‘You will be tested’, the condemned convict said, voice low and accent thick as the Magistrate gave the final chance for redemption to the accused. 

The Romani man had been found guilty of the most heinous crimes, charges that left no room for mercy in his mind. “A gypsy’s word is worth less than the rope around his neck” the Magistrate had declared earlier, unmoved by the plaintive cries for leniency and innocence from those who knew the condemned. Now, with his neck held tight in a noose, he stood defiant and awaited the final word from the cloaked, stern visage of the Magistrate who would pass his final sentence. 

‘Those are your last words?’ the Magistrate asked.

‘Beware your past, for it will test you’. 

The Magistrate was deathly still. The words meant nothing, a final attempt meant to unnerve him and make him falter in his verdict. It was a poor one. He’d faced worse than words, and no such petty attempt would work. 

The Magistrate nodded to the executioner, a faceless figure clothed in black garments with holes for barely-caring eyes, and very little flesh on display. The condemned’s eyes locked with the Magistrate, and never veered away. Not even as the trapdoor opened.

The rope held. 

The body twitched, then stilled. 

The convict’s eyes still locked on the Magistrate as life fled.

Cries amongst the crowd spoke of a family member bearing witness to one of their kin suffering a cruel end. He had seen the requests for clemency, to review the evidence and appeal the man’s sentence. The Magistrate knew better. Such requests were trifle and a way to ensure the law was not exacted. 

He would not be deterred from this role, or this testing. 

The Magistrate held the moment longer than he meant to. Something in the words snagged in the back of his mind like a splinter. Collecting himself, he pushed them away and spoke to the crowd.

‘So the guilty are punished.’ he began. ‘Let his end prove the lynch pin to those who wish to do society ill. Let his fate be a warning to others.’ 

He marked the end of his oratory with a flourish of his cape and left the grand stage, as the dead man was slowly loosened from his mortality-denying coil of rope and lowered to the ground. 

The Magistrate descended the steps from the platform, boots echoing hollow against the stone. Behind him, the crowd began to disperse, whispering, always whispering. He willed it in his mind that they would forget the man’s name soon – but not his words. The hanging would make sure of that. 

Was the whispering in the crowd of another rumour echoing through the crowd? What new piece of information could be so salacious as to bring the crowd around him to quietly talk, while passing glances at the Magistrate?

The man who passed sentence on the deceased considered possibilities. His stoic demeanour carried him forwards, paying no heed to the side glances. The deed was done, justice was served. Yet, their accusatory stares caught him unprepared. He returned the glances with the hardness of a man well versed in demanding respect from the public. 

Their idle chatter did no harm. They were simply warning each other to obey the law, to avoid committing crimes in this area, or at the very least, avoid getting caught. 

Still, for all his outward confidence and stoic bravado, the Magistrate was conflicted. The words of the condemned echoed through his mind. What could they mean?

He exhaled through his nose, long and steady. Then again, slower. As if each breath would push the man’s last words further from his thoughts. He refused to carry them. He would not grant them weight. He was the law. His past held no dominion over him.

He told himself again that would not be tested. 

#####

Days slipped by, and work absorbed the Magistrate’s every waking hour. Standard business: requests for legal rulings, denying spurious requests for leniency and the like – until a curious message arrived. 

Without hesitation he broke the seal.

With that simple motion, uninvited, came the thoughts of his father. That cold, heartless man whom he had followed into the same line of work. That man who claimed to be of his own blood, yet showed not an ounce of compassion or warmth to him. Who had never offered a hand, a kind word, or fatherly embrace. The same man who had left him largely in the care of nurses and tutors.

The same man who had been dead for several months now – cold in emotion as he was now cold in body.

The Magistrate folded the letter and pressed it shut, as if to seal those memories again might banish them. But the contents could not be ignored.

No sooner had the memories been bottled up than he found himself standing here – at the threshold of his father’s old domain. The Magistrate, in long robes of silk and cotton, stood in the doorway of a long anteroom of his father’s mansion. The letter in his pocket weighed heavy, its presence a constant summons. His hand thumbed the letter with reluctant familiarity. He had no desire to be here, but without this action the funds of the estate, currently in trust, would not be released. The letter’s instructions were clear – without his compliance, the funds would remain inaccessible.

Regardless of his office, the funds from the estate sale would be invaluable for his career prospects. The politics of the day were expensive to enter, and more so to win, especially since his political leanings were out of favour. Since the collapse of his party in power, due to some poor choices made by the Prime minister LLoyd George, his rival, it had been harder to secure financial support. The estate sale would reverse his political fate.

The letter came from his own solicitor, who assured the Magistrate that once items had been catalogued and filed for the sale then release of funds would follow soon after. 

