It was midafternoon and a slight coolness sheltered in the dense, humid heat. Modesta moved down to the edge of the stream and put her hot feet in the water, letting the ripples tickle her toes. Her head felt light and she wondered if the thin old man in her dream really was her grandfather, because he seemed unsure himself about his meaning.
Then she saw a movement out of the corner of her eye. A long canoe with six men paddling was coming towards her. A large grinning man stood up and pointed at her. Then he started laughing and shouting like an overgrown child. But it was not he nor the paddlers that made her stop wiggling her toes and freeze in wonder. It was the other man-thing that the laughing one was talking to. He lifted the man-thing up on a pole, like a flag, and flapped him towards her in a rough boisterous way, which rocked the boat dangerously. Then a small, grey Man Without Substance that had been obscured behind the bulk of the rowers barked as the boat tilted side to side. The paddlers looked scared and worked harder to stabilise the craft. The grey one who was dressed in the tattered robe of a dissolute priest shouted again, and the Wassidrus was lowered back into the boat. Then he turned to see what had so excited the idiot who was called Kippa. The look in his eye was strange and unpleasant as it changed from shock into intent. He spoke again to the rowers and they guided the boat to the side of a round green rock that jutted out midway in the stream, opposite from where she was sitting. One of the paddlers and the grey one stepped out into the fast water. They secured the boat while the small man waded in up to his waist towards her. He clambered onto the flinty beach where the roots crawled out of the undergrowth and tried to grip the wet shiny pebbles but caught only rank foam and the skin and fur of a dead beast and the matted twigs of dead trees.
“What are you doing here?” He chewed the words like he was eating a snake and looked like he was going to strangle her. She clearly did not understand what he was saying or recognise who was saying it. He said it again and again in many different languages. She understood odd words from half of them and began to try to answer. But the pollen and dust of her kindred’s dream gagged her voice. He stared at her unknowing, in what looked like distrust. Then he changed his attitude and grinned a ruthless agreement to something that neither of them had asked. It was an expression that had not found its way to his face in years, and the cobwebs in its sinews creaked in complaint. The soaking grey man then spoke and she understood what it meant and twisted to answer in a haze of instinct. The grey one became more enraged. He then stepped towards her and pushed his now-quiet hand into her face, turning it back and forward like a naked, infuriated puppet. She became confused by all these contradictions. What did he want of her? He must want her to go with him. So she grabbed the offered hand and let it guide her. He gripped back instinctively and she gave him the balance of her entire slight weight, which he held confounded as she climbed down the crumbling shelf to the loose wet beach. The paddler by the rock was struggling to keep the boat in place and called across to the grey one, who looked back and forth for a while before he swept her up in his wet arms and carried her out into the stream, calling to the men in the canoe as he waded. They moved to one side, so that he could lift her into the long husk-like canoe. The paddler with the rope clambered on board and pulled in the soggy dripping priest after him. They instantly started moving away, swiftly pushing against the stream into the Vorrh. She looked past the heavy working bodies to the back of the boat and the thing she did not understand lying there. The wet man said that his name was Father Lutchen, and that she was to sit still and say nothing, and that she was not to be frightened by the ugly thing back there. It was only a hurt man. Ugly but harmless. Sidrus had always been ugly and dangerous. The Wassidrus was worse, much worse, but without the means to express it.
Yet.
After they departed the river, the beach, and the raised lip of land, it all readjusted under the towering awareness of the trees. The pebbles lost the stain of human warmth. The water shook off its taste of sweat and the flattened grasses slowly clicked back into their vertical semblance of the rest of the forest. The breeze cleared the air and the birds changed their tune of alarm and disgust into a softer conversation about being here, there, and now. The ants and the clustering insects stopped waiting for the bodies to be still and foraged elsewhere, and the omnipresent mosquitoes reassessed their menu. In one hour all traces of the intrusion were lost and decent time settled back, oblivious to the rubbed-out moment of blight.
