The Lost Deaths Novella Part 4-6 (ending)

Previous Part

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Part 4

Fire. Fire was the friend who never betrayed you. You could always count on it to burn all it touched.

When I was a child, I saw one of my classmates—a young child by the name of Thomas Flagel—catch fire without explanation. He carried no match, nothing to smoke, and no tool which could have caused the ignition. His flesh simply caught fire while we were playing ball. It was only luck that he managed to survive by jumping into a nearby river, and even then he still bore marks that remained with him for the rest of his life.

Not only had this incident been the height of strangeness for me at the time, but I’d soon learned that his elder brother André also caught fire at the exact same time on the other side of town; except he had burned to ashes. Their sister, Agnès, was left so traumatized by the event that investigators could hardly make sense out of her testimony, but between her sobs and ramblings they discerned two words: “ghost” and “fire.”

It was that incident of spontaneous human combustion that first convinced me of the supernatural’s existence. I’d first applied to Portenoire when I heard Agnès had been interned there after being involved in another similar case in Paris. She was too traumatized to speak about it, but I knew deep within myself that she had taken a glimpse past the curtain.

The fire I summoned within the Coach-Eater’s belly was no supernatural event. Its blue sulfur flames were an act of science, research, and industry. My substance would continue to burn until it had exhausted all fuel, and not even water would quench its appetite.

The Coach-Eater screamed as the couch ahead of me and part of the floor began to burn. Its tongues wavered and flailed with such frenzy that I was nearly thrown off them. A deep and inhuman wail of agony arose from beneath my feet, and I could hear the bellowing growl of undead horses outside. The monster was in pain.

It almost put a smile on my face.

I had no time to waste though, lest I burn with the coach. I had to break the window and make my way outside.

Thankfully, it was disturbingly easy to buy a handaxe in Paris. I grabbed the one I’d hidden beneath my coat, rose from my couch by stepping past the rising flames, and then smashed the window with all my strength.

It cracked and bled.

A black and viscous substance colder than ice sprayed my weapon and hands. Its mere touch hurt the few patches of skin it managed to reach. It burned not like an all-consuming fire, but the cruelest of chills, one which reached all the way to my bones. Pulsating veins appeared on the window around the point where I struck it, the glass turning into a moist substance which I immediately recognized.

A sclera.

The windows were eyes, and the curtains were eyelids.

That realization didn’t stop me though. I hit it again and again until the window shattered and my hands were sprayed with thick black blood. The false glass broke and opened the way to the outside world, freeing smoke to escape into the cold night outside. The hole was now large enough for me to slip through, and I immediately powered through the pain and struggled to crawl to the other side.

I was halfway through when hands grabbed me by the legs. I dared to look over my shoulder, and then I saw them.

I now knew why the Coach-Eater never expelled waste after digesting its passengers.

It never let them go.

The coach’s floor had collapsed, revealing a gaping pit that seemed to go far below what its form should allow. Pale, eyeless corpses wailed below in between rows of mechanical wheels crushing their legs and backs like one of those infernal Prussian wood chippers. They wailed and screamed as the wheels pulled them deeper into the horrible contraption, their hands grabbing my ankles in an attempt to either follow me to freedom or drag me down to suffer with them. I recognized faces from past nights’ victims among them, their final expressions frozen in terror.

That was how the Coach-Eater killed them. It simply opened up its floor and crushed its passengers alive.

I didn’t think, I just kicked. I tried to push these corpses back, but they insisted. Their hands closed on my legs and tried to pull on me… only to release their grip with wails of pain and surprise.

They had hit the barbs.

Prior to approaching the Coach-Eater, I had taken the time to envelop my limbs and chest with barbed wire hidden below the coat. It had been a safety measure in case the monster tried to swallow me ahead of time. I assumed these metal spikes would have hurt it during digestion and forced it to spit me out.

I guess I had been half-right. The barbs wouldn’t have saved me from being crushed to death, but they did hurt the corpses enough for them to let me go. A terrible realization washed over me as I escaped their grasp.

They were dead, but not dead enough to be free from pain.

I managed to slip out of the cabin and hit the alley’s cold cobblestone floor below, shoulder first. The fall hurt, doubly so when some of the barbs broke on impact and cut my skin, but it beat being crushed to death. I rolled up against a wall that smelled of piss while the Coach-Eater hit another.

I smiled as I watched it burn.

