First Come, First Killed

The old man pressed the gun into my hand, and rather than listening to him, I marveled that his veined hands could produce such pressure.

"Katharine!" he snapped at me. "Did you hear what I just said?"

"No, sir," I muttered, turning my face to the ground sheepishly as I pocketed the gun. I had considered lying for a moment, but I knew that the old man would force me to repeat what he had said—and then, when I could not, he would punish me even worse after our work was done. It was best to take his anger now, before it had a chance to grow.

He sighed at me, but repeated himself willingly enough: "It's simple, Katharine. There is only one bullet in this gun, and you'll use it to shoot the first person through that door." He gestured at the door in question, and I nodded hesitantly.

"How," I asked, meekly as I could, "am I to know who to shoot? What color is their hair? What of their stature? Can I know them by their dress? Should I look for—"

"No," he interrupted sternly, clapping a hand down on my shoulder. "You are simply to shoot the first person through that very door. Let those who enter through other doors alone, but the first through that one is marked for death. Understand?"

"But—"

"Do you understand?" he ground out, telling me by his very tone that he would take no further questions.

"Yes, sir," I muttered, my voice again submissive as I could make it.

He nodded curtly. "You may have to wait all night, and all day to-morrow, and perhaps another night, as well—but you are not to leave this post, and you are not to shoot, until someone walks through that door. Don't fail me, girl," he said suddenly, before he rose and exited through one of the other doors. The room was large, and empty, so I settled myself into an empty chair next to the door in question (conveniently marked with a placard bearing my name), and waited, settling my petticoats around me and praying that the wait would not be too long.

The first night was a wedding. The door at my left rattled and shook, but the guests then appeared from the front doors of the room.

The door at my left shook again, but quieter, this tie, before it ceased. "Please, enter through this door," a man's voice said from my right, and a dark-suited butler held the door open to admit the bride. Her lips were a deep, bloody red, and she licked them and spared me but a single nervous glance before she hastened up the aisle and rushed towards her groom. In the flickering candlelight, her skin appeared to be carved of marble, or sculpted of porcelain—but certainly not made of living flesh and blood.

She recited her vows, a moving statue whose paleness matched the virginal white of her dress, before glancing directly at me once more and then leaping at her husband, taking aim at his neck rather than his lips and sucking him dry in an instant. She broke the priest's wrist next, forcing him to drop his cross and Bible before she sucked him, too, dry. She tossed aside his husk and systematically devoured everyone in the room—all of the doors, including the one to my left, seemed to have been locked, and if not for their blood spattering the stained-glass windows the guests' passing might have gone unremarked from the outside. As I was the only one still seated in the back of the church (for the wrath of the bride could never compare to the old man's anger), she stopped when her dress was dyed red with blood and stared at me.

"Could you kill me?" she asked politely, her eyes wide and innocent even though her face had just been buried in a man's innards.

I nodded—I could kill her, and she had luckily not answered that all-important question, which was whether or not I would kill her.

She laughed, then, and shouted, "Well, my dear, you shan't have the chance!"

Upon speaking those words, she leapt to the sill of the largest window, set ten feet above the ground behind me and made of a clear plate glass, and I watched as the sunlight did unspeakable things to her anatomy until she resembled nothing so much as a large bird dropping on the windowsill.

The door behind me rattled once more- though whether it did so in approval, or in mockery, I could not tell, and I settled myself into one of the pews and pretended to pray, continuing to watch the door all the while.

I was alone for hours, watching as the sun shone first from one blood-spattered window, and then another, and another, before someone finally came through the same door the bride had entered last night. It was the same butler who had opened the door for her the night prior, and he came with a sponge, a bucket full of soapy water, and a large, empty bag (presumably to hold what remained of the bodies). An identical man, the same items in, filed in after the first, and another, and another, and another, until there were twelve of them in the church. The last of them closed the door quietly, and turned to me, asking, "Where has she gone?"

I shook my head, and gestured that I could not understand what he asked.

He sighed, and shook his head, leaving me and rescuing the bride's gown and veil from where they had tumbled to the floor.

The men were quite finished within an hour, and the door behind me was silent as they worked. It rattled again only once, as they left, and I was left on my own as the shadows in the church first lengthened, then finally obscured all the light I might have seen. Only a few flickering candles were left to burn in a tiny niche, and I clutched my skirts tightly to me and strained my eyes through the darkness to see the door.

That second night, as midnight approached, the same doors through which the guests had first entered the night previous swung open to admit threescore and twelve hooded figures, each carrying a candle. They filled in the front rows of the pews, crowding closely together as another eight emerged from behind me: seven were hooded, and six of these were bearing large, sinister-smelling candles. The seventh hooded figure bore along an eighth figure, whose head was uncovered and who wore a sheer white dress. She was bound and gagged, and, it seemed, drugged, as the hooded one was forced to practically drag her along. I turned from their ritual then, watching the door as they performed some kind of act that left behind only the young woman's dress and shattered bones, much as the events of the night prior had left nothing in their wake but the bride's ashes and accoutrements.

I was not sure how it came to pass, but they caught sight of me as they finished sucking the marrow from her femurs. I did the only thing that I could, since I did not have even a single bullet to waste on the likes of them, and I stared evenly at their group.

They stared back, and one asked, "How long have you been here?"

"As long as it has suited me to be here," I replied, never once dropping my gaze or blinking.

"What did you see?" he asked again, his voice demanding and a bit harsh, reminding me of nothing so much as the old man.

I shrugged. "I saw enough," I answered, as I couldn't think of anything else to tell him.

