Richard Gavin has authored four acclaimed collections of eldritch horror fiction: Charnel Wine (Rainfall Books, 2004), Omens (Mythos Books, 2007), The Darkly Splendid Realm (Dark Regions Press, 2009) and At Fear’s Altar (Hippocampus Press, 2012). He has also published non-fiction writings on the macabre and the esoteric. Richard lives in Ontario, Canada with his beloved wife and their brood. Visit him online at www.richardgavin.net.
MARIETTA CAME TO THE Fallows to wait once more for the ghostlights. And, although they would manifest for her that day, she had no inkling that this would be the last time she would see them.
Her pilgrimage unfurled under the blaze of mid-afternoon. The ghostlights appeared in their customary manner, boiling up out of the aether itself. Tiny splatters of luxuriously-coloured light, their centres the purple-black of heart’s blood, their edges wreathed in a gaudy gleam of chartreuse. They were suspended in midair like Yuletide baubles hung with spider’s skeins.
The uncomfortably cold, soaked earth of the Fallows began to climb up around the holey leather that covered Marietta’s feet as she stood stone-still in the field, gazing. Although only her lungs and eyelids were moving, and, even then, scarcely, Marietta nonetheless felt as though she were cart-wheeling forward, spinning through the borderless country inside herself.
After so many visitations, she was well accustomed to such sensations, but thrilled to them all the same. She pressed her eyelids closed, watching the paler suggestions of the ghostlights cascading through the fleshly veils of her eyelids.
She was straining to hear the sound of his leap, or his terrible bellow that had long ago inspired all the local shepherds to usher their flocks elsewhere. (Marietta was, to the best of her knowledge, the only one who still visited the Fallows.)
But these heralds of his arrival did not come.
Opening her eyes, she was puzzled by the grim vacancy of both the field and the woods that framed it.
All at once, the landscape felt altered. Even the ghostlights shifted their pattern. They began to manically twirl and flex.
Then they began to drift, leaving thin trails of putrid fog in their wake.
Marietta followed them to the far end of the field.
The ghostlights seemed to swarm together to create a kind of constellation. The atmosphere thickened with a rare new gravity, which pulled Marietta’s gaze to a mud patch that stretched drably beneath the brightly churning orbs.
The ground here drooped in a lazy slope; forging a ditch that distinguished the Fallows from the copse that grew dense and wild alongside it.
There, heaped upon the dirt like a flung bale of hay, was a nightmare in flesh and fur. Marietta’s senses were so offended by the sight that she reflexively turned away, counting off enough heartbeats to melt the phantasm back into nothing more than the twisted boughs that had been made to breathe only by her own imagination.
But, when Marietta opened her eyes, she discovered that her attempt to banish it had been in vain.
The leaping one was still lying broken in the mud. The shock of discovery tainted the atmosphere with a numbness as cold and grey as a stone marker.
Talons of sorrow pushed deeply, deeply into Marietta until, punctured, she could only collapse at the side of her great love.
The crooked one’s jaws were moving, but no sound escaped his mouth. When Marietta’s sobs softened at last, the only noise she could discern was the delicate plash of ichor against stone.
She could but watch as the vital fluid emptied itself from the various wounds that brightened the leathery skin of his trunk, mottled the blackish wool on the wayward contours of his grand legs. Emerging from the tangles of fur was his great livid serpent of muscle, its skin the hue of an overripe plum. Marietta found herself staring at it in a shameful-yet-unbreakable trance. As this snake flexed, the black pit of its eye widened, releasing a reedy sine, a sound not unlike a song. The vivid ichor even spilled from this throbbing hole, mingling with the oh-so-mortal drabness of the earth.
Marietta believed that the thing was beseeching her with its unworldly eyes. Their irises were the blue of a frozen sea; their pupils vertical slitlike things, cauldron-black and omniscient. A filmy membrane winked across them in rapid sweeps, pushing the grit and sludge to the rim of the reddened sockets.
She wanted so much to question him, to learn what had happened and how. But Marietta knew that, although her lover’s plump tongue had many uses, speech was not among them.
Had the others found him? Had they traced him to the great ruddy cave where he slumbered and then beaten him, cut him with blades, pierced him with arrows?
The grove suddenly dimmed. At first Marietta, wondered if time had disappeared (hours always melted much more swiftly when she was with him), but she realised that the darkening was the result of the ghostlights winking out in tedious succession.
Now their colours existed only in the vital ichor that bled out of the dying god and seeped into the earth around his gnarled hands and the scuffed lustre of his cloven feet.
New forms began to halo the failing old one: flies who had come not to crown him, but to sup on the outpouring streams of his lifeblood. Marietta swatted away as many as she could, but, soon, they were legion. They swarmed in swiftly. After lapping up the vivid ichor, the bugs came away intoxicated. Their flight paths were visibly meandering, their pace logy. Never had they suckled a blood so rarefied.
