Chapter 20: Sins of the Father - The Night Market

The cloth bag smelled of dirt and dust and pressed into his face with damp insistence. The world was muffled, like he had been held underwater on account of his skull throbbing. A deep, resonant ache echoed with each heartbeat, making his temples drum.

A hand yanked the hood off.

Laik blinked against the sudden dullness of candlelight-coated stone. He was hanging by the wrists, arms pulled taut and awkward, hooked through an iron pulley nailed into the thick crossbeam of the coal shed roof. His feet barely brushed the dust-painted floor. Rain pattered against the slate outside and drummed louder against the tin eaves overhead. Wind crawled through the boards in whispering draughts.

His clothes were wet, clinging, his boots long gone. Cold seeped through him like needles of water.

They stood in front of him – his silent father, arms folded like a presiding judge. His mother beside him, shoulders hunched, hands folded around the crucifix that had hung above the mantel for as long as Laik could remember. And his brother, eyes narrowed to mean little slits, looking like he was trying not to look at all.

The accusations weren’t shouted. Not at first. His father said it plain, like reading from scripture.

He’d been seen out at night. In the fields. Stalking through the animals. Moving with the shadow. And he wasn’t right. Wasn’t normal. The Devil had him. That was the only explanation.

Laik, of course, protested. It was nonsense, all of it. He was injured. He’d been at war. He had seen hell and come home broken, not damned. But before he could string more than a sentence together, the air was punched from his lungs. A thick, meaty fist sank into the gut. He curled forward as much as the chain would let him.

The Devil be gone, his father roared.

Laik spat blood and tried again. It wasn’t true. It wasn’t fair. He wasn’t what they thought. He was their son. Please!

Another blow. Another howl.

Outside, the rain never let up.

His mother wept and clutched her crucifix. Her voice trembled, asking forgiveness from something, anything. Then she turned away. She couldn’t stay. She said she would pray for him. She didn’t look back again.

His brother followed without a word.

And Laik was left hanging.

Eight hours passed.

The candles were nearing their ends. His father sat on the floor now, knees up, back against the wall, smoking like he meant to set himself on fire from the inside. His hands shook. The bottle rattled as he poured a finger of something brown into a tin mug. His breath went in and came out sharp.

I want my boy back, he said to no one. I just want him back.

Then he left.

But it was far from the end.

Later, the door opened with a groan. His brother stepped in. Stared at him for a long time. Said Laik had got lucky. Said he should’ve died out there in France. Would’ve saved everyone the trouble. According to him it wasn’t fair. The limp in his own leg had kept him home, stuck in muck and cattle, while Laik ran off to glory, away from this shithole.

He hit him, slow at first, then again and again. The frustration spoke through his knuckles to an apologetic recipient. Laik groaned between the strikes, the chain creaking, the flesh of his back raw. At first, he pleaded for his brother to show mercy, before the sobs descended into an apology.

But it didn’t matter.

It went on like that. Day. Then night. Then day again. The routine of horror. No food. No water. Just salt in the wounds and prayers in the coal shed. He sagged against the restraints. At some point, it all left him. Laik stopped answering. Stopped reacting.

But he did not die.

Twenty days passed.

The whispers from the village grew louder. Even the priest, once so full of words, now had only questions when visiting. The family grew quiet in the house, moving solemnly within the walls. The mother crossed herself at every opportunity. The father drank more than he spoke. The brother watched the fields with a shotgun always at hand. The priest made a suggestion. A desperate one.

A bent-backed woman of the community was summoned from the edge of the village, where the land grew wilder and the hedge flowers strangled the fences. She revealed that her grandmother had followed an ancient tradition of being something called a Sin Eater – a taker of burdens, a devourer of guilt. In those days, the dead weren’t just mourned, they were unburdened. And for that, something had to carry the weight.

A box.

The old woman told of a box: a heavy thing she remembered dusting as a child, tucked behind other heirlooms, wrapped in linen. She’d asked about it once, curious about the strange markings that sometimes shifted across its lid. Her grandmother had hushed her and said it was for the craft. It was made to hold the worst of what people left behind. A vessel for sin, sealed tight. A cage for all things wicked.

A cage, she revealed, that could hold the Devil himself.

Laik hung broken, suspended, and barely conscious. The beatings were severe enough to rob any normal man of life, and an immortal one, their faith. Maybe even their sanity. He heard the conversation, her name, her promises, but by the time the words made it to his consciousness, they were jumbled and nonsensical.

The priest spoke, threw around a vial of water and began to recite from his little black book, but Laik was deaf to the words. The world was blurred and crooked from the swelling over one eye. He could see the shifting shape of his father brandishing a spade for a weapon. His brother, a kitchen knife. The weakest of these shapes, the outline in the doorway, was his hunched mother grasping something close to her chest. As a new one flooded into view, Laik simply didn’t care what they had in store.

Whatever they were doing, they could all go to hell.

The box was placed before Laik, the sheepskin pulled away in a great reveal. The symbols on the surface twitched momentarily in what others believed to be a trick of the eye, and should they have confirmed with each other, maybe they would have had second thoughts. They lacked the knowledge of the ritual. Were unable to speak the words to syphon whatever hid in Laik and banish it to this container. So emboldened by this new tool were they, so sure, that when the seals on the box were cut free, they believed what followed to initially be intentional.

It only took seconds.

The lid blasted off its hinges, sending everyone recoiling. The room howled and shrank in as light was drawn from every corner, swallowed by every shifting shadow that erupted from the container and clung on to the first thing before it.

Laik.

It swallowed him whole, swimming over bruised and burnt flesh, taking his form, wearing his face. A wail was somehow conjured from his throat that broke into pieces, but whatever summoned it was soon put at ease. This was a good thing, the entity insisted. The pain is temporary. He had nothing to fear. This was the reward for enduring so much suffering. And in an effort to convince Laik of this being true, it would give him a most generous gift.

Only now did the guilty realise their terrible mistake. Instead of drawing the sin into the box, they had inadvertently let it all out. And when the bindings snapped and the ceiling rafter split, the screams began.

But for Laik it was all just . . . stolen away by the dark.

Rain patted Laik’s face, making him come to.

His thoughts were muddled and thick, difficult to make sense of. His body felt distant, unwieldy, as though it belonged to someone else entirely. He was upright, somehow. Standing? But the moment he realised, his legs had no strength to them. They buckled without warning, and he collapsed to the soaked gravel like a puppet with its strings cut. The impact kicked something back into place. Not pain exactly, just the dim recognition of being alive. On all fours now, he gasped against the earth, fingers clawing wet stone, the weight of his own body unfamiliar after so long hanging.

He forced his head to lift, raindrops dripping from his fringe.

And saw his brother.

Face down in the dirt, one arm twisted unnaturally behind his back, the other stretched forward like it had been reaching for something. Blood trickled from beneath his body, washing out into the storm.

Not far behind, another shape. Mangled. And another. The old woman was twisted around herself like bound thread. His father’s body, or what remained of it, had been painted across the splintered fence. His mother lay strewn nearby, tangled in the gorse bushes, head skyward, eyes wide, her crucifix abandoned. But it was the shredded and spilled remains of the priest which finally forced Laik to hunch and vomit as much as he could – which was frustratingly little.

The farmhouse loomed behind it all, ruined. Slopes of wet, broken brick, windows smashed, the coal shed itself utterly destroyed as though a train had torn through. The entire building was frozen in the state of collapse.

The rain lashed on down in waves, uncaring.

And Laik, on his knees in the gravel, surrendered to the grief and wailed until his voice gave out.