Manticore 
I
People dropped dead by the dozens; their decaying bodies littered the rural roads of a tiny village on the outskirts of London that no one knew by any particular name. The village sat in the middle of nowhere, shielded by a dark forest to the east and rising hills to the west and north. The road south of the village that led to London brought curious travelers in and out of the village, and in 1351 brought nothing but plague and death. By this time much of Europe had been ravaged by the pestilence, a punishment sent down by god to exact it’s vengeance on the sinners, on those that had forgotten the righteous path. People cowered in church and begged the almighty to do away with this awful disease yet their prayers had fallen on deaf ears.
Death swooped down on its rotten, scabbed wings and took the inhabitants of the village without any prejudice, whether it was a man, a woman or a child, leaving them helpless, crippling them with its cold grasp. Though miles from London, the villagers could see the black smoke rise from the big city, the smoke that carried the ashes of those that had fallen prey to the horrible disease. The villagers reported a foul odor from these ashen clouds that traveled in their direction on those windy days.
In all major cities and centers of any significant population all across Europe, those still healthy enough gathered the corpses and piled them up in city squares where they would be burned. Yet people still fell ill en masse and the population all across the continent began to dwindle.
The village that no one knew by any particular name, for it was merely a passing ground for travelers, lost its people every day. Yet there was one peculiar detail that at first ordinary man could not pin point. Even though people fell ill with Bubonic Plague, there were very few graves in the village. The few grave stones that stood on a tiny hill from the main manor of the lord that had run the village were old and predated the plague by some years and those corpses that inhabited the burial ground had died in battle or of natural causes.
When someone would succumb to the plague and die two or three days later, villagers could see a small open carriage arrive to that person’s house and haul away the nearly rotten corpse away in the direction of the manor of Lord Talbot. There were usually two men who would come to claim the body, or bodies. They were dressed in black and their mouths and noses were covered by scarves that were tied tight around their neck.
The two men would load the bodies onto the carriage and ride off as the remaining family members cried and wailed. On occasion the men would even take the ones that were still alive, that is if they had broken out in buboes that protruded from their necks, thighs, armpits and so on.
It wasn’t uncommon for these men to strip whole families out in broad daylight and cold to examine their bodies. When they would uncover the buboes on the unfortunate ones, it was as if death had struck them. They would immediately put the unfortunate ones in shackles and carry them off along with any corpses.
It was a grim sight for those looking on; it was a grave situation for those going through the entire ordeal.
Not too long after the carriage would arrive at the lord’s manor and the bodies were unloaded, a strange howling sound could be heard in the distance, yet as if it came from underground.
The howling sound was deep, at times almost gurgling for a brief moment, until it would reach its highest pitch and then slowly subside. Some residents reported the earth shaking when these screeches would reach their terrifying heights.
Everyone ignored these terrifying sounds. Was it by sheer ignorance or fear, the villagers kept this to themselves.
II
When William’s wife came down with the plague, contracting the disease was the last thing William had thought of. He was stricken by grief and those sleepless nights he had spent by his wife’s bedside had taken a toll on him.
He first noticed the buboes protruding from her neck on November the 3rd. The next day there was another rather strange development; not only had she come down with a violent fever and cough, her fingernails had become black, some of them even falling off later that evening.
By the fifth day of November, her cough had regressed and now she spat handfuls of blood into her perfectly white handkerchief. The coughs were painful to listen to as she sounded as if her lungs would come out of her mouth. William tried his best to keep up with this terrible pestilence by making her warm drinks and changing the cold dressing on her forehead but eventually found that this was a reckoning force not of this world.
Those times when Joanna was asleep, William prayed. He begged God on his knees to send help, yet no help came.
The village began to talk on that day after no one had seen them at the market for the last three days. In a village so small, news of a terrible disease travels fast and to act as if to prevent it is all but in vain. William knew that the carriage would stop by their home soon enough. What killed his sanity was the uncertainty of when the men would come to haul his wife away.
He had also noticed that the more bodies they dragged behind the manor the more ghastly screams and bellows came from that direction. He surly wasn’t crazy, he knew that much. He had heard the screams and in the past several days there were more of them.
The screams were so terrible that when he heard them at night he would put a pillow over his head and try to drown out that terrible sound. Would they come to take Elizabeth to whatever monster hid behind the manor or the little hill?
He was sure they would; they had come to take away at least a dozen people so far, some of them still alive, and Elizabeth wouldn’t be an exception. She was sick, covered in horrible buboes that made her look like an abomination spat right out of hell. They came for those people, the ones covered buboes. During the lonely and quiet moments on his own, and those were many, he contemplated fighting the men in the carriage. Yes, he wanted to take the broadsword from atop the fireplace and cut their heads off as they approached his house.
That wouldn’t do much good to anyone. He’d be shot down by crossbows sooner or later or they would send more men from the manor and they would nail him to a cross and make an example out of him. It was a dire situation, no doubt.
