Chapter 15
I stand motionless outside the bedroom door. The ring of keys Sybil returned to me is in the game room where I left it. I could find the key to this chamber, unlock the door, and spend the rest of the night in my own bed, the one that was mine before I married her.
But she requested privacy, a temporary separation from me. I owe her that and more.
Countless times, I’ve pictured what would happen if my wife ever discovered what lay behind the blue door.
I imagined her screaming, running from the mansion, never deigning to speak to me again.
I thought perhaps she would try to assemble an army of local men to hunt me down and kill me.
Beautiful and bold as she is, I wondered if she might even try to slay me herself.
After all, I am an unnatural being with more than one dangerous form.
She should have abandoned me the second the word matagot passed my lips.
She should have killed me for devouring her mentor, Grandmother Riquet.
Instead, she listened. She asked questions.
She let me explain. I can’t express the depth of my gratitude for that fact alone.
My love for her has deepened tonight, enriched by her kindness, her understanding, and her hints that she might still care for me, even after learning the truth of my existence.
I was foolish to keep the truth from her, but even in my home realm, beings of my kind are reviled, hunted, and regarded with suspicion.
We are viewed as untrustworthy tricksters.
Face-Thieves, we’re called. Soul-Eaters, Body-Stealers.
It is legal for any resident of my world to kill a matagot the instant they are discovered.
From our inception, we are taught to adopt a primary form behind which to hide our true nature.
We never reveal ourselves fully to anyone.
A long time ago, I told my secret to someone I thought I could trust. That friend proved untrue and sold information about me to the wight, or the Barrow-Man, as Sybil knows him.
He ensnared me and wove a spell to destroy my collection of forms, which also eradicated the knowledge and skills I had gained from them.
For decades he kept me on the brink of starvation.
I came so close to perishing that my mind nearly dissipated into irreparable madness.
And yet, I survived, because of her. My savior, my Sybil, my wife.
She isn’t perfect, of course—I know that. She can be impatient and impulsive. No matter how desperate she was for knowledge, she should never have gone into the forest looking for the Barrow-Man. She said his name, and now he has set his sights on her.
Years of languishing in a cell within the wight’s lair taught me that he is as persistent as he is cruel.
There are goals that he wishes to achieve with his work, but those goals aren’t the driving force behind his constant experimentation.
For him, the pain is the point. He likes fusing parts of animals together, causing them agony and distress, hearing them scream and whimper, watching them writhe.
He craves their horror and fear as much as he enjoys seeing the strange results of his experiments.
Negative emotions and sensations fascinate him. The more intense, the better.
I hate that my wife is now the target of such a monster. And the irony isn’t lost on me that I, too, am like a monster to her. Yet while I may swallow souls, I also possess a soul of my own, as well as the capacity for love—something the wight can never feel.
Wind throws itself against the mansion, causing the timbers and windows to creak under the onslaught.
I know it is simply an autumn storm. We are on the brink of winter, after all.
And yet there is a shrill keening in the wind that disturbs me, as if the Barrow-Man himself is howling outside, prying at the edges of our dwelling, hunting for weak spots.
He knows what I am. He knows that I collect forms, and that without those forms, I will be helpless, incapable of protecting Sybil. If he does manage to leave the borders of the forest, he will come after my collection of bodies first.
I have two forms that I have permanently absorbed through consumption of flesh: the grotesque wolf and the ailing mare. One is powerful yet cumbersome, and the other is weak. Neither form is a suitable one for a husband.
Despite the habits of my species, I have obeyed one personal law. Other than the flesh of animals, I have only eaten souls. I have never devoured the physical body of anything that walks upon two legs and speaks with higher thought.
Most members of my kind consume such flesh a handful of times throughout their lives, usually to permanently secure a form they like. Others do it regularly because they have a murderous taste for it.