Even though he hated the house, he could not hand it off to a clerk. Caught between a financial burden and his own career aspirations, he would do what was necessary. 

Damn that place. Damn the situation, and damn the man he once called father.

In comparison to his own spartan offices, the mansion was a museum in honour to entropy and decay. Drapes covered most furniture and curtains, protecting them from light and dust. He had no love for trinkets or items his father held dear. His coldness was one passed down to him from the ‘old man’. Such items of monetary and cultural value held no interest in the heart of the Magistrate. The love and affection his father had for such hallowed items made him want to smash them to pieces, denying them the tender affection he never received. He wanted to sell it all, be rid of them, destroy them. He fervently hoped his father, wherever his soul resided, felt every defiant action of apathy towards the trinkets.

He remembered watching the old man hold lavish functionaries, showing off his collections to investors and members of high society. He would watch through the oak bannisters of the staircase, as his father recited the genesis of such items. Their origin, which intrepid collector he had acquired them from. The returned feigned smiles of interest shared amongst those who were present, hoping to get political capital, secure investment or simply, to drink in high society.

He hated them all. 

One peeked out from under the dust sheeting. A small glass goblet, the kind speeches raised in honour to notable dignitaries would be given. A fine piece of glass art, he knew it had been used many times. Upon that well-used piece of crystal was a lion’s head, with initials intricately etched into the flowing hair of the avatar of predation. Those belonging to his father.

Liquid consumed with a smile on broad features, Warm emotions writ across invisible marks in the fine surface detail. 

Such warm emotions were never shared with his son.

A dark potential bubbled intrusively in the Magistrate’s heart.

He launched the goblet as hard as he could against the wall, seeing the ornate decorative art unmake itself in a violent, kinetic crescendo.

With the act of protest done, the Magistrate continued to check over the lower rooms.

There were so many items ripe for appraisal. He ignored the kitchens, long devoid of anything of value. He continued his meticulous work, scrawling particular items of note. Ornate silverware dating back over a hundred years, a fine brass candle holder, marred with years of use and tarnished from sweating hands

Finer memories stirred within his mind, creeping along the once cavernous interiors of the house as a child, with the candle holder as the only source of light. His father detested wasting money on electricity, so the still ample supply of candles would light his way.

Such warm memories threatened to break a smile through his stern visage. These were the memories of a childhood poisoned with apathy and disdain by an uncaring father. His friends were books. The written word. Facts and figures. They could never betray him. 

He felt the words burn a metaphorical hole in his pocket. He had a job to do, best not get distracted by memories best left to the past.

He mentally marked the candle holder with a nominal value, and moved on throughout the lower rooms. All was still, cold, dead. Yet, he felt as if he was called to venture upstairs. The bedrooms and study lay beyond. A place of memories long forgotten, or perhaps repressed.

Each step up that foreboding staircase took him back in time. Formative years of apprenticeship as a man of law, times he vowed never to return to this place. 

In none of the portraits was a smile evident, or if possibly present, was it ever genuine. Such was life like in this house of the desolate, barren of empathy.

Emotions buried under protective layers of legal precedents, court attendances, curios of unusual cases requiring his particular expertise, and, ultimately ignorance of his upbringing. Each step stripped away his mental defences unconsciously laid down over the course of a career that could fill an entire library. By the time he had reached the top step, he felt mentally naked, and vulnerable – the same way he did when he was a child. 

He had made it to the top of the staircase. Standing at the end of a long landing area with several doors leading to the bedrooms and office. Looking down the dark, dank corridor he swore he was being watched, as a fly is viewed under a microscope when pinned out for study. A thousand eyes burrowing from ancient places, surveying his every conceivable movement and assessing his next course of action menacingly. He felt ludicrous. This was simply an old, unloved house ripe for renovation, or, if he had his way, demolition. 

He tried the light switch, but nothing happened. Of course, he mused: the power had been switched off months ago. He felt like a vandal, disturbing the memories of the dead. He imagined a wall of judging eyes fixated on this latest disturbance of eternal peace, and considered him a trespasser. 

Entering his father’s old study, he expected to see more of the same. Dust sheets covering a slowly rotting wooden table, his portrait shrouded in black, hiding his disapproving eyes; a funerary shroud to the unloved.

But instead, someone was there.

Not dust. 

Not silence. 

A presence.

An impossible apparition sat at his desk. A young man, strong in stature and will, dominated the room. His very presence drew the attention of all items present. It absorbed the colour from the room, and lured in wayward eyes. 

The Magistrate froze. It couldn’t be. And yet, he knew that posture. The stern face. The clenched jaw. It was his fireplace, the one burned several months ago in fact. But the man at the desk was not exactly as he remembered.