My flames soon filled the cabin and had begun to consume the wood making up the bulk of the infernal vehicle. I heard the screams of its victims coming from within, the shadow of the consumed corpses dancing in the sulfur light.

The horses stopped and began to rot away years in the span of seconds. Their desiccated flesh turned to dust in an instant, leaving nothing in their wake… but it was the driver that spooked me the most. It went through dozens of faces in the span of seconds, wearing the visage of its victims one after the other in chronological order, until it finally transformed back into what I assumed was its true self.

The creature looked at me with black, smoking wheel-shaped holes for eyes. It had no mouth, no nose, not even ears; only a smooth mask of pallid blue skin that never belonged to a human being in the first place. I sensed the gleam of a malevolent intelligence staring back from the darkness, and the cold expression of a primal emotion which I immediately recognized.

Hate.

It was then, at the very moment when I gazed into that bottomless abyss of seething loathing, that I understood that this thing didn’t kill men because it required our flesh to survive. This was no beast driven by instinct, no karmic bureaucrat following through with a task it never chose. This Death did not hunt us out of cold indifference or out of a desire to balance some cosmic sheet.

It killed us out of malice.

The coach’s burning door opened to reveal a maw of teeth that let out a final howl. The strident, high-pitched screams of hundreds of murdered victims wailing forced me to cover my ears. My vision blurred as the flames consumed the Coach-Eater whole. I sensed a vibration spread through the air; a wave that seeped its way through the air, the stones, and my very bones. Paris, nay, the entire world shuddered when Death by Coaches at last met its end.

The universe flickered for an instant, and then it was gone.

I remained still along the stone wall, staring at a bed of ashes and dust covering the alley’s floor. The chilling night wind carried them away into the sky in an instant. The Coach-Eater had left neither bones nor a trace of its existence; nothing except the thick black blood that now stained my axe and coat.

I had killed a Death, and none would know it.

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I returned to the asylum, stored the Coach-Eater’s blood in a glass vial, tended to my wounds, took a large dose of morphine when the pain proved too horrendous, and then slept for a full day.

This caused me to miss my first university course since I began my attendance. I knew that it was an absurd thought to have after what I went through last night, but it underlined a very simple fact about my life: it would never be normal again.

When I woke up the next day in my bed, part of me briefly wondered if I had hallucinated everything; that I had simply woken up from a dark nightmare which I would soon forget.

It only took me a moment to glance at the thick black blood vial next to the Lost Deaths, followed by the sharp pain coursing through my body from small wounds and burns, to realize otherwise. Unveiling my bandages to clean them only confirmed it.

My skin showed an advanced stage of necrosis wherever the Coach-Eater’s blood touched it. Thick black patches marred my hands and wrists, though thankfully not so far that I couldn’t hide them beneath sleeves and gloves. Working at an asylum thankfully meant I had access to medical supplies.

I’d never understood how painful necrosis could actually be until now. I felt the Coach-Eater’s chilling cold in those patches every time I moved or cleaned my bandages; and more than that, I remembered the hungry touch of those wailing corpses in its gullet. The morphine only dulled the pain so far, and it would take weeks for the wounds to fully heal. No normal substance could have caused such degradation so quickly.

I hadn’t been dreaming. It had all been real.

I had killed a monster and lived to tell the tale.

I would be lying if I said it didn’t bring some contentment. I had fulfilled my agreement with the Lost Deaths and slain a beast that had preyed on hundreds of lives, thus saving many more. I knew that I had made the world a better place.

Nonetheless, I couldn’t stop thinking about those… those screaming corpses in the beast’s gullet, nor the baleful glare the Coach-Eater sent me before perishing. That… that had been evil, true evil; the kind of fiend which religions warned us against but whose depthless malice they could never truly fathom.

This creature had only been a minor Mortality according to the Lost Deaths. What other horrors lurked among us, unseen and ever-hungry?

I was too spooked to question the Lost Deaths immediately nor undergo its ritual. I needed to clear my mind, and so I did. I cleaned up and then invited Germaine to visit the Universal Exposition with me. She kindly accepted.

“So?” she asked me as I returned her matchbox to her, cleaned of all of the Coach-Eater’s blood. “How was your first smoke?”

“Terrible, but somehow I do not regret it,” I replied a bit slower than usual. The painkillers slowed my wits. “My apologies for not being available in the past few days. I’ve been busy.”

“I can imagine, considering the hours at which you returned home.” She smiled keenly at me. “Do not tell me you’ve been taken with some girl?”

