Read Online HS02 - Days of Atonement by Michael Gregorio - Free Book Online

the right direction?’
    The voice of Mutiez brought me to earth with a bump. We halted in a glade, surrounded on all sides by skeletal trees which reached up to the leaden sky, shielding us from the biting wind. The smell of decay was stronger there. The man in the lead looked left and right. He seemed unsure of his bearings.
    Lavedrine turned to me.
    ‘Is this going to take much longer?’ I asked.
    ‘God knows!’ he murmured, shaking his head. ‘The guide’s been sniffing the air for the past ten minutes.’
    He raised his nose to the damp air, closed his eyes, and twitched his nostrils.
    ‘There
is
a trace of something, though,’ he said. ‘Can you smell it?’
    I stared into the forest gloom. The atmosphere was dominated by the mouldering damp of the earth and decaying leaves which lay thick on the ground. But beneath it all, there was the merest trace of a stench.
    ‘Sweet and penetrating,’ he suggested. ‘Something organic left to putrefy above the ground.’
    As the breeze shifted quarter, that stench seemed to vanquish every other vegetable essence, like the cloying miasma that issued from the town drains in summer.
    Had we stumbled on the corpse of Frau Gottewald?
    ‘Over there, sir,’ the lead soldier informed Mutiez, and led the way at a run towards a thicket which seemed to float above a waving sea of pale green nettles and brown decaying ferns.
    ‘The smell of shit drew us here, sir,’ the guide announced. With a mirthless laugh, he added, ‘Gournier has a nose for it. Heaved his guts all over the place.’
    Trooper Gournier, a fat, red-faced man, cursed fiercely beneath his breath, but hung back as we moved around the perimeter looking for the entrance.
    ‘Worse than the camp privy after the battle!’ the lead man prattled. ‘We were told to bring you gentlemen here, sir. No one said a word about going in again. There’s the entrance. Can we take a blow, sir?’
    Mutiez hissed something harsh between his teeth, and the men dropped down on their haunches, unscrewing the caps of their tin bottles, pulling out smoke-stained pipes from their leather pouches.
    An expression of resigned disgust on his face, Mutiez turned toLavedrine and myself, and made a sign to follow as he pushed aside a roughly woven gate of branches and twigs and led the way into the compound. Inside, the smell of rottenness was overwhelming. I raised my scarf, veiling my nose from the vapours, which hung in the air like a plague. Lavedrine reached for the hem of his cloak, while Mutiez held his
képi
to his face like a mask as we advanced on a mound in the centre.
    A mass of sticks like an unlit bonfire had been raised in the clearing. It might have been an otter’s lodge, but there was no water nearby. And it was six feet tall. Long branches had been raised to form a skeleton, the frame dressed with sticks, mud, leaves, and ferns. There was method in the construction. The pieces of wood diminished in size as the edifice rose to a point, where a mesh of willow canes bound the lot together. I had read that the savages in Canada made shelters of this sort. Signs of the hunter were everywhere. Animal skins in various stages of curing or decomposition, pieces of meat—some fresh, dripping blood, others black and rotten—dangled from nooses thrown into the branches overhead, then tied fast to the trunks lower down.
    As we moved around, looking for a way inside, the stench grew overpowering. Severed heads had been impaled on pointed sticks. I recognised the curved tusks of a boar, a black bear, the striped muzzle of a large badger, the rotting head of a lynx, but could not put a name to others. They reminded me of the hideous gargoyles the French used to decorate their Gothic cathedrals. But this blood was real, the eyes glazed, the yellow teeth long and sharp.
    ‘What sort of beast would live in such a manner?’ muttered Mutiez, turning to me. ‘Will this convince you, sir?’
    I did not reply, but forced myself to examine