Lost in the Woods
Mechthild Tausche felt she was awake, and laying on the ground. She was staring at the sunlight playing between the tree branches, but she didn’t remember how she got there. She tried raising, but a hard, clanking jolt that tugged her feet scattered her resolution to the winds. Something had grunted, and then everything fell quiet. Mechthild felt the stillness as hard to lift as would have been a cold, heavy corpse pinning her to the ground. She had found no courage yet to move a finger, but then she heard another clang, and her world was shrunk down to a narrow ball of terror, framed by jolts and pain, deafened by the low rumble of a body dragged on the ground: her own. Her ankles were chained together, numbed but for a dull, mounting pain. She was unable to do much, save for struggling for breath, wrapped inside her upturned petticoat.
‘Am I tied to a cart?’ She asked herself. It was an ordeal raising her head so as to watch. She found that she was being hauled around like a ragdoll by a towering figure that bristled with hair. Scythe-like horns poked from beyond the curve of hunchbacked shoulders, set upon a bulbous, inhuman head. In her condition it was easy to fall back again on the grinding forest-bed, but up she went again in a frenzy of contorsions, disbelieving. But she saw it again. She made no attempt to stifle her throat-wrenching screams, then, but they did naught to stop her ride, and her attempts at freedom were fruitless. All her prayers went unanswered, and her pleas likewise. No one came to help Mechthild while she spat out mouthfuls of mud-tasting old leaves, bumped tree roots, clawed at moss leaving finger-trails. Not even the fiend dragging her responded in any way, as pitiless as the World itself.
In the end, Mechthild finally understood she had stopped, but then an enormous hand grabbed her, and pulled her up like some cruel winch. She found herself staring at a visage from some otherworldly province of brutality, and was imprisoned by a squeezing vise and forced to stand on tiptoe to save her shoulder from dislocation. Mechthild knew she was delirious. Such a face was not created in the likeness of a human, but yet, wasn’t it true that some rocks or clouds could display a human-like appearence? When she was little she had been beaten by a nun, once: she had innocently told about a wood-knot in her table that looked like an angel, and how she prayed to it before bedtime. But a table was fashioned out of dead, unflinching wood. This visage instead relaxed into a likeness of perfect compassion and fatherly love, right in front of her horrified eyes.
“Please…” she managed to stutter, swallowing bile. And the horned demon smiled, his beauteous regard melting into a sneer of malignant contempt. Mechthild fainted.
She came to in a desert forest clearing. She found with a sharp jab of pain that her shoulder-joint was ruined, bone twisted right off its socket. She refused fainting again, and managed to raise — her feet were free at least. When she did so, she found there a man staring at her. He was dressed in a soldierly fashion, holding a live musket whose smoke haloed him. She managed to extend a trembling hand, but he smashed her down with a blow of his gun-stock.
“Filthy sinner. You are but the bait,” he heard him say. She found herself unable to faint at all, this time. It was a pity, for her body refused her call to muster.
“Silence! Are you perchance daft?” asked some new voice. “Was she the one whose pleas we heard from afar?” A second man had come forth into the clearing. He was paunchy, and ugly. It was queer finding the time for such considerations, all in all, she thought.
“It doesn’t catch just the wee ones, my lord the Doctor,” said the soldierly man. “He grabs the sin-laden too. Yea, this woman screamed, but she is tantamount to an accomplice for the vile creature!”
“Spare me the speeches. I would have been content with a nod, you daft man!” Hissed the so-called Doctor. “You can worry about her sins later.”
They both vanished in the woods, leaving Mechthild behind in her misery. So it came to pass that she understood that what happened to her was no mere nightmare, and furthermore, that those men were fully intent on hunting down the monster. That was the proverbial last straw, for Mechthild Tausche: her whole world felt upturned. She even came to question her line of work for the first time. She had always thought that hunting down war-orphans in the woods to sell to the highest bidder was just some thankless toil, like anything else she could have done to earn a living. When it came right down to it, instead, it looked like the Devil resented the competition.
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