Chapter 8
Ursula
Someone is rattling the front door handle.
The sound of it awakens Sister Ursula, who has always been a light sleeper.
Maybe I imagined it, she hopes, yet knows that she hasn’t.
There is someone outside who wants desperately to come in.
She turns to Elsebeth to ask her what to do.
The girl is sleeping soundly. To wake her now would be no kindness, so Sister Ursula slips out of bed, hissing at the pain that lances her right knee as soon as she puts any pressure on it.
She can’t see very well—the fire has burned low—but when she touches the joint, she feels it is still very much swollen despite the cold cloth she has wrapped around it.
No matter. The body may clamor all it wants, but that does not mean she needs to heed it, not when there are more important matters at hand.
She quickly puts on her clothes and shoes to keep warm and preserve her modesty from whoever is outside, makes the sign of the cross over the skull, says a quick prayer begging for the saint’s assistance, then limps to the front door, which is moving softly in its frame as if someone is patting it, looking for a crack.
“Who is it?” she asks. The words come out all strangled by her fear.
The voice that responds is not easily defined as male or female on account of it being very hoarse. “Have you milked the cows?” it asks.
She blinks in astonishment. “Excuse me?”
“Barbara needs new shoes. I don’t want her to go around barefoot like some urchin. We are better than that.”
“I’m sorry about Barbara and her shoes, but I don’t think I understand. Who are you, and why are you here? It’s much too cold a night to be out.”
The voice begins to babble. Perhaps it’s the thickness of the door and the howling of the wind, or perhaps something is desperately wrong with the person outside, because no matter how Sister Ursula strains her ears, she can’t make sense of what they are saying.
It’s not that the words are unintelligible, though they sometimes are, but that, when strung together, they don’t make much sense.
“It looks like rain and…Maria burned the bread this morning. Holy Father, please preserve us… What if it is the Hungarian sickness? No, no… Do you think your wife knows about us? I heard that…Nikolaus caught a bullet to the stomach. If you go to the market, you must remember to bring black thread, or I shall have to mend your dress with the blue. This bloody cold!”
And all the while, the person outside keeps rattling the doorknob and scratching at the wood.
Fear drags its icy finger along Sister Ursula’s spine, sending forth ripples of gooseflesh.
It makes a pain rise in her throat like sap in spring.
She is tired, so very tired, of having to play handmaiden to terror, but for all that it sickens her, she is powerless to stop it.
Not all bodily sensations can be ignored.
“I’m sorry, but I truly don’t understand,” she says during a lull in the person’s constant chatter. She still isn’t sure whether they are male or female; the talking has only further hoarsened their voice.
“You are a sinner, aren’t you?” The question turns into a giggle that makes the hair on her nape rise so fast the skin aches, because how could this person know about Sister Hildegard?
For a moment, she remembers the terrified farmer and his insistence that she and Elsebeth must be demons trying to trick him into letting them into his house.
What if there was truth to his words, and whoever is standing beyond this door is neither human nor benevolent?
And now that she has engaged them in conversation, they know that she is here…
Yet she does not turn around and limp back to bed. Instead, she rubs her sore nape, then lays her cheek against the cool, smooth wood of the door to hear better as she thinks about what to do.
For all that she believes in Satan and his legion of demons, Sister Junius also taught that there are much simpler things that can make a person talk so incoherently.
They could be delirious from fever, like Sister Hildegard was in her final hours; they might have grown so cold that they have begun to hallucinate; they may have seen something so horrendous that it has temporarily disordered their mind.
The poor wretch outside babbles on. “But stay awake at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are going to take place, and to stand before the Son of Man. Oh God, oh God oh God oh God have you seen its face oh dear God!” the person outside screams.
She flinches away, her heart beating as fast as a battle drum. Her belly clenches, though from fellow feeling or fear, she doesn’t know.
The screaming peters out, turns into soft sobbing. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and in the hour of our death.”
