Sins of Our Ancestors - [Chapter 3] Her Wicked Grin

[u/gothic-goat]

Chapter Index: [1] [2] [3] [4]

Every time I decided to take a shot at wandering off to Bleakmire Parish, I somehow conjured another excuse to put it off.

Usually to do more research, practice the protection ritual, or spend another night shooting the .38 revolver my father left duct taped underneath his desk.

I was completely terrified of what may be lying in wait. I knew deep down that leaving would be the right call. There is no shame in self preservation.

I almost called the whole thing off... But every time I try to closed my eyes at night, I could hear Oliver's paralyzing shriek as he tried in vain to beg for mercy.

I had to do it. I had to discover just what was so important that my father would willingly turn away from everything he loved. I wanted... No, I needed a role model. A leader to show me the way to salvation. A shoulder to lean on.

Anything.

The harsh reality is that we don't usually receive what we want. We're given just enough to survive in interestingly painful ways. Life pushes us down, beats the fuck out of us... All so we will learn.

Nature wants us to adapt. To step up and face the problem head on. I want nothing to do with the selfish designs of our reality... But it seems the more I resist, the more my life topples.

I knew I had to do something. For Kenneth. Oliver.

There was far more than I could perceive at stake here. That morning, I wandered out into the foreboding Arkham streets, towards Bleakmire Parish.

Every single time I leave the office since I learned it, I have casted the Ward of Protection.

The protection ritual isn't complex, but it is very precise. A simple chant, the burning of sage... A personal sacrifice.

I walked through the shadow covered bookshelves and half melted candle sticks, the smell of burning sage flooding my senses once more. Smoke rolled off of the flaming herbs and entered my nose.

Not as good as cigarette smoke, but the smell brings me peace. Every time I inhale that plume of positive energy, I remember the serenity that my sacrifice will bring.

A chalice, large and made from silver, sits upon a small makeshift shrine, hidden away in a corner between some of the oldest shelves. The shrine holds only the chalice sitting on a silver plate, and several unused candles that appeared to be simply be replacements for the desk candle.

Days earlier, while I read through my father's grim spell tome, I came across this passage:

"The Luxmist Chalice was given to the Rooke family hundreds of years ago. It's origins are lost to me. All I know is that the chalice draws water from the spirit world. A blood offering made by one of Warpblood lineage will be required."

My throat tightened as I braced myself. I had cast the ritual a dozen times now, yet the gleam of the silver chalice always made my skin crawl. I drew a combat knife that I handpicked out of my father's collection. Eyes closed tight, the knife sliced my palm with a rapid sliding of the blade.

A hot pain traced where the blade split my flesh, the heat dancing in synchrony with the knife's chilled metal.

Self mutilation for a spell would never feel normal, but the benefits of the ward were far too great to ignore.

I squeeze the fingers on my sliced hand over the Luxmist Chalice, allowing blood to flow down into a trickling trail, dripping splotchy crimson beads of blood. Each droplet splashes against the bottom of the chalice and dissipates with a soft puff of glowing green ash.

Ethereal dust fills the room, flowing throughout the entire office, reviving the glowing frequency of protection. Glowing symbols began to appear once more.

The feeling of warmth and positivity quickly destroyed my disdain for the casting of the ritual itself. I wrapped my newest wound and the others lined up next to it. Ritual wounds tend not to leave residual pain, and as I bandaged them, I could already see the skin scarring over.

The scars left over heal quickly, leaving a slight glow of purple light just under the skin in its place. As if the blood had forever been altered in my hand. I hoped that it wasn't a permanent change.

With the ritual done, I knew it was time to face the Sin Eaters.

My map of the district was ingrained in my head. I left it on the desk and made my way towards that looming cathedral. For the first time...

I would approach Bleakmire Parish.

Finding someone who had more than just ghost stories and superstition on their tongues became increasingly difficult. The longer I orbited the Parish and it's surrounding filth littered streets, the more evident that this was not going to be as straightforward as I had hoped.

Harsh east coast wind tore its way between cold, interlocked roads. The air itself tried its best to force my surrender as I skulked through the noticeably silent neighborhoods. Gusts of wind wore me down with a bone freezing current that pelted my nose with stinging salt water. Many old apartments and homes - long past their prime - were still filled with those souls foolish enough to stay in Arkham's underbelly.

Tales were carried on the hushed tones of city residents and the booze-scented homeless folk that were passing by on their way to Bleakmire.

Haphazardly constructed shanty communities surrounded the Parish, tucked away within the oldest sections of the city. The people here dealt with borderline biblical plagues and famine, well before the end days come for us all.

The locals all cast nervous glances into a darkness that swallowed every little crack and corner of their community. Their weary eyes searched dirt encrusted windows of rust colored buildings for the answers to their meek prayers.

