MOTHER OF US ALL
by
rbadac
The coach from Tirane rarely halted in the mountainous country of the Sredna Gora, but on this bright May afternoon it discharged a slim, mustached young Englishman not yet thirty.
Peter Tolleson only had his one valise with him when he got off the coach, and he carried it with him easily. He did not need much. His directions were simple; there would be a man to meet him at the hotel who would explain the rest.
He was shown to his unadorned suite and informed of the washroom down the hall where he could have a bath before the provided dinner downstairs. An hour later found him at a table with a glass of beer and his notebook. While waiting, he leafed through it idly.
He was in a small town near Hisarya, in Bulgaria, about 120 kilometers from the Yugoslavian border. The man he was to meet was from the town council, and was expected to provide him some background on the current matter, the alleged haunting of an abandoned hunting lodge in the mountains.
Peter was unacquainted with the area, but he had experience with hauntings in other places. His father was a member of long standing in the Society For Psychical Research, and with him Peter had participated in a number of investigations. He possessed a critical attitude from many encounters with various attempts at fraud, but he was not indisposed to accept genuine evidence. He had seen enough to know the difference. When the Society was contacted by the Bulgars for aid, no one was inclined to make the journey to that faraway and uninviting country, but during his travels on the Continent when he was younger Peter had spent a month in Sofia, and knew enough of the language to get by. He had been keen to go. This case was reputed to be of an unusually virulent character, resulting in several deaths, and without apparent outside motive. The money was, as a result, considerably better than average, in consonance with the danger, an arrangement Peter found very acceptable.
He looked up to see a bearded gentleman in vaguely official-looking dress who returned his gaze with a gesture and sat down opposite him.
The stranger extended an hand and said in good English that his name was Stefan. Peter motioned for the waiter, then introduced himself, and the two men exchanged pleasantries before commencing with their business.Stefan, it transpired, was from a wealthy family, and had been educated in England; he was thus able to spare Peter the use of his spotty Bulgarian. "We are not sure what you may find, Mr. Tolleson. You already know what is involved. If you wish to decline the commission, it is not too late for you to do so." Peter smiled. "I suppose I shouldn't have come this far not to at least have a look," he replied. "I brought my revolver with me, so I'm not afraid of any interference."
"There won't be any," Stefan answered. "There is no one here who would have anything to do with this. You'll be quite alone." He emptied half of his glass at a gulp and looked at Peter with frank appraisal. "You've been informed of the particulars. You are aware that this is not a seance. Those people in the churchyard are dead as they can be, and they did not die by any human hand."
"What is the generally-held opinion, then?" asked Peter. "I mean, does anyone have any notions at all?"
Stefan thought a moment. "If it means anything, yes. There has been talk of a *ghovt*, an evil spirit that is responsible, not of a traditional variety. It's hard to explain." The older man looked perplexed, but summoned his faculties and went on: "They say it is the ghost of a woman, long dead, who lived in the lodge when it was a plain house. Her family were landowners, well-to-do and generally respected, though not much for mixing socially. I think their neighbors found them odd," he summed up with only the merest hint of a smile. "She married a Magyar, and the two of them went to live at this house. They were to all appearances happy, but they kept to themselves even more than her family did.
"They soon had a family of their own. Again, no one ever suspected anything unusual, but after all they would not have been aware of much. None of the family were ever seen in any local churches, and the education of their young ones was undertaken by the parents alone. This was not an uncommon practice then. There were rumors that the bride's family had severed relations with them, but this was assumed to be because of her Magyar husband. As I say, practically nothing is known of them in this period. At any rate, her husband died, and not long after she apparently went mad.
"She was a murderer of children, her own, then later those of others. No one knows why. They caught her and accused her of the crimes. She spat in their faces and told them to send her to Hell if they wished. Which they did. She was put on the wheel, and her limbs were shattered, then she was hoisted up and left for the vultures. They were slow. People heard her for days."
"Pleas for mercy or curses?" Peter wondered solemnly. He did know something of the practice. There were locales where the Dark Ages might only have ended in living memory.
"Neither," said Stefan. "It was worse than that. She was heard singing lullabys. It was very hard on the dead children's parents who came to watch her die." He paused and drank again. Peter gave him time. He wondered if Stefan was afraid of scaring him off.
"She was difficult to understand at the end. No one heard any words of repentance. In her ravings, she would laugh horribly and say she would return to teach her children a lesson. She called herself the Mother of Us All. They shouted at her to be quiet, then ran from that place, unable to bear any more.
