Chapter 13
Ursula
One moment, Sister Ursula is basking in the spring sunshine and laughing with Elsebeth as she teaches her the Latin names of flowers. The next, some creature is attacking the girl she has come to feel so protective over.
For once, fear lags behind, and so she has not frozen yet and can pull the little knife she always carries with her from her pocket.
Where to strike? Her eyes dart over Elsebeth’s attacker, looking for a soft spot to sink her knife into.
She sees the side of its torso, so thin all the ribs can clearly be counted, the spine standing out like a string of marbles, the joints all swollen and much thicker than the limbs that connect to them, and all of it small.
It’s merely a child, she thinks, and that makes her falter.
She blinks, looks closer.
It is a child, but there is something very wrong with it, even outside of its thinness. Its skin is grayish and mottled, and its eyes…
It’s dead, she realizes.
In that instant, fear hits her as hard as a fist to the face. She sways, the hand holding the knife turning slick with sweat so that she could never strike at this walking corpse for fear the weapon will slip from her grip and slice up her palm, or worse, plunge into Elsebeth.
All the color drains from the world. Black spots dance in her vision, and sound becomes oddly muffled.
Time stretches and contracts in strange spurts, like a curl of hair that lengthens when being pulled.
Then, time rushes back, and with it color, scent, and sound.
As if to compensate for that moment of near blindness and deafness, her senses are blown wide-open.
She notices all sorts of little things: the way the birds have quieted and the only sound is of the wind rattling the bare branches; the fineness of the boy’s hair as the wind lifts it, each strand pale and thin as spider’s silk; the smell of him, which is not the powerful, ripe stench of decay but something more gentle, as if he is moldering rather than rotting.
There is something quite dreadful about his face.
It’s not even the lack of eyes, though that disturbs her very much; it’s more the expression it wears.
The face of the Nachzehrer that almost killed her was blank as a death mask.
This boy’s is anything but. It is equal parts grim determination and despair.
She feels that funny sensation at the back of her skull again, where it is joined to her spine.
You are such a coward, she thinks bitterly as she has to look away for fear she might faint otherwise. As she does so, her eyes snag on Elsebeth’s face. The girl’s cheeks have gone livid; even her lips have been drained from all color so that she looks almost corpse-like in her terror.
She is even more afraid than I am, Sister Ursula thinks, and that somehow snaps her out of her frozen state. She takes a step closer.
“Don’t!” Elsebeth says.
The boy bares his teeth and snarls. His gums are gray, as if he has been drinking ink. He tightens his hold on Elsebeth, choking her.
Sister Ursula backs away, and the boy loosens his hold a little. Elsebeth begins to cough. The sound is horrible, all raspy. She bends over, gagging. When she straightens, the blood has rushed to her face, and she looks more like herself again.
Sister Ursula wipes her free hand on her dress, then transfers the knife to that hand. “Another revenant,” she notes.
“An Aufhocker, to be exact, wanting to be returned to his grave,” Elsebeth says.
Suddenly, she whimpers, and it breaks Sister Ursula’s heart to see her scared and in pain, but she daren’t come close.
In her pocket, she feels for her broken rosary.
The familiar feel of the wood all warm from resting against her thigh gives her some strength.
She asks, “If he likes his grave so much, why did he leave in the first place?”
Elsebeth makes to shrug, but the boy tightens his grip around her throat again.
Wincing, she aborts the movement. “My grandmother never told me the reason. Mayhap he wandered in his sleep, or mayhap someone dug him up and moved him elsewhere, or mayhap there’s some other ground for it that you and I can never know whilst we still live.
Does it matter? He won’t let go of me till we have brought him where he wants to be. ”
“But we can’t!” she exclaims. Every moment they dawdle is a moment Sister Hildegard has to spend in purgatory, her soul scraped and sanded a little closer to cleanliness, and that’s all Sister Ursula’s fault; the choir mistress would not have to suffer as long if she had seen a priest before death, might even have gone straight to Heaven.
Tears warp her vision, making Elsebeth and the boy blend together until Elsebeth looks humpbacked. She rubs them away with trembling fingers. “We can’t,” she repeats, quieter now. “The saint’s skull—”
“Will have to wait till we have gotten rid of this dead boy. If we don’t take him where he wants to go, he’ll strangle me.
