The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Laird Barron is the author of several books, including The Croning, Occultation, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. An expatriate Alaskan, Barron currently resides in upstate New York. Slate has aptly said of his short fiction: “Relentlessly readable, highly atmospheric, sharply and often arrestingly written — Barron’s prose style resembles, by turns, a high-flown Jim Thompson mixed with a pulp Barry Hannah — and situated in a dizzying assortment of precision-built worlds.”

As for his contribution to this anthology, Barron explains: “Lovecraft’s fiction covers a broader spectrum than many people realize. It’s important to keep his versatility in mind when tilling this particular patch of earth for a themed anthology. ‘A Clutch’ isn’t meant to emulate Lovecraft, but rather to respond to certain elements of his work — black magic, corruption, ancient secrets best left buried, and lurking doom. I filtered these elements through my own conception of a weird tale. Crack the shell and have a look.”

A Clutch

The man on the straw bed was done for, for sure. The young woman saw it plainly in his knotted muscles, heard it in his wet and ragged coughs. Moss lung, the wise women called the malady. Woodcutters, such as her uncle, risked it by hewing into fungi-encrusted cedars and firs. He gleamed with sweat. Three white hens clucked and fluffed themselves on their rack near his naked feet. The dog grumbled by the hearth, lost in a dream of the hunt.

“I am dying,” her uncle said. “Come near. You took me in and gave me shelter. Allowed me to call you daughter . . . You are a precious ornament to my worthless life. O my sweet fair one! Scrubber of pots, burner of suppers, nurse to wounded forest creatures, radiant of heart, and pure of virtue!” He relapsed, head lolling.

The woman ignored him until she finished stoking the fire. She gathered her skirts and came to kneel at his side. She laid her hand upon his brow. Hot as a skillet. It wouldn’t be long. Death whetted his culling knife out in the night gloom, ready to cut another soul off at the knees. She uncorked a bottle of whiskey and dribbled it over the man’s scabrous lips until he gagged.

“My parents are dead these nine years. You have stood in their place. You have cut the wood and killed the wolves. You were my father’s blood returned home at our darkest hour. O Uncle, of course you may call me daughter.”

“Uncle. Yes, uncle. That was the story.” The man tugged her sleeve. He seemed to gather his innermost reserves, for his expression smoothed and he spoke with a cold, uncharacteristic serenity. “The moon will roll like the bloody hub of a chariot through the branches of the crying sycamores. On nights such as this when the wind roars in the trees and the hearth coals glow like the eyes of the Black Dog itself, you and the whiskey are a comfort. The cottage seems so rude, the candle glow of our souls so feeble, yet from your cheerful mien I draw courage. You resemble so much your mother now, Creator rest her.

“Gazing upon the accumulated trinkets, my bitten axes, the salted venison, the burlap and the barrels, storm chests and sealed urns, and the painting of your mother in her maidenhood, I am struck by how little there is to show for the generations of labor, for the missing thumb, the broken back, the lungs infested with devil’s club spore. My drunkard’s breath rasping, slower and slower.

“You are a good girl. Alas, I must tell you something nevertheless. My deathbed confession. Before you came along, I swore I’d be crisped in the fires of hell rather than sire offspring. You are dearer to my heart than any golden treasure. I should have kept my word.”

“Sired off spring?” she said. “I don’t take your meaning.”

“I fear it will come to you.”

When I was young, the Emperor’s Highway ended a few leagues south of the Black Forest. Not like today where the road cleaves right through the middle and is lined with hostels and cheery inns thanks to the many reforms of the Empress, Creator bless and keep her from harm. No, in the olden times all you got were deer paths and howling darkness once you set foot off the porch. Men hunted in groups with flintlocks and spears and packs of hounds. Boar, bear, wolf, and worse, lurked. Even a few of the trees and some of the mossy boulders couldn’t be trusted. Vile spirits were loose in the world. Hapless travelers vanished. Burly hunters, too. The children are what bothered everyone the most.

Ours has ever been a family of foresters — hunters, trappers, fellers, every one. My great-great-great grandfather Abernathy Ruark settled right here on the southern verge of the forest just after the shouting ended over the botched succession of King Theobald. Abernathy and his kin were a band of scofflaws and partisans who fled north when the revolt went sour, but half the kingdoms were in the same pickle and a couple generations later all was forgiven, if not forgotten. Most of the wood folk returned to the cities once the Interregnum ended. The Ruarks stood fast and continued to carve a living from the banded oak and red walnut that southern lords and fat-bellied merchants hold so dear. We hunted the razorback boars and skinned the bears-that-speakthe-tongue-of-men. We will continue until the last of us has shuffled into the Hinterlands.

James Dandy was a friend in my youth. Yes, yes, the very highwayman and brigand who got himself hanged in King’s Grove two winters gone. Last of his line. He grew up hard as nails. His parents were put to the ax and his brothers taken in chains to Sad Island. The Kouadoi would have bagged him, too, if he’d not squirreled away beneath a pile of dung until they tramped down to their ships and went back over the sea to their great ruined empire of caverns in Mount Thrall. That marked him, surely it did. Not a bad sort, but not a good one either, and now he’s worm food with all the rest but yours truly.

