Abomination
A short story by R. J. Creaney
Copyright © 2011 R. J. Creaney
Cover design by R. J. Creaney.
Skull imagery for cover image adapted from photography by Didier Descouens (User 'Archaeodontosaurus' on Wikimedia Commons). ‘Benegraphic’ font created by Brandon Schoepf.
https://rjcreaney.wordpress.com/
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The warrior Ragenard made his way down the rough, muddy track as dusk deepened about him. He could hear the cackle of fire and feel the great, towering heat at his back – it made him sweat under his grey cloak and ring mail hauberk – but he ignored it. Thick and foul-smelling smoke billowed about him, stung his eyes and darkened the gathering dusk, but he pushed through it nonetheless.
In time he felt the heat and smelled the smoke no longer, and was making his way, slowly but steadily, through a country of low rolling hills that was cool and dark. He did not know whether he was still in the realm of the Franks or in the land of Aquitaine. He did not care overly much, to own the truth – all he cared about was what he knew he had to do. There was no other soul walking the road with him that evening, but Ragenard spoke aloud all the same. He chanted prayers as he walked. Prayers of guidance, of strength and of fortitude: prayers to God, Christ-Jesus, the Blessed Virgin and St. Michael the Arch-angel. All to steel himself for the confrontation that he knew was forthcoming. When he had run out of prayers to chant, he took to singing war-lays and battle-songs.
Mostly he occupied his days in the northern provinces, fighting in the armies of the Frankish lords of the coast against the heathen invaders from the sea. Now, however, he had set himself his own task, one that was just as significant, he felt, to the wellbeing of Christendom.
Ragenard could not help but see within himself an embodiment of both righteous Christian virtue and God’s inexorable judgement. He often liked to imagine a great line, shining and unbroken, stretching from himself in the present day to the great virtuous warriors of earlier, nobler times; Charles the Hammer, the mighty Mayor of the Palace, his grandson Charles the Great, the God-ordained Emperor of the West, and his loyal servant and nephew Roland, the noble paladin and warrior-martyr who fell in battle at the Roncevaux pass.
After a time he had come to a stream, and he followed its course upward. Amidst the low hills in the distance it had carved out a small and shallow valley over the ages, and it was this he was entering. Soon he had come to a village, or, rather, the discarded bones of a village. Few hovels or grain-barns were still standing as it had, as far as Ragenard could tell, been the victim of a calamity some decades previously – but whether that calamity had been an act of God or man he could not know.
It was complete night by that time, but the full, low-hanging moon provided enough light by which to see.
The warrior proceeded onward, passing the ruins of the village’s small church. Its belfry had fallen, and one of its walls had toppled. More than one young tree grew up and out from within its confines.
Ragenard paid little heed to the ruin, however, for he had spied the village’s graveyard, not too far distant from where he stood. It appeared especially large for the graveyard of a small village, and it was presently overrun with all manner of shrubs and grasses and trees. He knew there would be more than only vegetation, however, waiting there for him.
He noticed a black shape, lingering in amongst the trees and the stark white headstones.
The fiend!
Ragenard resisted the urge to let out a thundering war-cry. Instead he quickened his pace.
The black shape suddenly quivered, and then grew in height before melting away into the surrounding darkness. It had seen him approaching.
Ragenard readied his broad, round shield. It had a battered iron boss at its centre, and its charge was a faded, blood-red cross of the Oc Country. He drew his sword from the scabbard at his hip, and proceeded onwards at a steady pace.
There would be no escape. Not this time.
The warrior reached the low, ruined stone fence that bordered the burial ground and stepped over it.
Nearby, he could see that there was a long, gaping hole in the ground. An open grave. Beside the grave, lying almost in Ragenard’s path was what must have been its occupant until recently. The corpse – he could not tell whether it had belonged to a man or a woman – was bloated and misshapen, and smelled as if all the foulness of the world had been concentrated somewhere within its trunk.
As the warrior drew closer, the body began to tremble and shudder as no body ought to. The torso and neck of the corpse appeared to engorge and bubble, like a thick simmering broth. Then, with a sudden and hideous blast, it exploded.
Ragenard crouched low behind his shield, just in time; he was able to defend against an explosion of rotted viscera, black bone-shards and slops of vile, boiling putrescence.
He stood upright after a moment, and shook the steaming muck and foulness from his shield before continuing deeper into the burial ground. The fiend had cast his magic on the carcass to make it into a trap, he surmised: setting it to burst violently when someone drew close. Ragenard knew, however, that there was yet viler magic in store for him.
Soon later, he saw a black man-shaped thing rise from the shadows behind a nearby grave marker.
It was altogether thin, twisted and rotten, and almost as much bone was visible as was flesh. Its head and shoulders were still veiled by its decayed burial shroud, and it shambled, with a low snarl, a moan and a retched squelch, towards Ragenard.
