In the early evening dusk, Anneliese sat in the damp and dreary remains of Father Bellamy’s residence. Head to toe, she adorned the traditional white religious gown, with Father Bellamy’s cross hanging tight upon her neck.
The room was hauntingly clean, as though preserved for Bellamy’s return, despite all known wisdom to the contrary. With lakefront views and the orange haze of the setting sun, it afforded Anneliese the serenity needed to peruse her deceased mentor’s library. At Bellamy’s old desk she sat, tracing the line of scripture while she replicated it word by word, making work of what little light the dying daylight dared to give.
Her pursuit was a matter of perfection, with every stroke of the quill pen made with graceful intentness and measured by how frequently and at what depth she dipped the inkwell. Back and forth, back and forth, her hand travelled. Until almost unconsciously, she became aware of the abruptly absent ink well when she approached the end of the page. The quill pen then made a firm pick against the desk. The vibration triggered tensed ligaments from knuckles to elbow. A pale of shock came upon her face; she was frozen in prayed anticipation for the ink well’s return.
It was not a matter of misplacement, rather of reoccurrence that stretch her sanity. From harvesting in the fields to washing the clothes, her daily routines were haunted by the unprovoked vanishing of items that would reappear or occasionally never be seen again. Though it was not the fear of loss that struck her most, it was the reputation of sticky fingers and the stigma of an ex-pagan’s moral sincerity that she so dearly struggled to avoid.
‘My dear Anneliese, we need firewood,’ said Mother Simonet with a firm, dry politeness that projected high-moral virtue.
However, her presence created a darkness that adjusted Anneliese’s eyes to the harshness of the room. The faded flicker of well-worn candles brought a semblance of color to the rough grey décor. ‘Of course. At once, Mother,’ said Anneliese, a now fearful teenager, acclimated to respect all forms of authority, as though she no longer felt safe in a world outside her presiding social structure.
‘There are inquisitors who would accuse such endeavors as witchery,’ said Simonet, thinking she knew better, throwing verbal stones from the sideline with little caring to whether Anneliese heeded her advice.
‘And if they did, would you defend me?’ Anneliese queried.
‘My efforts won’t be enough to defend you, hence why I’m trying to protect you,’ said Simonet. She then held Anneliese up at the doorway to reinforce her point.
‘I owe it to him,’ said Anneliese. Her teary-eyed conviction made visible the hairline fractures in Simonet’s stone-walled persona.
‘Of course, but the cure to mortality will never revive those lost. Such faculties lie in the hands of the almighty.’
‘But their memory can live on through our actions,’ said Anneliese while she held her hands upon her bosom, tugging against the thin twine keeping Bellamy’s cross to her person.
‘Many strive for things they will never get. Bellamy was no better, but he brought you closer to the church. For all his pursuits of grandeur, his impact upon this world lay in the hearts of those he touched. We, this community, are all we can afford. Everything else is just passing the time.’
‘Of course, Mother Simonet. I will get right on it,’ said Anneliese. She then turned back momentarily upon the realization of the small burgeoning weight upon her hand, which, upon further introspect turned out to be the lost inkwell.
It’s emergence brought about a sudden skip of Anneliese’s heartbeat. And she placed it firmly atop the table, to be sure her physical senses didn’t fool her a second time. Concerned her peculiar behavior might draw suspicion from Mother Simonet, she immediately rushed to her tasks.
She made a brief quickstep as she passed her orphan peers, trying to avoid their judgmental stares. It was a sentiment shared with the townsfolk, who remained unconvinced by Anneliese’s supposed acceptance of the church.
Every day was another reminder of her pagan past, and the stigmas that gravitated to her like flies to a carcass, further isolating herself into the hermit life that encompassed the confines of Father Bellamy’s study.
At the end of the day, she fell into an exhausted sleep, only to revisit the haunting memories of the pagan stronghold that plagued her dreams. She woke in a sweaty panic to the sound of a wolf’s cries. Soft but unmissable, it called out from lakeside hills directly behind her bedside window. Crouched upon her straw bed, she looked out to see the black wolf’s thick coat shimmering in the full moon’s grace as it strolled the dormant streets. It’s nose was kneading from corner to brush, searching for whatever scents appealed to its appetite.
Yet as the beast delved deeper into the township, its attention grew erratic. It experienced heightened alertness to any disturbance that served to undermine its stealthy endeavor. Until it broke its stride to an upright stillness, and with its ears flared, it focused on Anneliese’s otherwise inconspicuous window. It then gave out one last cry before scampering off towards the lakeside forest.
