by Scott Hale
“Will you do god’s work?” he asked as he beckoned me to take a seat at the end of a pew.
“I’m going to do the best I can,” I said, knowing that no amount of god’s work would save me from hell.
Father Clark sat opposite me, his eyes fixed on the morbid crucifix suspended at the furthest end of the church. “What do you know?”
“Less than I would like,” I said. I picked up a book of psalms and flipped through its pages. “Tell me what’s happened here, Father.”
The priest crossed his legs, uncrossed them, and then crossed them once more. “Garrett and Geoffrey took one look at their hometown and were sickened by what they saw,” he started, Garrett being Grunt and Geoffrey his brother. “How is it they’d heard of you and your partner?”
I set the book down and shook my head. “I wasn’t aware our names were known in Europe, but I suppose word travels quickly amongst circles concerned with these matters.” I paused for a moment. “How is it the police are not involved?”
“They were, for a time,” Father Clark said, “but we are too far from civilization for London to pay us any attention.” He stifled a yawn. “What are your qualifications?” he asked, as though he meant to send me away if I did not answer satisfactorily.
“Thirty have died here,” I said, sounding offended, “and yet I’ve come all the same.”
“That makes you a fool, not an expert,” Father Clark said humorlessly, “and it is thirty-three that have died here. Maud Wilkerson’s ten-year-old girl was found three nights ago in a burlap sack, dangling from one of the willows.”
“Do you live here, Father?” I asked, incensed by the man’s incompetence.
Sensing my anger, the priest stood up, closed the gap between us, and sat beside me, forcing me further down the pew.
“You’ve been in this town for no more than ten minutes and you’re already making accusations?” His eyes shone with the light of the flickering candles atop the church’s tabernacle. “This church is my home, and I’ve gone without sleep more times than I can remember watching that graveyard, waiting for the sinner who has shaken my flock’s faith. It is only when my back is turned, when my eyes have closed, that they carry out their cruel intentions.” He took a deep breath. “God was testing me, and I failed, and for my failure he now punishes me.”
I wanted to tell Father Clark that he was a selfish coward, and maybe even slap the man around some since his god wasn’t doing the job properly, but I held my tongue. “This will not be my first encounter with the macabre. My last assignment had me in the bayous, where the fetid water birthed fetid children longing for companions.”
Father Clark leaned in and asked, “What did you do?”
“We found the source,” I said, cringing, the scent of the swamp having never left my memory, “and severed its hold on our world. A husband had killed his wife when he found out that she could bear him no kids and dumped her body in the backwoods. Afterward…” I paused for dramatic effect, “she bore him all the children he could ever want and more.”
“How did you find this poor soul?” Father Clark asked, enraptured. “How did you put her to rest?”
“The offspring had a habit of carting off parts of the dead back to their mother as offerings and proof, so we followed them.” I rested against the pew and propped my elbow atop it to hold my weary head. “She’d taken up residence in a seldom seen part of the swamp. When we found her, she was still dressed in the white gown she’d worn the night she’d been murdered, except it had grown, having stretched across the ground and up the trees.”
“How did you put her to rest?” the Father repeated, close enough that I could have given him a peck on the forehead and gotten away with it given his state.
“Well,” I slipped my hands into my pockets, “we discovered she was living off the land from the fabric of her dress, so Seth cut it up the best that he could. And then we burned her body and her babies and buried her deep in the ground.”
“She was a demon,” Father Clark said, finally exhaling.
“She was something else, that’s for sure,” I said, wondering if I could convince him to let me have a sip of his savior’s sweet blood to quench my thirst.
“It seems you were meant to be here then.”
At that moment, I knew the priest was mine. “Half of the agreed payment now, half when it’s over.”
Father Clark nodded, licking his chapped lips. “It’s been three months since Death took interest in our town. Dying is natural, inevitable; a reward for those who have lived piously by the teachings of the lord. But there is nothing natural about what has happened here.”