“I have no time for such frivolities.” I had no interest in romance whatsoever and my work came ahead of everything else; especially now. “Perhaps I will show you what I’ve been up to once I’ve advanced it a little more.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” she said as we exited the sanitarium. “Would you kindly call a coach for us? My legs are old and tired.”

I winced. “I would rather walk, if you don’t mind the exercise. Carriages… carriages aren’t too safe, nowadays.”

Germaine gave me the strangest of looks, and then the kind of expression a parent would reserve for a naïve and foolish child who had just said the stupidest thing in the world.

“Oh, silly Laurent,” she said kindly. “Carriages have never killed anyone.”

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The most distasteful part of the Universal Exposition, in my mind, was the colonial wing at the Invalides, where the authorities paraded pavilions and indigenes from our colonies across the world. I never understood the appeal of watching so-called ‘savages’ pretending to live in recreations of their homes. I’d opened up enough corpses to tell that a black man’s skeleton looked no different than that of a white man or an Asian.

The dead all looked the same to me.

Unfortunately, the authorities spared no expense in reminding us of France’s great ‘civilizational mission’—whoever invented that term ought to have been interned—and turned colonial pavilions into an unmissable part of the exposition. Germaine insisted that we visit the Sénégal one out of curiosity, and I didn’t have the strength left to tell her no.

And then… and then my entire world came crashing down.

A month ago, an incident made national news. Colonel Duchemin, the man in charge of this part of the expedition, ended up slain in a carriage crash in Sénégal alongside his wife and child. From what the newspaper said, the driver had lost control of the horses on their way to the port and the vehicle ended up thrown sideways, crushing all its passengers. The exposition’s staff had to hastily replace Duchemin with someone else.

So imagine my surprise when I watched the colonel—someone who should be as dead as a man could get—give us a presentation of the ‘senegalaise way of life.’

I didn’t remember anything about the lecture. I simply stared at the man for half an hour, all my thoughts coming to a halt the moment he introduced himself. He was the very picture of the fifty-something colonial officer, a man as vociferous as he was arrogant, with a crippled leg and a skin marred by an unforgiving sun; but most importantly, he was alive. I felt his warmth when he shook my hand on our way out of the pavilion, the pain growing sharper when he accidentally pressed on the patches of necrosis beneath my gloves.

“If I may, my colonel?” I remember Germaine asking him. “How is your son? I’ve heard he was wounded in that awful incident.”

“My boy was spooked, but more afraid than hurt,” the man replied with a warm chuckle, before glancing at his wounded leg. “Not unlike his father, who will never walk straight again I’m afraid. I thank God each day to have spared our lives.”

I would have said that he was welcome if such a statement hadn’t been the height of blasphemy. His words at least jolted me enough out of my shock to interrogate him.

As it turned out, the accident did happen, but no one onboard the carriage perished. The colonel’s leg was crushed by the fall and his wife broke an arm. The man confessed that his lady did die a few days later from an infection caused by her injury—something he blamed on the lack of good doctors in the colonies—but it happened so long after the crash that I could hardly attribute it to it.

After the visit, I made a stop at the nearest library and reviewed every report of carriage accidents over the last year. A task which proved difficult, since carriages had been called the ‘world’s safest means of transportation’ and lived up to their reputation. My memory of crashes and other incidents clashed with written accounts.

As far as I could tell, no one had ever directly perished in a carriage accident since their creation. Crashes did happen—the laws of physics being what they were—but everyone involved in one simply survived with wounds. Many died later from complications unrelated incidents or very distant consequences such as infections, yet some formerly dead people still survived to this day.

Even an infamous incident where a French nobleman had a man run over by his own vehicle to death had changed. The new version reported that he simply crushed his victim’s legs, and then walked down to finish him off with a bullet to the head.

I had created a world in which death by carriage had become an impossible aberration.

It was a good start.

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Part 5

Someone stole Henry’s corpse in the morning.

The asylum was in uproar at the news, though I wasn’t entirely surprised. I’d expected someone to come investigate Henry’s death soon. That they’d been brazen enough to break into our cemetery, unearth his corpse, and abscond with it the day after I slew the Coach-Eater did take me aback. The two events had to be linked, and I could see how.

Whoever desecrated Henry’s tomb thought he had been involved in the Coach-Eater’s death and wished to confirm his demise.

This could only mean that the Coach-Eater wasn’t working alone, as scary as it sounded. Others of its kind had probably taken note of its disappearance and would hunt down the one responsible.

