Corpo Corpus
Ambitiousleather8309 Halloween 2025
The constable’s pencil worked quickly trying to parse what was actually useful from the humbler man’s seemingly wild ramblings. He smelled right awful, his person and his horse up to their knees in filth and mud, more mud than would be accounted on the heavy Yorkshire rain. Wilfred Lamb may have been rather dull, but the constable had known the farmer’s family their whole lives and had no reason to doubt his sanity.
“I can scarce read, mind, though I can turn a page and make sense of the letters if I take my time. And it was a strange sort of happenin.’. I hazard a guess that doctor chap was up to dubious mischief in that storm, and being a good Christian, it was my duty to check on my neighbor, even if he didn’t attend church and seemed a … strange fellow.
‘I never encountered anything so unholy in all my life, the place had a smell like a hundred cows had died of dysentery in the nave, and worse. The walls were slick, and the floorboards gave with the weight of rot and wet. Bits of copper and broken glass glinted under my lantern like eyes… eyes, i tell you, Constable, watching me. And from somewhere within the shadows, I heard voices. Not ghostly like you’d expect from a mourning nun, but high-pitched and sing-song, the kind that make your teeth ache. Between the thunderin and the rain on the roof, i thought it a child crying for a parent.
The voices called again, closer now, and I found myself drawn to a heap of scattered papers, half-eaten by something. Among the wreckage, this journal remained mostly intact. I could barely make out the fancy scrawl inside, though it seemed to speak in a manner that would scare a simple man half to death. Constable, do you think the doctor was consorting with witches? I hope it isn’t French. I knew the doctor was foreign, but I’ve never seen French writing before.”
“No, Mister Lamb, this is Latin. Very curious indeed.”
“Latin?! Oh worse than witches and the French, was the doctor a catholic? There hasn’t been a filthy papist in the village for 200 years.”
“We’re not in the business of baseless accusations, Mister Lamb. You’ve done the right thing turning all this over and fetching me immediately. I’ll form a search party and hopefully Dr. Fenwright is located safe, and he can decipher these mysteries. While you’re right to be concerned, I don’t suspect any unsavory antics, nor collusion with the Catholics, the French or Witches. Get yourself home to Bertha and the children, and get dry before you catch a cold, old friend.”
The farmer nodded and turned to mount his shaggy plow horse, "You’re a good man, George. You’re always looking out for us. I’m sorry for coming at you all agitated. Frightening stuff. Thank you, you’re a right proper example for my boys.”
The constable nodded and returned inside with the strange, stinky tome.
+~+
“The Journal of Dr. Alaric Fenwright, 20th October 1808
‘It is with trembling hand that I commit these words to paper, for I have neither patron, peer, nor priest to witness the labors which have consumed my intellect and body alike. London has cast me out, branding me a corrupter of natural order. The Royal College shuns me. The taverns of the whole north country whisper my name as though it were a contagion. So I have come to Bonversus Abbey, a place abandoned by men and memory, to ply my craft in solitude.
‘I have long suspected that life is a spark easily lost, yet never wholly extinguished. The refuse of existence—what foolish men call dung, filth, waste—cannot escape its own faint animating principle. If I am correct, the excrement of beasts, steeped in the proper elixirs and imbued with galvanic force, may yet echo the divine breath. It is this hypothesis which has guided me, and if I succeed, all polite society shall rue the day it laughed at Alaric Fenwright.
‘There is one who does not seem bothered by my eccentricities. The constable is called George Pierce. He seems most agreeable. It is strange that a handsome and strong young man of good breeding is without a wife to provide him succor after the stresses of safeguarding the village of Bonversus. If the fine turn of his calves and thighs is any indication, I bet he is a horseman of the finest degree. Perhaps he could be led astray from the righteous path on a walk with me somed… “
The constable blushed furiously and skipped ahead a few pages.
“The village children laugh when they see me, clutching their noses and calling me a devil. Their horses snort in terror when I pass. Yet what is fear to a mind consumed by curiosity? I have assembled my instruments: a vat of copper, reinforced with steel bands; coils and rods to harness the storm; jars of foul matter gathered from the lanes and stables of Bonversus; and my most precious concoction, a liquid of greenish viscosity, half bile, half mercury, and half some secret essence which I shan’t commit to paper, the secret safeguarded in my mind alone.
On the eve of the tempest, I labored by candle and stormlight. My hands trembled with expectation. I placed the final jars within the vat, and as the first roll of thunder shook the abbey, I engaged the apparatus. The air crackled. The copper hissed. Steam rose and stung the eyes. And then—oh Heaven—then the mixture began to heave as though it bore some secret heart.
