Our party elected to remain in the ruins until dawn as we did not believe that we would be safe walking in the dark on the trail back to the town. We instead took refuge in the old armory, with Thomas at our front holding his golden cross. We managed to keep a fire going until dawn so that we did not freeze to death. Almost no one spoke a word besides to make clear when more wood should be put on the fire.
Robert stayed in the back corner of the armory, ruminating the entire remainder of the evening. Come morning, he posited a possible explanation of what we had seen.
“In Celtic myth, there is a monstrosity known as the Dullahan,” he said as we composed ourselves just after dawn. “A headless horseman that travels the countryside slaughtering indiscriminately. The only reason I realized this was when Thomas held up his cross. Do you know what’s notable about it?”
“I can’t say I do,” Thomas shrugged.
“It’s gold, or at least partially gold. Legends tell us that Dullahans are terrified of gold,” Robert explained. “Why, I do not know, but it does offer a solution.”
“Be that as it may,” I sighed, still shaking from the prior night, “our first priority is to give the honourable constable a proper Christian burial. And the soldier, too. His name was…?”
I had motioned for an answer from one of his companions. The tall and lanky lad stepped forward and bowed to me. I would have corrected him that I was entitled to no such honor, but I think the ritualistic display was meant to give him comfort that some manner of normality was being maintained.
“Private Richard Goodwin, sir!” the soldier replied, seemingly unshaken.
“Mr. Goodwin died in the line of duty in the finest traditions of His Majesty’s Army,” I said, invoking a tone I had used when I had been a clergyman. “It will be our honour to bury him.”
We decided that the ground Mr. Walker had dug out in pursuit of this morbid treasure was as fine a place as any. With most ground in the area frozen for the winter and our burdens otherwise great, we were not able to provide for much else. In any case, I had no desire to spend a great deal of time with the bodies. Mr. Goodwin’s body was of course a complete atrocity, having been jagged cleaved from top to bottom. I had never in my life seen anything like that. Mr. Burnell’s body, of course, was largely intact aside from the top half of his head, which I had the displeasure of picking up myself. His brains and the remnants of his eyes were caked together with the snow in an abominable amalgam.
Even with the deplorable state of the remains, we managed to collect them and wrap them in those excess clothes we had on us, largely due to their deaths. We gathered over the hole to conduct a short funeral service.
“Lord Jesus, lamb of God, we offer unto you the bodies of our departed brothers, Baen Burnell and Richard Goodwin, who fell against vile foes opposed to your will,” I declared as the others bowed their heads. “We pledge our eternal loyalty to your commands and vow to seek out these foes and consign them to Hell. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen.”
“Amen,” all of the others replied in sullen tones.
When we returned to Ruthin, with the strange bone chest in our possession, there was the uncomfortable matter of explaining to the townspeople what had happened to their honourable constable. To make this declaration, we contacted the Lord Mayor of Ruthin, whom we had not previously met. He was an older craggy gentleman, probably my age, by the name of Nathaniel Cooper, an Englishman who had once served, as it happens, as a mayor far to the east in Lincolnshire close to where I maintain my hospital.
He had been out of town for the prior several days, touring the coastline of Clwyd as part of a commission to select a site for a new lighthouse or some such thing. The comings and goings of political figures have always vexed me. Indeed, when we met with him, he busily turned his attention from one task to the next, even as the gravity of our news could scarcely have been greater. His cluttered office in the town hall was cramped and uncomfortable as it was and that was made even worst by his constant stirring.
“Well, I’ll take your word for it that Burnell’s dead. I would normally ask to see the body myself so that we could conduct all of the appropriate records, but with someone as inestimable as Sir Lucas Pepys being a witness, I need nothing else,” he said dispassionately. “As to how you say he died, I cannot officially state that, as you know.”
“I understand,” I replied. I had no quarrel with the practice of preventing the ordinary people from learning about these more extraordinary threats. They could never handle the information responsibly.
“So, I will need a proper explanation,” Mayor Cooper sighed as he walked across the room to rummage through a pile of letters that had overtaken an end table. “Something believable to explain both that he’s dead and that there isn’t a public funeral.”
“Fell in a lake?” Thomas suggested, shrugging his shoulders.
Cooper spun around, his eyes peeking out from the rims of his glasses at Thomas.
