Parasite Soul

by Jags, Chris

  Movement caused him to duck behind a tree. A young woman, previously unseen, was returning from an overgrown well with a bucket of water. She was what one thought of as a traditional Cannevish girl: buxom, rosy-cheeked and well-fed, with long blonde plaits. The kind of girl one saw in the color plates of fairy stories, very unlike Niu. Unfortunately for her, she was also wearing fur-lined ankle boots, which the handmaiden clearly coveted.

  The blonde ascended three creaking wooden steps and disappeared through the front door of the cabin. Simon glanced around for any other signs of activity. The homestead wasn’t large, crowded as it was by the forest, with a small patch of garden and an old shed to house firewood and tools. Outside the shed was a large stump, stained and pitted with axe blows. A few feathers lay scattered around, hinting at a henhouse hidden behind the cabin. Laundry hung to dry on a line stretching from the porch to a nearby oak tree suggested a household mainly of women, but with at least one man.

  “This is good,” whispered Niu. “We will be able to find clothes, food, and maybe arm ourselves without even going into the town.”

  “I don’t like stealing,” Simon hedged. He’d been able to justify the concept earlier, back at the lake, before he’d seen who he was stealing from. Here, however, was a peasant family, living simply, not unlike his own. The notion of robbing them seemed little better than robbing one of his own neighbors in Brand.

  “It is simply survival.” Niu cast him a glance which spoke louder than words: am I going to have trouble with you every step of the way?

  “Fine,” Simon agreed at last. “But we take no more than we need.”

  “Of course.” Niu started forward. Simon caught her arm. Her jaw tightened as she turned to glare at him. “What?”

  “There’s a chance they might just help us if we ask,” he told her. “Country folk… we often do.”

  “I have told you - I trust country folk as far as I trust city folk. There is also a chance that they will turn us over to the King’s soldiers, particularly if coin is involved.” She shook herself free from his grip. “If you will not help me with this, wait here. I am growing accustomed to your inaction.”

  “I’ll help you,” Simon mumbled.

  One step behind Niu, Simon approached the cabin cautiously. Upon abandoning the cover of the forest, the handmaiden walked swiftly and with confidence. Pausing only to snatch up an abandoned trowel from the scattering of tools at the edge of the garden, she approached the cabin wall and listened carefully at an open window. Judging the room unoccupied, she stood on tiptoes to peer inside. Simon found himself holding his breath; he didn’t feel at all good about any of this.

  Beckoning to Simon, Niu indicated that she wanted a boost inside, or at least that was how he translated her convoluted gestures. His hands provided a springboard; with his assistance, she was easily able to heave herself up and through the window. While her performance in Vingate - scaling the inn as she had – strongly suggested that Simon’s assistance was unessential, he was happy to feel useful for a change. The handmaiden was extraordinarily light.

  Simon listened breathlessly as Niu prowled inside. Was he expected to follow her? He thought not, but he couldn’t be sure, so he waited for her cue. When she reappeared at the window, she handed him a pair of sheepskin boots, designed for a larger man than Simon, but a definite improvement over bare feet.

  “Wait,” she whispered as he pulled the boots on over protesting blisters. She looked uncharacteristically apprehensive. “Do not come in. I will return shortly. Keep watch.”

  Simon smiled tightly in return, hoping to communicate both amenability and concern. He would have preferred to be inside, with her. Here, pressed against the cabin wall, he felt exposed and vulnerable. The road, which ran past the property, was quiet; he would hear a cart or a patrol in time to relocate himself, but he wasn’t so sure he would detect foot traffic before it was too late. If the girl came back out and he was forced to move, where would he go? Edge around the cabin, where every corner was a blind spot and he might run into someone else? How large was this family? How many people might he have to avoid? What disposition might they have, faced with an intruder of uncertain intention?

  As hurting anyone was entirely unthinkable, Simon made up his mind to throw himself upon the mercy of anyone who discovered him. He had more faith in his fellow country folk than Niu, who was, after all, a city girl and a foreigner to boot. Had he and his father not given shelter to strangers of dubious character in the past? They’d never asked questions and none of their transient guests had caused them trouble. Hospitality was simply part of the rural code.

