Sawbones

Unable to escape the horrific recollections of his Civil War service even in the remoteness of the Dakota Territory, a surgeon finds his nightmares bleeding into reality.

***Content warning: This episode deals with themes of warfare, substance abuse, and associated psychological trauma, and contains both gore and body horror. Listener discretion is strongly advised.***

Thank you for listening! If you have any feedback or inquiries regarding the show, please feel free to drop me a line at darkerpasturespodcast@gmail.com.

Transcript

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

Some events cast long shadows, over our lives, over history, over the land. None casts a shadow so long as war, and that darkness can linger through decades and generations, festering like a secret, gangrenous wound. Nourished by shame and denial, grown fat on hidden iniquity and unacknowledged guilt, such spiritual putrescence can finally rupture and spew forth new monstrosities – quite literally, in these darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro - Continues]

NARRATOR

Episode Twenty-Two: Sawbones.

(Sounds of raccoon vocalizations)

NARRATOR

Horace Crawley sits on the back porch of his little house, which rests on the western edge of Wiberg. Smoking his pipe in the blue twilight, he stares out over the tall yellow grass of the open prairie from which the small frontier town seems to have spontaneously sprung full-grown, the transition between settlement and open range stark and abrupt.

For the moment, Horace is content, at ease and at peace – a vanishingly rare and precious experience for him. So often, his sleep is restless, and he wakes in the night believing that he is once more in the squalid and cacophonic tents of the field hospital, surrounded by the maimed and the dying. Sometimes he can feel the polished handle of the bone saw in his palm so plainly that he has to look to see that he is only gripping the edge of his bedframe, or a knotted, sweat-soaked sheet.

But in this moment, none of these thoughts, none of these memories, torment him. He thinks only of the excellent dinner he shared with the widow Sundby and her fourteen-year-old son Axel, the pleasure of the fine tobacco in his pipe, and the deliciously cool breeze the evening has brought.

He is torn from this joyous reprieve by the pounding of a fist upon his front door. With a faint sight, Horace rises from his seat and moves around the house, doing his best to suppress a grimace upon recognizing his caller.

Unkempt, worrisomely thin, and missing both the eye and most of the arm on his left side, Zebadiah Olwood is afflicted with yet another less immediately visible ailment which troubles so many veterans of the war between states – that disease for which cure and cause are the same.

Trying to muster as much friendly warmth as he can feign, Horace asks the pale, shivering man what brings him, despite knowing full well the answer already. Dabbing the beading sweat on his brow with a filthy handkerchief and then blowing his nose into it, Zeb says, with the usual mixture of shame and plaintiveness, that he needs more of his medicine – for the old pain of his injuries, of course.

Overwhelmed with a familiar mélange of pity, frustration, and guilt that Zeb’s visits always arouse, Horace reluctantly tells him to come inside, fully aware that his choice is between denying Zeb’s need and likely killing him quickly and painfully, or feeding it and destroying him just a little more insidiously.

Once within, Horace goes to his locked cabinet, produces the key, and extracts the little dark bottle of opium pills, tapping out a few into a small paper packet. As he hands it to the miserable Zeb, so clearly suffering not only from his dependence but also from the self-loathing it causes him, Horace urges him gently to make the pills last, to use them sparingly and only at the utmost necessity. His supply, he explains, has run low, and there is no telling when the new stock he has ordered will finally be delivered.

With profuse thanks, Zeb clutches the packet tightly to his shriveled chest and makes an obsequious exit. As ever, the encounter leaves Horace depressed, and he half-heartedly returns to his seat on the back porch and tries to rekindle his pipe. The sunlight has all but failed, and he cannot seem to stoke the remaining tobacco, and so after a few moments he empties the pipe bowl in disgust, then rises and retreats inside, resigned to bed and the sleeplessness he will likely find there – to the memories, distorted by the phantasms of dreams, of screaming, rotting men, and the endless flow of blood and pus.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Horace sits in his favorite chair, rereading yet again Lister’s treatise on antiseptic surgery – an exercise in psychological masochism. He reflects ruefully that if the Englishman had made his discoveries a few years earlier, so many more men and boys might have come home from the war, spared slow and awful deaths from the very treatment meant to save them. And Horace wonders how many of those souls he is personally responsible for sending to their graves.