The figure was younger. Decades younger. Not the withered man who was buried, but a version drawn straight from the stairwell portraits. His dark wool suit, long out of fashion, hung from his rigid shoulders. Fingers interlocked before him, he started down with glassy eyes that never seemed to blink.

The Magistrate remembered that suit – the one he used to wear during his long business circuits. Like the wisping smoke of the vision itself, a cigar smoldered in the ashtray in front of him. The scent of it lingered – anchoring the moment even as everything felt untethered from reality. 

A voice from somewhere out of sight, but present in the room called out to him. A soft voice, one of a caring woman

‘I am sorry sir, but your wife has passed on’.

The man at the table did not move. He did not show any emotion of grief. He was cold and callous. All life from him seemed to ebb from the stoic spectre, turned away in true sorrow. He simply lowered his head.

A pregnant silence threatened to strike the Magistrate deaf. The only sound, the crackling of charred wood in the fireplace. The light from the flames danced unusual shadows across the room. They exhibited more hurt, etching their dismay into the oak panels. The room began feeling heavy with woe, pressing in on the Magistrate.

The soft cries of a child echoed from somewhere nearby. The Magistrate turned to face the innocent mewlings of a newborn somewhere beyond his sight. The voice of the woman, without a body to emote such words, spoke with the warmth and compassion he had rarely expressed.

‘Your son still needs a name. What will you call him?’

‘Archibald.’, a dark sense of irony seemed to emanate from the man. It was the name of a hated cousin the man despised. Accomplice to a heinous crime years before, the aforementioned cousin lay cold in the earth, his demise the work of the former Magister rulings on the cousins’ deeds most foul.

The Magistrate, now ghoulish witness to the impossibility of his own birth, felt his resolve falter, almost driving him to his knees. He managed to stay on his feet, but across the room the man began to rise. 

Slowly, deliberately, the spectre turned – his expression a deathly, cold stare considering this interloper into the distant past.

The Magistrate stood as a statue, looking at the man who was as tall as he. Caught in this moment of his father’s great personal loss, the man wore a look he had come to know intimately over the years. 

The same look he shared with those condemned to die at the noose.

Grim resolve.

‘All. Your. Fault!’

The impossible, insane echo of the younger shade of his father pointed a finger in accusation at the Magistrate. The force of the auditory blast knocked him down, driving him hard to the wooden floor. Floorboards protested at the sudden assault, feeling slick with ethereal perspiration.

The Magistrate scrambled back on all fours, breath heaving. His conviction, so steadfast in court, had abandoned him utterly. Only instinct remained. 

He fled.

Scrambling into the hallway, he dared not look back at the phantasm. The door to the office slammed behind him with a violence that rattled the walls.

The staircase spun beneath his feet as he descended too fast, almost falling down in his retreat. The walls, those same cold, lifeless walls from before all pulled inwards, threatening to cut short his escape. They pressed in on him, making him struggle even more with the simple lock.

He fumbled at the front door’s catch, his fingers unable to grip.

Finally with a desperate yank, the oversized doors burst open.

Rain lashed his face as he stumbled into the street and out into the storm. His pulse pounded in his skull, and his vision swam. Exhaustion pushed through his composure, and without rest he would collapse on these steps, like the several vagabonds he had seen lie in their squalor. 

He tried to tell himself it was absurd. That none of it was real. Yet, the house was still before him. Watching. Judging.

Somewhere beyond sight, a faint rumble of thunder could be heard. 

Or was it the echoes of a disembodied laugh mocking him?.

#####

Across from Archibald, the solicitor adjusted his spectacles and placed a folder on the table between them. Papers inside shifted slightly, pages annotated with red ink and the neat lettering of bureaucratic necessity.

‘Magistrate, to proceed with the estate sale…’ he began ‘…we must first liquidate the contents of the property. Everything must be indexed for auction. Furniture, art, personal effects.’

Archibald stared at the man, his jaw tense.

‘So send someone in.’ he grumbled. ‘A clerk. A vulture with a clipboard. Anyone but me’.

The solicitor gave a regretful smile, one perfected over years of disappointing wealthy heirs.

‘I’m afraid we cannot, sir. As executor and next of kin, the inventory must be conducted or at least signed off by you. No third party can legally verify personal effects without your oversight”.

Archibald closed his eyes for a beat, praying for either patience or lightning to strike the man across from him.

‘So let me understand,’ he said slowly. ‘I cannot sell the house… until I sell what’s in the house… and I cannot sell what’s in the house… unless I personally go back into that moldering pit and tag every stick of furniture my father bought?’

‘That is correct’ the solicitor said with the unshakable serenity of a man who had never been haunted by his own bloodline.

Before Archibald could reply, the solicitor flipped open the folder and turned to a page with an exceptional number of red markings.

‘In addition…’ he continued, ‘…the surveyor has identified structural damage to the property. Until it is resolved we cannot sell the house’.

