V - The Hunt
In the morning her father was still able to speak. By the afternoon, he was almost as bad as her mother had been when Sybil had awoken: feverish and barely conscious, speaking only in weak, nonsensical babbles during his few extended spells of consciousness. Her parents spent most of the second half of the day in fitful rest, tossing and turning in their bed as they muttered to themselves or to each other or to the silhouette that either was or was not there the previous evening, all while soaking their bedding through with their hot, acrid, yellow sweat.
Sybil tended to all of the household chores by herself that day; she went out in the morning and fed Misty, then went down to the nearby river and drew three full buckets of water. When she returned home she prepared herself the last egg that they had left and ate it tiredly, barely tasting it; its runny yolk seemed to disintegrate before it even reached her stomach. Around noon she spent close to an hour chopping wood behind their cottage, then came inside and tended to her parents. That was when she learned that Martin had slipped into a similar state as her mother, and that her mother had only grown worse in the short time since she had last seen her. She placed cool, wet cloths upon each of their foreheads in an attempt to quell their fevers, and slowly dribbled water down their throats with the stew ladle.
In the mid afternoon Syble began trying to prepare a meal for the three of them, but quickly realized that, even if they were capable of eating, she did not have much of anything to feed them. The last of their vegetables had gone dry and were covered in mold, and what remained of their meat had already gone putrid. Having no silver to spend, she was unable to go into the village to buy anything to cook. With a terrible pit in her stomach, Sybil realized that they were scarce on luck, and completely out of options.
Or, at least, they almost were.
In the late afternoon, Sybil went behind their cottage, grabbed her horse, her crossbow and her quiver, and made her way out into the forest.
___
She spent hours in that damned wood, watching through the gaps in the canopy as the sky slowly grew dark with the heavy curtain of night. The few animals that she spotted caught wind of her quickly, scurrying into the brush before she even had a chance to raise her crossbow. After a while she left Misty behind in a small glade, hoping that being without the horse would allow her to creep through the forest undetected. This tactic saw little success.
The moon was full and great in a vast, cloudless sky by the time Sybil finally decided to turn in for the night. Her walk back to Misty was miserable: her body shook with equal parts hunger and cold, and each step felt like red hot fire in her legs. A cutting wind sliced through the trees and splashed against her exposed, pink face. Sybil found herself wishing, not for the first time that day, that she had thrown on more layers before leaving her home.
She tried not to think about the consequences of her failure as she walked. Sybil knew she could have gone a number of days without food, but her parents, in their current state, would be lucky to last another night without some form of nourishment. If she was unable to provide them with medicine, she had hoped to at least give them something warm and fresh to eat, but this had proven to be too great of a task for her. She remembered her father’s intention to sell Misty for medicine, and she considered bringing the horse into the village to see if anybody would be willing to trade her for something to eat. Sybil doubted very much that anybody would want the aging animal, and she feared the reaction that the villagers might have if they discovered that Sybil’s parents were unwell; paranoia surrounding the Plague was so great that she thought they were liable to do anything to keep from becoming ill, even if that meant bringing harm to two bedridden infected and their as-of-yet healthy daughter. Sybil shivered, this time not from the worsening cold.
She snapped her head in the direction of a sudden noise in the brush. Her veins turned to glaciers as she thought of the figure standing over her mother, but she shoved this memory back down into her throat and forced her shaking arms to raise her crossbow, aiming it into the gloom. For many long moments, there was only silence, and Sybil began to wonder if she had completely imagined the sound. Then there was movement again, and something crawled toward her from out of the thick brush.
It took her a moment to identify the creature in the darkness, but Sybil quickly recognized it as a fox. It sat down in the grass a few meters away, its back partially turned to her, and began scratching behind its ear. The creature had not yet noticed her.
Sybil cautiously crouched behind a downed tree that stood between her and the fox. She aimed the tip of the quarrel at the resting beast as she curled her palm around the weapon’s slender trigger. After a few long, frigid seconds, Sybil took a deep, steadying breath…
… and found that she was unable to fire.
She remained frozen in place, her crossbow trained perfectly on the fox, her trigger hand seemingly turned to stone. It felt like hours passed as Sybil crouched behind that dead tree, unable or unwilling to act. She held the fox’s life at the tip of her quarrel, but she could not muster the willpower to bring that life to a swift, merciful end. Her mind snapped to her parents, lying together in their bed where they slowly drifted further and further away from life, both of them relying on her to do the one thing that she was so inexplicably incapable of doing. Sybil knew that if she didn’t act, her parents would die. And she couldn’t let that happen. She had to act, and she had to do it now.
