Chapter 11
Elsebeth
I am kissing Ursula’s breasts, and it is sweet. We are naked as babes on a bed of velvet and down. The feel of her skin against mine has me trembling all over, or mayhap it’s the way the blade of her hip presses against my cunny.
“Ursula,” I moan, placing a trail of kisses from her nipple to her throat, which is pale, veined, and hot as sunstruck stone.
“Oh, Ursula, how sweet you taste and feel!” I close my eyes and run my hands through her hair.
Unlike my own hair, which is wispy and fine, hers is thick and a little coarse.
“Cease thy writhing and moaning, thou little harlot, and heed me, for I’ve a need of thee,” a voice whispers in my ear.
“But you feel so good,” I whisper back, my fingers tangling in her locks.
And then I realize.
It’s not Ursula’s voice.
I go cold all over. When I lift up my head and open my eyes, it’s not Ursula’s face I see, but the saint’s skull.
I know then that I am dreaming.
I flush from sole to crown, so violently that the tears spring into my eyes.
I push Ursula’s body (but is it still Ursula’s body if it has the saint’s skull as a head?) away from me and cover her with a sheet to preserve her modesty.
I wrap a sheet around myself also, though shame has me running hot. “Why are you here?” I snap.
The skull grins, but then she has no lips to purse and so must always grin. “How sorely I have vexed thee! Didst thou not mean to kiss me? Didst thou think ’twas not I, but the nun, mayhap?”
“Stop it!” I snap.
“Thou art welcome to kiss me some more, if it pleases thee. It has been a while since I’ve had a body, even in dreams. Alas, most people think of me only as a skull, and so a skull I must be.” She runs her hands all over her body, shuddering in delight. “Oh, but it feels good to have skin again!”
I grab her wrists so as to still those wandering hands. “That’s not your body. Don’t touch it so. It isn’t right.”
She looks at me all sly. “Methinks thou only sayest so because thou art ashamed. Dost thou think it sin, to long for another’s body? If that were true, then it seems to me I came to thee at the right time, or thou wouldst have sinned most grievously.”
I did not think it possible to burn hotter than I already am, but I do, so ashamed am I. “This is only a dream,” I retort.
“It would be sin still, no?”
“It wouldn’t be. I dream all manner of things, some of them very vile.
It does not mean I want those things to truly happen.
And why are you rooting around in my mind?
Why do you peep and lurk? My dreams should be my own, and are not for you to see!
Now tell me what need you have of me, then leave me to my dreams.” Though now that I know I am dreaming, I can’t keep kissing dream Ursula; it was innocent only when I knew not what I was doing, and what good is kissing her if she doesn’t have her head?
“Very well,” the skull says in that reedy voice of hers.
“The nun and thou must hurry. The necromancer and his servant are gaining ground. They will soon sorely hound us. The time has come for thee to leave behind thy slothful, gluttonous ways and continue on thy quest to return me to my body, which I miss more than I can say.”
Her words are unjust, and anger rises in me as sap does in trees. “Ursula can’t walk any farther or faster than she does because of her knee!”
“Pah!” the skull says, and if she could, I am sure she would spit. “If thou keepest moving at this slow pace, she shall soon no longer need to worry about her knee at all!”
I let go of her wrists and draw the sheet tighter around me.
“If there even is a necromancer pursuing us. Mayhap this is no more than a silly dream.” Sullenly, for I am still ashamed the skull has seen this dream and aggrieved that she has spoiled it for me, I add, “If you want us to move faster, you should heal Ursula’s knee.
I thought saints had the power to make the blind see again, the deaf hear, the dumb speak, and the crippled walk. ”
She swoops at me like a bird of prey. I shriek and raise my hands to my face, but too late. She has caught my left lobe between her sharp little teeth. As soon as she lets go, I draw back and clap my hand over my stinging ear.
“You bit me!” I exclaim.
“And how right that serves thee, thou little saucebox!” the skull snaps, her arms folded in front of her chest. She gnashes her teeth in a way that makes me wince.
A little blood runs down my neck. I rub at it. “That’s not very saintly of you,” I say. Her bite does not pain me overly much, but the shock of it has loosened my tongue.
“’Tis thine own fault for believing me some meek, martyred maid. Now heed me, you wretched wench: On the morrow, the nun and thou must make haste, unless thou wouldst like to face the necromancer.”
She hesitates, then takes hold of my hands and asks in a soft, uncertain voice, “Before thou wakest, wouldst thou hold me in thine arms? ‘Tis been a while since I had skin. I forgot how it hungers.”
I open my mouth to say something, I know not what, but I have come awake, and once more the skull is nothing more but bone shut away in a box.
