The Rose Demon Read Online Free PDF

in his hand. The man should have been out in the fields with the others but his daughter, Edith, had been found barbarously murdered in Sutton Courteny woods: her throat had been torn, her blood drained. Edith’s poor mangled corpse now lay in the parish coffin at the door to the rood screen of the church. Fulcher was mourning her in the only way he could.

    ‘Drunk as a pig!’ So he announced. ‘Until the pain has passed!’

    Matthias’ eyes softened. Fulcher looked so distraught, and Edith, his dreamy-eyed daughter, had been so kind. Whenever a corpse was laid in the coffin, Matthias always helped his mother to make sure that all was well before Requiem Mass was sung and the corpse was buried in its shroud beneath the outstretched yew trees in the cemetery. Corpses did not frighten Matthias. They were all the same: stiff and cold, lips turning blue and eyes half-open. This time, however, Osbert had been insistent that he himself tend the corpse. He wrapped it in a special canvas sheet and screwed the coffin lid well down till the poor girl’s remains were buried.

    ‘Edith!’ Fulcher cried up at the sky, swaying backwards and forwards on his feet. ‘Edith!’

    Piers the ploughman came out, caught Fulcher by the arm and took him back into the tangy coolness of the Hungry Man taproom.

    Matthias ran on, slipping like a shadow past the doorway of the tavern and up through the village. He stopped at the gallows stone from which Baron Sanguis’ gibbet stretched up, black and stark against the sky. No corpse hung there but, now and again, the Manor Lord gibbeted a victim coated in tar, bound with old rope, as a warning to the outlaws, wolf’s-heads and poachers to stay well away from his domain.

    At last the line of cottages ended. The trackway narrowed as it entered the dark wood. Matthias paused: his father and mother had warned him, on many an occasion, to stay well clear of this place.

    ‘Men as violent as wolves,’ the kindly parson’s face had been serious, ‘wander like demons. These horrid murders!’ Parson Osbert had shaken his balding head. ‘Moreover, there are armies on the march and, where there are soldiers, murder and rapine ride close behind. Isn’t that right, Mother?’

    Christina had brushed her thick, blonde hair away from her face and stared, white-faced, at her son. Matthias, being so young, did not know what murder and rapine were, though they sounded interesting. What concerned him more was how tired and grey his mother now looked. Usually merry-eyed, laughing and vigorous, Christina had, over the last few weeks, become quiet, withdrawn and ever anxious. Only last night Matthias had woken and found her in her shift, a blanket about her shoulders, staring down at him. The tallow candle in her hand had made her face look even more gaunt. When he’d stirred, she had sat down on the edge of his pallet bed and gently stroked his face.

    ‘Matthias.’

    ‘Yes, Mother?’

    ‘You go through the woods, don’t you? You go to see the hermit? . . . In his refuge at Tenebral?’

    Matthias had been about to lie but his mother’s eyes looked so strange, so full of fear, he had nodded slowly. Christina had turned away. She had told him to go back to sleep but, as she’d turned to say good night, he’d glimpsed the tears on her cheeks.

    Matthias now gnawed on his lips; the wood was a dark and secret place. He remembered the stories the villagers liked to tell when they all gathered around the great roaring fire in the taproom of the Hungry Man: about the pigmy king who lived beneath the tumuli, the ancient burial mounds, deep in the woods. Of Edric the Wild and his demonic horsemen who hunted along the banks of the Severn.

    A bird stirred noisily in the branches above him. Matthias recalled other stories about the Strigoi, the ravenous birds with hooked feet, grasping talons, eyes which stared fixedly - fowls from hell who preyed on the young. Or the hag whose carcass was clothed in