The sunlight falls golden and warm through the window beside him, gently illuminating the open page on his lap, when a boy from the Akerlund family appears on the other side of the glass, his head casting a shadow over Horace’s reading.

The boy’s brow is sweaty, his chest heaving. From the expression on his face, Horace’s mind goes icy, crystal clear but utterly devoid of warmth or feeling. He gathers up his tools in his worn but sturdy leather satchel, packs a few bottles of ether, chloroform, carbolic acid, and opium. Then he goes outside to meet the youth, lets him lead the way toward the field where his gravely injured father lies.

It is only hours later, after the badly mangled man has proven utterly beyond his ability to save, that Horace returns home, thoughts bleak and his aging body sore. Past forty, the years have not fallen lightly upon him, and it seems his every bone and muscle aches deeply.

For a while, he sits by the window, the pages of Lister’s findings lying beside him, unheeded. Horace thinks about calling on the widow, Margret Sundby, whose company has always proven such balm to his troubled spirit, but he decides that doing so would be selfish of him – that no one else needs be poisoned by his bitter mood.

He stays up far too late into the night, smoking his pipe and staring out across the moonlit prairie, listening to the rare and haunting voice of a large wolf in the distance. In his weary but restless mind, the howling melds with the old screams from long-quiet throats that still echo in the endless depths of his thought.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

It is two days after the fact the Margret tells him over dinner that the Svenssons found old Zeb in their west field one morning, hand clutched over his heart and his milky right eye staring wide at the cloudless blue sky.

As though he’d seen an angel descending to take him up, she says.

Horace tries to pass the rest of their dinner in good humor, but the murky suspicion that he had failed to save yet another soul dogs his thoughts throughout, and when he arrives home almost an hour after dark, he digs out an old bottle of whiskey and pulls deeply from it. Then he goes back outside to drunkenly wander the fields and pastures, eyes tearing in the cool night air. Horace lies to himself that it is only the bite of the wind.

He thinks, as he has not for many years, of his little sister, Alethea. As a boy, he adored and doted upon her, indulged her every childish whim. Then came the day when a runaway cart in the Boston streets crushed her little arm, and even after the doctor and the surgeon treated her wound, it festered badly, at least killing her on the very cusp of her sixth birthday.

Before that awful summer, Horace had dreamt of being a sea captain, or a military officer, or an explorer of the still little-known places of the world. But Alethea’s anguish and loss had birthed in him a new and almost obsessive interest in anatomy and medicine that shaped the course of his life irrevocably.

But too late, he thinks. He has always been too late, and insufficient.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

When he does at last sleep again, he dreams once more of the cots and tables of the field hospital, of screams and blood and the hideous rasp of the bone saw, the metallic whisper of the catling knife.

Horace sits upright in bed, a ragged groan escaping from his lips. He does not at once realize what has actually awoken him; it is only when the insistent knocking upon his door is repeated that he understands the need for haste. Rising and slipping on trousers and a shirt over his union suit, he rushes out to open the door.

He is greeted by the sight of two men he knows, the blacksmith and the keeper of Wiberg’s general store, supporting between them a third man who is unfamiliar. The man’s right sleeve is soaked with blood, both fresh red and old brown. Briefly, the blacksmith explains that the stranger came riding into town, calling loudly for a doctor, his horse lathered and nearly dead beneath him. Only a few moments after he drew his steed to a stop, the man collapsed and slid out of his saddle, just in front of the general store. Luckily, the shopkeeper had been in late, taking inventory, and had immediately been able to help the wounded stranger.

Horace directs the men to lay the patient onto the table as he cleans his tools in diluted carbolic acid, then he removes the man’s belt, into which are tucked two worn but well-maintained Navy Colts. Trying not to focus on this detail, he proceeds to remove the man’s jacket and shirt, and clenches his teeth as he recognizes a gunshot wound. This one appears to be from buckshot rather than a bullet, but the foul smell and the angry veins of red streaking away from the swollen edges of the wound are all too familiar. Horace tries to sound calm as he asks the man how long he has ridden with the wound.

