Blood And Bones

by B. L. Morgan

  Blood spurted up into the air from his neck stump like Old Faithful going off. A shower of gore shot straight up. Then he fell forward.

  The head rolled over a few times in the dirt until it stopped right side up balanced on the stump. The eyes blinked at me.

  I kicked that mother fucker a good one knocking it away from the twitching burning body.

  I didn’t want that bastard coming back for round two.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Senj

  As me and Johnny watched, the werewolf burned like a bonfire then flared up unnaturally bright white, like sulfur had been thrown on the flames. The sudden flare up blinded me for a moment so that I had to cover my eyes, but just as quickly after maybe two seconds, the flames were gone.

  I dropped my arm from my eyes and the only thing in front of me was a smoking pile of ash.

  The werewolf’s body was completely incinerated.

  This made me glance over the head where it lay about thirty feet away where I’d kicked it.

  The eyes were still open. They rolled around in the sockets and focused on me with an intense hatred. The jaws opened and from where it lay the thing actually snapped at me.

  Then the snarling wolfish head started dissolving. It was like it was made of ice and stuck inside a microwave oven. The hair on the head liquefied and ran down over the face in wet black streams. The skin peeled back and melted and ran down over the face and jawbones. Then the bones themselves melted into a gooey mess forming a vile puddle in the mud of the street.

  In less than one minute all that was left of that creature’s head was just a mud puddle filled with some shitty smelling crud.

  “I think I’m gonna be careful not to step in any of that crap,” Johnny told me.

  “No joke,” I agreed.

  From behind us at the stake came the woman’s heavily accented voice.

  She said, “Do you think I might trouble one of you gentlemen to please untie me?”

  I turned around and gazed at her perfect, magnificent breasts again.

  “Well, maybe in a little while,” I told her and smiled.

  After we got the woman untied from the pole, and although I didn’t really want to, I gave her my shirt to cover those great tits of hers, some of the towns folk came out from hiding to greet us.

  Actually they didn’t really come out to greet us. They more just drifted around pointing at the puddle of werewolf head and the pile of werewolf ash that was starting to blow away and muttering among them. There were a lot of oohs and ahhs as they were doing that.

  It only took about a minute of that and I was tired of it already.

  The woman who had been tied to the stake spoke to us.

  “My name is Judit,” pronouncing her name as who-deet. “I was born in Sinj and only returned tonight. The welcome I got for coming back to the town of my birth was that someone hit me on the back of the head and I woke up tied to the post left to feed the thing you killed.”

  “Yeah, these are some friendly mother-fuckers ain’t they,” Johnny said.

  The murmurs and the muttering among the gradually growing crowd were getting louder. The number of people in the street swelled in less than five minutes to around fifty. All of them were in ragged threadbare clothes. They were starting to remind me of the mob that stormed Frankenstein’s Castle in that old black and white movie.

  “Hey,” I yelled at the scattering of people wandering around the square. “Where the hell can we get a meal in this town?” I got no answer. I followed that one up with, “And where the fuck can I get a shirt?”

  That got us just more fingers pointed at us and more mutterings. Now the words that drifted out to us had changed to, “The chosen ones... the chosen ones. It was prophesied ... prophesied.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Johnny yelled at them. “I thought villages were only supposed to have one fucking idiot. All you mother fuckers are acting like village idiots!”

  “Let’s go find us an Inn or something,” I told Johnny. To Judit I said. “You can join us for dinner if you want or you can hang out with these fucking geniuses.”

  “I think I will stay with you for awhile,” she told us. “The people I knew as a child are no longer here. These are a bunch of superstitious fools.”

  I got the distinct impression that I’d heard Judit’s voice somewhere before but overlaid as it was with that Eastern European accent I couldn’t place it at all. I’d have to let that slide for the moment. Eventually I knew it would hit me where I knew her from. That’s the way my memory seems to work. Information just drops out of the sky at me usually a long time after what I needed the memory for is long past.

  We left the square and started walking on a street to the East. There were four small buildings up that way. One of them was a two story wooden building that had a mug painted on a sign above the front door. There was a word on the sign but it was nothing that me or Johnny could read.

  Wooden shutters had been pulled closed but through the crack between the slats light flickered from within.

  Judit told us, “That is an Inn and a mead house. They should also sell food. I have no money. Whoever hit me took everything I had.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told her and patted the money pouch hanging at my side. “I’m sure you’ll find a way to pay us back.”

  “Not as you are thinking,” she said. “I am no whore.”

  The front door to the place was locked but I could hear muffled talking coming from within as I knocked.

  No one answered. The talking stopped.

  I knocked again.

  From the other side of the door a whispered voice said, “Go away. The curse is upon us. Get off the streets. Hide.”

  I looked at Johnny.

  He told me, “Come to think of it, didn’t that red-headed girl from Madison say you gave her the curse when she came down with that crotch itch?”

  “You’re real fucking funny bro,” I said.

  “Always ready to help.”

