The troop reached the mouth as the top of the mountain crumbled like a burnt match head, shearing the face of the cliff into ruin. They ran into the woods as a river of mud and rock bubbled down, dancing like goblins in ink, until naught was left but a plain of trees flattened beneath the mountain. Men lay dead in the brush, crushed like hammocks between the trees. Survivors pulled their comrades from the wreckage, and others probed the marshy pools with sticks, watching bubbles return to the surface from those buried alive. Then a howl unfurled through the air, a cry of hatred.
The men rallied at the camp, replacing their lost with vows of retribution. Fierro returned to a troop count cut deep. Lightning struck and the men of lusterless minds ran into the wild, sworn on the oath of phantoms that the beast encamped among them. Then Fierro saw the young hunter at the fireside, warming his wounded hand over the flame. The captain harnessed his rifle on his shoulder and sat at his side, pulling a piece of chocolate from his rations.
“You saw it” Fierro said. The young man looked at the brick of cocoa then back to the captain and nodded. “Was it-” he stopped. If the words came out, what then? Could his men trust him if he could not envision his own sanity? He broke off a tab and handed it to the young hunter. “Tell me what you saw.”
“I- I don’t know” the hunter replied. “I saw this thing, like a dog, or a man. It was watching you move and when I was just about to step away it stood up. So I fired, but I was shaking so bad I missed it. Then it attacked me.” The young hunter lifted his hand like a mirage against an oasis of flames.
“Was it human?” The hunter turned his eyes toward him with a look that betrayed his soul, then drifted back into the flames.
~ 70
Fierro’s posse set camp in the field isolating the black forest from the castle. They cleaned their weapons of grit, clearing their iron sights of gun oil, and sharpened their sickles with strops and whetstone. Hunters caned their dogs, riling them with blistering words, and poachers blessed one another with grim slanders of rivalry. Bowman gathered at the fore where scroungers stocked the pyre with dead brush and ground flint till fire took the sprig. Archers dipped their arrows into the flame, then set them in their bows and drew, readying to scrawl the pitch with pens of fire.
A mantra rose into a chant and bowmen released their spears with a twang. Shafts sped the air, singing a chorus of ruination, and clamored the rooftops. Smoke drilled the stars into blackened sleep and hunters released their hounds to pour into the congested dikes beneath the walls. Fierro ordered the lumberjacks to charge the port as farmers steadied their pitchforks, waiting to impale villainous breast. The walls shook as fire spritzed out the windows, swooning like dying sparrows over of the men.
“Kill the beast!” they shouted, heaving the timber into the gate. A scream perished into silence behind them, when another took its place. The last man in the convoy spun around and no sooner gasped was caught at the throat by Chien and turned over slain. The next man lunged with his saber, offering his late father one last taste of blood against the blade, and found mud cleaved to the metal. Chien skirt the blow and locked its jaws around his head, hewing his face from the scalp to the bridge of his nose, anointing his eyes with blood. The men reeled and cried, dispersing like shod in cannon fire, and ran into concerts of turmoil across the field.
Fierro leveled his pistol, praying with a sailor’s tongue that the shot was faithful, and punched the passing shadows with dry shot. He slammed the weapon against the wall, culling the dead bead from the chamber, and packed another. The wolves’ cry heightened as the lumberjacks toppled the gate in suttee. Hunters entered the bailey where Chien swam in the shadows, breaking the dark pools with curdling screams, and vanished back into the fog, leaving bodies as monuments to its malice. Cowards hid in ransacked porticoes lying in rags of snow, dodging the cinder that swirled in the wind and settled on ice with searing kisses.
Apparitions of the beast leaped from shadow to shadow as men turned upon another, blurred in fright, and opened their brethren’ breast, while others stuck the barrel against their pallets and took the bullet without remedy. Fire swung from the walls and bridged the belfry. Cannons roared with solid copper balls tracing across the sky like bastard children of the sun. Clouds digested the rampart and transmuted the rage of man’s war machine into cyclones of hail, while cataracts of smoke spit from musket fire masticating the walls. Bodies piled in a holocaust of carnage.