"Finally she did die. Her attitude of course made everyone think she was a *vrykolakas*, a demon, or that she would become one after death, and they treated her according to their superstition. She was buried at a crossroads, around the biggest stake that could be found, and that was supposed to be the end of it. Her house was vacant for a time, but because of its location hunters began to use it for a lodge, and that's when the new trouble started.
"Four men, big fellows afraid of nothing, spent a night there after a shoot. When they were not heard from afterwards, others came there and found them, all dead. Their bodies were horribly slashed, but there were other details, the manner in which they were found-- are you sure you want to hear all this?" Peter indicated that he did. Stefan exhaled noisily and continued: "Their sleeping blankets were folded up in a corner. They were in cradles, wicker things that had not been there before, with their heads bound in nightcaps like infants. They had toys in their hands. It was blasphemous. Their families were not allowed to see them like that, only a few people knew, but of course word gets around..." Here Stefan ended his commentary, and for a few seconds both men were silent.
Finally Peter spoke up, with a professional's demeanor that concealed his distaste for the proceedings. "And this was the first instance, predating the others by," he consulted his notes, "some five years before the next, a girl, I believe?" Stefan nodded. "Yes, that was Arda, the shepherd's daughter. She wandered alone up there one afternoon. It is believed she was caught in a rainstorm. She was found the next day in the lodge. Like the others. She had lumps of sugar in her mouth. And then there were the ones after-- they sent you newspaper clippings." He indicated the yellowed pieces of paper in Peter's notebook.
"Now you see," he finished, "how we can say this was not the work of anyone living. We would not be ignorant of a creature like this in our midst. We are not a vicious people. We are far from the cities. We work hard, we trust in God, we are all known to each other. Someone who would do these things, well, how could he hide among us?"
Peter acknowledged that this was so, and promised to do everything he could.
The next morning, he and Stefan rode out to the lodge.
It was situated on a hillside facing west, a squat ugly structure of logs chinked with grey mud topped by a thatched roof, surrounded by large birch trees and patches of scrub grass. Even in sunlight, the facade projected an aspect of decrepitude and gloom. The garden was overgrown with rank, towering weeds that had spiny, cruel-looking leaves, the roof sagged in several places, the well was foul and the stones around it had collapsed.
They went inside and examined the interior, which was sparsely furnished with the rudest pieces. Dust covered the floor and the windows were caked with grime, letting in only a watery glimmer of light. Stefan lit a lantern and started cleaning the hearth for a fire while Peter unloaded the supplies from the wagon.
When he withdrew a crucifix from his bag, Stefan glanced at it with dubious interest.
"That may not serve you here. What if the ones who lived here were Bogomils?"
Peter frowned at the word. "An antiquated sect, isn't it? Something at odds with Catholicism and Orthodox both, though they professed to be Christians?"
"There were many practising in this country," said Stefan. "They did not hold with any image or icon, or ritual of the accepted Church. Some revered them, and some saw them as heretics. It is not easy to say which view is correct. They were persecuted for centuries. If the *ghovt* was one, she will not respond to your protection."
"Nor to my firearm, if she is a spirit," answered Peter. "Nevertheless, I haven't much else. I am not a magician."
"I am sorry to leave you with only that, then. It may be that you will have need of some sort of magic." He searched in his pockets. "Take this," he said, handing Peter a small linen bag.
"It contains earth that has been charmed by one of our elders. It may be worthless, or it may not be. At least it comes from the native ground where we stand." Peter took the gift and thanked him, and Stefan made to go. As he mounted his wagon, he turned to wave farewell, and the look he gave Peter was such a mixture of sadness and hope that Peter was momentarily embarrassed. He tried to diffuse it with a heartiness he did not particularly feel. "I'll be here in the morning to tell you all about it," he called out.
Stefan could only nod gravely, and flicked the reins. Soon his wagon was decreasing in the dust and distance, and Peter shrugged and went back into the lodge.
He spent the better part of the day going over it looking for any unusual features, trapdoors, hollow walls, secret closets, though he did not expect to find any. He did find old bloodstains on the floorboards, and a gourd rattle underneath a dresser that had been overlooked from a previous incident. He shook it. It was real enough.
The rest had been burnt upon discovery by the horrified search parties. Peter was inwardly convinced there were phenomena here, and the prospect nibbled at his courage, but he would face it the best he could. There were other factors that dictated the behavior of supernatural beings, and he set about making preparations for them.
He hung garlic and vervain at the points of entrance, poured a line of salt across the threshold, lit candles and burned incense. He sprinkled holy water on himself, the furniture, and the walls of the lodge. He recited prayers and services in Latin, Greek, and Bulgarian. He put the bag of charmed earth on the table next to his crucifix, his notebook, and his gun. Then he sat down in a chair facing the door and waited for nightfall.
