Nasty Stories

by Brian McNaughton

  Those teeth were strong and sharp. He gouged great chunks from the worm, the Mystery Worm, that his neighbors had sent and that Tourmalign had tried to warn him of. He pulled out tubular things and sinewy things, he cracked long bones that seemed anomalous to the anatomy of a snake, but he knew that this was no common snake.

  No wonder, it seemed, as he gouged and chewed and spat, that the blood pumping into his lap was warm.

  WATER AND THE SPIRIT

  Their horses wading daintily in morning mist, Heinrich von der Hiedlerheim and his mighty men jingled down from their tall abode through a wood where autumn raged. This season of bright colors and luminous haze filled Heinrich to bursting with restlessness, an atavistic compulsion to follow the geese, or perhaps the mammoths, to seek the sun or sack Rome. His singers, his cup-bearers and his concubines were forced to work long hours in the autumn. His warriors worked even harder at avoiding playful combats that could tumble into wrathful sincerity.

  “Know, O Prince!” The speaker burst upon them like a great fungus sprung up in their path. Men cursed, horses reared and shrieked, swords and axes flashed. Bristling with hair and twigs, brandishing a crooked cross of sticks, the apparition howled: “Know, O Prince, that Babylon’s doom is upon you, for you have fornicated under every green tree. Wo unto him that riseth up early in the morning to follow strong drink! Wo unto him that would slay his brother to lie with his brother’s wife! Wo unto him that would burn Jews on the Sabbath, eat meat on Friday and take the name of the Lord in vain!”

  “Not every green tree,” Heinrich protested.

  “Aye, mock me with your pride! A sin! Your gluttony at table, your sloth in the service of Christ, your envy of your emperor, your lust for what creature soever on two legs or four tempts you with its youth and warmth! Sins, sins, sins!”

  “You have failed to task me with the sin of anger, but it tempts me. To remove this temptation and make you a forgiving Christian, I command my men to baptize you in yonder river.”

  “My lord, this is Holy Hugo,” protested Reinhardt, who had earned himself a womanish name by sparing Magyar infants and dogs. But Lothar and Wolfgang were haply at the graf’s right hand, and they sprang to seize the hermit by arms and legs. They swung him, lustily chanting the baptismal formula—“ ... et-spiritus-sancti-amen!”—and lofted him out over the steely flood of the Edelwesel. Flapping and twisting like a shot crow, shrieking garbled maledictions, he fell into the torrent and sank.

  Reinhardt said: “My lord, Holy Hugo—”

  “Cannot, it would seem, walk on water.”

  “True. But he may be able to breathe it. Despite the apparent theological inconsistency, he is an infamous wizard.”

  * * * *

  The warlord’s most irksome neighbor, the Bishop of Wurzendorf, had recently imported Greekish artisans to build him a steam-bath. Upon arriving at the palace, Heinrich was told that the bishop, with his sweating acolytes and catamites, would receive him in that dissolute swamp. Heinrich was in the habit of bathing only when necessary, and of stripping naked only in darkness. But he suspected that the bishop knew this and was trying to put him off balance, so he braved it out.

  “Your scars are a map of German triumphs!” the bishop cried in a voice that rose from an oily baritone to a jarring squeak. He was only fourteen, but neither his youth nor the stigma of bastardy had prevented him from earning a miter on the strength of his piety alone, as his uncle, Emperor Otto II, often boasted.

  The only map that concerned Heinrich was that of his estates, upon which the prelate had grossly infringed, but it would be unwise to state his grievance at the outset. Better to confess some minor lapse and put the pudgy youth in a forgiving mood.

  “My Lord Bishop, I have sinned,” he said as he squeezed into the intolerably dense atmosphere and picked his way through a serpent’s nest of invisible limbs. The bishop led him to an open cubicle and urged him to sit by his side on an oaken bench.

  “You aren’t going to start that, are you? ‘Forgive me for this, forgive me for that.’ Christ! It’s enough to make me vomit, the things you folk get up to. I’m off duty now, dear graf, so wait until you see some paltering priest before you start babbling about what you do when you think of Our Blessed Mother.”

  Heinrich pressed on: “I slew the hermit known as Holy Hugo.”

