Two warnings: One, I am not good at writing fiction, so don’t expect much. Two, this is weird stuff. Read at your own peril. Probably not fit for public consumption.

It all began with one of the farmers’ girls in the schoolyard.

Later, it was learned that it began even earlier, with dead chickens outside of coops, the shepherd’s family dog found beaten to death, a vagrant’s body in a ditch on the north side of town, deceased of a cause indiscernible by the county doctor. The carpenter’s sister claimed to know exactly when it began, which she claimed was proof that she was attuned to matters of the occult. But it was generally agreed, even after the incident, that good and honorable ladies and gentlemen didn’t believe in matters of the occult (hinting, of course, that the carpenter’s sister, who lived two counties over anyway, was excluded from such company), and mutilated poultry was just as likely to be caused by a hungry fox as by whatever mysterious superstition had sprung up around the incident at hand.

And so it began with the girl the schoolyard, who came in from the outdoors one day crying and running to the teacher about something that had happened outside. When the teacher, who was a lovely young lady betrothed to the banker’s handsome son, found the girl, she held her in her arms and asked gently what had happened. The young girl was almost inconsolable, and the teacher soon discovered a mark, a cut on her arm that was bleeding. The teacher went to get bandages and water while the girl sobbed and breathed, and eventually the farmer’s daughter calmed to quiet, even while she shivered, though it was still only early Fall.

The teacher cleaned the wound and it took a strange shape as the blood was wiped away. Two lines of cuts, in what seemed the shape of teeth. Were you bitten? the teacher asked. The girl nodded, finally sharing some notion of what had taken place, and the teacher bent down to embrace her, desperate to calm her panic. It was the boy, the girl whispered. The widow’s son. He’s bad, she said.

It was off to the schoolmistress then. The teacher sent the girl home with an aide, and as class had let out for the day, sent the rest of the children straight home. The widow’s son had not returned from recess, which didn’t surprise the teacher — he had probably fled home for fear of punishment. The teacher wasn’t sure what type of punishment would be enacted, but the schoolmistress would know.

Well that won’t do, said the schoolmistress when she’d heard what the girl had said. The widow’s family certainly hadn’t had the most blessed of times — the husband had died in the mines years ago, back when there was still ore worth finding in the town. But since then, the widow had lived on the hill, feeding herself and her son as best she could. She hadn’t been seen in the town for a while, but the townsfolk left her to herself — she’d been through enough.

Still, they couldn’t have the son causing problems at school. The teacher shared that the boy had been a problem since the summer — he’d never attacked anyone, of course, but he’s been quieter than usual, reserved and darker. He’d wandered in the woods nearly every day during recess, and had even come from there occasionally in the mornings, and returned there in the evenings. The teacher had meant to talk to him, but every time she’d approached him, some other issue had come up, or her attention had been distracted, and she found herself drawn away from the boy to the other students. But nothing like this had ever happened. She’d have known.

The schoolmistress agreed, and it was decided that the two of them would travel up to the widow’s house that afternoon, to speak to the woman, and see what could be done about the boy. The teacher cleaned her classroom, the schoolmistress finished her work, and the two set out into the autumn afternoon as the orange sun moved through the crisp colored leaves toward the horizon.

The schoolmistress, being a lady of advanced age and a certain education, didn’t divulge many of the details of the visit — she said much of what happen could not and should not be spoken aloud. But later that night, she told the mayor and the priest and the teacher’s beloved what she could. As the two approached the house, there had been a smell about, an unidentifiable odor mixing with the brisk sea breeze. The women knocked on the door of the house, and called to the widow inside, saying that they were from the school, and had come to discuss the boy. He was not in trouble, they said, not yet. But they must talk. The schoolmistress remembered the teacher feeling uneasy, and remarking so.

Then, finally, the door of the widow’s house opened. And there, said the schoolmistress, after a pause to collect herself from fighting back emotion, was where the clear memories stopped, and only images returned. The schoolmistress remembered that the door had opened, and then the boy had appeared, and then she’d been sudden filled with a great yawning loneliness, and that the world had lots its color, and that skeletal bony hands grabbed at her hands and feet, pulling her parts away from her into a great sea of darkness. She was there, the teacher was there — the teacher was screaming or saying something — but she was alone, she felt. She began to cry. She was alone, and in all directions there was nothing, not even a presence in the void around her.

The priest, the mayor, and the banker’s son could say nothing. None of them understood what had happened. The boy was there for sure?

The schoolmistress again wiped her eyes, collected herself, tried to regain the tone she’s always prided herself on. He was.

