by Guy N Smith
The Festering - Kindle Version 1.0
(c) Guy N Smith 1989 - 2012
Published by Black Hill Books, July 2012
ISBN : 978-1-907846-50-2
First Published by Sphere Books December 1989.
Converted to Ebook from original paperback by Scan2Ebook.com
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Contents
Title
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
The End
PROLOGUE
The girl had lain upon the rocky shelf on the outskirts of the tiny village daily from morning until evening, from spring through to early autumn when the leaves on the giant oaks lining the road began to show the first signs of fading. Intent, she watched the road that stretched ahead of her across the flat moorland beneath the surrounding mountains, squinting in bright sunlight, peering as dusk approached, never once leaving her position. Hope – there was always hope, interspersed with disappointment and frustration when a rider approached and came close enough so that she could see that it was not the tall rangy man for whom she waited. Tears moistened her dark eyes, trickled slowly down the dirt-smudged cheeks; dried. Perhaps the next time it would be Tabor. She knew he would come, for he had promised to return and she had never known him to break his word. Not to her, anyway.
Long dark matted hair straggled around her shoulders and became entangled with the threadbare hessian dress, a scant garment that failed to screen her shapely adolescent body from prying male eyes. The young men in the village of Garth, this forgotten hamlet of tumbledown hovels, lusted for her; she was only too well aware of that. Their grimy fingers groped her if she was not quick enough to dodge them, stroking her tender flesh where it showed through the holes in her dress. Each and every one of them prayed that some misfortune had befallen the handsome forester, whom they had cause to hate for more reasons than that he had oft-times lain with this comely wench. On moonlit nights during the winter shoulders, uneasy in case Tabor should suddenly rear up our of the bole of some huge tree where he had been lying in wait for those who dared to steal his master’s game. Tabor the Terrible, Nemesis of poachers – the legend was already growing.
The girl called Rachel saw him in her mind: his rippling muscles, not an ounce of surplus fat on his body when he disrobed himself to take her; blue eyes that shone with love in the reflected moonlight; his lips soft and warm as they crushed her own; tender and yet strong as he took her. Sometimes the memory of him was too much and she sobbed herself to sleep in her filthy sacking bed in the corner of her parents’ single-roomed cottage.
‘Stop tha’ bawling, lass,’ her father would grunt in the darkness, ‘and get thee to sleep, for Tabor’ll na’ come back, and there’ll be none in the Garth, save yersel, who’ll mourn his absence. The fellow has gone to London in search of whores, they say, and I, for one, believe the talk. And shame on you for giving yourself to him when there’s plenty o’ decent young men in the village.’
Rachel clamped her lips together tightly, for to reply was futile. If an argument developed, her father was more than likely to take his frayed leather belt to her. Her mother would slap her, too – retribution for hurt peasant pride because their daughter had shamed them. When Tabor returned it would be different, she promised herself, for none dared to confront him openly; they whispered hatred and jealousy behind closed doors, and even then their frightened eyes darted furtively about them in case he was hidden in the shadows. A feared man, only the foolish and the brave faced him – and there were precious few of the latter in Garth.
Each morning as she walked up to the rock, she felt contemptuous eyes searing her back and knew what the villagers were saying, even if she could not hear them. ‘She’ll be a scrawny hag, as withered as a winter apple before Tabor returns. He’ll not come back, he’ll spend his strength in the brothels and be thrown out to die of the pox in the gutters. Let his soul rot in the filth of their slop buckets … if he has a soul.’
Up on the ledge, day after day, she clung to her undying hope that Tabor would come riding back down the road, hunched over his bony nag, his clothing dusty with travel, his strong body weary. Or perhaps riding a fine horse because he had found his fortune in London and returned to claim his bride. Whatever, rich or poor, he would come back, she did not doubt. And until he did, she would watch for him.
One day she was sheltering beneath the thick rhododendron bush which offered the only protection from the keen autumnal wind. By her side was a crust of stale bread and a cold boiled potato; she ate to give her body nourishment to survive the long watch, for no other reason. Her appetite had long ago deserted her.
A rider; she stiffened, straining her tired eyes into the distant haze of a late September mist. Dust clouds and gathering fog allowed only a silhouette: a cantering mount, its rider sitting erect. Rachel groaned her frustration long before she was able to discern the aquiline features of the short, stocky man who collected the tithes from the inhabitants of Garth. Another hated one. She shrank back into the foliage, and felt the urge to cry. Hopes raised and dashed; it would happen maybe a hundred times or more before the one for whom she watched rode back into the valley. For Tabor would come. One day.
