for dominance.
Jane gagged but didn’t dare to touch the body, as those human hands continued to pull themselves forward, ridding themselves further of the beastly pelt.
In a burst of blood, they at last hauled a body from the beast’s now hollowed torso.
The corpse deflated as the man continued to pull himself free.
There was the sound of rib bones collapsing upon no longer possessing a thing to cage.
It was eerily similar to the image of the man-beast abomination buried deep in Matthew’s grave.
Terence groaned after pulling his legs out from the beast and curled into a fetal position, allowing the rain to wash away the discolored blood painted across his naked body.
Despite everything in her body demanding that she stay put and return to the house, Jane dropped the Winchester and hurried to Terence’s side. She knelt beside him and tried to not be bothered by the fact he was utterly naked and had clumps of gore caught in his hair.
“Terence,” Jane didn’t know what else to say as her hand hovered over his shoulder, and she winced seeing the mark where her shot clipped him. The wound continued to weep blood, oozing.
Would a bullet need to be fished out? Or I can just let it scar over—that would be far easier…
It would serve as a reminder for the beast.
He groaned as he rolled onto his side, burrowing his face into the grass. Chains clinked around his wrists, his throat, the flesh beneath them rubbed raw and bleeding.
Jane sighed, shucked off her coat, and draped it across him. She nudged him with her foot. “Come on, boy—up. Let’s get you washed.”
Beside them, the beast’s pelt began to audibly sizzle, melting down into an acidic sludge until the marsh’s mud soaked the evil back into its accursed depths.
Terence kept silent and his gaze cast down as Jane guided him to the washroom upstairs.
She threw her coat, now soaked and crusted with the blood, to the corner, ran water until the room began to fog with steam, and eased him into the tub.
At some point, Mrs. Foster rushed in, as poised as ever, and unlocked the manacles clinging too tightly around his throat and wrists. The skin was blistered and bled the moment it was exposed to air.
With the soap and cloth she found in the cabinet, Jane began to slowly swab away blood until the water clouded a murky maroon color.