Did these monsters socialize like men? Did they keep in touch from a distance? I somehow couldn’t imagine such primeval horrors acting so humans. It was more likely that they could sense each other’s destruction like sharks smelling blood in the water.

How long would it take until they tracked its destruction back to me? I was sure I’d left no trace nor been seen by anyone, but if the graverobbers knew about the Lost Deaths, then they could simply have to interrogate the staff to put two and two together.

I better watch my back from now on.

Neither did it surprise me when Director Rochard summoned me one morning to his office without an explanation. What took me aback was his two guests sitting on the other side of his desk: a pair of gendarmes in uniforms. They looked like nothing to write home about until I spotted the familiar, silver insignia on their chests.

The Bureau des Moeurs’ all-seeing owl.

It took all of my willpower not to show my unease and distaste. I’d been careful to hide the Lost Deaths, the blood vial, and my other research in the asylum’s basement where I doubted anyone would ever find them, yet I knew these two had come for me.

“Laurent, my dear, come in,” Director Rochard said upon inviting me in. A graying man with spectacles going on in his middle-age, he was always scrupulously clean at any hour of the day. More than that, he had always been open-minded about my research and always looked the other way. I hoped he wouldn’t change his mind today. “Let me introduce you to Officers Delacroix and Giroud. They are here to ask you some questions.”

As I feared. I hid my unease behind a tired smile. The gendarmes’ names were carved on their insignia now that I took a closer look at them. I’d always expected a visit from the Bureau since I began collecting forbidden books and rehearsed this conversation in my mind many times.

“Greetings,” I said with the utmost politeness before shaking their hands and suppressing a wince of pain. The necrosis patches beneath my gloves remained terribly painful, and neither pills nor poultices did much to lessen the agony. “Is this about the grave robbery? It was quite shocking.”

“I am afraid we are here for a potentially unrelated case, but be certain that my colleagues are investigating the incident as we speak,” Officer Delacroix replied with icy grey eyes. He assessed me for a second and then went straight for the throat. “What relationship did you have with Gérard Leloup?”

“Gérard Leloup?” I frowned in genuine confusion. “The name means nothing to me.”

“Yet you were listed among his clients.” Officer Delacroix grabbed a notebook and began to read a page. “Perhaps he approached you under an alias then. Would the name Marcel Devereaux be more familiar to you?”

“Devereaux?” I repeated, my pulse quickening with dread while I struggled to keep a straight face. Did that ruffian sell me out? I knew it was odd he hadn’t contacted me in nearly two weeks! “Yes, I’ve met a man with that name. I’ve consulted him on a few books I’ve acquired but whose legitimacy I doubted.”

“Did you now?” The officer raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I hope you knew that the man was a forger and grifter.”

“Hence why I consulted him.” I feigned curiosity. “Did something happen to this man?”

The way the gendarmes looked at me confirmed that yes, something did. Officer Giroud shifted slightly. “Where were you yesterday Mr. Valmore?”

The tone implied that whether or not I would have to follow them to a police station depending on my answer, so I told them the truth.

“I visited the Universal Exposition with another alienist colleague, and we returned later in the evening,” I replied. “Afterwards I went to assist Director Rochard until late at night and then went to sleep around… eleven, I believe?”

Rochard backed up my words with a nod. “I can confirm it.”

“Which colleague?” Delacroix pressed and wrote down Germaine’s name the moment it escaped my mouth. I knew they would interrogate her as soon as they finished with me. “When did you last meet with Mr. Devereaux?”

“Nearly two weeks ago, officers.” He’s dead or in trouble. I was sure of it now. The only reason gendarmes asked those questions was to confirm alibis or interrogate witnesses. “Did something happen to him?”

“We fished him out of the Seine this morning,” Officer Giroud replied bluntly.

I scowled. “Was… was it an accident?”

“No, clearly not. His murderer cut him open from chin to groin.” Delacroix uttered those awful words with the casualness of a law officer who had seen dozens of such cases before. “The murder took place yesterday according to our preliminary analysis.”

I didn’t hide my shock. That kind of barbarism was beyond what most criminals would go for; and I knew, deep within my bones, that it was related to his investigation of Nelson’s past.

“That is awful,” Director Rochard said with sincere horror. “What kind of savage could do this?”

“That is what we are here to find out,” Delacroix replied before focusing back on me. “What did you consult Mr. Devereaux on?”