Our misadventures were mainly his doing, or that of his cousins Manfred Hurt and Ike Lutz, both of whom had fled Westhold under a dark cloud. Man whores, the pair. Hurt convinced me to leave home and travel the kingdom in search of adventure. For a year I followed him around like a puppy, growing leaner and meaner with each passing week. We survived by laboring when there was labor, stealing pies from windowsills, whoring ourselves to monied folk, and so forth. I learned much of Dandy and his cousins. Much indeed.

I’d resigned myself to another dose of boot-leather soup when Dandy waved a handbill he’d snagged from the gutter. He proposed that we four should join a troop of other stout lads to answer the King’s call for a march into the worst part of the Black Forest — The Fells. Aye, The Fells, The Fells where the Jumping Jack dwells . . . The Ministry of Coin wanted to scour the ruins of them old fallen holds that lie sunk into the muck and mire. There’d been a war, always a war, and it drained the treasury. Matters were so dire, palace servants had taken to melting royal dinnerware for the gold. Shameful.

Eadweard Mingy sat the throne in those days. King Mingy’s mother died birthing him and he was raised by a witch from the Far East. The bat gave him a taste for the black arts, maybe for the Dark itself. What a wretched court his must’ve been. Damned if that warlock Jon Foot didn’t curry his favor all the years Mingy reigned. Jon Foot’s folly is why I’ll never step north of the Hunt River so long as I draw breath. Creator blast him.

After a roaring drunk, my friends and I got fresh tattoos and signed up with the Royal Army. They were pleased to snatch our service since we were accomplished woodsmen, or close enough for their uses. I hoped to see home again. Foolish boy was I.

Away we went — a full company of soldiers, laborers, potboys, and whores. One of a dozen such companies sent to spelunk for gold and precious relics and jewelry in the abandoned strongholds of the dead lords. Whispers were that the leaders of the expeditions reported not to the chancellery, but to Foot himself. He sought something other than mere gold or trinkets among the ruins.

Woe to us who discovered it for him.

We marched. North and north through the tilled and green lands around Great Port. North and north over the Tumwater and though the Wolverine Mountains a day’s ride from the sea. North and north again until we passed through Sterling and entered the Black Forest in the region known as Cottonwood Vale for the cottonwood trees that line the River Fetch.

Our troop was led by Captain Vanger — well known throughout the army as a genuine hard ass. Vanger the Incorruptible, Vanger the Whip. Captain brooked no nonsense among the ranks, squaddie or civilian. Carried a blacksnake whip at his belt — as the men all do in Carlsbad, which is where he’d been brought bloody and screaming into this evil world. Loved that whip, Vanger did. Could snap a fly off a man’s cheek at seven paces. Nobody was safe from it, either. That’s how Manfred Hurt lost a chunk of his earlobe — old Incorruptible popped it like a cherry over some trifling infraction or because he didn’t care for the look on the lad’s face. No, it didn’t teach Hurt much except to use a bit more stealth when fucking about. Only a bit.

North and north. Five days along the Left Hand Path where the canopy closes like an iron trap and sunbeams are wan. That way cannot be found anymore; it has overgrown and some sprats argue it only exists in the addled minds of old men. Sprats with fewer teeth than before they say it to me, I aver.

Our scouts, a squad of Peloki warriors who wore topknots and red ochre war paint, had their chores cut out for them. You think our homely shack lies in the wilds, now, do you? Back then, the Left Hand was the only trail except what the animals made. Before the grand massacres that exterminated them once and for all, Malets and Hillmen skulked from the moors and hunted the forest. Not for game, mind you. Plenty of that in the highlands. The savages collected scalps from unwary southerners they caught with their breeches at half-mast.

None of us snot-noses had seen a genuine blue-belly, and despite the grim mutters among the veterans, we eagerly hoped to catch a glimpse. Some shit-eating fairy always lurks in the wings, waiting to grant an errant wish. Horses and donkeys went missing. Patrols spotted malevolent shadows flitting among the wagons and drove them away with torches and shouts. Finally, the Malets captured two lads on graveyard watch — snatched those unlucky boys smooth and quiet as weasels in the coop. Captain Vanger forbade any rescue mission into the deep undergrowth. He’d fought in the Battle of Thornwood and a dozen more on the Ynde subcontinent where tigers and their cults of worship roam the jungles. He knew the score. We marched onward and dusk came in a rich crimson blush through the foliage.

Deter Johansen and Marvin of Saltlick, those were their names. Healthy lads with good strong lungs. The boys’ screams echoed for two nights. Still echo in my mind sometimes.

Three more days northwest and we forded the River Hunt and soon came upon a marsh of pale moss. Across this bog spanned a rough path of rotted planks. Here lay the beginning of The Fells. The savages harried us no more. Even they were wise enough to stay clear of that cursed land with its toads, spiders, and poison clouds from the Fifty Years Fires.

The trails crisscrossed the Fells like veins in the back of a crone’s hand. Some called those paths The Gray Fingers, others, the Long Trail Winding. They branched every which way and as far as I know, wound on forever. Nobody can say who slapped them down in the first place. Perhaps it was the ancient kings or surveyors from the time of Argead of Enathia or his usurper son. What I do know is the horses and donkeys hated them. The soldiers hated them, too, but to step off the planks was sure death. The mud had no bottom and would suck a man straight down to hell.

