The Plague

©2002 Angeline Hawkes-Craig
All rights reserved.

Hungry tongues of licking fire lashed out at him, curling around in the air, seeking something to consume. The fire raged, constantly fed by the boy who had been herded to the flames to watch and feed the insatiable appetite. For now, it was the only thing keeping It away.

It seemed to be afraid of the fire, but the villagers couldn't seem to keep enough bonfires going around the perimeter of the village. Somehow, nightly, It got in. It found a hole here, or a gap there, and came like a thief, silently, dragging someone off into the darkness, leaving no trace behind, the person never to be seen again. At first, the fires were completely effective; but as time went on, their success began to fade and It began growing bolder once again.

"There, boy! Toss another log onto that fire." The passing man called to the tattered peasant boy who was lost in his own thoughts, terrified and alone.

The little boy jumped to his feet and threw a big, gnarled piece of wood onto the blaze. He stood back as it popped and hissed. The boy welcomed the job, for he stayed warm by the fire, and people passing by would bring him scraps of food or the end of a loaf of bread. He was performing a valuable function. Usually he was left to fend for himself.

Night was near. The boy shivered, not from cold, as working the fires caused the sweat to trickle down his dirty face, but from fear. He could hear the quietness that began to engulf the town. Fear. That's what it was, and it hung heavily in the air. He could almost reach out and grasp it in his hands, the fear felt so thick. The same questions pounded in everyone's mind. When would It strike? Who would It take? When they awoke in the morning, who among them would be missing?

The little boy threw another knotty piece of wood into the fire. He could see the fires that other boys and men tended across the village, around the edges; anywhere It might get in, sneak in, slither in and snatch someone away.

" 'Ey, there, 'Arry! Look alive now, boy!" Harry, the little boy, looked up at the Miller. It wasn't every day he heard his name used. The Miller was a kindly man who often brought him scraps and heels of bread. He had one son once. Before It came. His son had died of a choking fit. Miller seemed a very sad man since that happened.

Harry tossed more wood onto the fire. There wasn't much wood left to feed the flames. Unless someone brought him some more, his fire would not last until morning. Harry curled up on the ground a safe distance from the heat and lay watching the reds and oranges dance together in a teasing taunt. His heart beat hard. He could barely hear anything over the din of his own blood rushing by his ears. It would be here soon.

He suddenly grew aware of a damp coldness. His eyes popped open. His fire was nothing more than a smoldering pile of black charred wood. Only a few red spots glowed here and there in the early twilight of the morning. It was dawn. Harry sat up and rubbed his shoulder where he had been laying on the hard ground. Slowly, reality began to seep into his brain, and he wondered who would be gone. He tried to stir up the fire a bit, but managed only a few hissing bursts of fire that quickly died down again. He waited for the village to awake.

The cries began. He heard them wafting over the breeze from the other side of the village. They were soft at first, but then they reached a high wail easily heard over the still quiet morning. Harry wondered whom It had taken. He heard the ringing of the knells -- saw a priest hurry toward a hovel. Harry crossed himself. Not even faith could ward off this evil.

It was the Barber. He was simply gone. His wife had been asleep right next to him. She hadn't heard a thing. She was sitting in a heap on a bench outside their hut. The priest was praying with her. Here and there people wandered in and out of the hut gawking at nothing. Nothing was all that was left.

"Town meeting. Town meeting," someone called out. Harry raised his eyebrows. They had a town meeting every time someone disappeared. He didn't see how the meetings were helping. No one ever had any ideas on how to stop It. How can you fight something if you don't know what it is you are fighting?

"We need to stop It!" someone shouted.

"Hunt It! Track It!" another someone joined in.

The priest held his hands up to calm them. The Bailiff shook his head while he waited for the people to quiet down.

"Starting today, everyone is to board up their houses. All windows and doors. Any hole or crack bigger than some place a mouse could get in. We are going to organize shifts, with some men cutting and splitting the wood necessary for boarding and everyone else working on their own house. We need to do this before nightfall. Use what you have. Inside doors, if any. Table tops. Anything flat enough to nail to the outside or inside of your dwelling." The Bailiff had lined up small buckets of nails for those who had none. Slowly at first, then more quickly, the people shuffled away toward their huts, hovels and houses to begin nailing up the holes and windows that It might be using to gain entrance. Some pounded in wooden pegs to secure shutters. Some used the scarce metal nails. Everyone worked. Hammers, rocks, whatever could be used to pound in a nail or peg was used. Frantically, every man, woman and child big enough to stand alone, worked.