“A copy of the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis,” I replied. Officer Giroud clearly struggled to stifle a laugh, and I couldn’t blame him. I’d seen what a real demon looked like, and those demonology books clearly missed the mark. “It was mere curiosity, I assure you. I do not believe in witchcraft.”

“Good for you. You understand that we will have to confiscate this book as part of our investigation, of course.” Delacroix moved on without pause. “Did the victim question you about Henry Nelson?”

They knew. They knew Devereaux died because he had been investigating a dead man’s contacts.

“Do you think this is connected to the graverobbing?” I asked while feigning surprise.

“Answer the question, young man,” Officer Giroud replied icily.

I stroked my chin and pretended to be deep in thought. “I do not recall for certain,” I lied through my teeth. “I may have idly mentioned our patient’s death during our conversation, but it was weeks ago.”

“I see,” Officer Delacroix replied. I could tell from his icy stare that he found me suspicious, but not enough to arrest me on the spot. “We will keep in touch. If you remember anything pertaining to the case, please inform us.”

“I will,” I lied through my teeth.

Afterwards, the gendarme promptly confiscated my censored copy of Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis—whom I was sure I would never get back—interrogated the asylum staff about my whereabouts yesterday, and then left disappointed once my alibi proved foolproof. They would return, of course. The Bureau knew who I was now, and they would never keep me out of sight.

“Did you do it?” Director Rochard asked me in private the moment the gendarmes left.

I shook my head. “No. No, of course not.”

“Were you involved then?” The Director was no fool. He could tell this was no ordinary murder. “Is this about your research?”

“Mayhaps. I can’t tell yet, but I assure you I’ll do everything to ensure the asylum’s reputation remains clean.” This had been the director’s price for tolerating my more unsavory activities. Should anything happen, then I would take the blame. “I appreciate that you didn’t mention Henry’s book to them.”

Director Rochard frowned at me. “Which book?”

I stared back at him, saw the genuine confusion in his gaze, and then didn’t push the subject further.

After completing my work for the day, I descended into the asylum’s basement. Portenoire was built on old sepultures and quarries whose rooms now served as cells for our more troubled inmates, and Director Rochard allocated me one of them for more problematic experiments such as dissections. I had stored the Lost Deaths there alongside the Coach-Eater’s blood. The book was open when I found it in its hidden alcove, waiting for me under a gaslamp’s pale glow. Red words awaited me on the pages.

“My congratulations on your first hunt, master,” the book praised me. “Death’s grip on mankind has loosened a bit more, and true power is now within your grasp by right of conquest.”

The Coach-Eater’s demise was worth celebrating, but I had too many questions in mind for now. “You are like that thing,” I wrote down. “You can only be perceived by us mortals if you choose to.”

“Yes; I appeared to those whom I sensed within the potential to become my new master, such as you and that woman, Germaine. I have faded away from others’ minds until none but you may remember me. This Devereaux did not betray our secret, because he had forgotten it.”

So his murder was indeed about the Nelson investigation. “Did a Mortality slay him?”

“No,” the book said. “The Mortalities do not leave any remains. They take everything.”

A chill went down my spine. Devereaux died by the hands of men, not monstrosities. I could think of a potential culprit. “Was it the so-called Ankou Society then? Who are they?”

The Lost Deaths’ answer proved most disturbing. “A cult of humans dedicated to worshiping the Hecatombs, who rule lesser Deaths like gods lord over men.”

I sneered in disgust upon recalling the Coach-Eater. “How could anyone worship such an abomination?”

“The Mortalities can provide many blessings to the desperate and the weak-willed, the least of which being the privilege to live one more day and a sliver of their power,” the Lost Deaths replied. “Many of my previous masters died at the hands of such men.”

A chill traveled down my spine. “Why not Henry?”

The book’s pages rustled as its response appeared on the soft paper. “Because there will always be a Chassemort to hunt the Mortalities. I will always return to my master, and when lacking one, shall find my way to another.”

I pondered those words for a moment. The Lost Deaths appeared bound to a single master until their death. They only passed on to me after Henry’s demise.

It didn’t take me long to figure out a likely sequence of events. Henry had hunted creatures like this Coach-Eater and then he attracted their worshipers’ attention. They attacked his library with a handful of Mortalities, set it ablaze, and somehow drove the man insane. A demented, mentally-disturbed patient could not harm them; and since his death would lead to his vigil passing on to someone else, it was much easier for them to simply leave the man alive under close supervision.

