Excerpt: Secernere

When he saw the body strewn across the riverbank twenty feet below him, his first thought was that it had been twelve years since he’d seen a full-grown woman, and when he’d last seen that woman, she’d been dead—just like this one. The sight of her body, laying there as if she were only sleeping in the sand, chilled him. She was barely dressed, and the white clothes she was wearing were transparent like boiled onion, and clung to her alabaster body in all the places he wasn’t supposed to see.

The puppy Storey had been chasing—an escapee from the fenced-in pen where he was keeping the quickly maturing litter of bloodhounds—stood on the precipice in a vacillating stance that indicated both fear and curiosity. As the dog rocked lightly back and forth, a low whine vibrated out from his throat, and Storey tried to calm him in low, dulcet tones. But in one quick motion, the dog launched forward down the scree toward the body. Cursing the animal, Storey followed, half stepping, half slipping down the loose rocks of the slope. The dog ran directly to the body and immediately thrust his nose into the wet brown hair. Storey saw now that it was sticky and matted with dark blood. He darted his hand forward to grab the puppy by the scruff and yanked him back with a firm negative command, then gestured for the dog to sit. The dog obeyed with reluctance, resigning to stare at the body with his rheumy brown eyes.

Now just steps from the body, Storey could easily enough just roll it back into the water, as was his first instinct to do. It hadn’t come up too far on shore, and probably only landed here because of the sharp bend in the river. If he pushed it back into the turbid moving water, it would float freely north for several leagues before there was any geography that could foreseeably send the body aground once more. Then it would be the problem of some other estate, some other villein. That would be best. No one but Storey would have seen the body; no one ever had cause to visit this part of the river. The dog certainly wasn’t going to tell the tale.

Storey again gestured for the dog to stay put, then took a step forward. The wet sand of the shore rose up around his boot. He took one more step closer, then squatted down. Just looking at the body, he could already imagine what it would feel like to touch its soggy skin, and the thought nauseated him. He saw now that the body had strange tan lines: the face, shoulders, and arms were deeply bronzed, even burned on the very extremities like the bridge of the nose. The rest of her, however, was as white as if it had never seen sunshine. She couldn’t have been here very long, or surely she would have baked to a brick red in the August sun. It was a pity—she could have been a very important woman—but it wasn’t Storey’s problem. Taking a deep breath, grateful he could only smell river water and not the stench of decomposition, he pushed both his hands below the body’s back and began to turn it over to its side. As he did so, it suddenly convulsed in his hands, and the woman coughed and spit out a lungful of dirty water. Storey dropped the body and jumped back.

She was alive.