The sun could do little to aid against the groping shadows from behind consistently grey skies. Thick, murky rain clouds threatened to pop like overfed maggots as the atmosphere carried on in an inauspicious and uncaring formation above our heads at all times.

It felt like the city was trying to warn me at every turn... Yet, I had to press on and learn the truth. It was too late to turn back and run. So, into the lion's den I roamed.

I took a deep breath.

I kept inhaling whiffs of burning trash and rubber from the barrels that lined some of the sidewalks. The people were disheveled and forgotten, but they keep pushing to survive.

I knew I had to learn a bit more about Bleakmire before I willingly entered the source of all this chaos.

Not a single person would maintain eye contact unless approached directly, and even then I practically had to pry their attention away from whatever menial task they were doing before they bothered to acknowledge my existence.

I managed to learn that most of the city's homeless population eventually makes their way to Bleakmire Parish to take advantage of the religious survivors that still cling to their unwavering faith within the community.

As if to spite the several outbreaks of diseases that completely crippled the infrastructure of a once bustling spiritual hub, the survivors stood firm and offered what services they could to those in need.

I couldn't find a single modern photograph of the district in the files. Hell, not even at the university library. It was as if all sources of information have been scrubbed down to the bone. Or maybe down to whatever information wouldn't panic the outside world too badly.

When I finally got to interview the homeless, I quickly found out why.

What the locals wouldn't tell me, is that much of that information is divided up into carefully measured half truths, spoon fed to keep knowledge classified, and the denizens docile.

I found out from one of the old timers that the murder rate of the homeless goes up every year now, despite the assistance they receive from the Parish folk.

There were countless stories that seemed like twisted folklore to me. Urban legends at best, but at this point, all bets were off. A few of the stories stuck out to me, although I doubt the validity of some of them.

After roaming the streets covered in debris and lost souls for awhile, a shout rang out:

"Hey, kid!"

The form of a tired older woman spoke in a subtle New Orleans accent. Her voice could put anyone at ease, her ebony skin and long black hair easily the most vibrant I had seen in the city. She overheard my questioning of one of the homeless vagabonds and motioned to me to come speak with her just outside the doorway of her modest home.

"You're goin' to Bleakmire? Mighty foolish. Just who are you, boy?"

"Lawrence Rooke. I'm in the area investigating a murder. If you have any useful information, I would appreciate it ma'am." I did my best to sound official.

The woman's lips curved into a smile, her eyes easing up just a bit.

"Oh, good. Thought ya' might be a Fed'. Cops have been giving us trouble round here recently. They ain't got time to investigate murder these days. As for the Parish..."

The woman's eyes grow cold as she thinks for a moment. She searched my eyes as if she could pluck the answer right out of them.

"Three knocks. That's all she gives ya'. If you answer the third... Well, by then, it might be too late for ya'."

I could feel my brow furrow. What is wrong with the people here?

"I don't have time for nursery rhymes, ma'am."

The woman had to be in her sixties. She held an elegance about her that reflected her years of living a hard life on this planet. Her face was soft and wrinkled by experience. Her hair hung low beyond her back.

She continued on as if I hadn't said a word.

"Least that's how Danny Kline down the way at the Borer's Apartment building says it. He heard the knocks his second night living there n' answered the door to an empty hallway twice. But the third time... She was there."

Even as she spoke with confidence, she could not seem to hold her nerves completely steady. She took short breaths between sullen thoughts.

"Ol' Danny said she was the ghost of a nun, or least she was dressed like one. Said he couldn't see her face in the low light, even though she was only a couple feet away. Her black outfit hung loose, completely still in the dimly lit hallway, he says."

She shivered a moment, looking up to the sky as if seeking the correct words from the clouds.

"She stood and stared right at him. Just black nothingness where a woman of God's face should be. Worse yet, he feel her stare digging into his mind for just a split second, yessir. Then he slammed the door in her face, locked the bolts."

Taking a deep sigh, the old woman pulled out a pack of cheap cigarettes and offered me one. I gratefully accepted and flicked open my lighter with a satisfying clink. The bitter earthy smell of burning tobacco and the rush of nicotine helped sand my nerves down - if only by a fraction.

She leaned against the door frame of her half collapsed shack and looked off into the deeply overcast skies above. Dark bags under her eyes finally became visible as she turned her head heavenbound. She takes a long drag of her cigarette before continuing.

"Then Ol' Danny says a few months later, a drunk man down the hall of his building opened the door on the third knock. Didn't close it in time. Been gone ever since."

I finally spoke up. "I've heard the name before. Where is this Borer's apartment building, miss...?"

"Clarabelle. And it's in the only place no sane person seems to go... I think you know."

I did. I gave Clarabelle a nod, thanking her for her time.

I turned away, and as I did, I remembered the letter still sitting on my desk.

