The Collector

Short Story | Horror/ Urban Fantasy

I am a collector. Of a kind.

Lots of men are collectors. I would hazard that there is something in the masculine persuasion that makes acquisition intrinsic.

Some collect stamps. Some collect Pokemon. Some collect the bodies of women, however you wish to take that.

Mine, insofar as I know, is a unique collection.

I hold it within myself. It sustains me.

We’ll get to that.

Let me first tell you a story.

It is the story of my first acquisition. I remember him vividly. You might have thought that my memory had faded after so long, but we always recall our first, don’t we?

I was a man of the cloth then. I have been since but back then it was for love. My compunction was snow pure and burned with righteous fervor. Zealous.

So was he.

That was why he came unto me. Half-broken, his spirit bloodied and dirty. You could see it in how he walked. He sagged in, with his great white cape draped around him. His mail clanked as he shuffled into the cathedral.

I was readying myself to give a sermon. It was still hours yet and I was preparing the eucharist, my vestments laid out, pressed and ready. It was to be a fire and brimstone speech. That was my stock in trade, what the flock expected of me. They almost seemed to enjoy my verbal flagellations, my tongue whip-sharp, lacerating them for their foolish pride, their stubborn sloth and their weak, pathetic lust. Their eyes would widen in fear and awe as I castigated them for their sins. I had time for all of them, but not without contempt.

As he came to me, he cried out in such a voice as I have never heard before or since. There was pain in it, so much pain, but it was not the pain of the wronged. It was the pain of the aggressor. The pain of the bull who, having charged the muleta and gored the prancing toreador, will eventually calm and become resigned and sorrowful.

I could see it in his eyes. They were filmy, the irises somehow splintered like a cracked pond late in the season.

He requested my pardon. This was a time before confession booths.

I told him, “Kneel my son and tell me of your sins.”

He had killed. Fighting men and infidels, yes, but the innocent too. He had disarmed men and having beaten them, smashed their heads to bloodied pulps in the mud of battle. He had raped women and then cavorted in his their blood. He had taken children and enslaved them, tortured them. For a bet. To make an example. For pleasure’s sake itself.

He told me it was different in war. That they had been granted implicit absolution of any wrongdoing and that much was true of the ideology of the day. All knew that it was merely a means to an end though. What we might now call a “backward rationalisation.”

He had been at the Horns and at Cresson. He had put a sword through an Ayyubid’s eye. “Right through,” he said hoarsely, “I saw it come out of his neck with the … whiteness.”

The implied absolution, he evidently felt, was no good. Just something that their commanders had told them. It was piss weak beer and he needed spirits. He needed to hear it from a priest. He needed me to make it right with God. As though I were some negotiator, shuttling missives back and forth across the ether.

I witnessed him standing there and, in that precise moment, I first felt it.

I had known the light of the divine since boyhood. I had walked with God in my heart and had not then known the touch of a woman. His presence had been gentle, warming. A guiding light.

What I felt emanating from the soldier was its precise inversion. There was a hole. A gaping chasm in this man and he was desperate to fill it with God’s love. He was as Dante’s unbaptized children, reeling from sheer absence, though the Inferno would not be written for another 200 years.

And there is power in a vacuum. Make no mistake about that. Where God smiles, the void howls the music of erasure. Like a hurricane of the soul.

I laid my hand across his face. The poor fool didn’t even know enough of the sacraments to suspect anything untoward.

I took his pain that day.

But I did not give it to God.

Everyone reacts differently. Some are genuinely absolved: a spiritual ablution, a powerful healing. They walk away refreshed and buoyant. Some, I suspect those that saw too much of themselves in their deeds, crumble into shells of themselves. Some writhe in the agony of fiery limbo or worse. In the end, all that is constant is the transference.

But what do I collect?

Men — it is almost always men — have a certain self-righteousness that allows them to blow their pain out and use it as a battering ram against the world. It can be the smallest thing. A missed project, or cruel word spoken at an inopportune time. Women swallow their indiscretions but men will wear them like a barbed peacock’s tail and take every opportunity they can to flagellate themselves.

Especially now.

Everything is a crisis to this new generation, every second an opportunity to revel in the sins of their forebears. Climate. Race. Class. Sex.

