Revenge's Role

The resplendent, full disc hung in a clear star-pricked sky casting a silver veil across the rimy land. A breeze stirred the soughing elm trees that lined the faintly glistening drive leading up to Orchard House - his own well-to-do country house where his wife mostly resided while he was busy in the city and where he let his under-achieving brother stay in times of need ; it was where he witnessed the intimate tryst between his wife and brother that had shown him the deception of their seemingly platonic relationship, and that had led to grim consequences. The moon's veil shifted with the tree's swaying branches as the frosty leaves danced shadows and reflections back and forth; one last gambol before wizened falls. Out beyond where the drive ended, so did bare detail, fading into simple shapes and contours of shadow and penumbra until this too ended at the irregular skyline, giving way to balmy violet nightsky.

A sudden movement from the corner of his eye instinctively made him swing his gaze away from the distant horizon to the drive at the foot of the mansion. With curious dread, he scanned the drive and its verdant vicinity for the cause of his attention, but nothing incongruous could be seen. Probably just the simple tricks of an unstable mind at a preternatural hour; the thought of a harmless nocturnal creature going about its furtive chores did not cross his non-rustic mind.

He chided himself over this effeminate vagary as well as others that had preceded it; the terrifying awareness of something baleful or the incipient pervasion of malicious intent in the room that seemed to condense upon him like a slick layer of oil; an otherworldly presence compressed into terrible feelings of unfulfilled vengeance that threatened to smother him. He castigated himself over these disturbing fancies yet anxiety still lingered on him and his eyes would not shift from the road.

Presently a shadow moved under the trees and John's breath caught as a man shrouded in pale mist stepped out from the cover of the boughs. Moonlight illumined the hazy figure and as John looked closer upon his face his heart froze as apprehension stole over him; the deathly-pale face returning his stare was that of his brothers- come for revenge. Aghast at the window, John could not move, his fearful wide eyes locked upon his brothers void black eyes that were set in a ghastly gaunt countenance. A sudden fear of being struck dead on the spot by some wicked supernatural contrivance overwhelmed John and he instantly shrank back from the window and cowered by his bed. There he lay all night, a condemned wretch waiting for unmerciful justice, until as night waned he fell asleep again to return to his infernal prison.

****

Days and nights passed as mere shades to John, each one darker than the last. John continued his perfunctory cycle of sleeping restlessly by day and listlessly roaming Orchard House by night, shunning all human company for fear of tacit accusations behind sympathetic eyes. His unethical and selfish life was now taking its toll on him by miring his bedraggled soul in the foul excreta of unholy perdition.

However with the aid of outside influence a small glimmer of hope appeared to him; it was a tiny flame kindled within reach in his tenebrous state that he desperately wished to seize upon and at a cursory glance did.

Peculiarly, the outside influence that had precipitated this belief of redemption was the reappearance of that awful apparition; for he had decided that it was indeed an outside influence of some divinity and not the toys of despair of a deeply contrite and unstable man. Twice more on separate nights it appeared to him. On the second encounter he was walking past his brothers room, now locked and unused, when a barely audible hum coming from within made him pause in mid-stride.