A Darkness Below: Chapter 2
As promised, it's time for the second chapter of my novel! Enjoy, and, as always, input and constructive criticism is appreciated. I'm still stinging from the savage critique a writer friend of mine gave my book, but I'm recovering. Just...be gentle. lol
"Why's it gotta be so bloody cold and rainy," Daniel muttered as he finished his cigarette, tossing the stub into the gutter and tugging his coat closer to his neck. They'd been standing around for over an hour, waiting down the street from a pub they'd been watching for the last week. Like everywhere else in Limerick, the building was flat, concrete gray, and the only thing to recommend it as a place of entertainment was the sporadic flow of men in and out, some sober, some too drunk to stand. The redhead beside him rolled her eyes.
"It wouldn't be springtime without the rain, Danny boy," she quipped, tugging her brown overcoat around her a bit tighter. She secretly detested what the rain was doing to her hair; she already had enough trouble keeping it untangled, and this was going to cause no end of problems for her.
"To hell with the spring, Maggie," he replied, "I'm ready for summer."
"You and me both. Where's this Finnigan moron?"
He gave a shrug and turned back to the watching the pub. Maggie fished a cigarette from the pocket of her coat, smoothing down her plain blue dress over her nylons to keep the cold out. She didn't smoke - she didn't feel like hacking up a lung every morning - but it made for useful cover. After all, who thought twice about someone standing around outside smoking? She lit it with Daniel's lighter and tossed it back into her pocket, along with the pack, before turning her eyes where his had ended up.
The man they were looking for, if he could even be called that, was still nowhere to be found. They'd hoped to catch him walking into the pub, but they hadn't seen him in the street or lurking around any nearby corner. Not that knowing his schedule made it any easier to spot him; like everyone else in this dreary place, he was dressed in drab clothes and had a nondescript build. An average man, with an average face, but with an unusual grasp of particular information that the Order wanted, so the two of them continued to watch the bar.
On the verge of giving up and going back to Cahir Castle with empty hands, they were graced with providence. Whether or not it was by the Lord remained to be seen, but their mark wandered out of the pub and into the street, tugging his small tweed cap down over his brow. Patting down his drab brown coat to make sure he had everything he'd walked in with, he started his stumbling walk down the street, hanging a left and wandering away from them. The two of them didn't exchange glances. They both knew they were going to have to follow him until they found some convenient alleyway to drag him into. Maggie dropped her cigarette and started off first, Daniel falling into step behind her a few feet back.
The rain let up for a bit, reducing from a steady downpour to a light drizzle. Finnigan fished a cigarette out of his pocket and shakily put it up to his lips, muttering about the damp as he tried in vain to light it. Seemingly unaware of his surroundings, it was all too easy for the pair to approach their mark. Even more convenient, he'd stopped next to an alley between two shops that was covered with an awning, providing a darker spot to hide than the dreariness normally afforded. They walked quietly, Daniel catching up to Maggie and taking position beside her.
He kept trying to light the cigarette between his lips, cursing when he dropped his lighter. Slowly easing down to a crouch, his pale hands fumbled to pick it up when Maggie slid up beside him.
"Need a light, boy-o?" she said, flashing a grin at him.
Finnigan turned his dark eyes up to the red-haired maiden and grinned a toothy grin, all the while ignoring Daniel's approach to his opposite side. It was too late when he realized that he'd been conned; Daniel grabbed a hold of his shoulders and shoved him into the relative shelter of the alley. Maggie took a quick look down the street before ducking in after the two, giving Daniel a hand shoving the half-drunk man further into the alleyway and out of sight.
"'Ey now! Dinna do nuthin' to y'two," he mumbled, trying to catch his balance and get his feet under him. His hat was on the floor, revealing his scraggly black hair beneath, unkempt from weeks of neglect. Daniel shoved him up to his feet before he could reach for his cap, pressing his forearm under the man's jaw and pushing him onto his toes.
"No, I suppose you didn't, but y'see, you know something, don't you?"
"I din'know what yer blabberin' about, ya-"
"Shut it. You're not fooling us, Finnigan," Maggie interjected, moving up beside Daniel. "You're a small part of a large machine, and we want to know what it's doing."
Those small, dark eyes looked to Daniel, then back to Maggie, before he finally accepted they weren't buying the stumbling drunk routine. In an instant, the stumbling misery was replaced with a grinning sobriety, and he cleared his throat.
"Michael's my common name, deary," he quipped, turning his eyes back to Maggie, "and you'll have to do more convincing than that to make me tell you Order lapdogs anything. Worse than the gypos, I swear."
