Howls From the Dark Ages: An Anthology of Medieval Horror

by Christopher Buehlman, Brian Evenson, Bridget D. Brave, C.B. Jones, Caleb Stephens

Genres: Anthologies; Horror

Synopsis

Uncover the secret annals of untold history in these eighteen medieval manuscripts. Each tortured scribe will bring you face to face with ancient horrors lurking in cursed castles, wild woodlands, haunted hamlets, and mysterious monasteries. 

Including a lineup of authors both established and emerging, HOWL Society Press presents the first-ever anthology of historical horror from the medieval period, fittingly introduced by the writer who arguably started it all: Christopher Buehlman, author of the medieval horror epic Between Two Fires.

Cast of Narrators:

Pandora Beatrix

• "Palette" by J.L. Kiefer
• "In Every Drop" by Lindsey Ragsdale
• "The Forgotten Valley" by C.B. Jones
• "White Owl" by Stevie Edwards
• "The Lai of the Danse Macabre" by Jessica Peter

Kyle Royall-West

• "Brother Cornelius" by Peter Ong Cook
• "The Final Book of Sainte Foy's Miracles" by M.E. Bronstein
• "The Mouth of Hell" by Cody Goodfellow
• "The King of Youth vs. The Knight of Death" by Patrick Barb
• Opening/Closing Credits

Joshua Davos

• "In Thrall to This Good Earth" by Hailey Piper
• "Schizzare" by Bridget D. Brave

Matthew Byrne

• "Angelus" by Philippa Evans
• "A Dark Quadrivium" by David Worn

Lance Lovegood

• "The Lady of Leer Castle" by Christopher O'Halloran
• "The Fourth Scene" by Brian Evenson

James Takahashi

• "Deus Vult" by Ethan Yoder

Theodore T. Truman

• "A Dowry for Your Hand" by Michelle Tang

Sonja Lademacher

• "The Crowing" by Caleb Stephens

Don LaFollette

• Foreword by Christopher Buehlman

Release date: May 12, 2022

Publisher: HOWL Society Press LLC

Print pages: 340

Sample

WRITING MEDIEVAL HORROR FICTION FOR FUN AND…WELL, MOSTLY FOR FUN.

Christopher Buehlman

In the summer of 2010, I realized a lifelong dream and sold my 1930s Southern Gothic werewolf novel, Those Across the River,to Penguin, one of the biggest and most reputable publishers in the English-speaking world. Confidence seemed high at Berkeley, my division, that Those Across would be the next big thing in horror.

I was elated.

The book would come out the following year, and Penguin was ready to contract me to write a follow-up. When my editor asked me what I’d like to write next, I said, “I want to write about plague.”

I had been weaned on Stephen King’s The Stand, and as a teenager I would read any book at all about pandemics, from cheeseball Stand knock-offs to Michael Crichton’s brilliantly understated The Andromeda Strain. But I wasn’t interested in writing about a plague happening today.

I wanted to write about The Plague happening when The Plague happened. The Plague.

Capitalized, please.

That event in the 1340s that killed as many as two out of three medieval Europeans and, as one would expect, changed everything.By 1350, the time called the High Middle Ages was over, and with it went bright paintings featuring Summer and Spring; the colors of the art produced by the collective psyche grew autumnal now. The Dance of Death came into vogue, reminding us that bishops, bakers, mothers, and queens must all depart when summoned by that grinning, ubiquitous skeleton that tugged, and pulled, and sometimes bit them off the page. Laborers, their numbers thinned, walked off the farms where they had been effectively enslaved, and now sold their labor dearly. I daresay they sold it for something like what it was actually worth. Sound familiar? Plus ça change…

But rendering the summer and fall of 1348, the timeline framed in my second novel, Between Two Fires, meant understanding more than just the mechanisms and effect of the Black Death. It meant trying to understand, as best as I could, the mindset of the late medieval man or woman. It meant learning about the architecture of the period generally, and the layout of certain towns and neighborhoods specifically. It meant learning how people made war; what they ate; with whom they hunted, traveled, or made love; how they might be named; how they might be dressed.

First-hand accounts or illustrations were of course invaluable, as were insightful texts written after the fact. But the knowledge I needed would lead me to new depths of research. For example, I could find no sources in English telling me where bridges crossed the Seine in 1348 Paris. I knew about the ironically named Pont Neuf, or New Bridge, now the oldest bridge spanning that river; but since it dated from the 1500s, the Pont Neuf was not even a sketch when the Black Death came knocking. I knew about a big stone bridge called Le Grand Pont, but that collapsed in the 1200s. How the hell did 14th century Parisians get from the Right Bank to Île de la Cité to The Latin Quarter? To find out, I tapped into my college major—French—to read a French-language Atlas of Medieval Paris, which turned out to be the second most valuable single book I made use of, right after Barbara Tuchman’s masterpiece, A Distant Mirror. A lot of work for a sentence or two, I know.