Archibald stared at him, blinking slowly.

‘I am a senior Magistrate. I have condemned criminals with less ceremony than what’s required to be rid of this mausoleum’.

‘Yes,’ the solicitor said evenly. ‘But petty thieves don’t own three grandfather clocks and eleven bedrooms’. 

The meeting concluded with polite nods and mutual contempt. As Archibald rose to leave, he cast one last look at the solicitor and thought how satisfying it would be to sentence the man for crimes against common sense.

Archibald felt as if his own chosen profession was mocking him now. The legality of his position, beckoning him to confront the previous evening’s events.

Outside, the sky had darkened with rain again. Returning to the house was the last thing he wanted to do. He had put the insanity of the previous ‘incident’ at this corpse of a house down to increased fatigue, a stressful series of days at work, and the brooding atmosphere of that dark and foreboding evening. It was just an old house, he told himself. Memories and shadows.

Returning to the property during daylight helped. 

The house held less of the mystique and ominous ambience as it had before. Light pierced the boarded windows in slits, dust from countless months of entropy inside the property covered everything. 

The Magistrate wasted no time after the solicitor’s meeting. He arranged for the structural work to begin with all the urgency and cost-cutting zeal of a man desperate to be done with it. The lowest bidder had been accepted without question. The brief had been simple: reinforce the failing beams, stabilize the upper floors, and make the house saleable – quickly, and above all, cheaply. The tradesmen had come and gone in rotation, installing temporary supports and shoring up weak joists with modern scaffolding that looked out of place against rotted wainscoting. Some furniture had been dragged aside to make room for the work, but most had been left as they were – looming in corners like witnesses waiting for a verdict.

Yet, those tradesmen hired had not reported anything untoward. Nor had any of them seen evidence of the unexplained. None had reported anything unusual. No cold spots. No odd noises. No phantoms.

Just wood, plaster, dust, and decay.

It was just his mind playing tricks on him, that was all, Archibald the Magistrate accepted. It had all been in his head, that prior incident. A stormy night and a guilty conscience.

Still, he couldn’t stop glancing over his shoulder.

With the repairs underway and the tradesmen done for the afternoon, he now moved from room to room, brass tag punch and red ribbon in hand. Each item was catalogued swiftly: a brittle sideboard, a moth-eaten settee, the candle-holder, and oil portraits that watched too closely. A growing list of numbered spectres to be auctioned off.

He reassured his own crumbling confidence, as he made those heavy footfalls back up that yawning, welcoming staircase to the upper floors. The same pictures of contempt scratched away at his resolve, yet his conviction to complete this final piece of legislative work drove him on. 

He simply attempted to ignore the trepidation and fear that picked away at his gird.

Inventory marched on, item by item, as if the sheer repetition might drown out the unease gnawing at him. But then he turned a corner, close to the room where his father had died, and stopped cold.

There, beside an old carved hutch draped in cobwebs, laid something that did not belong. A shawl. Threadbare, beaded, deep burgundy and edged with intricate golden embroidery. Draped delicately across the hutch, as though draped there with reverence. This was not something of his father’s attire.

Gypsy, he thought before he could stop himself. The word struck him like a gavel blow. He remembered the convict from days prior – the man’s dark eyes, weathered hands, and accent thick.

A man Archibald had condemned.

And then, there before him, it began.

Not in a flash, but in a flicker. A slow bleed of reality, like ink through parchment, the figure emerged. It was him. The same man Archibald knew for certain could not be. For the man he saw he knew was dead, he had signed the document announcing that justice had been seen to be completed against the deceased. 

Yet, there he stood. The hanged man, marks evident around a garotted neck, eyes not in open defiance or sorrow. The condemned stood calmly by the old hutch, one hand resting on the embroidered shawl as if it were a sacred relic. The bruises around his neck bloomed like violets, a garland of death he wore without shame.

Rather, he looked at the Magistrate with a certain level of pity. 

‘You will be tested’.

‘Beware your past, for it will test you’. 

Archibald blinked, rubbing fingers into tired eyes. When his vision cleared, the man was gone. 

Archibald’s heart thudded in his chest as he approached the hutch. The shawl was nothing more than an old curtain, collapsed from its rail and bunched atop the wood like discarded laundry. Just a trick of texture and shadow. 

He was just tired, just fatigued, that was all, he inwardly reassured himself.

Now, he stood at the top of the upper landing, the door to the office where he had the most fantastical nightmare. Where he had seen his father manifested in his youth. 

Archibald hesitated, brass tag punch gripped tightly in one hand, the ribbon trembling in the other.

The daylight through the boarded-up windows had begun to dim. 

He exhaled once, sharply. 

‘Just a house’ he muttered. 

Then he opened the door.