Beasts poured into the meadow and men thrust prongs into their brothers’ slayers, heaving billows of fur, while the winds swept the brush and buried the fallen in crimson snow.
A sibilate of lightning opened in veins across the sky as Fierro dueled the wolves flowing through the portal like demons into swine. He turned the lane into a massacre, hacking heads into the mud and blasting brain matter out the back of their skulls, wielding their souls into hell. Men came to his side, stricken with rage, as wolves lanced with pitchforks and swords and arrows clambered from the mounds of dead and fell petrified under the men tearings the bodies apart with butchery.
Then a cry rained from the tower, shadowing the land in terror. Fierro turned and saw the beast at the window, its eyes raging, blood hanging in strands from its mouth, blaring like Lucifer from his throne for punishment. The wolves returned in masses, invigorated by damnation. Fierro's men fell in a sea of blood as the creatures swamped them against the fiery walls, thrashing and tearing until the fort crumbled, losing the skirmish to the inferno.
Fierro primed his weapon when Chien ran him to the ground, locking his jaws over his arm, digging through the meat, opened again and locked on the shoulder. The captain battered its head with the butt of the pistol, lacerating the ear, and buried his hand into its throat, prying it off his shoulder. The wolf snapped, pressing with the strength of a behemoth, and tore the flesh across his face, when Fierro took the pistol and interred the barrel in its eye. A gush of blood sprang around the pipe, like oil around a piston, while it leaped about, erratic as a burning martyr. Fierro drew his sword and clove between its brow until the blade was thatched in dead matter and skull flake. Chien kicked as its eyes rolled in opposite directions and blood drained from its mouth. At last death reaped its soul.
Fierro rose in a haze of disorientation as shadows swam through a backdrop of fire, chasing beasts into hell, clogging the screams with gunshots, vomiting blood, and disappeared back into the fog of war. He held out his hands covered in blood like it was a chrism. Then he heard a scream.
Gabrielle.
Fierro called his men as wild demons rose from the dead bodies, like damned souls from the necrotic, and chased him to the castle gates. Wolves slammed the walls, raking the wood with bloody paws, glutting the hold as they raped the nights with violent screams.
Darkness pressed the walls inside the castle. Silence drifted like a wraith, whispering ambush, when the scream pierced the void again. Fierro separated from his men. Gabrielle’s here! He ran ahead until his body absorbed into the pitch.
~ 71
Fierro’s men scattered through the passages, spreading out to look for their captain. They searched in blind fear, sparring the walls with swords as shadows passed, firing their guns empty, squeezing off dead rounds that clicked until the triggers broke, and chastised the silent night with screams of horror.
Fierro pushed into the darkness, daring to go beyond mortal boundaries, crossing the river Styx, until he would know for sure that that terrible cry belonged to his esteemed Gabrielle. For the sake of his soul he fought through the black until his eyes failed him. His hand dragged the wall, gliding across the cold stone like ice blocks, until a torch opened the end of the passage. Fierro took his pistol from its holster and armed it at his ear. He crept under the archway and drew on an empty corridor entering the bend.
Silence echoed back down the hall when he realized his men were nowhere in sight, their voices mute. He was alone. Fierro’s heart raged, and he bit so hard his teeth felt they pushed one another back into
the gum, forced into the jawbone. Was he the only one left inside the castle? Where was the beast? The thought struck him like a gong hammered in war. What if the beast is dead? Would he or the damned be able to leave the castle? Or face the woods alone? Would there be anyone to return home to if he could find the village again? No. He wouldn’t go. Couldn’t go. Not until he found the bodies of Gabrielle and the beast. He had to know she was gone, dead to him forever. While Fierro still held a mortal breath of faith, he would either find her alive or immortalize his despair with the sight of her remains. And he could never forgive the beast, nor the blood it spilled. Its hatred was too great for clemency. It would always idolize her, follow her, devour her.
Something moved in the shadows then vanished as flames opened the ceiling. Fear thundered through his heart as he doubled his grip on the knife and pistol and waited. The captain lifted the blade with a cry of hatred when the blackness faded beneath the fire, exposing a man. He stood center of the hall, his hip bone protruding like a spear bound in flesh, and staggered toward Fierro. A crescent of blood and ash covered his charred face, like a Geisha released from damnation.