More days of stumble and slog. Mosquitoes blacked the nets at night. Bloodsuckers droned so loud, you couldn’t hear the comrade snoring at you shoulder. Everybody had the shits. Lost four men and an entire string of horses to the bog water.

Autumn north of the Wolverine Mountains is dreary. Rain, muck, and leeches are what you’re in for. Our camps became restless as the priests argued with the officers on the matter of performing rites sacred to the season. The men were not particularly thrilled that the Feast of the Dead fell upon us as we journeyed across a land laid low by sorcery. We feared to off end the Powers, yet we dreaded to commence ceremonies that by necessity draw the attention of the Dark. Captain Vanger compromised by doubling wine rations and permitting the chaplain to affright us with gruesome tales of how the inhabitants of the region had all gotten themselves exterminated. The chaplain painted with broad strokes; the men were bumpkins and nitty-gritty details would have been wasted.

On the next to last evening of autumn, the army camped atop a butte that heaved from the quagmire. West lay the ruins of Castle Warrant. Warrant’s towers had crumbled and pieces of carved granite were embedded in the slope of the ridge it occupied. The vision of that night remains: a half dozen campfires in an encircling ring around the crown of our bluff, smoke rising into the grin of the skull moon; shattered battlements of the castle silhouetted against stars smashed so densely close together they formed bands of white and pink and smearing red. Gelid cold of the dark between the stars seeped across the void and stole my breath. I slept little.

At dawn, the soldiers dug earthworks. Captain Vanger hadn’t lived to earn silver in his whiskers by playing the fool. No guarantee the blue-bellies wouldn’t return in force or that the giant troglodytes of the deep swamp wouldn’t boil forth to ravish the men and slaughter the animals. We civvies were divided into small parties overseen by squads of light infantry and dispatched along vectors of approach.

Manfred Hurt and me were sent to a breach in the southern curtain wall. Dandy and Lutz got sent elsewhere with other laborers. I never saw Lutz again. He fell into a crevice. Plop.

With picks, axes, and pry bars we spent the hours until dusk chopping through thickets and rolling aside boulders to reach the outer courtyard. Mossy walls loomed overhead. Hurt asked me if I knew of the Warrants and why their castle was so damnably massive. It went against my grain to admit any sort of book learning to the oafs of my acquaintance, thus I broke wind and shrugged. Da had taught me to play it close to the chest. On the other hand, Ma had taught me to read, semi-educated lady that she’d been before her logger-love swept her away from civilization. I could’ve instructed my chum that this fortress had once held the Northwest Marches against the Noord, those fathers of Malets and Grethungs and the Peloki, indeed, a hundred other tribes that fell to barbarism when the great Empire Across the Sea receded into itself. They called her Castle Warrant, yet she’d served as the steading of many a noble family until the Belfours lost her during the Interregnum.

I could’ve also mentioned the rumors of madness and depravity that possessed the Balfour family decades before the wars. My grandmother waited on the famed historian Grote of Lygos, and she read over his shoulder when he recorded the Red Treatise of Diebold and the North. She’d muttered of bloody orgies and foul sacraments that occurred in many of the north holds of a certain era. A vile cult infiltrated the ranks of the noble families, corrupting those fair knights to the ways of evil, and ultimately destroying them from within. Traffickers with the Dark, Gram said of the cultists. Were she yet living, she would not have approved of our traipsing about the ruined estates of those who’d perished in the thrall of wormy perversions.

No way could I speak any of this to loutish Hurt. He cursed the Crown in one breath and praised it with the next. Over a supper of boiled oats and salted pork, a strapping blacksmith’s son named Henry Bane gripped my shoulder in his ham hock fist. “Don’ go back in the morn,” he says to me. I ask why not and he says he beheld a crow peck the eye from a dying mule. The crow winged through the mist toward the western tower. Henry Bane took it for an ill omen. “Somethin’ right terrible will happen tomorrow,” he warned.

Fuck me running if that clod wasn’t dead right. The horror acted on a delay. It fastened upon me, aye. I finally understood, in the fullness of time and all that. More and more every night when I lie awake and listen to branches scratch the roof.

The courtyard sod had grown brittle. A royal engineer marked a spot and we yoked a team of mules to an auger and bored until we’d punched a hole into a vault. Me and a score of other lads descended on a series of lines knotted together. Down and down into the bowels of the earth with our picks and our lamps, hearts pitter-patting in our throats. We knew what to search for — coffers of jewelry and objects of art and ancient precious coins tarnished or bright, ceremonial blades begrimed by rust and verdigris, and panoplies of ancestral armor.

A grand cavern spread beneath the foundations of Castle Warrant. Stalactites oozed primordial slime. Shelves of granite and quartz blazed in the torchlight and fell away into utter blackness. A river clashed over distant rocks. Colonies of bats shrilled as they funneled into the abyss. Echoes traveled for leagues. Our party unhooked from the belays and clung to the damp spine of bedrock, followed its curve around to a landing and came to a flight of steps carved from the very stone itself. One case spiraled downward into the heart of the earth. The second case corkscrewed upward into the ruins of the castle proper. Our party split. I ventured up with nine comrades. A lonely feeling to watch the torches of our other fellows sink and dwindle to specks floating in oil, then snuffed.

