[SPEAKER_00]: The Dunhill inheritance, a shornhand missile tail by Matthew C. McClain, part two, the visitor.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am a killer, a poisoner by trade, and a thief by convenience.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, it was not always this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sheltered in the mansion of my pretorial uncle, I eventually spotted him shut a small, blonde boy into the home.
[SPEAKER_00]: Unlike the others that had disappeared after several days, my uncle called me down to the main hall, proud and beaming, the small blonde teen that his side.
[SPEAKER_00]: He introduced him as Jacob, and me as Cole, rather than his master McDowell.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wondered at this breach of etiquette, recalling Jacob's shabby clothing and unwashed hair, which had both been clean since his furtive arrival.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was explained away when my uncle stated Jacob would be staying with us in one of the rooms, and that he would live with me as my brother.
[SPEAKER_00]: I pause as my uncle's words echoed throughout the hall.
[SPEAKER_00]: I examine Jacob, the difficulty of whatever place he had come from, unable to hide the softness of his cheeks, the blue of his eyes, or the loveliness of his hair.
[SPEAKER_00]: He managed to look me in the eye, though it was a struggle for him, being little more than an adolescent and me close to leaving it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It gave him an appearance of shy kindness, and I couldn't help but shut her at what my uncle might do to him once dusk arrived.
[SPEAKER_00]: When Jacob joined me at the dinner table, it only reinforced my initial impression of him.
[SPEAKER_00]: We ate in relative quiet, only making her street statements to the servants and occasionally to each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: I longed to ask him where he was from or how my uncle had found him.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, his quiet nature seemed to insulate him in a gentle air that I did not wish to disturb.
[SPEAKER_00]: This only buried me deeper in my shame as I felt it was only my own cowardice that I should not try to warn or protect him.
[SPEAKER_00]: We died for several nights in a row, ending with me going to complete my studies, and he escorted off by my uncle.
[SPEAKER_00]: One night I braved up to my rescue fantasy, enough that I stealthily followed them to see my uncle lead Jacob into the library.
[SPEAKER_00]: As that did not seem to place for his nightly emissions, I chose to hope that my uncle was, in fact, earnestly educating Jacob.
[SPEAKER_00]: Such was my piece of liberty.
[SPEAKER_00]: This false naive hope lasted until another nocturnal knock came at my door, and I squeezed my eyes shut wishing my uncle leave.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was dashed when I heard my bedroom chamber door open.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, this time the sound was not the heaviest sliding footsteps of my angle, but light and quick, finding my courage I set up to see Jacob standing by my bedside.
[SPEAKER_00]: His appearance, with his unblemished skin, thin frame and straw hair, was so unlike my angle that I couldn't help but smile.
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea of spending a night with someone as gentle and gyl as his Jacob
[SPEAKER_00]: touched me in a way that I no longer thought possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: This faltered quickly though when I looked at Jacob and the eye and saw nothing of his gentleness there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And his gaze was the same hard Everest that I had come to expect into my uncle's nightly visitations.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was only reinforced by the quick and direct way he climbed onto my bed and pulled his own night shut off.
[SPEAKER_00]: His prick was hard and standing, and I found myself staring at it as he pulled it my shirt, attempting to access me in a familiar way.
[SPEAKER_00]: While a part of me remained paralyzed, as I had many nights before, another was repelled by Jacob behaving so unlike the gentle boy with whom I had shared dinners.
[SPEAKER_00]: I grabbed his wrist, stopping his advance.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sparks such anger in him that I felt fear lands through me, despite his smaller size in younger years.
[SPEAKER_00]: I began to vocalize a protest, but before I could, Jacob spat out the words.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, after all this time, now you resist.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was then that I witnessed something change in Jacob's blue eyes as if you were swimming to the surface.