“Are you there?” the man called. Embers crackled above his head like static in the winds. The man turned his head and listened to the echoes spirited with death. “You are! You are!” He began beating his head as spit driveled over his lip to his chest, crying and screaming, ripping his scalp till clots of skin and veins lay matted in blood.
“There’s a girl” Fierro yelled. “Where is she? Tell me where the girl is.”
“You’re real” the man cried. He slammed his head with one fists and clawed his bare chest like a rabbi renting his tallit with the other. “Then it has eaten you too!”
“The girl” Fierro bit hard, pitting his voice deep down till it returned guttural. “The girl!” The man raised his eyes. They strobed red and black in the flames, warping with insanity, then he shut them behind blackened lids and ran laughing into the shadows.
Fire chewed the ceiling through an orange ring, leaving a blackened mouth like negatives of the sun. A tongue of flames stretched through the hole and licked the statues, then attached to the curtains that lifted it back to the ceiling on flaming trolleys of linen. The statues sizzled and cracked, splitting like bone, when he heard the scream again. Fierro pushed deeper into the castle until the lives of his men, the memories of the dead, the scent of all the blood and excretion, fell as flat as a level. Gone. Gabrielle’s voice hung in the air as clear as a tocsin.
The captain entered the ballroom where smoke fell from the rafters like black viper scales. There sat an imitation throne huddled in a mound of bones. A collection of bodies rested against the back wall, maggots writhing in the heat. A body kicked and sagged its head to its chest. Wet snaps filled the air. A wolf came out from behind the chair, basked in the waste of carnage.
The creature charged. Fierro fired his weapon, pinging the lead off the brass backing of the throne, and the wolf toppled him to the ground. It mauled his shoulders, reopening the wound, raking the blood in nets, until Fierro brought his blade around and stuck it through the ribs. A squirt of sic fanned across the ground as the wolf flounced around, crying and belching blood, when Fierro brought the grotesque pageant to a halt when he reloaded his pistol, placed the barrel against the side of its head and blew the damnation out its skull, then walked off in revulsion with the smoking pistol dangling in his hand.
Fierro went up to the throne, dressed like a sacrificial altar in dead offerings, and pulled the bodies from the mound, kicking them aside, rolling them over, checking each putrid face for hers. The rot stunk like high hell and gagged him, but choked back the bile until he got to the last corpse. He leaned into the replica and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, feeling he had just done something damnable, when the scream echoed again.
He rose and ran through another passage until he found himself in the court, center of the castle. Flames straddled the steeple like a candle burning at the wick, when he saw Gabrielle lean out the window, a dress flowing in her hands like a flag. She saw the captain and released it, letting the gown drift like angel garment out to sea.
Gabrielle was alive.
Then she sucked back inside the walls as a terrible howl bolstered into the night. Fierro ran across the court and entered a side door where his men greeted him with weapons drawn, an execution squad, then wringed into cries of joy as they brought him under arms. Their captain was safe. He looked at the faces, the young and the old. Each was blackened by war. Blood hid the freshness of the youth and the wrinkles of the old. All he needed was all they had left; no escape, just the intent to kill.
~ 72
Fierro entered the main hall. A bed of curtains rested at the foot of the throne with bones jutting from the hem. The captain carried his pistol high, held close to his ear; every good sailor knows that his weapon whispers both fear and caution. He gave signal and the men fanned out. They were in its lair, now where was it?
Scratches resonated from beneath the dinner table and the men hailed the sound with a band of terrible cries, many stumbled as though dead. Death clogged the air, so thick it could be licked off their flesh like dirty sweat. Fierro took point, and nearing the table raised his pistol and armed the hammer. His men drew their weapons and a fiery torrent stormed the hall. The linen flailed under the barrage as the table splintered then rested with sizzling pockmarks. A demented soldier stood at the back of the room, cackled, and discharged a solitary shot. The blast reverberated back into nothing.