  Listening hard, Simon tried to watch the road, forest, yard and window simultaneously. He felt like his head might take flight, or at least sprout a third eye. Sounds drifted from within the cabin, but Niu wasn’t responsible for any of them that he could tell. He heard soft singing – a young woman, no doubt the blonde from earlier – and the clatter of pots and pans.

  The kind of wife, Simon thought, and the kind of lifestyle that I might have had, if my head wasn’t always in the clouds; if my mind ruled my mouth rather than vice-versa. In that moment, he found himself almost resenting Niu, and had to remind himself that it wasn’t her fault that she and he were entangled in this ridiculous, dire situation.

  A muffled metallic clattering demanded his attention. Straining to locate the source of the sound – which sounded uncomfortably like the clanking of chains – he determined that it probably came from within the cabin, but below ground. The dwelling had a cellar, then, but what was being kept down there?

  “Keep quiet!” someone shouted, another woman, whose voice was harsh and cracking. Staccato thumping followed, as though of heels on hollow floorboards. Simon frowned, licking his lips as he was sometimes wont to do when he felt anxious. What were these people keeping in their cellar? Some kind of animal? If so, why wasn’t it penned outside? With a prickle of foreboding, he wished Niu would reemerge and that the two of them were well on their way.

  The next few minutes passed distressingly slowly. Simon became aware of a muted moaning, low and desolate, which seemed to hang in the air like a sorrowful fog. The hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention; something uncanny, something wrong was at play here.

  “Would! You! Bloody! Well! Keep! Quiet!” the unidentified women yelled, each word punctuated with angry drumming.

  “Oh, calm down, mother,” came another voice from an adjoining room, soft and soothing. “You know he just wants to be fed.”

  Simon could bear the tension no longer. He peered in the window.

  “Niu!” he hissed. “Niu, where are you?”

  He was looking into a cluttered den, where detritus had accumulated over a span of what looked to be decades. He couldn’t get a feeling for the identity of the occupant, whether man or woman, young or old. Dusty boxes were piled on the chairs, the bed, and in every corner; many of them overflowed with mismatched items of clothing, weapons, tools, toys and assorted knickknacks. Sheets of cobwebs draped the walls like a depressing parody of tapestries. A ratty old doll lay crumpled at the center of the room, staring back at him with blank glass orbs. Simon had the eerie feeling that he was looking at a graveyard. Worse, Niu was nowhere in sight.

  “I don’t care what he wants,” the older woman – ‘mother’ – snapped. “I’m sick of that infernal noise! Keeping him was foolish. Had I been a wiser woman…”

  “Hush, mother,” the girl said sharply. Simon sucked in his breath. Had she heard him calling for Niu? Had she detected Niu herself? He spun away from the window and flattened himself against the cabin wall, breathing hard.

  “Don’t you tell me to hush, girl! And don’t you be calling me mother! You’re the ungrateful baggage I inherited when I married your father…”

  “Oh?” the girl’s voice rose sharply, and if she had suspected intruders, the older woman had refocused her attention. “I’m the baggage, am I? I cook for you, I care for you - I clean your damn
ed chamber pot! – and… and, as for father, I do everything for him! When was the last time you lifted a finger to…”

  Mother’s quavering voice rose an octave as she cut across the girl. “Don’t you dare speak to me like that! I won’t have it! Your father…”

  “Ha! Father wouldn’t take your part in this if Vanyon himself demanded it!”

  “Is that so? Is that so, you little witch? Is that what you think? Conveniently hard to ask him, though, isn’t it, you sorry little harlot?”

  “Don’t you call me a harlot, you filthy old hag – what’s that?” A different kind of tension entered the girl’s voice. “Did you hear that?”

  “All I hear is the disrespect of my useless…”

  “Shut up!” the girl roared, and the woman fell obligingly silent. “There’s someone in the house!”

  Niu, Simon thought desperately, get out of there. For all his defense of country folk, something uncanny was going on in that cabin, and he wouldn’t even have minded enduring the handmaiden’s inevitable dry I-told-you-so if they could just leave.