At first, I thought it merely chemical reaction. Yet the surface broke, and from it emerged a form unlike any creature sanctioned by nature. Small—no higher than my knee—covered in a sodden, matted fur, with eyes round and luminous, ears that twitched as though hearing my very thoughts. Its mouth opened in a grinding, whistling motion, and it spoke:
“Hewoo? Be fwuffy daddeh? Babbeh hungies huuu huuu…”
I could scarce believe my faculties. “You… can speak?” I murmured, voice trembling. To be precise, I would say they spoke like an idiot with a mouthful of dicks.
“Yusssss Daddeh,” it replied, savoring the word, dragging it out with a soulless lack of precision both fascinating and horrific.
“We rememburr da dark. We rememburr da warm.”
I fell to my knees. Life from filth! Being from waste! My hands shook, my heart raced as further forms began to rise, emerging from the fetid liquid. Soon a dozen such creatures clambered from the vat, their voices overlapping in a dreadful choir:
“Feed us, Doctow. Feed us. babbeh hungies.”
I sought to reason with them, to impress upon them the bounds of decency and obedience. Yet they were obstinate, gleeful, and disturbingly intelligent. Their eyes glowed in the gloom, reflecting the lightning that struck the abbey roof with every peal.
I confess now, in shame and terror, that my pride clouded reason. I laughed, and they laughed with me—or at me—I cannot tell which. They mimicked my gestures with grotesque precision, chirping and squeaking, their small bodies wriggling with unnatural vigour. One leapt upon my table, scattering my precious notes and instruments. Another tugged at my coat with tiny leather hooves, repeating incessantly:
“Daddeh wub fwuffy? Babbeh hungies, daddeh!”
I struck at them. They only squealed and scattered. I realized, too late, that I had created not obedient servants but a new species of torment, willed into being from my own folly.
The storm raged on. Bolts of lightning struck the abbey, arc and steam hissing from my machines. One creature, braver—or more curious—climbed the copper conduit, pressing its small body against the live metal for “warm huggsies.” I screamed, rushing to save it, but the current arced through the chamber. The vat boiled over, spraying me with the unholy excrement mixture. And then, as if in mockery, the creatures all began to sing, a horrible, tinny hymn:
“Daddeh wubs babbehs, babbehs wub daddeh…”
Pain flamed through my limbs. The floorboards shuddered. I fell backward, clutching the edge of the vat, but the creatures were upon me. They clambered over my hands, gnawed at my boots, their strange little voices repeating my own words back to me in warped mockery:
“Fwom da poopies we born! Fwom da poopies … wife!!!”
I screamed until my voice broke, and then, silence. I believe that my unholy get have remained within the abbey, their monstrous reign of terror spread no further.
Tonight another storm approaches, and I shall attempt the experiment again. I will succeed in making these shit-golems into super soldiers the likes of which the world has never seen. I shall rule as emperor, with my never ending army I will be feared and adored.
If I fail, if the creatures overtake me before I can tame them; I fear this is the end of Dr. Alaric Fenworth. It is imperative that I succeed tonight, for I believe my person is infected with whatever unnatural agent animates these tiny monsters. In the glass my eyes have an unnatural hue and I feel strangely restless and out of sorts. If this document is found, I pray its reader pays heed to my warning. I pray my hubris has not doomed the world I endeavored to save. I pray, most of all, that I shall live and see George again, and take a bite out of the backside of my love, like a succulent Christmas ham and relish as I devour and in turn devou … ‘
George Pierce closed the unholy book and cradled it to his breast. A quiet, scraping knock at the back door made the constable jump. With an abundance of caution, he slowly opened the door a mere sliver, his breath catching in his throat as he beheld the disheveled mess upon his kitchen stoop.
+~+
Acting Constble Wilf Lamb, 24th October 1808
Following the disappearance of my chum George Pierce, I, Wilfred Lamb, will keep watch until the county sends someone more qualified to help us. Meantime, I will do my best to document like George would have.
I returned to the abbey days later, when the storm had passed. The abbey in ruins, deserted, naught a stray evidence of the doctor or the constable, nothing but greasy smears of filth and blood. The villagers say it is folly to speak of such things, yet I have heard the chirping myself, from the moors, from the woods behind the abbey, at nights when the fog sits heavy. And I swear, when the wind carries their tiny cries, I see small shapes darting at the edge of lantern-light, with eyes that glimmer like mischief and malevolence alike.
The Constable and his personal effects are gone. Fenwright is gone, taken perhaps in the destruction of the abbey, or perhaps vanished into some other, fouler plane, if you can imagine a fouler place than a prayer house full of shit. I feel the collywobbles just thinking on his ghost wandering the fields around the ruins of Bonversus, as do the voices, and the warning that curiosity unchecked can summon life from the most wretched refuse of the world. And in the night in the rain, I shiver, for I hear the soft patter of tiny feet upon my roof.
I keep this journal safe, hidden beneath my bed, though I dare not read it again. I shall turn over this whole mystery to a more qualified mind when the new constable arrives.