The cult’s surveillance of Henry had likely grown lax after eighteen years of internment, but the Coach-Eater’s demise suddenly jolted them back into activity. They must have unearthed Nelson’s corpse to confirm he was dead, and likely murdered Devereaux when he dug too deep.

I worried about this society’s reach. If they were willing to murder investigators and brazenly rob graves, then they were capable of anything. They would investigate the asylum and anyone Henry had been in contact with during his internment.

I would have to lay low and be careful. Maybe even leave Paris altogether.

“Who created you?” I asked the Lost Deaths. “Who had the power to create you?”

“You will see them during the rite.”

Them. Somehow that word sent chills down my spine. If the book required that I see its creators, then… then it meant I would likely not believe its words otherwise.

Another question hung on my mind since I had seen those poor souls inside the Coach-Eater’s gullet, all those corpses crushed by hungry wheels and reaching out to me with empty black eyes. My body would have joined them had I failed, but I wasn’t sure anything of the people they had once been remained within those horrors. Still, enough humanity remained in them that they could feel pain at least.

“Then answer this, if you can,” I wrote down. “What is on the other side of death? What happens to men after death? Hell’s torture? Heaven? Another life? Or one of those things’ gullets?”

The book absorbed my words into its pale pages, and left them blank for a moment as it considered my questions. Then the answer came on pale red ink, blunt and unambiguous.

“There is no other side, master,” it said. “This life of yours is all there is.”

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Part 6

The ingredient for a Philosopher’s Stone proved simple enough: blood. 

The Coach-Eater’s blood was the keystone, but the Lost Deaths also had me extract samples from various patients at the asylum. Agnès had been among them. Years of internment had left her gaunt and pale, but she still possessed a certain beauty, with auburn hair the color of the same fire that slew her brother. I will never forget the look she sent me upon spotting the necrosis marks on my arms. That face of recognition, laced with a dash of sharp fear. 

“You believe me now,” she had said. 

“Yes, I do,” I remember replying as I took a blood sample from her; officially to check on her health. “I will get you out of here one day.”

I didn’t think she cared too much about the last part. She simply felt relieved that someone out there didn’t think she was mad. 

Agnès had been involved in multiple cases of spontaneous human combustion, one of which caused her brother’s death and the other her fiancé. She always maintained the same story: that a ghost had set them on fire. Her words had earned her an indefinite stay in Portenoire under suspicions of arson, but I now knew that she was a victim rather than a perpetrator. 

A Mortality had haunted her steps since childhood.

Perhaps it would return for her one day to finish the job that it couldn’t complete all those years back. Part of me hoped it did, even if its ability and willingness to burn people alive in broad daylight meant it was likely much more dangerous than the Coach-Eater had been. I would ensure that the asylum became its tomb one way or another. 

The Mortalities had won many battles, but now I knew there was a war. 

Once I’d collected all the blood samples that the Lost Deaths required, I returned to my room and then mixed them with the Coach-Eater’s fluids. Black and red merged into a dark and murky substance darker than petroleum and so cold to the touch I could feel chills through the glass. Every fiber of my being told me not to drink this, like an old animal instinct warning me against poison. 

The Lost Deaths informed me that the blood of men came in various types and variations, and that recombining them would let me tap into the very essence of life and death. Ingesting this potion would refine my body and let me access true magic, or so it said… at a cost. 

“Beware that there is no turning back after this,” the book warned me. “With power comes enemies. The Mortalities and their servants are relentless. They will hunt you down as much as you hunt them, and you shall never find rest.”

“Not unless I slay them all first,” I replied.

“Yes,” the Lost Deaths confirmed. “What you will see next is a truth you shall never forget. Not all are strong-willed enough to accept it. Many of my would-be masters went mad or died from shock.”

I didn’t care, not since it told me what awaited me after death. I would do anything to slay the Mortalities and delay my death one more day. 

Anything to avoid the… the darkness. 

“What will I see?” I asked. 

“The Strangers who created me. The origin. The war.”

So cryptic, and yet so ominous. I sat on my bed, but did not immediately drink the vial. I first flipped through the Lost Deaths’ entries on defeated Mortalities until I reached the gallery’s end and read its latest addition. 

The Coach-Eater’s illustration faced me with a new set of text.

The Coach-Eater

Death by carriages, a minor Mortality in the service of the Hecatomb of Misfortune, which delighted in crushing men beneath its wheels. Incinerated by Laurent Valmore with Greek Fire in Paris, June 3rd, 1889.

