Nuclear Elves

Part 1:

Chef: “Precious little meat left on these bones, eh lads?”

Marley: “Snow got ‘im.”

Chef: “Never seen beautiful snowflakes leave a body’s rags all bitten.”

Marley: “Torn up in the woods, most like.”

Dogbeater: “Will you two lower our voice?!”

Chef: “What gives, love?”

Dogbeater: “It’s bad form, shouting midst the headstones.”

Chef: “Why?”

Dogbeater: “Let the dead’s eyes stay shut.”

Marley: “If they was gonna wake, they’d surely wake when our spade cracked that lid. I do say, this is a FINE coat we’re wearing now, lads. Real wool! Maybe the next will have a nice pair of shoes on ‘im…”

Chef: “Or maybe our legs will trip on another precious vagrant? Maybe one that’s a little more fresh.”

Dogbeater: “Quiet!”

Marley: “I told you, if the shovel didn’t wake…”

Dogbeater: “It ain’t the regular cadavers which concerns me, brother ghoul. It’s the ones under the stones at the hilltop.”

Marley: “The leaden tombs?”

Dogbeater: “We wander too near for my liking.”

Marley: “Superstitious filth. How’d you conjure that in our brains?”

Dogbeater: “Let’s just keep to the lichyard edge, brother ghoul. Plenty of graves-”

Chef: “Quiet, my loves! Methinks our voice doth draw some mutts…”

Yipping came the high voices of small hounds on the wind. The ghoul - the eater of flesh, male or female - bared his matte yellow teeth. He stood from where he had crouched over rags and bones half buried in snow. The ghoul squinted about. His eyes (also yellow, but with a poisonous gleam) darted one way, then another. The ghoul could not place the direction of the yipping - the sound seemed to come from all across the cemetery.

In one voice, Dogbeater’s, the ghoul said, “A whole pack of mutts, it sounds like.”

From a sheath at his side the ghoul pulled a long-handled hewer. The edge was dull and rusty. The ghoul sucked his teeth. In another voice, louder and higher pitched, the voice of Chef, the same ghoul said, “I bet they’re what got to this chap. They gnawed him, I wager.”

Dogbeater’s voice swore. “Bloody vermin.”

“Maybe they’re precious scavengers - vulture mutts. Heh, heh. Maybe they’re precious fleshy themselves.”

A third voice, Marley’s phlegmatic one, growled from the flesh eater’s throat. “Can’t risk that, Chef. You know they’ve prob’ly got the doom in ‘em.”

Dogbeater, now in control, kicked the frosted rags and bones at their feet, and swung the rusty hewer in the air. “Bloody, tainted vermin! Kill the lot!”

A new chorus of yips gamboled around the wind-worn headstones of the lichyard. The dogs sounded louder. The ghoul crunched two steps through the snow to glance around one tall and square grave marker. Then he turned the other way, squinting at a wall of dead briars. The yipping, along with shuffling and snarling, seemed to close from all sides.

The ghoul pointed up at a hill ringed by a cast iron fence. Marley’s voice growled, “Too many. Let’s take shelter.”

The ghoul took two steps down the row of graves towards the hill. Then he stopped short. Dogbeater shook their head viciously. He said, “No! We’re not going near those leaden markers.”

The ghoul rolled his poisonous yellow eyes.

Snow crunched suddenly behind the ghoul. He spun. One mutt - a malnourished terrier with matted brown fur - came yelping at the ghoul. Spittle flew from its frosted thin lips. Dogbeater took instinctive control. He swung the hewer, hard. The rusted blade chunked against the yapping dog’s head just above its right eyebrow. The eye popped out from the socket. The tongue lapped out from between the rimy lips, and blood oozed from the dog’s cracked temple as it veered with the blow. Its body skidded in the frozen grass and snow. It started flopping about in death throes, but Dogbeater lunged over it. He slammed the rusted hewer again and again. It cracked on the dying dog’s skull. It shattered the dying dog’s ribs. It severed the dead dog’s foreleg.

The yipping in the distance, meanwhile, had reached an insane, louder pitch. Breaking the cemetery silence in the grey day, the voices of the dogs were not distinct from each other, but instead made a communal, primitive din. It was like an echo from man’s ancient past; many, many seasons of the cylinder ago; a sound descended from the dogs’ ancestors, from wolves who called to the stars beyond the glass that girts the sky, wolves that hungered. A time when the ancestors of the ghoul had huddled in caves by a bright yellow flame, and watched with wide eyes the black night.