Harry could hear the hammering all day. Few did anything else. When one person was finished with his own home, he moved on to lend a hand to a neighbor. No building was left unboarded, no matter how humble. It was evening before the hammering stopped. He could see men and women before their houses, surveying the security they believed they had fashioned. People, mostly children, were hauling the scraps of wood left from the day's work in carts and dumping it near the fires. Harry watched as his pile grew. It was full of odd things. Stool legs, table legs, split wood pieces too slender to have worked well on the windows. It was all wood, and that's all that mattered.

A girl approached him and pulled a cloth bag from her basket. It was tied up with string. She handed it to Harry.

"Mum said to bring this to you, 'Arry. Said it had some extra in it 'cause you've been working so 'ard lately." The girl smiled a black-toothed grin and scampered off with the empty cart.

Harry sat down and quickly unfolded the greasy bundle. He had to eat fast, as it was nearly dark and he would need to get his fire going. He couldn't believe the feast before him! A whole chicken leg, roasted, and still hot. A potato, warm with a bit of real butter poked down inside. A slice of warm bread. Half an onion. It all smelled so wonderful. At the very bottom was the most delicious thing he had had for at least a year: a slice of fresh berry pie! It had been placed in a chipped piece of pottery. He would be sure to take that back, he noted to himself.

He couldn't remember the last time he had eaten meat. He ate every scrap. When he was done, all that was left was a very clean bone, which he tossed sadly into the fire. He would have eaten that too, had he been able. He piled all of the cloth scraps in a heap on top of the chipped piece of pottery and stashed them beneath his wood bench. There were some other fabric pieces there that other people had wrapped bits and pieces of food for him in, as well. When all of this was over, he would wash out the odds and ends of linen and sew them together for a new shirt.

Harry jumped up and began stacking the bits of wood into a pile. He stirred the coals around and blew on it here and there. Soon the sparks began to catch the new supply of wood and the fire licked its way up his tower of wood until it was raging, lighting the darkness in a shadowy circle around itself and Harry. Through the darkness, he saw other fires glowing against the black night and the dull outlines of boys tossing wood onto the fires.

Morning came. The plan had worked. No one was missing. The priest offered prayers of thanks in the town center. Everyone was happy. More people brought Harry bundles of food. He couldn't remember the last time he had eaten so well. He actually was full. Throughout the day, more wood was added to his pile. It would be night again soon. They knew they couldn't find a way to stop the night. All one could do was wait and pray.

That night, despite the fires, despite the boarding-up of cracks and windows, three people were taken. It had come back with a vengeance, defeating the barriers that had kept It out the night before. Yet not one stick of wood had been removed, cut, hacked, or pried off any door or window. How had It gotten in?

"This is evil," the priest said sadly. "An evil we cannot fight."

Harry thought sullenly that if the priest had given up hope, then there wasn't much hope to be found anywhere else. He wondered how many more days and nights he had left before he was one of the ones snatched away by the evil lurking in the darkness, beyond the village, beyond the curtain of reality. There were no explanations for the happenings. No way to explain it to the children or other folk. It just came and took whomever it desired, and left again. Did It eat them? Keep them as slaves? No one knew. It just kept coming.

The priest continued to pray. Then he moved aside to show a few buckets of white paint.

"Up until this point, It has not returned to a house where someone has already been stolen from earlier." A few sobs could be heard in the crowd. "So, after consulting with the remaining town fathers, we have decided that all homes already visited by It will be marked with an X. That way we hope to let It know It has already exercised its evil there and to move on."

Murmurings could be heard through the crowd. A couple of men stepped forward, picked up the buckets of wet paint, and left the crowd to go mark the huts and dwellings already unfortunate enough to have sacrificed one of their inhabitants to the evil that came in the night.

Most of the houses had a big white X marked on the front of the dwelling. Harry surveyed the boarded-up, X'ed up houses. He frowned. There weren't many dwellings that weren't marked with an X. Would It leave when someone had been taken from each hovel?

Days passed. Nights passed. More were taken nightly. The X's didn't stop It. In fact, the X's seemed to attract It back to the places It had already been to before, as if It had not done a good job and had left something behind unfinished. The village grew smaller. The Bailiff was gone. The priest was gone. All that they had found of the Holy Father was his large black-and-gold rosary, dropped on the floor next to his bed. Old, young. Strong, frail. It seemed to have no preference. No blood. No destruction. No mutilated corpses. Just a force, a being that somehow came like a fog and seeped through a crack in the wall, devoured its prey, and then oozed away again. Nothing left nothing.