Against her better judgement, Anneliese gathered her robe and tiptoed out into the street. She was accompanied by one long broom, her contingency against the far more adept creature, whose black coat disappeared effortlessly into the night.
As she made her way to the lakeside, there was nothing to be seen, despite the moon’s best effort to illuminate the tranquil surroundings.
‘Shadow?’ she said, almost whispering, hoping the beast would respond in kind. That their encounters were more than coincidence. Perhaps it was a spiritual connection that would decipher the strange anomalies she had been experiencing of late.
But her call remained unanswered as the late-night escapade turned into a futile hour-long stroll across the lakeside. The nocturnal ecosystem hummed in meditative harmony, while her frantic imagination brought back visions from the pagan stronghold. A bloody battlefield was covered with pitch-forked pagans corralled into the lake by their square-shielded oppressors. Their township ablaze. Every male of fighting age was conscripted or left amputated at the right hand.
Suddenly, the violent images faded away, and she saw foreign torches hurdling towards her township from the far hillside. There were too many for a late-night adventurer. And then the sound of rustling bushes preceded a spray of arrow swooshing past Anneliese’s peripheral vision. Their arrow shafts were scattered porcupine across a nearby patch of dirt and angled in a straight line to where her body should have been.
Holding back her initial instincts to scream, she dropped the broom and rushed towards the reeds. It was of little doubt she would make the shallows first, but the soft mud riverbed and deadweight clothes stalled her attempts to reach the deep. She then waded and latched onto the fragile reeds that snapped before offering any support in her hurried attempt to escape.
A black shadowy figure then emerged as a large muscular Viking, with a head of an ogre and skin of leper. Illuminated by the green, fluorescent glow of his oversized battle-axe, he revealed a misaligned jaw that opened to a half-set of deformed upper teeth on one side. This was offset by a corresponding missing set on the lower jaw. It looked like a two-piece checkerboard, the upper and lower sets clenching half upon their apposing gums. His face was a mismatch of battle scars, consistent with the missing digits upon stumpy fingers and deformations across his body. A battle-hardened beast of a man, who looked upon the unsettled waters, he scanned for what should have been his squirming victim. Yet for all the ripped reeds and unknown rustling, he couldn’t make out any human form.
His chest pumped hardened breath; his eye yearned for a thirst that blood could only quench. His focus was no longer on the hunt but the prospect of a far greater foe. This saw the beastly man retreat backwards, slow and steady. Ready to react to what appeared to be something conjuring from the deep.
‘Bjarke, you are with us, or you are alone,’ said another less stocky Viking, who was naïve to the ways of his senior.
‘Aye, but we not alone,’ said Bjarke as he scampered off at the same feverish pace at which he trailed Anneliese.
Anneliese remained motionless. She was paralyzed with fear, where even the frigid waters felt nothing to the adrenaline impulse that kept her frozen and pale upon the reeds. She was helpless to the sounds of screams and fire that swarmed the township. Her sanctuary of solace was consumed by cold-blooded violence.
However, in the dying ambers of chaos, she bore witness to the last sign of hope.
Mother Simonet was leading a small contingent of orphans through the vegetable gardens. Tiptoeing through the lions’ den, they scurried from cover to cover. Simonet’s strong-willed patience was making sure their next step would not be their last. While before them sprawled the well-grazed paddocks, whose scattered livestock left nothing in the way of foliage to disguise the harrowing distance that stood between them and their woodland escape.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
It was a destination obscuring the hidden horde of Viking stewards, who lay in wait for the mass exodus that didn’t eventuate.
Anneliese yearned to call out to the orphans, but her pursuer’s glowing axe held her to an inaudible squeak. That did nothing to forewarn her fellow orphans of their impending danger. Yet inside, she felt a burning sensation, crawling up her spine as though a snake was trying to levitate her out of the reeds. A tingle that resonated from her bones to hands, making numb fingers that acted on their own accord.
After a brief pause, and upon the sound of distant buildings collapsing, she saw Simonet hurry the children across the flat, dewy grass, towards a distortion in the woodlands. To where the stout trunks bent and deformed behind the bellowing of ungodly sounds until the central point of the distortion broke to reveal a dark semitransparent orb. From this orb erupted a fiery mess of straw-laden timber and stone. The cascade of debris illuminating then smothering the shadows of hidden Viking marauders.
Without a moment of hesitation and a near-ankle-breaking pivot, Simonet realized the error in her plans and drew the children away. Not to the town, but the near-impossible expanse that separated them from the opposite hillside forest.
Their trail was hotly pursued by one braided blond-haired Viking. His dual-wielded axes slashed up and down with pumping arms. His voice was a husky snarl of straining breath, fueled with hellfire fury.