I could have just said “they crossed the bridge,” and a lot of authors, understandably, would have done so in that situation. But I’m the kind of writer who wants to know what bridge, and to name it; not to show off or be pedantic, but to establish with the reader the kind of casual authority that true stories ring with. You don’t go from Sausalito to San Francisco across a bridge; you cross the Golden Gate Bridge, don’t you? You don’t walk up a road to Holyrood Castle in Edinburgh; you walk the Royal Mile. And when you approach Île de la Cité from the north in 1348, you damn well walk across the Pont aux Meuniers with its thirteen water mills at the bottom, because the Pont aux Changeurs is just for wheeled traffic, and you’ll get run over by a shit wagon. And no, I didn’t research whether or not there were shit wagons before I wrote that, but, if I had put one in the novel, you can bet I would have.

I also engaged knowledgeable beta readers to watch out for inconsistencies—one of them caught me on persimmons (which originated in East Asia and weren’t cultivated in Europe until the 19th century) and another on sunflowers, which are New World flora, and wouldn’t have shone in France until at least the sixteenth century.

Nitpicking?

Maybe.

But poor research is a form of author intrusion, and nothing is deadlier to the complex business of crafting illusions.

And what are fiction writers, particularly those in the more fantastical genres, but illusionists?

If I want you to engage the cinema of your mind to see an eely abomination in a river, or a bunch of dead people harvesting grapes, or an angel of God, I can’t also ask you to believe a little French girl in 1348 had a mule named Persimmon when you know she wouldn’t have known a persimmon from an Xbox. That’s a good way to make you remember I’m full of shit about angels, too. And, by extension, devils.

And, as a horror writer, I really want you to believe in my devils. Which brings us to the topic of medieval horror, the purview of this collection.

The first thing I think of when I think of what scared medieval Europeans is Hell. Certainly, individuals were scared of dying, getting old, illness, heights, spiders, snakes, or old ladies with moles. But the argument is compelling that a great many of them were frightened of the eternal torture promised to them by the Church should they fail to obey (wait for it…) the Church.

There’s something delicious about medieval images of Hell too, isn’t there? None of this existential Hell is other people hooey. When you come to medieval Hell, you’re in for torture, devils, fire, and seas of the damned that are nauseating in their scope. Medieval Catholicism didn’t fuck around. It was in a fight to the death, not only with Islam, secularism, and much older indigenous religions; it was amputating and burning mutations in the DNA of its own teachings. You would not only go to Hell for murder; you’d go for heresy. You’d go for believing Christ was only spirit and never had a body. You’d go for not believing the bread you ate at Mass was Christ’s body.

So Hell had to be really good at being really bad.

It had to be worse than the short, overworked, oppressed, shame-filled, opiate-free life of war, famine and plague its underfed population lived from day to day and season to season.

And you know what?

It almost was.

Come and see, come and see.

Welcome, Dear Visitor, to my humble little museum of medieval oddities. I am the Curator. Care to join me for a little spin through these echoing halls? I have such sights to show you, if only you think you’re brave enough. Follow me­—but be mindful not to leave the lighted path. I cannot guarantee your safety should you stray into the shadows.

The museum’s first exhibit is a wicked little thing, isn’t it? See the way the blade seems to drink in the light, a curious effect caused by its unique materials, its unique forging. Have you heard the phrase, “a stranger’s blade cuts deep, but a loved one’s cuts deeper still”? No? Makes sense—I just made it up.

THE CROWING

Caleb Stephens

I mark my age in scars. A forest of white lines mar my forearm, and tomorrow, the day of the Crowing, the hags will cut the final one. Tomorrow, I am to die having never once glimpsed the color of the sky.

ᚻ

A foot in the ribs wakes me, followed by a harsh cackle. My eyes creak open to Mother Valérie gripping a torch, the light dripping across the floor of my cave-made-prison in dusty orange puddles. A cruel smile parts her beautiful lips.

“On your feet, Ronyan! The Black Well awaits.”

Ronyan. The Old Crows’ name for me, an insult given the scabs that fester my skin and pock my face. The welts and sores that ooze and blister no matter how I tend to them. Though I am only eighteen, I have a spine as crooked as a spinster’s, with hair white as frost and skin wrinkled like a leather pouch. The Crowing requires the blood of a royal, and after thirteen years held captive, mine is nearly spent.

I grunt and look away.

“Ahh, feeling feisty, are we, girl? I’ve no time for your obstinance this morn.”