In case you’re wondering, we never saw them again either.

Hurt and I took point. We climbed. Three hundred steps. Cracks every which way. Deep cracks stuffed with millipedes and pill bugs and wet, cancerous moss that smelled worse than the stuff in the swamp. Clung to our boots and squelched like mud as did the pale mushrooms in their beds of hollowed step and splintered masonry. Earthquakes had tumbled stones from the vaulted roof. We scrambled over them, or went around, climbing, climbing, until at last we traveled through an archway into the basement.

Mind you, Castle Warrant stood for a millennium before the Interregnum. Emperor Innocent II himself ordered it built. As one of the great keeps of the North, Warrant contained smithies and barracks and stables to house lancers of diluted Xet stock who rode warhorses imported from the west. And dungeons. Many, many cells, many chambers of interrogation and woe. The rock was a honeycomb full of bones. An ossuary of damned souls. None of the prisoners of war were released during the final days before the Fires. Men, packed into cubbyholes, were left to gnaw one another like starved rats. Their skeletons moldered, locked in the eternal struggle.

Oh, how we tiptoed past the bones. Our shadows, tall and cruelly sharp, capered and spilled across the walls, mocking us. Grown men, with daggers and swords, we huddled together and held hands like children passing through that crypt. Halls crissed and crossed and doubled upon themselves. Sergeant Bakker broke out the chalk so we wouldn’t become lost forever in the warren.

The stairwell to the main floor had collapsed, confining our search for riches to those lower levels. I filled a burlap bag with coins. Brass, bronze, copper, reliefs worn smooth and shined to a glow I could see in the near dark. I swept all kinds of bullshit into that sack on the chance it would fetch a kind word from the Captain or at least spare me from the lash. Pewter cups and pewter plates, mostly cracked, but who gave a rip? Metal tongs and shattered candlesticks. Hurt rejoiced to find a trunk he thought would be jammed with valuables. Alas, mostly dirt and moldering cloth. He saved a moth-eaten tapestry that had grayed with antiquity.

Smoke hung in the fumy haze of our torch. More slimy lichen covered the walls. More slimy white mushrooms puffed beneath our tread. My breath huffed forth, and I sucked it and the torch smoke and the pall of the mushrooms in again and my thoughts revolved around themselves and my mood lightened even as a tear of desperation leaked from my eye. Intoxicated, dear daughter — no matter the source — is one way to pass the time in hell, should you ever need to know.

Hurt and I struck it rich in a dead end passage. I leaned against the wall to rest my sore backside. The stone crumbled and sloughed away and there in a queerly shaped cell, were two-dozen obsidian eggs stacked within the remnants of rotted crates. I’d seen their like once at a jeweler’s shop in Victory City: hollow for the placing of a gem or prayer scroll while other others contained several smaller versions, each nested within its kin. Richies collected them in sets of fanciful design and jewelers crafted them in a drover’s dozen lands.

I lifted one and turned it over. Different from the fabricated pieces I’d encountered, yet similar enough to give me hope of high value. Hard and edgy as the obsidian it resembled and seamless as any true egg. Something inside rattled the way a musician’s gourd rattles.

“Why’n hell they got no latches?” Hurt said the way a child will of a Solfest upon discovering there’s no gifts on the breakfast platter.

Surely the exotic nature of the eggs would fetch a fair coin. We’d get double rations at camp and that pleased me well enough to clear my foggy brain. I admit to a larcenous nature — knowing well that Hurt was too dumb to count, I socked away three of the eggs with the intention of smuggling them back to civilization and brokering a fortune of my own.

Hurt gathered our comrades while I set about fashioning a travois to transport the other goods we’d gathered. Soon the others arrived bearing their own dubious treasures. We stowed our spoils and proceeded for the surface. A train of scout ants dutifully transporting crumbs back to the colony.

Somehow, and maybe the brain-fog returned to beleaguer me, I lost the way. I’d taken the hind teat of our column as I dragged a carpet-load of junk treasure and no one wanted to trip over it in the gloom. One moment, Hurt trudged a couple paces ahead, and then I stubbed my toe on a loose stone and the men went around the corner, gone. Grunts and laughter and curses quit upon an instant as did the glare of their lamps and torches. The sudden stillness sobered me right smartly.

I shouted to them. My voice echoed through the labyrinth. It didn’t rebound; it kept on going without answer. Then I felt in my pockets for flint and in moments ignited a brand from a sconce. A feeble reddish hue flickered from that ancient pitch. Nowhere did I spy Sergeant Bakker’s chalk marks. I thought of all those skeletons in their cells and the weight of the rock overhead, and of the mold and slime oozing in the cracks. Somewhere, wind moaned through a crevice. Dread coiled around me, sure as the noxious smoke.

Hold still, young Ruark. Someone whispered from the shadows. Hold still, child. I’m almost with you. My father’s gruff voice, though he’d died several winters before, crushed beneath the felled trunk of an oak. Later, I became convinced it was my imagination, but in the moment, that coldly eager whisper was enough to get me moving. I abandoned the load and set forth with alacrity.