III
On the fourth day of her terrible sickness, Elizabeth had passed; the lump under her armpit had begun to ooze and the one sticking out of her neck had exploded onto William’s shirt. The bloody, chunky green, matter soaked William’s shirt and in that moment he almost vomited.
Though the only thing he did was cry; he dropped to his knees and put his face onto Elizabeth’s stomach. He sobbed like a child, cursing god’s name for taking his only love away from him.
And then, as if on cue, the squeaky wheels of the carriage and the trotting of horses had stopped at door on the door. Reluctantly, William opened the door and the men who had dragged away so many people before Elizabeth had presented themselves in all their infamy. They wore black coats and black hats, and on their faces they fashioned very simple yet grotesque white masks with elongated noses. William didn’t know if this was just some sort of showmanship or precautionary measure for not contracting the disease. Or perhaps it was for both.
He stepped aside and without much hesitation, the men walked into the house. They brought the lifeless body of a woman that just recently looked like Elizabeth and loaded her onto the cart along with three other bodies. All corpses were covered in awful buboes, most of them popped and oozing blood.
He tried to touch Elizabeth once more before the carriage left but one of the men almost slapped his hand in the process.
“I don’t recommend doing that,” the man almost hissed. “That is unless you want us to bring you with us. However, that would be the end of your life, you see.” The man’s voice was muffled behind the mask, sort of distant.
William watched the carriage make its way down the road and watched it disappear behind the manor. He couldn’t accept the fact that he would never see Elizabeth again. It all seemed very surreal to him, and a good part of him wished he had come down with the pestilence too. What was it all for it Elizabeth wasn’t here with him? They had no kids and now he was completely alone.
He wiped his tears with his dirty sleeve and walked back into the house.
He sat down by the fireplace and watched the dying fire crackle for a few moments. Morbid thoughts came and went as he watched the flames slowly extinguish, thoughts of life and death, about the purpose of such a miserable life. Only now had he missed Elizabeth.
The hours were spent in silence and the dull sun that fought through the clouds had finally gone down behind the horizon. It was only then that William came to from his morbid daydream and noticed that he had been sitting in the utter dark.
And then he heard the bellowing shriek from behind the manor.
IV
The night they took Elizabeth away, was another sleepless night for William. The more he thought about the circumstances the stronger the conclusion had become that living a life in lone solitude was utterly unacceptable to him.
Perhaps Elizabeth’s death was what triggered these emotions so deep within him; that and the fact that most of the village had fallen to the terrible pestilence and that those unnerving men with masks had dragged away half the population to whatever doom had awaited their grotesque corpses.
Was there a fate worse than this disease, William thought as the daylight entered the desolate home? And yes, of course, there was that terrible bellowing sound.
He told himself he would find out.
That morning he had put on his coat, a hat as to conceal his identity and left his home. He didn’t bother leaving a note or stopping by anyone’s house. Most of the people had been long gone. The ones that were still alive in the village, he didn’t care for much for there were still merely strangers, faces with no names.
The fields were abandoned; no one worked them and the animals grazed on their own.
He had approached the manor and saw that there were still guards on watch. The carriage was there too and so were the men in those evil looking masks. He rounded the house, doing his best to remain unseen and when he was sure no one would see him, picked up his pace.
Some distance away from the manor he continued to follow the trailer for several more minutes until he came up to an entrance burrowed at the base of a hill. Yet no one could tell that this entrance was ever used. The archway was small and shrouded in overgrowth, barely big enough to fit a person through.
He mustered his courage and a brief moment of hesitation and thinking of his lost beloved, William walked in.
Immediately after walking through the small and clogged archway there was a long winding flight of steps that led even deeper into the underground. There was no light along the stairway save for a tiny lit torch that burned dim flames every dozen or so feet. Every shadow on the wall, even his own sent William into a temporary shock, for at this point his mind had begun to play tricks on him. Every shadow was a monster sent straight from hell to get him, every footstep that echoed was a growl of some fiend that hungered to peel the flesh off his bones.
The deeper he descended the fouler the stench became; the air was putrid, smelling of damp earth and blood, some freshly spilt, some old and already hardened. Nausea had slowly set it for he felt as if all the graves had opened at once and all the bodies that had decomposed for so long had finally started to roam free, intoxicating the air with their awful stench of rotten flesh and innards.
He hung onto the wall as if for dear life and finally after so many winding and narrow steps he had finally made it to the bottom of this wretched place.
The base of whatever this structure had been was dimly lit. The series of torches continued to stretch far ahead of him. The hallway he had stared down resembled those in the castles, though this one was laid out with a much cruder and roughly cut stone. With a trembling step, he began to walk down the corridor; on each side was a cell and some of these cells contained human remains. Piles and piles of bones that used to be the people who had lived in the village were scattered all over the cells and the corridor.
This was perhaps the place they took all the sick and the dead; this underground chamber had served as an infirmary, William had no doubt about it. All the villagers that had fallen prey to the pestilence were brought here by the two masked men to await their doom. And yet William couldn’t rest his mind for they were not the only villagers that were taken here. His wife among many others was brought here already dead.
