Chapter 16
The night welcomes me with a familiar smell. The iron tang of blood. I stumble over something on the ground, and my heart stops.
At my feet is a body dressed in white. I don’t know which of the sisters lies before me, limbs spread under the night sky.
She’s hardly a body at all. She is the vague shape of a human; she is wet and slick remains.
My eyes go to the place where her face should have been.
Her skull has been crushed to near oblivion, all identifying features messily chewed off the bone.
Her brains, from what I can tell, are gone.
Her scalp hangs loosely from a shard of bone, still connected by a few strings of glistening tissue.
The rest of her body is much the same. Her breasts, stomach, fatty upper arms, all gone. Bones remain, shards of white, chewed and sucked on and spit out. Her internal organs are all consumed, or strewn about in glistening wet mounds.
Three other bodies lie nearby, all ripped apart, all unidentifiable, and all partially eaten.
These are the screams I heard, cut off by Anguish. Were they alive, then, while he did this? Was each sister all too aware of what was happening as his teeth pierced her belly and pulled her entrails out through a gash in her skin?
I hope he killed them first, before he fed.
But where is he now?
The night, I realize, has gone abruptly quiet. The bell is no longer ringing. The bell I suspect was designed to be a warning, if he ever grew too strong to be contained. If only the sisters had known they handed him their own demise, thinking I was a salvation.
I squint into the night and see other bodies, pale and still in the night. I hear sobbing, somewhere distant. But the shouts, the sounds of frightened chaos, are already gone. Anguish has extinguished either their lives or their hope, and no doubt soon it will be both.
Is this, finally, a dire emergency?
I hear a small sound behind me. I spin to see Irena, leaning weakly against the door of her hut. Her face is white as death. Tears stream silently down her face.
‘This is your fault.’ I make sure she hears it. I say it again, so that I know she understands. ‘This is your fault, Irena.’
I don’t wait to see how she reacts. I turn from her and plunge into the dark, into the nightmare that he has created for me, this labyrinth of dread that bleeds and weeps and draws me in, in, in.
My ship is forgotten. Sister Cadence’s hut is close, and when I reach it, I only pause for a moment to take in the horror.
Cadence’s torso lies across the threshold, her face in the mud.
The rest of her is … somewhere else. Her guts trail across the floor.
She was torn apart, tossed to the floor and left there.
I swallow a gag and step over her. It’s easy enough to find the radio. It’s sitting on a table by her bed, small and square and black. Its antenna is extended. Bloody fingerprints mar the metal surface, but the device is turned off. Was she about to make a call?
A low growl reverberates through the quiet night. Every nerve in my body alights with fear and anticipation.
Anguish stalks the village, looking for me. I tuck the radio under my arm, and return to the night. I feel him watching me, and the thrum of his attention twists my gut, a perverse pleasure.
The night is drenched in fog. The very air is almost black, as if a storm cloud descended from the heavens and settled here, choking all light from the world.
But I know that the darkness is him. He settles over all of us, this hungry god, the protector and the opponent.
The wide-open maw. The thrill that shudders down my spine.
Another decimated body emerges from the dark.
I nearly trip over this one, too, and I can’t help but pause to study her.
She, like all the others, is unidentifiable.
Her face is mostly gone and her hair is, too.
I vomit this time, turning away from her.
As I move away from her, deeper into the black fog, the image of her body remains superimposed in my mind.
It morphs and bleeds until it becomes new bodies, male bodies, laughing men, men that I have seen over and over in my nightmares.
Saliva fills my mouth. My gut twists with a new, needy sensation.
I try to clear my head; I try to breathe evenly, to think rationally. But the more I try, the harder it gets. My mind roils with a storm of death, of horror, of inevitable agony. My steps speed and then I sense him. He’s near; too near.
He roars, guttural, shaking the ground I walk on.
My knees nearly buckle.
He is a cacophony inside my skull, the swell of an ocean storm. He is within and without me, filling me to the brim, threatening to undo me.
I move through the darkness until I see him at last.
He’s hunched over something on the ground, feeding.
He has taken the shape of a wolf, malformed and monstrous, his back tall and arched, with angry fur all over his muscular body.
He is enormous, twice my height at least. He mauls the still-struggling sister, and I hear her gurgling scream cut short as her stomach splits open, as his snout and claws dig in, as his teeth gnash inside her.
A sound catches in my throat. Neither scream nor gasp but a choking sob. The sound of inevitability.
He turns to face me.
His eyes are glowing red. His teeth drip with blood and organs. His claws rake the black mud. ‘Come to watch?’
‘I came to ask you to stop.’ The words are so small, so fragile in the night. I don’t know why I say it, only that it’s all I can think of. That somehow I have a power here, delicate as it may be. That despite his hunger, so far he has spared me.
He spared me to do this.
Hot steam gusts from his nostrils, his wide-open mouth. A pink tongue lolls from his toothy jaws. His gaze falls to the radio under my arm, and flames spark in his eyes. ‘How will you stop me?’
I fumble with the radio, my fingers half numb. I flick it on, then turn the knob until it starts to crackle. There are distant voices, hints of songs. I find an open channel. The radio hums quietly, obedient in my hands.
Anguish is motionless.
‘I know you’d rather devour everything in the universe than remain here, imprisoned and weak,’ I say. ‘You’ve made that clear. And I can’t stop you. But I can let the world know who you are. And what you’ve done.’
He grins, red-slick and sharp-toothed. ‘You won’t do that, Midonia.’
I grip the radio harder. ‘Why not?’
‘Because I know the truth that you are only beginning to realize. I know who you truly are.’
I grit my teeth so hard my jaw begins to ache.
‘You will not use the radio,’ he continues.
‘You know as well as I do that even if you make contact with the authorities, no one will believe you. When they come here to investigate, they will see nothing but a blood-drenched woman with madness in her eyes, surrounded by the corpses of her victims.’
‘What do you want from me?’ My words are thick with tears, broken by a half-formed sob.
‘You know what I need,’ he rumbles, voice edged with ferality.
‘You are the only soul in this world who can give it to me. But you must give it freely. I would devour every living creature in this village until there is nothing but bones remaining. I would punish the sisters for their betrayal of you. I would feed myself on innocent souls until the end of time. And I would not touch you … until you asked me to. But you would never be free. I could not stop hunting you, Midonia, even if I wanted to. I have spent your entire lifetime calling for you, desperate that you would hear me, that you’d come to me.
And here you are. Do you think I would let you go?
Leave this place, if you like. Play at safety.
Play at living your life. But I am free now, and I will be waiting for you around every dark corner.
I will find you in every dream, and darken it to a nightmare.
I will drape my claws across your skin in the night until you give yourself willingly.
Go, if you must.’ His wolfish grin widens. ‘Or let me have you.’
I loosen my fingers. The radio lands in the mud with a muffled thud.