Lutchen watched the young woman and tried to place young Father Timothy’s description of her over the frailty he saw before him. But the stories of malign power and sinister control did not fit. He questioned himself again about a confusion of identity; much fit, but some details nagged at him. This young woman seemed much older than the child of Timothy’s nightmares. But he did say that she had been growing unnaturally. Surely this was her, near adulthood and of a species he had never experienced before, for what else could she be to beguile him so? She had given him her trust and he had taken it and more. He had felt her body close to him, in his care. He had even spoken to her, told her his name. And he had warned her about the Wassidrus. This was not what he had planned or imagined, if he ever met her again. He would not let her trick him further. He would watch her every minute of the journey.
The boat had entered deeper into the Vorrh, and it is at that part of the river when it is best to give up oneself: shed all notions of the “I” before it is wrenched out of the living soul. He sensed it and switched into the absence produced by serious meditation—a device that allows all men of learning and the servants of God to remain sane. He thought that the paddlers were safe because of their slavish obedience, Kippa because of his idiocy. He had no idea about the disgusting Wassidrus and did not much care, as long as he remained dormant and at the other end of the boat. But this child was another matter. She had once had enough willpower and hypnotic force to make her implacable. And dominant willpower: This place would rip it out of her if she did not offer it up. His old self smirked at the prospect that he would have the pleasure of the spectacle without ever doing a thing, ever lifting a hand or a finger in the horror of her punishment.
Modesta began her first convulsions.
Lutchen leaned forward to watch the white spittle form in the corner of her mouth and her delicate legs thrash out at the gunwales of the canoe. The paddlers looked sideways at her in consternation, recognising signs of shamanistic possession in her anguish. Kippa clapped his hands and twisted the stick so that the Wassidrus’s head scraped along the floor of the boat, closer to the thrashing child. This was all that Lutchen had predicted. The very core of the part of her that had hurt him was in agony before his eyes. So where was the pleasure, the satisfaction? As it got worse, his anticipation reversed and responsibility walked in. No one else on the boat could help her and he sickened at her anguish. He rushed at her, lifting her up and almost out of the boat. He pushed her choking head into the water so that she coughed and spluttered against it and the foam in her mouth. She started fighting for her life and the instinctive reaction drove all sense of “I” out of her body. The primitive battle to survive was deeper and older than the willpower that lived in her higher brain, and it took over everything. The fit ceased as she drowned and Lutchen dragged her back into the boat, turning her facedown so that he could work her lungs through her back. He did not notice that her face was only inches away from the mangled head of the Wassidrus, who was trying to speak to her. The paddlers had slowed to see what was happening and Lutchen screamed at them to go faster, to reach the next bend and farther before twilight. They hammered at the river, splashing the oars and accidentally spooning water into the boat with their force. She spluttered, now lying in an agitated pool that seemed to be coming equally from outside the boat and from inside the rawness of her lungs. She opened her eyes wide to understand where she was, and saw that she was looking point-blank into the bloated, jabbering face of the Wassidrus, his spitting mouth spraying her. She flinched back from the proximity of his gnashing broken teeth, making a small alert sound that forced Lutchen to see that she was breathing and about to make direct contact with the snapping monster in the bilge. He pulled her back and screamed at Kippa, “Keep that thing back there, keep it away.”
Kippa instantly tugged at the leglike appendages and slithered the entire thing back towards the rear of the canoe, its teeth and jaw raking the bilge.
“Keep it there or it goes over the side, now.”
The old priest lifted the shivering woman into his arms for the second time that day. He grabbed one of the rolled cloaks from an almost dry cubby at the side of the boat and wrapped it around her clattering bones. He pushed her head into the warmth of his chest so that he did not have to see her eyes.
The boat was quiet as twilight approached, squeezing out of the trees, thickening in the gaps between them, and snuffing out each particle of light in the crystal air.
“Make camp,” he almost whispered, anxious not to anger the gods of the dark or excite them about the strange being that was sleeping in his arms.