A sudden fear assailed her. The time of year was nigh for the coming of the Witchfinder. Each autumn the tall thin man wearing a wide-brimmed black hat with flowing robes to match came down the mountain road. His features were near skeletal: hollowed eyes that sought you out, burned right into your soul, located your innermost guilt so that you trembled. His questions were hissed like the pot boiling on the fire rather than spoken, demanding answers. If you lied, he knew. And if Satan destroyed. Always there was a guilty one; if not, then a scapegoat. Two years ago this man had hanged Jason, who was ageing and was surely near his time, anyway. The old man had sworn his innocence, but when the heated iron singed his flesh he confessed – and screamed for mercy as his fellow villagers dragged him to the hanging tree on the outskirts of Garth and tightened the noose around his sinewy neck, throwing the loose end of the rope over the thick bough. Three men had hauled the struggling, kicking body aloft until the blistered feet were well clear of the ground, then wound the hemp around a stump to secure it. The watching, terrified gathering was a compulsory audience, for any who ran and hid were deemed also to be guilty by the Witchfinder. ‘Stand and watch until he is dead,’ he had ordered ‘and only then may you return to your homes!’
Rachel had been forced to watch that afternoon, staring aghast, biting back her screams as the old man’s struggles grew more feeble and his features purpled, his eyes bloated like bubbles about to burst, and bluebottles swarmed and buzzed all over him. Finally he was still, just hanging there. Dead. Everybody had gone home, drifted away, leaving Jason where he was because they dared not move him. Until the morrow. It was a ritual
that had to be carried out, and they dared not disobey. Hanging; then gibbetting. At dawn the corvids would come, gouging out the corpse’s eyes with their cruel hooked beaks, ribboning the flesh with their talons. Only when the crows had feasted could Jason be buried.
And now the time was nigh for another witchfinding. Any day; any hour. Her eyes became fearful as she continued to keep watch.
Rachel was on the ledge again, but each day now it was more difficult to hope. Travellers passed, and she tensed at each one until she saw that it was not Tabor. She began feeling that her parents and the villagers were right: he would never come. Because he was with whores in London. The thought hurt her deeply, and she pushed it away. She forced herself to believe in him. He had gone south to find his fortune; it had taken longer than he had anticipated, but he would return – to fetch her, to take her to a new life away from this peasant poverty. Faith was difficult, and every night she returned home dejected and tried to close her ears to the taunts of her father. Oh, Tabor, please come and prove them all wrong.
With October and the fall of the leaves came the mists, low cloud enshrouding the mountains, sweeping down to cover the moorland. Visibility was reduced to a few yards, and it was likely to remain that way until the gales and rain came to sweep the mist away. She sought the cover of the lone rhododendron bush and huddled amid its damp foliage, her eyes hurting as they tried to penetrate the opaqueness. Hearing oncoming hoofbeats, seeing strangers pass, then groaning her frustration – so it continued. Please, God, let him come before the winter.
A sound. She tensed, listening. Not hoofbeats – too light and too slow; a scuffling sound as something was dragged across the stony ground; laboured breathing – she thought it might be human, but surely no human could rasp and wheeze like that and still live.
A shape materialized out of the daytime gloom, a silhouette which she thought was that of a man, tall and stooped, walking with difficulty, unsteadily, twice almost falling. She shrank back into her hiding place; perhaps it was a traveller who had been lost for days up in the mountains, exhausted and starving, in need of help. Or else whoever it was had fallen from his mount and been forced to continue on foot, injured. She moved forward, leaving her hiding place in order to obtain a closer look. He was in full view now, but his head was bent so that she was unable to see his face. He was painfully thin, and his clothing was in tatters so that white wasted flesh was visible in places. He was gasping for breath through tortured lungs, coughing, bent double. Now he was only when she saw his features for the first time – and screamed.
The stranger’s face was just patches of flesh amid a scourge of oozing ulcers and weeping sores, thick yellow pus tinged with crimson, congealing as it ran. The eyes were sunk so deep in the black sockets that they might not have existed, and the wide nostrils clogged with dried mucus as they flared and strained for air. The mouth, agape, displayed loose and blackened teeth that wobbled as he fought to breathe. Seeing her, he reached out for her, grunting, and then lapsed back into another spasm of coughing.
Yet in the depths of her revulsion and shock there was recognition, one which she fought against, screamed at. No, it could not be … Tabor. But it was, there was no doubt about it!
Diseased, festering even as he lived, barely recognizable as the man who had left Garth a few months ago – it was Tabor. Rachel backed off and writhed away from his clutching hands, his pleading grunts. And, still screaming, she fled blindly.
Mercifully the mist swirled in and hid him from her gaze as she looked back just once, and heard his rasping stertorous breathing somewhere behind her. Her reasoning almost snapped, but uppermost was the desire to be away from this creature who was her lover returned.
The inhabitants of Garth were in the entrances to their tumbledown hovels as Rachel ran screaming into the village. All eyes were on her, and the frightened faces of women and children peered out from behind their menfolk, mutely questioning; none dared to ask out loud for they feared what the reply might be. Curious, watching, ready to run back indoors, they guessed perhaps it was the Witchfinder arrived, for his time was nigh – the terrible tall figure dressed in his customary black, his merciless eyes searching for a scapegoat, for he never left a village without a hanging. They looked to one another as they prepared to betray a neighbour or relative. Somebody must die; let it be somebody else.
‘What’s the matter, wench? What are you wailing for?’ It was Rachel’s father who spoke gruffly, unkindly.
‘It is … Tabor!’ She pointed down the road with a trembling hand.
