The Conduit Prologue: Step on a crack

Horace Franklin is a sick man, and he's about to get away with murder

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And now please enjoy The Conduit

North Bay, ON: 1953

The house stood shortly after the town was settled. Time was its careful killer. Peeling paint dotted the scorched yellow grass of the front lawn with flecks of baby blue. Golden leaves of autumn skittered across the hard ground, flaking and dying in the blades before sliding through the picket fence and clogging the gutter.

Across an uneven and split stone walkway, he walked a zig-zag path. A child’s nursery song echoed in his head. 

Step on a crack, break your mothers back. 

He lurched through the small gate that swung from one hinge in the wind that whispered a threat of winter. He brought the heels of his leather boots down on each crack he could see. He hoped his mother, though she was long dead, could feel each of the cracks he connected with. 

The police officer at the front door was a giant. Tree-trunk like arms crossed across a barrel chest with coal black hair working against the leather strap of his cap. He took one look at Horace, and Horace knew his thoughts were spitting the same insults he’d heard from years of torment. 

Pipsqueak. Runt. Pervert. 

The last made him gasp, he hadn’t counted on hearing it in his head. It was a woman's voice. One he’d heard since that day after piano practice. After that it became a piece of him lost in the sands of time as they swallowed up memory. It was what drove him to revisit the house, to soothe his master's voice as his brain strained against its ever growing nature. 

The Giant at the door only let up when Horace produced his press card and hefted the hunk of metal in view so the lummox could take in the complexity of it. He also produced a five dollar note with the flourish of a dime store magician. Gold softened The Giant, as Horace knew it would, as it had with all giants in the past. 

“Arright.” The Giant said, “a buck a minute, I see you in there five minutes from now and I don’t care how much you got on you, I’m throwing you out on your ass, and breaking that camera on principle. Use the back door.” 

Horace tipped his cap as a smile snaked across his lips. Beneath his vest his heart fluttered like a bird trapped in an attic. He would be fast. 

The muted light of late morning spilled through the kitchen window as Horace Franklin stepped through the door. With three strides of his grasshopper-long legs he was in the living room, his boots clicking off the plank floor as if he were a sergeant about to address his men. 

She lay in the centre of the room, blond hair cascading around her face in ringlets, the top of it matted and stuck together as the golden curls mixed with the red and black ichor of dried and drying blood. Her swan-like ivory neck was perfection completed by the blue-purple bruising left when the killer's fingers dug into the flesh. She lay on the living room rug, her blue and white dress billowing around her like waves cresting in the ocean. 

Horace centered her in the frame and began snapping photos. He moved with a lithe strides that was almost void of sound. He circled the corpse, his finger a furious flurry of depressions. The shutter snapping with encouragement. 

Within moments he heard the heavy bootfalls of the giant stomping toward him, Horace was inches from the corpse. He was hunched to get the half lidded expression of her glassy eyes. He shifted the camera long enough to lean down and brush his lips across her cold forehead. 

“Sweet dreams, mother,” he murmured before standing swiftly and taking his leave through the door he entered through. 

In his dark room Horace was bathed in a crimson light. He imagined he was in the deepest caverns of where his master dwelled. The wall to his right held the tools of his craft as he slowly developed the photos he’d taken that afternoon. The remnants of his forged press pass littered the floor around his sock feet. 

His eyes crawled across the blades hanging around the room. He hung a photo to dry, flexing his hands. He grasped a small locket hanging from the handle of his favourite knife. It spun in lazy circles as it had while the blonde woman fought against his initial assault the night before.  

The photo image began to emerge. Horace swelled with pride. He knew this photo would be the one to join the others lining the wall of his bedroom. It was the final close up he had taken, one that encapsulated her essence in death with his fingernail marks still depressed in the meat of her neck. Horace wiped his hands on his trouser legs as he walked to the door, his eyes taking in the crimson scene before snapping off the light. 

Standing in the sudden darkness, Horace closed his eyes and reached for the part of himself that communicated with the devil. He was the conduit, and only he could pierce the veil between worlds. As his mind twitched with the connection he felt his master’s presence fill the room. It uttered only four words. 

More Horace, Many More.

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