When it came, he could hear the wind building outside in low, swooping moans. The candles guttered in the draft and threw wild shadows across the walls and floor. Peter drew the lantern closer to him. The wind outside increased, became a howling fury.
Suddenly the fire was blown out by a rush of air descending the chimney, and a muffled tattoo commenced of many small objects striking the thatched roof. He started up and looked out the window, where the land around glowed with a patina of sour moonlight.
Hailstones the size of peach pits were breaking the smaller limbs of the birches, bouncing off the grass and covering the ground like strewn gravel. Only the extreme overhang of the lodge's roof prevented them from smashing through the windowpanes. There was something vaguely familiar about the way they looked but, being too far away, Peter could not see them clearly. When a patter of them came down the chimney and shot out into the room, he picked one up.
It was a little ice skull, missing its lower jaw, remarkably formed, tiny hollows for the eye and nose sockets and angular teeth below. He picked up another. And another. They were all the same.
A cracking sound behind him made him turn, and he saw the door bulge inward, spring away from its hinges, and fling itself into the room, falling flat and sliding across the floor like a huge tile to collide with the wall opposite. The candles all went out, and the lantern too, plunging the interior into darkness, pierced by the broad vertical band of blue-white illumination from the gaping doorway. The hail stopped all at once. Silence hung in the air, resonating like the dying peal of a massive iron bell.
The line of salt across the entrance blew away with a slow, deliberate motion, not as if from the wind, but as if Something were expelling breath onto it from one end to the other.
Then a shadow passed across the threshold, and Peter heard a deep, corrosive chuckle.
Peter moved to the table and picked up the crucifix, and held it up. The chuckling voice murmured in archaic Bulgar and began to whisper mocking syllables that emanated from several corners of the room in succession. Spinning around to confront its source each time, Peter was soon nauseous and disoriented.
The temperature plummeted, and his limbs became weighted and clammy; he clutched at a chair to steady himself, found the vial of holy water in his pocket, and began slinging it in intersecting lines around him. The Voice whooped with delight. A stream of animated words rushed from It, and one by one the candles came alight again. The flames shot up in pulsating bursts that strobed in the murky air, destroying Peter's vision. He shut his eyes and recited a prayer in Greek. To his dismay the Voice echoed it, and when he stopped It continued, speaking the words faster and faster until they were but a blur of harsh sound assaulting his ears, so that he dropped the crucifix and covered them with his hands.
The noise abruptly ceased, and the candles dimmed to mere sparks. Peter lowered his hands and opened his eyes.
In all his investigations, he had always had the opinion that ghosts, troublesome and vexatious as they could sometimes be, still were motivated by concerns unrelated to the living, and in any case could not actually harm them. This had been bourne out by every instance he had ever seen, in which ghosts only seemed to be pale reflections of past emotion or forgotten motive, capable of only a pitiful redundancy in their existence. Never having been cognizant of any immediate focus of their activity, he saw them as going about an obsolete business, completely removed from present considerations, and he viewed their obsessions in this light. It was a comfortable philosophy, and helped him to maintain a useful objectivity, but it left him singularly unprepared for what he saw now.
Knives protruded from the floor, and from the walls as well, hundreds of them, their blades glinting dully in the dim light; black-handled and grotesque, row upon row wherever Peter looked. The walls began to bleed. Where the knives were embedded thin traceries of blood ran from their points down to the floor, which now looked like the floor of an abbatoir. Soft, tubular forms writhed in the liquescent muck; one of them flopped blindly onto his foot, and Peter withdrew with a choked disgust to perceive that it was a severed finger.
He snatched up his notebook and began to read the first prayer he saw, in a quavering voice: "Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of us all..."
An ear-splitting yowl of fury met these words. A spray of invective in jabbering gasps that seemed to originate right in front of his nose hit him, and Peter backed away in terror. His notebook bloomed into a yellow ball of flame and was consumed to an ash that whipped apart before it could even fall to the floor.
The blood around his feet began to boil, sending up an awful, suffocating stench. The fragments of flesh that puddled in it appeared to cave in upon themselves and become part of the red soup that surrounded them; and this slipped through the cracks in the floorboards and rapidly drained away, leaving the stark knives unstained. Their black handles swelled up and unfolded into wings, and the blades came up and were the cruel beaks of glittering-eyed crows that flew away from the walls and up from the floor to clot the air with screeches and flapping, beating their wings about Peter's face and body before swirling into a dark, twisting funnel that arched over his head and swept out the open door into the night.