” Elsebeth attempts to smile bravely, revealing her strong white teeth, the incisors sharp.
“Don’t fret, Ursula. Aren’t saints supposed to be quite forgiving? It’s not as if we tarry on purpose.”
“But how are we to know where his grave is?”
Elsebeth’s smile turns pained. “Fret not. He’ll lead us there.”
* * *
Despite Elsebeth’s assurance that the Aufhocker would show them the way, he does nothing but cling to Elsebeth at first. It’s not until the day has mostly gone that he suddenly digs his knees into her ribs to stir her to the left.
Elsebeth snaps, “I’m not a horse. If you want me to go somewhere, you can tell me in words, or if you have forgotten those, then point.”
The boy sticks out his tongue, making Sister Ursula gasp.
“What? What is it? What did he do?” Elsebeth demands to know, craning her head to see.
“He stuck out his tongue at you.”
“Oh, so you’re not merely a dead boy, but a rude one, too?” She stops walking. “Go ahead, then. Strangle me. I don’t care. I am not going to take you back to your grave if you’re going to behave like that, you ungrateful little wretch.”
The boy hisses and tightens his grip around Elsebeth’s throat, but she stands unmoving, although her face soon turns red and then blue.
“Stop!” Sister Ursula cries out. “If you strangle her, then I…I won’t allow you to climb on my back.
I’ll run like the devil himself is after me, and you won’t catch me, because my legs are a lot longer than yours, and also I’m not dead.
You’ll have to wait for someone else to come along then, and I think you’ll be waiting a very long time, because all this time we have been in the woods, we’ve not met a single soul. You’ll fall apart before that happens.”
The boy relents, slumping against Elsebeth’s back with a deep sigh.
“That’s what I thought,” Elsebeth gasps, rubbing at her throat.
They walk until dark. Then, they find a clearing and make a fire to stay warm. They cook. Still the dead boy clings to Elsebeth. He grows restless when they sit down to eat, muttering and keening.
“You want some, too?” Elsebeth asks, offering him a bit of jerky. The boy hesitates, then takes it and starts gnawing on it. “Don’t drool on my dress, and careful of your teeth. They are probably none too tight in your gums.”
When they make to sleep, the boy mewls with discontent. Elsebeth ignores this. She has to lie on her stomach. He pinches her as soon as she closes her eyes.
“Do that again, and I’ll box your ears till they fall off your head; see if I don’t!” Elsebeth snaps.
“Home,” he whines.
“You’ll have to wait,” Sister Ursula tells him, trying to sound stern.
“Elsebeth is tired. She needs to sleep. We’ll continue tomorrow.
” She curls up next to them so that they may share each other’s warmth.
She has no desire to touch the dead child any more than she has to, but Elsebeth matters more, and so she conquers her fear and revulsion.
“There,” she says. “That’s nice, isn’t it?”
The boy mutters something. He keeps twitching and readjusting his grip on Elsebeth, making it impossible to sleep.
“Maybe you should tell him a bedtime story,” Sister Ursula tries, and so Elsebeth recounts the story of the man who ate the snake and could talk to animals. The boy falls asleep before she reaches the ending.
“He’s just like my little brothers,” Elsebeth whispers. “They never wanted to go to bed, either, and then I would tell them a story, and they’d be asleep before I could say, ‘And if they didn’t die, they’re living on today.’”
“If I could take him from you, I would,” Sister Ursula says.
“I know,” Elsebeth responds. She takes Sister Ursula’s hand and squeezes it.
Despite everything, they sleep. Once, the boy whimpers, waking Sister Ursula.
Do the dead dream? Elsebeth said he might have wandered from his grave as he slept, so Sister Ursula supposes they must, though she hopes he doesn’t, for doesn’t dreaming imply a certain level of consciousness?
It would be a horrifying thing indeed to know that you are dead and rotting, yet to wander the world still.
Better to be nothing but a puppet for Satan to move through, like that Nachzehrer.
The boy mewls something that is almost a word. She hesitates, then brushes the hair from his forehead to soothe him. It’s a pale blond, the sort that will turn white as thistledown in summer for a few years more before it darkens to ash as the boy becomes a man.
