Not murder, she corrected herself. It was an accident. But suddenly she wasn’t so sure. Hadn’t it felt good? So very–
Chel shook her head, trying to focus on the present. The boy’s face was in profile to her, his gaze locked on the wall ahead, as though it carried an invisible message.
‘What do you want?’ Chel demanded, thrilled by the steel in her voice. ‘Why are you following me?’
He didn’t answer – didn’t even look at her. Scowling, Chel stepped towards him, then caught herself. What was she thinking? This was madness. Her inner alarm was tolling again, louder than before.
This isn’t me!
Skreech exhaled slowly as his quarry’s footsteps receded. For a moment there he thought the woman might push it – maybe even attack him before he was ready. Sometimes the marked ones fought back, but most just froze up and let things play out. None had ever confronted him. That proved he’d chosen well. Sure, the woman was old and dried-up on the outside, but there was a spark inside her – something fierce and bitter looking to break out.
‘I’ll show you the way, sister,’ Skreech promised, pulling a bag from inside his coat. Reverently he withdrew his true face. To call the sacred artefact a mask was unthinkable. No, his mask was the ink-stained meat he currently wore, not the black iron visage in his hands. He’d forged it soon after starting on his path, taking inspiration from the stories that terrified him as a child – the ones that proved to be so much more than just stories…
Behold the Needleman, piercer of light and spinner of night!
The totem stared back at him, its ragged eye slits demanding to be filled. Fulfilled! Skreech was no craftsman, but that didn’t matter. His creation was pure in its ugliness and savage in its honesty. It was a long veil of metal that tapered to a jagged point, with uneven edges that were sharp to the touch, as his scarred fingers attested. The surface was mottled with dried blood and rust, symbolising the twin anathemas of violence and decay, through which revelation could be ripped then rotted away, cycling the seasons of riot and ruin over and over again until the world itself wound down.
Beware the Needleman, bearer of all things dark and spiteful!
Skreech closed his eyes and donned his secret face, binding it to his skull with a leather cord. He shivered as his mind opened up, flooded with impressions that didn’t belong to him, along with an eloquence of thought that was equally exotic. In that moment he became what he wore, anointed by the Night Below.
Hail the Needleman, reaper of lies and weaver of sharp truths!
The myth was as old as the hive itself, though its roots extended much further back, hooked deep into the human psyche, drawing sustenance from that most primal of aversions, the fear of the night. On a world without natural light, where absolute darkness was only a whisper away, that terror had taken ardent form.
Run, hide, weep or fight, it’ll all end the same way, for where’s there’s one, there’s always more, waiting right inside you and wanting out!
One of his family’s servants had told him the story when he turned nine, sharing it like a dread secret. There were cracks in the great dome that shielded them from the night, riddling it like a spider’s web across an eggshell. They were too fine for the naked eye to see, but if you stared hard enough then closed your eyes suddenly you’d glimpse them, snagged in the torn interval between sight and its absence. Master the trick and you might even see more, though you’d wish you hadn’t, for those black fissures weren’t empty.
Oh no, they were full of needles!
Not the kind of needles that mended things or made you better with a quick jab of pain. No, these were barbs of pure darkness that raged against the light that condemned them to their hairline trenches. But late at night, when the sunlights had dimmed, then the prisoners would come slithering out. Coalescing into seething, spiny shapes, they would crawl across the dome, searching for a way to extinguish the lights for good.
The Needlemen…
The night’s terrors were without number, for they were all figments of the same immaculate fever dream. Sometimes they swarmed in the thousands, like black bugs, each fragment no bigger than a human hand. More rarely, they melded into a vast, thorny blanket that oozed across the canopy as one, but most commonly they took forms that looked manlike, but only if you didn’t look too closely.
Of course, Skreech had looked closely, and often. Once he’d started he couldn’t stop. And, in time, the children of the fissures had looked back and recognised a fellow servant of the Night Below.
Opening its eyes, the Needleman removed the remainder of its vestments from the bag. The gloves were tipped with slender blades, no two the same length. The herald smiled as it slipped them on and flexed its fingers experimentally.
‘Will you, won’t you?’ it asked its blades, anticipating the divine terror they would wring from its sacrifice. There had been no need to shadow the woman. Her jacket carried her company’s logo – a cartoon tin can with goggle eyes and a manic grin, its white-gloved hands raised to offer a double thumbs up. That same absurd figure crowned a building a few blocks from the station, rendered in plastek, its vast form glowing against the skyline.
‘Deceiver of fools,’ the Needleman challenged the false idol. Moving with a jerky grace, it set off in pursuit of its prey.
What was I thinking? Chel asked herself yet again. In the sterile sanctuary