#####

Archibald tentatively entered the office, expecting the same horror he was forced away from. The room was cold, limp of life and action. Ashes in the fireplace were devoid of warmth. No such fireplace had been used in many years.

He looked around, expecting to see nothing of note. Nothing. Nothing out of place.

Until his eye caught it – the faint glint of something on the desk. 

The last vestiges of a cigar were seen on the ashtray neatly placed on the table. It was half- smoked, left to go out by whatever had consumed part of it. 

Archibald, never a smoker of cigars like his father, not a smoker at all in fact, picked up the stogie. Pressed ends and the telltale sign of consumption marked the remains. Archibald dropped the cigar back into the ashtray from whence he picked it up. One of the workers employed must have used the room for his ‘break’, no doubt. Yet, it lay in the exact same place as the one his father had used the night previously. 

The Magistrate did not know what to believe anymore. He backed out of the room slowly, letting the doors close themselves under their titanic weight.

What was real, and what was his mind having its wicked way toying with his sanity? All his secure beliefs of the world left to the question. Doubt began to burn a hole into his conviction. His grip on the real had been rocked, but he doggedly refused to accept that recalled event from the day before.

He was tired, that was all. He tried to reassure himself, as he slowly walked along the upstairs landing, his footfalls softly echoing against the wooden floorboards. More pictures hung lankly either side Archibald, judging him for what he had done, what he would do.

He set the brass tag punch on a side table in the yawning chasm of a hallway, ignoring in lieu of something a part of him deemed of greater import. The portraits pressed in on him. 

He thought he could see them sneer at him. Images of younger men in their prime, considering him with sheer disdain. All those portraits and images picked away at his willpower to ignore. He would disavow them of the notion of weakening his calloused resolve, despite his growing apprehension the further he walked down that gloomy hallway. This house would soon be out of his hands. Their callous disdain of the Magistrate, a forgotten memory. Yet, drawn down the hallway, he felt powerless other than to follow in the footsteps of the dead and forgotten. 

Venturing past the old grandfather clock, its pendulum long stilled, Archibald paused.

Something stirred at the far end of the branching corridor. A figure. Not a flicker. Not a shadow.

The man stood beneath the archived window where dust-laced light fell in pale shafts, rendering him half-formed in brightness, half-lost in gloom. He appeared drawn from another time. 

‘No, it cannot be’, he whispered, as he recognised the image of his father appearing once again, comparing a pocket watch in his hand to the timepiece standing stalwart a dozen paces away. He slowly approached the man. The spectre seemed intact, almost human. An improbable collection of flesh and bone. Should he run and deny his sight, or confront the phantasm?

‘…Father?’ He silently whispered. 

The man closed the pocket watch, and put it into his side pocket, hanging by a golden broach and chain. 

‘Have you come to tell me good news, or another disappointment?’ The words pierced Archibald’s heart. The one man he wished to emulate with success and honour was always disapproving of his life choices, even when he announced his position of Junior Magister, shortly before he left the house the last time. The watch had been left to him in the will, but not gifted to him by the man that he yearned to be praised by.

‘You let not only the family down, but this house down, Archie’. A pet nickname he hated. 

‘Don’t call me that, father’.

‘That is your name, Archie.’ It seemed to be said with spite, knowing to draw his son’s ire. An old argument left unresolved threatened to rear its hateful head. 

‘I have done everything you asked of me. Everything. And yet, you will not give me the one thing I always wanted from you!’. Words never spoken back then now formed in the Magistrate’s mind. It was as if he was witness to the conversation lost to time, now playing on repeat. 

This was not how that conversation had played out, of course. He never had the confidence to confront that man. The fact this figure literally could not exist gave him the confidence to confront whatever he was.

‘I expected more from you. We expected more from you, your mother and I’.

‘Don’t you dare bring her into this!’ Archibald, now full of unrestrained wrath, clenched his hand around a stone in his pocket. 

‘She told me so. Why does her approval mean so much to you, Archie? She is dead, after all’.

You killed her. The last left unsaid, but the meaning plain as a bright summer day at noon. 

‘Lies!’. The Magistrate, blood boiling, launched the smooth projectile at the image in front of him. It evaporated as suddenly as it appeared, the glass of the grandfather clock shattering. Shards of crystal and metal parts flew out from the timepiece, falling like tears in the rain. 

The stone, which was not a stone, landed hard on the carpet. The timepiece, which was in his pocket, now lay broken at his feet, his hateful deed complete.

Archibald staggered back at the sudden violence he had caused yet felt something else in his pocket. It was the same watch. It was intact.

Am I going mad?

Then, from the ruins of the grandfather clock, came a sound it should not have made.

Bong.

Archibald froze.

The bell tolled deep and low, echoing through the corridor.

Bong.

