abThe rain lashed against the authentic 17th century window like a horde of angry wasps. The in the green gloom of his vast study George Topping, 15th lord of Bindling house sat alone in a cloud of whiskey induced ecstasy. He had lost control of his limbs a good 10 minutes ago and now all he could do was slump back in his chair and giggle inanely at the day’s events.

“Good hunt today!” he slurred to the grand picture of his father that hung on the wall opposite him, dominating the room. “Shame Alistair couldn’t be with us” his cold blue eyes narrowed. Partially from the light that continued to assault his reddened eyeballs, and the thought of his son. Suddenly the good mood that came with the temporary sating of his bloodlust left him, and was replaced by a maelstrom of rage, and the sort of emotions only a drunkard can experience. “Thasht ungrashful little bastard” he muttered into his decanter. “I do everything I can for him, finest education in all the land, the besht company, and how does he repay me?” he stopped mid-rant as he forgot what exactly he was angry about, but after a few quiet minutes he was back on his (shaky) track “little runt insulted me AND his mother” he paused in reflection, “God rest her soul”

Her death normally only affected him when it suited him, however in recent years the act had started to bleed into his mind, and he was at the point where he genuinely believed their relationship had been the perfect marriage and they never argued. He now blamed his habit of looking for answers at the bottom of the nearest alcoholic beverage and being in the company of men who made Ed Gein seem stable on her passing. The truth however was that when his dead wife was alive she had been more successful in covering up his misdemeanours than he was. She had even taken a blind eye to his overfriendliness with the maids.

  He clumsily brushed a hand through his grey thinning hair; his vanity permitted him to wear a hat anywhere he went. He then made his way to his thick moustache, which sat on his lip completely unaware of just how ridiculous it looked. He glanced to the picture that had been placed there by a maid who hadn’t yet realised why it always ended up in the bin. He glared at the two happy faces in the image, as though they were personally insulting him through the battered glass. “How dare he!” the picture was of his son and his son’s soon to be wife. She was pretty, smart and had genuinely wooed her eventual father in law until of course he discovered something about her, or more accurately something about her parentage. Her father had been an electrician and her mother a waitress in the sort of quaint little café where the stains on the cutlery just gave it character. When he discovered his he had to put his foot down, he wasn’t having his son marrying someone from the working class. He would never hear the end of it from his hunting friends, or his poker buddies. He grabbed the picture clumsily and held it unsteadily in his sweating palms, with his misguided aim he tried to spit on her face, but missed and hit the back of his hand instead, he didn’t seem to notice.

“Working class Vixen!” he hurled the picture over his shoulder and heard it crash onto the expensive rug behind him rather satisfyingly. He decided to take his mind off the young idiot and his plebeian whore and instead focus again on the day’s events. The hunt had gone very well indeed, apart from the one time where the panicking prey had injured one of his prized hounds, but this had merely egged the rest of the pack on as they tore the poor creature limb from limb.
“Bloody lefties!” he growled, thanks to them his only hobby apart from drinking and flirting was illegal. Apparently fox hunting was ‘cruel’. He couldn’t see the problem with ridding the countryside of foul vermin; in fact he felt it to be his duty. So he and his friends had conspired to find something new to hunt and in 21st century Britain finding vermin wasn’t hard. He tried to stand up but his legs failed him and he crashed to the floor in a mess of limp limbs and partially taken off hunting clothes. The tiny amount of whiskey left in the decanter flowed onto the floor. It wasn’t the first time this had happened.

He remembered the screaming from that afternoon, the horn blasting through the forest, the barking of the hounds, and the expression on that vagrants face as he was chased, chased through the trees. The limbs flailing as he fell because of a misplaced step find its way into a rabbit hole. And perpetual screaming. It had excited him like nothing before. The only problem was now they needed to find something else, but like a drug addict, he needed more. He gazed into the picture that lay on the floor next to him and a conniving smile flowed through his red face as he looked into the eyes of that woman that threatened to taint his family.