“You’d be surprised how quickly your definition of the word ‘natural’ changes once you’ve seen the things that I have.”
“Mary Davies was the first to die.” Father Clark stood up and turned sideways to exit the pew. “You should speak with her mother first. After that, see Lee Warren.”
“As of right now, I’m more interested in what you have to tell me, Father,” I said, noting the old man’s evasive maneuvering.
He shook his head. “I can only tell you of the bodies, that’s all I know.”
“That interests me as well.” I took another look at the church, searching the darkness for suspicious doorways and eldritch gateways. “What of Richard Dark and John Gallows? I’m sure they’ve something to say on the matter, being wrongly accused and all.”
“I’m sure they did,” Father Clark said, moving towards the altar, the rustle of his robes sounding like the beating wings of a bat. “Thirty-three have died here. Maud Wilkerson’s child was the thirty-third, and they the thirty-first and thirty-second.”
“You sound suspicious.”
The priest laughed. He faded into the shadows gathered in the church’s center and said from the darkness, “I feel a motive is forming, but I’m too close to see it. That’s why we need you.”
I hate people like Father Clark. He’s one of those lonely and tortured souls constantly searching for a place and purpose in a world that no longer exists. He ambles about annoyingly in the margins and the folds, and whispers words that promise enlightenment and intrigue. The man knows well enough that he cannot make good on his commitments, but that doesn’t stop him from preaching them all the same. He is a glutton, and it is only through self-inflicted martyrdom that he will be filled. I doubt he’s the killer, though I’m certain he’s killed before and will do so again when he grows weary of waiting for the bloodstained gates of heaven.
Entry Seven
Grunt had me rent a room at Hodge’s Lodge, a two story building of creaking wood and crumbling stone one minute from the death yard. In there, privacy was a commodity unattainable to even the wealthiest of residents: footsteps rang through the halls like thunder and voices carried through cracks like shrill invitations. Each room seemed fitted with ill-conceived peepholes, as though the driller had more interest in the motions of the fetish itself than the flesh and blood on the other side. The proprietor, Hrothgar Hodge, promised to be at my disposal at any hour, and the grin upon his face when he told me this suggested he would be nearby whether I called upon him or not.
I set my belongings on the floor, noted the draft creeping across the ground from its dark hideaway, and brought out the knives and daggers. They glinted in the silver light of the clouded sun. I knew they would protect me well enough when the time came. With a splintered quill and smattering of ink, I then sat at the desk, set upon it a piece of parchment, and drew from memory the layout of the village. There was little to illustrate, for I had seen little of Cairn, but it ensured that I would explore the place properly before relying on the local map.
“Settling in?” Hrothgar Hodge asked, leaning into the room.
I spun around, startled. I had not heard the man approach, and this troubled me. “What do you know of the murders?”
Hrothgar tapped his fingers on the molding of the doorway. “Not as much as I would like, to help you, I mean.”
“Sure,” I mumbled, nodding at the imp of a man who was far too unsettling in both parlance and appearance to have retained his innocence.
“You might find talking to the doctor enlightening,” Hrothgar teased.
I spun around, knife in hand, and pointed the sacred blade in his direction. “You might find talking to me enlightening, too,” I threatened.
“He’s got the bodies, is all I’m saying.” Hrothgar retreated into the motes of dust congregating in the hall. “He never put them back. We got two graveyards now.”
Entry Eight
The first night is always the hardest. Every shadow becomes a horror, every conversation a conspiracy. The darkness seems thicker and gathers like a malignancy in the corners and the closets, under the beds and under the stairs, breeding terror and promises of death. Safety becomes a scarcity, and those ordinary objects which we once looked upon with indifference now stand sinister and cruel. No longer does a candle promise warmth but the arrival of some shambling cannibal from its dusty cellar. No longer does a clock tell the passage of time but the moments that remain until the cult comes for their inquisitive claim.
