"They should have starved. It would have been kinder."
??? POV
Year 1714
The cottage hunched on the hill like a rotten tooth, its sagging beams groaning in the wind. Inside, the air was thick with the scent of infection and damp earth. Eugene dragged her ruined leg behind her, the stump wrapped in soiled rags, the flesh beneath pulsing with a feverish heat. She remembered the saw... her own hands, slick with blood, teeth gritted so hard she tasted iron and the way the bone had splintered, not clean, never clean.
Outside, her son crouched in the withered grass, his skeletal fingers cradling the blackened wings of a long-dead butterfly. His voice was too bright, too hollow. "Mommy, look! It's alive! That means there must be flowers, right?"
Eugene choked on the lie before it left her lips. There were no flowers. The fields had been dust for months. The village wells spat up brackish sludge. The last of the livestock had been slaughtered weeks ago, their bones cracked open for marrow. And the people... oh, the people... had begun to stare at each other with the same gnawing, feral hunger that lived in their bellies.
"Inola, come inside. It's getting late."
Her stomach twisted, empty as a gutted corpse. The scraps she'd begged, stolen, or bartered for went to Inola. The villagers whispered that she was to blame for the famine. The witch. The witch who lives where the damned are left to rot. The witch who buries the dead with her own hands. The witch who whelped a monster.
She had seen the way they looked at him... at his too-bright golden eyes, at the way the shadows clung to his small, malnourished frame.
Mr. Baker had been the last to show her kindness, though even that had curdled into fear. "I can't be associated with you anymore, Eugene," he'd hissed, his jowls trembling. "The villagers… it's like they've gone mad. They stare at me with too-hungry eyes." A nervous laugh. "Might use you as an excuse to eat me alive."
But he had promised her bread.
Now, as the sun and moon hung together in the sky, an ill omen, her grandmother would have said... she limped toward Saint Hollow, her walking stick tapping against the cracked earth. The forest whispered around her, the trees leaning in as if to listen. The wind carried the scent of rotting earth as Eugene hobbled toward the village, her walking stick sinking into the soft, lifeless soil. The setting sun bled across the horizon, painting the world in hues of fire and bile.
Just get the bread and go back, she told herself. Inola needs to eat.
The village was silent. Too Quiet.
Only the creak of swaying shutters and the occasional whisper that slithered through the air like a serpent through grass. The flicker of lanterns, their light greasy and thin. She moved like a shadow, her cloak pulled tight, but the air was wrong. Thick. Metallic.
Mr. Baker's house loomed ahead, its windows dark.
No singing from Mr. Baker and laughter from his eight year old daughter. No barking from Mr. Baker's old hound. Just silence.
Something is wrong.
The backyard was a slaughterhouse.
It was slick with something dark. The lantern's glow trembled as she lifted it, revealing the butchered remains of Baker's old hound, its throat torn open, its belly hollowed out. The dog lay in a pool of blackened blood. Flies clustered in its glazed eyes. Eugene's breath hitched. No. No, he wouldn't...
Then she heard it.
The wet, rhythmic sound came from the kitchen.
Of a saw biting through meat.
She crept closer, her breath shallow. The curtain over the window was parted just enough to see inside.
Through the kitchen window, the candlelight flickered over a nightmare. A man... Garrett, the village butcher... stood over the table, his arms slick to the elbow. The carcass before him on the table was not a deer. Not a pig.
Flabby cheeks. Chubby fingers.
It was Mr. Baker.
His head lolled on the counter, mouth gaping, tongue swollen and purple. His flabby cheeks were peeled back from his skull in a grotesque grin. His fingers... those short, chubby fingers that had once handed her crusts of bread, lay scattered like gristle.
"This fatty'll last us weeks," Garrett chuckled.
Eugene's scream tore through the night.
The window slammed open. Frank's face (Mr. Baker's bestfriend)... pale, grinning appeared, his lips smeared red. His eyes widened, his teeth too sharp in the moonlight, leered out at her. "Well, well. The witch delivers herself."
She scrambled back, her walking stick clattering to the ground, her hands slipping in the dog's blood. Frank lunged, his fingers tangling in her hair, wrenching her head back. Pain exploded through her jaw as his fist connected.
"We were coming for you next," he hissed, his breath rancid with the stench of raw meat.
The villagers poured into the yard, their faces gaunt, their eyes gleaming with something feral.
"Burn her!"
"Burn the witch!" The chant rose from the street, voices raw with hunger.
Hands seized her, rough, desperate... dragging her toward the square. The pyre was already waiting.
Eugene thrashed, her voice raw.
"You monsters! You ate him! You ate your own!"
Frank backhanded her, the blow splitting her lip.
"One must die so the rest may live," he snarled.
Eugene's vision swam as the men dragged her through the dirt, her useless leg scraping against the ground. The villagers' torches flickered like hellfire in the night, their faces gaunt, their eyes hollow... but not with hunger anymore. No, now they burned with something far worse. Madness.
