Past Returns by Hal Wilson

Author:Hal Wilson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2023-03-07T14:48:18+00:00

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hal Wilson lives and works in Berkshire, and when not reading or writing is usually found working on a new Warhammer project. ‘Past Returns’ is his first story for Black Library.

An extract from Hallowed Ground.

In the darkness, hands shaking, the girl hushed her breath and tried not to scream. There was a gap in front of her, a line of light to which she pressed her face. She peered through into the shadowed room beyond. The crackle of flame from elsewhere in the house, the stench of smoke, the reek of blood. On the floor lay her mother’s body, arms and legs twisted at impossible angles, her face turned away. The rent in her throat, blood pulsing onto the floorboards, the loaded crossbow at her side. She could see this. She could see everything. Her bed, the blankets tossed aside. Her dolls slumped on the sideboard. Her books. Her mother’s corpse.

She peered through the crack onto the ruin of her life.

‘Little girl…’ came the voice from deeper in the house. A woman’s voice, mocking and amused, sharp with pleasure. ‘Little girl, I can smell you… Come out, little girl, come out and play!’

Breath like a bellows now, rattling inside the darkness of the wardrobe where she had hidden herself. The girl clamped one hand over her mouth and reached with the other for the pendant around her neck. She squeezed it so tightly it broke the skin on her palm. The twin-tailed comet. Sigmar’s sign. Her mother’s final gift.

‘Sigmar protect me!’ she whispered. ‘Father, protect me.’

‘Child, don’t be so shy,’ the voice laughed. It was getting closer. The girl could hear the whisper of silk, the rustle of the woman’s gown. She could smell her corpse-scent beneath the stink of spilled blood. ‘If you’re waiting for your father to join us, then I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.’

The girl’s heart lurched in her chest. She sobbed, and the woman laughed to hear it. She was near now, very near.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ the woman said. Her voice was like red wine, like velvet. ‘He’s still alive, for now. Although, I imagine it will be a long while before he can walk again…’

The girl crouched in the darkness, tears burning in her eyes. Smoke was drifting into the room now, creeping in frills and tendrils across the floorboards. Her mother’s blood as black as oil, smouldering in the light of the aether-lamp.

‘What did you think would happen?’ the woman said. ‘For your parents to come after me like this, to try in their blundering way to hunt me down, like an animal…’ She snarled suddenly and the girl felt the blood in her veins curdle. ‘Like an animal!’

There was no way out. She would die here, die like her mother at the hands of this thing. And then her father would die, and his strong and gentle light would be taken from the world forever, snuffed out in agony and humiliation. The girl cried, no longer trying to muffle the sound.

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