Antlers

Antlers

It was ten past midnight when an infant was born with skin the color of a new bruise and hair matted with red.

    The blood had not yet cooled when the father knelt in the yellowing winter grass, begging. He knelt because his wife was dead, though her screams still echoed in his ears. He knelt because his son, the last of his family, was dying. 

"Please, God," he wailed, "don't take him too." 

    God didn't answer. But someone else did, someone—or rather, something—darker. And this something, this piece of the night, agreed to spirit the boy away from the threshold of Death. It agreed because in his desperation, the father forgot to be wary of the creatures that dwell in the shadows; rather, he pledged he would give the spirit anything it desired, if only it would let the child live. 

    "I shall save him, but he will come back to you less of a human than I." The spirit told the father. "And when the boy becomes a man, you shall bring me his head." 

    With that, the apparition vanished. In the house, the infant began to cry. When the father rushed in, he noticed two things. Firstly, the boy's skin was no longer bluish but a light, healthy pink. Secondly, there was a pair of nubs—the beginnings of what would blossom into antlers—sprouting from the top of the boy's head. 

How very peculiar. The father thought. But he didn’t care. After all, his son was alive, and that was all he had wanted. 

He seemed like an ordinary boy, though perhaps a bit more spry than most. Other than the antlers, the child was undeniably human. At least, that’s what his father insisted—the villagers noticed from the start there was something strange about him. It wasn’t his appearance—the father made sure his son was never seen without a hat or scarf covering his hair—no, the boy was quite plain-looking. Rather, it was his behavior that differentiated him from the other children. 

Hardly three days after his birth, the boy stood up in his crib. Within the hour, he had climbed out and was walking as sure-footed as a mountain goat. 

A few weeks later, the boy stopped taking milk from his wet nurse’s breast. For days, he refused to drink. His father, alarmed, ran for the village doctor despite not having two coins to rub together. But when the two men arrived at the house, they found the child happily chewing away at the wild ferns next to the house. 

The villagers whispered about the events, but they weren’t entirely alarmed. Such development wasn’t unheard of; in fact, it had been boasted of in legends. 

“Perhaps,” a washerwoman whispered, “perhaps he has been chosen by God to be His Champion.” It was an exciting thought, so for the first few years of the boy’s life, he was treated like a prince. The vendors gave him as many sweets as he could hold in his chubby fists, and everyone took to calling him the Holy Child. So popular the boy was that people from neighboring towns started to visit in hopes of catching a glimpse of him.

As the Holy Child grew more and more venerated, his father began to grow fat off the people’s offerings. A poor farmer no longer, the father rose to be a priest in the regional church—because his son, oh, how wonderful that child was! 

At four, the boy became proficient in his mother tongue as well as in Latin, Greek, and French. It was also at that age when the forest first began to talk to him. He would spend entire days in the embrace of the woods at the edge of town. There was something in the boy that drew him into the trees—it was a tugging in his navel, an undying whisper in his ears. There was something about him, a seed in his mind that made the boy want to traverse through those woods and never come out. 

“Sure, that boy has odd tendencies,” the townspeople agreed, “but he is nothing short of a miracle given to us by God.” 

At seven, the Holy Child was the fastest runner in all the town—beating all the older boys and even their fathers—and soon enough, in all the kingdom. When challengers came from foreign places to meet him, he bested them all with a twinkle in his eye. When he ran, his sun-browned limbs were a blur, and his red gash of a mouth would always be open with laughter. 

He was the small village’s pride, one of the wonders of the kingdom. But as the day of his eighteenth birthday—and according to the spirit, the day he would become a dead man—loomed closer, he became stranger. 

A year or so before his prophesied death, the boy stopped talking. He who had once known four, five languages now spoke in nothing but soft, unintelligible sounds. As his tongue failed him, he began to retreat from his people; when the villagers turned their reverent gazes upon him, he looked away. 

Noticing the boy’s calamity, his father, the priest-now-anointed-bishop, would clasp the villagers’ hands after church and conjure up explanations. “My boy is very sick. The evils of the world see his purity and wish to take it from him.” 

The bishop was afraid for his son, but even more afraid for the state of his coffers. And so he shut the boy away in their now massive estate—with the boy’s dazzling reputation, they had grown extraordinarily wealthy—and pleaded with him. The bishop was convinced his son was sick, not in the body, but in the heart. 

“You see what you have gotten us?” He would pause to gesture at the silk curtains, at the silver candelabras, at their mountains of riches. “You bring us prosperity. You bring everyone prosperity, so you must continue to be the Holy Child.” 

But the boy was difficult. Very difficult. His antlers were prominent, now. No amount of pleading could change him, no hat could cover the branch-like structure on the boy’s head. Slowly, the bishop grew violent, as the desperate do (or perhaps it had always been in him, like a pesky flea in the coat of a bull. The urge to hurt, to ravage). It started with yelling. The occasional slap or pinch. But as weeks passed, no new coins were being earned, and the boy still would not speak, the beatings started to occur.

“You must change. You must change now.” He would snarl in the heavy silence between the punishing blows. “You see what you are doing to us? To me?” 

The boy paid for his unspoken crimes in tears and sweat, and more commonly, in blood. But never in words—oh, no. Even if he could speak, the boy vowed he would never utter another word if it would please his father. 

With each dreary day, he grew estranged from himself. They seemed as distant as the stars, the days when the spirited boy who ran and laughed had lived. The stars...the boy could hardly make out their glow. For his father had confined him in a room somewhere deep in the manor where there were no windows and no light, said for the sad glow of a single lantern. 

The eve before his birthday, the boy lay motionless on the floor of his cell, too weak to even stand. His father, it seemed, wanted to starve the wild out of him. The meals the servants offered only consisted of meat, which the boy could not force himself to even smell. Though the meat was cooked, to him it reeked of blood—perhaps it was the spirit’s curse or years of eating only greens, perhaps a tiny part of him remembered the grim hour where he was dripping with the blood of his mother, but he refused to eat.

When presented with the starved body of his son, the father only grew more enraged. He ordered the servants to pry his son's mouth open and forced him to eat every last piece of meat on the plate. That night, from the boy’s cell came terrible howls to which no one answered. 

The next morning, the bishop’s estate awoke to a terrible ruckus. When the bishop himself was brought to the source, he nearly keeled over with shock. Instead of his son, in the cell there stood a large buck with a coat the color of tree bark. 

When the buck saw the bishop in the doorway, he squared up his antlers and charged. Startled, the bishop leapt out of the room and slammed the door shut, abandoning his accompanying servant to the dark room's embrace. The servant boy’s scream died in his throat as he was gutted by the buck.

Outside, the bishop watched as blood began to leak into the corridor from inside the room. For a heartbeat, all was silent in the manor. Then, the bishop cleared his throat. Cleared it again. 

As he reached into his pocket for a handkerchief, the bishop addressed the gathering crowd of servants. 

“One of you. Fetch me an axe.”