Beasts of the Field

An unlikely agent of Fate, possessed by his own shadow, moves unseen through the lives of the unknowing, tearing innocent lives apart as the darkness within him threatens to consume all. Will he find the freedom he takes from those lives he touches?

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen

          I am alive.
           Quickly I heave myself up from the damp seat of my nightmare, out of the heavy tarpaulin slumped over me, and hurry down the hill.
           It has been raining, and the city is rich with the smell of mushrooms and soggy newspaper. An urge possesses me in the cool early morning air - I want to know what the soil feels like - to tread the freshly watered ground with my bare feet, and feel the living earth rise up beneath my toes. I want to do nothing more than walk, from one place to another, picking up a reason for doing it along the way. I want to lie in the soft earth and let the sweet scent of life freshly laundered wash over me.
           But I don't. Here on the hilltop I feel a stronger urge to keep moving, above the people and beneath the stars.
           Across the city below, the world is waking up and going about its rituals as I watch. People are burning toast, having arguments and fastening buttons. They are spending the morning doing exactly what they did the morning before and will do again the morning after - living their lives with one footstep after another in a slow and steady line. I look out at the unseen mass of people below, and see fate spinning them into one simple and ordered garment that blankets humanity as one. I see the beauty of it all again, but I see beauty for its simplicity. I do not see blissful ignorance, nor do I see unique individuality. What burns brighter than any streetlight or star is the simplicity of their freedom, existing with the world, within the world in a perfect and simple order; a thread suspended between two points, intertwining with other threads as each moves along its own course. I see where each thread ends and where another takes up its path. I see everything all doing its unconscious part to knit the universe together. I see how precious each valueless thread really is, as part of a whole that can come to a wrenching halt at any moment, far beyond the sphere of one single life.
           I watch them live and breathe, and I know my existence is a lie I can't take back. I know I am the deceiver of the whole world.
           As I try to fight this certainty I feel the guilt swelling inside of me as water burns behind my eyes like vinegar, like a storm, surging as a splash of seawater against a dark and dirty rockface. I concentrate on the images that flash through my mind, the things I've seen: the man who lay dying on the cold cobble in the bright light of the moon; the stale corpse in the street-lit alleyway - more cardboard than human; the lifeless broken policeman devoured tonight without purpose. Without reason. They all lay so still now, gone from the world and its cycles, its needs and its wants. I cannot stop it, any of it. I know it is all my fault because I can't do anything to stop it happening. I cannot cut the shadow from me.
           I feel the water fall, against my will, running down my face like the slightest cleansing touch of forgiveness, only to swell at my chin and cascade to the ground, disappearing instantly to melt uselessly into the banks of dust and dirt - the unseen footsteps of unknown lives.

Words (c) Ben Leto. Images used with permission