“Not bad, actually,” he said after some delay. “To the southwest of here there’s a small pond just off a branch of the River Clwyd. Most of the locales around here refer to it as Mworg Pond. Yes, I’ll use that as the official explanation and draw up the relevant documents. Or rather, I’ll have our town clerk and notary, Cael Powys, write them up, as is customary. I suppose I should send you as the witnesses to it. He’s very exacting about these things.”
“We can expect a lot of probing questions then, yes?” Sir Lucas asked.
“Indeed. He’s a funny little man, but he does good work. Our records here in Ruthin are in fine condition on account of that, even though we have had to disguise the true nature of many of these happenings,” he declared as he walked around his desk to search yet another document pile. “Where did I put that damned thing?”
I realized how easily we had slid into ministerial minutiae, perhaps out of the comfort it gave us, and how we had spoken almost nothing of the menace itself. Bringing our attention more firmly back to the matter at hand was vital, even if Mayor Cooper would prefer that we attend to other matters.
“If I may, I want to spend some time addressing what we believe was this rampaging Dullahan we encountered last night,” I said politely. “It killed two men, including Constable Burnell, and we have every reason to believe that it likely killed Jack Walker as well. Surely we need to—”
“I’m not ignoring that problem, Doctor Willis,” he grumbled, his fingers continuing to flick through his various and sundry documents. “It’s just a little… Ah ha! Here it is!”
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My boys, Sir Lucas, and I waited in anticipation as Mayor Cooper pulled a piece of parchment from the morass on his desk and waved it.
“The last major death notice I posted,” he cheerily declared. “I was looking for a proper template for this one. Now I can get started.”
He sat down at his desk without a moment’s delay and withdrew his quill from the inkwell, elegantly writing the news onto a blank piece of parchment. I stood in silent astonishment at the mayor’s behaviour, which he appeared to notice despite not giving me even the slightest glance.
“As to your concern, Doctor Willis,” he said as he continued to write, “I’m not convinced that much can be done. If you look through the constable’s records, and those of his predecessor, I think you’ll find that Ruthin has been under siege by these sorts of phenomena, as you doctors would call them, for a good long while.”
“Surely this is all meaningfully worse than it once had been,” I said, my voice betraying all of my incredulousness at the mayor’s reaction.
He looked up from his declaration and formed a mirthless smile.
“The Dullahan is new, I’ll say that much for it,” he grimaced. “But as to banshees, various haunting spirits, and the like, I have heard it all before. I’ve seen the red banshee myself in fact. Every time someone is ready to die in this town, she comes lurking around the outskirts wailing with a voice that sounds like the worst wind you’ve ever heard.”
His description caused me to jolt where I stood. I had been far too quick to dismiss some of the more unnatural winds I had heard the prior night and indeed the night before that as well.
“Would you say that we would have known if it we heard it or would it have been indistinguishable with the winds?” I asked.
“It’s hard to imagine that you could mistake it for just the wind, but I suppose if you were not specifically listening for it that could’ve happened,” he said. “It’s not easy to tell some of the winter winds we hear from banshees and other foul things, if you’re not from around here that is.”
I realized that I had fallen into a trap of not pressing him on his call for inaction and returned to the point again.
“What is it that you suggest we do about what we experienced last night?” I inquired.
“Nothing,” he said. “I suggest we simply let this incident pass as we have with others before it. Whatever these foul and unnatural forces are, they come and they go. When they come, you just hope that they don’t come for you.”
His delivery of this argument carried a strange air of sincerity to it. I realized that it was not merely the case that he meant to try to leave him alone in that moment, but that he truly believed what he said was the appropriate course of action. Not wanting to press the point any further, we left and made for the notary’s office, which was in the same building on the opposite side.
The notary, who also served as the town clerk, was a peculiar and slovenly man whose clothes were disheveled and unwashed and had an office to match. There were places where Cael Powys had left crumbs of old food to dry out or rot and, like the mayor’s office, he had papers scattered all over nearly every surface. As far as I could determine, these were only personal correspondences and not official documents. Evidently, his official documents were orderly and nigh impeccable.
As for himself, he was a plump man of about forty years of age with messy black hair and thick glasses. Other than being slightly eccentric in his demeanor, a common feature we had found in the people of Ruthin, there was little truly notable about him. He listened politely, maintaining his focus on us as he sat at his desk, while we explained why it was that we were seeing him.
“So, here’s the thing,” he began in a cheery baritone voice, “I’m going to need three of you to sign an attestation that you truly saw Baen Burnell die since we don’t have a body.”
“That seems reasonable,” I muttered, looking toward Sir Lucas and my sons. “John, as my eldest, would you care to sign your name to this?”