Silence.
The beast burst out from under, shattering a rotted stool, and tumbled a soldier into a corpse beneath it. The men scattered like flies from the dead and ran trembling to all corners, finding no refuge, as the beast tore through the pack in a blaze of ire, leaving a vigil of mangled bodies. Hunters were quick to join their brothers in death, while the beast darkened the ground with blood like fire blackens the surface it touches. Gunfire rattled the walls as Fierro thrashed his head to and fro, following the shadow that left in its wake only ghosts of his men. Growls echoed amid the cries, and ricochet broke the windows, scattering glass like dice thrown in death’s gamble. Another wave of gunfire clapped and Fierro collapsed as a chunk of meat popped from his leg. Blood swelled around his fingers in pools. The men’s cries deafened in his pain.
The beast’s strange howl receded to a limp wail that sick dogs make near death. Could it be dying? Bodies sat beside one another in contorted huddles, guns lay scattered, racked and fractured in their snarled hands. Their mouths rested in gapes, the drawl of oblivion, gasps of terror.
Then it came.
The beast stood erect, its head protruding over a mound of bodies. A wet gnarr gurgled in its throat as ropes of blood drained from the corner of its mouth like a scarlet bridle. Fierro readied his pistol and fired. The shot cracked through the room with a sharp whistle and knocked a small mettle of fur off its shoulder with a heavy thud. The beast charged as fear gathered in Fierro's pores, the urge of his bowels lightening him. Its steps uttered not just death, but an awful death. How could he fail Gabrielle?
His eyes locked with the beasts in a truce of war, holding those black and sunken moons. The face maimed with hatred cried out as it drew nearer. It strode on all fours then dashed into the air. Fierro loosened a shrill cry he did not know was his own till the echoes fell off the distant walls. The beast was gone, and with it trailed a hellish scream.
The captain stood alone in the room. Dead bodies littered the floor. He held a knife with a sticky handle, and warmth drizzled around his arm and down the back of his hand. The gash glistened in his skin. Two blackened wands of meat rested on the floor. Fierror reached down and gathered the fingers stricken from the beast. He pocketed them, staining his pants with black ink.
The wound less than mortal proved it less than divine. Fierro held his side. Its nails carved him to the bone and a profuse amount of blood poured out like a horn of wine. He anchored the pistol on
his belt and ground out the burnt wick with his teeth, then, posing the gun on his belly, adding to the burn of the fresh wound, slid another shredded strip of flint beneath the hammer. Fire crackled in the hallway as roars fumed in the swells. Men lay emaciated on the floor, pedestals of flesh, as their blood dried on the walls like wings of Lucifer’s seraphs.
“Run back to hell!” Fierro shouted. “I will follow you and finish this!” He rounded the corner with his pistol drawn and found it empty, dashed in waves of ember and soot. Snow raged against the walls outside, but Fierro only recalled the bodies of his friends resting beside their empty graves, and heaved at the thought of his brigade lying dead behind, shredded and blanch, desiccated in their final breaths. They were forever manacled in this hell.
Fierro lowered his arm and advanced, knowing somewhere Gabrielle found refuge, and so too somewhere would the beast stalk upon its prey. That couldn’t happen. He ran down the hall, toting a heavy leg opened by misfire, while his tongue gamboled for spit, throwing a futile batch of scud to his parched throat. The wound dripped and formed mud in the ash. By night the castle turned from a cold fortress into a crematorium, with the scent of necrosis rich in the air; Fierro carried all that was left of his friends in the blood on his boot heel. He swore by his fathers that Gabrielle would live this or no one would, when the scream returned louder. He grabbed his side, fumbling with blood, and felt nausea fill his body.
Gabrielle! His feet turned clumsy and stomped harder as his wound became dead weight. Fierro drove after the beast, tailing the ambled reek that clung to its fur. His arm hung limp at his side with fatigue pulsing through his veins. The notch in his side burned, and he strained for breath as pain pulsed through his ribs and wrapped his spine. The wound blossomed like a venomous flower poisoning him with fevers and cold sweat. He rested against a wall, swallowing more air than breathing.
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