DeVante's Curse

DeVante's Curse

by

SM Johnson

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

QueerMojo (A Rebel Satori Imprint) on Smashwords

Copyright © 2011 by SM Johnson

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Chapter 1 -- A Child

It did not matter how he became the monster
or the man, only that he grew into both, and thus was meant to
survive.

Ernesto Alvarez was born a pariah, the male
offspring of the village witch, an impossibility according to
superstition. His mother had bled profusely from his passage into
the world, and the bleeding would not be stopped. Her frightened
apprentice reported that the witch used her last breath to curse
her male offspring.
You shall live darkly and long, and the
culmination of your life shall be your triumph.

He had no father. If any man from the village
had claimed parentage of the witch's son, they would surely have
both been driven away.

From the moment he could stand on his feet
and push open the door, Ernesto preferred the forest to the
enclosed space of his mother's empty hut, and so he took shelter
only during the heaviest rains.

The animals were his guides. He learned from
spider monkeys which fruits and berries were safe to eat, and from
the capybara about edible plants. He sometimes ate the raw flesh of
the tapir when the kill was plentiful, and the jaguar too sated to
chase him away.

Ernesto did not remember a taste preference
between these things. He knew the villagers cooked meat over fires,
but all of the animals distrusted fire, and he shared their
wariness. Fruits and nuts were plentiful and easier to catch than
meat, and killing for the purpose of sustenance was unpleasant.

Twelve rainy seasons passed, and then: a
guide from a different village brought the red-haired woman, and
explained that it was Ernesto's destiny to go away with her.
Ernesto did not understand, but as the villagers stood in a
semi-circle around him holding torches to ward off the night, he
could see in their solemn eyes that they wanted him to go.

The red-haired woman smiled and smoothed her
fingers through Ernesto's hair, but he could see a disconnect in
her eyes that belied her nectar-sweet smile.

Ernesto did not trust her, and less so when
she wrapped her arms around him and leapt into the sky like a great
bird of prey.

The woman brought him to a stone building in
a cold land. She talked to him, but she spoke a language he did not
know. He was shivering from the cold and shocking flight, and made
the mistake of ignoring her.

A loud shriek from her caught his attention.
And then her palm met his face with a harsh snap and sudden
pain.

She hit him again, and he fell to his knees,
raising his hands to protect his face.

She beat him until he thought he would die,
and then she went away.

Ernesto stayed on the floor, barely able to
breathe. A hard seed of anger settled into his chest. Discipline in
the animal world was swift and immediate. The jaguar might cuff her
young and send him sprawling if he bit or clawed too hard, but it
was warranted, and then it was over.

Ernesto had done nothing to warrant
discipline but fail to understand her words.

A boy, older than Ernesto by several rainy
seasons, helped him sit up, and then stand. A boy whose language
was more like Ernesto's than the woman's.

"She will beat you no matter what you do or
do not do, say or do not say," the boy said.

"How do I avoid it?" Ernesto asked.

"You cannot. She brought you here for some
purpose. Maybe she'll kill you, maybe not."

Ernesto worked to wipe all emotion from his
face, hoping to eradicate the dread from his heart. "What are we to
do?" he asked.

"We work," the boy said. "We feed her. We
obey."

The boy's name was Felix, and he led Ernesto
to a small kitchen where he cleaned Ernesto's face with a cool rag,
then gave him bread and cheese to eat. Then he led Ernesto through
the tasks of sweeping floors, and stacking wood into the
fireplaces. "We check the sun now," Felix said, and pulled Ernesto
through a doorway to an outside courtyard.

The right side of the courtyard was taken up
by a smoking pit encircled with large neat bricks mortared to waist
height. The flagstones beneath his bare feet were warm. Ernesto's
left flank was bruised, his limbs ached, and he wanted nothing more
than to lie on the stones under the caress of the sun. Felix lifted
his face to the sun and stood basking in its warmth for several
minutes with his eyes closed. His face was tranquil and his mouth
almost smiling.

When Felix opened his eyes, the tranquility
slipped away. He frowned, dual creases forming between his
eyebrows. He nodded his head toward the pit. "We have only one
really bad job."

Felix led Ernesto to the bedchamber of their
cruel mistress, where he dragged a limp form from the bed. It hit
the floor with a thud, but made no moan or sound of complaint.

"If they are alive in the morning," Felix
said, "we do what we can to keep them that way, so she can have
them again." He dragged the body across the floor and out of the
room.

Ernesto turned his head away, but asked,
"Does she beat them to death?"

"No. She feeds from them."

Ernesto shook his head. Perhaps it was a
barrier of dialect, because he thought the boy said the woman fed
from them.

"Their blood," Felix added, and tapped the
side of his own neck.

Ernesto looked at the dead man, then
shuddered and looked away.

Felix shrugged. "It is so. Now help me. We
need to drag him outside and lift him into the pit."

They pulled and jerked the corpse through the
castle, lifted it over the edge of the courtyard pit, and then
observed the burning. It was the most horrifying and gruesome act
Ernesto had ever performed.

The smell of it could not be described.
Ernesto headed water in the kitchen fireplace and bathed, then
bathed again, and still the putrid stench seemed permanently bound
to his skin.