No matter that these were yipping mutts and not old wolves, for they could still bite, could still kill and eat. No matter that the ghoul had a hewer instead of a stone club, for the once-sharp weapon was rusted and dull. No matter that the sky was not dark with night, for it lay grey enough under the snow clouds. No matter these differences - the mutts made the ghoul shiver.

The ghoul could tell the direction of the pack now. The headstones and grave markers ran for miles and miles in this part of The Restless Waste, but the lumpish hills over which they ran constrained the ghoul’s sight to a small burial tract. The poisonous yellow eyes caught the movement of the pack within this tract. The dogs were close.

They came from a ‘forest’ - a little copse among the corpses, skeleton trees straddling a hill, with gnarled roots uprooting the untended graves over which they cast their creaky shadows. The pack swarmed from these shadows. Three-odd dozen black shapes flitted swiftly down the snowy white hill, like rats scurrying down a set of marble temple stairs. The black shapes jittered between the headstones. One shape would smack another, rebound, stagger behind a headstone, and emerge from the other side, like the specter emerging from its final rest. All the dogs cavorted in this way, all of them skittering drunkenly down the slope. All of them charging toward the ghoul. All of them baying. All of them hungry.

The ghoul hissed, swung the hewer once into the emaciated terrier corpse with a wet crunch, tugged at his own sleeve. Chef whined, “Too many! Shelter, my loves.”

The ghoul turned toward the fenced hill, away from the direction of the pack. Again he stopped after two steps. His shoulders rolled, his left eye bulged, his right twitched. Dogbeater said, “No! I won’t-”

They heard the rattle of dog nails on a headstone. The pack was close. Marley cut in, “Chef’s right. Too many. I’d rather lay with a corpse than get mangled.”

The ghoul still did not move. The pack drew closer. Dogbeater said, “We were a dog crusader! Killing mutts is our supper, lads.”

“Not so many,” Marley countered. The ghoul’s face twisted to argue, but Marley went on, “We needn’t lay with the elves, Beatey. I spy a mausoleum in this endless lichfield. Let’s hole up in it, wait for the hounds to pass.”

The mutt pack had reached the base of the overgrown hill. The ghoul, turning, now spied the flash of bared teeth among several of the hairy, scrawny, scrabbling shadows. The ghoul hesitated no longer. his feet kicked up plumes of cold snow as he ran betwixt the graves. The dogs had his scent and his sight now. The two leading dogs took up a carnal barking that was soon picked up by the rest of the pack. The dogs were faster. The headstones dropped by the ghoul in twos and threes, but the pack raced past four and five at a second. The stones seemed to watch silently, the blurred and wind-worn names of the ancient markers marking now the clamor and passage of the raggedly-dressed ghoul pursued by the howling dogs.

The ghoul scrambled through the graves - too slowly. The frosting, stinking breath of the dogs seemed to permeate the air. He felt the barking of the leader at his heels. He felt the nip of teeth against a pantleg. With a sudden fury Dogbeater turned their body around and swung the hewer with abandon. The short spear missed the snapping grey muzzle of the sheepdog which had bit him. The dog retreated a step, but the rest were near.

The ghoul dived a hand into the front pocket of his ragged black coat. Chef screamed, “Not our supper!” but it was too late. Marley took a linen-wrapped chunk of suspicious meat and hurled it to the side. The pack saw the motion, and a second later caught the rancid, rotting smell of the flesh. They bayed as one and veered toward the meat.

The ghoul had not stopped to watch. He ran on. The barking, yipping, mad cacophony of dogs dwindled a little as he put row after row of headstones between them. The ghoul leapt a short stone fence. He crouched, rubbed his pants and coat with snow, trying to mask his scent. He crept along the broken wall for a hundred arms. He reached the end of the wall, at which point lay a large mausoleum of bluish stone. The pediment at the top was faded. The ghoul could just make out some ancient battle between two naked men with hammers and a half-skeleton, half-metal man with a whip and shield.

The ghoul did not ponder the carving long. He crept up to the iron gate at the front of the sepulcher. The gate was locked, but the lock was rusted. The ghoul smashed it with a fist-sized stone he found in the snow nearby, crept inside, and jammed the stone against the gate to hold it shut.

Mausoleum stillness settled around the ghoul. The air felt like icewater in his throat. Four squat windows were embedded in the stone near the floor. The windows were broken, jagged glass lay unshining under dust on the floor. The windows and the grated door let in scanty light and snow, as did a hole in the decaying ceiling.

There were three long, pale sarcophagi in the space. Above each was a face of fading paint. Like the man with the whip on the exterior pediment, each face was not fleshy, but a mix of skull and metal.

