Dorotea awoke in fright with dust in her mouth. Choking, she felt dirt and sand under her eye lids and in her nose. She couldn’t breathe, trying to sit up she was bound somehow. Opening her eyes through the pain she could feel ropes and belts around her arms. She couldn’t see clearly. She smelled something dank, muddy, rancid. She realized she was rolled in an old carpet.
She tried to scream for help but an oily rag was in her mouth. Panicking she tried to wriggle free. Just then something huge bites down on her legs. She feels her ankle twist and in terror she remembers the Alligators. Just as she comes to, hears the subtle sounds of a river, splashing of some large beasts slinking into the water. She also hears a train horn far off.
Wind and lightning but something familiar. Sniffing at her ear. She knows that breathing. It was Ophelia. Her Bunny had escaped the dogs and was now sticking her head in the carpet, licking her face and chewing on the rag tied around her head. Ophelia frees her and just like magic at that moment Dorotea’s bonds break and she is able to sit up. Struggling to make sense of this new reality. She is reborn in a new world, the “after life,” bellow a burning train bridge.
Smoking ruins of the Circus all around her, Lions roam freely, Elephants glide through the river, Tigers chase darting Birds and everywhere the blackened corpses of Clowns and injured Carnies. The moans of the dead and dying fill the air. Somewhere a Fortune Teller laments the death of her child, the broken bodies becoming a well earned meal for the beasts whose first taste of freedom came via a derailment and series of boiler explosions.
Climbing up the embankment, the sky is strange. There is black gloom over the land. It is a place she had never seen. Horrible smells like burning hair and decay fill her nose. Reaching out to Ophelia, petting her in thanks. Dorotea realizes sees that her fat baby Bunny is bigger than her, the size of a bear!
The same innocent eyes now massive and unblinking. Ophelia’s white coat now matted with blood and mud. She now sees the Alligators in the water are all dead, Ophelia silently fought and killed them. Her flat teeth that only chewed carrots and old shoes had done a number on the Alligators, leaving wounds that look like those of an Axe, removing heads, arms and tails into a sticky mess of coppery smelling wounds.
Dorotea feels a joy so strong in her heart, she feels like her body could explode and fly into the sky. She is saved! She could run home, gather her keepsakes and find a new life away from the abusive life she had. Maybe she could ask the Moran family if she could live with them or maybe they could hide her long enough for her to save up to buy a ticket to Europe. She always loved the stories she heard on the radio about princesses and kings, great wars and works of art and culture. She wanted to walk the stone streets of Rome, see Naples, Prague, Vienna or Brussels.
As she walks she sees strange vistas on the horizon. Ruined domes and spires of cities far off, burning pillars of black in the dingy brown sky. A harsh wind comes from the south, hot and full of harmful debris. She thinks back to the news papers she would keep from the Moran farm. Pictures of burning cathedrals and centers of government looted. Neoclassical edifices of grandeur reduced to mausoleums for those who did not escape.
This is not the coastal Texas of her youth. Searching the horizon for some useful landmark to gain her bearings. She sees skeletons tied to wagon wheels at the top of poles, cages of dying women suspended above the road, burning bodies in piles litter the countryside. She thinks this must be the Great War, somehow she has travelled to the battlefields of Verdun or the Somme.
Dorotea knows stories of the war, attrition, men fighting over the same ground in trenches, gas attacks and air raids. She can’t see a battle, just the endless rows of craters, barbed wire curled like a dead mans fist. She sees a sign in at the cross roads that reads, “Road to Damascus - East, Temple of Sidon - West, Tyre - South, Byblos / Baalbek - North.”
She has no shoes and her feet weep blood. The stoney ground biting her soft soles. She has the urge to find a pair of shoes but the thought of removing them from a rotting soldier is too ghastly. She comes to a dead tree with a massive Black Stallion tied up. The horse is wild eyed trying to dart away as she approaches. She hums a melody that calms its spirit. The Stallion is injured, arrows pepper his hind legs, dry blood and mud cake its face.