  “Where are you?” the girl hissed. Simon could barely make out the words, but there was no mistaking her tone: predatory, excited. Little as he wanted to set foot in that ill-omened cabin, it was time to save Niu for a change. He dithered for a moment, dancing on the spot, then dashed up the porch stairs before he could lose his nerve, making as much of a racket as he could. Not only would the groaning stairs attract the occupants’ attention away from Niu, the noise committed him to the enterprise, which strengthened his resolve to see the matter through.

  Ramming the door with his shoulder, only to find it both unlocked and hanging open, Simon flew into the cabin and collided with an interior wall. Grateful that no one had witnessed his inglorious entrance, he stared left and right. He found himself in an untidy little antechamber, dominated by a looming wardrobe and overseen by an enormous stag’s head mounted on the wall. Multiple pairs of shoes and boots lay where they’d been kicked. A woman’s jacket lay crumpled in one corner where it had fallen from its peg. Disconcertingly, several unpleasant-looking stains reddened the bare floorboards.

  Chickens, he told himself frantically. Might have been chickens.

  He dashed to the right, in the direction of an escalating commotion. The older woman was shrieking like a harpy, and the girl was yelling at someone, probably Niu. Something brittle impacted the wall; crockery, Simon guessed. He was right, and in time to watch white shards skittering across the floor of the common room he found himself in.

  He had no time to examine the room in detail. He had the impression of a cozy little den of a type which might, under different circumstances, have made him homesick. An empty hearth which surely crackled merrily on cold winter nights; a thick rug upon which Simon could easily imagine stretching out, his feet to the fire; a rocking chair of the type in which his father liked to doze. This sitting room was, unlike that of his own home, combined with a kitchen. Pots, pans, and utensils crowded one end of a long counter. At the other end, dripping gently onto the floor, was half a human corpse.

  Simon stared at this horror for a moment. The half-corpse, a green-eyed young man with a peach-fuzz beard, stared unseeingly back. Wherever his lower torso had disappeared was not immediately apparent, although a large iron pot containing what looked to be his entrails squatted nearby. A profusion of blades - butcher’s knives and smaller knives used for deboning – bristled from a block nearby the body. Simon, unable to entirely control his gag reflex, at least managed to prevent his quaking knees from giving out. He desired nothing more than to collapse and vomit himself empty, but Niu needed him. He had to keep it together.

  The handmaiden was trapped. The blonde girl had maneuvered her into a corner and was slashing at her with a butcher’s knife. Niu’s dark eyes betrayed no fear, and she ducked and dodged each swipe with uncanny precision. Simon had never seen anything quite like it; she moved with a dancer’s grace, but more rapidly, like a darting minnow. He got the sinking feeling that she was toying with her opponent, that she could have ended the fight any time she wished it. The tiny smile playing about her lips seemed to support that theory.

  The older woman, gaunt and skeletal, appeared to be confined to the rocking chair. Hurling epithets at Niu, she flung anything within reach in the handmaiden’s general direction – her plate, her cup, a poker. Her aim was terrible enough that Niu didn’t pay these missiles much heed, but despite her ineffectiveness, Simon found her loathsome. Her mad, sunken eyes hovered above an incongruously girlish, snub nose, while her lips were fixed into a cruel twist. Fleshless arms made puppets of her spidery hands, which scurried about searching for something to throw. A dirty threadbare blanket covered her useless legs. She didn’t notice Simon’s entrance, so he took the opportunity to run up behind her and violently spill her out of her chair.

  As she thrashed about shrieking on the floor, tangled in her blanket, Simon turn his attention to Niu’s predicament. The handmaiden caught his eye and frowned slightly. I told you to stay outside, was what that look said, but Simon was having none of it. Niu didn’t think he was useful; well, he was going to prove her wrong. He was going to help. He just needed a weapon, and there were several on the counter, if he could just stomach the proximity of that terrible corpse.

  Just as he was starting toward his goal, Niu ended her dance. Ducking a clumsy swing, as swift as a striking snake, she drove both palms into the blonde girl’s abdomen. The blonde made a choking noise and dropped, stunned, to the floorboards. The smallest of gasps escaped her lips. Niu, who was now wearing ill-fitting and stylistically incongruous ankle boots, gave her wrist a savage kick so that her knife went clattering away. As she strode past the girl, as seemed to be her signature move, Niu kneed her in the face.