I steel myself for another kick, but instead, she jams the torch into the flank of the goat lying next to me. Hob’s screams mix with mine as I push to my knees and grasp her robes. “Please, Mother Valérie, do not harm him. I will do as you say.”

Her eyes narrow, and she clucks her tongue. She is centuries old and beautiful beyond measure, her youth stolen bit by bit from mine and the royals the Crows bled before me. “That you will, Ronyan. That you will.” She pulls a length of rope from her pocket and flings it at me. “Bind this filthy creature and come. It is time.” With a flourish, she turns and stomps outside, a purple cloak trimmed in silver trailing behind her.

I crouch next to Hob and examine the wound. It has already blistered, the hair charred into a pocked ring. I stroke his coat, and he stops licking the burn long enough to give me a soft bleat. I trace my fingers the length of his jaw and then cup his face. His rectangular pupils quiver in place.

“I’m sorry, Hob. Their hate should not fall upon you.”

But it will. They will bleed him first.

With a heavy heart, I loop the rope around his neck and give it a tug. He follows without hesitation, even now, marching to his death.

I have never had a finer friend.

ᚻ

I step from the cave and into the swirling fog that has swallowed Francia’s sky for a millennium. It is the curse of the Old Crows, a veil so they may hunt unseen, frail shadows painted on the bedchamber walls of Carcassonne’s children—there one moment and gone with the child the next.

They took me from the palace when I was five. Thirteen years later, the memory is like a fever dream: Father in our chamber, facing Mother Madeleine with his broadsword drawn, the emerald hilt flashing in the moonlight, Mother Madeleine staring back with her flawless hands wrapped tight around my neck and that of my brother Thomason’s, neither of us able to move…to breathe. I can still hear her voice drifting like ice down my spine.

The sky is dark, and the hills are white, both in death as in life. Bring to me a royal’s line, for in it, I shall make your kingdom mine. Where there are two, there must be one. Give us thy daughter or give us thy son.

And Father cast his cold, pale eyes on me.

Take the girl if you must.

I bury his hateful voice and hobble after Mother Valérie, every step sending bolts of pain through my ruined feet. The fog lessens as we near the witches’ camp: a sea of shining tents and the apothecary full of glass jars packed with various herbs and roots. I know some of their names and uses. Acacia to steal a baby from its mother’s womb. Hellebore or maleficium to fly. Nightshade to poison.

Beyond the apothecary, at the edge of the encampment, lie the dead woods—a dense maze of fog-scrubbed bark and desiccated branches. When the Old Crows first brought me here to Salt Rock, Mother Grimilda spoke of the Otherlings, the ageless creatures the Crows seduced and banished within. It was Otherling blood that forged the Black Well, she said, and it is only Otherling blood that can reclaim it.

Sometimes, in the early morning hours, I can hear them shriek. Distant, haunting cries muffled by the fog that crawl across my skin like a nest of spiders. There’s a hunger to them, a seething, bubbling rage that bathes the witches in fear. They tell me I am never to speak of the Otherlings, never to mention their name or it will cost me my tongue.

It is said only a Crow may enter the dead woods and survive, and that anyone daft enough to do so will be devoured alive. But I know something different, because I’ve been in the forest, and I’ve seen an Otherling with my own eyes. A creature with skin black as the night sky and teeth like metal who spared my life in exchange for a promise—one I intend to fulfill today.

We break from the tents, and I hear the grating whispers of the Old Crows dripping through the air. They gather on either side of the first bone arch, the witches lining the cobblestone path in their ritual garb. Black cloaks clasped at the neck with silver brooches, banks of raven hair pinned in place with bone taken from sparrows. I am ugly in comparison, the old crone from a child’s storybook, and if one were to see me now, they would think me the witch.

The Crows fall silent as I hobble forward and brace myself for what comes next. A hot glob of spit smacks my cheek. A warm cup of urine soaks my tunic. My eyes water against the bitter ammonia stench. A handful of rocks flung with force bite into my neck and shoulders. A stone cracks off my shin and sends a sheet of blood running down my calf.

They hurl insults with perfectly shaped lips.

“Bent-nose swine!”

“Wanton whore!”

“Vile filth!”

Fingers tear at my hair as more spit spatters my face. Hob bleats in terror behind me, yanking against the rope with flared nostrils. I go numb inside and force myself to continue. My joints ache as if they are stuffed with glass. At last, I reach the final bone arch with its forest of cracked antlers and press beneath it into the great amphitheater. At its center, bound to the iron latticework encircling Salt Rock, are the children.

There are always four—one for each of the seasons. This year there are three girls and a boy, all of them younger than ten, some closer to five. They stand gagged, their bodies cloaked in simple linen gowns. I do not know the girls, peasants by the looks of them, with ash-smudged cheeks and hair caked in dirt, but the boy’s face is unblemished, something familiar about his square jaw and high cheekbones, his tuft of auburn hair. Before I can place it, Mother Valérie jams her gnarled cane into my back.