Dorotea is astounded as everywhere around the horse are gold coins, thousands of them, with rubies and brilliant sapphires fallen from saddle bags on the ground. Seeing an empty pail and brush, she wades into a deep pool to her thighs, as she gathers water she locks eyes with a corpse. A drowned young man, maybe a year older than her stares blankly, eyes an icy blue, mouth curled into a last scream, pale face leaching a sickly yellowish tint into the water.
As thirsty was she is, she cannot drink it. Beside the pool she sees a wagon cart, covered with a green canvas blowing in the wind and the same gold coins spilled every where. She sees a pile of dead horses half way in the pool. A bomb must have hit the convoy as they fled the battle. Returning to the Stallion she brushes his mane and tries to dab his filthy wounds. As she does the stallion drinks from the pail of dirty water. She is too tired to stop him.
After a nap and some jerry rigging, she has gathered up all the saddlebags of the dead horses onto hers, that she has named Octavian after the ancient Roman Emperor. The burden too great to carry her and the 8 gold laden saddle bags she walks leading the horse. She has also rigged the first wagon and a second wagon of weapons and gold to Ophelia who is smart enough to understand her important new duty pulling this new found riches of a dozen trunks of diamonds and gold.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Seeing the precariousness of her situation she also gathered some armor from beside the road. A sparkling horned faceplate for her horse and black rings of chainmail she drapes over Ophelia’s back. She thinks makes her look like a fine knights escort. She finds a large rifle she decides not to handle unless she has to. Also a collection of arrows removed from Octavian’s back, and a number of spears. She feels the day fade and the heat of the day turns to bitter wind. Seeing farms burning in the distance. Dorotea wishes she had removed a uniform from one of the unfortunate dead. Just then she sees an explosion ahead and hears the growl of an engine.
Two planes come into view, they seem to be chasing each other. One is a Red Biplane with 2 sets of wings, the other is dark and moving too fast to get any detail other than what looks like the snarling mouth of a great beast on the front. After minutes of clashing, bullets flying and smoke choking from over worked engines one of the planes comes smashing towards her, crashing parallel to the road.
The Pilot laughing as she approaches. His face black from soot except where he has removed his goggles. His plane is riddled with bullet holes. She tries to ask him where they are and whats going on but he is shouting in a language she doesn’t understand. He pulls a large ring from his finger, blood red stone! The size of her nose! The plane has crumpled, the engine still croaking and growling as the propeller has lodged into the ground erupts into flame. The pilot makes a face like this is expected, he struggles with his safety belts with his dagger long enough to realize both his legs are broken. He curses to the heavens and remembering he is in a little girls presence, tries to make a joke she doesn’t understand.
Now the Pilot is weeping but continuing a monologue only he understands. He hands her his face mask which is a gleaming white skull. With a series of pops and sizzle a fire breaks out in his cab. He smiles takes off his fur lined ace jacket, handing it over, then his remarkable boots fastened with a gold chain across the front, lastly his gleaming spiked helmet. The same style black and gold spiked helmet General Ludwig Von Hindenburg wore at the Battle of Tannenberg in the news papers. The Pilot waves sadly after a hearty chug from a flask of brandy shoots him self in the ear.
Dressed like the Red Baron himself, Dorotea resumes her trek. She decides to stop and get some sleep. She sees a stone Cathedral on a hill, in the dying light. That looks like a safe place to set up camp. As she approaches she sees the hill around the Cathedral covered in hundreds of crosses, many of them with women and children nailed to them.
As she nears the door of the Cathedral she gasps as a writhing black mass breaks apart and flies away revealing a murder of crows feasting on a Deadman nailed to the door. His chest full of arrows, face totally desiccated. Mummified in a state of anguish, lipless teeth gnash from beyond the grave. Around his neck, his severed hands hang from a leather cord.
She must free him to open the Cathedral. Finding a hammer at his feet she struggles with the large square bolts fastening his hands to the heavy wooden door. With struggle and several minutes of work she bends one nail and begins to pull it out, slipping she tears off her finger nail and spurts of blood mix with flashes of pain.
