Weaver

A Short Horror Story

Blood burbled from the peasant woman's mouth. Limbs akimbo, swathed in a rough hemp dress, she looked like another mound of refuse adorning the raw dirt street.

Help. Help me. She slobbered useless pleas through the fountain of her puny life's blood.

The horse had collided with her at a trot when she had jerked into the road without looking.

A spasm? A paroxysm?

A hysteria?

Some deficiency of mind, spirit, or flesh to be sure, to toss herself with abandon into the road. The horse's hooves had made a mash of her breast. There was no medicine to cure such a wound. No salvation.

Help was a speedy journey to the afterlife.

The young lord obliged in his typical manner. He assailed her withering flesh with strikes of his riding crop.

Imbecile! Cretinous whore! Filthy vagrant!

This was an ill-timed inconvenience. He had an engagement in the afternoon with the fair Virginia of Lansdowne. They were to go riding, and as a first, without chaperone. Such was the esteem he had garnered with his consummate portrayal of a gentleman.

To have his horse mangled, his boots spattered with blood, to arrive late—if now at all?

It was inconceivable.

Damned maniac! Rug licker! Lunatic fool!

The riding crop zipped and swished. A wet slap of ripped skin adding every insult to injury.

Peasants gathered in a crowd. They gazed at the spectacle, mute and stupid.

The young Lord Archibald stopped to catch his breath.

The broken woman twitched.

No more pleas. The blood stagnant. Yet something still moved under her clothes. With trepidation, Archibald aimed his riding crop under the folds of the woman’s blood-stained dress and lifted the fabric to peer underneath.

The color drained from Archibald's rubicund jowls. He swore and stamped his boots into the squirming fabric. 

Still flesh at last. 

This woman is deformed, he spat to the onlookers. Have her body burned and bury the remains.

He drew his pistol. With a tender look, he patted Challenger’s mane one last time, and then fired a single shot into the charger's skull.

The echo rang through the village.

Bring me a horse, Archibald growled.

A horse was produced, a plodding Haflinger fit for hauling apple carts.  Archibald saddled and rode off, gritting his teeth at the indignity he was forced to endure. 

Oh, the humiliation!

*

Who was the woman? No one knew. Her face was unfamiliar. Her dress that of Merlepike, so of no exotic provenance. But her hair—what could be seen of it—knotted in a style unlike that of any proper woman in Barnaben.

Probably some lunatic from the neighboring Titusville. They were all fools and derelicts of irresolute character there. Certainly, unchaste as well.

The woman had perfumed herself heavily, so heavily it masked her death scent, and she had covered many odd blemishes on her skin with powders and paints.

Surely, she was a woman of ill repute and loose morals.  Likely, she suffered one of the diseases of her trade.  That explained the deformities, her strange movements, her jerking, twitching, shuddering course directly into the path of the young lord's horse.

She had probably been driven off from Titusville and made her way across the forest to spread her sin amongst the decent folk of Barnaben.

She was no great loss. Her end no tragedy. Her treatment not shy of justified.

The peasants bickered over who should have to move her.  Stray dogs came to lap at the gravy of her wounds.  They were driven off with sticks and stones.

A downpour, one of those capricious and violent brumes that were liable to fall off the peaks of the eastern mountains, settled the matter.

The mayor, a milliner of more esteem in his own mind than wieldable authority, cajoled two day laborers, shiftless migrants, to dispose of the body at the cost of a night's pottage and the luxury of a thatched stable.

 The Echeverans did their work poorly. They dropped the ragged corpse onto a wide board lent for the purpose and by this means dragged her from the sight of the village.

It was not far at all, merely the banks of the Rowa. In the dry season the Rowa was a sluggish little crick barely fit to tug the wheel of the mill and much bled by the trench wounds of irrigation for thirsty wheat and barley.

Now it was a sloshing brown torrent.

The Echeverans were not beyond the desperation of looting. They probed for jewels and hidden wealth. Their rough hands traveled down from the woman’s ears. No earrings. To the neck. No necklace. Up the wrists. No watch, no bracelets. Along the ruined breast. No concealment in the bodice. Down to the swollen belly, where some strapped tightly wound cords of fabric to nestle coins.

And then further.

Gregor swore and jerked away his hands. He tottered backwards and scrabbled to his feet, making the sign of the ankh, muttering a prayer against evil.

Stiggen, his younger compatriot, laughed. He slid his pointer finger along the sole of the woman’s cloth shoe, in search of a pocket.

What’s frightened you, old man? he asked.

Gregor snatched a wet stick from the bank and swatted the shoe from Stiggen’s hand.

Curses! Stiggen shouted. I’ll beat you like a dog if you strike me again.

Gregor pulled from his rucksack the precious bottle of potato rye and splashed it on his hands.

Mad old fool! Stiggen grappled him to save the rye.

Cursed, Gregor moaned. A cursed soul, and now we are cursed as well.

Worthless drunkard! Stiggen snatched the rye. 

Gregor howled and ran off into the woods.

Stiggen washed the swears from his mouth with heavy swigs of rye. He turned back to the grisly business.

With the curved seax all Echeverans wore at their waist, he cut the folds of the woman’s slip.

The knife point caught on something midway up the woman’s thigh.

A garter perhaps? Full of coin?

Stiggen peeled away the cloth. In the gloom of the rain he couldn’t make out what it was. Something dark against the milky white flesh. Long and bristled.

He tapped it with his knife’s edge.

It twitched.

God’s whore! Stiggen swore. He wiped his knife on the wet grass and took a calming draught of rye.

With sticks and kicks he dumped the body into the murky whirl of the Rowa.

Damn, he couldn’t remember the prayer against curses.

Gregor! he called. Gregor, come back!

The roar of the Rowa smothered his calls. It smothered the sound of the body weltering in the shallows and the slick chatter of river stones as it squirmed back onto the bank.

Something emerged from between the dead woman’s pale exposed legs, which splayed and flopped like the horns of a fools cap.

Eyes, black, bulged, bunched, and smeared in viscera. Limbs, brown, hooked, and bristled. They twitched and clawed at the rooted mud, pulling from the dead flesh, dragging it behind in a trail of morbid afterbirth.

From amidst the shuddering mess of eyes and limbs emerged a pair of mandibles. They sank into Stiggen’s thigh, parting the skin and muscle and grating against the femur. Venom squirted from the hollow tips.

Stiggen howled. He sobbed and slashed with his seax. The bloodied, bristled limbs fell flaccid.  Ripping his thigh free he hobbled into the woods. His shrieks reached Barnaben, and the peasants made the sign of the ankh and tossed pinches of salt over their shoulders.

*

Stiggen’s wound healed well. Perhaps it was his mumbled prayers as he fled. Perhaps it was the ministrations of the mayor’s daughter, Jelena, who washed the cut with burning lye and dressed it juniper-scented rags. Perhaps it was the swift return to use, forced upon him when rumors of Jelena’s excessive attentions drove him from Barnaben at the point of staves.

Or perhaps it was the gossamer web spreading under the skin of his thigh, laced with tender black eggs, which drank lustily from the broth of his blood.