The answer that he wasn’t sure would come is a hoarse whisper that Horace must strain to catch. Three and a half days, the man says, and Horace has to consciously stop himself from grinding his teeth. Not only is the answer one he feared, but the whisper carries a trace of a drawl that awakens unbidden associations, that makes Horace immediately think of the man as the enemy.

The war is over, he reminds himself. Nevertheless, he cannot wholly quiet the quiet inner voice that whispers perhaps it is better if the man should die.

Still, Horace summons the inner ice, and sets to work in odiously well-practiced routine. Beneath the conjured placidity, he is sickened by the sight of the tourniquet, of the knife and saw, by the smell of chloroform. He is thankful only for the east with which the weakened man is coaxed into unconsciousness.

Yet to Horace’s dismay, the man does not survive the treatment, expiring upon the operating table midway through the removal of the festering limb. Perhaps he was weakened by the sickness spreading through his bloodstream, Horace tries to convince himself, or some congenital and invisible frailty of constitution. He tries to tell himself that the man’s death is not his fault, but the memory of that little voice of doubt telling him the man should die nags at his conscience.

And that voice resurges, when Horace looks over at the brace of revolvers in the dead man’s discarded belt.

Wanly, Horace asks the blacksmith to fetch the pastor and the carpenter, thinking bleakly that there is yet another soul for the hungry earth to swallow. The ice inside him groans and gives way, and he tumbles into gulfs of deepest night.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

After the dead man is removed from his home and Horace is once more alone, he doesn’t even try to return to sleep, but instead gathers his bottle of whiskey and removes to the back porch, sitting and drinking as the night gradually gives way to the greyness of coming dawn. The moon, almost full, shines brightly upon the grassland, lighting it only a little less clearly than the coming day.

It is only after he has begun to drift on the soporific fog of liquor that a hint of motion jerks him back into wakefulness. Straining his eyes, he stares out into the middle distance of the shadowy pastures, waiting to catch any sign of further movement. But all that moves is the grass, whispering in the chilly breeze.

Sealing the bottle clumsily and with a muttered curse, Horace carelessly stows it under his chair and stumbles inside, vowing that he will stop drinking so much and wondering if he is lying to himself, just as Zeb used to lie that his medicine was only for the pain of his old wounds.

As he settles into bed, Horace cannot help but muse that the impression left by the movement in the moonlit grass was one of something large, too big by far to be a fox or bird or even a coyote. And yet the movement had been similarly furtive and swift.

A wolf, he tells himself, as he finally slips into sleep with the help of the whiskey and the sun’s first fingers creep over the horizon.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The evening that he and Margret end their weekly dinner visit with a chaste and tentative kiss, Horace returns home humming an old tune, brimming with a cheer that feels almost alien. Only when he passes through his front door does he remember that the tune is one used to soothe little Alethea with – and which he occasionally used to comfort the men of the field hospital.

For a couple of hours, he reads by lamplight to distract himself from his souring thoughts. He reads until his eyes burn and his head aches, but even then, when he finally goes to bed, he lies awake, staring at the ceiling. Memories clamor behind his eyes: the scream of his sister under the cart, the pavilions reeking with the miasma of souring wounds and poisonous blood and seeping pus, the roar of rifle volleys and gun lines and the choking, hellish clouds of black powder smoke.

And when sleep finally comes, it melds insidiously with recollection, so that he moves among the tents of the field hospital, assigned the dreadful task of marking out those who can be saved and those who cannot – or at least will not. Yet against his will, he finds himself sentencing each patient to death, no matter the severity of their injuries.

Then one surgeon, a man with his face wholly obscured by a bloody cloth wrapping, emerges from a tent and hands him a bone saw, the serrations of the blade tacky with blood and crumbed by tiny fragments of bone.

Take their heads off, the faceless surgeon instructs him. We will not need those.

Horace waits until the surgeon retreats into another tent before he tosses aside the saw and runs away, toward the edge of the cluster of tents. Yet the rows of pavilions seem to march off into every horizon, this abode of morbidity endless.

Just when he has almost given up all hope of escaping, he comes abruptly to the edge, the pale tents opening on a featureless plain scored and pitted by every manner of firearm, its churned earth and torn grass smeared with gore.

