The Sick and the Dyeing

The statue of St. Lazarus overlooked the infirmary floor, shroud in his hands, pity in his eyes. A thousand ruptured lumps and a hundred broken fevers filled the room with the smell of blood and sulfur and the nauseous, sweet aroma of rotting flesh. Brother Colm once considered the hall cavernous, yet as the weeks ushered in more afflicted, and the demand for cots was greater than the Abbey could offer, he thought it more like a tomb. 

“How many days has she been like this?” Colm asked a shaking mother, burning the palm of his hand on the child’s forehead.

Her response was drowned beneath the dozen mournful screams sprouting from amongst the babel. But he already knew the answer from the purple boils on the girl’s inner thigh and shoulder. At least four. Either it bursts by morning, or she returns to the Lord. 

“I need to take her home. I need to take her home. This is madness,” the mother scooped the girl into her arms. 

“You must think of your other children. Your husband. If they are not already ill, they will be.”

“What do you know of children, Brother? You have none of your own. You know nothing of this pain.”

Colm was familiar with the losing argument. Parents would ignore his advice —they always did—and return a few days later, carrying a babe in each arm, their own strength draining from fevered limbs.

“A mother’s love works faster than the Devil’s hands,” Brother Angus would say, before the sickness took him, too.

 

###

 

Colm took respite in his stroll across the Abbey grounds, as he headed to the chapel, where he hoped to rinse the blood from his hands and partake in the evening prayers. But the Abbot met him on the stone walkway that arched across a lifeless brook, his undyed tunic and scapular radiating in the setting sun, his voluminous, black cowl accentuating his angelic silhouette.

“I hope rest finds you, friend.” The Abbot’s words stung with care. “Your dedication to the parish’s suffering is commendable.

Colm adjusted his herb-stained robe with pus-stained fingers. But even the crisp Scottish air couldn’t mask the stench of death that trailed behind him. “I am merely doing the Lord’s work.”

“Are you?” The Abbot placed a firm hand on the monk’s shoulder. “This is the second week you have not held mass in the infirmary. I pray you remember that the purpose of the infirmary is mercy, not medicine. You are doing more harm to their souls by neglecting the Eucharist than any disease could do to their bodies.” The Abbot leaned upon the short stone wall. “I fault you not for exhaustion. But perhaps it is better to send the sick home where their local priest can properly administer the sacraments.”

“No!” Colm didn’t intend to shout, nor make the Abbot recoil, but it happened all the same.

“May rest find you, brother.” The Abbot’s stare lingered, stern but loving, before leaving him alone on the bridge.

Colm focused his eyes on the mist, and the rocks, and the hills, and, finally, they settled on the far edge of the Abbey grounds, where the last ruin of the borderland fortress stood. A single tower whose stone was not yet repurposed to build a cloister. 

Where fear still lived.

There wasn’t a tower in the borderlands that didn’t have rumors of a Red Cap. A spirit, neither demonic nor angelic, which, to a good Catholic, may as well be demonic. Little goblins, inexplicably linked with death, and fond of murdering anyone on their land, who dyed their caps red with the blood of their victims.

Colm was drawn to the tower; it was isolated and quiet, and, somewhere deep in his soul, he found the idea of being haunted by something other than poxed corpses and dwindling resources appealing.

 

### 

 

The air was thick atop the motte. Even the wind struggled to wave the tattered remnants of a forgotten banner. There was a stone archway where a door had once been, and pieces of wood were scattered across the dirt floor; a collection of the broken and the abandoned.

He sat as best he could upon a three-legged chair, pulled the monastic diurnal from his inner pocket, and began to pray the vespers.

The sound of iron boots ricocheted off the curves of the ramparts, and the shrill of talons scratching the tower’s inner walls, swirled all around him. 

Colm kept his eyes on his diurnal, praying louder, combating the cacophony with the beauty of his Latin psalms. But heavy breathing roared just beyond the prayer book’s leather cover, and he could perceive those large, fiery eyes with senses he didn’t know he possessed.

“You’re the one who tends to the sick,” the voice said with a thirsty rasp.

Colm raised his gaze to see a short, thickset creature with grizzled white hair dangling past its shoulders. Its chapped mouth couldn’t contain its long, sharp fangs, and its impossibly sharp, hooked nails almost touched the ground. Its clothes were of a style and fabric Colm had never encountered, and its cap—

—wasn’t red at all. It was pale—undeyed—very much like those of the Cistercian Order. Very much like Colm’s.