"I don't give a high damn, Finnigan. You know what we do, so you should know how this works. Answer our questions and we promise we won't kill you in this trash heap."
"Pfft, you can't threaten me, love," he said, leaning his head back but keeping his eyes on the woman. "Worst you can do is kill me, and you're no closer to anything that way."
"Well, guess we'll have to show you we can do short of killing you, then," Daniel said, reaching his other hand into the left pocket of his leather jacket. After a moment, he brought his hand back up, presenting the silver chain of a rosary and the sterling cross at the end of it, wrapped around his fist.
Finnigan hissed and grabbed Daniel's arm to wrench it away from his throat, but he was quick with the punch to Finnigan's jaw. His fist contacted bone with a sickening crack, accompanied by the hiss of skin, as though someone had just put their palm on a burner and recoiled in pain. Finnigan let out a low growl, squirming but ultimately not finding the purchase he was looking for on the concrete wall or the cobblestone ground, twisting his head back to look at Daniel. The side of his face, which had been pale even by Irish standards, was now cracked, peeling, and red, sporting a burn in the shape of the rosary chain wrapped around Daniel's fist.
"Ready to cooperate? Or am I gonna be doing this all day, Mikey?"
"Fuck you," he spat, reaching up and digging talon-like nails into the arm of Daniel's coat. He grimaced, but that fist was quick to make a second introduction to the side of Finnigan's face, followed quickly by a third. The third impact caused a break in his jaw, but Daniel made no move to let him go.
"C'mon, Mike. I wanna get out of the rain eventually, and you're making that difficult,” he said, cocking his arm back again. The third strike made him a bit more receptive, and he calmed down enough to try and formulate some sort of coherent message. "Aight, aight, w'tell ya what ya wan' know," he stammered, working through the pain and anguish of a broken jaw and burning flesh from his brow to his lip. Maggie put on her most charming smile, crossing her arms over her chest and leaning in.
"We know you and your friends like to stir up the local commies. Get a little fight out of your food," she said, narrowing her sharp, emerald eyes. "But that hasn't been enough for you, has it? Fifteen people in the last two weeks, Finnigan. You're going to pay for it. We want to know why before you do."
The scarred man in front of them, worked his lower jaw around, grimacing a bit as he slowly worked it back into place before he spoke again, more clearly this time. "We're not th'only game in town, lass," he continued. "Why don'tcha ask the shadow fetishists down in Southend wha' they've been up to."
"Why the hell would we do that, when we have you right in front of us?"
"Yer dumber than you look, lassie, and that's hard to do for you," Finnigan said, choking for a moment on a chuckle and the arm against his throat. He snorted, shutting his eyes as his skin flaked off and cracked. The rosary had burned him well enough to cause pain, but the damage wasn't necessarily serious. It was enough to coerce, but whatever they were hoping to gain from him, it was only fueling his noncompliance. "Boy, oh boy, the surprise you two are in fer. Can't wait to see the look on your face, Red, when we come charging down your door and take the fight to ya."
Daniel reached back to punch him again, but Maggie took a hold of his arm, staying his hand. Her other hand slid into her coat, reaching for something beneath it and withdrawing a mahogany stake, sharp as a needle and the size of a small tent stake.
"Say that again," she said flatly, staring at him without expression.
"We're gonna tear down yer fucking doors, red, and root out yer whole Order in one go. And we'll take special care of you, zealot bitch," he said, spitting at her and snapping his teeth at her. Fangs had extended from the roof of his mouth from nowhere, gleaming dully in the reflected light from the alleyway entrance.
Without another word, Maggie jammed the piece of wood to the hilt into Finnigan's chest, causing a choked cough to leave him. Daniel blinked, slowly releasing his hold against the man's neck. Finnigan could do nothing. He writhed, arching his back and twitching his body back and forth, but he couldn't move his arms or legs. In a word, he was trapped in that standing position. Maggie stared at him with the compassionless, cold gaze of a coroner examining a corpse, withdrawing a dagger from a sheath sewn into her jacket. The blade was polished steel, and the hilt was wrapped in thick-hide leather to provide the maximum grip.
"Good fucking luck, Finnigan."
In a flash of motion, the blade sunk into the hilt through the front of his throat, splitting his neck open in one smooth action. Flesh burned and charred black around the edges of the blade, and Finnigan struggled to make some sort of sound or otherwise save himself. The stake, however, would prove to be the nail in his coffin; unable to move, it was an easy task for Maggie to slice clean through his neck and sever his head from his body. It tumbled to the ground, frozen in a twisted, open-mouthed grimace, dark eyes staring up blankly at the awning overhead. A second or two later, the body began to crack and peel, skin turning ashen gray as it burned from the inside out. Within a matter of ten seconds, the corpse had been reduced to a fine ash, blowing away in a passing breeze.
