Something was scrabbling underneath the floorboards. Hundreds of somethings.
Zdenka, Silvernose, and Beata looked at each
other’s faces in sheer terror.
Sounds of
rapid gnawing, splintering of wood.
Three sections of floorboard wood exploded upwards into the cabin
simultaneously. A dense, intense, aggressively pungent cloud of musk blew up along with splinters and dust. Snorting, choking,
coil-muscled, bristle-haired, tube-shaped muzzles with gaping, toothy lamprey-maws
fought the shattering boards and each other to force their way up into the
room.
Beata scrambled up to the bed platform first, smoldering
sticks gathered in her left hand, the better to climb using her right hand. Zdenka and Silvernose were immediately behind. The gap under the front door had been gnawed
enough to allow entry to a seething, snarling river of tubular whirlwinds.
The floorboards burst up in several more
places to admit additional geysers of the hairy, musky beasts. The stench thrusting
upwards made Zdenka gag. The hideous
creatures swarmed and fought each other to jump up or climb up the massive whitewashed
oven, but fortunately their comically stubby legs and shovel-like claws could
not gain purchase. Deafening howls,
shrieks, and squeals shot through the room’s air.
A terrible image flashed through Zdenka’s mind’s eye: if
enough beasts got in to the cabin, the living might crawl up the bodies of the
dead and dying, using them like some twitching, nightmarish ramp to reach
Ludmilla’s bed platform.
Zdenka followed
Beata up the trapdoor, levering herself as the others had from a foothold built
into the chimney that projected above the bed-shelf.
She turned around to look back down through the opening at Silvernose,
who remained behind on the bed-shelf. Finding the trapdoor too narrow to
negotiate, he crouched with his back to the blocky, whitewashed chimney, ready
with a blade in each hand to dispatch any of the creatures which might reach
his level.
“No fears for me, my dear friend!” He said, cracking a smile
between his precise moustache and pointy beard.
“Go up! They cannot reach me for
quite some time.”
Above the trapdoor was a dim, cramped attic smokehouse. The musk and din of the cabin’s main room
were a little muffled here. There were
fish and other meats hanging from the low, sharply-inclined rafters. The chimney proceeded up from the main level
of the house to pierce the roof here. A
blackened adjustable tin tube with a damper extended from the chimney to send
smoke from the fire toward the rafter-hung meats at Ludmilla’s wish. A dormer window interrupted the slope of the
ceiling. Sister Ludmilla was crouching
in front of it, peering out through the shutter she had opened.
Everyone had to duck their heads in the low attic space,
even kneeling or sitting cross-legged.
Zdenka and Beata joined Ludmilla at the window.
It had become late enough that they had lost the light
outside. The full moon, the “Rutting
Moon”, would rise soon. Even before moonrise, they could see the
ravine was a living, writhing carpet of horrible monsters.
“What absolutely unlikeable creatures!” Beata exclaimed, marveling at the boiling
mass of little hairy tube-shaped bodies streaming across the clearing to the
cabin. She then projected her voice to
yell down to Silvernose. “Silverbeak,
are you taking your ease down there? You
know, those fiends are categorically not Werwölfe!”
Silvernose’s muffled replied came up through the attic
floorboards: “Neither are they forest devils, except in the broadest
sense. What are they, then?”
Sister Ludmilla had a pained expression on her face. If the harsh sounds and reek were
discomforting the others, for the old hermitess with her heightened senses they
must have been excruciating.
“They are trdla!
TRDLAAAAA!” Ludmilla shrieked with eyes tightly shut, anguished tears dribbling out the corners.
Her piercing lament went on: “I was sure they
were a myth, an old-granny Hill Country myth… In all the years of my long life,
the only trdla I'd ever seen were the spit cakes!”
+++
Thanks for your kind attention.
Stay tuned for Part 16, which will be posted before the 28th night of Oak Moon (ie. April) 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
Part 14 - The Howling, Squealing Horde
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