Beast

by Thomas Castle

  Luis ducked behind a log and grit his teeth till he messed his pants. He raised his eyes just above the ridge and found the forest remiss. His reality dissolved. Doubt swam in his head as beads of sweat ran into his eyes and breath fell from his lips like menstruation from an anemic. Then a swans song rose from the fray. What beauty he thought.

  Luis pulled himself to his feet and dusted his britches, reseating the knife in its sheath. Everything was fake, the does nuzzling the grass with their snouts, the meadowlarks clucking with sharp whistles, the stunt to frame his manhood, all of it a sham.

  Then a putrid smell entered the air. Luis turned to see the creature in royal garb. Pants hung off it’s hip with a drawstring pulled out to the knot and a crown rested offset on its head. One shoulder slumped to the side, dislocated, and its eyes rolled around in a trance. Blood dripped from its paws. Veins of fox fur were sewn between its teeth. Then its eyes turned to him, its pupils were black stone.

  Luis ran. Pales of sunlight splashed his face, burning his eyes, turning the world blurry, while his chest thundered like a galley slave beating the drum of his heart. He ran until he could smell the smoke stacks rising on the horizon and hear the festival. Home was within reach. Luis reached out to touch the veil of music and fell into the loam, losing his knife to a pond beside the trail.

  The beast opened the woods behind him, immured in chains of moss, and stopped when its shadow covered the young man. Luis crawled, clawing the ground for sanctuary, when the beast opened the skin across his back. Luis bit into the dust, screaming as dirt clung to his tongue. He flopped around and kicked, pressing the wound into the mud, and found the forest empty. Luis turned, finding his rucksack next to the dead fox, and ran until the rooftops broke the tree line and the scent of mules and butter fried grits loomed in the air. Coming out of the woods he saw children arm in arm circling a maypole, with flyers sewn into their caps, waving ribbons and laughing.

  “Help” he cried, scissoring the air with his arms as the rucksack romped on his shoulder like an untamed colt. The children stopped their laughter like a dam catching water, and ran into the village. Moments later the mayor returned with Sir James Walden and Fierro. Luis fell into the grass, then rose again, staggering. Fierro caught him in his arms, feeling his tears met against his shoulder. The young boy sobbed and clutched at his clothes, sighing something incomprehensible.

  “He’s bleeding” Sir James said as he pulled Luis from Fierro and walked him to his uncle. “Don’t worry now, boy. You’re home.” The boy whimpered, caught in a cyclone of gasps, and held his uncle like a whipped man holding the flogging stone.

  “What happened, son?” Elton La Noire asked, taking Luis under his arm.

  “The boy’s drunk” Sir James said, turning to Fierro. “Had he been supervised none of this would have happened.” Fierro bit his tongue like a wrangler lassoing a bucking bronco. “Take him! He’s been through enough. Just look at what the ass has done to himself.” Sir James raised the flap of bloodied cloth off Luis’ back, flaunting his wound.

  “There was a terrible creature” Luis cried. “About the height of the captain. And it wore clothes like a man, a king. I swear it, uncle. It attacked me.”

  “Machinations!” Sir James said under his breath. “Go with them, Fierro. They need a consort to help him between the bed and outhouse.” Fierro felt like a wet nurse to be suckled by an infant, a diminutive object, a pawn. The captain followed the mayor and the boy to the house. Wooden figurines sat strewn throughout the home, a caricature of manhood, and as Fierro was about to touch one the mayor snapped his fingers.

  “Get some bandages” Elton La Noire barked. Fierro opened the drawers and found handwritten letters with Gabrielle’s name permeating them like some malignant disease. He crumpled them. Fierro searched the dressers until his energy wasted with his patience, then pulling the final knob, found a batch of shirts. He set them at the foot of the bed and tore them into rags.

  “Dress them” the mayor said. Fierro pulled back Luis’ shirt to a slick line drawn the length of his shoulder blade. The graze was inflamed in a mushroom of pus, and as he treated the ailment he raised his eyes to see Gabrielle passing the window. Something as minuscule as waiting on the overgrown child sweetened for the moment that she might find him in the act of a good deed. But once her shadow slid off the windowsill Fierro returned to a world ruled by musk and sweat, by thorns and insipid men.

