Four pure demon families walk this world, rubbing shoulders with you in supermarkets and schools. Sharing a desk in the office or fixing your hot water heater. Lineage matters to all of them. But to Leeches, it matters most. There’s no nobility in an origin tale where a primordial swamp is your mother. They craved
I was in the village two miles east yesterday morning. Errands. Nothing worth reporting. On the way back I passed Paula the teacher from the primary school. I haven’t seen her since before her maternity leave — eight, nine months ago maybe. She looked the way new mothers look: held together by necessity and not
New Haven, Connecticut. 1866. A rifle comes off the line at the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Model 1866. Brass receiver, polished to a shine. Walnut stock. Smooth action for its era. Nobody marks the occasion. It’s one of a thousand or so. The workers go home. The foreman ticks a number in a ledger. The
Conn O’Cuinn’s Rifle Read More »
I’ve known a few people who loved the wrong thing so completely that by the time they understood what it had cost them, there was nothing left. It’s a long, slow destruction. Until the person standing there at the end of it isn’t anything like the person who started. Jegudiel was one of those. I’m
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There was a man in a pub in Carlisle — this would have been the late nineties — who held a table for four hours without buying a round and left with three people’s phone numbers, one person’s car keys, and what I strongly suspect was a signed document of some kind. Nobody saw him
I’ve been putting this one off. Not because I don’t know what to write. Because I know too much, and case files are supposed to maintain a certain distance, and distance is a thing that becomes increasingly difficult when the subject has your number and uses it. We’ll get to that. Conn O’Cuinn. Celtic Soldier
Conn O’Cuinn: Three hundred years and counting Read More »
I sat in St. Cuthbert’s this morning. Don’t read anything into it. The heating works and it’s quiet before ten. Tazia and I have churches in common that way. There’s a painting on the north wall. Small thing. Oil on board, probably Victorian, probably donated by someone who thought they were being generous. An angel
Someone left a file on the bar last winter. I wasn’t there when it arrived. That happens sometimes. The door has a way of letting things in when I’m not watching. The file smelled like a damp basement. I’ve been sitting on it since. There’s a moment in 1914 that history skips over too quickly.
Information sheds weight as it travels. Names drop off first. Then dates. Then certainty. What’s left are phrases that don’t quite belong to anyone anymore. Copied, translated, misfiled, and passed along just because. Conn O’Cuinn got his hands on Carver’s file about Tazia. At that point, she’s just a girl nosing around his patch wanting
Tazia Savoy: The Girl With No Human Record Read More »
