Aldreda Etheldred

Grand-mère’s house was the sweetest place in the whole world to me. Not that I’d seen much of the world, at seven, but back then, it was the only place I needed. I would have happily spent the rest of my life there, if my parents and reality had allowed it.

“Lys! Oh, how I’ve waited for you to come spend the night again… I made you something! Here, come look… a new dress. With pockets, like the boys have. Just how you asked.”

It smelled like dusty cherries there and she would shower me in gifts each and every time I came to visit. Unfortunately, I could not do this very often. Despite her living a short walk’s away from my and my parents’ home, because she insisted on staying in her cabin at the edge of town, my mother and father were hesitant each time I would ask to go and stay there.

“Oh, don’t you worry about that, my sweet Lys. These stories… you know, I’ve lived here many years more than your mère and père. Those things do not know where this village is, nor will they ever.”

“Why’s that, grand-mère?”

“They’re scared little things. Shy, really. It’s ‘cause they’re so uncomfortable. They would never come to a place as deep in the woods as this clearing. In all my years, they never have. Why would they now?” She told me one afternoon, as I played with her sewing wheel, not understanding how the thing worked. “Now… I want you to sleep well tonight, so please, don’t even think about such silly things. I love you, and you are safe with me, no matter what. Do you know that?”

“I know, Grand-mère.” I replied, with a big smile on my face that I knew would make her happy. I wasn’t scared, and didn’t want her to think I was. Honestly, I didn’t even believe in the damned things, at the time. Stopped thinking much of anything I couldn’t see with my own eyes could really be real after I found out my father’s puppets weren’t really alive and my mother was the one who got me my presents on my birthday. They were just like any other story parents would tell their children to keep them good. But I was good. I didn’t need that. I thought it a little funny that my grandmother would even keep up the act that they existed, even while attempting to waive all fear she thought I might have of them. But, that was before I went to bed that night.

I remember the feeling of her warm, wrinkled hand on my forehead like it still rests there now. I like to think that those hands brought so much good into this world. She was a comforting blanket of a person, one I might have aspired to be if I weren’t so terribly restive. I think the words she said to me then were:

“Good night, my lily. Never forget that you are good. That you are all the good in the world to me. I love you so. Goodnight.”

Then the leftmost plank of the wall fell in, and with it, the skinless mongrel’s hand. I remember thinking it was some sort of man. I didn’t even realize the stories I’d heard were true. Couldn’t even consider it. But as two others piled atop it, I did know that I was afraid.

Zombies. God’s ugliest creatures.

As a child, you are spared from seeing them with your own eyes- rather, each night before bed, you are taught of them:

They are fleshless, rotten things, whose very appearance is enough to make animals sick. Their purple, dripping bodies were left unfinished, and are thus excruciatingly painful to live in. All roam the land in constant agony, dreading their disgusting forms as they look for humans like us- so that they may steal our skin and use it for themselves. They are demons, lost from their one home in hell, who are now condemned to forever search for a new resting place in the shape of our identities. Once they have your body, however, they will simply fight amongst themselves for it until they are all left dead. They may be intelligent, just as much as we are, but their hunger for peace drives them mad seconds after birth. It is for this reason that they are, without doubt, fiends- ones we must always struggle against if we still wish to live in this world we coinhabit.

That is what I believed.

My grandmother wasn’t my grandmother anymore. I’d never seen that look on Grand-mère’s face, not once in my life. She looked like the chickens do when their heads are already cut. She didn’t scream, and I might even say she wasn’t quite afraid- she was asleep with wide-open eyes, like a woman gazing into a dream. It was the last dream she would ever have.

A child only knows to hide under their covers when terror arrives in their heart. That’s all I did. I didn’t run. Didn’t fight. Don’t know if I could have. All I could do was hear- hear how they wept, hear how they howled- as if the act of disemboweling my grandmother was one of inscrutable remorse. There must have been at least five of the rabid ghouls, jumping on her, stamping on the wood of the floor my little feet had just pitter-pattered down to get into bed. I soon began to feel splashes of warmth hit my soft cave of drapes. More and more warmth hit the thin sheets as they removed her from herself. Warmth. So much warmth that the warmth soon became another blanket. It weighed me down as I laid across the bed on my aching stomach, the redness above me dying the darkness I resided in a shade that wouldn’t go away no matter how hard I shut my eyes. Eventually, I had no choice but to open them. I had to know. I had to see- Grand-mére… was she alive? Was it over? I think that I knew it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. But I felt like they were looking for me… like they wanted me. And I didn’t like that thought. The thought of being hunted. I’d rather be found. So I lifted up the cloth- just enough to see- and to my suprise, she was still there. 

She was there. Kneeling on the ground, like she merely had a cough. Grand-mére was just sick, that’s right. That’s why her veins were drained. That’s why I could see a faint violet between the small cuts on her body she surely got from sewing me a new dress. It was all okay.

Then they ate her.

They all ate each other, a mass of hungerless, vapid teeth gnashing at the other teeth next to them. Gnashing at Grand-mére. She gnashed too. I soon realized it was all like my parents had said. They fought like wolves over the body, until it fell apart and they were fighting each other for no reason at all. I was scared that at any moment they might turn towards me instead, yet, I did not lower the bloodstained blanket over my head. I kept looking. And, as if being rewarded, saw something incredible.

She appeared.

You are taught of gods and angels as a child just as much as you are of devils and monsters. I wasn’t sure which she was at the time. She was beautiful- the image of beauty- and violent. Violent like an animal left unfed for months. She was bane incarnate, in the form of divine perfection. Her blade was a massive one attached to an even longer staff- the shape of a scythe, fashioned from the greatest warsword I had ever seen, twice the height of my father and with a glint so sharp it nearly blinded me- she swung the blade again and again relentlessly at the attackers, until all that remained was a fine red power, and then, said not one word to me. Her dress stained and face blank, she walked at the same pace she had fought- perhaps to some other location in which to hunt.

As they tore at her skin, she just kept fighting- slicing the ghouls into shreds as her wounds bled violet.

From then on, that woman was the only god or devil I believed in. Aldreda Etheldred…

A zombie who kills zombies.