  He turned back to the whimpering boy, watching him grasp like a babe weaning from the teat, and jammed the rag into his sores. The uncle ripped his hand back by the wrist and ordered him out. Fierro looked back at the door, hearing the mayor assuage the broken ego with flattery, and swore by some malfeasance that this madness was far from over.

  ~ 29

  Adam returned to the castle and shrugged his robe to the floor. Dreadlocks of fur held the crown bobbing on the back of his neck. Fox viscera lay in the ruts between his gum and cheeks. His stomach grumbled, kicking with the blood of grouse and raccoon. Snowfall came early while death hanged its reef on the lands. Adam searched the pantry for food, finding naught but spoil. Famine came as the buttress to winter, stealing the souls that the cold could not. He disemboweled the sacks of putrefied tomatoes, scattered the rot and compost across the floor, and salvaged shriveled apple cores along with molding potato skins.

  “Meat” Adam coughed. He rubbed his hands and blew hot air into his palms like bellows. He left the kitchen in a cry of hunger and smashed a statue into rubble, running till sunlight hit his face. A garland of vultures circled the bailey like flying apocalyptics, bringing the reckoning for all his sins.

  Adam ran into a nearby chalet where a bed of straw lay halfway out the door. A cauldron sat frozen to the hearth and fire kicked the back of the kiln, guarding its coal from the building icicles, hissing as the water trickled in. Adam took a ladle and dipped it into the flames, freeing it on the ligneous wing. He brought it to his face, to the fur that filtered the cold, leaving only the icy needles slivering into his flesh.

  Adam crept through the house, breaking the window slats and bundling them into a faggit, when he came upon Miss Lena. Her body lay on the floor. He went to move the shell and it teetered on the joints, frozen as though betwixt with Midas’ touch.

  He set the burning ladle beneath her hand, melting the ice until the finger split and water dripped from the point. With a knife taken from the kitchen he pared the digit and bit it. Ice grated against his teeth. He moved the member into his palms, rubbing it, then bit again. The finger cracked into ice crystals, widening the fisher to a wool gray bone. A deep cold pushed into the home as the sun fell the sky. Adam kicked and yelled as the chill swept in, and threw the finger across the room. Death waited, hidden in the frost, counting the hours till it would call him in its tenure.

  Adam collected the window slats, broken furniture legs and kitchenware, and piled them onto the floor, then lit it with the burning ladle. A hair of smoke grew from the head of the pile like a snake’s tongue dancing in fire. Flames crawled from the dune and whirled about, but too small to sustain a night. He looked to Miss Lena’s body, having a carp between starving and freezing. Adam took the corpse and stripped the clothing into the blaze, then set the old woman atop the pyre.

  Flames licked her body, nibbling a poisonous berry, then rose and consumed the immolation. The blue meat darkened into a crisp brown glaze as drool hung behind his lips like a moat. Then it dried on his pallet with the ice cold air. Miss Lena’s skin cracked, the threads of fat foamed, and all the provisions blackened into a sepulcher of ash. Her hair coiled and shrunk in the heat, spinning afire into the night like sky lanterns.

  Adam disrobed and tossed his pants onto the pyre, then tore the crown from his head and inducted the fire with the gemless headpiece, watching the gold turn into caramel drops over the flames. Adam closed his eyes and rested his head on the deck.

  The king slept.

  ~ 30

  Tambourines jingled as the masked
jesters marched the streets on stilts, dragging dyed linen sewn to their cuffs like tails of basilisks. Percussionists led the flutists, generating a metronome of clicks and clacks. Clowns gave a harangue of wild stories while the acrobats reenacted them, climbing the air with twirls and flips. Men in scaly red tunics grew fire from flaming sticks with their spit, and beautiful women in risque gave voice to the sailors who filled the air with their applause. Goats tethered in bells ran in serpentine fashion through the street, sweetening the inflection with children’s laughter.

  Fierro sat atop an old ranch fence outside of town, watching the fiesta spread like ocean spume. He listened to the weather vane gripe whenever the winds called from another direction, and spit into the cold dust. Luis was a champion of cowards, still the mayor heralded his nephew through the town on an titular seat. It was a feast of fools.