“Then tend to me,” the creature continued. “I cannot feed on consecrated land. I cannot leave the border I’m born to stalk.”

“The Abbey was built over two hundred years ago—”

“I’m aware. I see all on my land. I watched when your lot tore down castles and erected their Churches. I watched when cowardly soldiers broke bread with their enemies behind those stained-glass windows. I watched when you opened the doors to the sick.”

“—‘feed?’”

“Death.” The creature paced around Colm’s broken chair, leaning on its pikestaff like a cane. “I feed on murder. I can smell the dying like a summer dew and drink their despair like a mountain spring.”

“I am a man of God,” Colm told the Red Cap, firmly, rising from his seat, standing nearly a meter taller than the abomination.

 “You’re a man of desperation. As am I.” The Red Cap clenched his pale headdress. Deconsecrate the land. Let me roam free. And I promise you, the dying will never leave the Abbey again.”

“You’re offering me a massacre?” Colm scoffed.

“I’m offering you containment.” The word poured forth from the creature’s vile lips like vintage wine.

Containment. Colm reacquainted himself with the chair. “And you’ll only…feed…on those who try to carry the sickness beyond our gates?”

“I never said that. I will bring death to whomever I want. But I promise to always bring death to the fleeing sick. Which is which? You’ll never know.”

How many would die in here? How many more will die out there? The questions raced through Colm’s mind. Three weeks ago, the Abbey buried 14 parishioners. Two weeks ago, 56. This week was nearing 300, and it was only Thursday.

“I will not send good people to their deaths in some sort of game of chance.”

“You fool. The game is already underway.” It extended its cap to Colm. “I’m offering you the opportunity to lose less.”

Or to lose everything. There was no absolution for what he was about to do, no confession that could redeem him, no grace to be obtained.  

Colm silently prayed.

Then nodded.

The Red Cap scratched his inner talon across Colm’s palm, catching the dripping blood with his cap. The headdress swallowed every trickle, slowly darkening as a glimpse of vitality sparkled in its owner’s eyes.

Colm hung his head low as the creature whispered into his ear. 

Replacing old oaths with a new one.

Forgoing his brothers in Christ for a brother in blood.

 

###

 

Colm spent the evening deconsecrating the Abbey gates and the pathways which led to the dilapidated tower. He did so without the Abbot’s permission, and ultimately, without the Bishop’s permission. The thought of excommunication kept him from getting what little sleep he could, which made the bedlam of the infirmary all the more sobering.

More afflicted arrived overnight, and for every person on a cot, another shivered on the floor. The smell of burnt juniper and beeswax candles did nothing to mask the overpowering stench. Death was in the air.

Colm watched the other monks as they engaged with the sick. Some stood their ground and concerned themselves with treating the symptoms, while others lost their own battles with family members insisting their loved ones should recover at home. 

And as each soul left the Abbey, Colm offered them confession and absolution. 

Then he waited. 

He waited for the screams at the gates. The screams of those who survived their fevers, the screams of those who wouldn’t. But, in truth, they were indistinguishable from the screams coming from his own cavernous tomb. 

The sounds of the sins he let happen. 

The sounds of the sins that weren’t his own.

He couldn’t tell which was which.

But every few hours, every few days, he saw the point of a cap scurry past the stained-glass windows, growing redder and redder with each feeding. 

And every evening, under the cover of darkness, Colm retrieved the bodies from the tower and gave them as proper a burial as he could; writing letters to their families informing them of their deaths and subsequent burial, all under the guise of the plague. 

Each week, there were fewer bodies in the tower and more empty cots in the infirmary, until the day the plague abandoned them and took up residence in the next parish.

The day Brother Colm made his confession.

 

###

 

The air was thick atop the motte, thicker than before. Colm wore the undyed cap of his monastic order, the only vestige the Abbot allowed him to keep.

“It’s time to dye,” he said to the Red Cap with a smile, laying his headdress on the ground. Remembering the pact whispered in his ear.

The creature lifted a large rock between its talons and sent it crashing down on the former monk’s head. Blood pooling on the ground, soaking the broken chair where he once prayed, soaking his pristine cap. His lifeless body folding inward, bones resettling, hands hooking into something ancient and wrong.”

And he rose again, hideous and unabsolved. 

Haunting the remnants of the Scottish Borderlands with a cap of blood and sorrow, seeking a new place to call home.