Empire

22 Tetch

Lily knocked on the study door and Tetch bade her enter. "Where is everyone?" She asked.

"Come over here, and I'll tell you." He motioned to a chair on the other side of the desk. Atop the desk, where stacks of books had been pushed aside, he had a shoebox filled with dirt. Lily eyed it with interest.

"I know how you've been wanting to go outside the gates," Tetch said, "and the truth of the matter is, I've been laying plans to make that possible. I'm tiring of the house myself, large as it is, and I don't want you to grow up and live your entire life inside these walls."

He emptied something into his palm from a paper bag. It was a dead frog, hard and black. Lily grimaced at the sight.

Tetch dropped it into the shoebox.

"You know your brothers and sisters aren't like the other rotters." He said. She nodded. "Here's why." He gestured to the box of dirt, and she craned her neck to peer inside, and the frog's frail little legs were kicking.

"It's earth from around the estate." Tetch explained. He loved the way her eyes shone as they followed the tiny movements of the born-again amphibian, the way she looked up at him, he who had done the miracle. "Harry and Prudence and all the others were brought back this same way."

"How did they die?" Lily asked boldly.

Clearing his throat, Tetch placed the frog on the back of his hand. "It was Doctor Addison — Father." He was lying, of course, but she was still too young to fully understand. And they had died peacefully besides, slowly poisoned by the exotic toxins Tetch had used to flavor their meals. None of them had ever suspected him of foul play; after all, he was the one who'd saved them from Addison.

The memory was clear as day, one he often replayed. Addison strapping the fifteen-year-old boy to a chair and presenting an instrument tray, upon it a mallet and steel spike. "You're stubborn." Addison was saying while he jotted notes. "Your soul simply isn't pliant enough — yet — to accept the Old Ones." These Old Ones, Addison was always rambling about them but refused to explain who they were. He refused to explain how feeding the children dirt and pricking their arms a hundred times a day did anything to find a cure for the plague.

Addison raised the spike; Tetch's arms tensed, but found resistance in the leather straps binding him. "This will be painless. Soon you'll be a more agreeable subject — they'll be pleased with you, I think."

"T-they who?" Tetch demanded, trying to sound strong. "The Old Ones?"

"The Old Ones." Addison set the tip of the spike just below Tetch's eye and reached with his other hand for the mallet. Tetch, unable to look directly at the spike, glanced down at Addison's notebook. He saw FRONTAL LOBOTOMY in a haphazard script.

"Living tissue, living bodies for them. Much better than the rotting animals out there, so much better." Addison leaned forward and moved the spike slightly. It was huge and cold in Tetch's tear duct. He was terrified. His arms strained and he felt the buckle give on one of the straps.

"Oh, no." Addison lowered the mallet and grabbed Tetch's arm. "I told you this won't hurt, Baron. I need you to relax. I've brought you out of Hell, son, in more ways than one, and I need you to trust me."

Son.

Something about that, at that moment, in that precise tone of voice, caused Tetch to snap.

He yanked his arm free and snatched the spike from Addison's hand. Tetch said something then, though he could never recall what it had been; nor could he recall planting the spike in Addison's throat. He only remembered the doctor flailing across the room with gouts of crimson erupting from him, then suddenly it was over.

Under cover of darkness, Tetch had taken Addison into the swamp to dispose of him. There, as he saw the body resurrect in the bog, saw it stagger about and then look questioningly at him…he'd begun to understand.

Killing the doctor's Great Dane was done out of necessity more than anything else. Tetch did take exquisite pleasure, however, in wiring the skull to Addison's head.

"Father" had been going about it all wrong: groveling to the Old Ones, thinking that they wanted these fragile human bodies, living or dead — it was all utterly beneath them. Tetch had completed Addison's research and realized his own gifts. Now, it was he who had pliant, undying servants. It was he who had mastered necrophagy, feeding his body on dormant energies — but unlike his siblings, retaining his soul.

Lily was captivated by the frog. Tetch extended his arm and allowed her to scoop it up.

"Gifts such as these weren't meant to be squandered in some rotten old house hidden from the rest of the world. I want to go outside the gates as much as you do."

"When?"

"When we've secured the city. When everyone within its walls — living or dead — belongs to me. It's about trust, Lily."

Later she took the frog outside and let it go. The man in black was standing at the fence.

"Why do you keep coming here?" She asked.

"I wanted to see if you were still all right."

"Yeah. Soon I can go out there too, but Baron says everybody has to belong to him." Casting a downward glance, Lily continued, "I think you'll probably have to leave."

"I won't be doing that." The man crouched, his smooth black eyes drawing her in. "Baron is wrong. These things he wants, they won't happen. I think you know that."

"H-he's always right."

The man pointed to the fence. "In there. Not out here."

She didn't respond. She was mulling it over, but as a child she couldn't avoid some truths, even those that made no sense, like the frog in the shoebox coming back alive. It was just…just so…

"It's sad." Said the man. He said it like he didn't know what sad was. Lily nodded though.

"I have to go back into the city," he told her. "Be safe." Then he was gone.

Lily turned and froze. Her blood ran cold at the sight of Tetch in the yard. He'd seen the man.