  “Well, good for you!” The bishop clapped him on a stony shoulder, his velvety hand lingering for an instant longer than the warlord liked. “Eremites are supposed to report to me, you know. We can’t have people going off into the wilderness and praying by themselves, can we? Holy Hugo never reported, and anyone I sent to remind him never came back.”

  “That a monk should be a wizard—”

  “A heretic, you mean!” The Bishop spoke with such vehemence that Heinrich was forced to admit he had indeed meant to say that. “He was no Christian at all, for though he professed devotion to the Son and the Holy Ghost, he heaped blasphemous scorn upon God the Father.”

  Questions of precedence among their three gods were a sore point with these carping clerics, and surely the last thing you wanted to get a bishop nattering about. An ill-considered word might provoke excommunication, which prevented your own wife from lying with you, or interrogation, which could prevent you from lying with anyone else’s.

  “Hugo’s mother,” the bishop went on, “was a foreigner and notorious spell-caster, who boasted that she was the last of an ancient race of were-foxes who worshipped the demon Bacchus. My predecessor broiled those vapors out of her, you can be sure. Hugo himself is—was, I mean, thank you, dear graf!—obsessed with seeking the ancient clepsydra that, he said, the Father had set in motion to create Time itself. Hugo believed that by reversing this clock with hydromantic arts he could restore to mankind the eternal pleasures of Eden.”

  This sounded like some kind of wizard to Heinrich, but he nodded and tried to look orthodox. He apparently succeeded, for the bishop beamed at him and cried, “I think I’ll grant you a plenary indulgence, you splendid blond beast, good for the rest of your life. In nomine, et cetera.” The boy sketched a languid loop in the steam. “That covers every sin ... except disobeying bishops.”

  Those who dared to irk Heinrich were routinely rebuked with five pounds of iron in the face. Even if he hadn’t left his spiky gauntlet outside, he couldn’t correct a bishop that way, at least not in the depths of a stronghold swarming with nominal clergymen who bore arms and were rumored to howl at the moon. It was clear that the bishop had farted, however, making the atmosphere even more intolerable. The graf set his hard face to granite lest it should show his disgust with the flatulent stripling.

  “What do you want?” the bishop demanded of someone on Heinrich’s blind side. He said to the graf: “That creature isn’t with you, is it?”

  Heinrich’s left eye had been treacherously gouged out in his childhood by a Wend he had been strangling. He usually kept Reinhardt at his left hand to make up for this loss. Soft-hearted or not, Reinhardt could make a viper seem indecisive when his lord was threatened. But the invitation to the bath had not included his bodyguards. He swiveled his head to behold the drenched and dripping figure of Holy Hugo in the steam. This apparition, and not the bishop, exuded the feculent stench. Whatever relief this gave was canceled by the sight of the hermit’s gray skin and milky eyes. With his jaw hanging slack and drooling river-bottom slime, he was plainly dead.

  “Wotan!” Heinrich cried.

  “Really, dear fellow, if there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s a persistence in superstitious, pagan—”

  The revenant seized the bishop by the throat and lifted him, kicking and flailing, from his seat. Heinrich sprang upright. He was appalled to find himself cringing into a corner. He had never in his life reacted to a threat in that way, nor had he ever thought twice about dealing a blow. The extra moment gave his blow the force of a hammer, but it was like striking a pond with a hammer. Fist and arm slipped through Hugo’s liquid form, and Heinrich sprawle
d on the planks of the floor. At the same time he was drenched in a shockingly cold flood.

  He was on his feet at once, but it was impossible to sort out his impressions of the last few seconds. He was soaked and shivering in the steam, as if someone had dumped a bucket of cold water over him, and he expected to confront the man who had done it. But no one stood before him. Holy Hugo was gone. The bishop lay contorted on the floor with a great purple plum stuffed in his gaping mouth: his tongue, Heinrich knew at once, the tongue of a strangled corpse. Blood oozed around the imprint of fingers in his fat neck.

  “What?” someone demanded at his elbow. “What have you—?”

  Unluckily for the skinny priest who quizzed him, Heinrich was again able to think. The occupants of this hellish stew had sensed only a violent disturbance in the steam. They had seen nothing. The graf slammed his fist down on the priest’s tonsure and drove him to his knees.