The world is my smorgasboard.

I taste, I sample, I devour all manner of passions and foibles and midnight rendezvous.

They keep me. And I keep them. Secrets are, after all, their own currency.

Today, for instance.

My vocation has changed in the last 900 years, my modus operandi anyway.

But not my staple, not my daily bread. There’s still plenty of fertile ground in the Catholic Church — plenty of grist for that particular mill, believe me — but I have more elegant solutions now.

That’s why I am sitting in the Hyatt with a small pinkish man in his mid-forties. He is wearing a dark suit and sweating a great deal. His name isn’t important. What is important is that he’s a high ranking Republican whose been in the closet since the age of fourteen, has an 8.5 beard of a wife and is running a very traditional, family-first, abortion-is-murder Christian-values campaign for the gubernatorial race in Georgia.

He’s knocked back multiple welfare bills for the poor and disenfranchised to, in a deliberately murky and roundabout way, throw up a series of stucco apartments built by his cronies. I suspect I won’t get much juice from that.

Still, the man is a walking turkey dinner. His little, sandy-haired twink of a secretary sits in an opposing chair, big blue eyes and full lips. I don’t even need to ask if they’re fucking.

I am what’s known in political spheres as a ‘blacklighter.’ Think of the role as the centre of a Venn diagram between a lawyer, a priest and a shamus: pre-damage control at the most microscopic level, levelled in advance against any potential political flashpoint.

I need to know everything that could be used against this man: every rendezvous with a glory hole in a Kansas truck-stop, every greasy dollar slipped into his back pocket from Shell or Exxon. Every hypocritical slip this shitheel has ever made. I need to pour over every brick he has laid in his own personal road to hell to make sure it’s clean and sanitisable. Or at least that it can be turned over.

Within ten minutes of grilling, he looks like he has spent days in a sauna. There are suitcases under his eyes. The armpits of his tailored suit have becomes swamps. He’s reeling a little, blinking slowly.

“Is that all?” I ask.

“Uh, yeah,” he says. “no, wait. I sucked off a priest when I was thirteen. That’s about it.”

I nod. I have never judged men for their sexual preferences, even if they themselves do.

“Kneel,” I say. I give no diagetic reason, but this is as much a confessional as anything so they never resist.

I step forward and place my long, slender fingers over his face, palm pushing against his nose.

“Be at peace,” I say in a low, sonorous voice.

Then it happens. His face begins to redden. At first, he says nothing. I expect he puts it down to his own humiliation.

A drop of blood trickles from his nose. Then another. Soon, streams, freshets of blood are pouring from his nostrils. Then his ears. Then his eyes.

Now he sees it and he babbles, “What is happening? What are you doing to me?” The little man struggles to rise but I push him back down. I can hold him to the ground at roughly four g’s without difficulty. The secretary’s mouth pops open and he looks like one of those carnival clowns you pop the ping-pong balls into.

The man on his knees screams and I thank the Gods of Soundproofing that we took the suite.

Soon his face is covered in it’s own gore, the rivulets of red ichor turning his face into a twisted demon from the very bowels of the Bad Place. He is no longer forming coherent sentences, merely babbling in fishy plosives and grunts.

In kindness, I crush his skull between my fingers, the chips of bone and white viscera spread between them like wet render. I drop him and the body crumples to the ground.

With a single flick, I excise the stuff from my hand, grab a handkerchief and wipe it diligently. In truth, I half expected this, but you can never be sure. You never know how deep the worm goes in these men.

The secretary is frozen in place, his mouth still open. I gently close it for him.

“He slipped,” I say, dragging the body, one handed, to the verandah. “He’d been depressed for days. You were out of the room when it happened.” I look him dead in the eye “… weren’t you?”

The kid inclines his head just enough to make sure I understand.

I heave the corpse off the balcony. There’s silence, then the wet plop of an egg dropped on a supermarket floor.

“Improve your taste in men,” I say to the secretary. Then I exit the room. In a second, I have taken on a different body. I am now a woman in a black dress, high cheekbones, a hint of a sneer at the corners of my mouth as I enter the elevator.

Guilt. The Elixir of Life is man’s own sniveling folly.