The little girl sits up, but there is something disturbingly mechanical about the motion, as if she’s being pulled by strings. Her face, which was once contorted into a look of such heart-piercing agony, is now utterly blank, like that of a doll.
Something shifts under the dress. The little girl appears to drop into the cloth. There is a sudden rush of dust.
Cloth swirling around it, it stands up slowly.
Shara looks at it, and immediately begins to vomit.
*
It is man-like, in a way: it has a torso, arms, and legs. Yet all are queerly long, distended, and many-jointed, as if its body is nothing but knuckles, hard bulbs of bone shifting under smooth skin. Its limbs are wrapped in white cloth stained gray with dust, and its feet are like a blend between a human’s and a goose’s: huge and syndactyly and webbed, with three fat toes, each with tiny perfect toenails on them. Yet its head is by far the worst part: the back is roughly like the head of a balding man, sporting a ring of long, gray scraggly hair around its skull; but instead of a face or jaw, the head stretches forward to form what looks like a wide, long, flat bill—like, again, that of a goose. Yet rather than the tough keratin normally seen in ducks or geese, the bill is made of knuckled human flesh, as if a man’s fingers were fused together, and he brought both hands together to form a joint at the heel of his palms.
The mhovost flaps its bill at Shara, making a wet fapfapfap. Somewhere in her mind she hears echoes of children laughing, screaming, crying. As its fleshy bill wags Shara can see it has no esophagus, no teeth: just more bony, hairy flesh in the inner recesses of the bill.
She spews vomit onto the floor again, but is careful to avoid the salt on the floor.
Sigrud stares blankly at this abomination, pacing in front of him like a bantam cock, daring him to attack it. “Is this,” he asks slowly, “a thing I should be killing?”
“No,” gasps Shara. More vomit burbles out of her. The mhovost flaps its bill at her—again, the echoes of ghostly children. She thinks, It’s laughing at me. “Don’t break the ring of salt! That’s the only thing keeping us alive!”
“And the little girl?”
“She was never there. … This creature is miraculous by nature, though darkly so.”
She spits bile on the floor. The mhovost gestures to her belligerently. The human nature of its movements is revolting: she imagines it saying, Come on! Come on!
“You killed Mrs. Torskeny, didn’t you?” asks Shara. “They led her here and she broke the salt barrier.”
The mhovost, in a bizarrely effective pantomime, looks at the pile of clothes and shrugs indifferently: That old thing? It waves dismissively: It was nothing. Then, again, it flaps its bill at them.
“I so wish”—Sigrud is turning his knife over and over in his hand—“that it would stop doing that.”
“It wants you to break the circle. If it can get at you, it’ll swallow you whole.”
Fapfapfapfap.
Sigrud gives her a skeptical look.
“It’s a creature of skin and bone,” says Shara. “But not its own skin and bone. Somewhere in it, I fear, is the repurposed remains of Mrs. Torskeny.”
The mhovost prods its belly with its many-jointed fingers, as if probing for her.
A joker. But it would be, of course, considering who made it.
“How are you alive?” asks Shara. “Shouldn’t you have perished when Jukov died?”
It stops. Stares at her, eyelessly. Then it walks backward, forward, backward, forward, as if it’s testing the edges of the salt ring.
“What is it doing?” asks Sigrud.
“It’s mad,” says Shara. “One of the creatures made by Jukov in his darker moods—a knuckle-man, a voice under the cloth. It’s meant to mock us, to goad us—the only way to identify them is to ask to see their feet, because that’s the only thing they can never really hide. Though I’ve no idea how it’s alive. … Is Jukov dead?” she asks the creature.
Still pacing back and forth, the mhovost shakes its head. Then it stops, appears to think, and shrugs.
“How are you here?”
Again, a shrug.
“I knew they could last for some time,” says Shara, “but I did not think that Divinities’ creatures could persist so long after their death.”
The mhovost extends a repulsively long, flat hand and tilts it back and forth: Maybe. Maybe not.
“The two men who were here,” says Shara. “Did they trap you here?”
It resumes pacing back and forth—Shara presumes she’s just angered it, so she must be right.
“How long have they had you trapped in this building?”
The creature mimes a laugh—Shara again reflects on what an astonishing pantomime it is—and waves a hand at her: What a silly question!
“A long time, then.”
It shrugs.
“You don’t look underfed. How many others have you killed?”
It shakes its head, waggles a finger: No no no no. Then it lovingly, thoughtfully caresses its stomach: What makes you think they’re dead?
Children laugh in the empty chambers of Shara’s head. She resists the urge to retch again. “How … How many have they pushed within this circle?”
It flaps its bill. Shrugs.
“A lot.”
Another shrug.