The Arms That Howl

This is a partial account of the Vinuk Massacre of 1344. You have never heard of this? There is a reason. Read and perhaps you will find it.

I know I don’t understand what happened. This won’t even make sense. But I have to tell it to you. It won’t leave me unless I tell it.

Forty years ago tonight Vinuk, my old village, was attacked. By what things, I still don’t know. I think I’ve found the answer in the years since then, but there’s no way to be absolutely sure. Even the answer I found seems like a pathetic imitation of what my people experienced in their final moments.

They were wild, shaggy beasts. Something like man, but far larger, possessed of demon-spirits, terrible enough to make old men scream. They came upon us as the night began. Bursting out of the dim edges of the forest. Perhaps they were some evil spirits loosed by our actions. Or maybe just an uncaring world that wanted playthings.

They broke down every door and entered our homes. I can still hear the wood cracking under their gnarled fists, big as a man’s head! The doorframe cracked too as they pushed their ugly bodies inside. I was sitting in my room that night, carving some wood-blocks. I heard the loud crack. And my sister screaming. Then this horrible sound…like someone tearing fruit…

I heard my father yell then, and his sword unsheathe. Part of me wanted to go out and fight whatever attacked us with him. But I could not move. Screaming flooded in all around, freezing my body, as though air were water meant to carry the pain into me.

Then my mother called out something in the old tongue. I think it was, “Bes! Odist Bes!” I heard footsteps, great hulking footsteps that rattled the wood and spoke of nightmare places, and an animal’s cry that shook all the windows. Then I heard it again from somewhere outside. And again. There were many.

By some Providence I was spared the monster’s intrusion. Of the memory, however, I was not spared. Between the window and me was my bed. Hunched while sitting as I was the bed obscured me to the outside. But I saw it walk past. Something more monkey than man, huge and coated with matted yellow fur, with terrible eyes of blood. From it wafted a terrifying air of savagery, a hatred of life, an abandon of anything good or worthwhile.

It didn’t look at me. To this day I’m grateful. For I’m sure whatever insane truths it knew, whatever foul purpose guided it and its brethren…
To see them in its eyes would have left me as broken, as mad-dead as it left the bodies of my family.

–Piotr Yvenshich, aged 48

His life in Smolensk was fraught with poverty; he spent almost half of it in asylums. He died shortly after recounting this story to a state authority. This authority is unnamed in the account. At this point, all records die out.

“Bes” is the name of a demon in old Slavic mythology. This is incorrect; the old woman mislabeled their visitor. Though a demon it could be judged, by its actions.

This is only half the story. No one ever found out about the symbols scratched into the rocks a mile north of Vinuk. They never found the blasphemous priestess who painted her body and danced that night. They never saw the remains left when her body exploded to complete the realm-piercing spell.

All of this is still there.

The piercing still yawns open.