30 Elle To Kill #2
If I kill Bridget, Mr. Pratterman can deem Liney no longer my kin due to her vow and thus make her who I should’ve killed instead, claiming her soul and mine. Or could he? His power ebbs and flows as necessary to his aims, yet the source here feels so much more infinite.
If I don’t kill Bridget, Mr. Pratterman can keep the deal as I’d thought intended, citing whatever amount of souls he chooses as debt, and bind my soul all the same.
Every choice, suffering. Every choice, not a choice at all.
Bridget’s eyes track across the stone and gore. Searching for a way out of this place. She spots the restraints and kicks fruitlessly. Her expression of pure disgust threatens my resolve. I clench my jaw to keep my face neutral. This is so different when the suffering’s in front of me.
“I can’t help but notice you’re not entirely paying attention.”
I snap my head back up to Mr. Pratterman. His smile has dampened. Does he see the doubt creeping into my mind?
“My apologies. I was focused on…” I nod down to Bridget frantically clawing at her bonds between us.
Mr. Pratterman’s features relax. I must make sense to him again.
He’s not immune to the flaw of so many men to underestimate and simplify.
“Ever the hound dog, aren’t you? That’s why you’d be perfect here.
You’ll keep the spiral fed while I extend our reach.
A nervous system under the world. A network. ”
Network. The word bubbles up a memory of flowers, old oak trees, the pressure of a hand on my throat, and the promise of power.
Thomas and my father were looking for investors.
I thought of ships and coal mines, but could there have been more?
Thomas promised a lordship for himself through marriage to me though I had no such titles to inherit.
I thought he’d misspoken. All I wanted was to get away from him, not ask for clarification.
He used his intimidations to boast without worry of discovery.
How did this never connect before? I’ve been sinking ships. Reducing the competition. Creating demand. Mr. Pratterman’s contract included exactly the kind of destruction that would most benefit my shipbuilding father and his would-be son-in-law.
I didn’t think of any pattern to or reason for the ships I helped sink. I considered them merely unlucky to be in the wrong harbor when the island’s hunger awoke. Yet many were merchant vessels or navy. Though that could be attributed to larger crews, more souls per ship.
Mr. Pratterman continues to describe grand plans of dark rituals while I rummage through my mind.
A ship captain’s thoughts in his final moments before drowning: surprising calm and disappointment he wouldn’t fulfill his contract.
With whom? A seal on the papers on his desk, now floating at chest level in his quarters.
An eagle over an anchor, laurels spreading up the sides.
Another—a young man, nauseated and retching over the side of the ship.
He spotted the first tendril as it coiled across the deck and believed himself dreaming.
His hands, lit under a pale moon, still had black dust encrusted under the nails from loading coal all day.
He was no sailor, just a man hired to shovel on a collier owned by a mining company in competition with the Seymours.
Colliers. Merchant marines. Ships full of souls, sure, but also supplies. Where did it all go if not down here? Even bodies have their price in the right hands.
Was I really inconspicuous in my drownings? Or did the man who would’ve checked logs and wages, Mr. Croxton, have another reason to be negligent of shipwrecks?
Mr. Pratterman sacrificed my father for this plan. Was that Thomas’s idea? Are the machinations of Mr. Pratterman to Thomas’s benefit or to his detriment as well?
I look down at the knife in my hand. It still pulses with a heartbeat that’s never been the rhythm of the spiral’s power. The markings along the blade glow gray blue, alien and familiar.
“We’ll create something the world’s never seen, Eleanor,” Mr. Pratterman continues, a new fervor in his voice. “And we won’t do it alone. With more wells of power, we could manage dozens, hundreds of ritual sites.”
I nod, but all my concentration is on the blade as he pitches what feels less like the damnation of the earth and more like a business plan. The dagger is trying to tell me something. That heartbeat. That color. If I concentrate, there’s a scent of cotton, sea salt, and cherries.
Cherry. The wine. This isn’t a heartbeat. It’s the rhythm of the music box’s lullaby. The song Douglas and I danced to in our moment of raw understanding.
I grip the knife’s sheath. I connect to the knife the way I connected with Douglas when my hand brushed his while dancing. It’s not Pratterman’s influence on the knife that I need. It’s James’s.
Immediately he’s in my head. Douglas, staring through my eyes.
He can sense my quickened pulse. Taste the ashen air of this cursed cavern.
How can he be here? This isn’t the island.
It’s not even earth. Flashes from Douglas’s memory merge into mine.
Talking to Liney in the lightroom. Bloody hands reaching up and around him.
The tug downward, through time and layers of reality.
Being forced into the knife by the buried ocean’s souls.
I called for power. They gave me my ghost.
But Douglas isn’t under Mr. Pratterman’s control. Never sacrificed. The reach of this dark ocean of souls may also go beyond his rules.
I peer over the water. The shriveled souls of the damned stretch up toward the surface like seaweed. I asked them to give me what I needed. Why Douglas?
You’ve noticed, haven’t you? Douglas’s voice echoes while Mr. Pratterman pontificates on the architecture of his misery machine. I didn’t know it for certain, but his words betray him. The man before you is no more the Devil than he is a cod. You can cut him. You’ve done it before.
Mr. Pratterman, the demon of ash and hibiscus and trickery. An impatient and wanting man who’s fearful of a young woman who lived through a shipwreck. A man no more immortal than I.
“It’s easier than you think to bring more into the fold,” Mr. Pratterman’s saying.
He doesn’t notice my expression anymore, lost in his visions of expansion.
What a fool I was to think he was a cosmic being.
One more conman, tapped into forces too big for both of us.
“That Mr. Croxton you’re so worried about?
His greed is easily manipulated. I started with him. ”
It’s been too long since I answered. “Terrific,” I say. Like my parents, like Thomas, that’s enough for Mr. Pratterman.
I must concentrate on that night in the lightroom. His specific wording. The first living nonkin I saw. I’d ruled Mr. Pratterman out as a being outside of life and death. I prepared to kill Bridget instead. Because who’d offer a deal where they themselves would be the target?
Everything lines up finally. It creates a tableau of mutually assured torment.
He promised to give me a chance to kill my target. I have what I need to do it here. I must. He knows me as the fool turned villain. Could I yet rise the victor?
Douglas’s strength surges through my muscles. It’s different from the spiral’s power. Cool within but not ice. Refreshing.
Mr. Pratterman convinced me—like my parents, like my congregation, like Thomas—that I wasn’t strong enough without him.
Who was this man of ash before becoming a false demon?
How did he gain this power? I picture generations of men like Mr. Pratterman engulfing themselves in this business of misery one after the next.
Did each deceive the last? This plan to create a human-run network of suffering under the guise of hell’s protection—is this what the Devil really is?
Not a tall man with moonlight eyes and an ashen cloak. Not burning lips and grasping hands.
It’s torched souls fanning the flames of agony by igniting the next nightmare. A cycle of violence. One after the next. Like the melting candles in his dark dream, each building itself from the degradation of the last.
Douglas was supposed to be next. A protégé, eventually. When he resisted, Mr. Pratterman changed tactics. He couldn’t let a wickie who could foil his plans survive. He had to find someone desperate who could be convinced to come to the island. To kill first and ask questions never.
I was his perfect victim. His perfect monster.
A surge of chill from the knife runs up my hand. Douglas. Comforting me. Even now I feel his impossible hope. Despite every wrong I’ve committed against him, Liney, and the cowering girl before me waiting for me to end her.