A Time of Torment Read Free Page A

office, where he continued the work of reassembling the records he had lost in the explosive fire that had destroyed his original business premises in Lynn, Massachusetts, some years earlier. Eldritch had almost entirely recovered from the physical injuries he received in the blast, but he remained frailer than before. His right hand shook slightly as he cut swaths through the shaving foam.
    Beside him was a window that gave a partial view of the sea through some trees. A man stood smoking on the lawn, his back to the house. This was Eldritch’s son, although the old lawyer had long conceded that he was his son in name only. At the moment of his birth, something had colonized his being: a wandering spirit, an angel, a demon. Call it what you would, but it was not human.
    The doctors were surprised that the child had lived: his umbilical cord had become wrapped around his neck during delivery, asphyxiating him. The boy had, in fact, been born dead, and only the swift actions of the attending staff had resuscitated him. Eldritch and his late wife – who barely lived long enough to see her boy begin to walk – had feared brain damage or some other disability, but their son appeared to be entirely healthy, if unusually quiet. Eldritch could only remember him crying, really bawling, a handful of times, and he had slept for seven hours a night throughout his infancy. Other fathers told him he was blessed. Mothers too.
    But he was not blessed: his son had died, and just as his soul left his body another force had taken its place, one that had only gradually revealed itself to Eldritch as the years passed. Even now, after many decades, it remained something of an enigma to him. As it grew and matured, so too did it alter Eldritch’s own nature, so that a once ordinary attorney with the usual slate of minor civil and criminal work became an examiner of the consciences of men, an assembler of evidence of base acts, and he presented his records to this being, who decided if action should be taken. The man now smoking on the lawn was an instrument of justice, although of whose justice Eldritch was uncertain.
    Eldritch had been raised Lutheran, but his faith quickly became a half-remembered matter irregularly indulged, like the expensive coat he only wore to church for his biannual attendances at Easter and Christmas. Then, as the creature that hid itself in the guise of his dead son became manifest, the reality of a world beyond this one concretized for Eldritch, but it was not a realm that bore any resemblance to the paradise of which the preachers spoke. From the little that Eldritch could glean, the being responsible for the creation of the universe had been silent for millennia. For all anyone knew, He might even be dead. (Perhaps, Eldritch’s son had suggested, spurred into an astonishing blasphemy by a rare indulgence in alcohol, He had killed Himself in despair at what He had created.) God, to give the entity a name, might have been unheard and unseen, but other creatures were waiting, and listening, and it was best not to draw their attention through loose talk.
    Kushiel: when Eldritch had asked his son for his true name, that was the one he gave, but he did so with a crooked smile, as though this, too, were part of some great cosmic joke to which Eldritch was not privy.
    Kushiel: Hell’s jailer.
    But to those he hunted, he was the Collector.
    Eldritch finished shaving and washed away the remains of the foam. Just as his son stank of nicotine from the cigarettes that had stained his fingers a deep ochre, so, too, could Eldritch smell his own mortality. His body odor had changed, and no matter how clean he kept himself, or how much cedarwood aftershave he used, he could still detect it. It was the stink of his physical form in decline. It was the reek of the mud in the bottom of the pond of existence, and flies buzzed around it. He wondered how much time he had left. Not long. He felt it in his bones.
    He carefully turned the