“‘Whatever thing you are,’ he said to the animal, ‘breathe your last.'”
“Nice line,” Todd remarked.
“The animal reared up, as though it was going to strike the Duke with its hoof a third time, but Goga didn’t give it the opportunity. He quickly drove his sword up into the belly of the animal.”
“As soon as it felt the sword entering its flesh the goat opened its mouth and let out a pitiful wail … ”
Katya paused here, watching Todd, waiting for him to put the pieces together.
“Oh Christ,” he said. “Like a baby?”
“Exactly like a baby. And hearing this pitiful human sound escaping the animal, Goga pulled his sword from the goat’s body, because he knew something unholy was in the air. Have you ever seen an animal slaughtered?”
“No.”
“Well there’s a lot of blood. A lot more than you think there’s going to be.”
“It was like that now?”
“Yes. The goat was thrashing around in a pool of red, its back legs kicking up the wet dirt, so that it spattered Goga and his men. And as it did so, it started to change.”
“Into what?”
Katya smiled the smile of a storyteller who had her audience hooked by some unexpected change of direction.
“Into a little child,” she said. “A boy, a naked little boy, with a nub of a tail and yellow eyes and goat’s ears. So now the Duke is looking down at this goat-boy, twitching in the mud made of dirt and blood, and the superstitious terror which his men had felt finally seizes hold of him too. He starts to speak a prayer.
“T-tal Nostru care ne esti in Ceruri, sfin easca-se numele Tu. Fie Imprtia Ta, fac-se voia Ta, precum în cer ala si pe pament.”
Todd listened to the unfamiliar words, knowing in the cadence that what Katya was reciting was not just any prayer; it was the Lord’s Prayer.
“Pâinea noastr? cea de toate zilele dane-o nouz azi si ne iarti noua greselile noastre.”
He scanned the landscape as he heard the prayer repeated; nothing had changed since he’d first set eyes on the place. The light of the eclipse held everything in suspension: the trees, the ships, the lynchers at their tree.
The rush of pleasure he’d experienced when he first arrived had diminished somewhere in the midst of Katya’s tale-telling. In its place there was now a profound unease. He wanted to stop her telling her story, but what reason could he give that didn’t sound cowardly?
So she continued.
“The Duke retreated, leaving his sword stuck deep in the body of the goat-boy. He intended to climb back onto his horse and ride away, but his steed had already bolted in terror. He called to one of his men to dismount, so that he might have the man’s horse, but before the fellow could obey the rock beneath their feet began to shake violently, and a great chasm opened up in the ground in front of them.”
“The men knew what they were witnessing. This was the very mouth of Hell, gaping in the earth beneath their feet. It was thirty, forty feet wide, and the roots of those ancient trees lined it like the veins of a skinned body. Smoke rose up out of the maw, stinking of every foul thing imaginable, and a good deal that was not. It was such a bitter stench that the Duke and his men began to weep like children.”
“Half-blinded by his own tears, and without a horse, Goga had no choice but to stay where he was, on the lip of the Hell’s Mouth, close to where his victim lay. He tore his gloves from his hands and did his best to clear the tears from his eyes.”
“As he did so he saw somebody coming up out of the earth. It was a woman, he saw; with hair so long it trailed the ground fully six feet behind her. She was naked, except for a necklace of white fleas with eyes that burned like fires in their tiny heads. Thousands of them, moving back and forth around the woman’s neck and up over her face, busy about the business of prettifying her.”