Maggie remained against the concrete wall of the back the adjacent store, furrowing her eyebrows in thought. What had he meant about them coming to get the Order? The clans had never had that kind of drive or that kind of organization in Ireland to come close to that effort. Even a hundred years ago, when they actually had the number to try and wipe Cahir off the map, there was still too much infighting for any sort of organized effort. It had to be boasting, little more than the last insult of a dying man staring his fate head on. She growled and slid the dagger back into her coat before retrieving her stake, turning back the way they came and shoving her hands back into her jacket pockets. Daniel, brow furrowed in a mixture of annoyance and irritation, followed after her, sliding his rosary back into his pocket.
"What in the bloody hell was that, Maggie?" He tugged a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it, draggin harshly as it and exhaling with equal violence.
"He was being difficult," she replied curtly, turning down the way they came and heading for the train station down the road. It was going to be a long walk, and the tone of the conversation wasn't improving her mood any more than the rain and cold were. "He wasn't going to give us anything useful."
"And we know that because we dropped him into a pile back there, right?"
"Yeah, we do, Daniel."
"No, we don't, Mairead," he said, bristling with anger enough to use her whole first name.
"Don't call me that unless you plan to whisper sweet nothings in my ear later tonight," she retorted, refusing to make eye contact with him. Reaching a hand up to brush the cold droplets of rain that had collected on the front of her nose, she took a moment to analyze her surroundings. People ambled about, indifferent and oblivious to the events that just transpired, blissfully ignorant of the grave threat to their existence that she and Daniel both knew all too well. Her pace increased, forcing her companion to speed up in order to keep it.
The walk to the train station was silent, as was the wait for the rail car. There was nothing either of them could have said that would have made a difference to the situation, anyway. Whatever information they'd hoped to gather from this Finnigan creature, information that would have hopefully corroborated other intelligence they'd gathered from equally disreputable sources, was lost. The only coherent thought they'd managed to pull from him was the vague threat of the destruction of their entire Order. It hadn't been the first time either of them had heard it. Both of them had been fighting the good fight their entire adult lives, and they'd trained for it since either of them could hold a knife.
For Maggie, though, the fight was intensely personal. Like her mother, she'd been inducted into the order when she was eight, but she'd insisted on being a hunter, not a scribe, as her mother had been. It had been made all the more difficult by the utter lack of female companionship within their dioceses. She'd had to fight harder, train harder, and think faster than every other boy in her class, but it had paid off. By the time she was given the title of protector at seventeen, she'd outmatched most of the boys that stood beside her. She knew more about stealth, stalking, tracking, and interrogation than any of her male counterparts now, and she was equally skilled with a blade or pistol.
It was her dedication to her craft that made the loss of her mother that much more unbearable. It hadn't been a coordinated attack that took her, nor had it been the evil machinations of some dark overlord working from the shadows. It had been pure, awful misfortune that had singled out her mother for attack in their own home by a gang of six monsters. Her father had gone down to the market to pick some groceries for a late night dinner, only to return to find his wife dead and his house being ransacked. It would have been something else if they'd been normal men, but these were not normal men. He managed to destroy all of them. His cane and his limp were the legacy of that fateful night.
And she hadn't been home to do anything about it, or to help her mother. She'd been at Cahir castle, asleep from a long day's worth of training and study. She didn't find out about it until the next day, when her instructor informed her that her father was in a local hospital, beaten severely but still alive. At twelve years old, she'd lost her mother and nearly lost her father. The anger, that seething rage that almost choked out her will to live, had driven her onward after that day. It was what made her as good at her craft as she was.
The train arrived half an hour later, and they both boarded quietly, heading to an empty booth and taking opposite seats. Maggie turned her head and looked out the window at the dreary countryside, expression blank as her green eyes gazed over the cold sky and the equally cold, concrete structures that people had managed to live in. The trip had been a waste of her time. She tucked a strand of fiery hair behind her ear before settling into the seat and closing her eyes, intent on trying to get some sleep.
“The vodka is terrible,” said the man at the far end of the bar counter.
