Link to article: Re-resurrection.
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[[>]] [[module Rate]] [[/>]] > **Note:** This is part 14 in a multi-part story based around [http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2982 SCP-2982]. Her hands. Always her hands. They attracted, caught and held his clinical attention. There were spiders less skilled at the art of capturing their prey than her, he realized; he watched, entranced, as Helen’s long, slender fingers made filo pastry cases for her daughter’s thirteenth birthday party. Allowed himself to be drawn in to her web of velvet and warmth and unconditional love. Allowed himself to sink into a cocoon that he himself had created, but she had usurped and reigned over for the last six years. Her fingers swayed and danced and wove their ballet, and he knew she knew he stared, and he knew the shyness and the pride would be blossoming inside her. Angela stood at her mother’s side, nearly as tall as her, nearly as shapely, as if observing a lesson from a master, nervously watching the pastry taking shape. On her other side, a tray of cookies and muffins for the oven. Flour sprinkled and swept on the worktop. Mixing bowls, scales, weights, egg shells and milk and butter. A bright red ladybug fluttered and skittered up the window, seeking exit into the warming, morning sunlight. It allowed itself to land, patient and unhurried, upon the sill. Gossamer wings furled up into a brilliant red shell. There was no rush to be away. “You spoil her,” Alexander said, making sure Angela would hear. He sat at a kitchen table laden with coffee and toast and bagels and fruit - bananas, mangos, apples, oranges, figs, dates - and Danish pastries, and French bread, and supped at his espresso. He winked a conspiratorial wink at Angela, and she winked back, the mischief multiplied five fold. Helen stopped abruptly in mock surprise and wheeled to face him. A fist was raised in his direction - and even in jest, threatening him with a wooden spoon, there was an unheard music, a calypso, a joy, a glimpse of paradise in everything she did - but Angela darted between them and hugged him close. She shrieked and giggled and shielded them both from her mother’s kitchenware. “Don’t hurt daddy!” Helen lowered her fist and placed the spoon gently onto the worktop. “Oh,” she said, and her eyes followed the spoon and remained fixed upon it. She was serious, sometimes, and sometimes she merely pretended to be, and when she pretended, she tried to sound serious; but always her warmth and her love and her happiness betrayed her. They stole themselves into her eyes; they crept up, up, up her vocal chords until her words acquiesced and her voice cracked and gave in finally to delicate, beautiful laughter. But still she pretended, knowing that they knew. “I see how it is,” she said, her head bowed, and already the humour was betraying her. “Your mother, God bless her awful and unrecognized existence, does all this for her ungrateful not-yet-teenage daughter, whilst your father sits and reads his horror stories.” Angela looked up to see her father roll his eyes. “Daddy is lovely.” “Your father is a terrible man,” Helen continued. “I only love him because I cannot do otherwise.” Angela nodded, as if this were beyond both doubt and the need to mention. “They’re not horror stories, anyway, are they daddy? //Daddy?//” But Alexander’s focus was elsewhere. He looked down at Angela and waved her away. “Go play somewhere else.” His attention, like a buzzing, fizzling, captive fly, was locked upon his wife’s hands again; their mercurial, non-euclidian geometry, moving, moving, moving in their dance. “Wow,” he laughed softly. She was elegant, beautiful, athletic. A ballet dancer’s poise and grace. And then, an image came into his mind: an almost empty library, a medical dictionary, black and white pictures. And then another image; stunted, grotesque fingers on tiny tyrannosaur arms. Subconsciously, under his breath, too quiet to hear he laughed. //Holy fuck.// Sometimes little keepsakes of the past creep into the present. A fragrance, a passage of classical music, a fine wine; they remind us of things that were and are no more. And sometimes these fragments stay with us; they outlive their intended time and function, they exist beyond their span, and they become one with the here and now. The ghosts of ghosts of ghosts. It can even be the way sometimes that these figments, impatient to work their miracles or mischief, cannot wait, and they come before their time as portents from the future; things that have not yet even come to pass, born early and unripe, half-formed, muddied, misshapen, their miracles gone awry and their mischiefs corrupted by their premature, misinformed births. So it is here; a man, his doting wife, a girl who calls him daddy, all unaware of the horrors that even now are gathering in pregnant pause to bring their forms into a perfect, loving world. Alexander Lazarine, who was once Alexander Lazarus, who was once Harold Augustus Maine, sat and watched his wife prepare the birthday feast. He might have seen the warning signs had his attention not been elsewhere for so long, but he had grown lazy; he had regressed, to an extent, back into what he was. The clinical, tactical guile of Lazarus-now-Lazarine was diminishing. Sometimes he found his old thoughts wandering around his head like prisoners who, having broken out of confinement, now walk aimlessly, their sense of security and place now gone; and the new thoughts would walk the old thoughts back to their cells and lock the doors, and they would be contained again for a while. Lazarine would remain the jailor, not the jailed - until the next time. Helen Lazarine nee Gwandoya opened the oven door and in went the muffins and cookies. “And now we wait,” she said. She was //perfection//. Alexander nodded - her rule in the kitchen was absolute - and settled back into the plastic chair. He watched her hands. Always her hands. [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/betrayal Last] @@ @@ [[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box]] [!-- N/A (No Images) --] [[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box-end]]