Thunder crashed and boomed all around, as the creaking horse and cart rumbled along the narrow, winding lane between Goatswood Farm and Peterleigh. Rain lashed at the driver as he screamed and frantically cracked the reins, urging the wide - eyed horse to go even faster.
Other than the feeble light from the swinging oil lamps either side of the cart, there was only the flash of lightning in the sky to illuminate the treacherous, rutted, muddy little road, Bouncing off rocks, the cart lurched this way and that, left and right, each time threatening to unseat the driver, who somehow managed to cling to his seat for dear life.
In the back of the cart, its cargo jounced and rattled loosely, but the driver merely prayed it wouldn't be thrown off the back and lost somewhere. Fervent prayers to God and Jesus passed the old man's lips in an incoherent stream of Hail Marys and Our Fathers, but he refused to look back at the article, to make sure it was safe.
The driver was old, by the standards of the day - 35 was considered old by the standard of living of the area, as the gravestones were all too eager to point out - and this man was a grizzled elder of 50, his long grey beard wispy, his face lined.
Behind the slate grey eyes was a look of fear. Steadfastly, the old man drove onwards through the rain, taking pains not to look back for any reason, all too aware of the overwhelmingly heavy sense of presence of the thing coming up behind him.
The road turned left sharply; the cart slowed down to navigate this awkward passage, and the driver's head turned left to catch a glimpse of the, whatever it was, following him.
He screamed, turned his attention to the horse. At that precise moment, there was an ominous crunch from below. The cart lurched and toppled to the right, thrown by the breaking of its axle. The driver was launched high into the air, over the hedgerow. He landed heavily on his back, winded, on something soft, wet and cold. A midden.
With a soft splatch, the item in the back of the cart, which had been throw in more or less the same direction, landed in soft muddy water some distance away. It sank to the bottom, and vanished.
The old man lay silent in the midst of farmland ordure, his mouth working as unvoiced prayers came to his lips, his eyes tightly closed as the beast pursuing him turned on the only other living thing in the road: the injured horse.
Tears came to his clenched eyes as whinnies became animal screams of pain, and his prayers became just the one: "Holy Mary Mother of God ... Holy Mary Mother of God ... Holy Mary Mother of God ... Holy Mary Mother of God ..."
Martin Lucas was always a loner. But at one time, he was a teacher, and a proud one at that. The Lucas family of Peterleigh had always been proud of their teachers, right down to Isiah Lucas, his so-many-greats- grandfather.
This was the life before his call-up: Martin would look around the classroom, at the pupils taking down notes he'd written on the blackboard. Today, it was Year Four, 14 - 15 year olds, and the subject of this week's RE lesson was "The Relevance of Faith in Modern Life."
Martin looked around the class, yawned, sat back in his chair, and thought of the chemistry lab, his usual home away from home ... or rather, still away from still. The latest batch of home brew had been placed into the Mason jars and stowed away in the stationery closet at the back of the lab, ready to mature.
It'd be ready next year, providing nobody tried to open any of the bottles of fermenting mix prematurely and let all the mould in.
Oddly enough, this was one experiment that the remedial Gamma grade seemed to be very enthusiastic in conducting ...
A hand rose from the middle of the class. "Yes, Walters?" Martin said, wearily.
"Sir, I don't understand this passage," said the young redhead, Helen.
"Well, don't expect me to be of any use," Martin replied. "Mrs Dudgeon's still in hospital with bronchitis, and I'm only filling in for her."
"Well, this question here. What's the difference between compassion and sympathy?" Helen asked. "I don't see how the passage the question refers to has any relevancy to it."
"Let's see," Martin said, getting up and walking over to the desk. He looked down at the passage in front of the young girl ...
... which read MAKE THE WORLD BETTER.
Martin looked again. The passage read something completely different. He shook his head, turned to face Helen ...
... and got a shock. Helen looked completely different. There was something wrong about her. He could see another image, superimposed upon her. A ghostly woman, something not belonging to Helen Walters.
In a series of flashes, he saw something else. The ghost entering her body at night, while she slept. Helen suddenly acting completely out of character, spending her nights sampling alcohol and smoking cigarettes with known shoplifters and troublemakers from the school, even having underage sex. Ghastly images of her violation and pain crossed Martin, one after the other. He came to realise that this, whatever it was, was forcing the girl to do these things.
He laid a hand on her shoulder, watching her flinch. "You are in pain," he said, not to the girl, but to the controlling entity. "But this one must not suffer any further."
There was something in his voice - an authority, a projection of force of will - that seemed to work on the strange stain double image, pushing it inexorably out of the girl's body, until it was gone like a stray wisp of smoke in a wind tunnel.
And then the spell was broken. Helen sprang out of her seat as Martin's perceptions returned to the here and now. Standing up, she looked around her at the class, who had turned to stare at her. She looked at Martin, and slowly her face began to crumple into tears as the realisation hit her that she was finally free.
"Sympathy means that you merely understand someone else's pain at a distance," Martin found himself saying. "Compassion means that the sympathiser is compelled by the suffering of others to act to relieve their pain." He returned to front of the class. "Now do you understand?"
The children lowered their heads hurriedly, scrutinising their books. The sound of scribbling intensified, almost drowning Helen Walters' sobs as Martin took her out to see the school counsellor and the First Aider.
On his return to the class, deserted after recess, to collect Helen's things, Martin drew a strange symbol he'd never seen before on her schoolbook. A sign he instinctively knew meant "victim."
