The Black Lord by Colin Hinckley

Author:Colin Hinckley [Hinckley, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-959790-93-8
Publisher: Tenebrous Press
Published: 2023-08-08T03:00:00+00:00

IV. I SAW IT COMING, I LET IT BE

THIS WAS NOT the life Sandy had envisioned for herself. When she was a young mother, right after Todd was born, she had been in love with the notion of a simple, quiet life; a life spent supporting her husband and boys, content to watch her family bloom like a well-tended garden. Her parents had taught her—in more ways than one—that the greatest goal she could possibly achieve was to be a caring, resilient wife and mother. That she need only depend on the men she loved to shape a life full of joy and free of sorrow. Boy, what a crock of shit that turned out to be.

Every man in her life, she muses, sitting in the back seat of her son’s car, staring through the darkening windshield, has failed her. Her husband turned out to be a monster worthy of nothing but a swift death; her youngest had followed him blindly into depravity and ruin. And, though she hates to admit it, Todd is his own sort of failure: despite her consistent warnings since Eddie’s birth, he had lied to his wife, systematically, over many years, then allowed her grandson to be stolen. Her idea of a good life had collapsed around her, all of it in excruciating slow motion.

She had long abandoned this dream of an easy family life, and had been surprised to find—with an occasional flash of shame—that her new, more solitary existence had suited her much better. It wasn’t until all the men had slunk away to their separate corners that she began to really know herself. And she had found, to her great delight, that she was excellent company.

“Graaaaaandpaaaaaaaaa!” Eddie’s voice comes drifting into the car from another world. Sandy leans forward on her aching knees and sighs through her nose. In the front seat, Laura shifts, clearly antsy. Outside, the wind has taken on a manic, agitated quality that Sandy doesn’t much care for. Through all her years of private study, she had gleaned a great deal about the natural world and how humans—and other, viler things—communed and interacted with it. Ideas of interconnectivity, of all nature being in conversation with itself, permeated the works she perused. There is also the idea—ridiculous, in Sandy’s opinion—that nature despises that which is outside its natural order, and will react accordingly: this being the rationale for freak disasters from some of the kookier corners of the internet. It’s preposterous to think that the trees know that there’s a monster in their midst, that the wind can smell an abomination. But still. The way the branches wave at her, like they’re trying to get her attention, trying to warn her . . . it seems more plausible now than it did in the daylight.

“Graaaaaandapaaaaaaaa!” Eddie’s voice comes again. Laura grips the steering wheel and rests her forehead on top.

“This was a mistake,” she mumbles into the car horn. “I can feel it in my stomach.”

Sandy doesn’t reply. There’s a growing worry in her own gut that Laura may be right: Sandy may have gravely miscalculated.

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