Archibald turned slowly to the broken clock. Its face was shattered, its workings gutted. It should not – could not – chime. And yet it did.

Bong.

A third toll. Three chimes. 

The same hour his father had died – three in the morning. The witching hour. The hour of reckoning. The hour in Shakespeare where daggers appear in the mind. The hour in Dickens when ghosts begin their visitation.

The house fell silent again, as is satisfied. He did not believe in omens.

He would not be tested, he inwardly uttered.

But something replied aloud to his thoughts

You will be tested.

The reply was sudden, ear-piercingly distinct and full of power. Yet, it held the subtle tonality of a stranger offering a comforting word. Archibald winced at the crescendo of spectral noise that followed. As soon as it began, it disappeared.

Archibald backed out of the hallway, and quickly walked down the gloomy corridor, tears now flecked his old cheekbones. Ghosts of the past chased his synapses.

Mincing past the various anterooms on the way to the master bedroom, he passed what were once his mother’s chambers. Those rooms had never been opened to his knowledge, after her death during childbirth. They remain closed now. However, next to those secured portals stood another. This one was ajar. Light emanated from within, viscous and oozing through the slit of an opening, beckoning the magistrate within.

He stood still, the pause lasting no more than a few seconds. Yet, he thought he heard a whimper of pain, followed by heavy, laboured breathing, The telltale sounds of a body slowly succumbing to the inevitable passage of fate and mortality. 

Fear gripped his heart, as he fervently forced his legs to work. Each step, a funerary procession in weight and meaning.

He thought back to the last conviction he had given. The eternal stare of the convict he had hanged for murder. A medium, suspected con artist, and the ensuing scuffle that led to the death of one of his customers. He had no time for such vagueries of fate, yet in those soul-stripped eyes he remembered with perfect recall the dead man’s last words:

You will be tested.

The words of the condemned man filled his heart with barely contained dread. He knew what he would face, but he dared not go into that room. What lies beyond…

He had not been in that room since…since…

He had never been a religious man, truly. Yet, he fumbled in his pocket for a trinket left for him by his mother. Received upon his father’s death as an initial gift from the estate’s will, He had never worn it, but something made him grab it from his desk bureau earlier that day. 

The delicate necklace held a single, silver cross hung from its length. 

Despite its light nature, the weight pulled at the back of his neck, like a drooping noose he imagined felt to a man standing at the scaffold, waiting for the final drop to occur. 

His feet were heavy, the weight of inaction and pain making him stagger. The horror behind that door he knew too well, he had done well to deny it, to ignore and refuse the persistent missives to attend his ailing father’s bedside. To face the man he hated for so long meant acknowledging the fact he wished was not true: the growing realisation he was becoming what he always hated. A cold, lifeless husk of a man, the living avatar of his own father. 

He had even managed to ignore the requests to attend the funeral. ‘Let the old man rot, forgotten’ he remembered telling his assistant that dour day.

Now he was here, he felt compelled to enter that room.

Reaching for the handle of the main bedroom door, he paused, fingering the folded letter in his left trouser pocket. He didn’t need to read it again. What had happened so far in this house of death and decay, it was implausible, beyond explanation.

And yet…

He reached into his pocket and looked at the letter.

‘We need to talk, Archie’. The letter he received before his father’s demise.

This was not the letter from his solicitor. The one he carried with him. 

Impossibly signed in his father’s handwriting. It was unmistakable, yet it could not be real. His father had been in a coma for over two years.  Kept alive by drips, tubes and feed lines that pumped nutrients and vital fluids into a body that should have given out years ago.

‘You did this. You did all of it’. An echo whispered in the midnight black hallway, almost chasing him into the final room. The voice chased him through the door. His heart beating hard against his ribcage.

Rushing in, daring to see all manner of horrors on the other side, all he saw was a bed of an ailing man, in the last trapping of his life. It was the man he grew to despise, to truly hate. 

Both stared at each other. One in resentment, the other, in pity. 

‘Archie’. The withered, frail form of a man who had once been a titan of law and order in the land, now lay down. Pain racked his body. Twitches of nerve agony cracked his features with every breath. 

This was not what he expected to see. He had visited his father, in secret, the night before he died. The first time in years. The former Magister was alive, but clearly waiting for death. 

The Magistrate stood, dumbfounded at what he saw. Unable to move, or unwilling to approach?

‘Come here, my son.’

The Magistrate walked over to the single chair at the bedside. 

‘I just wanted to see your face, to tell you, to tell you…’ A pained wheeze formed spittle in the father’s haggard mouth. 

‘Be still, father, I know. I…love you too.’ The words he never said openly to his father. It was simply not the done thing. Whether he truly meant them or not was moot.

A dry crackling laugh emanated from emaciated lips.

‘You think that is what I want to say to you? After what you did?’