Gentle, innocent Ernesto let his head sink
beneath the cool water, closed his eyes, and died.

DeVante, baptized in horror, rose from the
metaphorical grave.

The pit itself was twenty feet deep. A
corridor beneath the castle gave access to a walkway that led
around the whole circle where bellows were in place that could be
worked to make the fire burn hotter. Felix tried to keep the fire
smoldering at all times because it was easier to stoke the embers
into heat than to coax fire from cold ashes.

"It takes a lot of heat to burn bones," Felix
explained, "and most of our work here is to that end."

DeVante's second morning in the castle was
not as gruesome. There was an uprooted tree in the courtyard, but
no corpse in Katarina's bed. It took DeVante and Felix the full day
to chop the tree into manageable segments. They heaved the large
sections of trunk into the burn pit, then stacked the smaller
branches in the fireplace grates.

DeVante wondered aloud where they came
from.

"She plucks them from the ground and drops
them here. You must know that she flies through the night air like
a bird."

Of course he knew. It was how she brought him
to this place. "She is that strong, that she can pick a tree like a
child picks a flower?"

"She can do anything," Felix said, with sad
eyes. "She is strong and all-powerful, like a goddess."

She was no goddess, DeVante thought. She was
a scourge, a disease. He yearned to escape back to the simple
jungle life of Ernesto.

"You get used to burning the bodies," Felix
assured him, but DeVante did not believe him.

"What if we refuse?" DeVante asked, a couple
of weeks and six or seven burnings later. This day there were two
corpses, a fine-looking man and a small child, and the sight of
them renewed DeVante's initial horror.

"I won't refuse," Felix said, with a weary
shake of his head. "And if you refuse, it will be your body burning
soon enough."

"Where do they come from?" DeVante asked.
"Does no one ever come looking for them?"

"They come from anywhere," Felix said. "She
flies to wherever, plucks some unlucky bastard off the street, and
brings him back here. She's like… a wraith. No one comes."

"What if we leave?" DeVante asked.

Felix laughed, but the sound was just as
hopeless as the slow shake of his head had been. "There is no
escape. She left a door unbarred once, and I ran away. She found me
before morning, brought me back, and demonstrated that disobedience
is not an option."

DeVante adjusted to Felix's routine. They
took turns working the bellows to maintain the fire. It was hard
work, but if the pit wasn't hot enough, a burning took all day.

Katarina was awake only at night, and often
she was away until almost dawn. It was a relief to have her away,
because if she were bored and irritable in the castle it was
impossible to avoid her attention. "Sunlight kills vampires," Felix
confided. "And fire will do it, too. You will never find her near
the pit, and she will never trust either of us not to plot against
her."

Sometimes she ordered Felix into her
chambers, and when she was done with him, he had bruises and raw
red marks on his skin, and a too-bright sheen in his eyes. "What
does she do to you?"

"Nothing for you to worry about. She tells me
what to do, and I obey her," Felix said, and refused to share
details. "If I serve her well, she rewards me with her blood."

"She drinks from you?" DeVante asked, feeling
a war within himself between curiosity and revulsion.

"Sometimes. But not much – she needs me
strong for my chores."

A strangled, horrified sound escaped from
DeVante's throat, and though he did not mean to pass judgment on
his friend, Felix correctly interpreted the reaction.

"No, no, it's not like that, not terrible.
It's like a medicine, like the leavings of the cocoa or the poppy
plant. It's good. It feels good. She makes me crave it, I think, so
the thought of escaping her is almost as unbearable as the thought
of staying forever."

Surely Felix was delusional, DeVante thought.
How could any substance on earth be worth the repeated task of
burning corpses? But there was abject honesty in Felix's eyes, so
DeVante looked away and lifted his shoulders in a slight shrug. "I
cannot say I understand. But I can see that you are telling me your
truth."

DeVante did not ask more questions. Felix
seemed on the verge of defending Katarina, which was unfathomable.
She was malicious and cruel, worthy of nothing but horror and
revulsion.

DeVante watched the moon and counted
months.

He felt the seasons and counted years.

He stopped looking at the faces of the dead,
stopped noticing the smell of burning flesh. The hauling and
maneuvering part of his tasks became easier. When he bathed, he
felt the outline of hard muscle beneath his skin.

He grew out of boyhood and into manhood.

The days without corpses were good. Katarina
left food in the pantry, and DeVante and Felix did their work in
quick silence. When it was too cold to spend time outside, Felix
taught DeVante to read, and over the course of several winters they
worked their way through Katarina's library, learning about
history, mathematics, and the world.

"She doesn't seem like somene who would have
interest in books," DeVante observed.

Felix snorted. "She killed a nobleman and
stole his castle. The books were already here."

In the warmer seasons, they escaped the
courtyard through a gate that led to an abandoned garden, and
explored the twisted and overgrown pathways. The garden was
surrounded by the same brick wall as the courtyard, and DeVante
attempted to climb over it many times, despite Felix's story of
escape and recapture.

In the back corner of the garden was a
natural pool of fresh, cool water. Summers were hot, and they shed
their clothes and jumped in, nad the cold shock of the water forced
laughing exclamations from their throats. Small fish darted around
their legs, and they tried to catch them between their fingers.