[SPEAKER_00]: His verbalizations became clouded as well, words merging together until they were incoherent.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had read of seizures, such as the one the Caesar had endured, and I imagine the pain and uncertainty they caused were much like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in a moment, the epiplexi passed and the only Jacob's fear shown through his eyes to meet mine.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stuttered out my name and set up, confusion and panic shining through him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Before I could say anything else, he swit off the bed and fled, a platinum shadow that escaped the room.
[SPEAKER_00]: The next evening's dinner, I sat to eat alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: When Charles served me, I inquired as to whether Jacob would be joining me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Charles only flashed his white smile and said that the master Jacob was no longer in the house.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the first time in my recalling, I pulled the dark hair out of my eyes and spoke to Charles directly.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's become of him?
[SPEAKER_00]: Charles glared down to me as if he were the lord of the house.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not rise to certain McDonald's expectations.
[SPEAKER_00]: With that lone statement, Charles had done my dinner and exited.
[SPEAKER_00]: This left me with such a void that, despite the hunger of my physical lessons that left me with, I only pushed my food around and contemplated the previous evening's strange happenings.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those were mirrored that night when my uncle slid into my room.
[SPEAKER_00]: He moved to grab my bed covers to pull them from me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Rather than submit to him in my usual shame, I grabbed his wrist, feeling so different than Jacob's, but stopping him much the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: What became of Jacob?
[SPEAKER_00]: A familiar anger shones the dark in my uncle's eyes and in a flash he did something he had never done before.
[SPEAKER_00]: He struck me.
[SPEAKER_00]: He cuffed me across the cheek so hard and so fast to turn my head and cause my ears to ring.
[SPEAKER_00]: As he spoke, I rotated my head back to him wiping blood from my lips.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a failure.
[SPEAKER_00]: On worthy of the Macdown name, he will never speak of him again.
[SPEAKER_00]: My uncle mustered all the authority he could, but I found on that night, it collided with the palisade of my pain.
[SPEAKER_00]: Seeing something had changed my go-huffed and left, muttering about completing his work.
[SPEAKER_00]: The blood still in my mouth and ringing in my ears, I waited until I could barely hear my uncle's retreating footsteps.
[SPEAKER_00]: than I followed him.
[SPEAKER_00]: I shouted him to the library, my physical training make it easy to keep up with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Despite having spent hundreds of hours in the room for study, it appeared he knew it better than I, for as I spied from the balcony he stepped closer to a bookcase paused than uttered the word, recooled at a
[SPEAKER_00]: With that simple word, the bookcase slid open, and my uncle passed through the wall, leaving me to wonder what black and forbidden art he had mastered to allow for such an impossible mechanism.
[SPEAKER_00]: which is in warlocks, were still burned by the church and unknown.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I knew from my studies that even this did not stop certain nobles from reaching for the personal power that the left hand path might convey.
[SPEAKER_00]: Springing from my spying spot, I approached the bookcase to cautiously repeat the word.
[SPEAKER_00]: While I was surprised that the sturdy bookcase obeyed me as it did my uncle, I stepped into the dark corridor behind it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The walls beyond were lined with the same gray stone that the streets and buildings of Dunho were constructed from, but my bare feet felt the ground sloped downward and grow colder as I moved ahead.
[SPEAKER_00]: I went quietly and cautiously, only sparing a glance back as the bookcase slid shut behind me, sealing me and darkness.
[SPEAKER_00]: I potted my way along the path until a light could be seen ahead, illuminating and arched opening.
[SPEAKER_00]: I heard the crepitation of flames in the air grossly warmer as I stealthily moved to the side of the arched entrance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Through my stared upon was large enough that it's ceiling was not lit by the torches that dotted its walls.
[SPEAKER_00]: At a glance, I took it for a laboratory.
[SPEAKER_00]: So decorated it was by various tables with interconnected glass vials, tubes and albumics.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, the sight of a large cauldron, as empty as any abyss, sat in the middle of the wooden tables that surrounded it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of these myocles stood with his back to me, muttering to himself as he worked with something at the table.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were repetitive, stroping noise of a blade on leather came from his direction.