And before him, between the hospital camp and the plain, rises an ever-growing pile of severed limbs, mismatched and jumbled and drawing clouds of innumerable, ravenous flies. Frozen by horror, Horace stares, but falls backward onto the earth in shock when the mass of bleeding, discarded flesh quivers, slightly at first, then with mounting violence. One of the hands nearest him flexes its fingers tentatively, and then slowly turns and stretches feebly toward him, the reaching fingers dripping the blood that flows down from the other limbs above it.

Horace wakes screaming, and it takes several long moments for him to realize he is not in the field hospital, but his own cramped bedroom. He lies there, sobbing, glad only that his solitude prevents anyone from noticing either his cries or his tears in the night.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Sleep comes less and less, and he spends his nights drinking and reading by lamplight that he cannot really afford to burn so needlessly. Sometimes he manages to drown his unquiet thoughts in whisky, passing out in his armchair and waking far too late in the morning, but sometimes sleep never arrives at all, and morning finds him weak and languid, his heartbeat feeling faint and irregular in his chest.

Worst of all, though, is when the dreams still find him, wrapped as he is in his fog of brown, barrel-aged stupor, each time showing him fresh chimeras of nightmare and memory.

When next the time comes for dinner with the handsome widow, he sobers up long enough to conceal his new intemperance from her. Yet as he walks the short route to the Sundby farm, he gets an unpleasant sensation of being observed, of being followed. Stopping and scanning his surroundings, he finds only the faint wagon trail that leads out to the farm, and waves of swaying golden grass and grain.

Trying to shrug off the feeling as a side of effect of his growing dependence on drink, he walks on, telling himself that the rustling and shifting sounds around him are only the wind, that the barest hints of fleeting motion he from time to time perceives in his peripheral vision are only tricks of the waning light on an overwrought mind.

(Tranquil music fades in)

NARRATOR

Once he is safely ensconced within the farmhouse, eating the frugal yet toothsome fare of the widow’s table, something like ease begins to settle over him, and he is almost able to forget his nightmares, and their recent apparent intrusion even into waking.

He, Margret, and Axel play a game of three-handed euchre, a game which Horace has patiently taught them and which they all very much enjoy. Axel has proven an absolute fiend for the game, and handily wins twice, gently but cunningly mocking the older man and leaving them all laughing.

Yet, as the evening grows old and the hour of his departure looms, some of Horace’s former disquiet returns. As they put away the cards, Margret asks him if he is troubled, observing shrewdly that he seems a little distant and ill at ease.

Horace lies and says that all is well, forcing the most convincing smile he can muster.

Then, seized by a sudden impulse that takes him utterly by surprise, he asks her if she would have him as her husband.

Margrets eyes widen in shock, and then delight, and, laughing as she falls into his arms, she repeats the word yes over and over again between swift, sweet kisses. Axel beams, the haunted hollows that have lingered under his eyes ever since his father’s death seeming at last fully illuminated.

For the briefest of spaces, Horace is well and truly happy, for the first time in many years.

(Tranquil music fades out)

NARRATOR

It is almost two full hours later that he departs, almost scandalously late, should anyone espy him on his way. But there is little chance of that, on the little-used wagon road as midnight draws near, and despite the chill of the night, Horace feels warmed still by the brightness of his beloved’s smile and the promise of a shared future.

As he turns to offer her house a final, fond parting glance for the night, he sees it, crouched spiderlike upon the rooftop over the door he passed through only moments ago. He blinks in the moonlight, sure that it must be a deception of his weary eyes, of his mind addled by many sleepless nights. Yet the image does not resolve into any other, more rational sight, but sits nearly motionless, swaying ever so slightly upon its many and mismatched limbs.

(Creepy music fades in)

NARRATOR

Though it lacks any obvious eyes or seemingly any head, it seems palpably aware of him, and Horace even feels certain somehow that it is facing him, despite the lack of any discernible anatomical clue to that effect.

Throat gone absolutely dry, Horace struggle to swallow, to breathe. For an instant, he considers running back to the house, but whether this impulse is born from a desire to protect his potential family or merely out of cowardice is unclear to him. But he cannot seem to muster any movement from his limbs; he feels powerless to do anything but stand there and look at the horror on the rooftop.

