Abomination. Gary Whitta
after empty cell. Though the flame burned brightly, it stubbornly refused to reveal anything more than a few feet ahead. It should have cast at least a dim light down the tunnel’s entire length. Here, it shrank to an isolated sliver of light in a sea of unyielding black.
Wulfric began to hear something. A scratching sound in the dark up ahead. Snorting and snarling. Some kind of animal. It sounded to him sickly, or wounded, but not in any way that he had ever heard, and he had tended many an animal on his farm. He shivered as his suspicion grew that whatever was being held down here fell into that last dreaded category—the thing beyond his imagining.
The guard came to a halt. “Go no farther,” he warned. Before them a line had been daubed across the floor in woad, and a few feet beyond, the iron bars of the final cell at the hallway’s end could be dimly seen in the flickering dark. This cell looked different from the others. The lower half of the bars were ridden with rust and a strange, greenish corrosion; they were pitted and scarred as though something had been chewing at them, and some were still dripping with a wet, viscous saliva.
Something behind those bars was moving, something primal and ugly, scratching and snorting around the floor of the cell. Whatever it was, it lived low to the ground. But Wulfric caught only brief, partial glimpses of it in the dim light. For a moment, he thought he could discern a clawed foot, like that of an oversized cat. But then the torchlight reflected a glimmer of reptilian scale. Was his mind playing tricks with him, down here in the darkness?
The guard used his torch to light another that hung from the wall. He waited for its flame to bloom fully and then tossed it low against the foot of the iron bars. Wulfric jolted back in alarm as the creature within let out a shriek, amplified by the close stone walls, that set the hairs along his arms and neck on end. The creature retreated from the flames, into a dark corner of its cell, but then it slowly came forward again, into the light, and Wulfric at last saw the full nature of it.
It moved across the rotten straw lining the cell floor on six squat, lizard-like legs, each webbed foot bearing several large, horned claws. Its body was scaled but shaped like a potbellied hog, and it had the snout and tusks of one, too, although its lidless eyes were distinctly reptilian, bright red with slitted yellow irises. The unnameable thing approached the fallen torch, sniffing at the burning embers through the bars. And then the thing reached through and snatched the torch with its mouth, wrestling with it for a moment as it tried to pull it through the bars. Finally it dropped the torch, then grabbed it again by its tapered end, pulling it through the bars longwise. Wulfric watched in morbid fascination as the beast opened its jaws wide, revealing rows of slavering, needle-like fangs, bit down on the torch with a loud crunch, then shredded it to splinters in a frenzy before swallowing it down, flames and all.
The guardsman took a step back, ushering Alfred and Wulfric with a raised arm as he did so. A moment later, after swallowing the last of the torch, the beast belched out a hot burst of bright orange flame. In the brief eruption of light, Wulfric saw that much of the cell’s walls had been charred black by fire.
Against his better judgment, Wulfric found himself moving closer, unthinkingly stepping across the line on the floor. Alarmed, the guard reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder, but it was too late. The beast caught sight of Wulfric and went wild. Slavering like a rabid dog, it threw itself hard against the bars, screeching as it clawed at the air. As the guard tried to pull Wulfric back, an impossibly long tongue uncoiled from the creature’s mouth and snapped around Wulfric’s wrist. He cried out and tried to pull free, but the beast was stronger. It scuttled backward, toward the rear of the cell, dragging Wulfric with it.
Alfred grabbed Wulfric’s free arm and dug in his heels. But even their combined strength was not enough. As the two of them were dragged closer to the beast, the guard drew his sword and began hacking frantically at its tongue, severing it only on the third strike. Finally free, Wulfric and Alfred fell backward onto the floor. The wounded beast rolled onto its back as well, howling and kicking its feet hysterically.
Moving quickly, the guard drew a dagger from his belt and slid the blade under the piece of severed tongue that was still constricted around Wulfric’s wrist. With a hard jerk upward, he cut the tongue free, and it fell to the floor, still writhing like a fish flapping on a riverbank. Alfred stood ready with a skin of water, spilling it onto Wulfric’s wrist the moment the thing was removed. His flesh sizzled, wisps of smoke rising, and Wulfric saw a bright red welt encircling his wrist where the tongue had taken hold of him. The top layer of skin had been burned away by the beast’s saliva.
“It spits acid!” Alfred barked. “That is why we go no farther.”
Wulfric was still vaguely in shock. He took the water skin from Alfred and drank deeply. He looked back at the cell. The creature seemed to have calmed. It now lay slumped on its belly at the front of the cell, its head skewed sideways, and chewed lazily on the bars like a dog with a juicy bone. Wulfric watched as its wounded, bleeding tongue licked against the iron, covering it in its corrosive slobber.
“I ordered all the others destroyed,” Alfred explained. “This one, despite my reluctance, I kept. For who would believe the story on words alone?”
“What in God’s name is it?” Wulfric asked, still breathless.
“There is one thing of which I am certain,” said Alfred grimly. “Whatever it is, it was not created in God’s name.”
FIVE
Alfred told Wulfric the whole story as they left the dungeon and headed back toward the Great Hall. Along the way, they visited Alfred’s personal physician, who ministered to Wulfric’s wrist. It could have been much worse, the doctor observed as he applied a salve to the wound and wrapped it; there had been one man who had lost a hand to that beast the same way and another who had not returned from his visit at all. Visits to the dungeon were strictly regulated now, and none were made without the King’s permission.
By the time they arrived at the Great Hall, Wulfric had heard all. Of how Aethelred had discovered the arcane scrolls and devised a plan to use them, as a way to bolster England against future Danish threats without endangering English lives. How the plan had sounded so promising at the time. How Aethelred had been given license to conduct his experiments, in hopes of perfecting a way to control the transformations and the abominable creations that resulted. How Alfred had finally shuttered the whole endeavor when he learned the full, sickening truth of where Aethelred’s obsession had led him. And of how Aethelred, using the dark skills he had mastered, changed the very guards assigned to imprison him into monsters who then aided his escape from the tower.
Wulfric’s head was swimming long after Alfred had finished recounting the tale. He sat in silence at the heavy oak table at the center of the hall and stared into the distance as his mind attempted to reconcile it all. He had been raised to believe in the existence of things beyond his understanding, forces invisible to him and far greater than himself. But to actually see such things with one’s own eyes was another matter entirely. No known scientific or natural phenomenon could account for what he had witnessed down in that dungeon or for the tale the King had told him afterward. And he agreed with Alfred—no God that he held to would ever create something so diabolical, so wicked, so utterly without virtue. Something so . . . hellish.
“This is Chiswick,” announced Alfred, snapping Wulfric from his thoughts. Wulfric stood to greet the man and, as always, found himself not knowing quite where to look as the King’s counselor bowed to him. Chiswick was bull-necked, bald-headed, and stocky, an unremarkable-looking man save for the ugly scar that ran diagonally across his face from just beneath his left eye and across the bridge of his nose and both lips, ending just beneath the right side of his chin. Wulfric had seen enough war wounds to recognize this as one, probably inflicted by a Danish longsword years ago. Though the scar was unsettling to many, Wulfric found himself reassured by it. He gave more weight to the words of men who had learned the price of war firsthand. They tended to speak truth more plainly.
“It is my great honor, Sir Wulfric,” said Chiswick, as he completed his bow. “The King has regaled me with the tales of your heroism many a time.”
“It’s a fine line