Friar Benedict was on his way to further examine the remains of the Cyst where the voice had come from when he was interrupted by a novice who nervously told him that Friar Ludo wanted him in the kitchen.
“The kitchen?” asked Benedict in his best irritated voice. “Why?”
“There is a thing there that nobody knows.”
“What kind of thing?”
“What the peasants call a Woebegot, we think.”
Little from the outside world was worthy of Benedict’s observation and speculation. He had long since given up the trivia beyond the abbey walls. But the rumors of these new creatures had alerted his curiosity. The proliferation of new animals excited his imagination and its taste for the arcane. He knew such things no longer existed in the modern world. Nothing of this nature had been heard of since he was a snotty-nosed child during the passage of the Archimandrites. No, these new rumors must be species of unknown creatures driven to his door by a famine or by a deformed seasonal migration from a different curve of the world. At least that’s what he thought when he entered the kitchen.
A village oaf and his son had gathered the nerve to rap on the World Gate of the monastery and ask if they might speak to a learned man. Benedict was known and respected by all the monks as a wise and distinguished scholar. The abbot, however, had a different opinion, believing that any such qualities were ruined by Benedict’s irascible and petulant personality. In the past, Benedict was to be approached or indeed summoned only if something was deemed worthy enough to dislodge him from his books. There had been strict instructions that all incidents of the abnormal were to be reported to him, so that he, and only he, could examine and pass judgment on the odd and unexpected. But the abbot had recently proclaimed that Benedict should be released of such worrying duties and be allowed to pursue his studies without interruption. And that he, Abbot Clementine, would now take on the mantle of any such investigations.
But Friar Ludo made his own decision on who to call when the peasants and their sack were shooed into the rich odors of the monastery’s kitchen. This was about as deep into the holy brothers’ home as any outsider was allowed. The gormless duo stood with Friar Ludo around one of the enormous scarred wooden tables that dominated the room. On it they placed a hessian sack.
“These good folks have brought us a specimen of an animal that nobody has ever seen before,” said Ludo, poking the sack with a set of long-handled iron tongs.
“Wees never seen the like of this un,” said the farmer to the monks, his head swinging from one to the other, seeking signs of approval or interest. He got neither.
“Very well, let’s see it,” said Benedict, and Ludo gingerly held the corner of the sack and opened it roughly with the tongs. He then pulled the sack upward with a shaking motion and in a theatrical manner, which Benedict thought inappropriate to the circumstances. What fell out made both monks step away from the table and then step closer in a single unbroken motion.
“Never’d seen its like,” said the farmer.
It looked like a melon or a pumpkin or some other species of overgrown gourd that had been skewered with an elaborate spit of the same color: a bright, sickly orange. Benedict took the trembling tongs from Ludo and turned the thing over. Ludo put his hands over his mouth and stepped backward. On what had been its underside was a face, or at least a travesty of one: A long gash with a downward turn appeared to be a mouth. Above sat two shallow depressions in which orbs seemed to float. No sign of personality or character could be seen in them; they looked more like ancient, flaccid pickled onions than the windows to any kind of soul. The turning also revealed the nature of the “skewer”; each end of the creature unfolded into a three-fingered hand, which made it clear that these were in fact slender arms outstretched from the lumpen head or body of the thing. There was no sign of legs.
“Is it dead?” asked Ludo from the back of the kitchen.
“Shod be, I ’ad it with the muck-fork a dizen times or more,” said the farmer.
“Did you now?” said Benedict, turning the body again and stretching one of the arms out to its fullest length. He thought it was almost elegant in its odd proportion, like a muscular female child.
“Aye, I gave it a right trolluxing.” The farmer sharply elbowed his son to get his instant agreement.
“Then where are the wounds?” asked Benedict, without raising his eyes to confront the man.
The man looked from the creature, to his accuser, to his son, and back again, several times, without a single word of understanding.
“We need to dissect this thing. I suspect foul play, or blasphemy, or worse. Brother Ludo, please call the gentlemen of the watch.”
“Nay, nay,” said the son. “We’d meant no harm by it. Pa killed it because it were in our barn.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, child!”
Benedict had become furious in his manner and his speech, something he was much famed for when having to address novices about minor misdemeanors. His outrage also made his crippled lip stick above his teeth on the left side.
“Do you not understand? Your fafer nefer killed thif becausfe thif thing never livfed.”
He tugged at his mouth and continued, which made him even angrier.
“You must think us foolfish, bringing such nonsensth here. It’s bad enough that you or your kindred have constructed this outrage, with fruif of field and other matter. But to use the limbf of the dead is sacrilege. Defecrating recent graves of children for your own folly is a criminal offense.”
The old monk was holding the three-fingered hand in his own as he spat these words, and was about to erupt with more details of their just punishment, when the fingers twisted, gripped, and held his own.
His shriek was heard throughout the cloister.
Friar Cuthbert dropped his hoe and ran from the garden to confront whatever was occurring in the kitchen. The sight that met him confounded all possible responses, and left him with only the ability to cackle behind his nervous hand.
The miserable Friar Benedict was dancing with a hideous puppet and screaming “Get it off. Get it off!” at the top of his voice.
Three other white-faced witnesses were frozen to the spot, including Dominic, who’d been drawn to the commotion from his bed in the adjoining infirmary. It was the most convincing mummery the young monk had ever seen. True, the pumpkin-headed monster was poorly made, but the way the slit flapped open as a giant mouth and the apparent strength in its arms as it propelled about the room were amazing. However, it was the old monk’s acting that gave the whole thing a terrifying reality—especially his staring eyes, his squawks, and the way he bent his hand so it looked as if the puppet was twisting his fingers and forcing him to dance with the pain of it.
The monk and the puppet were hopping and falling around the kitchen table. Every so often, the puppet seemed to lunge with its free hand toward a dirty sack on the tabletop. On the third insane circuit, it clambered up the old monk’s body and grabbed something from the lip of the sack. It was most convincing. Friar Benedict’s great shudders of revulsion were almost believable. The puppet grabbed the object and brought it clattering to the floor. It was a dented saucepot. Letting go of the monk’s hand and quickly balancing the pot on its fat head, the puppet ran off on its hands like a great demented bird.
Benedict sat with his hands over his eyes and mouth, sobbing. The others did nothing until the farmer’s son said, “It’s what it was a-wearing when Pa killed it, that crock on its head…a-wearing it then, as it be a-wearing it again now.”
Nobody needed to argue with the boy’s stoic assertion.