Her mind struggles with the overpowering the pain her finger feels. It is like an explosion in her mind. Collecting her self, she tries again, whimpering in pain. With a massive jarring lunge she removes one nail, the body crumpling, now dangling from one impaled arm. Removing the final nail is done. Pushing open the large doors, she sees a dark hall that goes on forever.
Going through the contents of the pocket she finds a pack of cigarettes with matches. She finds a torch on the ground and hesitantly ties up the Stallion. Inside smells of roasted meat, sweet candles like old fruit and wax. Skeletal bodies of priests in colorful robes surround the entrance way.
Beyond in the dark something gleams like glass on the alter. In the pews endless rows of blackened parishioners litter the church. Scurrying rats, spiders and slithering maggots seem to be gorging on the dead at prayer. The roof has fallen in at the back of the church. A large stone sunburst that once held a large circular stained glass window now lets in wind and starlight. At the alter is a throne with a Giant Corpse sitting in it.
The Dead Giant wears a Horned Crown, in his dead fingers a gold cup. His face a skeleton’s smile, unblinking eyes made of glass. This is a jeweled body of a once mighty King, left in an ossuary of worshippers sent to join him in death. This place has an unholy feeling. Dorotea just wants to run into the night but her eyes keep going to the jeweled cup. She seizes it timidly, but she imagines the kings eyes on her. She imagines a fetid breath on her face. A plaque made from baroque styled glass, gold and jewels falls and shatters that reads, “Sorsos The Damned.”
Recoiling she seizes the cup away and falls down from the raised platform. The Giant King falls forward revealing a large golden sword stabbed in his back, now standing straight up from the crumpled corpse. She wants to run, but she feels as if this sword was waiting for an eternity for her to take it. She pulls it free and dashes out into the night.
After the embers of her fire ran down she had to go to the bathroom. Her back hurt, her bones all felt like they had been bent to the point of almost breaking and every bit of her body was bruised. She felt like she had been rained on and ice caught her breath in the air. She felt like yesterday had lasted for centuries and her life before was a distant memory.
As Ophelia the Bunny and Octavian the Stallion placidly dreamed and made happy noises in their sleep from dreams untouched by the torment she felt. She thought of the Dead Giant and the Deadman nailed to the door, the drowned soldier in the puddle and the bodies of horses left to rot.
She only saw death a few times when a mouse was snapped in a trap, or a woman from the town caught tuberculosis and suffocated in her sleep. She saw lamb killed once, it was like watching a crying child being tortured. She never wanted to think about innocent animals being killed for food but she could never bring her self to give up meat. She was always hungry and it was better not to ask or have an opinion of her Mother’s cooking. Once her Mother broke one of her older brothers fingers in a door and pretended it was an accident. The She-Devil smiled every time she recounted the story to her oafish, fat and loud alcoholic friends.
The thought of the Deadman nailed to the door didn’t sit right with her. Of all the bodies laying unburied she thought that at least she could try to bury one. She used matches to find a shovel on the cart and walked back up the hill to the Cathedral. On the body was a notice scrawled in blood over the dedication to Artemis, “Beware! Hecate! Baalim!”
The Deadman’s body was punctured by a dozen arrows, both eyes were poked out, hands cut off. He wore a strange dress coat, black with age. No insignia or piece of its original color escaped the caked blood and mud. It was a under the burgundy and crimson stains, a grey military uniform with gold laurels on the collar regal but out dated piping on the chest like a Napoleonic Hussar jacket. Ornate with gold ribs, braided flourishes on arms and but missing many of its buttons. Once it was a handsome uniform, now torn to shreds and black with putrid blood like the man had been whipped to death and dragged behind a horse cart.
She couldn’t do it now. It was too horrifying to handle this dried out mummified corpse in the dark. It had a satanic air of hostility, the whole place, the hill the church, the fields beyond had a cursed feeling. Like a silent stirring of all that is sad and hateful in this world.
She resigned to go back to sleep.