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the repetition I could hear some of his words.
[SPEAKER_00]: All four elements are in place.
[SPEAKER_00]: Temperature, diet, salts, and now coals of proper age.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stopped and held up a billhook in his hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: His examination of it putting his face in a profile.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jacob's failure proves a blood relation is needed for a successful transference.
[SPEAKER_00]: He spoke to no one in a feverish tone that edges dripped with obsession.
[SPEAKER_00]: Still, perhaps there is more to learn from a closer examination.
[SPEAKER_00]: He moved toward one of the other tables, the top which was a cloth covering an outline that made my blood run cold.
[SPEAKER_00]: Parts of the tarpulin raised from the table with an unmistakably human outline.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wish nothing more than to flee as my uncle approached the table, but I felt paralyzed as if this cold floor had set icicles into me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I stared in horror as he pulled the cloth away, revealing the now ghostly corpse of Jacob.
[SPEAKER_00]: I watched in stricken fright, my uncle thankfully directly between me and his ghastly work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even so, the sounds of his cutting scratched a litany of fear into my brain.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wiring me into place.
[SPEAKER_00]: My eyes only moved from him when gildred stepped forward from a shadow holding a bowl in our hands.
[SPEAKER_00]: Slowly, now stain crimson up to his wrists.
[SPEAKER_00]: My uncle began to place organs in the bowl.
[SPEAKER_00]: One, what piece of tissue at a time.
[SPEAKER_00]: A might of stayed frozen in place until caught if things had not taken an impossibly darker turn.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the midst of his bloody work, my uncle, lifted a piece of Jacob's flesh to kill his mouth.
[SPEAKER_00]: To my horror, the woman snapped at it with her white teeth until she ground it between with any human desire.
[SPEAKER_00]: My uncle continued to cut into what was once Jacob, setting orders aside and feeding his servants as if the corpse were nothing but a prize from the overlord's hunting grounds.
[SPEAKER_00]: This finally snapped me out for my paralysis, and I disappeared back down the tunnel from which I came.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I made any noise, my uncle and his servants were too wrapped in their own oretic cravings to notice me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wish that I could say that I bravely sprung an action that alerted one of Dunnell's black coat inspectors, and that only the reputation for corruption in my uncle's wells may be think twice about informing the constable air.
[SPEAKER_00]: Truth, though, is that I spent the rest of that night cowering under my sheets, hunted by the image of Jacob's corpse, and the sound of my uncle's tools cutting into his flesh.
[SPEAKER_00]: only my hate for him saved me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Shaking with fear, the frightened child inside me imagined my uncle covered him blood, coming into my room, seeking to satisfy himself as he had so many times before, and I, as so many times before, unable or unwilling to stop him.
[SPEAKER_00]: That awful echo of past events rolled into an anger that flattened my fear and pushed me out of bed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dawn had not yet sprung between Dun Hell's Towers and Small while I performed my ablutions and dressed myself carefully, butening my vest and tying my kerbot as if preparing for a funeral.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was then, as the version of the White of Day broke through, that I decided to kill my uncle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Although it felt it might crack my face like plaster, I smiled broadly as I went down the stairs, moving into the kitchen, insisting with a happy invasion to make my own breakfast.
[SPEAKER_00]: My uncle's mention of salt made me reluctant to eat anything not prepared by myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the servants protested at my presence, I pretended with a giddy air to be thrilled that Jacob's unexplained departure.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just said, I was demonstrating my usefulness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Before any of them could press upon this thin deceit, I banished them from the kitchen with a gleeful cackle and the wave of a meat cleaver.
[SPEAKER_00]: My tutors though, having long suspected something of us, gave little to no protest when my attention's wandered from my lessons.
[SPEAKER_00]: in the library I watched my uncle come or go from his sub-training laboratory.
[SPEAKER_00]: As the secret door of the book caves was not immediately evident, my uncle merely repeated the lie that his entries and exits were checks on my progress which I truly responded to with hardened smiles.
