Abomination (18 page)

“Why don’t he fight?” asked one of them. “What kind of a man don’t even raise a hand to defend himself?”

“A coward,” the other replied.

“A coward runs,” said the first. “A coward . . . cowers! He did nothing! That is not right. That is not . . . human.”

It bothered the tall man most of all. He had done much violence in his life, against all manner of men. Some fought back. Some tried to escape. Some begged for mercy. But never this. This one had simply knelt before them and taken the most savage of beatings without resistance or even complaint, almost as though it were a punishment he was glad to receive. Whatever his reason was, something told the tall man that he did not want to know it, that the explanation would be even more unsettling than what he had just witnessed.

He crouched in the mud beside Wulfric and began stripping him of his cloak. He untied the frayed cord of rope around Wulfric’s waist and threw back the layers of sopping-wet wool, eyes widening at what he found beneath. Wulfric was naked save for the cloak, just as he had said, but his body was wrapped in a length of heavy iron chain slung across both shoulders, crisscrossing his chest, and encircling his waist like a saggy iron belt.

“What in God’s name . . . ?” muttered one of the others. They all gazed down at the strange sight, none knowing what to make of it. But there was a reason the tall one was the leader. As the others tried to puzzle it out, he found one end of the chain and began to unravel it.

“I know an ironmonger in Ipswich who will pay well for this,” he said. “Help me get it off him.”

The notion that this bizarre episode might become a profitable venture after all bucked up the other men, and they moved without delay to help separate Wulfric from the chain. They rolled him over, face-first into the mud, as they unspooled the iron from around his waist and then his shoulders. They paused briefly as the unwinding of the chain revealed Wulfric’s bare chest and the strange mark at its center.

“What is that? Some kind of a burn?” said one.

“Idiot,” said another. “No burn looks like that. It’s a tattoo, look at the shape of it. You can see it’s supposed to be a beetle.”

“Who would want a tattoo of a beetle?”

The tall one hissed at them both to get back to work. Soon they had the chain free, but seeing it all unwound, they realized there was much more to it than had at first appeared.

“There must be twenty-five, thirty feet of it,” one of them said.

“It weighs a bloody ton,” said the other as he tried to gather it up from where it snaked across the ground and haul it over his shoulder. “Ipswich is ten miles or more. Who’s going to carry it?”

“We all will,” said the tall man, picking up part of its length and motioning to the others to do the same. When they had managed to get it all up off the ground and had divided its weight equally among the three of them, they set off one behind the other with the chain draped over their shoulders. But it was heavier even than it looked and they staggered as they tried to walk it back to their encampment, just a few yards away. One man slipped and was dragged down into the mud under the weight.

“Bugger this,” he said, as he threw the chain off him and clambered back to his feet. “It’s too heavy! We’d be lucky to get this even a mile, let alone ten. And what about our gear?”

The tall man knew that he was right. Perhaps the three of them could haul it back to town, but not along with their camping gear, which was cumbersome enough. He glanced back at Wulfric and found himself wondering how one man could possibly have borne
so heavy a load—and more perplexing, why he would be doing so, out here in the barrens.

The other two were still bickering with one another. The tall man shut them up and made them strike camp. With their gear on their backs, the three of them disappeared once more into the mist, leaving Wulfric in the road where he had fallen, motionless and naked, the rain washing away the blood that still seeped from his wounds.

It was some time before Wulfric came around. He rose slowly, with a pained groan as the bruises and welts all over his body hollered at him in unison. He was sitting upright before he realized he no longer felt the weight of the chain on his body. It was gone. Had the robbers taken it? The chain was the only thing he allowed himself to possess, the one thing in the world he truly needed. He looked around frantically, eyes trying to focus in the light of dusk, and exhaled in relief when he saw it lying on the ground a few feet away, where the thieves had abandoned it.

He felt a sharp pain in his abdomen as he stood and put his hand to it, remembering that he had been stabbed. It hurt, but it would heal; it mattered only if it would slow his search to find a safe place before night came. It was already getting dark.

Still unsteady on his feet, Wulfric walked over to the pile of chain lying in the mud and began to coil it around his body as he had done so many times before, around his waist and over his shoulders, until he carried its full weight. He glanced around for his cloak and found it balled up in the road a few feet from where he had risen. He shook off the excess mud and flung it around him before leaving the road and heading back into the heathlands. He rarely spoke to God these days, but as the skies darkened, he prayed he might yet find a single strong tree out here on this
desolate moor before night came. He had far too much blood on his conscience already.