“Onward, Ronyan. No time to dally.”

With quaking legs, I limp over the elaborate wings scorched into the amphitheater floor, the fan-shaped tail and curved beak, and ascend the white stone steps to Salt Rock. The Black Well rises from the stone’s center. I can smell it, a stale copper scent that churns in my stomach. Hob smells it, too, bleating and jerking against the rope. I kneel and coax him next to me as the Crows filter in one by one. Their voices crackle with excitement as they take their places, their strength withered after a year without innocent blood.

Mother Madeleine steps forward wearing her feathered headdress and raises her hands.

“Be still, my sisters, be still!”

The buzzing stops.

“Today, on this most sacred of all days, we remember the torment and suffering of those who came before us; the brave sisters who were hanged or burned or torn asunder by the evil men of the south for nothing more than practicing their beliefs. Our beliefs.”

Murmurs ripple through the coven. Heads nod.

“Today, as we have for a thousand years, we offer the children of Carcassonne to the Black Well as vengeance. With its power, we will renew the fog that chokes their kingdom and holds our enemies at bay. We will drape them in everlasting darkness and”—she levels a long finger at me, then draws it toward the boy—“drink the last drops of youth from their royal daughter and start anew with their princeling son.”

A hundred lungs expel as one, the sound like an ocean tide scrubbing sand.

“My Black Sisters, remove thy cloaks!”

Shrouds fall to reveal a sea of milk-white skin. Legs and waists and breasts coated in gooseflesh.

Mother Madeleine slips a sickle from her sleeve and disrobes, the blade shining as she raises her arms overhead once more. “Let the Crowing begin!”

A low reverberating bom…bom…bom fills the amphitheater, the Crows at the base of each of the five marble pillars swinging thick elk-bone drumsticks. The sound vibrates my teeth as Mother Madeleine drags one of the girls forward by the hair. She squeals and Mother Madeleine snaps her head back to reveal a soft patch of throat.

“Shh, you stupid thing. Calm now, and I may yet spare thee.”

It is a lie, but the girl goes still all the same, urine soaking her gown, fear clouding her gaze. Mother Madeleine nods toward the Crows standing naked before her and begins the chant.

“So what is above, we send below, for the life that is hers, we shall reap with a crow.”

The coven echoes the verse, their voices shrill and ragged.

“So what is above, we send below, for the life that is hers, we shall reap with a crow.”

And they crow.

“Ah…Ah…Ahhh.”

It is the sound that has infested my nightmares for more than a decade. It starts slow, and then builds to a biting, inhuman cadence; a wall of shrieking noise that spills through my veins. The girl’s eyes flash to mine a moment before Mother Madeleine carves a red grin into her neck and thrusts her into the well.

She repeats the ritual, wrestling the second girl forward. This one thrashes and screams, stopping only when the sickle parts her esophagus. The last girl flaps her hands and faints a second before Mother Madeleine slits her throat. My eyes burn as she topples into the well. Mother Madeleine smears the girl’s blood across her breasts and flashes me a gleaming smile.

“Bring me the beast.”

My stomach tears. I do not want Hob to die. He is my family and my only friend. But I have no choice, for it is with his death I hope to win my freedom. With a sinking dread, I limp forward and offer her the rope.

“Ahh, Ronyan, you sod. Today we begin with you.”

She snatches my wrist and jerks me to her chest, the sickle coming to rest against my neck. My heart explodes. This is not the way, cannot be the way. Hob must die first. In all my years, I have never bled before the animal. My gaze falls upon the Black Well. A billow of acrid heat drifts upward, wet with rot, and my legs go weak. A memory flashes. The Otherling I met in the dead forest. The thing that found me at the base of a withered cypress when I escaped Salt Rock a year ago, its finger tracing across my cheek as it spoke.

Allow me to bind my blood with that of the beast’s, then return to the Crows for their feast. Pour my blood into the well and light the fire that will summon hell. Until that time remain unseen, and when you call, we shall make you our queen.

It felt like a dream, the thing slowly drawing a talon across its wrist before setting it to Hob’s mouth, Hob lapping at the Otherling’s blood until his tongue blackened. I fainted then and woke to Mother Grimilda staring down with her spiteful gaze. She dragged me back by my hair and threatened to carve out my eyes. I begged her not to, swore an oath to never again flee. She smiled and said she wouldn’t. She cut off my toes instead.

“Sisters,” Mother Madeleine cries, her breath hot in my ear, “let us drink what youth yet remains in this pitiful creature.”

I go rigid as the knife digs into my throat. ...