Marietta traced her hand along the sharply jutting bone structure of his face. Through the filthy moss of his beard, a deep, silent oval of agony widened.
I’ll come back, Marietta sent to him. I’ll come back with help or with wine, or a song. I’ll come back with something to cure you. They’ll come looking for me if I don’t get back to the village, but I will come back to you. Please stay with me. Please.
The girl knew no sleep that night. When, upon sunrise, she returned to the Fallows, she discovered that even the gory remnant of her great love had vanished.
She shirked her chores in order to spend the lion’s share of the day scouring the meadows and the dim groves and the shadow-moistened caves. In her pouch she had a small ration of wine and some salt to titillate a waning palate. But he was nowhere to be found.
Even the lurid pond of his blood had been subsumed by the soil.
Marietta lowered herself onto the site of his expiration, too gutted to even weep.
The invasion commenced the very next morning. Great ships appeared, carrying people with ghost-pale flesh and a faith that was alien to these ancient woods.
The imprint-free villages of pitched canvas were razed, as swiftly as fired bullets, as inexorably as the descending blade. What swelled in their stead were structures forged from gutted forests. The ruddy contours of his great organic temple were smothered by chapels of chastity, of symmetry. His sighs and shrieks were bridled by a faith that wrestled to keep all ecstasies infuriatingly aloof until after one’s flesh had turned respectably cold.
The Fallows were upturned and transmuted into a golden carpet of wheat. Harvests sprouted and were soon sown as the interlopers put down deeper roots.
Marietta lingered, not for family ties, but to keep vigil in the place that had been his, been theirs.
She earned her keep by carrying out the meagre toils of one of the prominent families in the village. She slept on a cot in the barn and prepared their meals to their unique specifications. She scrubbed the smoothed wood of their floors and washed their dishes of clay. When their stiff clothing looked too lived-in, Marietta mended them with a silver needle and thread.
But, at night, when the austere ones were slumbering, she would bear a lantern back to the former Fallows and would call his name into the darkness.
Did these people even know the name of the one who had called these rustic hills his own? Had they any hint of the forces that churned beneath their pathways and their churches and their snug homes?
Surely, some among them would ache for it, could they but discover the Source ….
Marietta wished and, ultimately, the ghostlights returned … but in a changed state.
In the early harvest of the year, during one of Marietta’s rare afternoon visits to her paramour’s landmark, she discovered that the ghostlights were now colouring the wheat itself.
It had been a rainy season and the crops that had sprouted were not golden, but whitish and blotchy with a peculiar fungus: blue and green and flecked with a black that made Marietta think of the vault that held the stars; the darkness that had been the nativity of her great love, whose birth had heralded the primal dawn. And now his sovereign blood was flowering once more, chthonic and musty and raw.
The people were so desperate to maintain their comfort that they chanced the possibility of toxicity rather than deny themselves a bountiful table.
They cut the grotesque shoots and ground them. Though the resultant grist was pasty and smelled of unturned roots, they baked it into their loaves, which were devoured with thanksgiving to their Maker. Such were the gifts bestowed to the true.
Fittingly, it was a young woman who first felt the ichor burning within her. She would awaken with strange stories of nocturnal flights through eerie woodlands and of the touch of an inhuman lover.
Marietta would often comfort the daughter, encouraging her to keep such fancies to herself, to rest, and to, of course, eat heartily of the bread and wheat gruel she prepared for the girl daily.
The keepers of the stringent faith soon learned of similar night-rides from other girls in the village. Superstition grew rampant as reports of a great horned form emerging from the woods to hold congress caused great alarm, then persecution, and finally executions.
Twenty girls found death at the end of a rope. Men of reason pleaded with the authorities that the true problem was a blend of superstition, adolescent fancy and a tainted crop from the previous autumn. Ergot was the name some gave it: a strange mould that had infected the girls with sickness, with vivid nightmares.
But by then the ghostlights had ignited the blood of the chaste. This sanguinary pyre heralded the long awaited Return ….
The clan who had conspired to put an end to the diabolism was small but among the most fanatical. They went out to the Fallows, now stripped, where the girls had claimed they had seen It.
There they waited, without benefit of fire or food. In a blackness as cold as the deep sea, they waited.
The ghostlights were the first manifestation they witnessed and, even then, with unbelieving eyes.
Then, seized with panic, they saw the goatish shape as it came bounding from an ugly patch of woods and into the clearing.
Nothing, they thought, could be more ineffable than the awesome bent giant who was now lumbering toward them, reeking of dread-sweat and olde lust.
But, one by one, they glanced upward to see the face of the unclad woman who rode upon the creature’s back.
More dreadful than the appearance of the Beast was the face of its Bride. Her aspect, the living emblem of unbridled Rapture.