[SPEAKER_00]: When he was not there though, I poured through the library to see what I could learn of him.
[SPEAKER_00]: I found that he had an extensive catalog of journals written in a simple cipher that he must have thought impenetrable as the details there and would have gotten him burned at the stake if they were to be believed.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the contents had I not witnessed what I had, would have been unbelievable.
[SPEAKER_00]: The earliest entries were mundane.
[SPEAKER_00]: I read of how my uncle had made his fortune from shipping, having spent much time going to and from the islands of Suluest, where he had brought back spices and gold trinkets, both of which he sold to Dunhill's merchants at exorbitant prices.
[SPEAKER_00]: He also wrote, though, of his intermingling with the people's there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of whom were innocent, he was happy to exploit.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was then he was traveling with a doctor, Brody, that he learned of a small island, excoriated by all others, with a population that the other islanders simply called NERR.
[SPEAKER_00]: The NERR grew nothing, did no fishing, resided over no trade, nor industry, but pillaged everything from their neighbors.
[SPEAKER_00]: who so feared them they offered no resistance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Any that did were butchered with such brutality that their entire tribe remembered the screams for generations.
[SPEAKER_00]: The king of the Nure, though, was feared above the rest as the king was a repository of every torture and psychological terror that could be inflicted upon fellow human beings.
[SPEAKER_00]: The king, so-called regardless of gender,
[SPEAKER_00]: was the receptacle of all their history and knowledge.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dr. Brody and my uncle took great interest in how one individual could know and be trusted to know so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: The pair learned that when the king was ready and a child of theirs at the proper age and there were always plenty as
[SPEAKER_00]: No clothing, timing, consent, or decency, kept the king from procreating, with whomever he chose, whenever he chose.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that when they reached proper age, one of these prodigy, a ritual was set upon.
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe it was done, not my own cross-the-line from merely being a glitches old bugger to true evil.
[SPEAKER_00]: This general entry is that the state took on a fevered and hallucinatory pitch, describing how the child was educated in what passed for a nerr or knowledge, enforced to live in a cold, dark cave of the island.
[SPEAKER_00]: There the child was fed a specific diet, heavy in the sea, so altered the local lagoon, until the time was deemed right.
[SPEAKER_00]: The triumph is most trusted, which doctors would then bind the child, and place them into a large, open basket, and the king would also enter the cave.
[SPEAKER_00]: When whenever iniquitous incantations were performed in that darkness were complete, the cavalcade of evil emerged, and the child was proclaimed king.
[SPEAKER_00]: The old king, now bound hand in foot in the basket, as the child had been, was set upon by his erstwhile subjects, and cannibalized.
[SPEAKER_00]: Having bargained with the old king and then listened to the new one, Uncle Damon became convinced that not just transfer of knowledge to taking place, but a transfer of self.
[SPEAKER_00]: The old king he wrote in barely a legible script had become the new king.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dr. Brody fell away from the journal's pages, though I learned his death was recorded as an accident shortly after submitting a report to Queen Gloriaana in which he recommended the complete extermination of the Nure.
[SPEAKER_00]: As the seat of the Queen, and indeed all of Britannia's imperial administration,
[SPEAKER_00]: Dunhill's usual brutality and thoughtlessness allowed this wise recommendation to pass without notice.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever was behind Dr. Brody's fate, my uncle made many more trips to the island of Nure, learning of their ways in rituals, making whatever unholy promises he needed to in return.
[SPEAKER_00]: He augmented the knowledge he acquired upon these trips by acting as a messenger between
[SPEAKER_00]: the nerve and a splinter church of some power and ill repute and resurrects Polita.
[SPEAKER_00]: I also learned most critically to me that in all of his travels and kernel explorations, my uncle had picked up more than one disease that had weakened his heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was this that inspired me.
[SPEAKER_00]: My lessons in chemistry would be useful then, as they are now, with Beaker's burners and album X of Uncle Damon's laboratory, my beginner's kit for his demise.