The ghoul shivered. “Looks like elves in here too,” said Dogbeater. “Let’s go back-”

Both the ghoul and the silence were interrupted by a furious barking and rattling from behind. The ghoul spun.

Two dogs - two mangy, flea-riddled, worm-infested, bloody-eyed mutts - bayed just beyond the gate. They pushed against the door. The wedged stone rattled. The ghoul jumped forward and slammed the door back into place, at the same time lashing through the bars with his hewer. “Back, you frothers,” the ghoul screamed in Dogbeater’s voice. “Back, before I skin you too!”

The two mutts retreated. One’s snout drizzled snot and blood from the rusty hewer’s lash. The ghoul, meanwhile, wedged the stone more firmly under the door. Marley said, “Need something to tie it with.” The poisonous yellow eyes scanned the room, then settled on one of the sarcophagi. “Check the box. Might be cloth on ‘em what’s not too sere.”

“Maybe they’ve still got precious marrow,” added Chef.

“Don’t be stupid. They’re elves - golani. Their bones are-”

But again the ghoul was interrupted by further barking, this time from the windows. A muzzle stuck itself through the opening of jagged glass in one of the four. It tore its eye on the jagged glass still in the frame, yelped, and withdrew. But more barking came from the other windows, and another head plunged in, followed by a body as one the skinny dogs tried to scurry through.

The ghoul snarled and leapt from the door. Snowflakes fell gently on his black wool coat as he passed under the hole in the roof. The ghoul un-gently smacked the wriggling dog. The hewer cracked against its skull, and the emaciated mutt fell instantly limp, half-in half-out of the broken window.

“Quick, love,” said Chef eagerly. “Drag that meat inside.”

But there was no time. Another dog began crawling in at the window on the opposite wall. Dogbeater, in full control of their arms and legs, sprang at that on. Silence had abandoned the sepulcher by then. The yipping was closer than ever, dogs at every window now, dogs trying to crawl through, dogs rattling at the iron bars of the door. The wedged stone scraped on the floor. It held; for the moment. The ghoul yelled in all three voices at once. He rushed madly about the space, hacking with his hewer, trying to shut one of his ears against his shoulder, trying to drown out the barking with his screams.

Then, through his open ear, the ghoul heard a deeper call…

The yipping at the doors slackened. The mutts sulked back, whimpering, from the windows. The ghoul strained his ears. He heard a second, deep, resonant boom. The rest of the dogs seemed to pause. The ghoul could see their frothing maws waiting at the windows, the breath heaving clouds in and out of their ribbed lungs. But still, they held back. A third boom resounded. The ghoul swung his wild, poisonous eyes toward the barred door.

The three smaller mutts standing at the barrier - two smaller vicious shorthairs and a shaggy collie with a missing foreleg - slunk back.

From around the corner, the ghoul watched a black-haired beast emerge.

It was a wolfhound, though with more ‘wolf’ than ‘hound’ about it to the ghoul’s eye. It was thin still, but not quite as thin as the other half-starved dogs. Its hairy face was poxy, with bright pink scars, and one white eye. The other eye was black as the bottom of a well, yet with a purplish gleam to it like the gloaming.

This wolfdog’s head hung low to the ground as it stalked around the corner. It kept its purple eye fixed upon the ghoul from the moment it rounded the corner, while its white eye stared uncannily down its long muzzle.

The beast strolled up to the iron bars. It sniffed the white stone of the floor. Its lips curled back, showing a huge set of fangs as yellow as the ghoul’s, but shinier. Instead of a bark, it gave a sepulchral growl. The other three dogs by the door shied farther back. The barking at the low windows ceased. The other dogs around the mausoleum quivered in eager anticipation as black-haired wolfdog approached the bars.

“Don’t,” Marley’s voice warned in a hiss between clenched teeth. The ghoul swung his hewer in the still air.

The great dog, still watching with its one eye, stalked surprisingly backward. The ghoul did not dare move - something seemed wrong. This mutt seemed smarter.

One-eye raised its head from the ground. It rose from its lower crouch to stand tall between two faded headstones. It tilted its head up and back. Its grey muzzle opened only a little for the front canines. Toward the grey sky, over the silent day, like a monster descended from some jagged mountain cleft, the wolfdog howled.

A choral shriek of all that was wild cracked the silence of the tombs. All as one the pack lunged. Glass crunched as the dogs wriggled through the jagged windows. The black wolfdog charged the iron door. He shot his snapping, pressured jaw between the bars and shook the cast iron with his mighty shoulders. The wedged stone ground against the floor.