  The captain desired to reenlist in the corps, to wake every morning to dogface thugs, eat the same roach ridden slush that every other toothless bum gummed, to touch the helm once more and feel it slide across his palms as it drove against the waves. He missed the way the sails kicked as the undercurrent passed the rudder, the way the men raised hell as seagulls swooped and deuced over their heads. Some might say it was menial, but it had purpose.

  Then he saw Gabrielle leave the crowd. She was Lazarus among corpses. Gabrielle walked the fields as the winds raised the hem of her dress and the dust split, opening a path before her feet. Moonlight, the jealous lover, held her as she neared Fierro.

  “Hey” she said. Fierro dipped his head, spit on the bottom rung of the fence, then brought his eyes back up to Gabrielle and patted a section on the rail next to him. The young lady took her place beside him, spitting on the rung beside his, and took a deep breath. “I keep hoping they’ll drop Luis into the dirt.”

  “Only if the gods weren’t deaf” Fierro replied. “What are you doing out?”

  “My lantern ran out of oil so I had to stop reading. And I like the music. Too bad we need people to have music. It would be so, so nice without them.” Fierro looked at her, the way her lip tightened as firm as a crisp apple when she smiled. It was time to shed the layers of cowardice. Whether the gods would accept his fortune or deny him was no longer his concern.

  “Gabrielle, if I left, would you come with me?” She set her hand on his and kissed his cheek, laying her head on his shoulder. The stars grew magnetized while the moon portended bittersweet truth.

  “I can’t. All this time I’ve waited for my father. You two may have never settled your differences, but I can’t let go hope of seeing him again.”

  “He left you too. I am the only one who came back.” She drew her head off his shoulder and his knuckles tightened. “Do you really want to get hitched with someone from this town?”

  “Do you?” Fierro bit his lip and drove his eyes across the fields. “I just want closure. My father went to the king of this province. But he told me he couldn’t say more, and that it was best to leave this enigma be, so said the nurse waiting me anyway. Then he vanished.”

  “Come with me” Fierro repeated. “The only thing that coincides between we men is the understanding that you don’t belong here. So take this opportunity and start a new life. There is a new world. A new start.”

  “A new wife.” The captain turned his eyes toward Gabrielle’s, seeing the girl he grew up with, seeing the same fears, the same lost child, same soul.

  “I love you.” She lowered her head and took her hand away from his. He awaited a response.

  “I hoped that once you disembarked that I would never see you again. I prayed that you would find love and never return, because if you did I knew I would never be ready. I can’t go, Fi. I’m sorry.” She slid off the fence, like another love falling into Arge’s River, and he watched as she disappeared into the night at the end of the field. A tear fell from his eye, the only since his breath as a babe, and slaughtered in the dust.

  The stars drew back into hibernation as Fierro jumped from the fence, landing like a head on a guillotine, and walked toward the festival. Willem emerged from the crowd ornate in a laurel, staggering with husks of corn pinned through his vest. He hugged Fierro and belched, slapped his back and put a drink in his hands.

  “Come on” Willem slurred. “Luis has a private party for guest list guests only.”

  “What are these?” Fierro flicked a cornhusk while his mind reverted into the void. Willem turned his head and blinked, then nodded. “Well?”

  “Oh yes!” Willem wiped his mouth and pulled the underwear from his crotch. “These buy you a kiss from any participating dame. Take one” he said, stuffing Fierro's pocket with a shuck. “Maybe Gabrielle will oblige.”

  “Let’s go to the court.” Fierro placed his hand on Willem’s shoulder and shoved him off. People danced like mantis in a cologne of sweat and rosewater, spitting fire across the sky on alcoholic vapor. Women stole rinds from Willem’s vest and left his lips a debt; cheers sprung from the crowd in a geyser of laughter. Heat and cold fluctuated as pockets of bodies opened up to starlight and closed again until the two men reached the court blockaded by a parapet.

  Offset rows of white cloth tables lead to the honorary seat where sat the mayor and his nephew. Poached quail danced on the Luis’ fork as he tore the flesh with his teeth, leaving the knife idle in his fist mounted to the table. Elton La Noire slapped his back with a belt of laughter and raised a goblet to the crowd.