And the remaining pillaging Vikings played spectator to the imperiled lady of the church, who in her heavy-coated garment could barely keep upright as she fell victim to Anneliese’s stray broom that had been lazily left upon the slippery ground. Her stumble only brought her mere seconds away from peril as she urged the orphans to not look back.
But a defeated woman, she was not.
She righted herself in time to deliver a clean heel strike to the broom handle. The break turned the splintered midsection into a makeshift spear, as she posed for a show of resistance without the semblance of technique. Rigid and grounded, she braced for impact. The Viking’s bulging neck veins were the last thing either Mother Simonet or Anneliese saw before they both closed their eyes. The former for good, the latter in sheer repulsion of the horror before her.
And as the dreaded moment of impact passed without a thud, Anneliese awoke to a shell of nothingness.
It was as though she had teleported into a sea of black, absent of all nature and temperature. A place that felt foreign and yet eerily familiar. An empty slate that had transformed through instinct into the poorly lit corridors of the old pagan stronghold and the echoing sound of fumbling feet on rocky floors.
Her arrival, via this teleportation, and the surround’s subsequent transformation brought about a burst of light that rippled from ceiling-bound glow-worms. It illuminated the shifting walls that aligned the one-way passage between Anneliese and the same blond-haired Viking, who, unabated by the sudden change in location, having been teleported with Annelise, continued his war-footing towards the only viable target for his one-axe offensive.
Then as quickly as these new surrounds revealed themselves, in the blink of an eye, Anneliese teleported back to the comfort of the nothingness.
By morning break, she found herself back among the reeds with a dragonfly taking rest upon her pale cheek. In her exhausted state, she was unable to make clear the blurry rendition of the now-razed town, where ghostly grey figures traced up and down the lakeside, collecting the remains of the night’s carnage.
The strangers expressed themselves in various degrees of vengeful hate and disturbed sorrow, which, for one indistinguishable soldier, became too much to bear.
One’s limp legs fell to all fours, and his head hung heavy over the disturbed reeds, before he looked up and yelled, ‘Over here.’
Nearby soldiers hurried in the direction of Anneliese, who was floating lifelessly within the reeds. The first few strangers waded in fully dressed, and they dragged her limp body to the dry grasslands. Various hands then rendered aid and clothing to warm her frigid frame. One elderly gentleman manipulated and pulled at her fingers. The stimulation triggered brief reflexes from Anneliese, which spawned shouts of relief from the amassing crowd.
‘Lady! Lady, are you okay?’ asked one ironclad knight. He then threw his gauntlet to gravel before cradling her head against his breastplate. With his free hand, he brushed the marshy residue from her hair.
‘My name is Anneliese … Lady of,’ she said before succumbing to exhaustion and only quietly whispering words of unknown origin as her eyes delved deeper into an unconscious state.
‘Lord Bradfrey, there is no,’ said the elder …
These words brought Anneliese back to the nothingness, where she encountered a ragged leather armchair that was facing a large ornamental mirror.
The mirror reflected a disorientating brightness, prompting her to approach, eyelids clenched. And then her body naturally gravitated towards the fraying leather seat. The mirror’s brightness dispersed behind her closed eyes, creating a solar eclipse within her mind.
And there appeared a mental image of an old, slouched man with a partially crushed crown – a king? His body twisted, zigzagged into the contours of the armchair, derogatively steering her down with every sense of mental awareness, as though she were intruding in on him.
‘Who are you?’ asked Anneliese.
‘There is only one of us in this room, yet here we are. It’ll make sense when you realize the one who guides the ship doesn’t always choose the destination,’ said the decrepit ghost-king. His one-sided stroke-ridden body was holding back the intended anger that accompanied the few facial muscles he had to portray emotion.
With his words, the sound of a grated drone reverberated throughout the emptiness.
‘You are me?’ Anneliese asked.
‘Aha ha.’ He laughed, as though this was his dying breath. ‘I am more than you. I’m the force of a thousand generations of magic, deciding what to make of this poor little girl.’
‘You’re a demon?’
‘I am many things. Temptation, regret, lust, and fear. All those emotions you bottle up inside. All those things you can’t control, control you.’
‘I don’t care who you are or what you want from me, but I am not yours for the taking.’
‘Oh, but I’m already here. I might as well make myself acquainted.’ He snapped his fingers—
The illusion ended, and the sensation of a cold invisible hand was upon Anneliese’s shoulder. And then she recoiled into wide-eyed startlement, only to be overwhelmed by the mirror’s light that blinded her back into the abyss.