Jasen set his pen down on the notepad he'd been tracking inventory on and reached up to rub the back of his neck. Today was a warm day, but not nearly warm enough to keep Mircea, the local drunk, out of the Capul de Lup before two in the afternoon. The half-portly, white-haired Romanian man seated at the bar was nursing his glass of vodka the same way he'd been nursing it for the past half hour. As was the way between the two of them, Jasen ignored him, prompting the aging merchant to stare at him indignantly. His tie was loosened an inch and the top button of his shirt was undone, giving Jasen some room to breathe in the oppressive heat of another Bucharest summer.
“So is your service, jackass,” Mircea added, tired eyes fixated on his favorite bartender's forehead.
Jasen continued to ignore him, sliding a hand through his dark hair and slicking back a few strands that had come free. He contemplated unbuttoning his vest, too, but given that he was working, it was only proper that he stay modestly dressed. He turned from his singular patron and looked at the rack of drinks now before him, counting them silently. Starting at the far left end, he worked his way down across the top shelf before dropping down to the next shelf and making his way across to the side he started. Mircea snorted and finished his vodka, setting the glass down lightly after wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“You shame yourself, treating your customers like this.”
He stopped mid-way through the second shelf and stood there for a moment, letting that last comment hang in the air to build suspense. Jasen turned slowly, a smile across his face, green eyes gleaming in the early afternoon light.
“As always, you're my favorite customer, Mircea,” he said. “You always know how to make me feel wanted.”
“It's my pleasure, you worthless foreigner,” replied the white-haired man, chuckling and raising his glass. “Spare me the speech about how your name is some terrible joke your parents played on you. You might look like a proper Romanian boyar, but no proper Romanian has a name like Jasen. Refill, please?”
Jasen laughed along with him, even as the scene darkened and disappeared before his eyes. After a while, even the laughter faded into nothing, leaving only a dark, dank cell around him and the aching pang of hunger in his gut. Like an awful beast trying claw its way out from inside of his chest, it tore at him, leaving his throat raw and every nerve in his body electrified. It was all he could do to maintain his composure, and he furrowed his brows, leaning his head forward in quiet resignation. You put yourself here, he thought. In a moment of clarity, he’d put down his arms and asked for his life in exchange for imprisonment in this dungeon. He’d had plenty of time to think it over in the dank, dark Irish basement, and he’d come to the conclusion that he’d made the right choice. It was better to perish slowly in command of one’s own mind, than to die in glorious combat, at the mercy of one’s own desire for violence, even if it meant wasting away, emaciated and chained to a wall.
The sound of a gate opening caught his attention, along with the quiet click of Oxford shoes accompanied by a cane. He kept his head down, black hair masking his face, but he smirked in spite of himself.
Moonlight filtered in through the narrow slots near the roof that allowed airflow from outside, creating sharp corridors of stark light. The gray stones, surprisingly dry and uncovered here, reflected it through the room, providing the faintest of detail in the otherwise impermeable black. What the moonlight didn't illuminate, Sullivan compensated for by lighting the two sconces on either side of the rotunda. The orange glow from the flames cast light down onto a pale figure, kneeling on the floor with his arms outstretched in chains. His head hung down, moderately long, wiry black hair forming a curtain in front of his face and obscuring it. Despite what must have been a fairly defined, lean musculature at one point, this man looked much older than Sullivan. His skin was as pale as the moonlight, but it looked dried out and stretched, like leather left out in the sun too long. His only article of clothing was what might have once been brown leather pants, long since frayed and reduced to tattered shorts instead.
“Come to gloat at me again, William?” His voice was a raspy, grating sound, echoing against the dark stone walls of the castle chamber. His accent made his vowels different than the Irishman that had come down to visit him, but his grasp of the language was excellent, despite the difficulty he had speaking. “At least you brought a torch.”
“Not gloat, Jasen. Just to talk. I don’t ever gloat over a vanquished foe, least of all one that’s been chained to a wall as long as you have.”
“How thoughtful of you,” Jasen replied, stretching his fingers out and cracking the joints in his hands before letting them hang down on the opposite side of his shackles.
“Thoughtful is right. McKenna and Brennan are arguing about going to war; I’m against it, and so is Brennan. Between you and me, I think he’s insecure in his manhood because he was too young to go ‘over there’ the first time. But they both want me to dispose of you for good. They’re making the heresy claim again, that holding you is somehow an affront to the Lord Almighty.”
“Well, they’re not wrong.”
“Please,” Sullivan replied, shuffling over to the opposite end of the room and pulling a small wooden chair that he’d put down there years ago across the room so he could sit. “Man’s word is his bond, right? You agreed to my terms, and I agreed to yours.”