The hall wound this way and that and tightened until rudely carved rock dug into my shoulders. I squeezed through and stumbled into a cavern. Saints know how big — couldn’t see far as the brand smoldered to a nub. Earth crumbled away from the toes of my boots into a pit. A foul breeze moaned up from that abyss and snuffed the dying flame.

Sapped of fight, I curled into a ball and fell asleep right there on the lip of oblivion. Chill and damp woke me. Didn’t know what else to do, so I crawled. Crawled because I dared not risk tripping into sudden doom. I rested often; so thirsty I sucked at water seeping through rock, so hungry I licked the salty blood from my scabs, so weary I’d slip into dreams of the home cottage and Mother’s honey porridge before the miserable cold roused me and I crept onward without direction or hope. The hunger became terrible. I sorted through my pockets, mad for the smallest crumb, and came across three of the obsidian eggs I’d stuffed in there and forgotten. I nearly pitched them away, until something stayed my hand.

Strangely, the jagged edges had smoothed and softened as unfired clay does over time. The shell curved, pliable as leather as I caressed it. In a daze, I obeyed a mindless command and cracked the egg and took its clabbered bounty in a gulp. The darkness was complete, thus I couldn’t discern what yolky, blood-warm mass sludged down my throat, nor what fine bones and bits crunched between my teeth. The taste of it, horrible and delightful, a rancid ambrosia, smoldered in my guts. The next two went down the hatch with more ease. I heard my own grunts and gulps echoing from the rocks around me. Horrible. And I licked my fingers and the ground for any drooling trace, and when I’d done, crawled onward.

The Dark looks after its own.

I found a chimney vent and wriggled my way until I popped out on the surface. I wept and rolled in that bog mud. You’ve seen the scars upon my back. You know how Captain Vanger greeted me upon my return to camp. After twenty lashes at the whipping post, they clapped me in the stocks for a night and chalked it off as a lesson learned. The Captain said I reminded him of one of his stupider nephews.

I wasn’t the only sod who disappeared. Only one who vanished and then came back, though. Vanger ordered the company to withdraw. Apparently he took a gander at the obsidian eggs Hurt and the other lads hauled out of the depths and made the call right there. Loose talk spread through the ranks — Jon Foot wanted the eggs, had sent us into the wilderness for the very purposes of securing them, gold and gems be damned.

Damned.

The company made good time on its return journey. The weather stiffened and that sent the blue-bellies into their warrens for the cold season. On the eleventh sunset when we camped near the Thrush Meadows, I went forth to fetch wood for the bonfires. Dreadful pains stabbed through my innards. A foul, sickly sweat oozed from my entire body and made my clothes sodden. Phantasms of delirium cascaded through my mind. I bolted from the work part and squatted behind a log and voided my bowels.

Women groan about the agonies of giving birth. Well, lass, they have my profound sympathy. Shite and blood burst from me. I thought myself liable to split apart at the seams, as it were. Miracles and horrors! Three eggs dropped from me and lay in the muddy stench. A clutch of my very own. Each glistened in the muck; roughly the size of a hen’s and translucent. Shrimplike embryos coiled in jelly. I recognized the black wisps of my hair, the imprint of my own coarse features, my own eye gone molten yellow that flashed with unnatural awareness. Within a few heartbeats, the eggs crusted over, sealed by a jagged black shell.

Feral cunning overtook me, reduced me to an animal. I scooped handfuls of dirt and dead leaves over the abominations, then slipped back among my comrades who’d made merry at my cries of gastric distress. Life in the Legion is cruel.

Nightmares lashed me, surely as Vanger’s whip. I was shorn of rest and sanity, condemned to drift as a voiceless spirit while doppelgangers assumed my life. Brazen, evilly grinning doubles doted upon by dear mother, my friends and colleagues. Each new dawn found me shaking in my bedroll. Only Jim Dandy and Hurt noted my ghastly pale countenance for I strove mightily to conceal the nature of my ills. The instinct that compelled me to bury the eggs also warned that I lived in the shadow of some obscene, circling terror. Should anyone discover my secret, I would be undone in spectacular fashion.

The moral I learned from this experience, is always heed your suspicious inner voice.

On the seventeenth evening Jon Foot himself materialized from the whirling smoke of our main bonfire. The dogs barked with insane fury and then cowered at his sandals. Two sentries pissed themselves. Most depictions of the warlock are exaggerated. Artists render him as a monster: red eyes, spiked horns, a death’s head. Eight feet tall, razor talons and a lizard’s tail. In private, he may strip his costume and resemble exactly thus a demon. However, when I met him, he appeared altogether ordinary. Softening into middle age, his hair receded and his belly rounded. Brown of eye and mildly spoken. His black cloak smelt of sulfur and he smiled too much. He smoked a clay pipe. That was the extent of his nefarious comport.

Soldiers vacated a tent on the edge of camp. Jon Foot quartered within. Shortly thereafter he summoned, one by one, those of us who’d ventured beneath Castle Warrant. The interviews were brief. Men emerged from their audiences none the worse for the wear, although none would speak of what had transpired nor meet the eyes of those who inquired. Vanger’s lieutenants roamed among us and boxed the ears of those who pressed the point. Soon enough, the gossip stilled and the men fell into sulky routine.

My turn rolled round after midnight.

Jon Foot’s tent fumed with smoke from an iron brazier and his pipe.