Without fail, it began at midnight. I was half-asleep, half-drunk on a bottle of stolen wine when I heard metal chipping at stone. Sobriety found me just as quickly as it had left me and brought me to the window. The streets were empty and the houses still, and the wind blew softly, clear and chilled. The trees swayed rigidly, their boney branches shedding curled leaves to the ground. If not for the thirty-three deaths that had brought me here, I dare say I might’ve enjoyed the moment.
I spun around as the floorboards groaned outside my door. I waited for words that I knew would never come, then went to my knives; they were meant for monsters, but they would bleed men all the same. I could hear the entity breathing on the other side, a shallow and lustful breathing rolling over wet, pursed lips. Beads of sweat slid down my forehead and into my eyes as the door knob turned slowly, carefully.
Filled with courageous stupidity, I vaulted across the room and, with the knife raised high, pulled the door open. Hoping to find Hrothgar with his pants around his ankles, I found nothing instead. The hall was empty, the only evidence of anything having been there being the faint smell of rain. Looking to Grunt’s room and the two others the innkeeper had stated were occupied, I saw that the doors were shut, rumbling snores wandering out of them.
Pattering feet on loose tile sent me skirting down the stairs, my watcher still on the premises. I hit the landing and then the first floor. The front doors stood wide open before me. I snatched a lantern from the front desk and brought it to life. Shadows recoiled around me as I stumbled onto the street. No sign or shape of the stranger remained. But, through the gloom, I heard the call of a shovel cutting through earth. And so I foolishly I followed.
Like all places, the dark made of Cairn an endless catacomb of stone, wood, and soil. I wandered aimlessly, helplessly, through the night, in search of the graveyard which should have been nearby, yet seemed to have disappeared entirely. The woods that surrounded the town swayed loudly, a tide of leaves washing against the shore of the sky. Grunt had warned of wolves, and now I heard them, howling and yelping and reveling in their carnage.
“Get inside,” a voice whispered.
“Who said that?” I whipped around to find the pale face of an old man floating in the doorway beside me.
“Don’t be an asshole,” he said, disappearing into his home. “Get inside.”
Interview Two
It was the doctor who found me, and his name was Frederickson. He was the mad scientist type and seemed to enjoy playing the part. His house smelled of chemicals, of sour anxiety. After glancing nervously at my knife, he directed me into the living room and sat me down on a chair that had seen its fair share of use.
“You’re the investigator, yes?” He disappeared and returned with a cup of tea.
The chair creaked as I leaned forward, scrutinized the tea for poisons, and then sipped it. “I heard something skulking about outside my room,” I explained. “I followed after it.”
“I’ve heard that’s how it starts.” The doctor picked at his neck. “It drags you out, makes you lose your way.”
“You say ‘it’ as though you’re certain it’s not human.”
“Well, if it was, why would you be here?” The doctor took a seat and lit a candle. “I know man is capable of a great many terrible things, but I have to hold out hope that no such man lives here in Cairn.”
“You’ve lived here all your life?” I finished off the tea and searched the room for shadowed conspirators.
Frederickson nodded.
“What do you think is happening?”
Frederickson let out a heavy sigh and stood up. “Come with me.”
I remembered what Hodge had told me about the doctor and the bodies and asked accusingly, “Where are we going?”
The basement, that’s where we went, and that’s where I found them, all of them; all of the men and the women and the children, all wrapped in sheets, all torn apart; all thirty-three corpses webbed in blood and wracked by rot, decaying in splintered coffins, their souls growing impatient and hateful as they waited for the calming rest of the grave.
“You need to bury these bodies.” I shoved my nose in the crook of my elbow to escape the smell of putrefaction. “Put them where they belong.”
Frederickson shook his head. “We tried that.” He walked over to a child’s coffin, pulled back the lid, and said, “But they kept digging them up, as though killing them wasn’t enough.”
The skull of a little girl peered out from the box, the rest of her bones and partially decomposed flesh surrounding it like a wreath. “Mary Davies,” I muttered, realizing she was the first to have died.
