Alice Borchardt by The Silver Wolf

Author:The Silver Wolf
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-01-30T00:34:15+00:00

SAD, SO SAD. THE NAKED PAIN IN THE WORDLESS voice was so terrible it jolted Regeane out of sleep. She woke thinking Elfgifa. She knew Elfgifa had been bedded down in the dormitory room with the orphans in the nuns’ care. Had she perhaps been awakened by some nightmare and was she even now crying for the comfort of Regeane’s arms?

Regeane turned on the cot and stared into the darkness open-eyed. The room was illuminated now only by starlight glowing through the window slit. The candle had burned down. The flame extinguished in a cascade of hard wax.

But the wolf knew the hour as she knew the hours of the passing day by the changing slant of the moving sun and the night by scent and sound, the position of the wheeling stars. She matched them against the template engraved since before the beginning of time on her mind and heart. It was close to dawn, that darkest hour when even the four winds seem to feel the weight of night and a breathless hush precedes the coming of dawn. The room was freezing and Regeane could see the cloud of mist created by her breath on the air.

She listened and found that even the wolf’s ears heard nothing. Only a dream, she thought. I had a nightmare of my own.

In the profound darkness and silence something sighed. No, Regeane thought, remembering the face in the mirror. No. But she knew however much she wanted to deny it, the dead called to her from beyond the world.

Another sigh—this one louder followed by low laughter, brittle and cruel that seemed to mock her fear. And shadows began to gather themselves and grow darker near the table and the mirror.

It’s coming, she thought in terror, coming to visit me. Suddenly, the air around her grew colder. The shadows were an ugly phosphorescent mist. Mist the color of a corpse candle.

She gasped, choked, and tried not to breathe as an almost intolerable stench of decay pervaded the room. Regeane threw the covers aside and leaped to her feet.

The cold was more than cold, a freezing shock wave that seemed to chill her to the bone and then she remembered she couldn’t run. She was locked in with the thing. She retreated toward the door. The awful stench nearly gagging her. She would scream, she decided. Hammer on the wooden panels. Surely someone would come.

At the thought, another sort of terror overcame her. What would the good ladies think of her? But the thing was taking shape now and what she could see a ghastly blasphemy of the human form.

Regeane shoved her shoulders and back against the door. She found she was afraid to turn her back on it, afraid she would throw herself against the bolts and bars in vain and in a few seconds she would feel a hand on her shoulder. She would turn, she knew—she would turn and look into the face of God alone knew what horror.

No, it was better to confront it, no matter what grisly shape it might assume.

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