When Dr. Gottfried had taken the time to inspect the coins brought to him by the man now asleep on his operating table, he had noticed then their oddity– fine coins they were, for certain, but all were minting of rather antiquated pedigree. Almost all were carved with the faces of emperors long past– Charles V, Ferdinand I… the oldest, somehow without a bit of rust on its form, held the countenance of Louis IV. As the stranger, his leg bloodied (and were it but for a few more inches of flesh cut, perhaps entirely useless), twitched on his bed and awaited, Gottfried pondered where the man could’ve acquired such glittering and venerable coinage… was the fool a grave robber?
***
The accursed Baron Von Lange, spurned noble of Würzburg, the bastard son of Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn! Near alone, for fatal darkness swept his few ranks up at Lomnice in the din of cannon fire– all that remained were but a dozen horsemen who struck out with him when the battle was known hopeless. He and his ranks were thought dead by all who despised him, and were he to return to the pitiful estate remaining (almost certainly now given to his kin of truer blood), there would be a show trial for cowardice, and the hangman’s rope. Behind their horses, a grotesque display of scofflaws, vagabonds, deserters, and brigands– all seeking survival as the victorious Bohemians sacked the countryside in their war-brought revelry. Already they had passed twenty peasant bodies on the road– disemboweled, burnt, and hung on the sickly trees of early winter as a warning to any who might protect his fields from the victors.
The Baron and his “army,” were little better than the marauders. In the evenings they stole what could be found among the last, pitiful harvests of late November– stunted beets and near dead plums of a diseased shade. By daylight, with dwindling powder and shot they hunted fattened autumn game, but the chaotic march of the armies had disturbed the animals and made the pickings slim. The men, deprived of meat and beer, spoke of frozen death, death unforgiven– a bit of ruddiness came to a few cynical faces when they imagined the cozy warmth of hell.
Were they know hell would be among their ranks in short order– for among the river, spotted by the wily Halbrecht, there, glimmering! A Thaler, eroded to near illegibility by the stream, yet still usable in its weight of silver. Attracted by his shouting, the others fell in among the stream, searching for more river-hidden bounties, and soon discerned a trail of the things, leading to a nearby cavern that had been hidden by brush and fallen dirt. The men spoke of thieves' safehouses, the legendary footpads of yore who carried the gold of treasury carriages off to hidden boroughs of the earth and left it forgotten when they met justice at the axe. Like excitable children begging for sweets, they crowded around Lange for approval to dive within. His handle of these rabble tenuous, he resigned to their excited pleas, and in short order they had carved a path among the roots; their sap, sickly and unwholesome, irritated the skin as it leaked and fell down upon the invaders.
The pale light of an overcast day gave little illumination to the scavengers, and all that could be seen of the cavern from within was dark, glittering walls, coated in a moist algae– a odd shade of crimson-tinted purple that seemed to consume what little light came in. Gathering some ripped and useless cloth and a touch of powder, Lange made a crude torch. Its flames danced about in some mouldered wind journeying from deeper within the cavern, and were tormented into a smoky dervish by dripping waters. Caught in the weak glow of torchlight, the cavern was revealed only partially– a kind of antechamber with a rough-hewn hallway leading deeper within, its end hidden among impenetrable darkness that beckoned forth the weak torch. Each step further into the darkness the men seemed to be in greater company of that ever-thickening lavender algae, which leaked some dark red liquid more akin to rust or blood than water.
Unwary of what lurked within, the men took to turning the place upside down in search of their golden quarry. More Thaler’s turned up among stones, streams, hidden in patches of rock, or simply lying about on the floor– it was as if a coin-barrel had blown itself to pieces. Caught in the laughing ecstasy of greed, they did not notice the shifting forms that danced among the hallway, perhaps not a quarter revealed by the weak glow of the torch– neither did they hear the porcine snorting that echoed off the smooth walls, becoming indiscernible from the babbling brook within. Had not Halbrecht screamed like the pitchforks of hell were at his loins, none would have even noticed the pendulous, newborn-pink arm that reached out from the darkness to grab him and turn his ribcage to useless dust.
