THE TRADE

Art by Ilia Kate

THE TRADE

by Tom Hollow

The trader had discovered a massacre. Every month, he visited the lakeside village to strike a bargain for the leathers they crafted. He could not speak their tongue, but some of the young ones spoke simple English, and they all understood the language of bargaining. Pots and pans ladened his backpack—metallurgy was beyond their means—and he expected to receive a good haul in return. They had always welcomed him with an offering of hot stew, but that day he was welcomed with the wretched stench of viscera and gore.

Blood tainted the snow, violent red smeared across a pure canvas. Blackened limbs lay ownerless with twisted fingers clawing at air. Ribcages were ornaments carelessly strewn about, dedications to wretchedness. Heads half buried, alive with agony as if they suffered beyond their severance.

The trader fought the bile rising in his throat. What could have done such a thing? Twenty-seven men, women, children. All dead? They were few, but not defenceless. They were hunters, survivors. God, they’re all dead.

Across a wooden post were deep scars—evidence of a great, vicious predator. Too big to be a bear. Too big to be anything. Something monstrous made these marks.

A deep creak startled him, and his immediate thought was that a door must have opened. However, he deduced that could not be the case, as only tents populated the village. The droning creak continued. It’s coming from the shore.

The trader rounded a tent, then saw him. One of the villagers—no more than a teenager—knelt naked by the lake. He hurried to his side and began to ask, ‘Boy, are you alri—’ but his voice was stolen by the sight.

The boy’s muzzle and bare chest were painted in blood; so much that it dripped from his nose in excess. He was crying in the desperate, empty way one does when they have run dry of howls and tears, yet agony still flows in abundance. He whispered something in his own tongue, barely even a sound.

The trader did not know the boy’s name, but he recognised him at a glance. Only fifteen, by the trader’s estimation. It’s the one who would bring the leathers out for the elders to bargain with. I saw him when I left last month. He carried his little sister on his shoulders so she could pretend she was a bear. God, what has he done?

The boy finally noticed the trader and looked up to him with bloodshot eyes, filled with confusion. He gripped a bone dagger, pristine and unsullied.

‘I tried to,’ said the boy, voice scraped thin. ‘It won’t let me.’

He offered the dagger.

‘It won’t let me,’ he murmured. ‘It won’t let me.’

The trader accepted the gift. He considered leaving the boy to rot in his own grief. He’s a murderer, a devil. He killed his whole family. He’s no better than an animal. No, he’s worse than an animal. No animal would have killed like this.

But he considered the alternative, leaving him alive. The boy would find another village, perhaps repeat the bloodshed. And what of his family? Is there no justice for them? He recalled the image of children playing in snow, and thought of how their laughter was stolen from the world. No. He doesn’t deserve life.

The trader performed his duty. Fresh blood flooded over his hands when he bloomed the boy’s throat. As he bled out, his gaze never drifted from his executioner—eyes filled with confusion, until the last moments, when the trader could only find sorrow.

Gripping his stomach, the trader fell to a knee. It felt like something had leapt into him and stirred his insides. He collected himself, then washed clean in the lake, and left the village as he found it.

#

A month had passed since that morning. He had seen fit not to disclose the events to his wife, being so gruesome. When she asked why he would need to find a new village to trade with, he told her, ‘They packed up and left. Went to find a better place to hunt.’

He had thought the event put out of his mind, but that night, while showing his son how to train their dog, it had all returned to him in an awful flood, clawing his stomach and sickening him once again. The wretchedness clung to his innards for the rest of the day, until he finally managed to sleep.

His rest was omitted—an instant gap in consciousness—one moment he was with his wife, the next he was beside the kennel. He was kneeling in the dirt, their dog torn open before him.

Falling away, he landed on his bare back and realised he was naked. His chest was sullied with blood, and he was overwhelmed by the taste of iron.

It was only after looking to his house that he grasped the extent of his misery. The door to his home was ripped from its hinges, the jamb coated in crimson. Inside, he saw a leg, so small.

#

The trader held a pistol to his temple, aiming to end his grief before it could swallow him. He wanted to squeeze the trigger, but his finger was frozen. He thought it must be cowardice, but after trying again, he understood it as something deeper.

His finger was restrained from within, like a string pulled taught that kept his knuckles from bending. From deep in his core, something made itself known. He could see it—the fangs, the claws, the terrible black coat. He could smell its fur, damp with gore.

A voice leaked through the beast’s teeth, a bottomless growl that told him, ‘No.’

The End