Sybil felt the stone encasing her hand melt away, disappearing in an instant. The trigger felt more real in her palm; more tangible. She felt herself apply pressure to it; felt it ready to respond to her command. Sybil thought of her parents as she prepared to fire.
A large shape leapt out of the brush and pounced on top of the fox. This new, mightier beast took the smaller creature’s neck into its terrible jaws and clamped down with a quick, absolute crunch. The fox cried out in agony and terror as its life came to a swift end, its limp body immediately being tossed around like a doll by the superior creature. A horror-stricken Sybil vaguely recognized the assailant as a wolf right before she turned and sprinted into the darkness. Her unfired crossbow shook wildly in her hands as she ran.
She did not remember much of her flight. One moment she was bounding through the forest gloom, guided only by the light of the moon that managed to leak in through the gaps in the canopy above, the next she was in the glade where she had left Misty, huffing and puffing and doing all she could to prevent her body from collapsing or her heart from bursting in her chest. After taking a few moments to calm her body and fight back the rising tears, she began walking toward her horse. The animal looked at its master quizzically as she approached, clearly noting the girl’s distress; Misty may have been an old girl, but she was still a long way from losing her deep-rooted intuition.
Sybil took the packhorse by her reins and led her through the forest. The sting of defeat and the horror of what she had just witnessed were made easier by the presence of the aging mare, even if only slightly, and Sybil was grateful for her horse’s companionship on that long, cold walk home.
The girl and her horse emerged from the forest and into the clearing. She approached their cottage from the rear, completely circumventing the village. White moonlight drifted down in powerful beams, illuminating her path ahead; compared to the gloom of the forest, the glade almost looked as bright as day.
She led Misty to her hovel and tied the beast to the hitch before removing her pack saddle. Sybil patted the old mare’s face once, placed her crossbow and quiver on a shelf in the hovel, and turned to begin the long, cold, bitter walk to the cottage. She only made it a few meters before she felt her stomach rumble with hunger, prompting her to suddenly stop. The icy wind tossed her long hair as she stood thinking about her parents inside, who were rapidly withering away into nothing.
And she then realized what she had to do.
Sybil turned around slowly; the action felt as though it took hours. Before her was the hovel where she had just tied off Misty. Sinister moonlight cascaded down upon the small structure, lighting her in a way that made her look like the only thing in the world. Sybil noticed that she had stopped next to the tree stump where she and her father chopped firewood; Martin had left the old hatchet embedded into the stump. Sybil glanced down at it for a painfully long moment, its handle calling to her, beckoning her, reminding her of what needed to happen next. She reached for the small axe, and with a single, quick motion, pulled it free of the stump.
Her walk back to the hovel was agonizing. Every step she took felt like it lasted an eternity, as if she could have watched the world be born and fall to ashes in the time between her feet leaving and returning to the ground. Angry, miserable, devastated tears rolled down her face, which she made no effort to contain. They flowed from her freely, uninhibited and unyielding.
Misty snorted as Sybil approached. The mare stared at her with one bulging, almond-shaped eye. Her beast’s intuition told her that something was wrong, but Sybil saw in her gaze that she trusted Sybil to resolve whatever that something was. She trusted Sybil to protect her.
“I’m sorry, girl,” Sybil said, her voice a bitter, harsh rasp. “I’m so sorry.”
She stood in front of the mare and raised the hatchet. Its worn blade glinted with the lunar brilliance that descended from above. Sybil stared into Misty’s unblinking eye, where she watched as her reflection raised the weapon to the very top of its arc and prepared to bring it down in one swift, final stroke.
A stroke that would never come.
Sybil tossed the hatchet into the earth at her feet, slightly startling the mare, who snorted briefly before returning to her normal, passive self. Sybil fell to her knees at Misty’s hooves and wept for what felt like the rest of her life. Her sobs came in long, pathetic gasps which seemed intent on ripping every last breath from her burning lungs. When she had exhausted all of her shame and misery, Sybil slowly clambered to her feet, patted the old horse on the side of her neck, and once again turned to walk toward the waiting cottage.
Which is when she saw the silhouette in the window, standing over her parents’ bed.
Sybil froze. She could only stare dumbly into the window for many long moments as her entire body slowly went numb. At first she feared that maybe the figure was watching her through the window, but she quickly realized this could not be the case—it was turned away from her, looking down at the bed where her sleeping parents rested.
