Far along the path, the treetops from either side made a roof
that nearly blocked out the late afternoon sun. A musky scent similar to that
in Skalica began to assault everyone’s nose- except for Silvernose, whose
eponymous prosthesis had never been able to restore his lost ability to
smell.
The tree-roofed rutted path finally opened up in a
clearing. The clearing lay in a ravine,
at the center of which trickled a small stream.
On the far side, on the most gentle of the ravine’s slopes, which was
still quite steep, a rustic cabin stood.
Zdenka parked the horses and wagon on the somewhat level
shelf right where the path debouched onto the clearing. She did not want to risk taking the wagon
across the uneven ground and crossing the part-rocky, part-squishy
streambed.
Everyone hurried on foot across
the distance to the cabin to take what they could from Ludmilla’s home, return
to the wagon, and leave for Horalka before the good light faded and the moon
rose. Except for Ludmilla, each carried
at least one weapon.
Silvernose noted the lines of disturbed dirt, which
converged at the cabin in a tumult of torn-up soil and turf. He could see the remains of what had been
Ludmilla’s garden.
To his surprise, there were no obvious wolf prints to be
seen as he neared the cabin. He
dismissed an urge to puzzle this out. He
strongly agreed with the others that it was more important to salvage
Ludmilla’s belongings and get back on the road.
The musk-stench grew worse as they approached the little
house. The door hung open. Something had tracked muddy trails all over
the floorboards. Bits of Ludmilla’s
furs, blankets, towels, clothes, and food supplies were strewn everywhere. There were claw-marks, scratches across the
floor. Ludmilla’s table and single chair had been knocked over. Her wooden storage chests had been smashed
open.
Worst attacked was the corner where the floorboards stopped,
to make a stone-lined storage hole, where Ludmilla had kept various barrels of
flour, oil, dried beans, and seeds. The
lingering musk was most pungent here.
Mud, splintered barrel staves, and filthy scraps of wasted food lay
scattered around this corner of the cabin.
Ludmilla fairly growled at this, and turned away to unbar the windows
and open the shutters.
Ludmilla’s pallet lay on the flat top of the massive whitewashed
clay oven in the middle of the one-room hermitage. Underneath the fireplace hole in the stove
were alcoves in which Sister Ludmilla kept her precious iron skillet, clay and
wooden jugs and bowls, and other kitchen tools.
She unhooked a cauldron from the roof, and asked Zdenka to start shoving
the kitchen items into it. Her bow
looked like it had been gnawed, trampled, and broken, but Ludmilla asked Zdenka
to pack any surviving arrows, hunting knives, torches, and traps she could find
in the cauldron as well.
Ludmilla unhooked several other baskets from the rafters and
told Silvernose to collect all the herbs hanging upside-down there to dry. She said they would go through the herbs
together at Horalka and he could keep whatever he wanted for himself. Silvernose waved away her generosity.
The old hermitess pulled a final basket from the rafters,
and handed it to Beata. She gingerly
gathered together some glass, clay, and wooden fragments from the floor into a
silver cup, which she carefully wrapped in a soft rag, and placed in the
basket. She then took each icon off the
shelves in her icon corner, sighed, folded them in what dried moss and scraps
of old red and white ručník towels
she could find, and gave them to Beata to carefully fit into the basket around
the silver cup.
Beata, like Silvernose, had not noticed any obvious wolf
tracks outside. There were no clearly
wolfish muddy pawprints inside, either. This
cast Silvernose’s Werwolf theory into doubt.
Her own theory that forest devils, hairy devils of loneliness,
had attacked the hermitage did not seem any more plausible now, though. The icons on the upper shelves had not been
disturbed – she could recognize Mikulašky St. Liptov and St. Vlasta of Vodníkov. But St. Lucina and the other saints on the
lowest two shelves, along with their seed-oil lanterns, had been bumped onto
the floor and knocked around. This was
something the intelligently evil forest or mountain devils, no matter how
ferocious or hirsute, would not be able to do, because of the sovereign protective
power of God’s saints.
This was the damage a dumb animal would do, thought
Beata. It was as if a stampede of small
dogs or large rats had upset the shelf and trampled its contents.
While the four rummaged inside the hermitage, an uncanny
silence descended on the forest outside.
The silence was broken by a rustling in the undergrowth
several bowshots distant. The rustling
surged toward the hermitage like a fast-moving swell on the sea.
Rabbits, weasels, snakes, mice, and other
small animals dodged and bounded headlong at top speed before the mysterious wave of disturbance. Several animals came scrambling and tumbling
through the still-open door.
“It’s happening again!” screeched Ludmilla, and beckoned
everyone toward the doorway.
+++
The story so far...
The Terror of the Trdlo, Serialized:
Part I - The Adventure Begins (But Not Really the Terror, Yet)
Part II - Zdenka vs. The Green-Eyed Monster (Jealousy - That Is)
Part III - Nun: The Wiser
Part IV - The Hermitess
Part V - Silvernose Arrives Minus His Weird Girlfriend
Part VI - She's Gone Feral
Part VII - A Little Traveling Music
Part VIII - Horror at the Hermitage
Part IX - The Rutting Moon
Part X - Herbal Interlude
Part XI - "It's Blood"
Part XII - Empty, Disturbed, Dead
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