Jasen rocked back slowly on his knees until his back hit the cool stone of the wall behind him. His arms remained in the air thanks to the chains, but at least he could lean his head back and look at Sullivan properly. Through the curtain of dirty, unkempt black hair, two dull red eyes looked up at the man, and his head tilted to the side.
“Only because you realized I was desperate, and that I would have killed all of you if you hadn’t agreed to them.”
“Hmph,” Sullivan retorted. “We had numerical superiority, even after you killed three of us.”
“If you couldn’t manage it with eight, what really makes you think you could have done it with five?”
“Either way, you yet live. So long as I’m alive, so are you, but it won’t last forever. If McKenna keeps pressing the issue, he might convince Brennan to overrule me by executive referendum and send some hunters down here to finish you off,” he said. In truth, Sullivan wasn’t particularly upset about that idea, even if he did object to it on personal grounds. The last thing they needed was division at the top, especially now. They were on war footing. The Order didn’t need their three commanders bickering over this or anything else.
“I’m sure you’d object strenuously over the matter,” Jasen wheezed, before his body was wracked with heavy coughs, making his shoulders shudder and the chains rattle. He was once again reminded of the clawing hunger in his gut and the way his throat was parched and cracked. Were it not for the fact he’d been chained down here, like this, for two decades, it would have driven him into a frenzy. Now it was just a familiar complaint.
“You’re damn right I would. I don’t murder a man I’ve given my oath not to.”
“Just the ones you’ve given an oath to kill, right,” Jasen retorted.
“That was different,” Sullivan said, straightening up in the chair and narrowing his eyes. “That was war. War is a different circumstance.”
“It’s all killing, Sullivan. It’s all murder. Don’t act like you didn’t enjoy cutting down those barbaric Huns. You loved it as much I loved it.”
Sullivan’s jaw clenched, but he couldn’t say that Jasen was wrong. He watched his friends, men under his care, die around him every time they were told to go up and over the trench. Exacting that cost on the Germans hadn’t just been duty; he’d been satisfied with shooting them and, when he’d run out of ammunition, running them through with his bayonet. He sat silently, offering no rebuttal. Instead, he leaned back in his chair and let out a quiet sigh.
“Don’t have to admit it to me, Sullivan. Besides, sooner than later, the other two are going to overrule you, come down here, and separate my head from my neck. I’m going to miss our conversations. Just do me a small favor? Keep my sword out of McKenna’s hands. The last thing the world needs is that man-boy feeding his aggression,” Jasen said, closing his eyes again.
“Destroy it, if you can. Or else drown it in the sea, far from here.”
“On that we agree,” he said plainly. Without another word, Sullivan stood from his chair and leaned on his cane, lifting himself back up to his feet. He turned and walked back toward the gate, cane tapping the ground to the same rhythm as his shoes. He’d opened the gate by the time Jasen’s raspy voice cut the silence again.
“You’re a good man, you know, William.”
He stopped and turned to look over his shoulder at the dried-up wretch chained to the opposite wall. Jasen had been subjected to torture and experimentation for the last decade and a half, in equal parts, sometimes under Sullivan’s authority and sometimes under the authority of others; behaviors hardly fitting a good man. There was no bitterness or venom in Jasen’s voice though. In spite of it all, he still had a high enough regard of Sullivan to pass him a compliment.
“If you say so, Jasen.”
With that, he turned and left the dungeon, shuffling back down the hallway and leaving Jasen alone to his thoughts once again.
Stay tuned for the next exciting chapter, and, as always, upvotes and comments are appreciated!
Man, receiving harsh critiques is hard. But, keep in mind that you can use those to improve your craft. Whoever that friend was, I wish that he would've cushioned the blow even a little. Bedside manners is important in handing out feedback as well.
This is a nice follow-up from the first chapter. I really enjoyed your use of language. The way you wrote makes the characters sound all the more genuine. Also, the dynamics you set up are pretty well made. I still haven't picked a favorite of mine, but your characters are what I've come to know you for. It's just so strange reading a non sci-fi story from you, and I'm still adjusting. Nice work, brother! Keep your chin up and just keep pushing :D
Oh no, it wasn't rude or mean, or anything like that. It was just very pointed and precise, and there was a lot of it. So it was a bit much to process all at once. XD Thank you for your words of encouragement!
Personally, I tend to comment more on the encouraging side. I have a lot of critical opinion swirling in my head, but I seldom dish it out unsolicited. Let me know if you need an anvil to the other person's hammer haha!
If you do have some specific suggestions, I am always open to them from you. I'm going to post the story in its entirety before I make additional edits, but it would be useful to have them collated by chapter if you're comfortable doing that.
Yeah, sure thing.