OGRISM TAIL.

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 18

After falling asleep he fell prey to some terrifying dreams. He came woke up well past midnight, trying to shake a vision of a gigantic demon, monstrosity crashing through the house on which he was a mate. At the sound of Matendechere screaming and the house falling down on them with a loud thud, heavy stones falling on them and crushing his fingers.

His eyes opened in a chamber. He managed to fall asleep once again, but yet another nightmare came for him He was tied to the ground in the woods at night, and a man whose head was encased in a bizarre metal apparatus approached him, holding a baby high above his head. He was begging this man not to harm it, but he then stood over him, the baby crying and kicking, and without a word he slammed that poor little child down upon Abednego's left arm, undoubtedly killing the infant with the awful force of the strike.

He awoke at that exact moment, a dog howling somewhere far away in the interior of that forest. He lay in down in a chamber quite still for a moment, feeling a tingling in his left arm, as if in fact it had been struck. Then, perhaps five seconds after this terrible dream ended, an excruciating bolt of pain leapt up his arm from fingers to shoulder. A second bolt followed the first, and he rose from the chamber in a panic, moving his arm into the moonlight that streamed through chamber.

What he beheld caused him to cry out in horror. His arm was twisted around so drastically it was as if something had attached it to his body incorrectly. It had also broken in two places, white bone protruding just below his elbow. He managed to stagger three steps forward but then collapsed to his knees, weeping in agony, having no understanding of what could have happened to him.

The thought that perhaps an intruder had broken in and assaulted him flirted in and out of his fevered mind, but it simply could not be. There came a final grievous bodily injury he did not even feel at first, but which asserted itself there in the dark only when he began to stumble down the stairs to the inn’s bottom floor: some of the fingers of his left hand, and his entire palm, had been burned red as if he had doused it all in hot water. Only some moments later did he become certain that the afflicted flesh corresponded exactly to that which had touched the tiny bat brought to him by Matendechere.

Not ten minutes after discovering his injuries, he made his way out of the place and climbed onto a tall tree to try and see how far he was in the forest. He climbed the tree with great effort so as not to have his arm strike his side. He had made no effort to wrap it; it would have been too painful. He somehow saw a road, four miles away, though he was in great agony. He simply could not take his time.

His injuries were slow to heal, but heal they did. It was immensely difficult for him. He was musing upon what could possibly have caused the affliction. Nothing made any sense. Especially puzzling was the conundrum of the burns on his hand; the pain from these marks had faded quickly, but the redness remained there.

He climbed down from the tree, he'd seen one thing that had given him pause. He laboured to think about it, deeper contemplating, uncertain as to how to convey the image in words and unsure of what to make of it. The sun had been low in the sky as he’d trotted down on the road, the horizon orange and red, throwing everything into sharp relief. In a distance he’d seen two silhouettes, feminine ones.

They were engaged in a frenetic sort of dance, he thought, though that wasn’t quite right; they were locked at the arms and were spinning fast, their heads c****d back, one body urging the other toward greater and greater speed. There was nothing in this act. Trees had blocked his view rather quickly, and he had been unable to get another look at this anomaly.

Some thoughts came to him, more carefully this time, but again it led nowhere except into the parts of imagination that pondered such enigma only in the lonely minutes before being hindered by the worries of the spirits of the dead; thus his life less afflicted with banal solitude.

He was thinking of going back, the taste was breathtakingly and would set out in the morning because the forest was too risky at night, but he simply could not abide the wind and cold he’d come through under a waning moon.

He emerged into the woods, collected some woods to light fire to keep himself warm.

He moved close to the fire, gazing into it, appearing utterly exhausted. His face and his hands were chapped from the cold.

As the night hours passed, Abednego became more and more troubled by the silence. Despite Matendechere warning, she knew he would have to at least get deeper into the creatures inhabited house in that forest and confirm to himself that indeed those creatures are food for the ogrism. He had decided upon morning to set out on this task, but upon stepping outside an hour in that night hour, he could see the mists over the forest swirling ominously, and he knew the heavy downpour wind was about to blow in with high winds.

During that night the wind screamed as it swept down trees, stranding Abednego at the same place for another three full hours filled with loneliness and troubled thoughts. He tried to take his mind off such disconcerting matters.

Matendechere had explained to Abednego much about the place she gave an explanation for the vanishing of any person who was in pursuit of ogrism tail and looking for the ogrism tail. They have vanished and no trace of any of them, was ever found. It was at this time that whispers of some satanic influence within the place Abednego took hold as never before.

The creatures have a craven temptress whose true ambition had been to reach out from beyond the grave to consume the souls of the living. The creatures have frightful appearance. They are wisp of creatures, pale as sleet, with a piercing gaze.

Abednego set of that very night to where the creatures are believed to be hunting, the place is filed with human limbs and heads. The weather was passable when he left, with low winds coming from the east, a crisp but not terribly unpleasant night.

On the way he saw someone coming down the road in the other direction, a solitary man who was singing very softly to himself.

Aside from this man he saw no one. He reached the creatures inhabited house gate at about there hours later having travelled more slowly than normal, giving himself every chance to turn around, thinking of all the reasons he should not be on this mission. Moving on silently and the midst of frenzy, he actually stopped briefly when he could spy the upper part of the forest against the sky. But in the end he overcame his fears.

The first thing he noticed through the trees that fronted the place troubling, was that there were some owls that kept flying here and there, they were in form of human beings.

It hasn't been a comforting sight to see, an image of the kind and in form of an owl on this frigid, solent road that stretched for miles in either direction without any glimpse of something welcoming. Now there was just a bloodless phantoms. The building looked as if it had been empty for a hundred years. It would be very cold inside, the stone walls chilling one to the core.

The low iron gate in front was closed but not locked, not a terribly unusual happenstance. Abednego confirming his back bag moved through it, approaching the front door, which he had never actually parted. In his right hand he held a magic calabash, having prepared himself for the dark. Embedded in the door was a heavy knockers shaped like an owl, which he struck five times against the wood. He waited. No one came. He had not expected a response. He pushed gently on the door and realized it had not even been fully shut.

There was no visible gap between the door and the jamb, but someone had obviously not noticed that it had never been closed. Or perhaps it had intentionally been left open. He entered inside for the first time.

All was black within. Closing the door behind him against the light wind, he found himself in a long, draught front hall that stretched left and right. The gloom shrouded him, and his magic calabash could not show him anything that was not less than five feet in front of him. The walls around him were hundred-year-old gray stone, virtually devoid of ornamentation of any kind.

He called out a greeting, his words echoing with a sad shallowness, and he received nothing in return. He chose to move to his left down the hall, stepping carefully, his eyes trained mostly downward. The floor was scratched and in many places not quite level with the earth.

Abednego's foot came to rest on dead winter leaves once or twice, a sign that perhaps the front door had been left open wider and longer than it had even first seemed. He knew it was true then, that they had all perished. He needed little more proof. He wondered if the creatures killed and ate the owners before occupying the place.