The Parasite: Chapter Five - Final Chapter

V: Sin-Eater

His father led the way, meandering out of the hamlet and onto the steep track that led to Alice’s. Cillian watched his father’s head, a boulder of a thing, with his shoulders slouched lazily forward, ambling up the slope before him. 

Cillian had the Mauser in his hand, gripping it carefully like he would a bar of soap. Two shots, indeed. The first, he figured, would send his father stumbling forward, leaving his ears ringing and vision a mess of stars and lights. The second would be the kill shot. His scalp would hit the nearest tree before his body had time to slump forward in the dirt.

Cillian’s hands were matted in sweat, and he cast a look back at the hamlet and across the fields. Everyone had receded into their homes, awaiting the frantic screams of Alice as she came down the hill to be burned. They hid inside, likely with their ears covered or fists clasped around a set of rosary beads. They’d be anticipating now, the questions of Alice’s daughter: Where are you taking my Mammy? Why are you lighting her on fire? Why isn’t anyone stopping him?! Questions that no one had the answer to, because objecting to John was blasphemous. Rising against John was treason.

With the fields bare of workers and the village submerged in a sickening silence, Cillian turned back to face John. He marched ahead, and Alice’s house had come into sight now. The big tree outside her house rustled gently. Cillian raised his gun, and placed the iron reticle over his father’s head. His throat swelled under the drumming of his pulse, and he was breathing through a pinhole. The reticle swayed left and right and up and below John’s head.

(Murderer, you’re destined to be a murderer so MURDER)

His finger pressed gently against the trigger. To pull it a millimetre toward him would set off a crack so loud that the seagulls would bat their wings in horror, rise from the cliffs and disappear across the pastures. 

To pull it a millimetre toward him would render him a murderer, just like his old man. 

The reticle swayed frantically across and around his father’s head and now Alice’s house was no longer a dot in the distance but right there, with its picket fence and windows and chimney and

(Alive Cillian you bring him to me alive and I’ll do the rest I’ll do the rest) 

Great oak tree. Cillian tucked the pistol into his beltline.

John pushed open the picket fence with a shrill creak and Cillian closed it behind him. Before his father could knock on the door, Alice hauled it open and met him. By her waist, little Eireann looked up wide-eyed at the visitors.

“John, Cillian”, Alice nodded.

“Miss Kyteller”, John said. “And Miss Eireann”, he reached down and ruffled the young girl’s hair. “Do you mind?”

Alice pulled the door wide.“Of course not, come in, come in. Is everything alright?” 

“Fine, indeed all is fine.” John followed Alice in as she made her way to the stove where a teapot was coming to the whistle. Cillian stepped forward to enter behind his father,  but little Eireann stood in front of him in the doorway. 

She shook her head and smiled. “My Mammy told me to say thank you”, she said, a voice of innocence and purity, and closed the door gently in his face.

*

Mick and Cillian stood on the beach that night. The waves swelled and crashed in thunderous, hissing barrages. Between them, an empty whiskey bottle poked its neck from the sand, its body buried beneath the surface.

“I don’t understand it, Cillian.”

“Neither do I.”

“I never heard the shot from the Mauser.”

“I didn’t shoot him.”

“Then how did you kill him?”

“I didn’t.”

“So he’s alive.”

“No.”

Mick looked along the beach and up to the great oak which hung over the cliff face, the very oak which spat him from his noose all those years ago. Below it, Alice Kyteller’s house was submerged in darkness. 

“You’ll look after your mother, won’t you? When the British come”, Mick said.

“Aye. Of course.”

Mick hesitated. There was a lot more to say, but none of it seemed to matter. The monster was dead. Somewhere, through the village and across the fields, a flower bloomed in the dead grass of the prairie, a beautiful thing, and under the rot-seized soil, the crops found the strength to grow.