Something in her shifted, and Sybil suddenly regained control of her body. She lowered herself to a crouch and crept her way back over to her waiting crossbow, fighting off the pins and needles of the fading numbness as she went. Sybil threw her quiver over her shoulder, loaded a quarrel into her crossbow, and with one more glance at Misty, crept her way back toward the cottage.
Their home only had one entrance, and thus Sybil needed to cautiously sneak her way toward the front of the building in order to make her way inside. She slipped beneath another window on her way, certain that allowing herself to appear in the aperture would cause whoever was waiting inside to immediately notice her. After nearly two minutes of slowly creeping and barely moving, Sybil made it to the front door of the cottage. She turned the door’s knob as carefully and furtively as she could, wincing as latches came undone, the snapping and clipping of their mechanisms echoing through the air. She was unable to prevent the door from creaking as it came open, and could only hope that holding her breath would somehow muffle its sound to any intruder that might have been waiting for her on the other side of the threshold.
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The door swung open into the waiting darkness and Sybil stepped into the swallowing shadows. The fire in the hearth had recoiled significantly, turning into a calm, smoldering collection of embers; the only other source of light in the cottage’s main room came from a candle on their dining table that Sybil did not remember lighting before she left, but which stood low in a pool of wax which told her it had been burning for several hours, and was nearing the end of its life. A thick silence infested the home; it drifted on the dust that swirled in the air all around her, and was so strong that she could almost not even hear herself think.
It took all of Sybil’s strength to control her breathing as she slowly crept through her home. She used her nearly two decades of living in the cottage to carefully position each stride to elicit as little noise as possible. Her heart almost stopped a couple of times when she miscalculated a step and sent a rogue creak shivering through the home, each time pausing to see if her disturbance had been detected. Nothing stirred at any of her transgressions; the only movement in the cottage belonged to the flickering flame on the table, which splashed dancing shadows on the walls and ceiling as it guttered with the final throes of its life.
Sybil approached her parents’ quarters. Darkness oozed from its threshold like a gaping wound. Inside she could see the slight flicker of another dying candle, as if it had only ever been lit to guide her on the very path that she now walked, but beyond this, the space was wreathed in a dense, sinister umbra. It was this meager, perishing light that allowed her to see the figure standing in the room, existing as a black mass that barely made itself known from the surrounding darkness. She could not determine if the silhouette could see her, or even what direction it was now facing. Sybil took aim with her quivering crossbow, but found herself unable to step any closer to the thing waiting on the other side of the threshold.
“Who goes there?” she said in the most authoritative voice that she could muster; it was far less commanding than she would have liked. “Identify yourself!”
For several tortuous moments, the figure did not respond. Then she saw it stir; its form undulated and squirmed in the darkness as it drew closer to the candle that stood between its haven of darkness and the marginally brighter world that Sybil resided in. Sybil refused to move—in truth she did not know if she remembered how to—all she could focus on was keeping her crossbow trained on the intruder, her right hand held against its eager trigger.
She only lowered her weapon when she saw Beatrice Fletcher step into the candle’s thinning domain.
At first Sybil could not find her voice. She was stunned by the sight of her mother standing before her, more able-bodied than she had seen her in days. To find her legs after how deathly she had been just that morning was nothing short of a miracle—and to Sybil, was almost too incredible to be true.
“Mother?” Sybil managed to somehow rediscover her lost voice; it sounded weak, uncertain, afraid.
In the flickering shadows of the candle, Beatrice’s face contorted into a wicked grin, and for the first time Sybil realized how her mother’s appearance had changed. She was more pale than Sybil had ever seen her—more pale even than a cold, still corpse—and her eyes, now devoid of any light, somehow seemed to glow with an unnatural luminescence. Her thin lips curled back from her white gums and glistening grin, which was completed by a pair of sharp, thin fangs. When she spoke, her voice, while containing a whisper of Beatrice’s familiarity, was no longer her own. It did not even sound like it was produced by her own body, and instead was projected from somewhere far away, coming from a deep, dark, terrible place. “My lovely Sybil,” she said. “Back from your hunt, I see—and without any trophies to speak of. I suppose this is no surprise. I expect nothing less from my disappointment of a daughter.”
Sybil, her stomach filled by a sudden pang of shock and disgust, took a slight, recoiling step backwards. She kept her crossbow lowered to the ground, but felt the strengthening urge to raise it. “What’s wrong with you, Mother? Why are you speaking this way?”