  “That will teach you not to kill bishops, foul heretic!”

  No one of the soft, moist throng who pressed unpleasantly around Heinrich could contest this version of events. The priest he had struck couldn’t. (This culprit’s refusal to regain consciousness for a full week, despite unstinting application of hot irons, icy immersions and caustic enemas, proved that he was an obstinate sinner, and so the bishop’s angry staff dropped his comatose body headfirst from the topmost spire of the cathedral. Except perhaps in a religious sense, this, too, failed to wake him.)

  Even as he elaborated on his tale of treason and heresy, the graf stared at the floor beneath his feet, where a quantity of water lay spilled. It rapidly seeped through the seams of the floorboards. No one else seemed to notice that it left behind some river weeds and a few twitching minnows and crayfish.

  Heinrich bent to pick up a glimmering, pea-sized object that caught his eye among this wrack, but it skittered away from his fingers as if by design before dropping through the boards.

  * * * *

  As it always did, Heinrich’s mood mellowed with the coming of long rains and long nights. In the twelve-foot bed that he shared with his principal heroes and their lemans, along with his favorite hounds and Wolfgang’s beloved goat, it was sweet to sleep with the rain pattering and plashing and gurgling all around; and sweet to couple, too, even though in his half-wakefulness he was sometimes uncertain whom or what he coupled with. By Christmas, when the glowworm-sun made only a perfunctory appearance that was often obscured by snow, he would be positively merry. Heinrich was a creature of night and fog.

  The resurrection of Holy Hugo no longer troubled him. He had known a shaman of the Wends who could raise the dead, he had known a rabbi of the Jews who could draw an image of a man in sand and have it rise up and walk, both to the extreme discomfiture of his simple-hearted Saxon warriors. That a wizard might remake himself from the water wherein he had drowned seemed commonplace.

  Life is hard enough for the living, Heinrich knew, and a dead man labors under a further handicap. He bought a few masses for the repose of Holy Hugo’s soul, hoping to increase his difficulties, for a vengeful spirit would surely be encumbered by a swarm of angels or demons striving to escort him to his eternal reward. The matter seemed closed.

  These self-satisfied thoughts had crossed his mind when he drifted off on a night of particularly torrential rain. He was woken before dawn by a woman’s piercing shrieks of outrage, disgust and, ultimately, puzzlement: “Help! Rape! I’m being ... douched?“

  The bed disgorged its inmates in a commotion of shouts and screams and barks. Candles were lit from the dying hearth, torches ignited. Swords were drawn to no purpose. Sleepy attendants and quidnuncs tumbled into the room to swell the uproar.

  A lady called Sieglinde had caused the disturbance. Drenched and shivering, not just from cold but loathing, she babbled an incoherent account of her violation. She was closely attended, less for the nonsense she spoke than for her heedless display of wet charms. Brother Matthias, who bustled in to cover her with a blanket, was thwarted by a deft kidney-punch.

  She asserted that a smelly intruder had raped her. In response to her violent struggles, he had not just doused her and half-drowned her but intimately injected her with icy water. All were prepared to dismiss this as a dream provoked by a fresh leak in the roof until it was remarked that three men had not yet stirred from the soaked bed, including Sieglinde’s husband, Lothar. They had been strangled. A heavy silence fell, to be broken by Wolfgang’s roar of grief upon discovering that his goat had suffered the same fate.

  It was thought suspicious—especially by Brother Matthias, who further suspected the graf of nearly killing him with that cowardly blow—that Heinrich paid no further heed to the gleaming and goose-pimply Sieglinde, nor to the corpses on the bed, but turned from the scene to push aside the oiled linen that covered an embrasure and contemplate the continuing downpour: as if he found the weather more interesting than the outrages against his vassals.