Only this boy will never grow up, and though that is a common tragedy made more common still these past two decades filled with war and hunger and disease, it makes Sister Ursula’s throat constrict and her eyes burn.
Despair and sadness lie heavily on her chest, almost as if she has her own Aufhocker clinging to her.
Sometimes, in her weakest moments, she wonders if there even is a God, for how can He be all-knowing and good, yet still allow such horrors to exist? It’s not to be wondered at that Elsebeth struggles in a similar manner with her faith.
Sister Ursula fishes into her pocket for her rosary as she pushes the thought away. Despair only serves the devil. Better to cling to love, hope, and kindness, all these good things that energize her to help.
Dear God, she prays as she holds the broken strand of beads, please look after this little boy, for like all children, he is blameless. Make that he can lie down and shed all his burdens, that he may find the rest that so far has eluded him.
Please also take care of my sisters, flung far and wide by the hand of war.
Give Reverend Mother Regina the strength to lead us, and dear Sister Junius the means to heal my sisters who decided to stay behind and protect Your house.
I also beseech You to have mercy on Sister Hildegard, whose death is my most grievous sin, and my parents, who must have offended You greatly with their fornicating ways.
And please, beloved Husband, show Elsebeth that she is loved, and give her the strength to bear all that You have seen it fit to burden her with, that she may find happiness again in this world.
Amen.
* * *
Come morning, Sister Ursula’s knee is tender from all that walking.
She has probably overdone it, but what else could she have done?
She wants to liberate Elsebeth from this dead child as soon as possible, because her knee is nothing compared to Elsebeth’s whole body.
The girl is all sore and stiff from having slept on her belly and moves like someone thrice her age.
Sister Ursula gives her some willow bark to chew on and tries to loosen the girl’s muscles with her fingers, only the dead boy clings so fiercely to her that Sister Ursula can’t reach the painful knots in her neck and shoulders.
Once, he even growls at Sister Ursula, showing her his mismatched teeth, all crowded and crooked like the gravestones in an overused cemetery.
“Oh, hush you,” Elsebeth snaps. “She won’t try to pry you away from me, though I wish she could, for you have made me mighty sore.”
“Home,” the boy whines in his gravelly voice.
“Yes, yes, home. Have some patience, won’t you? From the look, feel, and smell of you, you’ve been dead for some months. Methinks you can wait some hours yet.”
In the end, the boy doesn’t have to wait more than three. The closer they get, the more fretful he grows, mewling and digging his bony knees into Elsebeth’s ribs, and his long nails into her shoulders and scalp.
Elsebeth bears it all in silence, though with a fierce scowl on her face.
Always a fighter, she, Sister Ursula thinks as they come upon a cottage at the edge of the woods.
A woman is sitting propped up against the door, her long red hair wrapped around herself like a shawl.
She is so thin, she looks simultaneously ancient and very young, her eyes huge in her shrunken face.
In contrast, her belly is distended, as if she is in the final weeks of pregnancy. Her lips are stained green.
As they approach, Sister Ursula a little ahead of Elsebeth, who is weary from carrying the boy whilst being pinched and scratched at, the woman smiles in a strange way, like one drunk or sleepwalking. There’s a blade of grass stuck to her teeth.
“Are you an angel come to fetch me?” she asks Sister Ursula.
Sister Ursula swallows against the lump of emotion in her throat. If only she could be! How much more bearable life would be if she were made free of sin.
Before she can say anything, the woman’s eyes fall on Elsebeth and the dead boy riding on her back, and her face turns as still as a puddle of water on a windless day.
At the same time, the boy says, in that awful croaking voice of his, not at all like the voice of a child but of something much older and no longer quite human, “Mutti!”
Sister Ursula whips around to look at Elsebeth. “Did he just call her his mother?”
“He did.”
“I thought he would take us to his grave, not his home?” Then it strikes her: If this poor boy has died of hunger, as his mother seems to be on the brink of doing, his family might not have had the strength to take him to the nearest graveyard, which must be several miles from here.
They might, instead, have buried him somewhere near.
She kneels down next to the poor woman, gently takes her hand, which feels like the hand of a corpse, and explains to her why they have come.
At first, she isn’t sure whether the woman has heard her, because her face remains so still, but once she is finished, the woman sighs and says, “I suppose you better come in then.”