“I’ll do it,” he grimly answered as Cael pushed a piece of paper forward for us to sign.
Cael pursed his lips and carefully watched as we all dutifully swore that we had witnessed the death of Mr. Burnell.
“Can we just talk about how our town’s constable died in the presence of several people, none of whom are from here?” he asked in a mischievous tone.
“Is there an accusation there, Mr. Powys?” Robert asked with hostility.
“Oh, no. Of course not. I can only speak for myself and I can’t tell you how others might take this. If they hear that several Englishmen came here two days before the constable died and that those Englishmen were the only witnesses, hoo boy,” Cale said with a wheezing laugh that turned into an impish giggle. “Of course, I’m but a humble notary. It’s not my job to look into such things. I would’ve been curious what our constable would’ve said if presented with that same evidence.”
I wished to confront him over his accusation, but Sir Lucas beat me to it.
“Sir, this is a most unbecoming insinuation. Most unbecoming. We witnessed a horrible tragedy and your first words you say to us are nothing but innuendo of the most loathsome kind,” Sir Lucas shouted at him, his squeaky voice nearly cracking. “I am a ranking member of the Royal College of Physicians. I swear my life’s reputation that we had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Mr. Burnell’s death.”
Cael chuckled and took back the document, applying his wax seal to it without saying anything more.
“Oh, you all can go now,” he said, adjusting his glasses.
There is enough pain in death’s sting for the friends and family of the departed to burden men’s minds without the added load of innuendo that Mr. Powys heaped on us. I have never once in my whole life been accused of such a thing, nor has it even been insinuated by anyone, save of course the lunatics in my asylum. One cannot take too seriously the things said by the afflicted, however. There was some value in what Cael said to us, though. It was a warning that we would be struggling to find any allies in Ruthin, especially since one of the few people with whom we spoke had met with such an unfortunate end.
Entirely exhausted from the frights and strains of the prior evening, I retired to my room early that evening and lay on my bed. I may have slipped in and out of a restive and unproductive sleep, but it was difficult to tell. So much of the world had become from me indistinguishable from a dream, or rather an atrocious nightmare.
At some point much later in the evening, my son John came to my room and requested my presence. He had been focused on the strange chest that we acquired from Ruthin Castle and had put it in the center of his room while he studied it. He had procured a series of candles that he put around the chest, illuminating it brilliantly. I could see nearly every individual bone that had been stuck together to construct the chest. Ribs, femurs, pieces of skull, and so on. John had noticed something obvious that I had not, however.
“Father, I’ve been looking at these bones all night and something occurred to me. These are new bones,” he said. “Given their density and relative lack of wear, I’d say they were stuck together like this in the past few weeks.”
“I don’t understand then,” I murmured. “If this is new, then what was all that nonsense about the townsfolk speaking of a promise?”
“I think, and I will need to ask Robert about this since he knows these sorts of things better than I, that it may have been part of a ritual yet to come,” John’s voice became weaker as he spoke. He must have found the conclusion as unnerving as I did. “Look very carefully on each side of the chest. There’s Welsh script in six locations. I can’t read it, but either Robert or Sir Lucas could.”
I examined the sides, top, and bottom of the chest and, sure enough, there was crudely-etched Welsh script on each of the six femurs. I summoned both Robert and Sir Lucas to John’s room as soon as I could find them. They had stayed down in the tavern, drinking away their sorrows, but they were still serviceable.
Both of them scurried around the chest, whispering to one another as they read each side in turn. When they were done, Sir Lucas took to writing down the words while Robert explained them to us. Robert’s face twitched as he spoke.
“Y rhain rydyn ni'n eu cynnig i chi; Y rhain rydyn ni'n eu rhoi i chi; Am was dewr; I was yn wirl Cnawd unyielding; Gwaed yn anfodlon,” he intoned, affecting a perfectly fair Welsh accent for the task. John and I looked to one another. While unsure of what exactly it meant, there was a meaning to it that still worried me. Robert provided the translation after a pause. “These we offer you; These we grant you; For a servant brave; For a servant true; Flesh unyielding; Blood unspilling.”
As Robert finished his translation, I stared at the chest, that unholy box of unspeakable provenance. I swear to this day that I could hear the lamentations of the poor souls that had been slain to craft it. We had indeed interrupted a ritual that was to be performed, but that meant another disquieting truth. Whoever had made that chest would now be looking for it. And for us.