The ghoul shrieked. He arced a wild swing at the wolfdog’s stuck head. Missed. Stumbled back. A mutt snapped at the ghoul’s ankle; the hewer blade cracked its skull and loosed the jaws. Panicking, the ghoul climbed atop a sarcophagus.

Three dogs were already inside, their thin fur crisscrossed by cuts from the broken windows. The skinny hounds ran up to the ghoul and began nipping his feet. He stomped, and spat, and swung the jagged short spear, but the pack was closing and gathering. More dogs circled around and streamed through the door. The wolfdog jerked its head free and came around the bars as well.

The ghoul’s eyes, terror-wide, shone suddenly with a crafty gleam. He had noticed, somehow, little white flakes sticking to his black wool coat. The ghoul glanced up. The hole in the rotten ceiling was just above. He leapt and grabbed the collapsing edge of the wall. The old ceramic shingles fell and cracked away at his touch, but the ghoul managed both to keep his hold and to keep his hewer clutched in a thumb.

Beneath the ghoul the dogs brayed madly. The nearest ones jumped and snapped at the scraping feet. The ghoul tried to scrabble quickly up the wall, but one lanky pointer-dog jumped and snapped just in time to latch on to his rotten, ‘secondhand’ boot. The ghoul screamed curses. He slipped an inch lower. He tried to shift his elbow up so that he could use his hewer hand to slash at the dog, but the ghoul saw the wolfdog in the mix. The monster bullied its way through the rest of the pack, snapping at its comrades, eager for a taste of ghoul flesh. Instead of swinging his hewer, the ghoul only screamed and kicked madly. Another dog jumped and came down with a scrap of the ghoul’s trousers. The wolfdog reached the sarcophagus. It squatted back on its hind legs and prepared to lunge.

Just in time the ghoul’s boot came loose. The mutt fell away with the boot in its teeth. It shook the thin leather footwear viciously. The ghoul heaved himself up just as the black wolfdog lunged. Its teeth snapped like a bear trap over empty air where the ghoul’s leg had been.

Hauling himself fully up onto the ledge formed by the broken roof over the brick wall, with the dogs braying below, the ghoul perched tentatively. He gave a ragged scream as he glanced back down, triumph and terror echoing across the lichyard.

Part 2:

When night at last swallowed the sprawling headstones and crypts in its deep black stomach, the dogs ceased to bark. The ghoul knew, however, that they were still there, in the darkness, in the silence. From his perch on the broken tile roof, he could see their eyes shining. And among the pairs of hungry, shiny motes shifting restlessly below, the ghoul kept track of a special mote that moved on its own - a singular purple eye without a partner, always watching up at the ghoul.

“Should’ve… grabbed… that vagrant’s rags…” said the voice of Marley through chattering yellow teeth. “Our coat… just soaks… the flakes.”

“Chuck another… shingle…” suggested Dogbeater.

“Won’t work… No stars… to aim by… Besides… the big one won’t run…”

The ghoul pulled his thin coat tighter. He rubbed his arms with his hands and thumped his hollow chest, trying to warm himself. Below, the dogs stirred. Then they settled, watching. Waiting.

The ghoul locked glares with the singular mote among the crowd of pairs. “Betting his meat would taste precious,” said Chef. His voice was whispery and sadistic.

“Didn’t I warn us: have some sense?” countered Marley. “They’re mutts o’ the Restless Waste. Could be doom carriers.”

“Didn’t look like it,” Chef mumbled. The ghoul’s yellow eyes drooped in a sulk.

“Don’t matter. Remember, Captain Yearning Girl said it could be - what was her word…”

“Asymmetric?” suggested Dogbeater.

“That bitch knew her dog killin’.”

“We’re so precious famished,” said Chef. The ghoul drooled. The drool froze on his lip. “We should never have deserted the comp-”

The ghoul stopped speaking as his teeth chattered. The clacking echoed in the dark among the stones. The ghoul swayed on his precarious wall perch. The pack watched, all eyes fixed. The ghoul noticed, and fixed his numb fingers around the broken tiles to steady himself.

“Lads,” said Marley, addressing his other halves, “we can’t keep up this way. We’re too exposed to this biting wind. Our eyes are slipping shut.”

“We’ll tilt, fall, and be mongrel chow,” agreed Dogbeater. “Or freeze, fall, and wind up the same.”

“Bad way for a Dog Crusader to go.”

“We already tried laying on the roof,” said Chef with a low whimper. “It’ll break under us.”

Marley said, “We know, We know. But, brother, we can’t well stay here.”

The cold wind blew in the dark, and the snow floated down in the dark, and the oddly numbered, gleaming eyes of the dogs watched in the dark - all while the shivering, sniveling, famished flesh eater argued with himself, and squinted back at the black silence, seeking salvation.

