Horror Stories by Ron Ripley

Author:Ron Ripley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ScareStreet.com
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Sin Eater

By David Longhorn

He lived in a hut on a bleak hillside, and was despised.

Nobody knew his name, or how old he was, or where he even came from. If he'd ever had family in the neighborhood, they were either long gone or kept quiet about their link to the outcast. When people met him on the roads or in the fields they turned aside, some saying a prayer, others mouthing a charm passed down from an older tradition. Children sometimes taunted him, the braver ones even threw stones, but only till an adult came and drove them away. Everyone knew it was bad luck to lay eyes on the nameless man, to spend even the briefest time within sight of him.

The Sin-Eater was one of many boogeymen invoked by weary parents to keep fractious children quiet. He just happened to be real.

He had only one function, and when he was needed, the people of the district did not need to seek him out. Some uncanny instinct told the Sin-Eater when he could enter a home where a wake was being held. It was his role to eat a simple meal from a wooden bowl placed on the chest of the corpse, and to take upon himself all the sins of any dead man, woman, or child. It was believed this would speed the passage of the deceased through purgatory to paradise. Once he had finished his meal, the Sin-Eater would return to his hovel, and the ritual would be complete.

The bowl, especially crafted for the occasion, was always burned afterwards.

"He is the last of his kind," mused the parish priest, with a sad shake of the head. He often regretted the passing of the old ways, although they clashed with his own beliefs. More than that, though, he wished he could in some way improve the lot of the outcast on the hill, the meanest of his flock. As things stood, he did what little he could.

It was customary for the parish priest to leave food and drink for the Sin-Eater by the churchyard gate on the first day of the month. The Reverend Monckton stood, now, awaiting the nameless man, feeling it is his duty to make sure that the provisions were not taken by just any passing vagrant. A thin rain fell, the last remnant of storms over the Welsh hills to the west.

"I really think you are indulging these people's superstitions," grumbled the squire, who had come to chat with his old friend and disliked all concessions to the old ways.

Sir John Prescott was a forward-thinking man, an advocate of science, education, and progress. He had been instrumental in bringing the railway and the telegraph to his remote corner of Herefordshire. Not surprisingly, Sir John felt sin-eating, like witchcraft and fortune-telling, was a worthless relic of the Dark Ages. This was the Year of Our Lord 1889, a time of enlightenment. With the British Empire engaged in spreading civilization to the four corners of the globe, no decent Victorian gentleman could overlook the backwardness of the English peasantry.

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