The thing, a mass of mangled and severed limbs somehow coalesced into a single cohesive and yet incoherent being, a thing that moves and lives without any sign of functioning vital organs or even a true body beneath its multitude of scavenged appendages, suddenly stops its subtle swaying and raises three more or less intact arms momentarily. Then, with deliberate and exaggerated ponderance, it points downward at the house upon which it sits perched.

A moment of stillness passes, and then, soundlessly, it scuttles away from Horace up and over the roof, disappearing from his sight. Its movement seems far too swift, too adroit, for anything of such size.

For a long time, the aging surgeon simply stands there, his flesh prickling and cold through to his very marrow – and none of it owing to the night’s chill. For he believes he partially understood the thing, understands that it threatened his newfound joy and perhaps the very lives of his few loved ones.

(Creepy music fades out)

NARRATOR

He wonders if he should knock once more upon Margret’s door, warn her about the thing that lurked above her with such hideous and unlikely stealth. Yet he cannot think of how he might explain her danger without sounding like he has hallucinated – a thing which he fears is very possible – and can think of no explanation for staying overnight that might not be taken for lewd impropriety.

So, when he finally summons the nerve to unroot himself and walk homeward, he jumps at each small nocturnal sound, sure it is the thing returning to claim him for whatever designs such an ungodly thing might cherish. Yet it is only the wholesome nightly activity of the prairie and its many earthly creatures.

Crossing at last over his own threshold, he does not even think of the whiskey bottle. Instead, he moves toward the cabinet, unlocks it, and draws out the smaller bottle that drew and doomed poor Zeb. He hesitates only an instant before partaking of that same dubious antidote.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

For the next few days, he keeps his door locked, thankful that no one calls upon him and unsure how he would respond if they did. He does not venture from his house, hardly eating and emptying his chamber pot through the window.

His days are spent in fitful, drug-aided slumber, and his nights are filled with anxious watching, moving from one window and one room to another so that no approach on his house from any direction might go unnoticed.

And yet, every time a timber creaks or a sudden gust wails, he is sure the thing has clambered atop his roof, is tearing through the barriers that shelter Horace from the outside world.

And how thin those barriers are, he suddenly realizes, how meager and pathetic in the face of all the threats nature and humanity has to offer: fire, blizzard, lightning, flood, tornado, the blast of a cannon, the predations of a hungry bear, even the frenzied efforts of a truly desperate man.

Of the threats beyond the scope of nature and humanity, he doesn’t even dare to ponder long, for fear his beleaguered mind will finally and completely shatter.

Then one evening, there does come at last a knocking at his door. At first, he simply pretends to be out, hoping that the caller will give up and depart. But the knocking continues, growing more and more insistent. For what must be nearly ten minutes, Horace hides, waiting for the knocker to leave, and watching with growing impatience and alarm as the sun edges toward its resting place in the west. Finally, when he feels afraid the knocker will linger until after nightfall and hinder his nightly vigil, he opens the door.

It is a young woman, one of the Svensson daughters, Horace thinks. Her eyes widen with surprise at his sudden appearance, and he mumbles out a feeble excuse of feeling unwell by way of apology for his delay. He invites the young woman in, doing his best not to let his impatience color his voice.

The young woman begins to tell him her baby will not stop crying, has not stopped for two full days now, and that neither she nor her young husband know what to do. They both fear for the child’s health, that something is very wrong with their infant daughter – and she whisperingly confides that sometimes her husband is so upset by the babe’s constant wailing, she is afraid he might harm the child.

Horace listens absent-mindedly, occasionally asking a question and only half-listening to the answer. His eyes keep drifting toward the windows, visually measuring the distance between sun and horizon and calculating the time until full dark falls.

When she has finished, he tells her that it sounds like typical colic, and that the best medicine in his experience is often to simply wait it out – despite how difficult that may be for the parents. Likely, he tries to reassure her, there is little risk of real danger to the child, merely a bout of discomfort that will in time end.

Still, the young woman begs him for help, to please come look at the baby.

Horace closes his eyes and rubs at his temples. Surgery is his skillset – he feels ill-prepared for infant care, and he can think only of the shadows are even now lengthening, becoming pools of darkness in which any creeping, cunning thing might hide. That darkness, he knows, will only deepen if he follows the woman home, becoming full pitch by the time he leaves to return to his own door.

