The Taken

When the rains come, the howls ascend like rancid fire. It begins with one or two and then spreads like a fire amongst them all. Like wolves calling in the hills, but without unity or purpose. Wild vocalizations without control, like a rage forced through damp chords of flesh crushed from them by an unseen hand. A haunted bellow of something utterly lost. A nothing calling to nothing.

The echoes in the bluffs are deceptive and I can’t tell how many there are tonight. The cries come from everywhere and the lightning just makes it worse. And tonight, there is lightning - as the southern storm disgorges herself before the rise of the mountains in a paroxysm of shattering light. Soon they will begin to gather in grey clots before the iron gate to bellow their guttural utterances like unformed profanations.

Three weeks dug in here now, after the escape from the village fifty kilometers down the mountain in a serpentine of impossible gravel turns. An abandoned mine complex shielded by masonry walls surrounded by wild Mburucuya fruit and Guava and a well that tastes of sulphur. Enough to live, enough to keep them out, but nothing to shield us from their screams.

Only three children remain. Manuella folds herself over them in the deepest room of the compound stretching a woven blanket over them cooing whispers, a lock of her greying hair curling above them like a single mobile over a crib. She oversaw the village orphanage and without her none of the children would have survived. I was their last missionary before Cholera claimed nearly everyone as entire families shed themselves into putrid, bloody latrines. They blamed the tribes in the foothills of the Andes whose blood drums throbbed dulling across the dry valleys.

The Santeríans whose gods were not ours and whose names the villagers carved with flint into the dirt only to stamp them out and urinate them into a slurry of mud and rage. Cursings and cursings without cease. The invisible war of enmity across the expanse of the lowlands until that night during Vespers prayers, when their creatures came in their rottings and everyone fell in a dark chorus of screams.

We took the only truck, gathered the ones remaining in the panic and flames, and set to the graveled mountain road which terminated here. Six of us are left.

Beneath the blanket Diego and Valentina stare longingly up to me with their black hair and dirty ponchos as I nod and smile, lying that everything is just fine. They are both just four.

But Malena, a year younger maybe, is inconsolable when these nights come, her tear coursed face swollen red with unyielding wails. It all begins when she hears the rain. Manuella, her broad face lined with crags, wistfully shrugs. She is doing her best. She had rescued Malena herself from the jungle and I didn’t ask questions.

Anders and Santiago, both still youthful, keep watch from behind a bulwark of adobe bricks near the gate. Then Anders in his strained stoicism is suddenly at the doorway. ‘Amigo. They are here.’

Too dark to count, but when the lightning detonates in rising ladders through the towers of the sky, they're there. In the white-blue flash we see them pressed against the gates like rotten dolls. The latent image of them vibrating in my eyes. Naked in an obscene tableau of pendulant filth and rage. Yet about their necks and wrists, they are adorned with hammered bangles, thin woven ropes with vague talismans and carvings of bone. This rancid legion that somehow found us across an impossible expanse of terrain. Even the gravel road left no tracings of us and which forked in a spiderweb of disparate trails to all parts of the mountain. And they found us within days.

Their meals pass through them like oily ropes, sometimes to hang like false tails to be shed mindlessly in the dark. The stench of their beings chokes the air. An acrid rot of spoiled meat and feces and the rain only makes it worse. It never dissipates. Ever.

I look over to Santiago shaking behind a low wall, his back turned away. He won’t be able to take much more of this. And in turn, as the weeks die behind us, none of us will. Their howls, their unyielding reek will eventually bring madness.

A peal of lightning hatchets across from horizon to horizon, flashing the field into day when one of the creatures stands out. A thing once a woman. A purple caesarean scar carved into pale leather skin above matted pubic hair. Breasts that once fed the child it birthed lay flattened like old thumbless mittens down her chest.

Where is your baby now? How long ago? Not long, for you look like you were young when this happened to you. Did your baby make it? Or did you take it screaming back into yourself, piece by piece in some profane counter-birth? Some godless uncreation?

The once-woman crushes against the cold wet bars of the gate, its flesh now pulling away from her ribs like wet paper, the tiny carved trinkets of skulls, hearts and crosses jolt across her chest encrusted in filth. Writhing about her, they all seem nearly blind, their red, swollen eyes unfocussed, cracked and rolled upwards.

Then chillingly her eyes lock with mine. Crusted in rust blood, they dart from me to sky and back as if some electrical switch was thrown back and forth in her decaying brain. Nerves on fire. Its eyes find me again and glare, her skeletal mouth twisting around yellowed, shattered teeth and lets out a long forlorn moan.

Anders stares wildly at me while Santiago covers his ears, stamping his foot into the muddy ground as if to drown her out. Yet it still calls.

Suddenly, Santiago grabs a pipe from the mud and rushes the gate.

‘Santiago?? Santiago! Stop! No!’

The once-woman then drifts back melting into the crush of bodies as Santiago brings the pipe down upon the closest one, caving its skull as it cleaves open to the side with the sound of a large popping egg, its yellowed brains slopping to the dust like clotted soup. Two more blows send it staggering backwards as its partial head with its spike of shattered skull drops hanging across its back and held now only by a thin straining tendon.