That decides it. If Satan moves through this person, then the holy words of the Ave Maria would surely turn to burning coals in their mouth, blistering their tongue, cheeks, and lips. She lays her hand on the bolt, the iron shockingly cold, then slides it aside and opens the door at a crack.
What stands on her doorstep may have been human once but is now human no more.
It is incredibly tall but in an ill-proportioned way, as if whoever this revenant used to be in life has been stretched upon the rack.
Its skin is gray, the eyes luminous in the way of nocturnal animals.
The lips have shrunken and peeled back, revealing overly large teeth in blackened gums.
Sister Ursula can do nothing but stare at it in horror.
Just as happened on the road, panic possesses her.
It makes her mind and memory flicker. One moment, she is standing in the hallway of the deserted house, staring at the revenant on her doorstep, trying not to gag at the scent of rot and freshly turned earth that clings to its desiccated skin and the remnants of its clothes; the next, she is being dragged through the empty street.
“Please,” she babbles over and over again, “please don’t hurt me. ”
She only snaps out of this state of fear-induced madness when she stumbles over a bit of broken rock and hits the ground with her wounded knee. She can’t even scream, the pain is so intense. It batters her and sickens her. For a moment, there is nothing else.
When she comes to, the revenant has hoisted her to her feet.
The agony of her knee has broken the choke hold panic had on her, allowing her to think.
“In the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, I beg of you: Please stop whatever you are doing and let me go,” she pleads.
“I’m sorry, but I truly don’t understand,” the walking corpse answers, perfectly echoing Sister Ursula’s earlier remark. Its face remains slack, its eyes empty and dead.
It doesn’t understand what it’s saying, she realizes. It just mimics what it has heard its victims say in order to lure the living close so it can eat us. She knows then that her begging is useless.
But she can’t just let it drag her away to God knows where to do God knows what. If she has learned one thing since meeting Elsebeth, it is that doing nothing will get you killed.
What did Elsebeth tell her again about revenants? All the different ones are blending together in her mind, but she said they are often the playthings of Satan, didn’t she? If that is true, then perhaps she can cast him out and in that way return this revenant to being a simple unmoving corpse.
She reaches for her rosary, raises the little cross at the end of the chain, and begins to pray the rites of exorcism. She does not know them fully—only priests are allowed to perform them, and she has only attended two exorcisms in her entire life—but she is desperate.
Soon, the revenant repeats the sacred words back to her in the way of some birds: perfect in pitch yet empty of understanding.
Tears of anger and frustration burn in her eyes. She knows this devil’s puppet doesn’t consciously mean to make a mockery of her prayers, but it’s still atrocious. She digs her heels into the wet ground, gritting her teeth against the daggerlike pain in her knee, and hisses, “Begone, thou demon!”
The revenant only cocks its head. In the dark, its eyes shine bright as newly minted coins.
It says, “Seven already dead from the Hungarian sickness. How many more will you take, oh Lord?” Then, it tears the rosary from around her throat.
The chain cuts into her skin before it breaks. The creature drops it into the dirt.
“No!” Sister Ursula wails. She reaches for her beloved rosary.
The beads are as familiar to her as her own hands.
The exorcism may not have worked, but if she can take hold of it and undo the knots that keep each bead in place, she can scatter some of them in front of the revenant, just as Elsebeth scattered the pebbles around that poor peasant’s corpse.
It will be compelled to count them, but because it can’t count beyond two, it will soon get stuck, and then she…
Her fingertips brush the cord, but before she can grip it, the revenant roughly hauls her away.
For a beat, despair and panic drown out all other thoughts again, though this time, it’s not long until the pain in her knee carves out a space in her consciousness. Perhaps Sister Valentina was right to thank God so passionately for her suffering after all.
Everything for Jesus, she thinks and laughs, or perhaps sobs.
By now, they have left the village, and the revenant is taking her down a rutted road, the black earth hard as stone due to frost. She wishes she could fight it, could flee, but her body, ever the traitor, won’t obey her, and so she lets the revenant lead her as if she is a dog and it her master.
A bead of blood from the cut her rosary made as it was torn from around her neck rolls down her spine. She shivers.