‘What?’, the Magistrate replied, the old argument threatened to rear its toxic head once more.

‘I know what you did that day’.

Bong.

The rush of memory was sudden, bleaching all his sight, and replaying the buried memory in full eidetic recall.

Bong.

The blood line in Archibald’s hand, the plunger drawn fully back, forming an air pocket in the machine’s feed line and syringe. 

Bong.

The whispered words to a man who had not the strength or ability to defend himself. 

‘Die for me now, old man’.

The struggling body on the bed as it underwent cardiac arrest. The stilling of the once beating heart full of hate. The hiding of all evidence, and Archibadl’s manner of escape to avoid the staff in the household. After all, years of hide and seek with the staff as a child taught him how to move unseen. 

With this vision of his secret came the grim realisation he was not being given a second chance at redemption. It was evidence, and this was his own trial. A supernatural trial and one potential chance to own up to his crime. 

You will be tested.

Time slowed, as the lifting and lowering of his father’s slowly decreasing breaths came to a final crescendo of movement. Dust stopped its myriad dancing through the haze of the room, and Archibald felt a shift in perspective, as if he bore witness to the events in front of him, but from the eyes of another. Heady and unnaturally disconcerting, the unnatural viewpoint persisted, and in the distance a faint but familiar voice seemed to materialise. It spoke with the conviction and empathy of one not of this world.

‘You have a choice, Archibold.’

The voice, his last execution victim, the gypsy. Thoughts of his case file flew through his mind. Circumstantial evidence, but with the right legal wrangling a conviction could be guaranteed. Much like his actions here at his father’s bedside, were premeditated.

‘I watched you die. I watched this man die…’

‘Yet’, the shade spoke hauntingly.’ Your fate hangs in the balance.’

A pause filled the time slip in this empty domicile, devoid of emotional connection. Archibald held little regard for his father, like he held little regard for this shade that now judged him.

‘Admit your crimes to the world. All of them. Lay your fate in their hands. You will face your peers in judgement, but that would be much better than the alternative.’

Archibald considered the plaintiff offer. His crimes were varied and numerous. He would likely be executed himself. Yet could he atone? Could he be forgiven for his wrongs?

Did he even want to atone for his actions? He gave the offer desultory consideration.

He looked down upon his dying father on the bed. The man who stole his joy, his childhood. His hopes, his dreams. His chance at a better tomorrow.

He deserved to die.

‘No, spirit.’ Archibald started ‘I have no desire to surrender my fate to another’s hands. All my life, my father’s voice was there. Unyielding, never satisfied. He shaped me into something equally unyielding, his expectations as unreachable as the horizon.

It was that lesson that carried me to the Magistrate’s bench. I became the hand that meted out the fairness he claimed to value but never understood. 

My father’s life ended by my hands. The others are no different. Each one met the punishment they earned, and I delivered it. 

If time itself turned back and placed those choices before me again, as your visions have shown me here… I would not hesitate. I would do it all again.’

The shade behind the effigy of Archibald sighed, and in resignation said two words.

‘I tried.’

Archibald was confused. Surely the spectre would leave him with this memory now. Yet, it remained for a moment more.

Seeming to dematerialise, his voice now a whisper on the winds of fate, the shade said one last sentence

‘You will not atone and accept your guilt. I leave you at the mercy…’

‘…Of them’.

The ghost evaporated, and time slowly seeped back into the world. Archibald, shuddering under the temporal state change, was confused.

‘Them?… Who’s them?’ Archibald called out, as time resumed its inexorable dance towards the future.

Time had seemed to reverse a few seconds, to his last words shared with his father…

‘Die for me now, old man’.

The same pause repeated, as it did when he committed the act of murder. He remained defiant, much as he did back then. Yet, something was different.

He had laid out his defence, refused repentance and atonement. Now, at the end of this terrible experience of his past actions, in this house of woe, the body on the bed in front of him did something it never did before.

His father opened his eyes, and weakly smiled.

‘You took my life’. As the soulless one in the bed began to lift from his prone position, the weight of the situation upended Archibald’s grasp on reality. He fell backwards, unable to bring himself to his feet. Words stuck at the back of his throat stubbornly refused to form, as he began to scramble from the demonic entity now stalking him around the room. 

His father’s form grew in stature, reminding Archibald of the figure he knew back when he was a child, strong in will and hate. Yet, this creature was beyond all that. It followed him across the room, each step causing the floorboards to erupt in architectural violence. The house itself creaked and groaned unnaturally. Around the periphery, the faces of those denied an empathetic judgment watched on. They littered the darkened corners of the room that grew with horrific, insane geometries. Yet, the house buckled, splinters peppering the crawling form of Archibald. Welts appeared from the kinetic impacts, droplets of vitae sizzling among the growing embers that began to burst into life.