Wasn't-

By the time my body whipped back around, no one was there. I couldn't find her anywhere. Shaking my head, I continued on. I kept an eye out for Clarabelle as I went. To no avail, of course.

The next story was a bit harder for me to process.

I approached a man dressed in a sooty, grime encrusted Sunday church style suit... He looked like he was a fine enough man at one point, but his sharp boned jaw and thin, pale limbs dragged my wariness out of hiding.

His voice crackled like the burning barrels that stood along this particularly trashed street. His face was scrunched, as if he constantly had to stave off a fit of teary-eyed anger that pursued his every movement, trying to crawl out from the creases of his pursed lips.

When I asked if he knew anything about Bleakmire, his mouth curled into a thin line that stretched into a cold snapping frown.

"Don't go down Phillip's Lane. It's always hidden away in some part of the Parish, it is. Every hapless fool who finds their way out claims it to be in a different spot. Some are stuck there for days, they is."

Speaking about that logic defying street seemed to have grounded him back to his senses. Relaxing his shoulders and huddling closer to the nearby open flame. The weather grew colder and more damp as he went on.

"Some says the buildings and trees will lean in over the road, they will. The further you get, the closer them long shadows will try to take you."

The weary gentleman's eye contact fizzled out.

"I met a young man, a cartographer and avid conspiracy debunker. He came stumbling out of the district with his tail tucked. He wanted to map the road himself, he did. Called us foolish on his way in. He was gone for two days, and all he had to show for it was a mess of mapped out nonsense and frustrated scribbles."

I shifted and squirmed as he told his unlikely tale. His words, accompanied by his stench being heated by literal flaming trash, was almost more than I could bear.

"And what's worse is anyone who's walked that lane long enough... Well, they lose their shadow. For a few days it stays missing, even under the sun. They say they got an empty feeling in their stomach. Then one day, their shadow is just back, it is."

My face must have betrayed my skepticism, because he tacked on defensively;

"I'm not crazy, sir. That place ain't what the good Lord intended it to be. Not no more..."

Without dismissing me out right, the bone thin man hunched over to warm his hands over the flame of his barrel and silently begged me to leave with the forlorn look in his eyes.

I did.

The last story that really caught my attention was given to me by one of the local women, just around the corner to the Parish. She was almost out of sight, trying to duck into her brick hovel as I came forth. She was quietly relieved that all I sought was information.

Her voice was rough, like fine stones tempered by a raging river, completely doused in mystique and anxiety.

"If you don't know the place, then stay away from the gutters. Especially when it rains. The Thirsting One comes crawling for the wet."

The younger woman looked at me from the wide crack between the door of her home and the reddish decaying outer wall. I could smell sickness and death pouring out of the home, so I kept some distance.

"The hobos gave her that name, but we picked it up around here since it's so... Too damn accurate. She comes crawling in the damp dark, her neck twisting and stretched. Her head is covered with dark hair that drips like pondweed. She's got rotted skin that lumps in odd places, and countless eyeballs that shimmer in the shadows."

Her head poked out of the doorway so she could give the road a proper paranoid search. Long nails looked like bloodied talons as she dug them into the door frame.

"And when she's done? All that's left is a dried husk, left to be found in the morning.

The young woman's upper lip quivered as she spoke, a look of desperate hopelessness racked her features as she fought to contain her tears.

I shuddered at her description of the thing. Strange urban legends and superstitions didn't scare me nearly as much after what I glimpsed in the darkness near that diner... I couldn't quite help but see the similarities in my memories of what attacked Oliver.

Despite his refusal to join me against the evil in this city, Oliver still became my first prime example of the presence lurking beneath this God forsaken sink hole.

Leaving the woman to process her pain, I turned away, only to come face to face with the first harrowing street that leads into the district.

Eventually, the newfound information found a way to break my hesitation the more it wormed through my head.

I couldn't put it off any longer.

I had to go into the Parish.

Wrought-iron fences lined multiple blocks of church owned land, tipped with spikes that would curl the devil's tail. A once hallowed district, now left destitute and full of lower class citizens who couldn't afford to move away from the madness.

I saw men, women, children, all without proper housing and practically roaming the narrow stone streets in hordes. They acted as if they were shambling zombies, searching for sustenance.

I wandered onto the grounds of the massive Catholic cathedral that has plagued me for almost a month now. I decided to join the gathering crowd of grime covered vagrants. Their combined odor almost made me gag as I tried to blend into the group. They lingered in front of Saint Jacob's with whimsical glee in their eyes.

A man, dressed in muck caked-rags, resembling a tattered clergyman's long abandoned attire, babbled to a growing crowd of the dregs of Arkham society. He stood up on the steps of a Saint Jacob's, the remnants of a sermon still exiting in a frenzied manner.

Weird for a Tuesday.

