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Member
Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Canterbury, UK
Gender: Male
Posts: 24
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As on a darkling plain
A short story. Part mood-piece, part urban fantasy. The title comes from Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach.
Kiandra dropped from the ledge and landed silently in the alleyway before dissolving into the shadows. Only the most diligent of searchers could have found her; she did not wish to be seen or heard and so she wasn’t. In truth, there was no need for such stealth. The venators knew she would be here and she knew they would not reveal themselves until she had done likewise. Still, Kiandra was by nature unnecessarily cautious. It was but one of the many flaws that she had to lose.
Making a final mental affirmation of confidence, Kiandra stepped into the unwelcome glare of the streetlight, her eyes adjusting instantaneously to the increased brightness. As soon as she was visible a group of four men and two women also revealed themselves. The diversity of the group would have been surprising to a bystander. Next to an immaculately dressed businessman stood a half-dressed prostitute. A skinny twelve-year-old girl rubbed shoulders with a large black bouncer. Kiandra knew however that despite the diverse appearances of the people arranged before her, they were all possessed of the same petty, clockwork mind; a human mind that had had all of humanity’s redeeming features removed and replaced with more of what made it abhorrent. That was what the venators did when they created more of themselves, infected humans with their own minds and destroyed any vestiges of humanity that remained. Venators were no longer humans; mentally or physically. They would be strong foes, but not strong enough. Kiandra was as strong as she needed to be.
Kiandra was preparing to initiate the combat when a voice cut the tension in the air.
“You lot better have a good explanation f…” A policeman had walked passed the alley entrance and spotted the gathering. Obviously, he had decided something suspicious was going on that required his intervention. Kiandra did not hesitate; once the intruder was within arms’ length she whipped around and struck him in the chest with enough force to push his sternum through his spine. The broken man impacted the wall to Kiandra’s right and slid noiselessly to the concrete. Kiandra herself turned her attention back to where it mattered, quickly noticing the wedding ring on the corpse’s left hand in the process. Briefly she wondered how it had come to this, murdering innocent family men in filthy back alleys.
*** *** *** *** ***
It had been ten years now since it had started. Ten years had passed since her world had begun to fall apart. Kiandra had been twelve at the time, and you’d be hard pressed to find a more normal little girl. Living in the London suburbs, her life had been one of middle-class mediocrity; an office-bound father, a kitchen-bound mother and herself bound irrevocably to the subtly soul destroying prison of unending routine. She had had just enough quirks to ensure that she wasn’t so normal she stood out, but beyond that she was not a person, just a mass of flesh interchangeable with almost any other mass of flesh you cared to pick out. She had thought of herself as happy; after all, she had everything she could have reasonably desired. There was a roof over her head, clothes on her back, food on the table and that precise balance between luxury and poverty that ensures one has neither the desire to help the needy nor the burning determination to advance. In fact, she wasn’t happy. Like most humans though, having never felt true happiness, she didn’t realise it. In short, she was thoroughly and almost irredeemably average.
Then her father had died. Even his death was average and passionless. A slightly overweight middle aged man undergoing cardiac arrest due to a poor diet and lack of exercise, what could be more normal? This was not the event that destroyed her life however. No, that was to come but a short while later. There had been a customary mourning period for all involved; nothing too dramatic but not so understated as to draw accusations of being cold-hearted. She herself had wept as was only proper. But then had come the funeral, held at a local renaissance era church. Truly, it was a strange place for such people to congregate, for it was a work of fantastic beauty and passion. It was not large or grandiose, but it was a labour of such love that she felt her soul being laid bare before it. It was as if the apparitions in the stained-glass windows glared ruthlessly at her with accusing eyes, saying “you are not alive, you have not lived. We are but cold and unfeeling glass and yet there is in us more life and beauty than exists in all the people gathered in this hall.” It was then that she realised the truth. For all her tears and feigned sorrow, she was not grieving, and nor were the others. She realised that she felt but a hollow imitation of an emotion that neither she nor almost any human had ever experienced.
From that point on she was merely a walking corpse, a soulless automaton. She had tried so many avenues to experience true feeling but not one had successfully stirred her. The wonders of science and the physical universe were cold, clinical and meaningless to her. The studies of history and literature left her haunted by the faded spectres of past accomplishments. Art and music almost proved to be Kiandra’s salvation, but those rare works of beauty were drowned out in a cacophony of contrived, passionless babble. Finally, in utter desperation and now in her late teens, Kiandra decided that death might hold the secret to true life. She courted it whenever the mood took her. Busy motorways were there to be crossed; wide gaps to be jumped; determined attackers to be beaten mercilessly and passionately into the pavement. For several years, mortal terror was the only emotion Kiandra felt and even then only for the briefest of flashes. The terror was a drug. As she became further jaded to the emotion she would have to make her close encounters with death progressively closer just to feel alive. She did not always escape unscathed. Until she met Imre, a mercifully early grave was all she had to look forward to.
Imre was the cleansing storm that had scoured away the presumptions of her life that had led to her deplorable position. He had come to her in hospital as she lay dying from a broken neck, ribs and legs as well as severe internal bleeding. She had known that the six drunken men were far more than she could handle, but that was what had drawn her to them. As darkness had overtaken her in that stinking hospital bed a stranger had approached her and said simply, “you want to live. Not just go through the motions. You want to really live.” She had blacked out then, and so her journey with Imre began.
*** *** *** *** ***
All of this and more flashed through Kiandra’s head as she stood, bathed in the sickly yellow light, waiting for the stillness to be broken. Tiny details filled her eyes. She noticed the dead policemen laying slumped at a grotesque angle, broken in half. His eyes seemed strangely excited, like he was a spectator who could barely contain his anticipation for the action to begin. She noticed a drop of water that had fallen onto his face from the overhead gutter, jarring away the illusion of excitement and replacing it with one of near-heartbreaking sorrow. She noticed two rats facing each other, frozen in readiness for the other to pounce, neither daring to move before the time was right. Whiskers twitching, they seemed to quiver with readiness, each looking into its opposite’s eyes with boundless intensity. All of this, Kiandra noticed and more as she prepared herself for the fight to come. There was a sudden flash of movement as one of the rats finally saw fit to move. Kiandra moved with it.
*** *** *** *** ***
The sulphurous glow of the alley turned the blood on Kiandra’s clothes black. There was a lot of black spattered around that night. The seven corpses at her feet barely seemed real now, bent as they were at grotesque angles and themselves covered in the sticky blackness. One human and six venators; all of them strong, but none strong enough. Kiandra was as strong as she needed to be. She saw that none of the blood had spread onto the policeman’s face. Curiously, the gutter-teardrop remained undisturbed. Neither of the rats were to be seen, though a small patch of smeared blackness bore testament to their own struggle.
“How do you feel?”
Imre had finally decided to show himself. His question was not borne of concern. It was a test and Kiandra knew it. Everything was a test with Imre.
“I feel elated,” she replied, mostly proud from her victory though tainted with a hint of sadness.
“Elated?” he inquired with a cocked eyebrow, his face half a smirk and half a scowl. Kiandra sighed. It was not a melancholy sigh, but rather one of profound catharsis.
“I feel alive.”
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