Gianfranco Mancini’s Reviews > The Accursed > Status Update

Then a crawler was on top of her, snapping and drooling, while another seized the meaty flesh of her right calf and worried at her like a rat fighting over a scrap. No mercy of a swift fall or a bullet here; they were going to eat her alive while she watched and screamed. The stench of them choked her, and the darkness was raucous with their looping howls.

She knew she was getting close when the shadows in her peripheral vision began to scamper, and the pressure that had been building in her head started to feel like hydraulic pistons on either side of her skull. She gritted her teeth and forced herself forward, trying not to be distracted by the leering faces that she knew weren’t really there.

No doubt Pieter would have dealt with the body on his floor with the same easy confidence with which he sailed through his entire life, leaving me to stumble and botch at every turn. But the golden boy of the family was dead, butchered with the rest of his regiment in some futile off-world conflict, his body too mutilated to be worth sending home. This time I was the one in desperate trouble.

Beasts that walked as men, horned like goats but muscled like bulls or warhorses. Armed with deadly spears and serrated blades of steel and bone, they cut through ranks of soldiers in a ferocious frenzy. Driven by bloodlust, the beasts had hacked and torn, roaring their war cries as if outraged by man’s very existence. Rutger had seen friends fall and scatter and he’d fled, determined to live while others died.

‘A kind of morbid voyeurism,’ his best friend Harratio had called it. Perhaps there was some truth in that, for he had developed a habit of idly dwelling on peasants’ tales whilst staring into the mist. Tales of tortured phantoms and leering cannibals, of hungry things that could take human form and beasts that walked as men.

Beware the Needleman, bearer of all things dark and spiteful!
Skreech closed his eyes and donned his secret face, binding it to his skull with a leather cord. He shivered as his mind opened up, flooded with impressions that didn’t belong to him, along with an eloquence of thought that was equally exotic. In that moment he became what he wore, anointed by the Night Below.

Taking a fork from the kitchen, he’d crept into his parents’ room one night and stood over the sleeping forms, waiting for a sign. They were rich folks, undertower Alpha-bloods who’d hidden themselves far from the dome and the endless night beyond, never imagining the deeper darkness already inside. No matter. Their son brought it home to them.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing there.’
‘I swear, captain, I swear – and then it, it…’
No one said anything. Jezek couldn’t meet his eye – and yet, something had scared him, scared him bad. Becherovka glanced through at the ossuary niche, the stacked skulls brittle with age. What had they seen, in their time?

The command tent had been musty and close, the light stark from the lumen-globe that stuttered above the map table. Much revised, the map showed a front on the verge of collapse – troops’ positions overrun by suicidal cultist assaults, counter-attacking armoured spearheads shattered against impregnable defences. The Archenemy was rolling up the advance everywhere. The whole campaign was on the brink.

When he ran away from home a few years later, leaving the village by hiding under the sacks of a visiting merchant, it was as much to escape the daily beatings as it was in hope of seeking the prospect of another, better life.
But there was no better life, at least none that he could find. His early years away from home were spent as a beggar, relying on the pity of others to save himself from starving.