The warrior lashed out at it with his sturdy sword, cleaving the revenant in two before its rotten, splayed hands could take hold of him.
Ragenard found that another revenant was already upon him, however, and this he dispatched with a swift strike from his shield, followed up by a stroke of his sword that cut its head in half.
“Man-witch! Whore-son!” he yelled into the night. “You cannot send your ghouls and revenants after me forever and you cannot hide from me forever. I will find you, necromancer; I will find you and put an end to you.”
Three shadowed bodies then suddenly stood, garishly, in the distance. Ragenard inched closer. They stood upright, but not in the regular fashion of men – they appeared as if hoisted up by unseen meat-hooks. As the warrior approached, they slowly shifted to face him, and in perfect unison their rancid mouths moved, clumsily and dreadfully.
“How many murders have you done to reach me, Ragenard?” the corpses asked him, or appeared to ask. The language was that of the Franks, coloured by a mother-tongue which was that of the Basques.
Ragenard kicked savagely at the nearest corpse, and it fell over and did not attempt to get back up.
“I would slaughter all the first-born sons in Egypt if it would bring me closer to destroying you, fiend.”
Cold iron seared through rotten flesh, tendons and muscle and shattered ancient bones.
“You can call me a fiend, Ragenard, but I only follow in the footsteps of Our Lord, in my own humble way.” All three of the speaking corpses had been felled, but the voice persisted – it seemed to well up perhaps from the bowels of the earth.
“You are not fit to even mention him,” Ragenard snarled.
“I will mention him, Ragenard, and his miracles. The widow’s son, at Nain. The daughter of Jairus. Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary, of Bethany. Our Lord raised all these people from death with their body and soul in place. You would surely know of these, Ragenard, had you the ability to read. Our Lord himself triumphed over his own death, at Calvary – and it is this miracle of his which we cherish above all others. I am merely his unworthy disciple. I can rise up a body from the earth. I can call upon a soul lingering in the gap between this world and the next, and bid it tell me what it knows. But to r
ise up a body with its soul in place; that is the right of our Lord alone.”
“You dare compare yourself to Christ-Jesus?” Ragenard screamed.
“No, Ragenard,” the voice replied. “But ask yourself. When one considers you and I, who is more alike to God, the Son? The man who instills life, or the man who takes it away?”
“You speak naught but falsehood,” Ragenard said. “What you instil is not life, only a mockery of life.”
“I grow tired of running from you, Ragenard,” spoke the voice.
“Show yourself, then,” the warrior said. “Come out and address me face-to-face, as one true Christian would another.”
There was no response.
“Black magician!” He spat. “Necromancer! You sup on them, I know this for certain. You have your way with them, too, as you would a village whore. And it is only after that that you sup on them. I know the truth of the matter! You are a fiend and an affront to God’s Creation!”
The magical voice made no reply to the insult.
Ragenard continued on his path through the burial ground, but he had already reached the far side. There were no other revenants waiting for him amongst the graves. Some one hundred meters before him, however, was the beginning of a thicket of trees – a small dark wood of beech and poplar.
He approached, and soon saw movement amidst the darkness of the trees. Within, Ragenard could see a shape taking form.
It was not his adversary, he realised quickly. It was much too large.
Then suddenly the thing surged towards him, crashing through the branches. Ragenard had to leap out of the way to avoid being crushed. He swiftly regained his footing and assumed his stance, holding sword and shield in place.
It was not simply a reanimated corpse – it was a hulking, heaving worm-like monstrosity, formed of numerous pieces of dead flesh sewn together with black magic. Its wide, gaping mouth was lined by several dozen bone-shard teeth, and it had many arms and legs, all reaching out and flailing.
It threw itself at him, gnashing and thrashing about like a great fish hauled onto land. It was faster than it should have been, though – it shattered his shield, and at one point it came within an inch of tearing right through him.
He could not let the fiend and his minions prevail against him, however.
It was fast and massive, but decidedly clumsy in its movements. It lunged towards him, and he was able to dodge out of the way, shearing through the creature’s flank as he went. Its side opened wide, but none of that boiling, stinking vileness was to be found therein. Ragenard leapt at the opportunity presented to him, forcing his way inside the creature – he wagered that it would not be able to assault what was within it.
He was correct. Degraded muscles pressed and pushed at him, and he could feel the desperate thrashings of the corpse-worm from inside. The smell of sorcery and the stench of death filled his nostrils and caused him to gag and vomit, but regardless he struck furiously at the creature from within, cutting and stabbing and twisting and wrenching his sword until he could see moonlight and smell the night air and the trees again.
Ragenard’s assault on the creature from its inside had caused it grievous harm. The sorcery that had fastened the flesh together faltered, and the thing came apart piece by piece.
Soon the creature was nothing but scattered, rotten masses of flesh. One large piece was still twitching and churning about on the ground. Ragenard hacked at it until it had stopped dead.
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