All that could be seen was the things arm– fattened yet muscular, thickset veins all across its length; the size of a man, and each finger ending in a stubby brown, hoof-like appendage that contorted Halbrecht like a vise on every side before his upper half exploded in a shower of gore. Red coated the walls of the cavern– the algae shrieked and the men wiped their faces in shock as each tried to collect themselves. Lange, quick to the draw, brought forth his riding petronel and fired it into the hallway as the arm retracted. The explosion illuminated for only a moment the form of some terrible, malformed thing, some hulking brute of twisted flesh and blood-gleaming teeth, the blast reflecting in its dark, deep-set eyes. He could not discern what manner of unholy nightmare lurked in that flash of light, but as the rest of the men shrieked, he dropped the now-impotent pistol and drew forth a saber, plunging into darkness to slay the thing.
The others were too stunned to follow– many left their swords outside on their saddles, or had never possessed a sword to begin. The bloody spray of a late companion and the noise of Lange’s blast had reduced them to shivering wretches… yet soon, with little more than daggers and stones, afraid of being left in the dark, they followed their leader into the pit. Marching ever deeper, the algae grew like a carpet, and each step soon was accompanied by a moist crunching that sickened their most resilient. Treading onward into the gloom, each took stock, disgusted by the noise, the stench…
For some indeterminable time they continued on. The torch grew dim, prompting all to sacrifice cloth and powder; now even weaker a light than before, those in the rear were caught in near-darkness that evoked terror in the heart and brought to mind strained nightmares of endless hallways, dark childhood beds that rumbled in phantasms of hell, all manner of beastly eyes that glower in fog… onward they tread through what seemed miles of twisting stone path. Soon, hearing the chant and dance of drums, and seeing ahead some faint putrescent light, torches were extinguished and the scant armament gathered was brought to bear. Faint and unclear, though sinister for certain, did the chants reach the ranks, and among those once stern men were quivering breaths and uncertain footfall as they struggled in the grasp of fear. As Lange snuck onward crouched and terrified, he stepped beyond the boundary where the path grew into a dim-lit cavern; there lay beyond a visage so terrible it stilled his heart for a moment, and sucked breath from his lungs that he nearly choked.
Sick merriment prevailed over the carnal tableau now seen by the curious remainder of his column, who with much regret wished they had never turned the corner– for beyond…
The dance of a succubi from hell and her foul spawn, the red-tinted dreams of torment, the spurt of blood that ejects from the devil’s hemorrhaged mind and sprays the world in its foul essence! No greater an unbalanced sight tread under the vault of heaven, no dream so dark slept within men. On a throne of stretched skin and unclean bone sat the Swine-Witch, her teeth long and unkempt as she dined on the ruptured flesh that was Halbrecht. In crimson cloth she lounged, clad in a robe like hounds-hair that swayed in the subterranean wind. Before her in dark pens were what must’ve been a dozen score of hogs, corralled so tight it was a wonder they might still breathe. All squealed so loud as to frighten the ears and shake the mind– yet in each was a note of rhythm, some infernal song of slaughter that chanted together made the cavern a cacophonous realm of swine-choir; were one man to scream, the fellow next to him would scarce hear it over this foul butchers requiem.
And yet standing guard over the hogs was that most terrible sight: the thing that had killed Halbrecht, now revealed in the bloody light of torches for all its bulk. It stood near half the height of the cavern, certainly larger than any man, and was of a strange, malformed proportion that suggested the touch of evil in its very being. Its chest was miniscule, shortened compared to its titanic legs, and yet it was only further dwarfed by the thing’s arms– two gigantic slabs of meat, each the size of an entire cattle, hanging limply from its body due to their sheer size. One imagined the beast might simply grab the ground and pull itself to walk, lest each hand be scraped to nothing by the stone floors. Yet most terrible was its head, for it spoke with certainty that the thing before them, despite standing on its hind legs, was not some cruel offshoot of man, but rather an animal twisted by hell and witchery. The face and skull atop that thing was of a swine, with dark, empty eyes that sucked in the light of the torches, and two terrible ears that seemed to ignore the cries of its brothers. Each eye was unfocused, simply staring at either end of the cavern, not showing a hint of the cruelty the thing had demonstrated upon Halbrecht– eyes no different than that of a placid farm hog.
Without warning, the thing snorted with such strength that it silenced the rest of the hogs. It was a deep, guttural noise that rattled stones and turned what little resolve the men had to liquid nothings. Not even caring a look into the pens to find a hog of particular girth or size, the thing unfeelingly reached an arm into the confines and grabbed at random one of the swine. Lifted above the things head, the hog squealed in terror unearthly as it fell within the beast’s maw. The swine never stopped struggling and screaming as it descended– and only when the thing had closed its mouth did the noise cease. Those few vagabonds among Lange’s company who had once been a farmhand felt a deep, twisting memory arise– that a hog might eat anything without second thought.
