CONPEDIS
The COMPOSER
My subject was chained down and screaming. I don’t really know why. I hadn’t even done anything to her yet, but she was already weeping and begging for her life. Seriously, I was almost glad that I wouldn’t have a chance to torture her. Takes all the fun out of it.
“Please, just let me go, I just want to go home…”
It was ever so tempting to flay her alive (only a little bit, she’d live), but I resisted. Because I have willpower. That’s the secret to success, really. Prioritize what you need over what you want.
Instead, I whispered a song in the girl’s ear. Her weeping slowed, then ceased, as she was caught up in the beauty of the music. After a moment, I stopped singing, but the girl didn’t start crying again. I unlocked the chains with a wave of my hand.
I snapped my fingers and she followed the sound, thought she didn’t come out of the trance. I carefully waved my fingers in front of her face, back and forth, in a simple pattern.
“None of this happened,” I explained to her in a gentle voice. “You woke up and decided to go for a walk.”
“I woke up and decided to go for a walk.”
“That’s right. Now leave this place and forget it ever existed.”
My new conductor did as she was ordered, leaving my little lair without so much as a word.
I sighed, this time with pleasure. The chorus were the most obvious of the ‘zombies,’ but far from the real threat. Butler and his little gang would chase them around, while the conductors kept everything under control. Until the time was right for the good guys to win, of course. And I had pieces already in play for just that occasion.
Five directors running around, ready to stop a zombie apocalypse. Well, four directors and that idiot Adam. He’d die soon and get replaced by my fifth director. What was she doing? The others had to have contacted her by now. I couldn’t have made mistake…
Bah. It would be easier to just kill them all and start over with a fresh batch. But I had already invested too much effort in these. If only my goal was easier, I wouldn’t have to deal with all this frustrating planning.
What I needed was to kill something. Run off into the night like a chorus, screaming my head off, and just rip through a cafe or something. But that would skew all my results. The directors would hear the screaming, they’d come investigate, so on and so forth. I couldn’t risk playing my hand so early in the game.
So annoying.
But, such was my curse. Greater good and all that.
Heh. Greater good. That wasn’t my goal. I just wanted to kill things. But, it’s been pointed out to me more than once that if I didn’t do this right, I would eventually run out of things to kill. So, I’d wait and bide my time.
I glanced at the clock. It was five in the morning. I grinned. It was a little ahead of schedule, but why not give those fools a nice wake up call?
With a snap of my fingers another conductor I had created a few days earlier lost all conscious control of her body and began to sing. There weren’t that many people around her, but there were a few, and they stopped to listen to this hauntingly beautiful music.
And then, one by one, they became chorus, and they began to scream, an endless, emotionless cry that shook the soul.
Five people sleeping soundly in their beds woke up with a jolt.
I grinned to myself.
“And…here…we…go.”
Behind the Scenes (scene 11)
Here’s the main villain! Ominous, yes? We’ll call him/her/it/them “the Composer” for now, fitting in with the musical theme.
Domina Urbana 