He reclined upon a stone chair carved into the likeness of a centipede rampant. It much resembled the one I am told existed at court in the Privy Council. The warlock took my measure with a long polite stare. He finished his cigarette and lighted another from the small flames of the brazier.

In that lull, I realized the sounds of camp were not muffled by the tent walls. Nay, we inhabited a bubble in a sea of silent darkness. Cozier than my terrifying span trapped in the caverns, yet much the same.

“Master Ruark, so good to make your acquaintance. I’m sure this will be the high-water mark of my day.” He affected the cultured tones of a highborn. His politeness smacked of malice. Or, perhaps his tepid certainty and unwavering gaze preyed upon my guilt. His demeanor suggested that he knew everything about me all the way back to the rainy morn I dropped from Mama’s womb. He laughed and said, “Yes, yes. I know much. Much, however, isn’t the same as all. I cannot see what happened to you in the dim cellars of Henry Belfour. You were lost and now you are found. How does this happen?”

My intent was to mumble an inoffensive lie or three, to deflect and prevaricate as peasantry has treated with the rich since the beginning of time. Foot, black magician, must have cast a geas upon me, for matters took a bizarre turn.

“I got hungry and I ate three of them fucking eggs you’re on about,” I listened to myself say. Every other muscle in my body froze. I swayed, rooted in place.

“Damn. Captain Vanger counted the haul. A perfect set if not for the ones you abandoned. And the ones you devoured, alas.”

“Too bad. They hit the spot.”

“Thank you for your honesty, son.” Jon Foot levitated to his feet. “Apparently you met an old friend of mine down there in the cellars.”

“Aye, someone else was there. Whispering.”

Jon Foot nodded wisely. “Others sought the Clutch. Bad ones. Ethan, Julie the Fifth, Carling . . . Phil Wary. Black sorcerers, each. It would be no matter to disguise themselves and walk among your comrades. To divide and strike. You were befuddled and cut from the herd. Mere chance delivered you from doom . . . Did he speak to you? Surely, he did.”

My mouth opened again, though I resisted mightily. “Aye. My father came upon me in the dark.”

“Your dead father.”

“As a doornail.”

“This won’t do. I’m sorry.” He actually did seem a trifle melancholy. Then he took a small skinning knife from his pocket and sliced me from crotch to sternum. I cannot emphasize how disconcerting it is to watch in hapless wonder as the cut is assayed and one’s intestines slop onto hard-packed dirt. What’s worse? The warlock crouched, poking through the mess the way priests divine the future from pigeon entrails. The shock awakened my muscles. I regained sufficient control to stagger backward through the tent flaps.

Jon Foot watched me go, knife dripping in his hand. “Come back here, son. I want to hug the shit out of you!” He spread his arms and smiled with pure joy. His shadow against the wall coiled most unnaturally. It bristled with barbs.

Me and my train of guts paid no heed of his imprecation. Three steps took me across the threshold. I collapsed near a cook fire where soldiers just off watch gathered to warm themselves. The last moment I recalled of that particular life are their shouts, their expressions of panic and disgust. Sweet oblivion swept over me, and I was dead.

I revived, blanketed in slimy leaves, in the woods behind this very cottage. Naked and bloody and stinking, but whole. The pink flesh of my belly was without blemish, its cleaving wound had perfectly healed. They say that home always seems smaller when a man returns. This was the opposite. Trees loomed, the night stretched wider and deeper.

Guided by memory and habit, I emerged from the woods and knocked on the door. Ma swooned at the sight of her son, gone nearly two years. More than surprise smote her. More than alarm at my gory visage. Far more, as I discovered upon glimpsing myself in yonder body mirror. Upon departing to seek my fortune in the wide world, I’d attained middling height and shorn my whiskers daily with Da’s razor. Now, my form had reverted to that of a child of no more than five winters. My face had altered into a somewhat familiar stranger’s. Partially my grown self, partially a changeling’s. Mom would remark later that for a several moments she took me for her grandson.

Days of confusion followed. My thoughts buzzed. Waking proved difficult to separate from dreaming. I raved of centipede men and eternal darkness. Mother tended me as my strength and wits were gradually restored, and by the end of a week I’d grown fully into my father’s old logging clothes. I began to feed myself. I shaved again. She gently inquired what I recalled of the time between my murder and awakening. What she wanted to know was if I’d witnessed the afterlife, if I’d gone there and dipped in a toe.

I shook my head and claimed ignorance of aught save a smooth, formless void. How could I tell her the truth? I recalled the formless dark. Indeed, I also remembered the licks of fire shooting through its depths, the black rolling back to reveal a deathly white, an iris of bones of men fused together unto eternity. How could I speak to her of the awesome cold, or of the death groans of hidden stars? How could I articulate the sense of folding into myself, of being trapped inside an egg, drawing sustenance from its yolk as a chick does?

I lacked the courage to describe a vision of rebirth wherein my eggshell cracked in half and I floated upon a woodland stream near a summer twilight. Willows entangled themselves against a red sky. Other reborn souls rode the current in their shells. They cried to one another, mewling as babes. Bitterns jigged between the reeds, their tarnished bills poised for the killing stroke. The towering birds pecked and stabbed at tiny prey and swallowed piteous shrieks of my fellow travelers. I met the glaring, avaricious eye of fate as it plunged its bill toward me and the red sky cracked as the eggshell had, and tarry black spilled forth instead of light. I drowned in blood, not water.