Laughing in a hateful way, the sorceress congratulated her familiar in a language none understood– it struck the men as a snorting-speak, half caught in syllables that sounded as though spoken through a mouthful of honey, before a choking series of gasps completed each sentence. Each word seemed unreal and sickly, yet thick with corruption to the point of near strangling the speaker. Were they to know the foul swine-tongue of the witch, they would’ve understood the devilish speak was a command to the pig-thing; for she knew all that occurred in her underground realm, and felt compelled to give her onlookers a show before they met the same fate as that swine.
When the thing turned to face the entrance, the men seemed marble rather than flesh, unable to mount any effort against it. Nor when it began marching some heavy-felt stomp that shook loose pebbles and rattled the mind, did they move. When the beast was almost upon them, they stumbled back, and attempted to run, yet none could find their legs; their last thoughts were of death unremembered, resting places at what must surely be the entrance to hell. Only as the beast entered the cavern hall, then were they able to all stand at attention, a fitting end for the deserters. The swine stood before them, its front shadowed and face hidden, motionless before the few that remained, a dark silhouette of sheer bestial hunger. Even in the darkness one saw it's all too vital and “healthy” pink skin, the layers of curled fat atop brute muscle, and still most potent, those terrifying dark eyes that seemed to outclass even the subterranean night. Berkmann was the first to put any sort of resistance to the beast, a fact Lange would lament on the operating table as he flitted in and out of consciousness. With all the strength a terrified man could bring forth, Berkmann had thrown a stone right at the thing’s skull, and it had bounced off harmlessly. Not a moment later, he had been pulverized by a mighty blow that had launched him against the cavern wall, shattering his bones and turning his head into a blasted mess of brain fragments.
The rest, facing the mortal coil by swine’s hand, struggled desperately and met similar fates. A dagger embedded without effect in the thing’s flank had been paid in turn with the shadow-masked sight of Klein’s chest being torn in two by the beast’s massive arms, showering the others in his torn stomach. A pistol-blast once more tore through the noise, a concussive boom that might’ve inspired great heroism had its wielder, Neumann, not met with snapping jaws. None was a clean death– by the end of the terrible massacre, its only survivor had been thoroughly baptized in the slick slaughter of his former column, his clothes sodden with half chopped up guts and dark with blood. His nerves had failed him, the coward, and he remained the only one to not strike at the beast. Saber hung harmlessly in his hand, he simply watched as his former ranks were demolished under brute strength and animalistic hunger. And when Lange stood the last, there was a churlish laugh from within the chamber– the queen of this porcine nightmare once more spoke her damned orders, and without hesitation the beast near-crushed Lange and tossed him carelessly before the Swine-Witch's throne. His ribs crying out in agony from the brutal grasp of the beast, he lay unmoving while with dreadful anticipation he heard the bony shoes of the witch clatter on the floor, growing nearer and nearer, that terrible language unfolding and circling him in its gurgling, bubbling way.
Standing directly over him, she bent down and put a clawed finger to his chin, pushing his face up with strength unbefitting a woman so lithe. Her face was now apparent in its fell seduction under dim torch-sway, each terrible angle of her sunken cheekbones, the crimson character of her iris, the bloody tusks that hung beneath her lips dripping with malevolent blood. A pale, terrible doll of a woman, accursed wretch with nightmare eyes, the bloody tongue of a man-eater that speaks thick pig-tongue, may not a man forget that the starving hog will tear the flesh of its kin without remorse, and here stood the most starved of all flesh-eaters, driven to cannibalistic madness!
Lange could not move from her terrible glance, could not break the stare he held with her, could not cease to absorb in perfect memory the darkly beautiful form of she who dined with the long-pig. A spark of witch-hatred, a flaming desire of revenge for all misdeeds done to the bastard son overpowered him as she leaned to deliver the fatal throat-kiss that might undo him and reveal the meat within. Once impotent, his arm of its own volition struck her face with the curved guard of his saber as he screamed an animalistic cry of revenge. Before the nightmarish revenge blow of the witch’s beast could sunder him, he had already rolled out of the way. The curved blade of his royal kin held aloft and glimmering in the blood-light of the cavern, he cursed his family and their misdeeds that led him to this stygian swine-pit, before charging toward the titanic hog-that-stood. It reeled back its massive arm and prepared to bowl him out, but as the blow fell, Lange had already bailed to the side, landing beside the hog-pen. Their deafening cries were overwhelming so close to the crowded herd, but no screaming swine would dissuade him from his plot. Laying on his stomach, he brought the wooden peg that held the corner of the pen down in a sideward sweep of his blade that cleft it clear in twain. Almost instantly, the hogs broke free of their hellish pit and covered the ground in their decrepit and unclean hooves. Squeals greater than ever before as they charged out in liberation, the torrent of swine soon broke out their brothers by the force of their tide, covering the floor in pigshit and blood as they went. Lange attempted to stand and escape the oncoming tide, but found his ankles useless; cut to pieces by stone shrapnel, his tendons were crippled and his feet would not bear his weight. As the hogs came ever closer, Lange feared a death far worse than being eaten.
