***
“Oh, how you’ve been tricked, by boy. Oh, what damage you’ve caused, my poor, poor boy. You think your story’s over, but it’s hardly even started. No idea. You’ve no idea what’s ahead of you. Poor boy. Poor, poor boy.”
The next thing Philippe knew were these words being whispered over and over in his ear. A soft voice, close to his head spoke gently and carefully, full of compassion and strength. For a long time he slept, not sure whether he was alive or dead, with this voice and these words his only connection to the world. When eventually he opened his eyes, it was to a strange place, indeed. A tiny cottage hidden deep in the woods with warm red rugs draped over every surface and a flickering light from a dozen candles glittering and sparkling through the glass flowers and bright silver charms which hung and swayed on long lengths of string from the ceiling above him. He was lying on a bed in the corner of this room. By his side was a small, old woman who was gently washing his forehead with a cool flannel soaked in lavender water. Her eyes were sharp and wide and a great smile spread across her face when she saw Philippe was waking at last.
“He lives!” she said, a chuckle of gleeful satisfaction rattling through her as she turned to collect a glass of water with which to wet his lips. While she turned, Philippe saw that she wore around her neck a silver talisman of a bird’s skull which, in these parts, indicated the wearer to be a witch of some great power. He did not find this alarming, though. There was something so gentle and tender about the old woman’s demeanour and so comforting about the place she lived that he felt nothing but safe in her presence.
“You’ve been asleep a long time, my boy. And a good thing too, because you’ll need all the strength you can muster if you are to come through the test you have ahead of you. Here, drink this and eat and when you are finished I will tell you all about it.”
Philippe did as he was told and, feeling much revived after eating the strange, bitter tasting soup the witch had prepared for him, sat back in horror as she told her story.
She told of how she’d found his body, twisted and lifeless, in a midden heap by the side of the castle and how she had, using her magic and her skills, nourished the tiny spark of life that remained in it until his mind could return to him. “You are the victim of a grand trick,” she said. “A long conspiracy between the ogre, who lived in that castle, and his emissary, Murnock, an old foe of mine who used to trade slave children and other abominations in these very woods. Their plan was to break the enchantment that protects Glenlaw by having the ogre cross the town boundary clothed in the blood of an innocent child of the burgh. That blood was yours and even now I am afraid their plan has worked and the beast is well on his way to wreak his terror upon your home. Make no mistake, if he succeeds everything you know will be destroyed. He has no soul, this creature, only hunger. For generations he has fed upon the villages and towns that surround us here, but he has fed so deeply that there remains little to sustain him anymore. You’ve seen that already. That depravity that sours the mountain villages here, that is what he wants to bring to Glenlaw. This has been his goal for so many years, his hunger is so great that I cannot even imagine the horrors he will inflict. You must stop him, Philippe. It is your blood which will allow him in and your strength which must destroy him.”
Philippe heard all this, his cheeks growing pale with shock as he realised what he had done. “I wanted only freedom to love and be loved,” he thought. “How is it possible that so much evil could come from such a simple wish?”
“There is only one way to defeat the ogre, Philippe. He is a powerful creature and to best him you must confront him with the one thing his foul heart cannot stand.” With these words, the witch lifted a silver flute from a box that lay on her lap. Shining brightly in the candlelight, she placed it in Philippe’s hands, closing his fingers around the strange runes that were carved along its barrel.
“I carved this flute many years ago, forging into it every last ounce of power I could summon. I was not always the old woman you see me as now, you know. I used to be a very powerful witch, a mistress of all the elements, but I gave all of that up to create this flute. That ogre you met murdered my sisters and destroyed my home and I made this as a weapon with which to destroy him. It didn’t work. Oh, it helped subdue him and keep him at bay – the music it plays being as poison to his ogre’s soul – but I did not have left within me the strength needed to destroy him with it. That job is yours, Philippe. Take the flute. Go now. Find the ogre and destroy him before he destroys every last thing you love.”
Philippe’s blood ran cold to hear the tale the witch recounted to him. His thoughts ran immediately to Ursula, pure, beautiful Ursula, waiting patiently for him in her father’s white house by the riverside, knowing nothing of the horror that was at that very moment on its way towards her. “Ursula, my love,” he thought. “If anything should happen to you, I will never forgive myself. I am coming to you, my love. I am coming back to you now.” His will so determined, Philippe set off on his journey back home that very morning. Back across the bleak moorland, back through the dark, mistrustful forests, following again the route that Murnock, the fiend, had set for him.