My weary mother deserved a fairer tale. All mothers do. Thus, I spun a pretty yarn about warmth and quiet and the peace of the womb. I had changed enough from the son she bore and raised that she had little choice but to accept the lies as one might from a fresh-faced stranger. Wearing a new face and armed with bitter experience, my gift for fabrication was much improved. Despite the uncanniness of the situation, it proved easier for her than I might’ve suspected. We were able to make a fresh slate of it.

As the doldrums evaporated, I realized the starkness of Mom’s situation. Since Dad’s untimely demise and my departure, she’d become haggard and mournful. Our ancestral hut had gone to wrack and ruin. Where had my younger brother Marlon gone? Four summers my junior and a forester in the making, I assumed his absence meant he was afield cutting wood or away at the market in King’s Grove. Mom covered her face and wept. The gods demanded balance — three nights before my return, Marlon vanished while logging a nearby hillside. He’d been in the company of fellow woodcutters. They searched for him in vain. The men concluded he’d run afoul of wolves, which were particularly ravenous of late.

Immediately, I dressed in my father’s work clothes, gathered meager supplies, and set forth with his bearded ax slung across my back. The hillside wasn’t far. I supped with the loggers who toiled there. These were men slightly younger than myself alongside whom I’d labored and feasted in days gone by. None recognized my countenance, although each embraced me as a Ruark for I bore an unerring stamp of the family bloodline. I introduced myself as a traveling cousin and was thus reborn full and true. Solved my problem with the Legion. The functionaries hate it when folks they’ve killed turn up alive and well. Their foreman told me how Marlon walked into the bushes and vanished. He didn’t figure I’d have any better luck turning up a corpse, but gods be with me in my task.

I sought my brother high and low. Scoured the nearby hills and hollows. Finally, I kicked over a pile of human bones deep in a thicket. Couldn’t tell whether they belonged to him or not — hacked and charred too badly. Reminded me of something. I buried the bones and said a few words in case the gods were watching.

Reinvention and a newfound loathing for travel served me well. I put my faith in the fates, relegated miseries to the past, and set to work. Strong whiskey and back-breaking labor kept me on the straight path and with scant time for contemplation on matters best left undisturbed.

Soon, I became an accomplished logger and attracted a crew of strapping lads. As you can see, riches didn’t follow. Nonetheless, we did well enough. I was content to dwell here in this cottage alone for a score of years. Over the years, I sought out Dandy, Hurt, and the others and introduced myself under this new identity. Never did I choose to wander, however. Nor did I pine for the company of a wife. Not until I met your mother in King’s Grove by happy accident. Charm, wit, beauty. Youth! Too good for a woodcutter with white in his mane and sap in his beard, I vow. She smote me with a bat of her lashes. Long after our honeymoon, I harbored the notion she’d merely taken pity on a poor boy. In hindsight, it’s more likely she fled demons of her own. City life is as treacherous as any bad stretch of the forest. Eventually you came along, my dear, our only child.

Despite an abundance of joy, I occasionally dreamed of death and of things worse than death.

The second time I died was on a midsummer’s night, nine years gone. Like my father before me, I chopped a tree and it corkscrewed beyond control and crushed me to jelly. You and your mother wept. Then she disappeared. I imagine how it went — a strangled cry jolted you from nightmares. Though you desperately searched this hut, though you combed the yard and the woods, you discovered nary hide nor hair of her. You collapsed near the hearth ashes in despair. Calamity upon calamity! What would become of you?

But three nights later you opened this door to soft knocking and found me, naked and delirious upon your step. I claimed to be your uncle. What choice did you have other than accept providence? Parents dead or missing. No man to protect you, no man to provide. A girl alone in the wood is easy prey for beasts. Besides, there could be no question of our kinship. I am inalienably a Ruark. Sad to say I am also a wee bit more than that.

This second death had traversed a similar arc to the first. I envisioned an abyss of terrible cold and darkness; I floated a stream as a fingerling babe upon a half shell and was devoured alive by bitterns. I clawed back into this world in the bog just yonder. The only real difference being my transformation from toddler to graybeard occurred as I stumbled along the path to your door. You accepted me and my hastily contrived tale of prodigal uncle, home at last. Robbers stripped me and left me beaten bloody. By the grace of the gods had I managed to reach sanctuary . . .

The moment I learned of your mother’s disappearance, I finally possessed an inkling of the horrible nature of the black eggs, if not their unholy provenance. Once a man departs the mortal realm he can only be restored by the subtraction of another soul. Rebirth via the egg claimed the flesh and blood, the very consciousness, of those whom I cherished. My suspicions were confirmed when I located her skeleton in the blackberry tangles that border the meadow. My wails of anguish scattered birds from the trees. A dark cloud blotted the sun and rain lashed the field.

Full to the craw with dread, I went to the bog that twice vomited me forth and beheld the remnants of the obsidian eggs. Animals steer well clear of that plot. Pieces of broken shell lay there, perfectly preserved. After a bit of rooting around the bed of decayed leaves and mossy loam, I uncovered the third egg. It nestled in a patch of muck, glittering like a flinty gemstone prized free of the Dark Lord’s own tiara.