  * * * *

  It took a week for the bed to dry, and Heinrich and his intimates were forced to sleep on the floor like ordinary people. This was especially galling to the hounds, who spent the livelong night pacing with clicking claws to find a comfortable spot, then twisting to screw themselves into its invisible limits, only to rise after fretful naps and pace again. Instead of throwing things at the dogs—and he was the only one who would have dared to—Heinrich observed them. On the night of the horrors, he had glimpsed Schrecklichen pursuing something that might have been a mouse, though it looked more like a bead of quicksilver, until she collided painfully with the wall. She had persisted in snuffling and growling and clawing at a seam in the stone blocks that appeared too narrow even for a mouse to squeeze through. On their rounds of the room, Schrecklichen and the other hounds now would give this chink a routine sniffing. Heinrich believed it was not just the absence of a bed that made them restless.

  Although the graf was given to mad rages even when sober, and therefore seemed the obvious culprit, suspicion turned on Sieglinde as her story grew stranger with each retelling. Her marriage to Lothar had been tempestuous. Whenever he tried to beat her, she had bitten off one of his fingers, knocked out some of his teeth or stabbed him. He had shown off his domestic scars with greater pride than those he had earned in battle. “Who else dares to couple with a she-wolf?” he would demand as he flaunted his latest mutilation, and no one had the heart to answer: Just about everybody.

  Once her guilt was established by consensus, a clamor arose to throw Sieglinde off the battlements, but Heinrich ordered that she instead take her vows at the convent of St. Horrida. Some grumbled that this was no punishment at all, exile to a bucolic spa where ladies whose liberty was deemed inconvenient wallowed in sapphism and vindictive prayer. But this debate was forgotten in outrage over a fresh enormity.

  In his rounds of the countryside, Brother Matthias carried a flask for sprinkling holy water on infants, the sick and the occasional werewolf. Now that its silver finish had rubbed off, it seemed nothing more than a plain zinc flask; but Cardinal della Malebolgia, from whom the friar had bought it in Rome, had attested that this was the vessel Mary Magdalene had used to bring oil to the feet of Jesus. When it was stolen, its theft was seen as not just an inconvenience to Brother Matthias, not just an affront to Holy Mother Church, but as an assault against the majesty of God Almighty.

  So Brother Matthias saw it, and his sermons scaled heights of fervor from which the Apocalypse might be viewed as a sunlit garden of moderation. His auditors did not merely hear about the tortures of the damned, they felt them as their flesh blistered from the heat and bled from the pricking of imps’ tridents. The innocent threw fits and the wicked dropped dead before the torrent of fire that poured from his golden throat.

  Satan, it was evident to everyone, had chosen to walk abroad in the domain of Heinrich von der Hiedlerheim. Although some ascribed this to the graf’s murder of a holy man, not even Brother Matthias was so simple as to suggest it aloud.

  But Satan himself
was persuaded to stay at home by the cold that clamped down on the final month of the Year of Our Lord 980. The Millennium was not due for twenty years yet, but some scholars spent sleepless nights in a meticulous collation of Scriptures and the calendar, for the weather that now prevailed could portend nothing less than the end of the world.

  In Ostenburg, it was said, fires froze on the hearths. When a peasant who had set out to bring a sample of this wonder to his lord stopped for refreshment in a warm tavern, the fire thawed inside his smock and burned him to ashes. Searchers who retrieved the frozen body of a woodcutter in the vicinity of Dimnitz happened to drop the corpse, which broke into innumerable tiny crystals that were seized and scattered by the wind.

  With the cold came snow in every conceivable variety and permutation, in feathery flakes and wet wads, in stone bullets and steely darts, sometimes lit by unseasonable lightning in godless shades of pink and green. Strong men groveled before not only the fury but also the whimsicality of their Maker.

  As he had known it would, Heinrich’s mood lightened in the cold and darkness: so much so that those who already believed he was possessed were persuaded that a new and infinitely worse demon had set up residence. After a night and a day and most of another night of relentless drinking, he mounted naked to battlements slicked with black ice and, shaking his fist at a gale of granular snow, raved at its inability to harm him. He was lifted like a cowslip and hurled downward by an unexpected gust, but the snow was so deep at the foot of the ramparts that he rose laughing and hurled snowballs at his would-be rescuers.

  * * * *

  Under the influence of his wife, Hrotswilda, a fastidious lady of the Franks, Heinrich strove to set an example of gentility for his household. At the riotous feast on Christmas Eve, when he felt an urgent need to relieve his bladder, he made a point of stepping outside to the courtyard.