Haggard Monstrosity

The dappled sunlight upon the chimney stones was a condescending reminder of joy. There could not be any more joy. Nor was the sun rising at all, dawn was taking its time in the shadowed forests.

The screams of her mother had ceased. The sound of a dull knife cutting into her flesh had replaced those noises. The haggard monstrosity from the cellar, a ragged revenant, had a dull-one, a rusted-one, a knife. Eating, chewing and slobbering. It sorta shuffled around a bit.

"Oh God." the girl, Abbeth, prayed as she hid in the cupboard. It heard her and it shuffled closer, still chewing. The horrid and ragged thing came nearer to the cupboard. It held a stone-cold rusted knife and her mother's flesh in either of its boney fingers. It started to speak to her in a deep and lifeless voice:

"Cresil-oh-lik. Saint Barbara, impaled on a cross with a staff-crucifix. Putrid virgin-child, go outside and see your god. It is sunrise, I will kill you when you are ripe." The creature stood near the cupboard and dripped, talking with its mouth full.

As if it had nothing better to do, the haggard monstrosity descended into the cellar below, into the darkness from whence it had come. The little girl knew it must be the discarded pile of laundry she had not cleaned, come to life to butcher and eat her mother. Or perhaps a draugar, a corpse-monster of some kind, come up from their cellar, buried where she had thrown that laundry. Her thoughts kept coming back to the putrid clothes. It did seem to be partially composed of such material.

"Abbeth?" A voice called from the hayloft-like second floor, above. It was her brother, Nathan. They had both survived the thing of horror coming out of their cottage cellar. It had killed and cut and eaten their mother.

Abbeth and Nathan crawled into the flickering candlelight from their hiding places.

She was on the table, her hands oozing blood from the defensive wounds. Her face had claw marks upon it, also oozing blood. Her eyes were closed, part of her neck cut out, her head mostly off. Abbeth was not crying and Nathan had not wet himself at the horror. Not until they saw their plates had portions upon them, set aside from the haggard monstrosity. That is when Abbeth shrieked and began to cry, falling to her knees and loudly saying:

"Oh God!"

"Her on my plate." Nathan decided and kicked it over, but then wet himself. Thereafter both children ran outside. It was the darkest hour, the hour before the sunrise, the dawn. The sun had already shone the first rays, hills and the endless shadowed and now silent forests of the medieval landscape held onto the night. The shadow of a mountain might prolong darkness, well into morning, but here there was an ever-present darkness.

"We made it, Oh Lord save us from this haggard monstrosity. Please, I pray in the Name. Amen." Abbeth knelt and prayed. She looked up and saw a man was there.

"I am lost in the forest, I mean no intrusion." He said calmly. He saw their cottage sitting warm and smoking peacefully in the prelit dawn.

"She was on my plate! She is still on yours!" The boy suddenly exploded with anger at his older sister and pushed her over, grabbing ahold of her nightgown and punching the back of her head. The girl fell over under the boy's assault.

"Wait, stop!" The man dropped his ax and bow and grabbed the boy, pulling him from atop his sister. He was hysterical and clawed at her frenetically and clutched her gown. Then with his other hand he got a hold of her braided hair and pulled her by that until the man dropped the boy and went for his hands instead. He freed the girl from the attack and then restrained the boy.

"Our mother is dead. Eaten. It tried to feed us part of her neck." The girl, Abbeth, pointed.

"Bloody uncooked meat. Twain raw bits on the floor to spoil, drying for the rats" the boy, Nathan, said and laughed madly.

The strange man felt a compulsion to simply snap his neck as he held him restrained, seemed the merciful thing to do. He didn't of course, and was revolted by his own instinct.

"I must dispatch this creature." he said to himself. "Or I must take these children to safety, if it is an unliving thing it won't endure daylight. I could return with help."

"Take us from here!" Abbeth urged him. She doubted that even this strong and armed man was a match for the horror in her cellar.

Hunted By The Dead

"Come back, wait!" the bloodied up and limping woodsman lingered and called through the dawn forest.

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It was behind him in the lit green. The forest was green and morning as it had followed. It was smart and had covered its skeletal remains in a cowl of discarded refuse of clothes. A bunch of wet rotting clothing was pasted to it in heaps, protecting it. It also had its weapons now, a bow, some arrows, its rusted, dried blood, stone cold knife and the man's ax as well. Its teeth were grinning, the skull its face, an undead thing of utter evil and dread. It had license to walk the earth, and so it did.

It fired an arrow keenly and it whistled the maximum distance and struck a tree's wood near the fleeing man's face.

He looked back and there it was, all hunched under its pile of gray and brown and moldy green rags, grinning with a face only of the white skull teeth under the shade of its cowl.

"Dear God!" he whimpered. His mind wandered in defiance of the awfulness he was staring at. The damn thing, the haggard monstrosity had thrown him out of the cellar and then proceeded to defeat him and take all his weapons. It had turned out that the woodsman was no match for such a foul demon, after all.