He shrugged, and replaced his hood. "We've made our sacrifice for tonight," he informed me, "but if you are still here to-morrow night, well..."

Inclining my head in comprehension, I murmured quietly, "Of course. I've a task to complete, and who knows if it will be finished by to-morrow night?"

"Well," he answered, laughing curtly, "you'd best hope that it's finished by to-morrow night."

I shrugged again, resettled my skirts around me, and returned to watching the door.

They laughed as they left, their pockets rattling with the new weight of fresh bone.

The sun rose shortly thereafter, and I continued to watch the door. Nothing came through it, but the handle began to rattle more regularly, though, as if it were reassuring me that this would all be over before the hooded ones came back to claim me that night.

The sun had just set when the first window flew open, and a black bird swooped in and perched itself on a chandelier, ruffling its feathers before settling back onto the surface of the metal ring with the air of a spectator waiting for an opera to start. I was hardly surprised when, a moment later, it removed from its waistcoat-pocket an opera glass, and began to peer at the floor beneath.

Another crow flew in a moment later, this one with a glimmering shawl wrapped about its wings, and settled itself beside the first. This continued for some time, until all the chandeliers were filled with a black, feathery weight and the church itself was filled with the soft rustling of feathers moving past fabric. The sun had, by this point, set completely, and the chandeliers suddenly blazed to life before their flames died down to a respectable glow, and a veritable army of dancers entered through the walls.

They were like normal humans in every way, save the fact that they were slightly transparent, and seemed not to realize that the walls, pillars, and pews of the church were quite solid. They arranged themselves neatly about the space then, a couple standing partially in my pew (but largely in the centre of my lap) and several others virtually embedded in pillars, before they began to dance.

They moved all the more beautifully for their utter disregard for the conventions of physics, the dancers moving through not only the church and the objects around them, but through one another. They began with a waltz, moved on to a quadrille, and then their steps began flying so speedily that I could no longer recognize the patterns in which they moved.

One rather lonely woman seemed to be lurking in the dark behind me, though, and she eventually approached me nervously, and began twittering joyously at having found someone as partnerless as she was. She mocked the other dancers to me for a short while, but my attention was only half on the young woman—the door handle was rattling with increasing frequency, and I was not sure when someone would emerge through it.

The young woman sighed, and tried to engage my attention by stepping between me and the door—I could effectively feign interest then, as her translucent figure afforded me a view of the rattling handle. I wondered idly whether I could shoot through her, and whether the normal laws of physics might take effect then, and I was forced to experiment rather before I had finished contemplating the problem.

A haggard form burst through the door, and, my eyes still locked on the young woman's watery, not-quite-there blue irises, I fired without looking.

With a masculine grunt, the figure toppled forward, and the door clicked shut behind his prone form.

The young woman didn't even blink, she simply continued to discuss the utter lack of suitable partners, and how ridiculous it was to invite an uneven number of ladies and men to a ball, and wasn't the Duchess' dress simply horrific?

I nodded silently at the first two, pausing only to ask her who the Duchess was (she pointed out a matronly woman in a dress that resembled nothing so much as an inverted mushroom), and I affected a high-pitched, girly giggle, that I might ignore the fact that I had just shot and killed something, or someone, with hardly a thought given to the act.

But it became rather impossible to ignore as a ghastly, semi-transparent figure arose from the wrecked body and came towards the young woman and I. He glided to a stop directly beside the young woman, and, winking at me, said, "I was getting tired of killing, and dancing seemed an appropriate way to retire, wouldn't you agree?"

I gaped, speechless, at the old man.

He laughed and patted me on the shoulder, whispering, "You did well, Katharine. Thank you." And there was nothing left for me to do but stare as the old man guided the giddy young woman out into the group of dancers, and led her off in some bastardized combination of the quadrille and a skip.

"I do hope you'll find a partner soon!" she called out to me, but I only heard her as the door clicked shut behind me, and the male body I dragged along with me down into the cemetery fronting the old church.

I walked down into the midst of the hooded figures of the night before, communing quietly with the butler of the first night.

"Please!" the hooded leader asked, "tell him we did nothing to his bride!" He grasped my arm suddenly, tugging on it in an additional, silent plea.

I looked evenly at the butler, and told him, "She went out into the sun, and-"

He nodded curtly in understanding, cutting me off without a word. "Why, then?" he asked softly, hopefully.

"She thought I might have shot her," I told him honestly.

He nodded again, and vanished quite suddenly into the darkness.

The hooded figures, in the meantime, had taken hold of the old man's body.

"Thank you for the gift!" they cried, as the ghosts poured out into the night, and the hooded figures rushed in to replace them.

I shrugged again, and, bulletless, strode off as the last star winked out. The ghost of the old man passed me by in a rush of air, laughing, and I made to shoot at him again. But my gun was empty, and there was nothing with which he could be wounded, anyways.

His voice did not echo long, and soon I was alone in the night with no sound but the rustle of my skirts.

A/N:

Long time, no see, eh?

I tend to go through these peculiarly long phases during which I simply cannot seem to write, and then oddly short phases during which I am distressingly prolific.

Unfortunately, much of the work I complete during my phases of astonishing creativity is scrapped in the ensuing depression which usually accompanies my unproductive periods.

That, you know, is the real reason that I can never seem to get any work done.

At any rate, this is a continuation of my obsession with assassins. I just… I don't know, I rather like this one even though it's nothing like what I had in mind when I started. And don't you just love how I speak as though I had something in mind to begin with?

Love,

finch