* * *
When morning comes, Ursula wakes me. “Look, Elsebeth, your poultice worked a miracle. My knee is much better!” she says, and indeed it is. It’s still yellow and green, but the swelling has gone.
Her dear face creases with worry and she touches my ear. “You hurt yourself,” she says.
I feel my earlobe, which is sore and sticky with half-dried blood. I remember my dream, and my heart leaps like a hare inside my chest. Has the saint’s skull…?
But no, such things are not possible. It’s much more likely that I scratched myself in sleep, and my brain took the pain and stitched it into my dream.
It has done so before. When my monthly bleeding begins in the night, I dream I am being stabbed, and two winters ago, when there was nothing to eat, and Margarethe and I did nothing but lie near the hearth for warmth, I often dreamt the same dream, of something dark and hungry living inside of my belly gnawing on my insides.
We leave as soon as it is light. As we walk, I am not exactly happy, but I feel awake and full of life, and that’s much better than I have felt in a long while.
Mayhap it’s because Ursula can walk so much better now; mayhap it’s because the sun is warm and the air is full of the scent of rising sap and green things growing.
I think it’s mainly because of Ursula’s hand in mine, though.
I can’t stop myself from toying with it. I map the lines on her palm with my fingertips, move her fingers this way and that, stroke the dips and crags of her knuckles. It’s such a common thing, a friendly hand to hold is, but I didn’t have one for so long that I grow almost drunk on it now.
The skull has reason to be glad also. In the abandoned farm, we found a satchel for her. I carry her now, strapped carefully to my chest so she won’t bounce around and break her brittle teeth, though I think secretly to myself that a few broken teeth might make her less mean.
I have not yet told Ursula of my skull dreams. There are many things that I think about against my will, but this one thing I can push out of my mind very well, for most dreams are nonsense.
My grandmother said they are only worth heeding when you have had the same dream thrice, because only then is there any truth to them, for three is the number of the Lord.
Soon, we have entered the woods again. Although Ursula’s knee is much better, we still stop often, so she can rest and I can forage.
April is a cruel month, lean and full of hunger, this year more so than others.
The winter we had was bitterly cold, and it clings to the land still, leaving the earth hard as a crust of burnt bread and the trees loath to bloom.
They are full of buds clenched closed as tightly as a miser’s fist around a coin.
“Dandelion,” Ursula says. She has to call out, for I have strayed a little way from her in my gathering.
“Taraxacum officinale,” I reply.
“Crocus?”
I kneel down to pluck a dandelion. “That’s an easy one. Crocus.”
Ursula laughs. It’s a surprisingly deep sound, and dear to me. “Sometimes, life is easy like that. Nettle?”
I do not reply, for what I see has knocked all the Latin straight out of my head.
Hidden in the undergrowth lies a boy.
Had I not knelt down to pluck that dandelion, I would not have seen him. So close is he, I can brush his dirty hair from his forehead if I reach out.
But I don’t reach out, and I don’t brush his dirty hair from his forehead, for he is a dead boy.
He is so thin, his bones look as if they are trying to burst through his skin, which hangs loose like fabric in some places but is pulled taut as a drum in others.
He has no eyes, just two meaty caverns in his face.
His eyelids have been torn to shreds, likely by the very same birds who have eaten his eyes, and they hang in front of those empty sockets like tattered curtains.
No living boy, this.
Yet for all that he is dead and for all that he has no eyes, I know he is looking at me. When I lower my hand with the dandelion, his head moves also.
A revenant, then, but what kind? It’s hard to see with him hidden in the undergrowth, all dappled by shade and sun.
I daren’t move. I am so afraid, my limbs are shaking, and I feel as the cows must after a long winter shut away in their stables: ready to bolt and aggrieved that I can’t, for if I run, he will come after me.
In this, revenants are like wolves, bears, and other meat-eating things; if you run, you make yourself the prey and tell them that the hunt has begun.
If only he would just leave us be! We want nothing to do with him, for he is a vile thing.
Unclean.
Unnatural.
Ungodly.
So stuck am I in thought that I do not hear Ursula draw near until she lays a hand on my shoulder. The touch is light, yet it strikes me like lightning. I whip around, my heart racing.
The moment I turn my back on the dead boy, he slithers out from the hollow where he has been hiding.
Quick as a snake, he strikes. With his little hands, the nails long and filthy, he climbs up my legs until he’s on my back.
There, he clamps his legs, skinny as two sticks, around my ribs and wraps his arms around my neck.
He does not weigh much because he’s no more than skin and bone, but he stinks, and the pain in my throat where his arm presses hard against it is terrible. “Home,” he whispers in a voice that sounds ancient, not like a little boy at all.
I know then what he is.
An Aufhocker.
One who jumps on the backs of unsuspecting travelers and kills them unless they find him his grave.