The creature advanced and promptly vanished behind trees, leaving only glimpses of its approach. It was quiet as it came, slow and quiet but not silent. It was listening to the birds, to their songs, it understood them.

The woodsman was looking at the haggard monstrosity as it tilted itself, apparently listening to two crows calling at each other. He looked up and saw a juvenile crow in the branch above him. He started forward, then broke the arrow and took the shaft with him.

The juvenile crow decided that the woodsman's activities needed to be reported to mom and dad and called out. This awoke the elderly owl above which disturbed two sparrows. They all went different directions.

"Why are there so many birds in that tree?" the injured and fleeing woodsman was praying aloud. He doubted he was going to get last rites, at this rate and then having been slain by an undead he would rise again himself: a draugar of some kind. "May my armies be as the birds in the air?" He memed-medievally.

The ax came hurtling at the woodsman from nowhere and stopped him in his tracks, struck the trunk in front of him directly. The woodsman tried to pry it from the tree as the haggard monstrosity advanced.

"Your prayers are weak-as-hell" the haggard monstrosity caught him up as he prized the ax.

The woodsman used the ax on the haggard monstrosity to little effect. The creature chuckled and held him pinned to the tree by his chin with one hand. It collected the ax from him with the other. Then it head-butted him with its skull forehead, which was quite thick and although bare bone, a dark earthy color, stained by the ground of the cellar and embedded with clay. The hollow eyes of the haggard monstrosity held a pool of darkness, untouched by sunlight.

He broke free from the creature and fled again from it. As he went he gained some distance, as though the haggard monstrosity were just walking casually. The woodsman collected his wits and tried to travel into the sunlight, hoping to throw it off.

The haggard monstrosity appeared in front of him. It had flanked him and cut him off so that it faced him with its hooded back facing the sun. A hood made of decaying clothing and leathers and tunics and such. Just a matted lump of fly-attracting laundry covered in patches of green mold with white rings, giving the haggard monstrosity a natural camouflage as it hunted the woodsman expertly, herding him, stalking him.

Then the woodsman arrived upon an old forest road and his decision was to follow it in one direction it went. So he did and soon the steeple of a village chapel was ahead. The village also had a monastery nearby.

The woodsman fell to his knees under the open blue sunless sky. The town stood neatly and he knelt in the muddy wagon ruts, some with standing water in them. A fly landed on him and buzzed as it took off. No shadows.

The woodsman hated evening for this effect. No shadows, twilight. No light either.

The ax was at his feet on the ground, tossed from nearby to land harmlessly on the ground.

"Pick it up." the unearthly voice of the haggard monstrosity commanded.

It had a rusty knife that somehow caught the flash of sunset through the trees in a strange and forlorn way, only on part of its surface uncaked enough to cast the light. It was as it the former use of the blade, the arm, the body that held it were protesting the hideous use.

That was a blackened skeleton full of thick hard clay and wielding the knife like an expert combatant. Its pile of putrid laundry it wore was discarded nearby along with the bow and arrow and a spear it had fashioned while it had followed him.

The woodsman went for the ax but fell over. The skeletal variant of the haggard monstrosity advanced on him and began stabbing him without further delay.

As he died it looked down on him. Three crows circled above.

"I followed you as you prayed to reach safety." It chuckled in its evil voice, thinking it was more clever than the woodsman's god.

It looked at the town and lifted the ax. As it stood there it heard the footfalls from the forest. The two children. It had not forgotten them. They went into the town as the haggard monstrosity watched. Then it donned its garments and took the body of the woodsman into the forest where it planned to make a camp. It stopped at a small lumberjack's shed and found nobody home. It took some ropes.

A fire would be nice, but it really lacked the courage to spark one so it waited. It made up the campsite it wanted and then proceeded to clean and skin its kill. It saved the woodsman's outfit, deciding it might be fitted with a hood and used later as part of a disguise.

To this effect its skull turned and it examined the skins it had begun to tan. Indeed the haggard monstrosity had found a good place to begin an infestation of undead. The skinned corpse of the woodsman hung by ropes upside down was only its second recruit.

By morning the first one arrived at her master's calling. Her head hung from her body as a begging dog looking up from its paws. Many wounds adorned her and were now dark colored, even in the night's last hour.

"Welcome. Your children are safe in warm beds, yonder. Night will fall again and we shall sally forth." the haggard monstrosity spoke to its firstborn crypt-thing.

She stared back at the horror that had killed her, only able to obey it. The movement of the corpse had built up enough force to squirt some fluids from the open veins of her mostly removed neck. Her unsupported head just sorta hung heavy, eyes turned upwards.

The haggard monstrosity carved a piece off of the dead woodsman and offered it to her and said:

"Hungry?"