A Season of Monstrous Conceptions by Lina Rather

Author:Lina Rather
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

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In the early morning some two weeks after Sarah’s association with Wren began, she woke early to go for cheese and bread for the week. Usually a morning walk without Mrs. June cleared her head as well as a draught of the cleanest, crispest spring water; today in the weak morning light, she was only cold and annoyed at the damp. Spring was far enough away to be little more than a dream. And spring, of course, would be only a few weeks of fragile bliss until the summer came and with it the heat and the stinking rot of the waste left in the streets and washed by the cartful into the stagnant, swelling Thames. Back in Cookham, they at least had open fields and woods to get away from the stink of humanity. She missed so few things about that place, but the open space was one of them. Here you could not escape from the crush of so many bodies stacked upon one another.

She was so engrossed in thinking about the creek she played in as a child, with its muddy eddies and sweet, clean water, that she almost did not notice the shadow stalking her.

When she did notice, there was no ignoring it. She caught it because its shape was so wrong. Not the blocky shape of a cart or building, or the expected animals (cattle, horses, dogs). This was large and furred and it moved with a sloughing, rolling motion, like the way the gelatin from boiled bones trembled after it set. She stopped, and the strange shadow became indeed just the outline of a cart piled high with hay. What strange pictures one’s mind could make when left alone with its follies.

Still—her hands were damp with sweat suddenly. She tucked them inside her cloak and decided it was best to turn back. She left the water and the fishermen hawking the first of this season’s catches, and cut down an alley overshadowed with crisscrossing clotheslines hung with moldering washing.

It was much darker in the alley than she had thought. But still, it was morning and this was a decent part of the city and though she was a woman alone, she had never looked an easy target.

Then, she smelled it. Sour. Bitter. Not rot—oil? Char?

Tallow rendering. That was the smell. But she didn’t know of a chandler down this way.

She tripped on someone’s discarded table scraps, and when she picked herself up, she saw it.

At first, all she knew was a hulking mass of black fur that shivered and shimmied like strands of kelp. She stuffed her fist in her mouth to muffle a scream, because the only thing she could think was that she had finally gone mad. The fur shuddered, and what must be arms emerged—a wrong number of arms, and all of them waving desperately at her. She staggered back, and slipped on those same traitorous potato peels, and fell backward into the muck.

The beast approached. The air around it seemed wrong; it made Sarah’s skin prickle and her teeth hurt down into their roots.

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