The rustling wave raced out of the trees and into the
grasses of the clearing, closing in on the cabin at lightning speed. An invisible but almost palpably dense new
cloud of unbearably intense musk engulfed the hermitage. Hundreds of blood-curdling shrieks, howls, snorts
and squeals rose from the grasses and shrubs of the clearing, each
accompanied, a hand’s breadth above the ground, by the baleful glare of a pair
of huge, leathery-lidded, thick-lashed eyes.
Between each pair of eyes was a bizarre ring of muscle and bristling
brown fur, an astoundingly hideous circular snout giving way to successively
smaller concentric circles of sharp yellow teeth, receding in the very middle
into each creature’s raw, red gullet, like some arcane round-mouthed
vampyric lamprey from the deepest abyss of the ocean.
Squat legs and formidably-clawed feet projected from the bottom
side of these doughnut-muzzled hairy beasts.
 |
| Apologies to the great DAT - Trdlo is a disgusting, moist subject for drawing |
“Too many! More this
time! Can’t get past!” Ludmilla screamed as she slammed
and barred the door.
More forest animals were desperately scrambling under the
doorjamb. Silvernose and Zdenka struck them down, stomped them, slashed them open as they struggled to enter. In their split-heartbeat unconscious thought,
they were hoping to block the gap with the fleeing animals’ bodies.
Ludmilla raced around the cabin to bar and
shutter the windows she had recently opened.
Beata kindled a fire in the oven with the leftover sticks and logs she
found there, and a little of Ludmilla’s incendiary seed-oil. She put her cocked and loaded repeating
crossbow on Ludmilla’s bed shelf above the oven, and prepared a stack of
firebrands. She held one in each hand,
ignited them, and began to strike with them at the powerfully clawed feet that
were beginning to widen the gap underneath the door, splinter after
splinter.
The ferocious howling, snarling, snorting, and squealing had
become louder, drawn closer. The cacophonous horde tightly encircled the cabin.
The musk-stench had become overwhelming to those inside -except, blessedly for him,
Silvernose.
“What say you…” shouted Beata. “We take up torches and blaze a path back to
the horses, in the most literal sense?”
“No!” Ludmilla was wide-eyed and vehement. “Too many out there! Can’t risk opening the door!”
As if to underscore her point, the blood-curdling squeals
of the horses across the ravine reached their ears. The horses were still in harness and hitched
to the wagon, which had wheel-brakes engaged.
Wild-eyed, they tried to trample the myriad small attackers biting their
legs, but thrashed impotently in the bonds of the harness. They bled out, screaming, and died. The ravenous, aggressive creatures ripped
gobbets of flesh from whichever parts of the horses’ corpses they could access
standing on hind legs or jumping.
Sister Ludmilla scrambled up the hand and foot holds built
into the side of her oven, and gained the shelf where she had slept until
recently. She grabbed Beata’s crossbow as
she crawled, lifted the other hand to push open a trapdoor in the ceiling.
“Follow me!” she said, climbed into the trapdoor, and
disappeared.
+++
Thank you for reading - Part 15 will be posted by April 27, 2020.
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
Part 13 - Hut Stinking of Musk
No comments:
Post a Comment