Harry shuddered. That was the terror of it all. There was nothing. If a pile of gore and bones had been left behind after a grisly night feast, that could have been more easily explained. If a bloodless corpse had been found, that could have been explained. If a decomposing body had been discovered outside of the village, on the bridge, on the road, dragged away like the leftovers of some wild dog's feast, that too could have been explained -- somehow. But to explain nothing could not be done.

There weren't any people to tend the fires at night now. Harry kept his bonfire going, though. He scrounged the wood himself in a cart he took from the Bailiff's now empty, boarded, and X'ed house. The Bailiff had a nice wood home, sturdier than most in the village, but not sturdy enough to lock out It.

He took stools and chairs and benches from the empty homes for use in his fires. His pile grew throughout the day and shrank throughout the night.

"No use tending the fire, boy," Miller said to him one day. Harry stretched out his hand to take the warm bread and honey that the Miller had brought to him. The Miller was all alone now. It had taken everyone but him.

"'Ave to. I gotta do something, sir. Stay 'ere with me tonight. The fire has kept me safe." Harry ate the bread hungrily.

"That's good of you to offer, 'Arry. Maybe I'll do that. Maybe I will." The Miller smiled at him, and then went off to see if anyone might need any bread, but there wasn't anyone left. Harry had tried to tell him that a few hours before. Harry was pretty sure that the Miller had gone mad.

Harry didn't think the Miller would come. The Miller didn't believe anything could protect them now. If the Father couldn't pray down protection, then a fire wasn't going to offer any, either.

He shrugged. The fire had kept him safe and he would stay by the fire. Maybe the evil that had chosen their village to feed upon was Death itself. Somehow Death was coming and claiming more than just the souls of its victims. Maybe Death was hungry for flesh and souls. Harry didn't know. If the Holy Father hadn't known, how was a boy like himself supposed to figure it out? Earlier, when It first came, the men had searched all over, all around the village. Nothing had been found. No clue had ever been left as to what this evil was that hovered near and around their village waiting to absorb its victims. Harry wondered if you got to see what It was before It took you away. Seemed only fair that you should get to see what It was before you saw Saint Peter at the pearly gates in Heaven. Then again, what was fair about life?

A few months later, London sent a group of officials to the village. Taxes had been due and no one had heard anything or received any payment from the village. One solicitor had reported that he had not heard from his client in over eight weeks' time. An elderly man had reported that his son was due to arrive three weeks ago and had never arrived, nor had he sent a letter or a messenger to explain his delay.

The officials rode into the deserted village. Benches were strewn about as if no one had tidied up for awhile. The windows and doors were boarded up securely. All of the homes had been marked in bold, white paint with large X's.

"Mother Mary!" The large man in the blue cape said slowly. "The plague has been here."

"Aye. Been everywhere, it has," another man replied.

There was evidence of massive fires used to purify the air of the stench of death. It looked as if the villagers had done everything they could to stave off the spread of the dreaded plague.

The man in the blue cape pulled out a massive handkerchief from his jerkin. He held it to his nose as if to protect his delicate passages from possible infection.

A man in a green velvet vest suddenly noticed something after eyeing Blue Cape's handkerchief.

"There is no stench here," he said oddly.

"Aye. You're right. Shouldn't we be bombarded with the stink of rotting flesh?" Blue Cape lowered his handkerchief and stated while sniffing the air.

The men began to look around. They entered the dwellings, hesitantly at first, but then, finding no one, more boldly.

"There is no one here. Not a single person or body," said one man, who came back to the horses.

"I found no one either," Blue Cape said with a frown.

"There must be graves." A strong-looking chap started out toward the edge of the village in search of a mass grave, or a few scattered ones. He was looking for crosses, markers of some kind. He found nothing.

"No graves," he muttered to himself.

The rest of the group approached.

"I found no graves."

"None at all?"

"Perhaps they went to a nearby village, to a doctor?" a man suggested.

"There isn't a village around here for four days' ride. The whole village couldn't have left," someone said.

"No people. No bodies. No graves." Blue Cape stood, hands on his hips, gazing around the village. "What in bloody hell went on here?"

One man didn't seem satisfied with those results, so he went off to look over the hovels again. Blue Cape righted a wood bench near a charred scar where a fire had been and kicked through a small pile of belongings. Nothing much but some bits of cloth and a piece of chipped pottery.

"What should we report to the Sheriff? There will have to be some explanation for why the taxes have not been paid this year," a man asked Blue Cape, who was examining the piece of chipped pottery as though it might hold a clue.

"I don't know. Let's sleep here tonight, and we'll think of something in the morning." He stood up, dusted off the back of his breeches, and looked beyond the village and into the forest and fields surrounding the area. He walked toward a large, sturdy-looking house while listening to the wind blow through the quietness.

He had never heard such silence before.

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