I stumble.

I can hear voices in the wall, and they scare me. But I cannot help myself, and I place my ear to the rough and listen.

One of the voices becomes more clear than others, and as I focus on it, my mind begins to swim. Pictures appear, and I quietly revere them.

Each morning, bells tolled, and the train of able bodies stamped out into the wet dawn to do the work of collecting corpses. They were all alike in their garb. Thick leathers, stiff gloves and boots stuffed with wool, their faces wrapped tightly in oily linens to keep out the stench and sickness. In teams of two, they entered the homes and huts and pulled warped and shrunken forms from their beds and into the road. Then they would load the dead high onto carts like animal furs until the wheels could hardly turn and pushed through the mud to reach the burning house.

Some days there was no bell, and those were days of muted and thankful celebration. And hollow. A day without bells was always followed by a day with.

The fires inside the burning house never went out, not even on the days without a bell. The fire needed to be hot to dispose of the corpses immediately. Left out to rot in the meager light of day, they would only spread their curse further. The burning would stave off the full force, and so the fires were always alive and roaring, the greasy smoke billowing lazily out of the soot-baked chimney poking out of the roof. Once the bodies had been consumed by the flame, the ash had to be blessed and buried. Shovels scraped the embers from the hot stone beneath the benches where the bodies had rested, and some men said the old words and made the ancient gestures while brooms swept clear the smaller remains. Then trenches were dug into the dirt behind the burning house and filled with the cooling ash and covered with soil. Each afternoon before supper, the rhythm of effort carried through the village as spades tore at the earth to make room for the next day’s yield. If there was supper. Many nights there was not.

This was an open hell and constant nightmare. Two wicked years since the First blight. Swiftly and wretched, it struck, lingering to twist and wrench the defiant spirits out of the gasping mouths of the common. Dying rattles and coughs were the symphony of the days, and the wails of the widows and children filled the night.

Then it came again. The village became a forlorn and cloistered place. The vigorous and feeble alike cut down trees from the surrounding forest. They gathered the trunks together, erecting a thick wall to keep out strangers and the unwanted. The long-ago happy settlement was transformed by the presence of the blight. The dewey earth with healthy, growing soil where robust crop broke from the ground in season and was plucked from its root by strong hands withered. The hands soon became too weak to rip the most fragile blades of weed from the plant bed. So the rich black dirt turned gray, and the quivering lips of the folk were left pinched and their stomachs empty. Their bent and blistered fingers stabbing hungrily into the parched, dry ground, searching the barren womb for a sign of life and finding nothing but loam.

By the Third strike of the sickness, there were hardly any living behind the walls, but it took whom it chose anyway and left the others to sort out its leavings. No word passed in the village that did not grow from inside it to begin with, not since shortly after the Second. The world was a lonely place, and the folk inside the walls were exiles from all but their own misery. After the Third was finished, the blight seemed to leave, though the people were never sure. They could sense its persistence in the quiet of the wild, a loitering gloom that hung like a shroud. Animals had fled the blights, and few remained, the people desperate for sustenance. Rabbit and snake were hunted easily enough, but when the game grew more scarce, the rabbits were kept to breed. Though now, those that survived to adulthood were pathetic and atrophied. But they fed the people as did the slugs and mice and voles that were snared. A fox had trapped itself in one of the vacant huts that had not yet been disassembled for kindling for the burning house. Some of the men rattled rods and cudgels against the walls until it emerged, scared, before the men broke its body against the road with their tools and their fists. It was cleaned and cooked, the men’s bellies swollen, and their faces shiny with grease as they smiled and swatted each other on the back. Then the morning came, and the bells spoke, and the men went back to work, moving the dead to the burning house. And again.

On a day, one week after the fox was eaten, the men-- in their heavy leathers and wraps, went to their duties, and some of the women dug and swept. The children did not play, the younger ones dug and cleaned, and the older ones helped with the train. Then at midday, a stranger approached the gates.

.

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch his wife or his daughter. But they were not there. They had not been there since the First. In his bleary and half-remembered dreams, they would lie beside him with their soft breath lifting clouds of warm steam to float in the cold air. His hand would touch blank earth, and he would remember their deaths again with a black dagger of regret. He’d rouse and unroll himself from his tattered swaddling, and begin his day before the sun crested, dragging his bony knees across the dead leaves as he crouched and laced his fingers for the old words. He would beg for success, and he would beg to not slip into maudlin and then move away from his camp to piss. If there was food, he would eat some of it, pulling it from the cloth he kept stuffed into his pack and build a small fire and cook it while drinking brackish water he’d gleaned from a stream or river. Then he would kick dirt into the fire to put it out and prepare to hunt. All days marched along like predictable soldiers of sadness. His bow slung over his shoulder, he slipped down from his resting spot between the rocks holding the hilltop and down into the ravine. Small hoof marks were dotting the wet. Perhaps some deer were still left. A deer, even a little one, would be welcome in the village and would sit long in their exhausted bellies. He limped along the ravine for some time following the tracks, finding no other signs of animals. Branches clawed at his beard and hair, and he swatted them away and followed the tracks further as they darted across the ravine and into the thicker brush.

He heard a sound and notched an arrow. A crow fluttered from a branch, and he tracked it along its flight, and his hands moved in response. He loosed the shaft into the crow, and it fell to the ground with a soft thump. He hobbled to where it landed and picked it up. It was small, and many of its feathers were missing already. It may have been sick. He plucked the arrow from the bird and stuffed it into the pack hanging from his waist next to his knife. He sighed and found a downed trunk to rest and stretch his leg. He pulled a boot off, exposing the angry flesh of his ankle. It was blue and brown and purple, telltale marks of a sprain. He touched the skin and felt the dull sting travel up his leg. He stuffed more cloth into his boot and rearranged the existing cushion to soften his movement so he could continue and slipped his foot back in carefully.