  “What’s going on here?” Simon gasped as the groaning blonde, blood streaming down her face, clutched her shattered nose.

  “Whatever it is, it is none of our business,” Niu said crisply. “I have packed some supplies for our journey. The food, I think, we will leave.”

  Simon couldn’t have agreed more fervently.

  “Alright,” he nodded.

  “Do not turn your back to them. I will fetch the bag.” Niu disappeared.

  Simon, alone with two butchers and a corpse, hovered uneasily near the set of knives, counting the seconds until he could be away from this horrible den of cannibals. Then he heard it again, beneath the floorboards: the rattling of chains and a protracted, shivering moan.

  “Who’s down there?” Simon stabbed a finger at the floor. “Who do you have captive?”

  “No one,” snapped the woman designated as ‘mother’. She’d hauled herself into an awkward sitting position and was glaring venomous needles at Simon.

  Simon could have let it go. For a moment he desperately wanted to; but then his gaze brushed the dead eyes of the unfortunate young man atop the counter, and his resolve hardened. Retrieving a hefty knife from the block, he waved it at the women. “Show me this no one.”

  “Never,” spat Mother, her mouth twisted into a jeering snarl.

  “Not a good idea,” the blonde girl said, or an approximation thereof; her gushing nose made her sound like she had a heavy cold.

  “Now!” Simon shouted, surprising even himself. The girl jumped, even as Mother continued to sneer belligerently.

  “You heard him.” Niu had reappeared with a traveling bag slung over her shoulder. Her expression was conflicted: her stony eyes said that she wished Simon had left well enough alone, but a slight smirk suggested that she was impressed that he was showing some backbone. “Show this prisoner to us.”

  The blonde girl struggled to her feet. She looked dazed and helpless.

  “Don’t you do it, Aletta,” Mother snarled, groping about for a weapon and coming up short.

  “He… he’s in the basement.” Aletta wiped her nose with a bloody sleeve.

  “Well, we’re going to get him out of there before you can eat him, to
o,” Simon snapped.

  To his surprise, a tear trickled down Alletta’s cheek. “I don’t eat people,” she snuffled thickly. “I don’t, I wouldn’t…”

  “If you speak further to these folk, you little witch,” Mother hissed, clutching at her rocking chair, struggling to right it, “It will be the worse for you when your father gets back. You know what he will be forced to do.”

  Aletta threw a glance at the corpse on the counter and bit her lip. She seemed to struggle with herself for a moment, then she moved across to the hearthrug and peeled it back. Beneath it was a trapdoor, chained and padlocked. She withdrew a key from her bodice and unlocked it with shaking hands.

  “Think what you are doing!” Mother howled.

  “I’m sick of all this,” said Aletta hoarsely, and threw back the trapdoor.

  The stench wafting from the black pit below caused Simon’s stomach to revolt once again, and he fell back coughing. Rotting meat, dank decay, and a sickly sweet, unfamiliar smell combined into a nauseatingly pungent cocktail. Unaffected by the miasma, Aletta descended a set of creaking stairs, and moments later, a torch flared. Simon who was beginning to think that Niu was right, that this as none of their business and that they should take to their heels, had to forcibly remind himself that some poor sap languished below waiting to become these degenerates’ next meal. Covering his nose and mouth with the crook of his elbow, he followed the girl into the dank pit, knife gripped tight.

  Niu remained behind, hovering warily at the entrance. No doubt she feared ambush, or perhaps worried that Mother would slam the trapdoor closed once they were inside. Either way, she took it upon herself to act as sentry, which was good, because Simon hadn’t thought of it. With Niu guarding his back, he was able to descend with greater confidence.

  “Stay back,” Aletta muttered, which seemed like sound advice to Simon. He squinted in the flickering torchlit gloom. Unlike the cabin above, the claustrophobically narrow walls of the squalid little chamber were of cut and fitted stone; the floor was invisible beneath layers of packed refuse, the composition of which Simon elected not to think about. The clink of chains drew his attention to the far end of the little room, where something huddled. Something, Simon quickly ascertained, which was definitely not the terrified prisoner of his imagination.