A tuneless humming began, languid and nasal... there appeared before him a shape that swung from side to side, growing larger and more distinct until he could see that it was a long basketlike receptacle, swaying and turning in the air and coming slowly closer to him. When it was directly in front of him it upended, standing on its heel; Peter saw the coverlet fall down to reveal the shrunken brown body within.
Its skull hung with bits of decayed flesh and hair; its spindly arms were drawn up close to it like bird claws and soil spilled from its eye sockets. While he stared in horror the tiny jaw dropped open and a keening wail escaped from the ruined mouth, in a gust and a smell of corruption. Its stick-thin arms jerked, puppet-fashion, outward and upward, the tiny fingers clutching the air inches from his eyes.
Peter felt the edge of the table behind him. His flailing hand skittered across its surface and closed around something cold and metallic. He brought the revolver up and fired at the obscenity, screaming.
The bullets punched through the dead thing as if it had been made of cardboard; from out of the wounds swarms of gnats poured, in gouts of peppered slime. The hellish child-cadaver coughed up pieces of its dried lungs that struck Peter's face like bits of rice, and the Voice laughed.
He dropped the gun and toppled backward. The table gave way beneath him, and he fell to the floor in a heap. The rotted infant's cries grew louder and more insistent; the humming Voice started to sing soft, lilting notes. A queasy, unwelcome desire to surrender to Sleep groped at the edges of Peter's consciousness, and he struggled to resist it, but the Voice invaded his senses and overwhelmed him. Under his hand there was cloth, but when he brought it up (to pull it around himself? Did he think it was a blanket?), it came without bulk, only a wadded fistful, a bag that tore in his fingers as he swung his arm to fend off the tattered, shrieking face bearing down upon him...
The taste of dirt was in his mouth when he awoke in the cold dawn, lying on his stomach in the path just beyond the crumbling well. He ached in every muscle and bone, as if he'd been thrown there without a great deal of discussion about his landing.
The creak of Stefan's wagon wheels made him turn his head painfully to where the old councilman was approaching up the path. Stefan stopped the horse and leaped off the wagon, and hurried over to where Peter lay.
"You're alive," he said, grinning at the prostrate form of the investigator.
"Help me inside," Peter groaned. "I feel like I've been beaten with clubs."
"Get in the wagon," Stefan answered. "There is no inside. I'll take you back to town."
Struggling to his feet, Peter looked back at the charred pile of logs and smoking thatch that was all that remained of the lodge. Stefan's laughter he barely heard, but the councilman felt obliged to provide it anyway. "Now some will say you earned a lot of money with cheap work, but they'll be the same ones who were too afraid to come up here and put a simple torch to this place themselves. They can pay for their own cowardice. Don't forget your suitcase." He vaulted back up onto his seat; Peter picked up his precious valise from where it lay nearby and threw it in the back, and joined him.
Back at the hotel he felt much better after a hot bath and coffee. Stefan returned early that afternoon with a fat envelope which Peter put in his waistcoat, and the two men shook hands. "Did you even see anything?" Stefan asked him conspiratorially. "Don't worry, I won't tell. It's just for my own curiosity."
"I don't know," answered Peter. "Let me think about it. I need to get some rest first, and decide how much of it was a dream or not."
They parted; Stefan told him he would be back for Peter the next morning to take him to meet the coach. Peter went up to his room and lay down on the bed.
As he stared up at the ceiling he thought about it a good deal, and also about the vanity of appearances, and about the worthiness of things close to one's home, however plain they may seem to others. The greatest tool he had in his suitcase was the most mundane substance known to man, but perhaps also the fundamental stuff from which he sprang. Smiling, he reached down to unclasp his valise, then reached in and sought the round surface of the little bag of earth, to draw it out and admire it... and the gourd rattle susurrated softly in his hand before he knew what it was.
Then he felt something like a hot wire drawn across his throat and deep into it; and though he could not cry out, and the muscles of his neck would no longer function, still he could see the spreading red increase beneath him out of the corner of his eye. While the world exploded in fuzzy grey flowers he could feel the sheets being tucked in around him, and he knew that, in the morning, this was how they would find him.
The End
oOo
rbadac (May 21, 2000)
rbadac wrote:
>
>
> MOTHER OF US ALL
>
> by
>
> rbadac
Ahhhhhh, that's terrible. You oughta be shot for posting that.
my biggest fan
oOo
salamon (May 23, 2000)
OK, OK I'll comment on the story.Is the moral Mother Earth Sucks?
Jake...
oOo
rbadac (May 24, 2000)
Damn ! I KNEW there was something wrong with it !!rbadac, who knows it's not nice to fool with Mother Earth
ooOoo