High above, the recognizable statues of the forces of heaven and hell looked down upon us. For once, their gaze held not anger, and was not directed at me.

Instead, reverence clung to their faces. With a divine sense of purpose and love, they looked directly to the ragged priest as he bellowed his words before the crowd.

Every last word of his ravings still echo in my head.

Every hoarse cough in that raspy rattling voice. Every wet lapping lick of his peeling and stained lips sent a shivering reminder of Oliver's dried and mangled form, carelessly discarded like food wrappings.

"The Gods, when left to their own devices, are oft to experiment with our lives, our world... our very souls. We are but vermin to those who create and destroy. And maybe, it is humanity itself that violently stirs those celestials from their deeply restful slumber."

The crowd mumbled with approval amongst themselves, caught in the intoxicating influence of the man's message. They shifted along the stone steps as he spoke, his baritone voice booming like wild thunder all around.

"Perhaps it is our own darkness that draws the ill will of our Creator into the garden of Eden, tools of transformation in hand. Are we not the parasitic weeds that alter the very nature of our hosts in an attempt to purge our festering corruption through salvation? Is it not that we decided to speak for the creators and destroyers that we cast ourselves into the gaping maw of K'thali Mata'rith?"

That name... Flashes of Oliver's hastily written messages appeared in my mind.

I moved my way towards the front of the crowd to try and get a better look at the man. Whispers in the gathering were calling him "Reverend Armond." They held onto his every word and movement, as if entranced by his passionate speech. They were beginning to shiver in a blissful stupor.

"And when the Angel of Death can no longer live separated from the Illusion of Life, who are we to deny her all devouring will?"

As he spoke he reached upwards, pointing back at a tall statue of a hooded woman built upon the marble steps. The crowd's fervor could be felt hanging in the humidity.

Reverend Armond continued, a boundless conviction that bubbled out of him with every syllable. I had no intentions of finding him here today, and yet here he was. The man responsible for Kenneth's murder.

"Tonight, brothers and sisters, we gather for the feast. We will devour the lies of the past, as K'thali Mata'rith has done before us, within innumerable cycles of existence. We can put ourselves and our ancestors to rest. If you have faith in her divine will, and a drive to atone for your sins, then pray. Beg that she exert her perilous mercy unto the feast."

I stood at the front of the crowd that spilled over the huge marble steps of the cathedral, my eyes fixated on the hooded Angel statue that looked over us all. As I stared into the hood filled with a featureless face, my head began to feel light.

Sweat poured down my face in sheets of cold, salty streams. It felt like pressure was building in the back of my skull and teeth. Every moment that I watched, the angel shimmered with an aura of darkness, magnified in my altered mind state.

The taste of sulphur filled my mouth as the world around me faded into a red tinted haze.

"Damn it..." Was all I could squeeze through gritted teeth as I hunkered down to resist the hallucination.

Her arms sway in a rigid motion as the edges of reality frayed around my vision. Then, in a psychedelic fractalized motion, the arms split into six separate limbs that swirled in a hypnotic motion that pierced through our reality.

A wicked, rotted tooth grin spreads across the Reverend's loose and yellowed skin. The whole district itself slowly expanded, revealing endless rows of vicious fangs that must have always been hidden away from our world. Encircling us unseen for centuries, the inevitability of our fate locked within a gaping maw

The damage ridden cathedral began to break away into the sky as I stared on, no longer tethered to our world. I was becoming lost in the jaws of a being I couldn't hope to possibly comprehend. It fell into pieces in a swirling sky of malevolent clouds.

My vision began to fade as the Reverend and the entire crowd turned to watch me with swirling vortexing faces, a pure and unstable look of satisfaction rippling across their eyes and bloodied lips.

They all pointed at me and began cackling like wild dogs descending upon the spoils of their night's kill.

All except the Reverend. His softly spoken final words swirled about my consciousness as I fell into a bottomless pit of void and nothingness.

"May you be reborn in her image tonight, Lawrence Rooke. Do what your father could not."

The void caressed me with a vampiric embrace. For a time, it was as though I didn't exist at all. My purpose in the world melted away into a feverish, pitch-black abyss as consciousness connected and fused with unconsciousness.

I believed I was dead... for so long. It felt like centuries.

Just when I thought my worldly suffering to finally be over, I woke up in my father's... Well, my office, slumped over the desk still riddled with manilla folders and melted wax.

I stood weakly from the wobbling chair and tried to rekindle my balance, dangerously leaning all my weight onto a pair of sturdy bookshelves. A deep, tender pain in my guts brought my hand down to feel the flesh.

Fresh stitches held a new wound shut. Crusted blood crystalized along the shoddy medical work, leaving behind a mess that even a medieval physician would scoff at.

Not even the hum of my protection ward could ease the pain.

Fuck. Time for a drink.