The dark cloud in the wooden box

"Welcome sir" said a wizened little man who finally answered the
door. "I am sorry to have kept you waiting out in the cold like this. I
was at the far end, and I fear the years, and the harsh concrete floors
of the house, have taken their toll on my legs."
He ushered me into the entrance hall. The candle he held barely
penetrated the gloom. I could hear the ticking of a clock, and
somewhere deeper within the house faint cries.
He looked at me strangely. I did not care for the way his eyes seemed
to sink deeper into their sockets in the flickering orange light. And
then, something stirred in my mind, and I realized I had seen him
before.
"You were here, were you not?" I asked him. "All those years
ago?"
He shrugged his shoulders, and it seemed for a moment that the weight
of a thousand years of sorrow and loneliness weighed heavily on him. "I
am needed here. She would not be able to cope without me. Please follow
me sir. I will show you where you are to be lodged tonight."
He turned, and his candle had almost faded into the darkness before I
thought to follow him. Its dull glow bobbed ahead of me and I soon felt
my feet creak on a wide staircase that may once have appeared grand and
elegant in the days when this house had thronged with the most dazzling
people in England.
Those times had long since ended. Suddenly. When my father had
returned from the Crimea in 1856 clutching a wooden box and had opened
it at the banquet my mother had arranged to welcome him home. The
guests, sipping their claret and smacking their lips at the prospect of
a grand feast, simply withered away. For all I knew, their bones still
lay strewn across the floor in a distant room of the house. Time had
dimmed my sense of the geography of the place.
We must have climbed through several floors of the house. The old
butler paused, then turned towards me. I wasn't sure whether the
quivering of his thin lips was an attempt to smile or a sign of his
increasing infirmity.
"Your chambers are a little further. But perhaps you would care to see
your sister beforehand." The ghastly light showed the dark rectangle of
a door. The corridor walls around it quivered. The walls seemed yellow,
jaundiced with age.
I felt that old, bitter agony welling up from the pit of my stomach. I
had first felt it ten years before, seated at the far end of that
glorious, dazzlingly white table. It had seemed to burn, as the
crystal, gold and silver glinted and reflected a thousand lights. My
sister had sat on my right, shining in the light and admired by the
officers in their red tunics who worshipped her even more than our
father. He had led them unscathed through bloody battle on the shores
of the Black Sea. Yet with peace, and the sating of their bloodlust,
her blue eyes and firm figure had inspired a different kind of
lust.
My father, flushed with wine and power had spoken at length before
opening the tiny wooden box. I remembered little of what he said,
beyond the discovery of a tiny village deep in the birch woods, so
remote that its people still clung to ancient, pre-Christian beliefs,
and worshipped the trees, the rivers, and the dark Russian earth. An
ancient, wild-haired shaman had pleaded with his men not to take the
relic. In an alien land it would be only destructive. There, it would
make the crops grow. Anywhere else, it could only wither and
blight.
The faint, dark cloud that poured from the box was silent. The weeping
and moaning of the people it touched still echoes deafeningly in my
ears. It caught my father first, peeling the flesh from his head. It
seemed an eternity before he fell, but I can never forget the white of
his skull, the bloody streaks of flesh and the dark tufts of hair. It
seemed to delight in his death; in contrast my mother died quickly. Her
body collapsed almost instantly in a shower of bone and blood.
The cloud moved slowly towards our end of the table. I knew we would
have time to escape, even as its stench, like black peaty soil dug from
the bowels of the earth, reached my nostrils. "Run!" I shouted to my
sister. But she sat still, frozen with horror, watching as the
disintegration drew closer and closer to her. I pulled her clear, but
not before the cloud had begun to work on one half of her body.
I had not seen her since. The thought of her, half-skinned, repulsed
me. I couldn't imagine how she could possibly have survived, but
somehow she had clung to life. I thought it strange the cloud had
stopped when it reached her, rather than billowing from the windows of
my father's house and shredding the entire country. I feared that it
somehow still lived inside her, brooding, its dark tendrils running
through her body, biding its time.
The cries I had first heard when I entered the house came again, this
time from behind the door. I felt in one way desperately saddened by
them. This was my blood, crying out in pain, anguish and loneliness.
Yet the groans and gurgles that always followed them turned my stomach,
and made my mouth bitter with bile.
" No, I am weary from my journey. I will rest and visit her in the
morning."
The old man shrugged again and led me further on down the
corridor.
That night, I realized that even though the dark cloud had not touched
me, my soul had still been blackened by it. I resolved never to
wake.