Frank threw her onto the rough planks of the village square, where a stake had already been driven deep into the earth. Bundles of dry straw and kindling were piled at its base, waiting. The air reeked of iron and sweat, of something rotting beneath the frenzy.
"You took our crops," a woman hissed, her lips cracked, her fingers twitching like a starving rat's claws.
"You cursed the land," another spat, his teeth blackened.
Eugene coughed, blood dribbling down her chin. "You fools… You think I did this? Look at yourselves! Look at what you've become!"
Frank backhanded her again. "Shut your devil's mouth."
They bound her to the stake with coarse rope, the fibers biting into her flesh. The crowd swelled, their chants rising to a fever pitch.
"Burn the witch! Burn the witch!"
A child... no older than Inola... stepped forward, clutching a torch too big for her tiny hands. Her eyes were empty. Dead. She thrust the flame into the straw.
Fire erupted at Eugene's feet.
The heat was unbearable, the smoke choking. She screamed, not from the pain, but from the horror of it all. These were her neighbors. The people she had once shared bread with before she left to the lone cottage in the forest. Now, they watched her burn with glee.
The torch touched the kindling.
Flames roared to life, And as the flames licked at her skin, as the smoke filled her lungs Eugene's last thought was not of herself.
It was of Inola.
...and the black butterfly he had cradled so gently in his hands.
Alone in the dark.
Waiting for her to come home.
And the thing in the woods that had been whispering his name.
The flames had consumed her.
Eugene's body twisted in the pyre, her screams long since faded into the crackling roar of the fire. The villagers watched, their hollow eyes reflecting the inferno, their lips curled in something between triumph and hunger. The scent of burning flesh filled the air... thick, greasy, wrong.
Frank wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, grinning. "That's that, then. Devil's gone."
The crowd murmured in agreement.
Then...
A sound.
A child's voice.
"Mommy?"
The villagers turned.
At the edge of the square, half-shrouded in smoke, stood Inola.
His golden eyes gleamed in the firelight. His tattered clothes hung loose on his frail frame. In his hands, the black butterfly twitched, its wings fluttering unnaturally, as if it were breathing.
The villagers froze.
The boy took a step forward.
Then another.
His bare feet made no sound against the earth.
Frank swallowed hard. "Boy… you shouldn't be here."
Inola tilted his head. His smile stretched. Too wide.
"You hurt Mommy."
The air turned cold.
The fire dimmed, as if something had sucked the heat from it. The villagers shivered, their breath frosting in the sudden chill.
Then...
Inola's skin began to move.
It rippled, like something beneath was pressing against it. His fingers twitched, then lengthened, nails blackening into hooked claws. His jaw unhinged with a wet crack, his teeth sharpening into needle points.
The butterfly in his hands melted, its wings dissolving into a black, oily liquid that dripped between his fingers... then crawled up his arms, seeping into his flesh.
The villagers stumbled back.
Frank's voice trembled. "W-What in God's name..."
Inola's body convulsed.
His spine arched, his ribs splitting his skin as something pushed its way out. A second mouth tore open across his throat, lined with jagged teeth. His golden eyes rolled back, replaced by pits of swirling darkness.
And then...
He screamed.
Not a child's cry.
Not a human sound at all.
It was the shriek of something old, something that had been waiting in the dark, in the soil, in the rot beneath the village.
The ground shook.
Shadows twisted, peeling away from the trees, from the houses, from the villagers themselves... stretching toward Inola like worshippers to a god.
Frank turned to run.
Too late.
Inola moved.
One moment he was there. The next, his clawed fingers were buried in Frank's chest, ripping through flesh and bone like wet parchment. Frank gasped, his eyes bulging as Inola pulled...
...and his ribs came with him.
The villagers screamed.
Inola laughed.
The shadows surged.
They wrapped around the fleeing villagers like serpents, dragging them back. Limbs snapped. Bodies burst. The air filled with the wet, tearing sounds of flesh being peeled apart.
And Inola fed.
His form shifted, growing, unfolding, until he was no longer a boy at all... but a thing of jagged bone and dripping shadow, mouths splitting open across its writhing mass.
The last villager fell.
Silence.
Then...
A whisper.
"Mommy."
The creature that was once Inola turned toward the smoldering pyre.
Eugene's charred remains slumped against the stake.
The thing whimpered.
It reached for her with too many hands, its claws gently brushing her blackened face.
Then it wailed... a sound so full of grief and hunger that the trees themselves bent away.
The wind howled.
The earth shuddered.
And the thing that was Inola crawled into the forest, dragging its mother's corpse behind it.
The next morning, the crops grew.
Fat.
Ripe.
Blood-red.
And in the abandoned cottage on the hill, something waited.
Hungry.
Waiting.
Watching.