  I was getting pretty tired of this.

  “This shit’s getting old real fucking fast,” I told Johnny and Judit.

  “You got that right,” Johnny said.

  I stepped back and kicked the door a good straight shot but it was solid and only banged real loud and vibrated.

  “Let’s both hit that mother-fucker,” Johnny suggested.

  We took five steps back from the door then ran at it and jumping at the same moment we blasted it with our shoulders.

  Wood splintered, the latch flew apart in pieces and the door swung open. We fell inside the swinging door.

  Sitting around three thick wooden tables were ten wide eyed people.

  Me and Johnny picked ourselves up from the floor and dusted ourselves off. Judit came in and stood beside us.

  Beside the door there was a coat rack. I grabbed an animal skin coat from the rack that smelled of body odor and put it on.

  I looked around the room.

  “This is mine now.” I told them. “If you got a problem with that, too fucking bad.”

  We sat down at the only open table.

  We all looked around the room.

  Everyone stared at us.

  We stared back.

  This place might have been the worst excuse for a café that I’d ever seen. It was dirty and dingy and the lighting was from three oil lanterns and wasn’t worth shit. But we were hungry, so it would do.

  Johnny was the next one to speak.

  He slammed his fist down on the table and yelled, “We’d best get some service here or we might burn this mother fucker to the ground.”

  “That was real subtle,” I told him.

  “I’m known for that,” he answered.

  A moment later a trembling skinny grey haired man appeared at our table.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  What’s What & Who’s Who

  About the same time that the three of us were starting to dig into a bowl of vegetable chicken stew the door swung
open and three men walked in.

  One of them had on clean clothes and looked like he might be in charge. One of them was nervous as hell and avoided our eyes. The last guy was in a tattered monk’s robe. For some strange reason he looked like he was stifling a self-satisfied grin.

  The three marched up to our table although the nervous guy, a thin man with a weather beaten face, didn’t seem like he wanted to.

  The man with clean clothes had a bit of a belly on him. He stuck out his hand and announced, “I am Christophe Menke, the Burgomaster of Senj. We welcome you to our humble village and want to thank you for ridding us of the beast.”

  “The Burgomaster?” I asked. “Well, I don’t give a shit if you’re the Burger King. Your little town is seriously fucked up. This woman,” I indicated Judit. “Comes back home and you let somebody knock her over the head and tie her to a post for a hairy guy’s meal. That is seriously fucking wrong!”

  The nervous man stepped out to the side now. With a trembling voice he said, “I apologize for that. My family was drawn this time. So I had to produce a woman to feed the beast. I have a wife and daughter but when I saw you,” he looked into Judit’s eyes. “I saw a way to not have to offer one of my own. Please forgive me.”

  I stood up and was going to backhand the boy but Judit laid a hand on my arm and shook her head, No. “I understand,” she said. “It does not make it right. But I do understand.”

  I pointed my finger in the guy’s face.

  “Give her, her money back, now! Or I’m gonna stomp a years worth of wages out of your ass in about a second and a half.”

  The man had a money bag in his hand. He handed it over to Judit.

  “Again, I say I am sorry,” he told her. “You cannot know how bad I feel about this.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they all fucking say,” Johnny told him. “And I don’t give a shit how fucking sorry you are. Sorry doesn’t do shit! Sorry’s just sorry.”

  The last man, the guy dressed like a monk, now stepped forward.

  “What is the reason you are traveling through our village?” he asked.

  I answered him straight up.

  “We’re here to hunt Elizabeth Bathory and kill that blood-thirsty bitch. Give us directions to her castle and as soon as we get a night’s sleep and horses and supplies, we’ll be out of your hair and on the road.”

  The monk, or whatever the hell he was, turned to the Burger Boy. “They are the ones prophesied. They will rid the land of the curse by ending it at the source.”

  Johnny told him, “We could give a shit less about your curse. Just tell us where Elizabeth is and we’ll deal with her.”

  The monk dropped to his knees and raised his hands above his head like he was beseeching God and cried out, “Oh Lord, thank you. You have finally sent them. For twenty long years since the curse began in 1650 we have prayed. You sent me signs and now my visions are flesh. Praised be to you oh Lord!”

  I did some quick mental figuring on dates and realized that things weren’t adding up. The perplexed look on Johnny’s face told me the same thing occurred to him.

  When we’d been with Carmel’s crew the year had been 1643,

  Now this guy was saying some kind of curse started in 1650, twenty years earlier.

  “Just what fucking year is it anyway,” I asked everybody.

  They looked at me surprised.

  The Burger Boy answered, “1675.”

  “God-dam!” Johnny said. “We were on that water a long fucking time!”

  “No shit!” I answered.

  The next morning there were five horses out front of the Inn.

  One of the horses was loaded with bedrolls and supplies.

  One of the horses was for Judit. She had announced last night to the Burger Boy she would never stay in a town where they would draw lots to see who would be offered as a sacrifice to a wild beast. She would travel with us until she found a place that seemed good to settle in.