So reassured, I smiled and ingested it all in one stroke. I did not hesitate; not even for a second. 

A terrible cold seized me the moment the substance touched my tongue. Pain surged from my necrosis patches, sharper than ever. A terrible chill traveled through my body and froze the blood within my veins. 

The icy grasp of death had closed around my heart. 

I barely remembered falling onto my bed before darkness seized my vision. A terrible and primeval fear seized me as my body went numb, leaving my limbs heavier than stone and smothering my breath. 

The first and greatest terror had come. 

My soul drowned in cold tar and pitch blackness, deep into an abyss that would devour me until nothing remained. Panic seized my addled mind. Had the Lost Deaths lied to me? Was this all a trick? 

Was this… the end? 

Then I saw them. 

The countless faces of death staring at me with malice and hunger. 

I saw a grinning flame that offered no comfort, only ashes. I walked a hell of a Valhalla where corpses fought a war of annihilation, and heard the whispers of that frightful voice that advised me to slit my own throat. I felt the putrid kiss of plagues that boiled my skin and rotted my blood while I yet lived. 

I saw the deaths that were, and those unborn. I fled from a giant, monstrous vehicle of steel rising from the land of America, which would one day pave the roads of the world with blood. I escaped machines commanded by no man, and burned in a mushroom-shaped light. I saw the shadow of the Hecatombs and the lesser demises that served them. 

More than that, I saw the dark. I saw the final end which the Mortalities all shepherded us towards, the cold and silent end of a finite universe, without end nor beginning. 

I saw true blackness. 

I saw the enemy.

But then came the light splitting the coin of existence. The grip of death loosened on me and dragged me away from its waiting jaws. I was welcomed back on the other side of the war, and gazed upon our origin. 

I saw the Strangers. 

I behold the host of life, our forefathers and future, and met with the true masters of reality. I walked on living planets of pulsating flesh whose moons were seeds waiting to bloom. I dined in the halls of the Silent King, amidst the ruins of civilizations which it collected. I stepped inside the Dream of Kazat where all nightmares arose from. I gazed upon the Web of Life that stretched across the cosmos and connected us all, all the way back to the impossible day when the first bacteria came to be under the light of distant stars.

More than that, I saw what the Lost Deaths truly looked like; an ancient thing of names and eyes and tentacles, as old as the first Mortality.

I understood its nature at last: that of a weapon of life that could not be sealed nor contained, that changed forms and shapes with each era and civilization. It was one of many such tools that the Strangers spread across the infinity, my own world included, waiting for those ready and willing to take up the fight. There were other Chassemorts on Earth, soldiers waging a war that spanned all of space and time.

And I now stood among their numbers.

—-

When I awoke again with a clear yet shaken mind, my wounds had healed. The necrosis and burns were gone, along with the cut. When I used a knife to slash across my hand, I watched the skin knit itself back together in seconds. 

I looked the same on the outside, and I knew that would not change; not unless I chose to. I had become more aware of my body than ever before. I could feel my blood coursing through every inch of flesh. I heard the song of my organs to which I was once deaf to. My senses were sharper than knives and my bones stronger than steel. 

I would not grow old. I would walk this world untouched by time and age’s grasp.

But I could still die. 

I could feel the cloud of death hovering over me, like a silent promise. I sensed the great malevolent force of which the Mortalities were mere incarnations everywhere around me, waiting, hating. Violence, fire, despair… it had so many tools to slay me with even with the gifts I’d obtained from my benefactors. 

I’ve met many people who thought death was an inevitable part of life, but I now knew otherwise. Death wasn’t a law of the universe; it was its undying enemy, a creeping cold that shepherded all things toward the silent oblivion which it craved. Only when all worlds became silent, only when the last star was extinguished and the cosmos returned to eternal darkness, would it finally be satisfied. 

Maupassant wrote that death was only the certainty in life. He was wrong; I now knew that death could be fought, even slain… but in my currently imperfect state, one of the Mortalities would eventually overcome me. 

I had taken the first step on a long journey towards immortality, yet many ordeals still awaited me. The Lost Deaths would guide me, teach me spells from the Web of Life, and perfect me until I became as imperishable as true a Philosopher’s Stone. 

Everyone in Paris was abuzz with talks of Boulangisme and socialist gatherings, and I couldn’t care less anymore. I alone knew that there had only been one war waged since the beginning of time, only one conflict worth fighting: the Great War between Life and Death.  