Santiago huffs raging through his teeth, the pipe dripping with gore. But the headless one simply recovers, returns to grip the bars and draws ragged wet breaths into its shredded windpipe like a blowhole.

‘Everyone inside. Now…’

Santiago sits on the muddy floor, his head in his hands. Anders stares blankly out the window and none of us speak a word the entire night. Deep inside, as if in a different world, Manuella lullabies the children as her voice quietly echoes off the walls. Malena has stopped crying. When the sun comes, the creatures will disband to shamble away in their defecations. But we are three hours from dawn.

…

It is noon when I wake and the air is cold. Downstairs Manuella is feeding the children rice and papaya. ‘Where are the others?’ I ask. ‘Outside,’ she says hesitantly. ‘They outside.’

But I don’t see them. The gate is open, the putrid leavings from the night before lay in dark thickened mounds. I take the pipe. Out far along the rise of waving Bahiagrass I see two figures coming my way. It’s them. I wave but they don’t wave back. I grip the pipe as I approach until I can see their faces. When I do, they look utterly bereft. ‘¿Qué es?’ Anders doesn’t look up. ‘You see.’ And they straggle past me.

But I don’t see. I scan about me as I walk farther up the rise. Then I stop. It’s a hundred or so yards out.

A llama stands crookedly in the clearing, its back legs bent underneath it, its front legs planted motionless. Its coat grey and matted with running discharge. It is shivering despite the sun. Long dark strands of drool run from its yellowed mouth and its eyes swollen to twice their size, purple and crusted with blood. It folds and twists its head from side to side then raising it from its chest, brays mournfully and drops its head again before me as if waiting. My heart is shattering.

‘Está bien,’ I whisper in dismay.

The first strike it stumbles but fights to stand, stamping its feet. I strike it again and then again. Its cries now like a baby's - thin and plaintive, till finally it collapses, shivers once more and goes still. And I hurl the pipe out into the far grass. In the distance I can hear Santiago weeping.

Back down the slope, it’s now only Anders. I put my hand on his shoulder to join the others inside. ‘Amigo,’ he nods off to my right. I turn.

The creatures are standing evenly spaced along the ridge, perfectly still and silhouetted against the darkening northern sky like crooked pagan trees. ‘Another storm tonight, Amigo.’

…

And in the perilous drench it is there again amongst the horde with her baleful keening, but I am the only one there. The rest are harbored with the children and I turn to join them. Malena has suddenly grown sick.

‘meee…mee…aaaah…’

I stop. It’s barely a hiss, but it’s there and I turn. It’s the once-woman.

‘neeeen…neeeeennnn…’

Shaken, I rush inside. I want it to be some lost fragment, something bilged up by some random firing of dead neurons. But I know it’s not.

Anders is holding Manuela who is crying while Santiago paces distraught. Manuela looks up frightened.

‘Sicker. Malena sicker.’

I pick the child up and she is ashen and shivering as I sway her in my arms. Around her neck a woven string falls loose. On it a tiny bone talisman, like a primitive locket carved crudely into a heart. I start to tremble.

‘Manuela, listen to me. Where did Malena come from? Where did you find her?’

‘Baby is safe. Safe with us. Not them.’

‘Them. Who are them? Manuela, who are them?!’

‘The mountain ones. Los diablos!’

And outside the howls ascend like rancid fire.

Oh, Jesus no.

It wants her child back.

In numbness, I hand Malena back as Santiago glares in shock. I return to the courtyard and stare at the creature.

‘Say it’.

‘neeeen…neeen…yo’

‘Niño. Tu niño.’

‘meeee…yo…

No. I slowly shake my head. ‘No. I’m sorry.’

Her jaw springs wide to twice the size possible, the shriek piercing, a preternatural wail beyond what a body could produce, the gate jolting under rotting fists. In the distance I hear the drums.

Stumbling inside, Santiago is gesticulating and sobbing as Anders restrains him, Manuela pleading. ‘Stop! Stop it!’ but no one is listening. Then comes a heavy wet thud. Then another.

The birds are the size of vultures and are descending. It sounds like hundreds. They’ve taken them too. The windows explode in knife shards as their swollen bodies collide in the darkness. Screams are now indistinguishable from each other in the chaos.

‘Where are the children?!’ I shout into the caterwaul but all I see are blood and shadows, Anders flailing. I crawl to get to him when the tumult suddenly arrests as the last of the wet impacts halters off to silence. For the first time silence. Anders and I stare at each other and clamber outside.

The creatures are gone and the rain has slackened to mist. In the mud, Manuella kneels hands outstretched, her chest heaving. Diego and Valentina shaking at her side. I look up and Santiago is shutting the gate, his clothes torn. I look wildly about.

‘Where’s Malena? Santiago, where’s Malena?’

He shakes his head. ‘It over, amigo. She back home.’

I slump numb against the wall and the night is choked again with howls.