Judgement, an unfinished story

2-24-12: 9:50 pm

The weather is getting ugly, and it makes Candlemass a little wistful. As he says, his most difficult jobs in terms of the supernatural came during the winter, while most of his difficult jobs in terms of humans always came in the summer.



I was eating a quick dinner and scrolling through some sites when Candlemass appeared, walking in from the closed door. His body was hitching when he walked, so I was immediately concerned. It's not like he's particularly graceful or gracile, but he never has had problems with moving before, so I asked him immediately if he was okay. He said he was, it was just the weather making all of his old wounds and scars ache.

I asked him if there was anything I could do to help, but he just dropped on one of my chairs, eyes closing and shaking his head.

So instead I just gave him the coffee I had been drinking and asked him to tell me about it.

So, Candlemass took that as an invitation to regale me with stories of his experiences, and told me about some of his rougher experiences that bordered on the paranormal. Kind of the more normal ones we experience here.

During the summer time, some years ago, Candlemass had been summoned to a lodging hall set far off in the recesses of town.

It had been a pleasant day- the sun was out and morning mist was rising off the fields, and the birds were singing lazily from the branches.

And Candlemass was going to go judge a man who had murdered the entire occupancy of the tenancy building, and had made sculptures from their organs and teeth.

Candlemass had never relished his job as a Punisher- he knew he was good at it, and he knew it was neccessary. This type of attitude, he assured me, had always helped him retain perspective, and keep his edge.

But he still hadn't been prepared for what he had seen in the lodging building.

The place had been turned into an abbatoir. The scent of blood and bodily fluids bled out into the street when he reached the door.

Several low-level council members had been guarding the door when he got there, but they looked skittish, and Candlemass had known it was going to be particularly bad.

He found the man in the pantry, tucked into the furthest corner, his eyes so wide Candlemass could see the whites around the iris, and a grin pulling his face tight.

When he saw Candlemass, he'd begun to laugh hysterically, and say they'd been right, and only kept repeating that, no matter what Candlemass had said to him.

Finally he'd said, "The dog was right."

This stopped Candlemass, and he'd been about to ask what he'd meant, when the man had sprung forward, wielding the same knife he'd killed the rest of the occupants with, and opened Candlemass up from hip to sternum.

Reflecting on it, he'd said that had probably been one of the times he'd been sure he'd been close to dying from a human.

The council members caught the man when he'd tried to flee past them, dogpiling him, and Candlemass had meted out his punishment.

He'd wrapped his ropes, still trying to hold his innards into his belly, around the man's neck until he stopped struggling, and the life fled from his body in one, last human gush.

The council members took him to the hospital, and he spent some time in recovery, but Candlemass knew something unnatural had driven the man mad, and he'd be the one to go and find it.

The scar, he said, he still had, and it ached in the cold. But that didn't matter as much that he'd gotten the job done.

It took him nearly another six months to complete it, however. The rest of the case would have to wait until the first snows had fallen.

(after putting this up, I realized the story is incomplete, and I'll have to tell you the rest of the story sometime else. I got distracted writing it down originally)