Miserere Hardwyck is a member of The Prenderghast Exorcist Company, a prodigious group tasked with the eradication, arrest, and execution of those infected with the mysterious Pestis. The Pestial are identified by their beastliness, madness, and notably fear of the Exorcists' blades specifically; made with Blightstone as harvested from calcified Pestial corpses. Scouring the elusive city of Shaw, the Company acts more like a military police and have full governmental control over the region.
Every Exorcist is told to apprehend Pestial who "hears voices that they do not recognise", so when Miserere finds a sullen little boy with a progression of Pestis far beyond that which would allow him to keep his wits, who hears a voice he cannot recognise, she feels a pull to him as she takes him back to the Pesthouse -- the Company's centre of business, a great repurposed cathedral.
This sets in motion a series of events that has Miserere and her young ward, Percival (or, Percy), escape from all they know; pursued by the Company. Something is guiding Miserere to dissent from all she once loved. With a cast of characters, from the sinister Arch-Doctor Theodore Wynter, the curate of the Company, to the benevolent Bartholomew Stewart, the old archivist and obsessor of the Prenderghasts who narrates this tale, Project Misery is a mixture of both Bloodborne and A Plague Tale; set in the mid-19th century.
It is written from the perspective of a multitude of characters, as inspired by Dracula, and attempts to maintain an immersive voice akin to fiction written in the 19th century. I will be sharing updates and snippets here as I progress! As I write this, I am currently 25k words in! <3
“Miserere, why did you become an Exorcist?”
We had been captives in the clocktower for two days. Our time had consisted of arbitrary conversation and verbal games when we were not planning our route of escape. Percy had told me of his life before that fateful storm: the picture of an impoverished homelife grasping at the fruit of the Prenderghast’s looming tree, far too tall to reach. While the inner circles of Shaw, the Sanguine and Melancholic, eat heedlessly the fruits of the Company’s prosperity, the outer Choleric and Phlegmatic must fight for such privilege. Percival, he who did not even know his surname, was the embodiment of this divide. I mourned for a childhood lost, for innocence adrift. We, pariahs both, shall become strangers to peace. The motivation to my morals are still alluding me, but I digress.
He had issued his question upon the eventide of our second day. Our source of food was whatever the merchants below had discarded and left upon the cobble in the day, to which we plundered in the early morning gloom. I had just forced down a rather unfortunate-looking tomato, its flesh half blackened and its juices emitting a malodour that made us both stifle a gag. Alas, hunger is a powerful motivator.
“It is a rather… lurid tale. I fear it will give you nightmares.”
Our humour had since been twisted into something mocking. It is something I had noticed, and welcomed. What use is there to brood when our situation was so very incessantly dire?
“I am quite brave!” The boy sat before me. The colossal clockface was to our right, and a draught threatened to extinguish the candles we had found and lit for their meagre warmth. We should blow these out soon, I thought, lest the light be seen from below and give us away.
“Come, do tell me! Oh do, Miserere!” Continued he, accompanied with a tug on my arm.
“Oh, alright, beastie. If only to quieten you.” Percy wrapped my greatcoat further around his shoulders. How small he looked beneath it. I cleared my throat and begun my tale.
“I was perhaps seven years old, and that was not quite so long ago as you think. I grew up in the Choleric Quarter, but my childhood was blessed with ignorance as my parents protected their children from the grievances they endured. My father was a barber-surgeon, proficient in one and perhaps less so in the other.” Percy cocked his head in a silent inquiry. “That is to say, if you broke your biggest toe, you would be better off allowing a dog to chew it off than my father. Do not laugh! We must, instead, mourn those who are now six toes less than they intended!
“My mother helped my father in his surgeries but with far more... aptitude. This left my brothers and I ample time to ourselves. Beyond cleaning our home, we spent our youth clowning with friends or attending to errands. I, with far less affinity to the outdoors than my brothers, I spent most of my time in the rafters of our local church. This was a cold building, derelict and crumbling. So many avoided it for it was only really used as an emergency refuge should our small community befall a bout of the Pestis. The rafters smelt divine; of wood and wet moss. I had found a small hovel that was accessible from without; a corner which sat adjacent to a break in the stone, acting as a small window only a little church mouse such as I could enter through.