As he walked, he thought over all that he would say to Ursula when again he held her safely in his arms. “You will have fresh flowers in your hair every day, my love. You will have gardens filled with butterflies to dance in, my love. And songs, such songs I will sing for you, if only you will be safe when I return.”
His pace was quick, much faster on his return than he had been when first making his way along this road. He walked all day, barely passing for rest, and for most of the night, stopping by the roadside for only a few hours sleep when his legs would carry him no further that day. With every step, he held the silver flute in his hands. As soon as the witch had given it to him, it had felt comfortable to hold. His fingers curled around it easily and naturally, caressing its keys as though they had done so every day of his life, even though he had never so much as seen such a thing before. “You see,” the witch had said. “It belongs to you now. It knows what its purpose is and that you are the man to fulfil it.”
So walking along the road, Philippe raised the flute to his lips and began to play. Nervously at first, but with gradually more and more confidence, he blew simple tunes that spiralled and rang through the forests and across the mountains. Strange reels of music poured from his lips and fingers, ever more complicated melodies that danced around him, note after note that played themselves out almost before he had thought to invent them. And as he played, so the landscape around him changed. Where once there was hard, unfertile ground, now flowers sprang up as he walked, fresh leaves sprouting from trees and through the air birds sang and bees buzzed through groves and clearings that only a few days before had been silent as a grave and as dry as death itself. Such was the magic the flute could bring when he played it.
Every step he took brought him closer to Glenlaw and the further he travelled, the more obvious it became that he was following directly in the footsteps of the ogre he was hunting. The very step of the beast seemed enough to poison the land. There were animals left for dead by the side of the path, rivers that ran black and fetid where the creature had crossed them and in the mountain villages, already impoverished and downtrodden, Philippe found a new devastation that was beyond anything he could have imagined. Every house lay in ruins. In every field, the crops were burned to nothing. Even the old men and women who had survived so many trials in this place had not been spared. Their bodies filled the streets, broken and cast aside as though the creature had killed them in a rapture, killing for the pure, furious pleasure of it, with no reason and no heart.
Reaching the last of the villages, he came across again the crippled young apple seller, whose twisted, bloated body he found in heap by the roadside. On finding the boy, Philippe wept tears of shame and broke his journey for a moment to dig the boy’s g
rave and lay his body to rest. Having done this, he again raised his flute and blew a fierce, passionate reel that shocked the air and caused bright red apples to spring suddenly from the branches of nearby trees. Philippe picked one such apple, biting into it with determined relish as he continued on, his pace quicker, more urgent than ever.
By noon on the second day, he arrived back at the stone marker that was the threshold of Glenlaw. So fast was his progress that he had travelled along the entire road in less than half the time it had taken him in the opposite direction. For each step he took along the way he had peered into the distance, hoping to catch some sight of the ogre he was chasing, longing for some sign he had a chance of catching his prey before it arrived at Glenlaw. With the passing of the marker stone, so passed the last such hope. Within just a few minutes walk, it was clear that the first of Philippe’s fears had come true. The enchantment was broken. The ogre was in Glenlaw and wreaking the same havoc there as he had done in every other village along the foul road he had travelled.
The scene was as if from a nightmare. Blood ran in the gutters. Buildings fell in burned out ruins and the screams of the dying and of the bereaved rang out through the smoke filled air. In the streets lay the broken, devastated bodies of those brave men of the town who had stepped forward to confront the beast. The ogre had killed without pity. Like a fox in a henhouse, he killed indiscriminately, out of instinct not hunger. Like a hurricane, he had blown through the town, leaving only death and pain in his wake.
Amid the chaos, Philippe came across an old schoolmate who stood, eyes wide with shock, staring out across the devastated main town square. “Tell me what happened here,” he demanded, shaking the poor, distraught boy by the shoulders. “Which way did it go?”
“It was like a devil,” the boy whispered. “There was nothing we could do. It was a devil rising among us. There was nothing…”
“Which way?” shouted Philippe again.
“To the east. To the riverside,” the boy said, pointing the way with one outstretched finger. “But you mustn’t go! Philippe, you mustn’t go!”
It was too late. Philippe had left him already. The boy’s finger hung in the air, pointing the way in which Philippe now ran. To the east. To the riverside. To the white house where Ursula lived.
The Shorecliff Horror and Other Stories Page 18