“They dug her up four times before we moved her here.” The doctor closed the coffin and muttered, “Her poor mother.” He turned to me. “You asked what I think is happening here.”
“I did.”
The doctor surveyed the room, twitching at the patter of water off the sweating stones. “Something evil has wandered out of the woods and made its home here. And not just in Cairn, but the whole countryside. I went to diseased Parish to offer my services to friends and acquaintances and found only strangers. The sickness had taken their memory of me, or so I thought. I wouldn’t tell this to anyone else, but you understand, you accept things others won’t allow themselves to believe.
“The people of Parish were not human, had never been human. My friends, my acquaintances, everyone—they were gone, replaced by these things that looked the part, but hadn’t a clue how to act it. I tried to treat them regardless, but they refused, and when I confronted them about their consumption of the strange veins that’d begun to grow there—for surely that was the source of their maladies—they turned violent. It sounds like madness, I know, but it is the truth.”
“If they were imitations, then where did everyone else go?” I whispered.
The doctor shook his head. “I do not know. I can only guess.”
“Grunt and I witnessed several travelers from Parish on the road heading toward the city.”
Frederickson sighed and said as he stared at his feet, “I’ve heard, and it won’t be long until the disease spreads further, I expect.”
“You think something has followed you back,” I said, having heard the notes of guilt in his confession.
A rogue tear streaked down the man’s quivering cheek. “Yes.”
“But this is different from Parish. There is no disease, no mockeries of man.”
“Only bloody slaughter for the sake of amusement.” Frederickson paused, took a deep breath, and said, “Mary Davies, six; John Williams, twenty-two; Alice Hall, thirteen; Colin Walker, five; Charles Bell, thirty; Eric Bell, thirty-one; Abigail Green, ten; John Ward, forty-four; Hugh Hill, thirty-seven; Ann Hill, twenty-nine; Ian Hill, eleven; Lesley Hill, four; Malcolm Wood, thirty-five; Elizabeth Baker, thirty-five; Francesca Baudin
, forty-three; Alfred Axel, fifty-seven; Agnes Axel, forty-nine; Aleid Boeckman, seven; Katie Warren, thirty-two; Benjamin Ash, sixty; Christopher Babcock, nineteen; Graham Cross, two; Emily Cross, six months; Sarah Bertrand, fifty-eight; Ella Delacroix, eighty; Orphan Boy, age unknown; Gregory Haywood, twenty-seven; Orphan Girl, age unknown; Michael Hopkins, thirty-eight; Michael Norton, four; Richard Dark, twenty-six; John Gallows, twenty-four; and Maud Wilkerson, eight.
“The names of the dead and the order in which they died. I will never forget them, or what I may have done to them.”
I looked over the thirty-three coffins stacked and crammed in the doctor’s basement. “Orphan Boy and Orphan Girl?” I asked, the names having stood out to me.
“Yes.” The doctor held his light up to the two small coffins which had small ribbons dangling from each of their cracks. “We could not identify them as our own. We’ll hold the children here until someone comes looking for them.”
“Doctor,” I said, backing away towards the stairs, “why are the bodies being held in your house? I’m sure there are safer, more secure places.”
“It’s my burden to bear, and my responsibility to bring them back when this is all over.”
Because the madman had me in his lair, I nodded and smiled and backed up to the first floor, where the light of the rising sun shone on new horrors yet to be seen.
Entry Nine
What I’d heard and tried to find throughout the night was the sound of murder. Lee and deceased Katie Warren’s daughter, Eliza, had been butchered, her arms and legs, head and torso, and organs strung up in one of the graveyard’s willows. Her tongue had been bitten in half, likely eaten, and there were bits of stone in her eye sockets. A small hole sat before the grisly spectacle, as though the killer meant to taunt the town to bury her. Those nearby reported she had been a bright girl, a beautiful girl, with a wide smile and a charming sense of humor.
Eliza Warren had been ten years old when the world was through with her.