Catchism: A Derry Row to Seal Pestilence

Catchism: A Derry Row to Seal Pestilence

Postby catch » Thu Sep 26, 2013 6:15 pm

"Got few enough to us fer charity -" The harridan-woman trailed off, her body braced against the door of her little hut, in case the man turned for her. The squalor of Derry Row, as it was coming to be called, was hardly a squalor at all for a bunch of refugees. Volunteers kept the place clean, shining knight-boys with radiant smiles who set up the walls and tiled the roofs in good, proper tile. 'Squalor' was nothing like the center of town, past the fine walls and among the Myrken-folk, whom the woman always heard to be queer, always with strange going-ons. For all of the hut's sturdiness, bracing the door did not make her feel safe. The figure that had been staggering up and down the Row for the past candlemark was one she'd hadn't seen, a big brute of a fellow that some folks said was a bit off, not right in the head. "Even posters up about him, though can't imagine what fer," her boy had said, illiterate as sin.

Still. She was a kindly woman, and the poor fellow seemed to be looking for something, though what, she couldn't imagine. When she shouted out with her quivering, rasping voice, the man stopped to look at her, with one eye, the other covered with a grimy bit of cloth. He said nothing, and she cringed, quickly shutting the door.

She hadn't made it over the Sikasoon Pass for nothing. She was strong as a weasel and stubborn as a goat, and she was a mother, too, of five dead boys and two live ones, and two dead, little girls. Disease had taken the girls; war had taken the boys, all but two, her youngest working as a coach-boy in town, and the elder marched of to Gods knew where, his young head full of glory and revenge against Thessilane and Channelers. She had no idea if he was still alive. She was alone, in her little hut, and she regretted ever speaking out when the soft, little tap came to the door, scant seconds after she had closed it. Stubborn. Yes, she was stubborn, and she couldn't have stood watching the poor thing wander about like a dazed dog for yet another candlemark. Someone might call the constables down. Stubborn. The milkmaid in her shriveled up, and - with a scowl - the harridan picked up a crude-carved ladle, carefully wedging herself against the door before she opened it up. Only a crack.

"Like I said, fellow, wotever ye're lookin' fer, we ain' got it," she breaks in as she opens it, her voice as stern as a Granny, a long-time mother of boys. "Well? Wot're ye doin' 'ere?" Bolder, because the door was not thrust aside. When she peered to look, the man was there, slightly stooped due to his great height, regarding her with an eye that seemed to threaten her with a devouring.

Threat, and pity, in equal measures; she could not say why, but she lifted up her ladle to the silent man, waiting his reply. It was long in coming. He seemed to consider it, his strange, apeish, degenerate face a mask she could not read. Like a muzzle, almost.

"Th-there was a hole, here," the strange man said, his stuttering voice so low that it surprised her. "It's g-g-gone, now." He reached out his great hand, and his fingers wrapped themselves about the door; he pushed, gently, and the harridan could do nothing against the great pressure of him - until the entirety of him squeezed into her hut, and the roof seemed to lift with how large he was. He looked about him. He looked at the simple, one-roomed hut, with naked beams and a squat, little stove. He looked at the bed, hardly big enough to fit her and her son, with no privacy and little space.

"It smells like Derry," the big man said, and the harridan could do little but clutch her ladle.

"Y'weren' invited in," she says, her voice broken from years of iron will, and when that will faded, then sobs. Her ladle reaches out, thrusts against his pale skin - so pale! - to make certain he was flesh and bone. He was, and that emboldened her, even as he gazed at her, her heart an icy sliver. She felt something strange in her, but she could recognize it, her mind thinking back to the winter trek across the Sikasoons. How close she had come to death, and this man, this thing that she had, unwittingly, invited into her house, would give it to her.

But it wasn't as simple as that, she thought. No. It wasn't as simple. "Have y'got no manners? You can't walk into nobody's house, doin' wot y'please." The large man flinched as she hit him harder with the ladle, but he did little else but shift into the only chair, her chair, her good, solid rocking-chair, and that enraged her to no end, welling up past the fright and the certainty.

"Why, you -" she starts. His face shifted. His face shifted, and it was different, so very different, and the harridan felt the ladle slip from her nerveless fingers, and clatter on the pounded-earth floor. It was strange. She thought she smelled flowers; she thought that they came up through the ground, that the ladle became one of them. That she was. For a pulse of her heart, she felt the world around her. Her feet were powerful roots; her fingers were young, supple, and stretched for the sun.

"Do you see it?" and, at first, she didn't hear. He had to repeat himself, and he was behind her. They were together, out in the forest, and his arm came past her, his finger pointing at it. The Hole. It was a small hole, it's lips uneven; she felt a thrill of fear and revulsion as she saw the blood that bubbled and frothed, the faint roiling of something shimmering and yellow-grey.

"It's in there. It's all in there," and his voice was so full of child-like anxiousness, such fear, that she could not help but try to soothe him. Her lips were melded shut. She could say nothing, only hear the faint screams from within the hole, feel herself drawn to it.

Later, the inhabitants of Derry Row could not say what had happened. Only a few said that there had been a man, a stranger. There had been a sound, a great, shuddering noise, something like bells all out of tune with on another, broken, debased. They were deafening, yet no one outside of the Row could claim to have heard it. Some of the outermost houses shattered under the strain of it; the others shook and groaned. There was a terrible, horrible smell, something utterly natural and, yet, utterly repulsive. It was rotting leaf-matter and rotting meat, and flowers long past their prime, as something great and shifting and silvery rose up to the sky.

The Derry-refugees could not say what the silver Shape was; a squamous mass of tentacles and psuedopods, a great stag, a lean and hungry wolf. A Silver Bull, with thick-slabbed shoulders and sloping hindquarters. It was gone, blown away by the wind. It was a long moment before anyone had the wits to act, but these people had suffered, had struggled, and they were just as hardy as the most hardened Myrkenite. Heads were counted; rubble was dug. They called for no help, for they could take care of themselves. Numerous injuries, there were, and a girl who had looked too closely at the silver mist and, now, could not stop laughing - but of deaths, there was none.

Only a missing woman, a middle-aged woman who had a son somewhere in town. Where her house had stood was nothing more than shattered tile and torn planks, and a strange, woody fixture with the vague shape of a hunched-over woman. Fetal, it's face pushed to the floor, it's lips sunk into the earth, forever plugging a Hole that no one knew was there. The next day, delicate, amber flowers grew upon it.

The locusts were gone, and that is what he did: he fixed things.

He always fixed things when he broke them.
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