I’ve resisted so far, and yet with the threat of the Barrow-Man looming over us, I find myself creating a mental exception to the rule. The idea of losing Beresford’s body and never being able to take this form again is unacceptable.
I left him in the charmed room because I thought he would be safe there.
The only person I allowed to jeopardize him was Sybil.
I thought that if she found him and destroyed my link to his body, it wouldn’t matter, because our relationship would be over anyway.
Without her, my existence as Beresford would be meaningless.
Now that she knows the truth, she isn’t the primary threat any longer. The wight has become a far more imminent danger.
Even if he manages to ensorcel someone, to trap them under his growing influence and force them to summon him, he should be contained to Wormsloe for a while.
An entity of his species can be forestalled by certain natural boundaries or shapes, like rivers, hills, ravines, mountain ranges, or the borders of forests.
Sometimes even a good stone wall can prevent them from passing unless they are invited through an open gate and lured with offerings of raw meat and sugar or honey.
But with his magic and his intellect focused on Sybil and me, I have no doubt he will eventually find a way to walk freely through this land.
Waiting for him to come after my collection would be idiotic. I need to secure Beresford’s form as my own, permanently, and I need to do it now, while Sybil is asleep. She shouldn’t have to watch.
I head back into the game room to collect the ring of keys. Sybil didn’t question me about the nature of the bloodstained key, though I have no doubt she will once she has had time to rest and accumulate more questions in that clever mind of hers.
When she asks, I will tell her that I had a source in the city, a woman gifted with the ability to charm objects with dark magic.
She could only perform a handful of such charms each year, and she charged a small fortune for each one.
I found her through the memories of the original Beresford, who used her to charm a few pairs of shackles, an iron muzzle, and several torture tools.
Beresford wanted inescapable bonds, a muzzle that only death or his word could remove, and sadistic implements that would cause supernatural levels of pain.
After the woman charmed the telltale key for the blue door, I sucked out her soul and brought her body back to my estate in a large wooden chest. She’s hanging in a back corner of the collection room.
Magical qualities like her dark energy or Grandmother Riquet’s protective influence do not transfer to me, so although I possess her knowledge, I don’t have the right kind of power to cast the dark charms for which she was known.
Some might say that devouring her soul was a waste of a valuable resource. But I despise the work she did for the original Beresford. She was complicit in the captivity and torment of his victims, so in my mind, she was no better than the wight.
When I unlock the blue door, the charm on the key resets, and the bloodstain vanishes.
I enter the room, pushing my way between the hanging bodies.
After I’m finished with Beresford, I will transform into the wolf and dig a great hole in which to bury some of the other corpses.
I won’t be able to take those forms again, and their memories and skills will fade from my mind, but that will hardly matter.
I’ll keep the old gardener for his knowledge of plants and incense, and I’ll keep the thief that broke into my house, the one who lent me his skills with musical instruments. Sacrificing the rest of the collection will please my wife, and that is all I truly care about.
Once I’ve reached Beresford’s body, hanging at the back of the room, I unfasten his harness. I catch him before his big form crumples to the floor, and I hoist him onto my shoulders.
Despite my strength, it’s no easy matter maneuvering him through the room and out the door. By the time I reach the stairs, I’m sweating and panting. I let him slide off my back and drag his naked carcass down the steps and into the kitchen.
After shutting the door, I stir up the fire, light a couple of lamps, and clear off the huge kitchen table. Then, with a grunt of effort, I haul Beresford’s carcass upright and slam him down onto its surface.
It would be so much easier if I could drag Beresford outside, transform into the two-headed wolf, and devour him with its gigantic jaws.
I can place a bite and suck out a soul in any form, but to assimilate someone permanently, I must be in my original form as a matagot, or in the form of the thing I am devouring.
When I ate the she-wolf, I was in matagot form, so it was a simple matter of swallowing everything—spirit and body all at once. When I killed the old mare, I bit her first, tasted her blood, and took her soul. Then I changed into her form and devoured her, bite by bite.