Suddenly, inspiration flashes through his mind, and he opens his eyes and moves to the cabinet. Unlocking it, he draws out a very small bottle of laudanum, then turns and hands it to the woman.

Give the child only two drips per day, he says, until the colic resolves.

The woman lingers a moment, seeming unsure, asking if he will not at least look at the baby first. Donning what he hopes is a reassuring smile, Horace tells her that this ailment is not at all uncommon, and though unpleasant, will soon be behind her and her new family.

That seems to dispel her fears, and she thanks him profusely, pays for the medicine, and departs. Watching her go from the window, Horace moves to the door and locks it again when he thinks she is far enough away not to hear it.

Then, horrified by the thought that the thing might have moved through the gathering twilight while he was distracted, he begins his routine of walking the circuit of the windows, peering carefully out into the dimming landscape.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

He treats his next few patients with similar inattention, unable to think about anything but the thing upon the rooftop and its murky threat. Increasingly, he must rely upon drink and opium to sleep, and yet each when he succeeds, his nightmares are ever more vivid.

For the first time since he settled in Wiberg, he regrets coming to so remote and small a place. He had come seeking refuge from the memories of his past, and had come just close enough to believe it was possible, before the thing arrived and showed him the truth of his lot – that he was already damned for his failings, damned to live wretchedly and shamefully and to die filled with regret.

It is in the midst of the worst nightmare he has ever had, after the thing has stalked an eternal night and killed all the inhabitants of Wiberg and the surrounding farms, then used their parts to assemble other beings like itself, that he wakes to a frantic knocking at the door. He sits upright at once, not because of the urgency of the knocking, but because the room is far too dark – he realizes he has overslept and that night is already falling.

Running out of the bedroom and to the front door, he throws it open and asks, rather rudely, what the caller wants. Yet when he looks outside, there is no one standing before the door.

A cold November gust blows past him into the house, making him shiver, and he lingers but a moment longer, peering into the moonless night to be sure there is no knocker, before retreating back inside and locking the door again.

He has moved only a single pace from the door before the knock is repeated.

This time, Horace moves not to the door, but to the window beside his armchair. From that angle, he figures he should be able to see any prankster or fool disturbing his rest without cause. Yet when he looks outside, there is again only darkness upon his threshold.

Then, slowly and noiselessly, three arms descend from the eaves to wave languidly before him. They are of different proportions, yet they move in perfect unison.

Horace steps back, stumbling over his armchair and sprawling upon the floor. Gibbering faintly, he scuttles back away from the window, back into his bedroom, and kicks shut the door. Then he turns to the small window over his bed, horrified. Glancing at his chest of drawers, he clambers to his feet and pushes it in front of the window, even as he doubts that either is barrier enough should the thing truly decide to come for him.

This feeble fortification accomplished, he collapses onto his bed, sobbing mutedly into his pillow.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

It is the next day – or perhaps several days after, time has become harder for Horace to track – that he emerges from his bedroom as the sunlight falls fully upon the world. But it was not the seeming safety of day that has drawn him out, but a soft knocking and a gentle voice.

Margret stands before his door, calling his name.

As if in a dream, he moves toward the door. His every fiber screams for him to throw it open, to pull her into a fierce embrace, to lose himself in her gentle feminine strength and subtle wisdom. Yet he dares not, for fear that she might remain here even a moment longer.

Instead, he croaks out that she must go.

She calls his name, so very sadly, and asks what has happened to him.

Nothing, he answers, and says that he is no longer her concern, that she should never think of him again.

Are you so cruel? she asks him, tears audible in her voice. Would you pretend to love us, offer us a future, and then forsake us so unkindly and break our hearts?

His own voice cracking, Horace tells Margret that he is not worthy of her, and that she must not marry him, must not even think of it.

Find a better man, he tells her, and be happy.

There is a long silence then, and finally, more faintly, Margret repeats her question, asking what has happened to him.

Horace makes no reply.

Another pause, and then, her voice taking a different tone, Margret tells him that Hilde Svensson’s baby has died.

Horace blinks, feeling breathless.