And the teacher, said the banker’s son. In God’s name, what did he do to her face? Whatever had happened at the house, the teacher had not come away from it well. Horrible gashes had been cut into her face, drooling with blood. She was alive, the banker’s son had been told by the farmer’s wife, who tended to the once-beautiful woman’s wound. She would live and be fine. But the teacher herself was just as inconsolable as the student she’d tended to earlier in the day — she cried and cried even while her face was bandaged up. The banker’s son was told she’d calm down, she’d be all right, but even as he interrogated the schoolmistress, he could still hear his betrothed’s cries.

The boy did nothing to the teacher, she said. Of this she was certain.

But he did, said the banker’s son. She’s destroyed. He must have attacked her, just as he did the little girl. He’ll pay for what he’s done. The priest stayed quiet — clearly, the young man was angry, and he felt it better to let the anger out now than keep it bottled up, only to pop open at some future time. The mayor said nothing.

Oh no, said the schoolmistress. The boy did nothing. He did something — he stood there, at the door. But he never touched the teacher. He just stood there, and we felt… She trailed off.

But she’s injured, said the mayor suddenly. What has he done?

Don’t you understand, said the schoolmistress, a woman who’d dealt with countless treacherous children, again on the verge of breaking down. She did it to herself.

At this, she dissolved into emotion, and the banker’s son, priest, and mayor could learn no more. They sent her and the teacher home with the farmer’s wife, and conferred together on what was to be done.

The banker’s son was full of fire, and demanded that action be taken immediately. Something had happened at that house, the widow or her son was responsible, and not a night could go by without their intervention. One or both must be apprehended as soon as possible, and he was ready to volunteer for the task. The mayor, who was a stout, slightly older man dressed in fine but disheveled clothing, agreed that action had to be taken, but the county constable was based miles inland — it would be hours before a message could reach him, and a few more after that before he could arrive and determine the legal course of action. The law is clear, retorted the banker’s son. Blood has been shed. Contact the constable if you must, but he would be going to the widow’s house that very night, with or without help.

It was the priest, older than both other men and dressed in the simple clerical collar, who stood and thought. The boy, full of vengeance as he might be, was right. If the widow and her son had committed some crime, they would likely not be in the house come morning, and they might never know the truth of what had happened. But the mayor was correct as well — this was a woman and her son, a widow and her young boy. These were not hardened criminals — neither one had ever caused trouble in the town before. The priest had even seen the woman in church occasionally, sitting by herself in the back pews during the service, faintly bowing her head and leaving before the service ended, before anyone but the preacher noticed her. The priest looked out over the darkened town, as sun had long set by the time the three men discussed the issue. He looked in the direction of the widow’s house, and himself shivered.

Something was certainly wrong up there, and they had to make it right as soon as they could.

We can go, he finally said, interrupting the banker’s son arguing with the portly mayor. But we’ll need help.

The men collected their things, dressed in their coats. The mayor summoned a messenger, sent word to the constable of what had happened, and asked him to come to the town by the sea as quickly as he could. And they made their way to the house of the butcher.

The butcher was a large man, with a large bald head and wide shoulders that reminded any who looked at him of the bulls he dissected for the town every day. His muscles were strong and tight, hardened from years of rending flesh and bone and turning it into sustenance. He’d been a soldier, once upon a time, fighting in one of the old wars against the savages that used to inhabit the land, but now he was older and retired, and worked only to deliver meats and cheeses to the ladies of the town. He was a quiet but firm man — his history had given him a wisdom that the priest felt the group would value when they went to visit the house. The banker’s son was still glowing with fury like an ashen log in an hours old fire, the mayor wouldn’t be much help if trouble arose, and the priest was old, his mind much sharper than his body. What the group needed was strength, and the butcher had plenty.

They gave him only the plain details when he opened the door to answer their knock — there had been a problem at the widow’s house, and they needed to go and solve it. It was late, but the butcher was a practical and honorable man. In just a matter of minutes, he appeared on his doorstep, dressed in his old soldier’s coat. I don’t know what it is I could do for you, he said plainly. But if you need my help, I will go.

This was the party that climbed the hill to the widow’s house, then. The banker’s son led the way, determined to bring justice to his future wife. The mayor followed behind, cautious of what might happen before the constable arrived. The priest walked behind, slowly but determinedly, trying to decipher just what kind of evil might face them in the widow’s house. And the butcher walked beside him, the largest of the four, his steps just as sure as the cleaver he wielded every day in the shop.

