The Grimm Dossier

Chapter 48 - Dyowls Hollow

England, West Coast
Devonshire, Dartmoor
Dyowl's Hollow - Woods of Dartmoor
5 November 1898, 10:28 pm

Ben's next thought was solely to regain a more advantageous position for the fight and above all: to gain distance! He wanted to get away from the creature at all costs!

With harsh force, he tried to yank on his arm in a panic and take a step back, but the grip of the scrawny fingers did not loosen. Then the dark demon suddenly bent away again. It arched its back unnaturally far backwards in a peal of laughter, so Ben just waited for the sickening crack. But it did not happen. As if this creature had no spine at all that could break. Instead, however, the grip loosened all at once, the figure shredded right before his eyes and a blink later, black mist billowed again many metres away. The wisps of mist settled over the brown-yellow leaves on the ground, making it look as if death was breathing a breath of pestilence and disease over them. This rolled off the dark man's cloak like dewdrops. The man in black stood there, in a simple matter-of-factness, as if he had never left, as he sank down into a crouch beside the girl.

To face such horrors made even the legs of the seasoned soldier weaken. It was one thing to cling tremblingly to a gun and fear that he was about to be swept to his death by a bullet. But he had never expected anything like this! Ben felt overwhelmed and disbelieving. Something in him still hoped he could just wake up and realise it had been nothing but a horrible nightmare. But as so often, his prayers went unheard.

With stiff fingers, he clutched what little hope he had left in the form of the revolver and stared at the figure of terror near the sleeping girl. From this distance, it looked as if the fingers possessed not two, but four or more joints in their deviant length. It reminded Ben of hideous scary dreams and pictures from books where artists captured the dark facets of their minds in woodcuts of demonic creatures.

And the girl lay there in the damp leaves as if on a bed. Her small chest rose and fell again and again. Her eyelashes cast little shadows on her flushed cheeks and her lips were parted a tiny bit. Calmly, the black man with the red feather plucked a leaf from the wild curls of brown-red hair and flicked it away.

"Look how blissfully asleep she is." purred the voice, sharp edges hidden beneath its black velvet. 

"No child just makes a pact." the doctor now gritted out, the nasty certainty of what he was dealing with slowly but surely solidifying in his mind. All that talk of depravity in the hearts. Innocence and guilt.

The dark man laughed softly and darkly, brushed a small strand of hair from the child's forehead and straightened back to his full height and scrawny figure. The black smoke around his silhouette wrinkled devoutly and billowed across the leaf-covered ground. "Of course, the little angel didn't know what she was doing when she made that little deal with me." Something eager but highly delighted lit up in his eyes and he licked his lips again, as if after a delicious feast. Then he waved it off and laughed, as if he had explained an amusing joke to the little human, "Fortunately for me, that's not necessary for a pact either."

Pact. That word struck Benjamin's mind like a hammer on an anvil, sending sparks into the dry straw. This man... no, this creature was so incredibly dangerous that every instinct in him wanted to recoil.

"What exactly did she do?" he clenched between his teeth, his eyes already firing the next thousand bullets imaginarily in the bastard's direction.