Alone once more, the tingling sensations began amplifying within her. A sphere of numbness that traced her mind’s eye from limb to limb until finally inching its way up her spine. An unstable force that tweaked and prodded every nerve it passed. There was no concept of time nor weariness, no distraction, only this sphere of numbness traversing her weightless body.
Under the rigors of trial and error, she directed its path towards the base of her neck. A growing resonance that emanated desire and control. Yet it subjected her to increased pain as the sphere reached a point of impassability below her cranium, where every ascent failed under paralytic pain. Her measure of progress was laid in how quickly she collected herself upon every failure. To rise again with narrowed focus and precision of control, as her eye socket became consumed by smoke, and the searing pain more a hurdle than a barrier. Until she once again encountered that point of impassability, that occupied her frontal lobe …
‘The path forward is never a straight line. Seek the unknown, the unclear,’ said the distant voice, echoed in from all directions.
‘What is the unknown? How is that meant to help?’ Anneliese asked as her fists pressed hard against her face, forcefully trying to release the pain. Then without warning, she felt a sense of gravity ignited from her extremities that warped and bent the sphere. All she had to do was anchor it within her mind, then release the tension she used to move it there. The sphere did the rest as it trickled down, like honey, through her nervous system, creating new connections the further it went.
Able to relinquish all thoughts, she allowed her mind’s eye to wonder. To feel her body release. The numbness drained through her spine. Her limbs relaxed as the unstable sphere forged the new veins of unknown sensations …
Free and unchallenged, she visualized a dark sphere.
Darker than the nothingness. Its presence made all else glow like the glow-worms within the pagan stronghold. Then it clicked.
Her eyes burst to a steady black smoke of purple glow.
The nothingness transformed into the enchanted pagan stronghold. It’s walls shifting and crafting to her will. As she focused in on the cold charcoal blue flames of the dying firepit, whose ashes lofted up the air until the mere irritation of her nose created a shock wave to dispense with the troublesome particles. As she transformed the dark, depressing cave to the winter wonderland.
Her ragged clothes made way for the finest of furs, hugging her figure. The long-paved roads surrounded by white covered pines opening to grand walled city. Of warm festive streets that bore every imaginable character of craftsmanship but lacked the human presence necessary to fulfill any genuine sense of communal celebration.
Only the stray wolf’s prints showed any sense of life as she followed the trail, crisscrossing from the open markets to the confined side allies and dead ends, where the paw prints vanished from sight.
Still withholding hope of deeper meaning, she whispered, ‘Shadow?’
Her plea was answered by the growling breath from behind. She turned, and the black wolf tackled her to the ground. It’s claws were pinning her down via the thick fur winter coat.
‘Go home,’ said the wolf, its thick vapor-filled breath spraying a vile concoction of retched odor upon her face. Its jagged teeth brought immediacy to the situation as protector unveiled as predator. The wolf jawed at her neck before Anneliese withdrew back into the cave, and from the cave to the nothingness, to the blinding light and the expulsion from fantasy to reality—
She was awoken to find herself in the back of a horse cart upon a pile of hay and constricting blanket, which she threw off in a burst of energy.
‘Well, that was some recovery,’ said Patricia, a woman of round figure and plush cheeks. She had a twangy voice that spoke with every ounce of simple-minded surprise.
‘I’m alive?’ said Anneliese. Her surreal experience left her doubting the world as any more real than the winter wonderland in which she escaped.
‘Aye. More than that, by the looks of things,’ said Patricia.
Patricia was snugged up with the two youngest of the five remaining orphans. Together, they huddled under the only remaining blanket not spared for Anneliese and the other injured passengers.
‘What happened to the others?’ Anneliese asked.
‘Look around,’ said Mother Simonet. She was a pale-faced wreck of her former self, with a stumpy amputated right arm that protruded from the thick woolly cover as she drearily tilted her head towards Anneliese’s lively presence. ‘I thought we lost you. We were all lost, but our better angels intervened and forged a reckoning upon the heathens.’
‘Aye, may God have mercy on their souls. For he didn’t spare mercy upon their mortal bodies, I’ll tell you that,’ said Patricia.
Patricia’s word resonated with Anneliese’s sense of familiarity – knowledge beyond the common senses of sight and sound. The persistent tingling in her hands, that held fragmented memories she could feel but not visualize. A sensation too incomprehensible, but authentic enough to recognize a terror she dared not try to understand. Was it her voice she heard deep inside the abyss, or was it the manipulative influence of the ghost-king’s?
Holding the bent metal cross tethered around her neck, she vowed a silent promise. Whatever the future bared, it would not be the demon’s doing. Her faculties were her own, no one else’s.