“Here, I would read. It was upon an evening similar to this one, but at the zenith of spring, that I recall most ardently the answer to your question. I was contemplating my return home, that my parents should be home soon and I must begin our supper, when my attention was caught by footfalls below. The church echoed any and all sound, so much so that many a time had I been startled by the barn owls that nestled in the eaves. Footfalls below were noteworthy for not many entered this church, and no one entered at so late in the day.
“‘On the altar. C’mon, fucking walk and you’ll get it over with sooner!’ They were older than I, still yet to bloom into adulthood. My eldest brother surely knew them, but later inquiries proved fruitless. They were boys not from here, but had captive one I knew all too well. His name was Oliver Marshire, and he was a family friend who had gone missing weeks prior. They had entered through a back entrance, and from my alcove, a sufficient vantage point to see the entire nave, I saw Oliver in a half-starved state; beaten black and blue. Emaciated, so gaunt I could see his bones and the way his skin hung from them like wet fabric. That alone frightened me.
“They, the four of them, hauled his frame against the stone altar in the apse. His fingertips were blackened and his nails, not unlike yours, were long and claw-like. Tell-tale signs of the Pestis. Despite my puerility, I understood as much as I could the nature of the blight. Frozen I was, unable to look away, and I subconsciously sought for signs of witlessness. But he did not move, not until one of the boys struck him; seemingly awake.
“‘Finish it quick, fuck sake. We get caught in ‘ere and we’re as good as dead.’
‘Please.’ His voice was a hopeless plea, one he had likely begged countless times before. He had not lost his wit, and they still sought to take the law in their own hands. I later was enlightened that Oliver fled, as many do, to the Phlegmatic in search of succour in the Marrows. He did not make it, evidently, and was given over to those boys who dragged him home.
“I watched as one took a Blightstone knife, stolen from whomever in his family bore the crest of the Exorcists, and began to drag the blade across Oliver’s rotting flesh. He was still human; human enough to feel it, but a rag in his mouth kept him from screaming, and his spine had been broken so that he could not resist. I, seven years old, watched as a boy was flayed because his blood was flecked in the Pestis; because he was unfortunate enough to have contracted this damned plague. They peeled away his skin, as whole as that callous child could manage, and spread it on the altar in some juvenile display of power. They left what remained of Oliver sitting against the altar, and fled.”
Percival had not lowered his eyes, only stared in mute empathy at my growing distress. I had not realised how much this memory remained festering in the back of my mind until I recalled it for him. I took a breath and continued:
“I recall the minutes that passed very… vaguely. Only one image that I cannot seem to shake: the indistinctness of his body due to our distance, it made him into something far more monstrous. There is something uncanny about seeing something so very… unnatural. We are not meant to witness these kinds of things, Percival. Especially not as children. I could only stare; the emptiness of the nave was distinct against that impossibly red… thing in the apse. It had such a presence that it emphasised the expanse of the church. It sat there and was so very important. I— I can hardly explain.”
“It wished not to be there so very muchly that you could not help but look at it and wish it was somewhere else too.”
I remember smiling, then. He is a clever beastie, I thought as I nodded in assent.
“I stayed until the cramp in my legs ached and woke me from a strange stupor. He was a stark umbra against the half-light of twilight, and my imagination filled in the gaps to such an extent that I began to imagine something… incomprehensible. Something worse. Just an idea, a concept, but one so very terrifying that I was knocked out of my mental paralysis and ran. I fled but I did not cry. My parents were rightly furious until they noticed my pallor; ghastly, I bet.
“I know not what happened to those boys. Oliver was taken to the Columbarium, and I did not sleep for weeks upon weeks. But it planted the seed — that to be an Exorcist is to give an honest death to those Pestial and suffering. Death can be a mercy, and I wished to ensure no other would succumb to the same fate as Oliver Marshire.”
“I do not want to be like Oliver Marshire.”
I was torn from the past and blinked away the memories. My eyes strained against the dancing candleflame contrasting with the now darkened room.
“I will not let that happen, Percy.” Something tugged at my conscience. I spoke absently, turning my attention to the clockface that struck ten-minutes-past-eight. The echo of hoof-falls on cobblestone below; the “good night” of a merchant to her neighbour; the screech of a barn owl that startled me.
We had forgotten to blow out the candles.
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This is so goooood. It reminds me a lot of the bloodborne comics.
Welp, I'm sold on Project Misery. All the best while it works its way out and unfolds for us all to read in final form.
I am curious - do you have recommended reading for those of us wanting something with a Bloodborne bent? (while we wait for your novel)