“Though there is no real substitute for the Blessed Sacrament, I can make frequent spiritual communions to satisfy my spiritual thirst in some small way.”

He floated above Joseph Letterer’s binding table, looking down from the place of dreams onto the mess he had made. The ink was not quite black, but going on deep gray. The ink did not spread evenly as it should. For this he was glad, having spilled the ink used to print the Confraternity and the Bible.

He fell from the place of dreams like a stone, anticipating though not caring about, the smashing of his face upon the ink-fouled table. Too his surprise Josiah landed on his back, plunging deeply through leaves to strike the unyielding ground. His ribs were sore immediately. His eyes opened with a start—no my eyes are already open.

His face was nestled in leaves, his body half under a fallen log. He gazed up into the very ink pattern of his dream. This was no dream, but a light blue dawn sky heavy with clumps of grey cloud, streaked with a single yellow spray of sunlight cast across the entire vault. The moon glowed a sharp white-blue from behind a cloud and he wondered absently if that were God’s eye in the night sky.

He began to move, to test his arms and legs. Then, somewhere below it seemed, he heard the tramp of shoed feet, and on this very fallen tree above him as well. He could hear the wood-on-wood tread of a militia man’s shoes, and the baying of hounds and many heavy feet on the trail below.

He was in great fear; alone, separated from family, cast out before God, and hunted by the men of his only friend, now dead. Joshua Hound was the youngest of six brothers, son to Solomon Hound, owner of the many hounds who patrolled the outskirts of Samara. Joshua had wanted to be a village man, not a houndsman. He wanted to paint, print, build, craft and tinker, not patrol the woods for raiders from the clans or bag strings of rabbits for the pot.

His brothers were of another mind; hunters and houndsmen all! How could Josiah hope to escape them?

A sharp voice sung out just as the shoed feet stopped above him. He dare not even turn his head for fear of rustling leaves. He was sunken deep in a seasons-old Mattress of half-rotted leaves, with some few at the top possibly dry enough to rustle or even crackle if he moved. His eyes were uncovered as was his flattish nose. It seemed every other inch of him was buried in the pungent mass.

The sharp voice belonged to Joseph Hound, “Father, there is no trace. He has not taken to the hillsides. Perhaps he dunked the creek and is floating to Hudson Sound?”

The gruff voice of Solomon Hound growled across the hillside and up into the hills, “That Chowning boy has no running legs. We should bring up the hounds to sniff the creek banks. Then we head uphill with the hounds to ferret him out from a hide. The boy is a hider I tell you. He cannot run, short and stout as he is.”

The voice of Ezra Hound then chimed in from down on the trail, “Father, Daniel Bethel claims that Josiah flew over the walls as a demon, a bewitched creature fatted on the blood of Patriarch Pig?”

Solomon Hound then fairly snarled, “I care not for Pig, bled dry or not. I care only for an eye for an eye, for the life of that Chowning boy in retribution for the life of your brother he took! We shall run him to ground, fish him up, or ferret him out. And when we do! When we do!"

“When we do boys, our hounds will eat well, eat fresh. Big Blister will get his groans first, then Bitch Knows will feast on his fingers. You better turn your hearts to stone boys, for the vengeance of Solomon Hound is not a swift thing!”

Joseph then made a tapping sound above him and ran back down the fallen birch under which Josiah hid, and from which, as soon as the creek bed was scoured, here where his trail apparently ended, he would be dragged to his terrible fate. Joseph hollered from below to others of his father’s sons farther down the trail, “Bring up the hounds, Hounds!”

The baying of the hounds below as they sniffed along the rocky root-veined dirt-pack of the creek bank for any sign that he may have ‘dunked’ in as they said, was frightening. Josiah’s body was frozen in terror but his mind worked furiously as he wiggled his toes and fingers, realizing for the first time since waking that he was barefoot.

He somehow knew—knew with his body, not his mind—that he could slide out silently, almost slithering like a serpent from the freshly scooped hollow of earth he found himself in. Something had torn the roots, broken rocks, and slid him into this place. He pushed out silently from beneath the leafy mass and crawled away as silently as he might. He crawled, and crawled and crawled, hoping the sounds of the Hounds and their hounds would grow more distant. As he climbed the baying and coaxing sounds drifted up the hillside to torment him. Finally he found rest with his back against a great maple.

He was perhaps half way to the ridgeline above. He wanted to bolt for the top but decided a glance behind him to see if things were clear was the prudent course. Josiah pushed his head out from behind the base of the tree and found himself looking directly into the eyes of Solomon Hound, his evil hawk beak of a nose seeming to focus his piercing eyes. Josiah was surprised that a man of that age could see his face so clearly from this distance, but he did, and let out a ghostly howl, “Chowwwnnning!”

Josiah Chowning ran, ran for his life, up the steep wooded hillside. He had never been so fast in field races, but Joshua and he had run some hills before, and Josiah had a knack for running uphill. Joshua had always told him it was because his knees bent back too far. Whatever the cause was, Josiah drove hard and fast up the hill cresting the top before he had expected he would.

The sounds behind him now dulled thanks to the intervening hill. He heard little else than the pounding of his heart and the pounding of his feet. The descent was steeper than the climb and he was having great difficulty avoiding the tree trunks and keeping his knees from buckling under him. He was halfway down the hillside to the bottom land that stretched for a musket shot to Perch Creek when he heard the pursuers top the ridge. Josiah recalled Joshua telling of twelve hounds in their pen. Could he really hope to outrun the hounds?

His thighs were beginning to quiver when Solomon Hound bellowed, “Release the hounds, Hounds!”

Josiah pounded down the hillside all the harder and noticed, from the glimpses he got between the trees that he dodged, that a great thicket of thorn stalks and brush barred his way. The hounds were tearing down the hillside like the fiends out of Hell come on Judgment Day. They were big dogs, Big Blister larger than Josiah himself. He ran the faster until he hit the bottom land and his legs buckled like poorly made furniture.

He scrambled to his feet and looked left and right, noticing the thicket extending for acres on either side. He would be pinned against it trying to skirt it. Off he flew at the thicket propelled nonsensically by the eager barking and baying of the hounds, great and small, behind him. He charged as fast as he could, the slathering jaws of Bitch Knows and Big Blister closing in so that he could hear their eager panting over the baying of the lesser hounds behind.

He hit the thicket and caught fire—or so it seemed as he crashed through the razor thorn stalks both great and small, brittle and pliant. His brows, hair, chest, belly and hips were shredded as were the clothes that hung from him in tatters. His arms and legs were as if alight with kerosene they burned so fiercely from the cuts uncounted. He could taste blood in his mouth, smell blood in the air. On he tore through the thicket becoming numb to the fiery pain.

A terrible howling and baying gathered behind him, then the pathetic squealing of a big hound as it seemed to find itself caught in the thicket. The cursing of Hounds then joined the baying and crying of their hounds. A musket boomed and the crackle of a ball ripping through the thicket followed. He continued through the thicket and broke out, naked almost entirely, and ran all the harder now that he was not torn with each step, toward the creek, tumbling with clear water just a stone throw ahead.

As he neared the rocky creek bed he looked over his shoulder to smile in triumph at the bloody tunnel he had carved with his own body in the thicket behind him, and out from the thorny maw that he had just escaped burst Big Blister, torn, bleeding, slathering, and red eyed with the hunt!

Continued with Squib Trace: Hemavore #5