“I told you NOT to hang the Bastard, Billingsworth!” The sound of rain bounced off Cravenhill’s wide-brimmed leather hat. The sound of dripping became heavier as the sky’s tears turned into uncontrollable sobbing. “I explicitly said-” Cravenhill had a habit of annunciating the words he viewed as the most potent in his sentence.

“Ach! Leave the boy alone, will you,” Turingstone commanded with a wave of his hand, Cravenhill turned away, muttering curses under his breath. Turingstone approached the corpse, swinging from its noose in the shallow gusts of wind. Every other minute it half attempted to breathe life back into the landscape, always at a pace too slow to replicate resuscitation. Turingstone stopped a few feet away from the body, Billingsworth staying close behind him. Cravenhill continued muttering angrily under his breath, refusing to join them and kicked stones across the rough ground covering the execution site.

Billngsworth had heard that it used to be a luscious field, with colourful wildflowers rolling on for days. He’d heard the stories, but he wished he had seen that beauty with his own eyes. Now the land was as black as the night sky that itself had been pressing closer, growing darker, for a decade.

“No rot yet,” Turingstone murmured, his gloved hand gently disturbing the ground beneath the corpse’s feet. Billingsworth sighed, relieved, as he gazed up from the ground, between the dangling legs of the body. The countryside was peppered with other nameless, hanged men in different stages of entropy. One of them would fall any day now as the rot took hold. With a noise like an overstretched elastic band snapping, the tendons holding one of the corpses necks ripped, dropping maggots from behind the corpse’s burst eyes. Billingsworth looked at it, he didn’t recognise him. He peered closer at its mangled and gloomy face, not denying his own morbid curiosity. The rot drew him in, he moved forward for a better angle. He was mere inches from its stinking skin when he finally clicked: this one wasn’t nameless, this was Bradingstall.

It seemed impossible. How could it be Bradingstall? They’d only hung that treacherous man at the last half-moon, only two days had passed. Billingsworth reached up a hand to brush off the dark-coloured rot that had set in around Bradingstall’s cold fingers. He had to see the ring. The Bradingstall family ring, just to ensure he was correct. And earn himself a pretty penny at the flea market. Just as he was about to shake the dead man’s hand, he was pulled away by rough hands that yanked him backwards, so severely he almost collapsed into the mud beneath his feet.

“Don’t be a fool! Boy!” Cravenhill chastised him, standing like a lone barrier between Billingsworth and a small fortune. Cravenhill removed his hand from Billingsworth’s jacket and flexed it in harsh gestures. They ended with just enough physical contact to send Billingsworth a tentative step back. But the rot. The rot…
Cravenhill shouted but the sound seemed to fade. He gesticulated but the motions were non-existent before Billingsworth’s eyes. They were focused on Bradingstall’s Leech finger. He willed the ring to fall off, to roll towards him, to claim him as its new master. Cravenhill seemed to be continuing to talk, and he dimly felt him push him further back. A rotting blackness darkened his vision until all he could see was the finger which now seemed like the magnificent limb of some much larger creature. He was in awe of that finger, feeling a surge of admiration for the ring resting upon it.

But then, he was aware again. The sight of Cravenhill, now arguing with Turingstone, became more explicit. He strained to focus on the finger again but found he couldn’t. Not like just before. The fact that he couldn’t angered him. But then he caught a glint of it again. He slowly dropped to his knees like a devout Christian in their time of need. He began to crawl, keeping his chin held high as the glinting gold flashed brighter and faster with every muddy stone that he slid over. The other two men were now too distracted by each other’s wise words to notice him, slug-like, writhing closer to his goal.

He followed the glistening trail of rot, blending with the mud as it dripped down like gasoline from a leaking pump. He had never noticed feet before, he’d never seen anyone else’s, but the rot crawled between Bradingstall’s pale toes. It pulled the whole corpse closer to the ground, closer to his reach. Behind the translucent curtain of its skin, black veins pumped something through the corpse, now a vessel for something more beautiful. He beheld it for a moment; the gentle, rhythmic movement brought him peace. He reached out towards it, towards the rot, which had formed a protective layer of skin over the hand. It almost covered the ring entirely, but he could still see a small stone in the band; he followed it like the blinking North star.

He touched it. Finally, he held it. The finger had become so detached from the hand that it was only connected to it by the rot, as though it were extending it to him, granted him this gift. He gladly accepted it. The remains of the finger disintegrated in his hands, leaving a bubbling puddle of rot with the ring in the palm of his hand. Billingsworth smiled, watching the rot sink into his skin and turned his capillaries black. The sense of peace that he felt became all-consuming. He held up the ring, grinning wide.

He turned and saw the other two men looking at him. Their eyes were wide with horror. They looked like ghosts, so delicate that they might just fade into the jaws of eternity at any moment. He took a heavy step towards them, the rot rooting his feet into the ground. He felt as strong as the old oak tree that the nameless corpses hung from. Cravenhill and Turingstone turned and fled from him. He wanted to follow them, wanted to show them his prize, wanted to make them regret ever speaking down to him. Let them call him ‘boy’ now. Oh, how they would regret it. He tried to step forward again, but the rot told him to wait, and he listened.

Billingsworth waited as the rot delved deeper into his body, deeper into his mind. He clutched the ring, even as its weight pulled his body down towards the dirt. Day by day, millimeter by millimeter, he hunched towards the earth as the rot ensnared his lower half. It took his feet, making them as immovable as stone, but as brittle as old firewood, before it spread up his legs. He would wait, becoming indistinguishable from the rot. And the rot would be just as patient, waiting until it too, was indistinguishable from Billingsworth.

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