The smell was terrible as they approached the house — the banker’s son winced in reaction, but the butcher recognized it immediately: Death, he said. The mayor stepped up to the door and announced the party. They were there about the schoolmistress and the teacher, he said diplomatically. There was no trouble, he continued, and at this the banker’s son bristled, as the priest patted his shoulder to calm him, that could not be dealt with peacefully. Please, he said, open the door.

Nothing happened. The butcher seemed to be listening to the air around them, but at the priest’s query, he shook his head and said nothing. Enough, said the banker’s son. We’re going in. He ran to the door and opened it, stepped inside.

The smell did get worse when the door opened, and when the group entered the room, they could immediately see why. The widow’s body sat in the main room of the small cottage, her corpse likely dead a month. The mayor immediately became sick, as the banker’s son grabbed for his handkerchief and covered his mouth. The priest surveyed the rest of the room — dishes were left out uncleaned, but the cupboards were empty — the boy had been living here on his own.

Suddenly, the butcher grabbed the priest’s arm, and the party turned to look at the bedroom door. The boy, the widow’s son, appeared in it. And this too, the priest later said, was when memories began to mix with pure images, ghastly visions that could not be explained. The boy appeared distraught, and spoke, but the priest remembered hearing not the voice of a young boy, but of something much older and darker, speaking in a language the priest could not understand. The priest remembered seeing things — bodies burning in a fire, an image of Christ, bloodied on the cross and crying, and other unspeakable things whose origins the priest could not bring himself to say.

The party also tumbled into chaos. The mayor fell to his knees in prostration, as the priest remembered, and then started to beat the wooden floor, first with his hands, which soon bloodied and splintered, and then with his upper body and face, all the while crying for forgiveness, but for what, the priest could not say. The banker’s son, too, seemed to fall to pieces — he at first raged at the empty dishes, and then curled up and positioned himself in a corner of the room, looking around blankly. The priest could not explain either of these behaviors, save that he surmised the two men were seeing images in their own minds, experiencing things that they too could not explain. What those things were, the priest, again, couldn’t say. But he did think of the young teacher and her predicament, even in that moment.

As for the butcher, he stayed a solid acquaintance of the priest for many years later, and he eventually revealed what he felt when the boy entered the room. He saw again the sights and sounds of battle, the horrible images that he’d seen during war. Men scalped and disembowled, mad horses dragging corpses that used to be soldiers, and men with families and children turned into slippery red meat with the mere flick of a knife or the echo of a rifle. The butcher, the old soldier, was the first in the widow’s house to react — he jumped towards the boy immediately and grabbed him around the neck, pulling him down to the floor under the gigantic man’s shadow.

The priest felt the images subside momentarily, and the butcher looked up at him with wide eyes, wordlessly asking him to do something while something could be done. The boy, at first frightened and shocked at the attack, now appeared to gain strength, and his face twisted into some feature the priest could not explain, nor examine directly. The boy spoke to the butcher, but now it no longer had even the intonation of the child — it was some ancient, evil vocalization, stabbing like a dagger into the souls of the people in the room, directed at the butcher himself.

The priest did all he could think to do, and moved into the back bedroom. The widow’s husband had died years ago, and the woman and her son had been dirt poor since then. The boy played in the woods, the schoolmistress had told the priest. And in the back room, on the bedtable, the priest saw an item that did not belong in the house. He immediately knew that it was the source of the trouble, that it had been brought here somehow, and that it would need to be removed as soon as possible.

It was a small brown statue, an ornate carving of a head, but the priest could not describe the features of the face, as he could not truly bring himself to look upon them. It was old, possibly made by the savages centuries before the town by the sea had been founded. And even as the priest moved closer to the statue, he could tell that it was full of value and power, but power that he did not, and could not truly want.

The sounds of scuffling between the boy and the butcher, the mayor’s thrashing violence, and the banker’s son’s cries reached the priest again from the back room. He knew the statue must be removed, but he wouldn’t dare to touch it. He grabbed a blanket from the bed, wrapped it around the statue, and as he picked it up, could feel the images in his mind increase in intensity — horrible scenes of blood and blasphemy. A crow eating out the eye of a woman, brutal and bloody murder in a field, ancient rituals of gore and sex, and other things the priest himself could not bear to identify. The priest wore a crucifix around his neck, and even as he pulled the thing to his chest, folded in the blanket, the metal burned him in a strange agony.

He fled the house — the mayor had stopped beating himself and lay on the floor in a bloody mess, the butcher stood over the boy who continued to chant in the evil tone even with the butcher’s hands around his neck. The banker’s son sat in a corner and wept in agony, a puddle of liquid growing beneath him. The priest ran outside, looked down at the town, and then ran northwest — toward the sea.