The ghoul’s yellow eyes narrowed suddenly - a cunning look unseen in the dark. He glanced over a shoulder, at the darkened silhouette of a cemetery hill. Marley’s voice said, “Lads, we have a thought.”

“Unthink it!” barked Dogbeater. The ghoul swayed. The hounds below stirred, and a few took to barking as well. They settled when they saw the ghoul kept his perch.

“Is it worth expirin’,” Marley reasoned, “over a superstition?”

The ghoul said nothing. Below, some of the eyes shifted one way, then another, the mutts pacing back and forth along the mausoleum wall.

The ghoul looked again over his shoulder to the south. The black, cloudy night was not yet so thick that the ghoul was left completely blind. In the distance he saw the darkly-pale, snow-covered, cold mound of a cemetery hill. And atop the hill? The five tall grave markers, blacker than any of the others under day or night.

Marley’s voice said, “We’d be out of this wind. Safe too. The hill’s fence-girt.”

“I told you, unthink it,” said Dogbeater.

“Beatey, it’s just dead, lead-sealed bodies.”

“Dry golani corpses,” grumbled Chef.

“Right! Parched harmless. And we can stick to the bottom of the hill. Leave ‘em to rest up top.”

The ghoul ground his teeth and dug his fingers into the eave. Dogbeater said, “Haven’t you noticed there’s the pack betwixt us and your proposed paradise?”

“I’m not thinking we climb down, brother.” Marley’s voice shivered with his body, but still held a sly, convincing, wheedling sneer in his pitch.

“What? Jump the fence? Have we lost our head?”

“It’s not far.”

“It is far!”

“Not to the tree, brother, the tree! Hardly three arms ‘twixt the edge of this building coffin n’ that branch we saw before the slumber came.”

Another wind stirred the stalking silence of the vast lichyard. Snow flurried invisibly in the night. The ghoul swayed on his ledge, while the dogs circled and stalked, just like coonhounds after treeing some chicken-killing varmint.

“Loves,” said Chef, addressing himself, “we can’t go another minute on this ledge. We’ll topple into those precious frothers.”

“Let’s go for the tree,” Marley agreed.

Dogbeater groaned. “It’s too dark to see the branches!” But the ghoul’s other parts took control. Shivering, weak, clutching the ledge tight, the squatting ghoul turned slowly around to face the hill with the five mounds. The bleak skeleton of a large tree was only dimly visible, close to the edge of the mausoleum roof, on the other side of the hill’s iron fence. Carefully, the ghoul took one step toward the tree. He took another.

Ceramic tiles slid and shattered as the ghoul’s worn boot stepped along the eave.

The eyes below moved suddenly as one in conjunction with a renewed uproar of barking.

Against the deeper black below the broken mausoleum roof stood faintly ahead in the night.

Wind pressed against the ghoul’s face and shingles dropped faster under his boot.

The ghoul’s skinny legs launched him into cold, empty, windy air.

Dogs’ teeth snapped to the rhythm of their barks in the pause.

Leafless branches twined their cutting fingers with the ghouls grasping ones.

The ghouls arms flailed, snapping twigs, scraping bark.

Air and tree limbs tore at the ghoul’s face.

A ripping, a scream - cast iron fence tore cloth and flesh.

A thud against frozen earth.

The ghoul wailed in agony; the dogs chorused. The ghoul writhed and thumped the cold snowy ground; the dogs threw themselves against the iron fence. The ghoul curled his body and wrapped numb fingers around the fast-wetting flesh of one leg; the dogs snapped their teeth inches from the other.

With the last of his senses, realizing that he had reached the inside of the fence, the ghoul rolled away from the snapping muzzles. His sheathed hewer twisted oddly on his belt. The ghoul rolled over, still half-delirious from the consuming fire in his leg. He scrambled up the hill (blindly nearer those five lead graves), leaving a trail of bloody snow unseen in the dark.

Behind, the dogs slammed the fence. Again and again. The metal shook. The pack raged, seethed, howled after their escaping quarry. Some leapt - their eyes soaring up and dropping down in the dark - while others dug at the foundations. Hunger drove the ferals. They smelled blood.

The ghoul scrambled farther. Suddenly he felt a sharp clamp upon his bootless foot. One of the mutts had him. How?! New pain flicked without sight in his good leg. The ghoul thrashed and yelled. He kicked, but even contracting sent an ache in his shredded leg.

The ghoul felt himself slide back toward the fence. He rolled his other side into the thin snow. He got a hand around the wooden shaft of his hewer. He yanked the rusty weapon loose, then hacked at the moving black shape clamped around his foot.