I had seen our origin. The beginning. 

The same way all Mortalities were emanations of the same primeval hunger, we were only branches of a great superorganism called Life, whose purpose was only to spread and survive. A single human was no more important in the great scheme of things than a single cell; yet each of us played a vital role in its continued existence. 

I had seen the enemy too. The dispenser of endings. So many thought they could bargain with death or lessen its threat, that it was only a door leading to heaven or a new life rather than our first and final fear. I assumed the Ankous believed that they could appease this great hunger. 

They were all wrong. 

Death could not be bargained with, because it was never alive in the first place, let alone human. Its hate could not be quelled. It would come for all without mercy or compassion. It could only be delayed, fought, or surrendered to. 

The Lost Deaths warned me that seeing the truth might turn me as insane as the inmates I watched over, but my mind had never been clearer. I knew what I had to. What I was born to do. 

So many philosophers thought about the meaning of life. They overthought it all. 

Existence was meaning in itself, and Death its negation. 

It was up to me to change the world. The government and the Bureau clearly knew something, but they chose lies and suppression over carrying on the fight. That duty now fell to me.

It didn’t matter how long it would take, or the sacrifices required. I would slay the Mortalities one after another, gaze into the abyss of sorcery with my book’s guidance, and rise ever higher to ascend to the Strangers. 

Immortality would be within mankind’s grasp and all the deaths lost to time one day, with a book’s gallery their final legacy.  

I would never die. 

I refused to die. 

I was a Chassemort, and I had a hunt tonight.

This Hunt's End

—--

A/N: This story is dedicated to my stepmother Dominique, whom I loathed but who did not deserve to die like she did. 

I was at an author’s retreat last year when I learned of her demise. Truth be told, it did not surprise nor sadden me. She had been struggling with smoke-induced cancer for years, but stubbornly continued to smoke while in chemo. She was a cruel and bitter woman who treated my father terribly, and I never understood why he stayed with her after separating from my mother; besides perhaps fear of loneliness.

But when I called him to offer my condolences and reassure him, he told me how she died. He told me of the long nights of suffering and delirium, the fear, and that short yet fatal moment when she simply ceased to be; and for all of the disdain I held for that woman, I couldn’t help but feel both sympathy and utter terror for what she went through. 

One moment she was here, and then she was gone. 

I’m going on thirty, and while I’m still rather young by human standards, 2024 was the first year when I first started truly dwelling on my mortality. My stepmother died; half of the people in my life over sixty are struggling with cancer or disease; a fellow author in my field perished recently, far too early. All these little things combined cast a heavy cloud on the second half of the year for me. 

Lovecraft said that fear of the unknown was the primal fear of man, and I believe he was right. It’s not death that we truly fear, but the unknown that follows. Some of my friends believe that death is part of life, or simply the start of another life, but their words always offered me cold comfort.

No matter how hard I try, I cannot help but see death as something cruel and horrible; our first and greatest terror. 

It was during that time that the idea of the Mortalities came to be; reapers that weren’t servants of a cosmic order nor anthropomorphized entities, but monsters that loathed life. I believe there is something innately terrifying in an enemy that cannot be reasoned with, because there is nothing reasonable about them. You can’t bargain with a meteor on its way to crash onto the earth or an earthquake. 

Senselessness is the greatest form of cruelty. 

So… the idea of The Lost Deaths was present in my mind for a while and it resonated with me, but I decided against writing it as a serial after my darker stories struggled on Amazon. A Gaslamp Dark Fantasy Horror story about killing deaths is simply too niche. I had to professionally focus on more marketable stories for financial reasons (that Perfect Run game in development doesn’t pay for itself yet) and wished to return to more lighter stuff anyway. 

Nevertheless, the idea simply wouldn’t leave me. I had to write down these intrusive thoughts somehow. 

The Royal Road Magazine Prompt, which echoed very much with this story idea, inspired me to at least try writing it as a short story. It has been a pleasant experience (the story flowed out of my head in a handful of days) and I would say The Lost Deaths probably rank high among my novels in terms of quality. Long-time readers will also notice some winks and references to my Underland series. 

In any case, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this novella as much as I enjoyed writing it, and that it gave you much to think about. I'm going to focus on Dungeon Wreckers/B&F/B&C again, but I don’t exclude writing more tales in this universe one day. So long as I breathe, I hope, as they say.

Best regards,

Voidy.