After walking for about half a mile, Wulfric found a small secluded wood on the far side of a hill that hid it from the road. It was perfect, and he gave thanks for not having to spend the night in the open. He had done so before when there was no better option, sleeping in some remote valley or field, and hoping. Yet sometimes an unfortunate traveler or some other hapless soul would stumble upon him, and Wulfric was powerless to prevent what would inevitably happen next. Every time, he punished himself for not being strong enough to stop it.

But for tonight, at least, he had found a place of safety, and just in time; as darkness began to fall, Wulfric could feel the tremors he had come to know all too well, the feeling of something beginning to stir beneath his skin.
Not much time
. He moved deeper into the wood and sought out the largest tree, a sturdy yew with a stout trunk and strong, deep roots. There he shrugged off his cloak and uncoiled the chain from his body until he stood naked once again. His body twitched and convulsed as he walked the chain around the girth of the tree, wrapping it once, then twice.
Quickly
.

Wulfric sat with his back against the tree and slipped the chain over his head and around his chest. On one end of the chain was a padlock, the key to which Wulfric kept on a loop of cord around his neck. Hands trembling, he turned the key in the lock, and the mechanism sprang loose. Pulling the chain around him, he hooked the padlock between two of its links and snapped it shut, then pushed his body against it to test the integrity of the binding. It was not an easy thing to do, chaining oneself to a tree, but Wulfric, through years of practice, night after night, had mastered it.

Satisfied that he was properly secured, he set the key on the ground beside him. And there he sat, shivering in the cold, waiting for the beast.

He would not wait long. Just moments after he shackled himself, Wulfric’s tremors became convulsions, then worse. He cried out in pain as his entire body spasmed and seized. It had started in earnest, and what would follow would be agony, unbearable. He closed his eyes tight and bit down hard, trying to focus his mind, to divert it from the excruciating pain that was radiating out from the center of his chest and infiltrating every extremity. It was growing within him, the beast, pushing outward, violently, in every direction as it sought its escape. Wulfric’s skin rippled and writhed, his arms and legs contorting at impossible angles, bones snapping with a sickening crunch as his back arched outward and he strained and thrashed wildly against the tree. Wulfric heard the iron chain groaning under the stress, and with his last coherent thought, he prayed that the many nights like this one had not weakened it. That it would hold him. Then he could tolerate the pain no more and finally, mercifully, he faded into blackness. His head lolled forward, and from the scarab-shaped scar at the center of his chest, his flesh tore open, an oily black pincer emerging from the widening wound and grasping wildly at the air. As it had countless times before, the monster that lay dormant within Wulfric by light of day was born once more into the darkness of night.

Wulfric awoke into the nightmare state that he shared with the beast.

He was conscious, after a fashion. It would be wrong to say that he and the beast shared a mind as they shared a body, for
the beast itself was mindless. All it knew was hatred and death. It existed only to kill; that was its sole instinct, its sole purpose.

As the creature was trapped within the cage of Wulfric’s body by day, so Wulfric was trapped within the body of the creature by night. An unholy symbiosis. Wulfric was fully aware, fully present, yet powerless to influence or control the senseless, savage thing that he became after dark. It was beyond maddening, the feeling of being nothing more than a marionette, forced to perform mindless violence by some maniacal puppeteer. Many times he had tried to overpower it, focusing his mind and mustering every ounce of willpower in a bid to stay the creature as it descended upon a defenseless village or caravan, but it was never enough. The beast’s compulsion to slaughter and destroy was deep and primal; it could not be denied, try as Wulfric might. Time after time, he was an unwilling participant in the carnage, just as he had been that first night long ago when, in the form of the beast, he had murdered his friends and neighbors, his wife and newborn child.

Finally, having given up any hope of controlling the monster within him, Wulfric had hit upon the idea of the chain. If he could not restrain this vile thing while it possessed him, he would do so while it still slept. Lashed against a tree, the beast could writhe and flail and shriek all it wanted, but if the chain were strong enough, it could do no harm. So it would be tonight; the wretched thing emerged from its prison of flesh and bone hungry for blood, only to find itself immobile, imprisoned by the trap Wulfric had set for it.