The beast, seeing his immobility, brought a titanic blow down, killing some half-dozen pigs with its massive, veined fist. Yet the remains of Lange were not among them. The sorceress cried bloody revenge for the thievery of her stock, before being subsumed under a wave of pig-flesh. Her screams continued for a moment, grew louder, before the sound of torn skin and guttural snorting came and she screamed no more. The hog-thing cried in confused rage out as it smashed about wildly, trying to find its quarry among the shifting and unceasing horde, but he was not to be found. Unbeknownst to the beast Lange hid among the stock, clinging for life on the underside of a huge swine.
The brawnier and more rutting of the pigs began to circle around the beast in a whirlwind, knocking their tough skulls against his legs, further enraging their once all-powerful captor. Screaming, it brought down its fists in overwhelmed rage; but where five died fifty appeared from the flock to continue the circle. Shouting and stomping to clear a path in the wake of its unruly subjects, the beast had made its way toward egress when an unlucky hog had landed beneath his feet. Crushed instantly beneath the mammoth weight of the thing, the hogs skull exploded from all sides in a spray that slicked the floor. All that was necessary then was poor footing and the harassment of the lower-swine; the beast fell, the earth quaked, the cave shook, and Lange feared a ravine might swallow them all to perdition– yet it never came. The beast shook on the ground, and tried to regain its footing, yet never could, pinned by its own massive bulk. The rushing wave of starved swine overcame it and hid the thing from view– death had come for the beast of the Swine-Witch; one remembers that a hungry enough swine will eat its own kin, its mother, its father, were the situation to be so desperate as starved entrapment.
The swine soon found the path out, and Lange found that what was once miles of subterranean hall was only perhaps a few hundred paces, a journey particularly swift when one is riding on the underside of a starved pig. Brightness overpowered him as the swine charged out of the cavern, and as they descended upon the rolling hills to leave the grass bare, he released the hide of his hoggish-carriage. The pale evening rays of November for but a brief moment had broken through the clouds and cast their light upon his sprawled form, and for a moment he felt joy.
Unable to do little but crawl, he lay there till nightfall, caught in some haze of violence and the visions of slaughter that lay within the cavern, crippled by the lasting wounds of the pig-thing. By next morning he had painfully and slowly crawled into the cavern once more, against the crying of all his nerves that feared what may remain, and found the quarry that had led them to their doom: a bag of coins, dropped in the haste of Halbrecht’s murder. Crawling out once more consumed the day, but by nightfall he had found his horse (though the beast was assuredly spooked by the torrent of swine, it still would take its crippled master), and rode, rode far away from the cavern of the Swine-Witch, rode till he found some land that might take his hard-won payment.
***
The doctor had patched up his ankle to the point that within a few weeks of rest he might walk again. His patient asleep on the operating table, Gottfried saw the stranger stir and twitch as though attacked and pondered what nightmares might compel a man to dance in the manner he did while sleeping– perhaps it was the guilty sleep of a corpse plunderer after all. Before he pondered it much further though, Lange shook a bit more, catching his breath, and sat up. Eyes half-closed with unbanished sleep, he limped out of little better than a bandaged corpse. Before the doctor could protest, he looked at the bag of coinage on his desk, and turned a blind eye to the accursed Baron Von Lange, who strode out limping to find what glory a bastard son may seek.
-- GROZNY is a Floridian nightmare writer, dreaming of surreal visions and melancholic fantasy to anyone who will listen. He uploads writings at https://grozny1992.itch.io/ , while also working on his twin manuscripts LONGTIME SUNSHINE and Vomiting Data (to be released at a currently unknown date). He can be reached at @PUNISHEDBOULDE2 on twitter.