The ghoul felt a satisfying, soft, crunching thud in the handle, though also a new flash of pain from the dog-fang-clamp. The biting dog’s snarl ceased instantly. The other dogs picked up the snarl, rattling the fence. The ghoul hacked a second time, and a third. Two more pain spikes followed, but suddenly the ghoul felt the clamp loosen. Faster now the ghoul propelled himself away from the snapping fence on his elbows and arms.

The ghoul took a heavy breath, then screamed at the barking, rattling, biting darkness.

The pack screamed back.

The disturbance of screams in the lichyard subsided. The growling retreated. One or two feral dogs still lunged against the cast iron fence, rattling the bars, but the majority reverted to shifting, hungry shadows with gleaming eyes against the deeper black canvas of the night.

The ghoul ceased his own screams and curses. He breathed. He took stock. He could almost taste the deep gouge in his leg, feeling the pain cloying up his throat. Still, the ghoul had reason. He felt lumps of wood through his coat, under his ribs. Some branches had fallen when the ghoul crashed through the tree.

Working mostly by touch the ghoul managed to sweep a small patch of dead grass clear of snow. He piled wood in the space - small kindling on the bottom, larger sticks above. He tried ignoring the growling dogs, but could not stop his yellow eyes from darting up every so often and catching the shifting ones.

From an inner pocket the ghoul took out a flint-and-steel striker; part of his dog crusader’s kit. He showered the kindling in tiny sparks. The wood took flame. Soon the little flame grew larger. A crackling, wondrously warm orange light bloomed in isolation, at the base of the hill, in that lonely sector of the cemetery.

For a moment the ghoul sat with his pallid, calloused hands before the flame. He straightened his legs, the position that seemed least painful.

Wiping frozen pain-tears from his eyes and frozen snot from his nose, the ghoul took a burning branch from the fire. He held the branch aloft.

The yellow eyes could not help looking at the legs first. The ghoul shuddered. Dogbeater said, “Vermin fucking bloody fucking rat mongrel! We’ll never walk again…”

The ghoul raised the torch higher.

Four or so arms down the slope of the hill stood the trunk of the tree, and beside it the vertical spears of the iron fence. The ghoul squinted, and saw that one of the posts had a scrap of trouser cloth glued to its sharp point by frozen blood.

Beyond the fence was the pale backside of the marble mausoleum.

Between the mausoleum and the fence, the pack paced.

Two dozen half-starved mutts, at least, stalked back and forth, fangs continuously bared, sometimes growling, sometimes biting at the fence metal. The fence held, however, and the ghoul seemed safe. The biggest of the lot - the wolflike monster with black fur - sat among its pacing crowd. Perfectly still. It stared at the ghoul with an uncanny intelligence in its onyx and ivory eyes.

One of the canids did not move, but lay with its body against the fence bars. This was the one that had bit the ghoul’s foot - the one the ghoul had hacked with his hewer. This mutt remained still because it no longer had a head to drive its shrunken legs and emaciated body. The torso of the hacked dog ended at the neck in a pulpy tangle of muscle and bone. The open-mouthed, tongue-lolled, severed head lay inside the fence.

The ghoul stared at the head, then at the dogs, then bared his own teeth in a grin.

Chef’s voice said, “Isn’t that pre-ci-ous.”

The ghoul lunged down the hill, ignoring the pain in his leg. He grabbed at the severed dog head. The dogs beyond the fence yelped and charged. All except the great dog. That one sat, black and massive in the night, watching.

The combined weight of the pack shook the iron bars. They held, even so, and the ghoul crawled backwards. He pulled his gape-faced prize with him by a pointed ear.

In Marley’s voice the ghoul muttered, “What are you thinkin’, Chefey? Remember the doom…”

“Bother the doom,” snapped the high-pitched voice of chef. “You see any mutations on this flesh?”

“Captain warned us-”

“Bother the captain!” The ghoul pulled tufts of bloody, wiry brown fur from around the ragged edge of the severed neck. He brought the pulpy flesh towards his mouth.

The voices of Dogbeater and Marley said at once, “Chef!”

Marley’s voice alone added, “Cook it first at least. Fire purifies.”

The ghoul skewered the dog’s head on one of the broken branches from the tree. The blood sizzled as it dripped into the fire. Meanwhile the ghoul took a small roll of linen from his pocket. He bent forward over his torn leg. Ugly pain tears washed rivulets of grime from the ghoul’s face as he folded his loose, gory chunk of leg flesh back into place and bound it in the cloth. He also wrapped his dog-bitten foot.