“What’s wrong?” Beatrice chuckled. Her echoing laughter caused the nearby candle to gutter and spit. “Why, my sweet child, what could possibly be wrong? I feel better now than I ever have in my life.” She took a step forward.
Sybil finally gave in to her urge. She raised the crossbow and reluctantly trained it on her mother. The girl could hardly believe what she was doing, but at the same time felt that the action was paramount to ensuring her own safety. The new presence of her mother filled her with an overwhelming sense of danger that she could not possibly ignore. “S-stay back! Not another step!”
“Why, Sybil!” Beatrice’s voice feigned offense, but the sinister smirk never left her terrible, curling lips. “How could you threaten your own mother? Have you no longer any affinity for your own flesh and blood? No longer any love for the one who brought you into this life?”
Sybil forced herself to keep the crossbow aimed straight ahead. Sweat caked her brow and ran down the side of her face, but she resisted the urge to wipe it away. “I said to stay back! Stay back or I’ll shoot!”
The woman chuckled again. “You and I both know that you will do no such thing.”
The candle resting on the table near Beatrice suddenly went out, casting her entire room into darkness. Sybil, no longer able to see the woman, quickly turned on her heel and ran toward the cottage’s front door in a panic. She passed by the candle on the kitchen table and, reaching the door, grabbed its handle, threw it open—
—and found her father waiting for her on the other side.
Martin Fletcher had adopted a similar look to his wife, including her malevolent grin, with one key difference: his entire face below his cheeksbones was splashed in a thick, crimson layer of what Sybil could only identify as blood. Redness dripped from his fangs, landing in two distinct pools in the doorway.
Sybil backed away from him with a terrified scream, stumbling over herself until her back slammed into the rear wall of the cottage barely a foot away from the smoldering remains of the hearth. Her father stepped leisurely through the doorway, prompting Sybil to raise her quaking crossbow once more, its quarrel aimed at his chest.
Martin snickered, his nauseating chortles sounding even less human than his wife’s had. “Come, now, Sybil. Are you so eager to do away with your poor, ailing parents? Do we mean so little to you, that you would so gladly discard us when we need you the most?”
Sybil did not speak; she could not conjure any words. Instead she rapidly flicked her crossbow back and forth between her father approaching from the doorway, and her mother who slowly made her way across the cottage. They drew closer with each passing moment, steadily enclosing her in their snare.
“Go on then, Sybil,” her father said. “Make use of that weapon of yours instead of waving it around like some child’s plaything.” Martin stopped in front of the kitchen table. “I will even stay entirely still so that you cannot possibly miss—not that I believe you would ever be capable of such a thing. You’re twice the marksman I was at your age, after all.”
Sybil trained her weapon on her father’s waiting form, its sharp quarrel aimed straight for his heart. But even as she prepared to pull the trigger, she knew that she would not be able to. She knew that, come what may, she would never be able to do what needed to be done.
And so her father laughed again. “As I thought.”
The candle on the kitchen table guttered on for another moment before it went out, casting almost the entire cottage into complete darkness. Overwhelming fear gnawed at Sybil now as she waited for her parents—or what looked like her parents—to finish closing their trap. Then, in a moment of crucial clarity, a thought managed to break through that seemingly impenetrable wall of terror. Holding onto her crossbow with one hand, Sybil used her other to grab the fire iron that hung on the wall next to the hearth and ripped it free. She then stuck the iron into the fire and pulled with all of her strength, sending burning hot embers scattering into the room in front of her. Sparks flew as the once-diminishing fire came back to life; it spread among the furs on the floor and quickly began to grow with uncontrollable fervor. It illuminated the space around her, revealing her way forward and casting out some of the darkness.
Her parents, both mere feet from her, recoiled from the sudden blaze. They both hissed like startled cats and reflexively covered their eyes with their arms. Sybil, seizing the opportunity, sprinted for the door, but was stopped when her father grabbed at her wrist with his free hand and latched onto her with an inhumanly powerful grip. He snarled at her from beyond his arm sleeve, watching her with a single eye while the other was shielded from the growing blaze.
Sybil, acting on reflex, lunged the fire iron at her father. It impaled him in his one watching eye, eliciting another hiss, the pitch and intensity of which threatened to blow out her eardrums. Sybil lost her grip on the iron as her father did the same on her wrist. She ran through the cottage and out the front door, feeling the heat of the worsening inferno on the back of her neck as she went.