Fires broke out uncontrollably, lights exploded, glass shattered and all manner of support joists burst through floorboards, threatening to pin and skewer Archibald in place.

This room was morphing into a prison cell. Floorboards bent into unnatural angles. His traversal across what was once polished oak floorboards had become a climb for survival, as those flat beams formed stairs in their own destructive demise. The room was breaking apart around him, shards of shattered oak and beech joists bounced off his quickly tattered clothing and pierced his flesh in a multitude of locations. Pain echoed through his ravaged frame.

Archibald tore himself free from the piercing wood, and in a tornado of flying shapes and shattering timbers he glimpsed a door. Heart hammering, he fought towards it. His hand closed on the handle – searing hot, as if something infernal waited beyond – and he threw it open.

His mind swam with impossible realities of what lay beyond that infernal portal, where spectres of half-seen being drifted like pale witnesses. The door slammed, hurling him backward from the threshold.

In the flurry of madness, the bedroom was reconstructed into a makeshift courtroom. His body physically dashed against the ironwork of the dock dais, he lifted himself, seeing his past condemned bearing witness. Faces of grim hate and pain littered the witness stand and public spaces. His father stood in all his majestic horror as a judge, fires burning where eyes once lay.

The house around him continued to break down, glass shattered in raised windows, cutting deep furrows into the flesh of the damned in attendance. Where blood once flowed, hellfire now resided.

Fear overpowered Archibald’s senses. Eyes filled with impossible sights. His father’s court in hellish parodism.

‘You stand accused. How do you find the defendant?’ His father now passed his own judgement.

All those present spoke as one, their voices no longer human. The sound caused Archibald’s ears to bleed.

‘GUILTY!’

The pain was exquisite. He struggled to find a footing, as the support trusses shattered beneath his feet, causing further anguish upon his mortal body. His face became a facet of agony, as shards of wood embedded themselves in his cheeks and limbs. Blood flowed from new wounds, as older, emotional pain rose to consume his sanity.

Picking his damaged body up once more, using whatever strength of will he had left, Archibald pleaded for what was left – his life.

‘I beg you father, I can change. I can undo my failings.’

‘You were given that chance’. His father maliciously retorted. Fire exuded from the leaking fluid of ruined eyeballs. His skin the colour of ash, as blackened bones burst through ruined fingertips.

Whatever this macabre creature beyond reality’s laws was, it was not his father.

It was far, far worse.

The floor grew hotter. Red light permeated through what remained of the floorboards.

The roof caved in, dashing and reduced to shattered timber and tiles on the floor. It bore an opening to the sky now awash with starlight and smoke.

Below him, his position now raised up high, a makeshift scaffold had formed from broken trusses and stanchions. Ropes once used to hold supports in place now formed a noose. It has snaked around his frame and pulled tight. The rope snaked around his frame, pulling tight. A hangman’s knot found its way around his neck.

‘I always knew you were a miserly, uncaring soul. Your actions led to this end, my son’.

Archibald tried to recant the Lord’s prayer, such words failing in remembrance.

His father roared in defiance.

‘THE LORD DENIES YOU! THIS IS YOUR REWARD!’

The faces of his witnesses, those he had condemned now burned with righteous indignation. Their smiles are full of hate and wrath.

They roared in supplication to the approaching judgement.

Looking to his right, at the executioner, the robed spectre removed his hood. It was the condemned Romani.

‘I gave you the choice. I warned you would be tested. You have been measured and found wanting’.

The faces of the damned bayed for vengeance. They chanted as one.

‘DROP. DROP. DROP. ’

And now, as the rope began to pull tight enough to starve his brain of oxygen, Archibald felt his eyes bulge under the carotid pressure about his throat. All the while the room around him morphed. He imagined this was what hanging would feel like. Air forcefully denied to his lungs, as the bones in his neck slowly clicked under the titanic weight of his own body mass. The noose strangling the life from him, taut and rigid against his reddened flesh, slowly going pale with restricted blood flow.

The floor gave way. Foundations creaking and groaning, finally failing in their constructive duty. Damnation lay below.

The last moments of his life, his past crimes, his acts of wanton hate and vicious riposte echoed in his eyes.  The hateful glares of the accused, condemned and executed watched on, as he fell for what seemed like eternity. Hellfire scorched his body, infernal claws reaching for their pound of flesh, payment for lives cruelly taken. The rope connected to the noose around his neck unfurled impossibly long, unspooling and spiralling above him. His chance of forgiveness disappearing in the reality that now abandoned Archibald to his eternal torment.

As he felt himself dropping to the darkness below, the house fell quiet at last, its splinters whispering his crimes as he dropped into the hellscape below. 

The rope cracked once – and hell applauded.