As he ran, he felt the statue’s images change in his mind. Instead of violence and insanity, the images, just as horrible, now became promises and temptations. The priest saw his congregation tethered to their seats in the pews with barbed wire, saw his parish’s collection plates full of gold and riches. He preached a fantasy sermon in his mind, and the parish, the county, indeed the whole world, hung on his every word, obeyed his every entreaty. There were no words from the statue, but this, it said with the images flashed in the priest’s mind as he ran through the cold night towards the dark ocean, could all be yours.

The priest tried to stop and grab a horse on the way down to the beach — he could travel faster in a saddle, he though, and he worried what might still be happening at the widow’s house. But when he reached a farm and opened the barn to find a ride, the horse inside rose up and reared in sheer madness. The priest tried to calm it down, tried to master it even with his own mind clouded by the horror of the statue, but it was no use — the horse ran through the open door and off into the night. Lights came on in the house next door and the priest fled — he couldn’t afford to see what happened around another human being.

The horse was found dead in a field two days later. It had run until it collapsed and expired of exhaustion.

Finally the priest reached the sea, and his mind burned with madness. He had started praying on the way, and as he stood at the top of the sea cliff, with the waves crashing below, words no longer came to him, just a ringing voice desperately clinging to a last hope. He reared back with the last of his strength and threw the statue, in the blanket, as far as he could out over the ocean. It seemed to hover above the crashing waves for just a moment, and the priest felt one last stab of horror, one last flood of images, horrible things being done to innocent women and children, great men destroyed under a vast, horrible power. And then the thing fell, and the images lost their strength. The dark form of the blanket dissolved into the shadows of the sea, and with a final splash among the waves below, the priest fainted into a black stupor.

He awoke, and it was nearly morning, the waves still crashing on the rocks below behind a quiet stillness before predawn light. He made his way back across the fields to the widow’s house, and found a hopeless and horrible scene. The constable had arrived, had brought two deputies. The banker’s son was there and appeared to be unharmed, but seemed ultimately fatigued, crushed under a weight of memory and loss. The butcher was there, and he too was hurt not in body but soul, forlorn and full of sorrow. The boy, the priest asked the constable, and the lawman merely pointed at the house.

Inside was the bloodied mess that previously had been the town’s honorable mayor — he had beaten his head on the floor and died from the wounds. The widow’s body was covered with a white sheet, and with the doors and windows opened and the deputies coming in and out of the room, the smell had subsided. And there, in the doorway of the bedroom, was the boy’s body. His neck was bruised, but his face seemed to be at peace. As much peace as the priest could spot in such a terrible scene.

What happened here, asked the constable. Something terrible, said the priest. But it’s over now.

The boy, his mother, and the mayor were buried that day, and the priest convinced the constable that the town had suffered enough — no charges were brought. The butcher and the priest stayed close, and while the priest could see lines of fatigue and sorrow on the butcher’s face, he was a man of war, a man who could deal with death as well as any man. Which is to say, not well, but well enough.

The teacher’s cuts recovered and were healed, but her being was not — once a woman of youth and beauty, she was lost in her own mind. She could no longer teach — the children were frightened by the scars. A few years later, after the wedding had come and gone, she took ill and passed away. The banker’s son, once a man of fire and purpose, betrothed to a beautiful woman and facing a future of great prosperity and riches, had lost everything. Last the priest had heard, he had moved away to the city, had gotten mixed up in the company of criminals. That was many years ago, the priest told his ordinand as he lay on his deathbed.

The priest had surmised in years after that the boy had been wandering through the woods one day when he found the statue and heard its whispers of power, taking it and thinking it would bring salvation to his forgotten mother. Instead, it brought only terror and panic. The widow, trapped in close proximity to the thing, had either died or ended her own life, and the boy himself possessed by whatever savage evil it contained.

And the priest himself was left to carry the weight of the story, though he didn’t have to carry it for long. The townspeople whispered of the incident for a few months (and the carpenter’s sister collected and shared as many rumors and superstitions about it as she could find), and then it was all but forgotten, a lost story of the house on the hill in the town by the sea. Eventually, with the mine long gone, the town itself closed up, and all that was left there now was a small inlet, one fishermen in the area avoided if possible, for reasons they only talked about late at night while drinking.

And as for the statue, the priest told his ordinand, it is still there. Waiting. The ordinand blessed the priest, told him that this life offers us many troubles, and yet God is always there to see us through. The priest stayed silent, his face still and knowing. And then the ordinand blew out the candles that lit the priest’s room in the infirmary and bid him go to sleep for the night before closing the door.

The priest lay in the dark, remembering. His mind kept bringing him images of the incident in the town by the sea.