Sybil turned and sprinted for the rear of the building, taking in gasps of fresh, cold air while she ran. It seemed to take an eternity for her to finally arrive at Misty’s hovel. Her lungs burned with a fire not unlike the one that was beginning to engulf her home, but she knew she did not have time to rest. She leaned her crossbow against the wooden wall and, with a pair of shaking, terrified hands, began untying the horse’s reins from the post.
She was so focused, so narrowed in on her task, that the reins were fully free and in her hands by the time she realized that the mare was lying dead at her feet, her throat torn clean out of her still-bubbling neck.
Sybil shrieked; she took a recoiling step away from the bleeding carcass of her beloved animal. Her strength quickly left her; she buckled to her knees and felt her stomach heave, ready to expel its nonexistent contents. Only the sudden chuckle of her father distracted her from her nausea and forced her to turn her head.
Martin Fletcher slowly approached his daughter, walking without any care in the world as the cottage several meters behind him began to cough black, billowing smoke from every orifice. The fire iron was still lodged in his eye and stuck out awkwardly as he walked, resembling an antler of one of the countless stags that he had hunted over his many years in the forest. He did not even seem to notice the protrusion. It was not until he stood over the kneeled, shaking Sybil that he finally pulled the iron free from his eye socket and allowed it to drop, its tip blackened and bloody, to the ground at his feet. His injured eye swam with blackish blood; it began to squirm and writhe as it slowly regained its shape, even as crimson-dark liquid spilled down his face, mixing with the spattering around his mouth and fangs. He spoke through the layer of red that seemed to have become one with his putrid face, his words sticking into her like many sharp, thin daggers of ice. “Had you been born a man, that blow might have actually struck true.”
Sybil no longer had the energy to run from him. She no longer had the willpower to try to escape. Instead she could only look up into her father’s pale, nightmarish face as cold, mortified tears streamed down her own. “What’s wrong with you, Father? What’s happened to you?”
“Again you ask such a foolish question,” he said as Beatrice appeared from out of the darkness behind him. She stood back, watching the scene unfold before her. “It is as your mother said, Sybil. There is nothing wrong with us at all. We feel better than we ever have—better than we ever possibly could have before. And you can join us, my beloved daughter. He left you for us, so that we could be the ones to give you this wonderful gift. All you have to do is accept it.”
“What gift?” Sybil sobbed. “What do you speak of, Father?”
“The beautiful, generous, eternal gift,” he said calmly, licking the blood that ran along his fangs, “of death.”
Martin lunged at her, his sharp, black claws ready and eager to slice into her waiting flesh. Sybil did not know when she noticed the hatchet lying on the ground near her hand, but she grabbed it and swung at her attacker without so much as a thought while at the same time lunging to her feet. The blade caught her father in the side of his face, causing him to reel. Its handle escaped from Sybil’s grasp, but she paid it no mind, instead scurrying backwards and grabbing her crossbow from its spot against the hovel wall. She turned it on her father and immediately froze, once again finding herself unable to act.
Martin grabbed the hatchet by the handle and yanked it free in a spray of shadowy blood. He dropped the weapon onto the ground and looked at his daughter with a deadly, monstrous scowl. Even before he spoke, the spilling, bleeding gash was already beginning to mend itself. “You’re a fool to reject this gift, daughter of mine. And you shall not live to regret your decision!”
Martin lunged at her again, his clawed hand ready to strike. Sybil meant to fire. She meant to pull the trigger that would send her loaded quarrel flashing through the air before it pierced her father’s heart. But she knew, much as she always had, that she would never be able to. Instead she lowered her crossbow with her pair of shaking hands, turned her closed eyes toward her shoulder, and awaited the inevitable. She wondered if the pain would leave her in agony for long, or if her end would come as quickly as it had for Gareth, all those years ago.
Sybil heard the sound of tearing flesh, and for a moment, she believed that her father’s dark goal had been achieved. Only when she realized that she felt no pain, experienced no searing heat, no unending anguish, did she find the courage to look forward and open her eyes.
In front of her lay her father’s dead, bleeding corpse, its headless neck ending in an oozing stump, which spurted out crimson-black liquid onto the cold ground. Stood behind his body was a figure gripping a longsword, which dripped with her father’s blood as it glistened in the silver moonlight.
The masked figure, with its long, sharp beak and emotionless eyes of onyx, was the very embodiment of death.