While the ghoul cooked his grizzly meal and tended his wounds, he kept turning and looking over his shoulder. The small fire lit only a little space, and the night was thick. Even so the ghoul saw the silhouettes of the five lead graves at the top. Each time he glanced at the five, the ghoul would shudder, quickly averting his gaze and returning to his task.

The dogs watched. They had stopped charging the cast iron fence. All now prowled, their staring eyes and bared teeth sliding back and forth behind the bars. All of them - except for the great black one. It just sat there, beyond the fence. Its two enormous front limbs were before it in almost-military stiffness. Its blind eye stared blankly straight ahead, while its shiny, purple-black one never once left the ghoul.

The ghoul met the great dog’s eye. His own narrowed. Dogbeater said, “Can’t get us now, can you mongrel?”

Marley said, “Don’t antagonate,” but Dogbeater’s voice only growled in response.

The ghoul heard the sizzle of cooked meat. He saw that the neck of the dog head, at least, was brown and tender-looking. The ghoul grabbed the dog’s head by its ears. He stared at the monster hound through the fence; the monster hound stared back.

The ghoul brought the neck up to his face and squinted at the meat. Marley’s voice, uncertain, said, “First Crusaders’ rule is never to touch tainted-”

But the ghoul’s expression flipped to an eager, salivating one. Chef said, “It’s cooked now, love. It’s precious pure now. Let’s tuck in.”

The expression flipped again. The yellow eyes of the ghoul hardened, darting back to the monster dog. Dogbeater added, “Yes, let’s.”

The ghoul brought the cooked, ragged neck of the severed shorthair head to his face. Keeping eyes on the wolfdog, he opened his mouth, bit down on the neck with his yellow teeth, and tore away a chunk of meat. He chewed. He swallowed. The wolfdog watched. The ghoul worked his way through the cooked, stringy meat of the dog’s neck, biting only the cooked parts, holding it up by the singed ears.

The black hound stood. The black hound’s purple eye glittered. The black hound opened its jaw. For a long, breathing, stretching moment, the beast released a visible vapor of warm breath between its open teeth.

Then the black hound roared. Its jaw split suddenly wide, impossibly wide. The flesh at the corners of its mouth tore apart, the lower jaw split like two pincer mandibles. Four long tongues exploded from its throat.

The ghoul gaped. Then each of the ghoul’s voices screamed in turn. “It is a precious doomed dog!” “Bloody shapechanger-” “-one of those ‘Endless Form Most Horrible’-s!” The black hound’s head continued to open. The flesh peeled back like flower petals. Misplaced skull-intestines writhed in the open air.

The other hounds danced like pagans. One dog howled at the hidden stars. One gnashed its teeth on the iron. The black not-hound walked slowly up to the bars. It wrapped its skull tentacles around the metal. The ghoul voices spoke again. “It’s tainted meat, my loves!” “The beast knew.” “Quick! Swallow a finger.”

The ghoul dropped the half-gnawed, half-cooked head of a dog in the snow beside the fire. He brought a hand to his mouth and shoved his index down his throat, wincing, trying to force himself to vomit. Meanwhile the doomed black hound began to backpedal. It pulled the bars with its fleshy, intestinal tentacles. The ghoul heard the bars groan. He opened his eyes. He goggled as, by the light of the flame, he saw the fence bars begin to bend.

The ghoul’s hand fell from his mouth. “It can’t-” Marley began to say but stopped short. There was a loud snap, and the ghoul saw one of the iron spikes break off from the crossbeam at the top of the fence. The doomed dog - the Endless Form Most Horrible - dug its feet into the cold earth and pried the metal down. The other cavorting, frothing animals crowded up to the expanding gap.

The ghoul yelled. He began to hyperventilate. In terror he grabbed the hewer where it lay nearby in the snow. He grabbed one larger burning branch from the fire as well. He tried to stand, using the hewer as a crutch, but his gnawed foot and torn calf wouldn’t support his weight. He began scrabbling backwards up the hill, away from the fence.

The ghoul had crawled a dozen arms backwards, never taking his eyes from the fence and the still-burning campfire, when he saw a shadow pass by the flame. One of the smaller pups had squeezed through the gap already. The animal scrambled up the slope. It snapped its teeth at the ghoul’s foot. The ghoul lashed his hewer. The weapon missed, but the thin beagle retreated. The ghoul continued to crawl backward. The beagle growled, waiting for the rest of the pack.

Despite the flash of pain at every dragging movement over the hard earth and thin snow, the ghoul reached the summit of the fenced hill. He felt a smoother surface under his palm. Taking a better grip of the burning branch, the ghoul raised his light and turned. He saw that he had reached the edge of the ring of five lead markers.