Gods help me, I intended to destroy the egg lest you one day feed its unnatural hunger. I failed. Each time I bore the egg away, it slipped from my pocket and reappeared in the bog by some malignant supernatural trickery. I kicked it, smashed it with my ax, piled tinder wood atop and set it ablaze. All useless; no measure so much as scratched the gods damned egg. I even resorted to prayer, if you can imagine your old man upon his knees, yammering to the invisible powers with the zeal of a penitent. What a farce.

Despite these theatrics, a small voice in my head was pleased. My soul and my thoughts are corrupted, you see. To eat of the black egg is to be damned.

Both times I’ve rowed back from the abyss, my essence mingled and consumed an innocent sacrificial soul. In the process, some essential piece of my own being was replaced. Cold and darkness seeped into my bones. That cruelly selfish portion bid me to quit my attempts to destroy the egg and speak of it no more. It promised to ease my nightmares, it swore I would forget, but only if I played the fool, the supplicant. To my everlasting shame, I heeded this whisper. Grateful as a dog for the whipping to end.

Light burn me, I’ve tried to be a good father. Once in a blue moon, I ignored my instincts and summoned the courage to perform one last valorous deed before the bell tolls an accounting. Perhaps Jon Foot’s dark magic could reverse this damnation. Too bad he’s dead and beyond the reach of all men. The names he mentioned — Julie, Ethan, Phil Wary — are mysteries that confound solution. With rare exceptions, sorcerers tend to keep a low profile.

There have been times, such as last night, fortified by loneliness for your mother, or by the powerful spirit of the jug, that I crept out to the bog and sat cross-legged in the moss and schemed of ways to slip this noose around our necks. Generally though, it’s much easier to live the life of a garrulous drunkard and cheerfully wait for fate to run its course. Yes, so much easier to not dream of bitterns pecking my eyes and balls for eternity.

Soon, I shall die. Then, I shall return and you will be gone. You will vanish as my brother and your mother did. After you, there is no one. I will reside here, an unfamiliar ghost of myself, alone.

He slumped against his pillow. The effort of reciting his tale of woe had drained the man and turned his flesh a chalky white. Bruises around his eyes and nostrils lent him the aspect of a corpse about to endure ritual mummification. He coughed. Blood speckled his beard.

The woman held his hand. The fire had burnt low, casting a shadow across her face. She said, “Uncle, I mean, Da, that was an amazing story. Especially the part about Jon Foot. Did you really meet him? Was he so very ordinary? Surely, you never met him.”

“Merciful . . . Did you listen to a word?”

“You are a sweet, confused sod. Fret not over damnation nor curses, nor phantoms. I ate the egg.”

“You what?”

“We ate the egg, to speak true. Did you suppose I slept through your blundering around the cottage at all hours? What matter to follow you? And what matter, after you’d come and gone, to examine the item you coveted in your fevered state? A great white goose egg. Pristine as snow awaiting my eager hands to pluck it from the nest. Pluck it I did; plop into my apron and borne home in a trice.”

“No.” Horror twisted his countenance. He covered his mouth against a deeper, ripping cough, and blood came freely between his fingers. “Oh, daughter. There are no geese here. No geese. Nothing lives in the bog.”

“Our luck was good,” she said with placid determination. “The omelet we enjoyed this morning contained rich red yolk and a lump of half-formed gosling to boot. Praise to the Light. It is the first meat we’ve enjoyed since you took ill.”

He moaned and tossed his head in terrible negation. The woman stroked his brow. She soothed him until he ceased thrashing. His breathing slowed. After a long while it stopped. She squeezed his hand. How sad it was to lose one’s sanity with age as one lost his or her teeth.

She wiped her eyes and composed herself. There were practical matters to attend, such as acquiring a husband to chop wood and hunt game and run off the ever-lurking bandits. Pickings were slim in this neck of the woods, so she’d long delayed accepting a suitor. Now she feared it would come down to one of the inbred Slawson brothers or a gap-toothed hick from among the Smyths who dwelt a couple of hollows over . . .

The dog growled. His mangy fur stiffened until he was more porcupine than mutt. The woman told him to be still and then the shake roof peeled away with a grinding clatter. The stars were gone, replaced by a sky that glowed hellish red. A bittern, as tall and wide as a windmill, warbled mightily and slithered its long neck and broadsword of a bill through the gap and skewered the man’s corpse, lifted him on high, and flicked him back down its throat. A second bird echoed the hunting cry and muscled in, its smooth dark eye glinting with the murderous crimson light of the firmament.

“Well, shit,” the woman said. The black bill unhinged as it plunged to take her.

Gradually the swollen red light dimmed and stars sprinkled the heavens. The dog waited until he hadn’t heard any more screams or those piss-inducing bird cries for a while. He crept from beneath a table and sniffed around warily. Cold hearth, empty beds, no humans but for their fading scents. Tragic, although the mongrel had only wandered into the yard that spring. Scraps were less than plentiful of late, and the woodcutter had been free with his hobnail boot after a few drinks, so the dog wasn’t overly invested in the arrangement.

He jumped through the open window and trotted away into the night.