  “To Luis La Noire” the mayor hollered. Wine sloshed and fell off the lip, cascading over his knuckles like blood red beads of a rosary. “Today we celebrate Luis’ inauguration. He has shown himself confident, reliable, and I am proud to accept him as a new member and benefactor of this great little village.” The crowd rose, beating their palms and the young man stood. Meat rippled in his mouth and a soiled bib hung over his shoulders like a placard for convicts. The applause sent Fierro into rage as he sank his hands into his pockets. Luis wiped his mouth on his sleeve and held up his palm to quiet the crowd.

  “Thank you” Luis mumbled through jowls chalked full of meat. He drained the grail then turned his eyes on Fierro. “I foster a secret; I love my people. I went out into those woods to prove that I too can be like you, to forge, to feed, to fight. On that day, I left and came home like you all.

  “I give my utmost to my Uncle Elton for seeing me through this. Without him, none of this, for me or for you, would happen.” Luis turned to his uncle and took his hand. “I attribute my safety to you. Your blessing saw me out into the woods, and received me home with the same spirit of generosity with which I was sent. Now, as you may have seen, I have a small blemish” he raised a finger to his eye opposite the bruise. “I learned fast that low hanging fruit comes from low branches.” The crowd laughed and Luis received their applause with raised hands.

  “Thank you all. And thank you, uncle” Luis said.

  “To Luis La Noire!” Elton toasted with his stein. The chair skid as Fierro fell into his seat, leaving black scud on the flagstones.

  “Cheer up” Willem slapped the captain’s knee. “You’re in good standing. Sir Walden requested your presence. Maybe one day you’ll rise to dignitary. Don’t scoff lady luck. You’ve been entreated for. Quit being a munce and show some gratitude.” Fierro turned around where he found Sir James and Gale seated in conversation.

  “He loves Gabrielle” Gale said as Sir James sipped his cocktail and batted his hand to denounce it. “Aye, he does. It’s certain now his promotion came that he’ll propose.” Fierro turned back into his seat and took the flute of chardonnay. His hand quivered, watering the tablecloth in fizz, then set the spirit back and stood up.

  “Where are you going?” Willem asked. “We can’t turn in yet.” Fierro made his way out the gate into a street sewn in rice and flower petal. His heart thundered as he fell to the wayside, clamping his wrist to his forehead, and hung his head to his chest. Why did he eavesdrop when the most scurrilous thing was spoken? Could Luis win her love with his
statute, and all his reiterations? He was a scoundrel, an affront to manhood, and his promotion a slight against every industrious person.

  Fierro wanted him dead.

  But how? The boy was never alone. His demise would be suspect. What then of making him disappear; would it be all the same to the people? Luis has an ego that cannot be metered. It wouldn’t be unprecedented of him to revalidate his merit. Why not wheedle him into the woods again? Whatever calamities may befall him are coincidental. Would anyone besides the mayor and his lackeys care?

  Fierro lifted his head and watched as men pulled their friends along, calling one another chum as they shared a bottle of hooch. He turned toward the party where Luis danced with a young lady, wondering if she were a concubine, and then looked to the woods where owls flew into the night and disappeared over the forest. Something out there spooked them, those feathered sages.

  That was it. Something attacked the boy, tasted his blood, knew his scent. Fierro stood to his feet and began toward his home. Tonight he would commence his plan. Luis’ days were summed.

  ~ 31

  The tanner opened the door to Adam sleeping beside a smoldering mound of ash. He found the king naked on the floor with a wolf lying at his feet. He pulled the stoker from the silt and drove it across the creature’s brow. A sharp yelp awoke Adam as the tanner circled the wolf, caught in a Ferris wheel of hatred, pummeling the creature as it spun about, snipping at him. The king rose to his feet and staggered over the fuming pyre.

  “Run!” the tanner yelled as he thrust the stoker at the wolf and spat. “Run, sire!” Adam dove atop of him, slamming his head into the boards, and threw the poker across the room. The wolf clamped onto the tanner’s ankle, wrenching it back and forth till the bone broke the skin. The tanner kicked, biting into Adam’s hand where the valley rested between the thumb and forefinger, till blood squirt.