  Judit turned both me and Johnny down cold the night before when we offered to let her share our rooms. She got her own room and that was fine with me.

  She could ride with us, but if she wasn’t spreading those thighs it didn’t really make a difference to me one way or another where the hell she was parking her ass.

  Two of the horses were for me and Johnny.

  The fifth horse, well that religious guy who’d greeted us the night before wearing the monk costume was beside it.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?” Johnny asked the guy.

  The night before he’d introduced himself as Father Nicholai Liahovich.

  “I can be your guide,” he answered.

  “We need a map,” I told him. “Not you.”

  “You do not speak the different dialects of the people of this region,” he went on. “I do. You will reach your destination much faster if I help you.”

  “Just don’t get in our way,” Johnny told him.

  “I will try not to,” Nicholai answered.

  Judit had a strange look of unease pass over her face. I got the distinct impression that she was not at all happy with the priest going with us.

  After we went back inside and ate another bowl of that chicken vegetable stew and washed it down with a mug of some thick beer we took our horses and lead them down to the market square where we’d found Judit.

  The moment we entered the square there seemed to be a collective gasp and everybody who glanced our way pointed and mumbled something under their breath.

  Johnny glanced at me.

  “Fuck these idiots?” I told him.

  We were coming back here because the two of us wanted to buy some extra sets of clothes. Maybe it didn’t bother these people to wear the same clothes for years on end and to smell like the ass-end of a horse all the time but we weren’t like that.

  The only wagons in the square were the ones that merchants were selling directly out of. Everybody was mingling around on foot. In fact, we were the people who were leading horses among what was essentially a Medieval style flea market.

  The way I was feeling about these villagers it wouldn’t have bothered me one bit if all our horses just took a crap right out there in the middle of the street where everyone was walking. But to tell you the truth, the way these idiots smelled today, they probably wouldn’t even notice it.

  All kinds of stuff was for sale out there, fishing and hunting gear, handcrafted items of all kinds and what we were looking for, handmade clothes.

  We walked past booths and wagons. People looked at us, crossed themselves, and then quickly looked away.

  After the third person did that I turned to Johnny and Judit and said, “You’d think they’d be grateful for us killing that son of a bitch last night. But hell, these people act like we got a fucking disease or something.”

  Nicholai the Monk spoke, “They are grateful, but they fear what they do not understand. When the curse began, first livestock was found mangled and half-eaten. Then entire families in their farm houses were found the same way.

  “After a vision I was shown the way. In dreams I was shone to give an offering of one woman to the beast every harvest moon and that would satisfy his craving for blood. It was a desperate measure. A town meeting was held once a year, where a random draw was held and one family had to sacrifice one female.

  My visions also told me that you would come and defeat the beast and bring an end to the pestilence that curses all our lands.”

  Johnny spoke now. “How do you know that we’re the guys from your visions? We could just be some bad mother fuckers wandering through town that just like beating the hell out of werewolves.”

  The monk said, “I told them over ten years ago that men would come to save the woman who had no family from the beast. Both of them would be from a far off land. One of the men would have black skin. That is a rare thing on this coast. Most of the villagers have never seen a man with black skin.”

  “Hey Johnny,” I told him. “They rea
lly love the brothers around here. Why don’t you give them a real show and shake your dick at them.”

  “I would,” he answered. “But that would scare them worse than any werewolf ever did.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  On The Road

  We hit the road just before noon.

  It was cold, somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty degrees, but the sky was clear. The sun was out and large cotton ball looking clouds drifted by.

  We were breathing steam.

  The horses snorted steam.

  Something had been bugging me so I had to get it off my chest.

  “Hey Johnny,” I asked. “Just what the hell went wrong between you and Carmel anyway? The two of you seemed to be banging it out pretty good for awhile.”

  He answered immediately, “The broad’s fucking crazy!”

  I started to ask him to go on and explain but he did before I asked.

  “The girl likes getting smacked around,” he said. “And as I was getting more and more of that Jonydavid’s memories, which I guess was me but in this life, I realized that I’d been smacking her around a whole lot before she had me thrown overboard for cheating on her.

  “You see, I’m a different guy from the man that she knew. Maybe I’m the same spirit or soul or whatever the fuck it is that wore this face in this century but I’ve evolved a bit. That ain’t me now.

  “The Jonydavid born in this century used to rattle Carmel’s teeth every time she looked at him the wrong way. Now, I’m a man of restraint. When she got stupid on me, I’d ask Carmel what’s wrong when she was expecting a backhand.

  “In Carmel’s world she can’t respect a man who isn’t kicking her ass. So she started acting like the bitch that she is just as soon as she knew I wasn’t willing to knuckle her down every now and then.

  “To her, in every household there’s got to be somebody who’s kicking everybody else’s ass. If I wasn’t kicking her ass she was going to try to kick mine. There were a couple of times when Carmel swung on me and I just grabbed her and held her and told her to calm the fuck down.