A second metal snap rang through the night. The ghoul glanced back to the fire just in time to see a massive shadow pass before the flame. A dozen smaller shades followed through the gap.

Crying in fear, forgetting superstition, the ghoul crawled backwards into the ring of five. He felt the grass underneath the snow give way to hard, flat stone at this summit. The air was colder too, at the top of the hill; probably because of the blowing wind. Somehow the ghoul thought it seemed brighter in the ring - as if he stood in the midst of a temple.

The ghoul saw the shapes closing the distance swiftly up the hill. He crawled to the nearest marker. The lead was black and shiny by the torchlight, three meters high and menhir-shaped. Using the monument and his hewer the ghoul managed to prop himself onto his feet.

The cold touch of the stone and the lead, and the pain of getting to his feet, had distracted the ghoul. He suddenly realized that stillness had swept once more over the night, the blowing hilltop breeze the only disturber of the lichyard. The ghoul looked up and around.

By the strangely lighted quality of the circle, the ghoul spied the mutts at the edge of the ring. They stood perfectly still and made not a sound. Their black shapes formed an outer circle around the inner ring of standing monuments. Dogbeater’s voice, faltering, said, “Heh. S-scared are you, you rats? Afraid of some dead elves?”

A shadow exploded into motion beside the ghoul’s stone. The doomed black hound kicked snow up with its paws. It lunged. Tentacles reached from the flower-petal head. The ghoul snarled. Set his weight against the lead. Lifted his hewer. Stabbed.

The tentacles wrapped the ghoul’s arms - but, the hewer struck true. In one swift motion the blade plunged into the doomed dog’s wriggling, open cranium. The dog slammed the ghoul with its weight, the ghoul fell. He scrabbled, trying to get out from beneath the body, wriggling free. He stabbed, but only once more. The purple had vanished, the gleam become matte, in the one black eye of the doomed wolfhound. The ghoul had killed it with a single blow. Its blood soaked the snow and wetted the stonework beneath.

“Hah.” “Hah.” “Hah.” The ghoul, in all his different voices, chuckled to himself.

In Dogbeater’s voice alone he added, “Didn’t know you were up against a crusader, did you? Stupid dog.” The ghoul kicked the tainted dog’s corpse. “Misjudged your prey, didn’t you?”

The outer blackness churned. The shades surged into the ring of lead monuments. The emaciated dogs of all shapes and sizes snapped at the ghoul. Their teeth caught his limbs and tore his flesh. The ghoul snarled, as feral a sound as any dog ever made, and hacked with abandon, left and right from the ground. The dogs were all around, eyes flashing, teeth biting. The ghoul beat and thrashed, desperate to live - if only to live!

The ghoul never saw the sudden shift on the face of that nearest lead tomb. Surrounded by braying and snarls, he never heard the hiss of releasing air nor the grating sound as half of that monument slid forward and to the right. The ghoul hadn’t seen the blood of the slain black dog as it ran to the base of this monument. Harried, the ghoul heeded not the revealed cavity within the leaden tomb.

The dogs suddenly drew back. The ghoul kept swinging. He stopped though when his rusted hewer banged against open stone. Looking one way, then another, the ghoul saw the dogs whimpering, some bloodied by his hewer; backpedaling, their tails between their legs. Elation shone briefly on the sadist’s face.

Then he heard a sound at his back. The ghoul turned.

A huge creature stood over the ghoul - a metal-strut-and-bone man, wearing leather breeches, sandals over his skeletal feet, and an open animal-skin vest. The ghoul saw that this creature had emerged from the cavity in the lead monument. He saw a second, smaller, dark cavity in the visible ribcage of the creature, within which the trapped skeleton of a hummingbird made no happy song.

Names for this creature dribbled from the ghoul’s mouth.

“Golani,” said Marley.

“Deathless,” said Chef.

“Bloody Nuclear Elf,” said Dogbeater.

The deathless creature reached down. It grasped the weak and skinny ghoul by his shoulder. With one bone-and-metal hand, it lifted him from the ground. The creature seemed to contemplate the ghoul face to face for a moment, meeting the ghoul’s putrid, bloodshot, yellow eyes with its empty sockets.

The ghoul opened his mouth to say something else. Before he could, the creature grabbed the ghouls head with its other hand, clamping the ghoul’s jaw. The ghoul tried to scream, but could not.

Then - from behind the fixedly grinning skull’s teeth, grating and hissing yet comprehensible - there came to the ghoul’s ears a voice not his own:

“You reek, human.”