Then, slowly, her footsteps recede into the distance, and Horace is left alone in the house.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The following days are a meaningless blur, but Horace no longer cares than he cannot seem to track them. He drains the last of the whiskey, then breaks into the bottles of laudanum and opium pills, dulling his mind until he feels nothing and can pass the days.

The nights, he still spends wandering the house, checking the windows. But now he is less diligent, sometimes even sleeping through part of the night.

He does not eat, hardly drinks anything that does not come out of a bottle. He knows that his body will fail, if he continues this course, but he simply does not care.

And he does not answer the door, no matter the hour of the knock. Many times, he feels certain that he hears more than one hand upon the wood, and wishes only that it were of stouter construction.

Sometimes he hears voices too, but whether they are those of the townsfolk or the ones that bleed ever more often out from his dreams, or those of some new and unknown horror, he dares not examine.

Then at last comes the day when the thirst is unbearable. He waits until he is sure that the light is full and yet that there are also none of his neighbors observing the house, then slips out the back door with a pan in hand, gathering up some of the lingering snow from the night before – the first snow of the year. With his pan full, he turns back toward the house – and stops short, frowning. The door, which he’d left open behind him, is now closed.

And he cannot be certain, but he thinks that, very faintly, he can hear the timbers of the house creaking within, as though a great weight moved upon it.

Dropping the pan, he turns and runs away from the house, away from the town. He casts but a single glance over his shoulder as he flees, but the house is still and unchanged behind him. Still he runs.

His lungs, no longer young and weakened by his intemperance, begin to protest violently, and after a while he falls into the grass of the fields, coughing and wheezing with an unpleasant metallic taste in his mouth. Hardly daring, he looks once more behind him, but there is no sign of any living thing in sight aside from himself. Cold moisture seeps through his clothes as he lies there, struggling to regain his breath, and he realizes he has fallen on yet another small patch of lingering snow. He gathers a handful of it and swallows it greedily, ignoring the discomfort in his haste to slake his thirst.

When he rises to his feet, he realizes that he has unconsciously fled along the route to Margret’s house – and dimly wonders if it was truly unconscious. The thought of being in her company, in partaking once more of the joys they once shared, fills him with longing, and yet he knows that cannot be again.

He knows the thing would not allow it.

And as though summoned by that thought, it looms up out of the grass before him, standing on dozens of legs and arms, waving dozens more.

It must be larger than three bull bison, Horace thinks inanely.

The thing, swaying in what can only be a dance, but a dance that blasphemes against all that is wholesome and healthy in the universe, begins to creep toward him.

Horace turns to run, but still weak and winded, his foot catches in a tangled knot of grass and he falls flat upon the earth. Groaning and struggling feebly to rise again, he feels as much as he sees the thing’s shadow loom over him.

No, he breathes.

The thing moves closer. A cold, rough, long-dead hand reaches out and brushes his cheek, testing the taste of his flesh like a tongue.

Please, he whimpers.

Seven more hands reach out, then over a dozen, all of them gentle with their bloodless touch – almost as though they are caressing him, he thinks.

Then, still gently, they seize him: his legs, his arms, his shoulders. They begin to draw him up off the earth, into their midst. The thing is swallowing him, Horace realizes.

No, he cries now, hoarsely, but within himself, another voice says, yes, I belong here. I deserve this. Take me.

Then, several of the arms near the center of the mass unfold like a budding flower, and from within emerges what looks like a head, but completely swathed in white cloth and stained with old, dried blood.

Several arms wrap themselves around Horace’s neck like snakes, and finally, Horace understands the thing’s need, the thing’s threat.

For it is alive, despite all apparent logic, and all living things must feed in some way or another. All must nourish themselves – and procreate.

And who better to help this thing, born of human ruin, to do that than a skilled and compliant surgeon? Or, should he prove less than compliant, the ingested mind of that surgeon?

The hands tighten their grip, cold and ironlike.

Horace begins to scream, but the many hands are quick to snuff it out into silence. Their work, as it always has been in this second life, is completed in perfect, deathly silence. And when finished, there is no sign left of Wiberg’s tortured surgeon beyond his vacated house, and the many empty bottles scattered upon its floor.

(Bleak music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, and arrangement by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]