He knew something else was here.
That strong and deep bellowing sound had to have come from here. He heard it many times when they had taken the sick and the dead away on the carriage.
He made his way further down this dimly and ominous corridor until he came out into a rather large and round chamber that had a dome shaped roof and in the center of this roof was a round opening that lead in and out of this hellish prison. In the center of this domelike chamber was a pile of bones, and there were many more scattered about. William had concluded immediately that this opening was the entrance point where they had dumped the already dead villagers. The thing that he knew had resided here devoured them upon being dropped. He could see shreds of their clothes lying around.
The place had an incredibly strong stench of blood and there was plenty of it, both old and new. He walked around the perimeter and stared at the large uneven opening on the other side of this dome. From there a strong gust of putrid wind came and hit him like a brick wall; the gust smelled stronger that the already polluted air of the chamber and he could tell that it had an animalistic feature to it. It smelled of decomposing flesh, blood and innards both human and its own. By the sound of its breathing and heart beat, the fiend had to be larger than an ordinary animal, say a wolf for instance. Yes, this was much larger than a pesky wolf the guards had to fight off to protect the villagers in the fields.
Every heart beat the creature gave off, it sent a tiny vibration through the chamber. Then it stopped and from the darkness in the opening it showed itself in all its grotesque glory.
It first showed its head out of that darkness, the head that looked like that one of a mangy wolf, its eyes glowing bright orange. Then it began to take slow strides on its talon feet and eventually showed its hellish body in its entirety.
It walked on all fours though it looked like it could pounce and use its hind legs while it held its victims with the front two. The wings looked scabbed, leathery like, as if it were from a mutant, oversized bat. The tail that split into three separate whips somewhere down the middle were jagged, like the daggers that they were and William saw that blood still dripped from them.
The body appeared to be covered in flesh wounds, though at a second look, William noticed that it was simply the texture that gave off this illusion. It was muscular, William thought in horror and some of the meat and muscles showed through the torn, furry skin.
The creature brought its ugly head down as if to more carefully observe its next victim. The sound that came from its very core was a guttural one, the sound that sent chills down William’s spine. No, this wasn’t the deep bellow that it sounded after it had devoured its victims, the sound William had heard many times. This was a demon’s sound, a low, wet growl that came straight from the stomach.
William stepped back and touched the wall. He then moved in a circle, away from the beast that had stared directly at him; it watched his every move, almost in sync and he knew that he had to make it back to the corridor if he wanted to get out of this hell alive.
The scariest thing, even scarier than the certain death he was facing, was that he knew the creature, knew its name. He remembered its rough picture and name from the Old Persian books. They called the creature Manticore. Another name attributed to it, William remembered, was Man Eater. It all made sense now, for the thing was the perfect killing machine, the one that had disposed of all the infected bodies. It was a pet of the degenerate lord of the manor and while it was fed, it was calm.
Manticore had finally opened its large mouth and showed the rows of sharp teeth, dozens and dozens of them. William could see the meat and flesh still hang between them, the flesh of the poor villagers that had succumbed to the pestilence and were in the end denied the proper burial. Instead they ended up as a Manticore fodder, just minced meat for the hellish fiend.
The beast readied itself, its butt in the air, tails whipping to and fro.
William tried to run to the side, aiming for the entrance back into the corridor. Manticore had jumped several feet toward the fleeing man and landed just short. It whipped the tail and one of the points had pierced William’s shoulder.
The wound was large; perhaps the size of an adult fist, and William began to bleed immensely. Seconds passed though to William time was at a standstill. He was sure that what the thing had on or in its jagged, pointy tails was some kind of venom, for William began to feel dizzy.
The creature moved about him, observing him, studying him, anticipating William’s next move.
Then it closed in. It closed the distance between itself and the prey and next William was plunged into agonizing pain; Manticore had taken both of his legs, up to the knees, into its mouth and taken a bite. The bones cracked, William could hear them crack, and after a tug or two, the legs came clean off. The creature chewed on them hungrily as blood sprayed all over. William tried to scream though the venom had begun to work its way into his nervous system.
Though he was paralyzed, he could still feel the pain. He felt every agonizing moment of it. He looked down at the thing as it chewed his legs, blood dripping from its mouth. Before he began to slip into eternal unconsciousness, the thing came around and slowly put his head into its mouth. He felt its sharp teeth around his neck, though for a very brief moment.
And then, there was nothing but darkness.
Mantiocre crushed the bones with its powerful jaws as it chewed hungrily. Soon, William’s remains were scattered along with his fellow villagers in this dome of doom; yet these remains were just a few crushed bones and bloody, shredded pieces of clothing, nothing of incredible importance that would hint that it was in fact him that had suffered such a gruesome death.
The beast bellowed and slowly retreated into its lair where it began its slumber, awaiting its next batch of victims.
Death Rattle 