Heads turned, all eyes stretched into the mist. They heard the wheezing and the dragging of wasted feet before they saw the awful apparition materialize out of the fog.
Twisted cancerous features came into view, the mouth dribbled vile matter as it cursed them incomprehensibly, and bony fists shook feebly at the dwellings on either side of the rough road. It was Tabor, all right, and he had not forgotten his hatred for them whilst he had been away. It had simmered inside him, come to the boil, and seemingly eaten his body away in the process. The living festering entity had the watchers backing indoors, dragging their doors shut and barricading them with any available heavy objects. Crawl away and die, Tabor, and may the crows and the foxes devour your filthy flesh so that we do not have to look upon it again!
Two days later the Witchfinder rode into Garth, a spectral form hunched on a scrawny nag. His deep-set eyes flicked from side to side, noting every cottage, seeing the doors barred. He smiled grimly, his thin lips stretched mercilessly across his angular pallid face, as if to say: You cannot hide from me, peasant scum. Come out and determine among yourselves which of you is going to die – and surely one of you will before I leave, for I have yet to find a village where the devil does not dwell in somebody! He sat there waiting, for he was in no hurry. He had learned to savour such occasions; the power over his lesser fellow humans never ceased to delight him. Let them crawl into the open in their own time, he thought, for the longer they waited the more afraid they would be.
A door scraped open and a stocky grimed fellow in rough clothing showed himself. The Witchfinder read fear in the other’s eyes and something else, too – gloating.
‘Sir,’ Rachel’s father spoke humbly in rough rural tones, and bowed his head. ‘There is one among us who has the devil in him, is being eaten by evil even as he lives. You must hurry ’ere he dies and the evil spirit inside him leaves and enters one of us.’
‘Where is he?’ The Witchfinder snapped, tensing, suddenly erect in his saddle. The smile was gone and the small eyes blazed an unholy lust, the expression of a hunter who has cornered his prey.
‘In the building at the end of the road.’ He jerked his head towards a dilapidated outbuilding with gaping holes in its sagging roof. ‘Tabor is bewitched, diseased with a plague caught from whores in London. Nobody will go near him. We have not seen him since he crawled in there. Perchance he is already dead and it is too late.’
‘Fetch him out!’ The Witchfinder snarled.
The peasant paled, stepped back, made as if to dart indoors and drag the door shut, but changed his mind because this horseman was the most feared man in the land. His features drained of colour and he trembled visibly. His mouth opened and the thick lips quivered, but no words came out.
‘Fetch Tabor out!’
‘Yes, sir.’
Doors were being dragged open, men emerging, cowed forms slinking out, watched by their womenfolk and children. The Witchfinder had ordered that Tabor be dragged from his hiding place, and that meant every one of them had to assist – and God help any who hung back.
The Witchfinder sat on his horse and watched them trudge fearfully in the direction of the old cowshed then bunch together before the doorway. There was no mistaking their terror, the way they looked at one another, each hoping that the other would enter first. A muttered consultation, then they went forward and peered into the gloomy interior. He heard their gasps of horror, saw them back off and lo
ok back at him. Then they squeezed inside, more afraid of the one who sat watching them than of whatever lay within.
A minute, no more, and they emerged, four of them dragging a stinking ulcerated body that was barely recognizable as human. Tabor still lived; at least, his chest rose and fell and slimy bloody mucus bubbled on his mouth and nostrils. His eyes were gone; the corvids might already have ventured in there and feasted. Blind, a dead weight, oblivious to what was happening, the diseased forester hung limply as his arms and legs were lifted off the ground, wheezing faintly. The end could not be far away.
‘We are in time.’ There was a slight note of relief in the Witchfinder’s harsh voice. ‘But we must hurry. Get a rope, one of you. The others carry him to the hanging tree.’
One of the younger men broke off and ran to fetch a rope, relieved to be away from that dead-alive body, crossing himself as he went. Heads turned away, the procession carried their burden in the direction of the big tree, which was just visible at the far end of the road, a gaunt gallows constructed by Nature. The Witchfinder kept his distance; for once he did not dismount and approach his victim. His eyes flickered beneath the hooded brows, but there was not one among the company brave enough to look closely and see his expression of fear. Behind him came the women and children, bunched together. Rachel hung back. Her eyes were closed and her fingers clutched her mother’s arm. I don’t want to look, I don’t want to see. Hang him, and put him out of his misery, whatever it is.
They were fumbling to slip the noose over Tabor’s sagging head, then they tightened it around the near fleshless neck and threw the loose end up over the big bough. Two of them took the strain, their faces averted. Heads turned, they were looking for a sign from the terrible horseman.
The Witchfinder’s hand was raised, his head nodded. Hang him!
There was a protesting creak from the ancient branch which had borne the weight of a score of executions over the years, and the hempen rope tautened. Those who had been supporting the body leaped away in relief, grateful to be spared further contact. Tabor was dragged upright by his neck. Not so much as a grunt of pain, just a snort of dislodged bloody matter from his clogged nostrils, as he stood, still living, his lungs rattling; then he was borne aloft.
