Still shaking with a mixture of nerves and excitement, he hid the full sack inside the cupboard under the stairs.
Only the Thin Woman could possibly fit in the space, and the filth guaranteed she never would.
As long as nothing could be seen from outside and no evidence remained, he could store whatever he liked.
Grinning, he retrieved his old emergency scraps of bread and buried them in the kitchen rubbish.
Real progress was being made.
He returned to the pantry, ignoring the hollow ache in his stomach, and found the section devoted to bottles of water, juice, and the sugary drinks Dudley seemed to live on.
More than a dozen bottles of water and six of orange juice disappeared into the cupboard.
Success left him almost giddy.
He added one more bag of jerky, a bottle of apple juice, and two muffins, then returned to his prison.
Gripping the hinged side of the door, he pulled it shut and slid the now quieter hinges back into place.
The lock was undamaged.
Nothing the family would care about was missing.
No evidence remained, and they were currently trying to kill him through simple neglect.
He had never been safer.
He decided the hidden space under the floorboard would serve as a rubbish bin for wrappers; even if they discovered it, they might overlook the wallet beneath.
A smile seemed fixed on his face as he placed small pieces of seasoned meat into his mouth.
He felt more alive than he had in months, and he intended to keep it that way.
While he ate he reached a quiet decision: immediate further healing would support every other plan.
He could build stores of food and money now.
The ability to leave the cupboard at will had already expanded his options, but greater strength would expand them further still.
He finished the food and the apple juice, pushed the rubbish down into the floorboard space on top of the wallet, and settled himself more comfortably.
He felt ready at last to deal with the damage the infant daemon had left behind.
No one was going to ruin his grassland.
Warm green threads rose into his neck once more, wrapping around his brain as the world dissolved into soft white light.
The world was green again.
He fell forward, toes sinking into grass and soft earth, hands catching him before he struck the ground.
He had expected the return to demand more effort.
Instead it felt almost natural. This story is hosted at g.com.
Rising, he began to assess the damage.
The sky still bore the wounds of the blackness—thin, unmoving cracks like frozen lightning scarring the blue.
The explosion of the corpse had torn a jagged crater into the sod.
Even without the evil sludge, the pit felt raw and violated.
Smaller clumps of grass and soil lay scattered across the field; a few had even tumbled down into the white wood corridor below.
But the sky was the worst of it.
He frowned as he looked around.
Where once a single pulsing dark cloud had hung, now many lighter ones crowded the air, forming a restless sort of storm.
The clean white memories held them apart, yet the whole arrangement felt wrong.
Almost without thinking he stretched out his right hand.
A light-grey cloud edged in black was yanked from the heavens.
It was a memory, but tainted—twisted.
Merely trying to view it left him feeling unclean.
He could not leave it there.
Green threads shaped a new glass bottle; he seized the recollection and twisted it like a soaked towel.
Black anger, rage, even distant cries of victory and defiance oozed into the glass.
When the last of the corruption had been drained, fresh cords of light cleaned his own threads, forcing every drop of the residue into the bottle.
Labels appeared of their own accord: the contained emotions, a date, a time, a place.
He sealed it and set it aside, then examined what remained of the memory.
Before, the thought had dripped with the dark man’s fury as he punished someone for some imagined slight.
Now the cloud was dull and grey, like an old silent film.
The voices and actions were still recognisable, but the terror and hatred had been stripped away and locked in glass.
The daemon infant must have released the fragment upon its death, or the original memory had simply collapsed once the intelligence restraining it was gone.
The memory itself held no value for him.
He compressed it into a small grey sphere, wrapped both sphere and bottle in green threads, and carried them downstairs.
Through the metal door he entered the evil-duck room.
A wave of threads created a new row of shelving marked by time, place and emotion, together with a small plaque that read Evil and Not Useful.
Torture held no appeal for him; he did not even truly wish to harm the people who had hurt him.
Live and let live was enough.
Still, he found the proper place for this particular bottle of evil and set it on a stand.
A pattern was forming.
As he left the room the bottle now held a grey, duck-shaped memory floating on the hatred that had once saturated it.
He sighed when he returned to the open air.
The sky was once more crowded with clouds, many of them edged in black.
There was no point in delaying.
He reached for the next memory and began shaping more glass bottles.
He had a sinking suspicion he was going to acquire a great many new duck friends in the metal room.
It might have been seconds or years.
Time refused to behave properly inside his mind.
He dealt first with every cloud that still dripped corruption.
After encountering more than a handful of pure torture, he quickly learned not to examine them.
Each one was squeezed, reduced to a duck, and stored.
Then he heard a woman crying and, against his own better judgment, looked more closely into the next cloud.
He vomited twice.
The bottle he created after that taught him a permanent lesson: store them and move on.
Any memory of similar colour was shoved into a locked cabinet inside the metal duck room, sealed and bound with a knot made from his own memory of watching the horror.
He could not help the woman—no one could, not any longer—so he used his own horror, disgust and anger as a permanent warning to himself never to look inside.
He could still guess how many other women, and perhaps children, had suffered under that monster.
The cabinet was filling far too quickly, and that fact alone unsettled him.
In a strange way the simple physical torture had been easier to face.
He had lived pain and degradation; he had already come to terms with it in his own life.
Watching others forced to hurt the people they loved, watching calculated cruelty inflicted on the innocent—that was different.
That was too much.
He locked those memories away, carefully categorised, each one guarded by his own warning so that curiosity could never tempt him.
At last the coloured clouds were gone.
The relief felt almost spiritual.
He was grateful he had only released those things for a short time; left unchecked they could have twisted his entire world and stained it beyond repair.
One final unpleasant task remained.
He had found the companion memory of the Red Woman —seen from the killer’s point of view.
He had been avoiding it, but the residual lightning made its identity unmistakable.
With only a slight hesitation and a hand that was not quite steady, he sent thick cables of green light around the cloud and began to drain it.