The morning was misty, and his skin felt like fish scales. He blew hot air into his hands and rubbed them together. His eye found the legs of the crow poking from the opening in his pack, and he shook his head and hoped. He could not return to the village with just a crow. He was called the Deerstalker and not the Crowkiller. It would be a disappointment to many and certain death to some if his offerings were so small.

He stood again and carried on into the wood.

.

The Deerstalker arrived at the walls just after sundown, and dropped the deer carcass from his shoulders to the ground. Lanterns were burning inside the village and the sound of merriment carried down to him. His hackles raised, he could see the smoke from chimneys and smell something that was not the burning house. It smelled like cooking food. What was the cause for clamor? He lifted the deer again and hobbled forward to the entrance, left open partially, a thin crack of merry light slipping through the pause in the two doors. Then he entered. No one greeted him, and the grounds around him were bare and abandoned. He dropped the deer again, tucking it near a cart without wheels, turning a tarp over the dead animal to hide it. Then he limped up the road toward the raised happy voices of the people.

He found them in the old stone pub, all of them, calling and pounding and whirling and dancing. No one noticed as he entered, the celebration too strong. Everyone ate though the Deerstalker did not know where the food had been procured. They crashed overflowing steins against each other and took long pulls from them, wiping their beards and cheeks from sustenance and tears all at once. They chattered like they had found the fervor of the old words and sang and laughed. And in the center of it all sat a stranger.

The stranger was still and sitting in a chair by the hearth like a throne. His arms splayed on the rests of the chair, his left hand holding a stein and his right flaccid and relaxed. His eyes held the Deerstalker, and he was the only one who noticed him enter at all. They were burning green things set into the bruised sockets of one who doesn’t sleep, and his ugly face with hard lines in the skin near the nose and on the brow held no emotion. Next to the stranger sat one of the village boys, naked but for a small cloth wrapped around his waist and genitals and staring into the fire soundlessly. His skin was yellow and marked, his head a painting of scabs and scratches, and the Deerstalker knew he’d been sick. Occasionally one of the villagers would sidle up to the boy and clout him on the back or neck or rub his scarred and balding pate gleefully as though he were some ancient and glorious god of the wood. The boy did not react to any of this, but kept his eyes searching the fire, his back bent, and his shoulders rolled forward like a prowling wildcat, the bones of his spine visible under his sickly skin. The Deerstalker could not remember the boy’s name but knew both of his parents had perished in the blight.

The Deerstalker could see the storeroom door was open, and some of the men entered and returned to the gathering with rotten root vegetables. They bit into them with their worn and broken teeth, swallowing great mouthfuls of fetid. The storeroom was sealed during the Second blight when the pub’s owner had been found in there harboring sickness, and hadn’t been opened since.

He had expired in silence, his eyes intumesced into bloated red orbs, the crawl of the blight’s markings slung around his body and neck, like the very hands of death had choked the life out of him. The Deerstalker and the cook had found him like this, and they’d made sure to drag the body into the road, and then to the burning house. The food was compromised and rather than set fire to it and ignite the ire and ill of the village they chose to seal the food away. But now it was open again in celebration and the Deerstalker felt his stomach heave as he watched his neighbors devour their festering feast.

He moved to tear the food from their hands or stop them from swallowing. Still, they batted him away and kept to their game of dance and observance, some of the women exposing their breasts and some of the men clamoring to them. The Deerstalker turned to the stranger again, who had not moved his gaze from him and felt the burn of shame in this den of fever. Then the cook grasped the scruff of his thick linen shirt, and his eyes were alive with tears and hope and other madness.

“Look, Deerstalker,” he said and brought his hand up to regard the stranger and the boy, “he has brought the child back.”

The Deerstalker pulled the cook’s hand from his clothing and let his palm find the rounded handle of the skinning knife hanging from his waist as the cook stuttered with spittle and excitement.

“It’s truth,” he said, “he plucked the boy from death like ripened fruit, and there he sits warming himself by the fire. This is truly the end of the blight. The man said so.”

The cook whirled on his heel and found his wife, where she sit at a bench with her remaining leg dangling beneath her. He gathered her up in a frail bundle and pressed her to his chest, his tears milky and tumbling down in rivulets.

The stranger’s eyes still burned into the Deerstalker, and he felt the rise of bile reach his throat. He forced himself away from the feeling and the pub and ran into the road and unburdened himself in the mud. He wiped the strings of saliva and mucus from his face and blinked back tears. He was not sure how this had happened, but the stranger in the pub felt wrong to behold, the anathema he’d revived as well. He found that he had dropped his pack, and cursed knowing that he’d have to return to the pub to retrieve it.

He entered again, and the assembly was drawn in a caricature of awe as the crow the Deerstalker had felled lay in the strangers' lap. It quaked suddenly, drawing a gasp from the enraptured assembly. Another quiver and the crow was alive then, as in a blink, it sat and peered around calmly as the fever took over the people. He could see his pack at the stranger’s feet and pushed his way through the crowd to get to it, and they paid him no mind. As he snatched it from the dirt of the floor, his eyes found the strangers once more. They burned into the Deerstalker with an angry plume, and fear filled his heart and whispers his mind.

It felt as though the whole of the room was squeezing him and tightening around his neck and shoulders and face as the stranger’s gaze snared him. Not knowing else to do, he fled out into the night.

I back away from the images and the voice inside the walls.

What story does this tell? What purpose did this montage serve save to confuse me. What world was this that lay bare just moments ago, fading quickly?

Then, more scratches in the passage beyond, and I limp forward.