That was Helen Walters' first day of recovery ... and Martin Lucas' last day in school. That night, he was out on the street, looking for signs of others like him. Looking for Word, strange voices, anything to convince him he wasn't crazy.
He eventually found colleagues, friends, fellow hunters. But by then Martin Lucas, schoolteacher, was long gone. Nobody from the old school would recognise him now, nor would they allow him to enter their homes in his dishevelled state.
Plenty of rain, but no thunder and no wind. Just cold, bitter, vertical rain, coursing down from a sky made dull and oppressive by the streetlights.
The High Street of Peterleigh was deserted at 8:30, nothing moving in the central bus station except for the tall, dark haired man in the dark Macintosh coat pacing up and down inside the Plexiglas bus shelter, shivering and wrapping his arms about himself to keep the cold at bay.
A blonde raced across the empty street to the bus shelter, and tapped the man on the shoulder; an unnecessary move, since the man had had her in his sights on and off all evening.
The blonde was dressed as a streetwalker in a shiny black vinyl coat with grey fur lining, collar, cuffs and edging. Her legs under the fishnet stockings were raw with the cold, her fingers nearly numb in the fingerless gloves.
"It's late," she said to the man. The man nodded, looking down the High Street with dark brown eyes. He was silent for a moment, before turning to the woman.
"You know," he said, "I thought these Army surplus hand warmers would be useful in weather like this. But they're not. Bloody thing's conked out on me."
The girl took out a lighter from her handbag, watched as the man took out the small blue hand warmer and opened it. Inside it, the fuel rod was only burned at one end, a few millimetres.
"How long have you had this?" she asked.
"I lit it half an hour ago," the man said.
"You fool," she said. "The rod didn't take, that's all. You've got to hold the flame over the end a lot longer before it'll catch. Watch." She flicked the lighter, let it burn at the end of the solid fuel rod until a full centimeter of it was red, like a bizarre dull metal cigarette. This she put into the handwarmer and closed it. "You'll notice the difference in a minute," she said.
The man smiled, a rare occurrence. "You have it," he said. "You need it more than I do tonight." He sat down on the tiny bench the Council had thoughtfully provided inside the shelter. "Sit with me a bit."
"I'll look like a street girl trying to proposition a trick," the girl said, using the lighter to light a cigarette. She offered one to the man, but he shook his head.
"Packed them in," he said.
"When?"
"Months ago. Just before I got the wake-up." He stretched. "I've never felt better."
The woman threw her cigarette down, ground it beneath her heels. "If it makes you feel better," she said.
"You'll kiss better," he said, smiling.
"Be careful," the girl said, laughing. "Exercising those smile muscles so much in one day will lead to trouble."
"H'mm," the man said. "I see Zeiss and Vagabond."
"Where?"
"Follow my eyes, girl. Don't make me point at them. That'll risk giving them away."
The girl, known only as Vestal, followed her friend's gaze to a point on the corner of a crossroads beside the Town Hall. There, in the corner, were two huddled masses sitting between black binbags full of refuse, looking for all the world like two more additions to the national homeless problem.
"Is that them?" Vestal asked.
"Shh. It's coming."
"Where is it, then?"
The man turned his head around to the left. Vestal followed his gaze. The creature was already here. Tall, thin, elegant in a long, flowing cape.
"Bloody pretentious git," the man said. "He's only gone and broken into the theatre shop down Roberts Road, hasn't he? Last night it was jeans and a T shirt. Now he's wearing the Dracula costume that was in the shop window display."
"What's that mean?" Vestal asked.
"He's pulling our leg. It means that he knows we're onto him. He's advertising his presence. Bastard." The man got up, turned to walk out of the shelter.
"What now, Libra?" Vestal asked. The man straightened the collar of his jacket, sniffed dismissively.
"We scrub the mission tonight," he said. "He could have any number of henchmen watching us from any number of windows overlooking the street. He may have suborned the guy who monitors the town centre CCTVs. Either way, our cover's blown. Until he gets cocky again."
Turning away, he looked at Vestal. "Give them the signal to bail."
Vestal took out another cigarette, tried lighting it three times, then threw the cigarette away in the bin. She and Libra walked away, and the prey vanished into the shadows of the side streets. Behind the prey, unnoticed, the two tramps got up and looked at one another.
"We must do this again some time," said the young man, smiling wearily.
"'Parting is such sweet sorrow,'" responded the older man, smiling through his scruffy beard.
"He knows of us," said the young man. "We'll have to adapt. Again."
"We'll have to recruit newcomers to go after this one now," Vagabond replied. "We're too well known. A stealth attack would still leave us vulnerable, because we no longer have a cover, and neither, I'm afraid, does the big guy. We've been seen around with him; he's become known to the mosquito, as well. As long as we've been no more than a minor annoyance, he's left us alone, but if we make the move against him, he could have our names and addresses all over the net. All his friends would be able to target us. No, I'm afraid this monster can do us a lot more damage than we can to him."
"We need to surprise this guy," Zeiss19 said. "I mean really surprise him. I've been talking with Libra about this. I think we could assign some of the fresh new talent onto this one, faces he's unfamiliar with."
"And more hiders like you," Vagabond added. Zeiss nodded. "Not ol' Elmer Fudds like us."
They laughed, and wandered off into the night.
Three miles out of town, in the darkness, the rain landed on soft agricultural soil, washing it gently away as it had done for two hundred years.
Only this time, it finally began uncovering that which had been buried all this time ...
By: Fiat Knox
Copyright © Fiat Knox, 2001