The Subotnik of the Dead

Plasnitz was once a proud jewel in the collectives crown, sat as it was below the sacred wood chapel.

In former times it's citizens, it's kameraden, would labour to make the village  patriotic examples, a cultural opal in otherwise desolate times.

The forces of chaos were all around the village, a malevolent and inexorable amoeba of evil and bloodshed led by the loathsome tyrant, the giant Rattenhaut.

Plasnitz however stood resolute, an oasis of freedom buffeted like a breakwater by the rising sea of corruption. All other villages had fallen to Rattenhaut and militia of subservient goons. They had plundered their meagre coffers and had taken the women for their own pleasuring. The men were massacred. The children butchered. There could be no inheritors.

News of the routs came to Plasnitz and smoke rose in the valleys. Still it's comrades forged on with their daily diligences and stoicly prepared for the subotnik, the collective task.

This subotnik was a village-wide effort to repair and re-line their beloved timber chapel and sweep and refresh its ancient pews and screeds high above them on the hill. 

The entire community made the trek up the holy path to the building. Mothers, Grandmothers, fathers, Grandfathers, children and babies. They sang of their ancestors as they carried the tools up the to the peak in wooden carts, the hammers, saws, chisels and takes clattering like teeth in winter. Wagons with food and drink for the Subotnik feast followed close behind, the scents of beer, fresh bread, pickles, peppers and sausage filling the spring air. 

Bees buzzed in the summit meadows like angels and at the top the villagers immediately set to work on the wooden church. Only the dogs had been left behind to watch out for intruders and sound the alarm. 

The men toiled on the interior refurbishment, replacing roof joists and timbers. The children assisted as it was cooler inside on such a warm day. The women began to render the flaking outside walls with new gesso.

So engrossed in the Subotnik were they all that neither the momentary yelps of their dogs in the village, shot by lethal enemy archers, nor the quiet advance of Rattenhaut's band could be heard.

The tyrant's heart beat faster as he approached the hilltop. Long had he coveted the church on the peak and lusted after the legendary reliquary thought buried beneath the crucifix in its shadow. It opals and sapphires mesmerised his thoughts. Only the bones of hill's saints, with their ancient promise to vanquish it's defilers, gave him cause for concern. 

The infidels swept up the slope like a plague. So sudden was the siege that all the women were punched semi-conscious simultaneously and no sound was made as the enemy encircled the chapel.

It was then that the gargantuan Rattenhaut raped each woman one by one, their desperate moans reaching the ears of the men inside.

Noooooooooo!

But it was too late. The chapel was sealed shut and the laughing rabble waited for the command.

Do it! Kill them all and burn the remains!

The fevered marauders flung open the doors and poured in, swords and axes slashing with wild wide strokes. It was a cataclysm, the heroic subotniks and their children hacked to bits among the gore-spattered pews. The chapel was a charnel-house of dismembered limbs and thick crimson blood lapping against the walls like a sacred sea.

Burn it?

The enormous tyrant nodded. The women writhed in their captors' grip and screamed as their hearts broke a thousand times o er.

As the flames erupted the despot turned to the huge wooden crucifix in the chapel's lee. Ordering two of his men to dig at the base, his greed surged as the reliquary of legend was indeed dragged out.

Open it!

The lustrous lid was heaved away to reveal ... 

Nothing. Nothing but the bones of the beatified.

Damn them to Hell! I shall show the saints what I think of them.

Rattenhaut unbuttoned his bulging codpiece and urinated fully like a horse over the sacred relics of the chapel, shaking his massive member until every drop was out.

I piss on your saints Plasnitz. I piss on all your souls.

The womenfolk gasped and the heavens darkened. 

Rattenhaut stared at them and the sky, shivered without any of his men seeing and shouted his final command.

Bring the women down to the village men. They must cook and fuck for us now!

With the black smoke from the pogrom rising behind them, the invaders wrestled their prizes to the now silent Plasnitz below.

Immediately a deplorable daily ritual of feeding the enemy and having them inside befell the enslaved women, their spirits smashed by the intolerable tragedy at the chapel.

Rattenhaut himself became ever more hateful and erratic, taking as many women as he could, planting his twisted essence and pissing in their imploring faces as he commanded them to reveal the hidden treasures of the holies. They laughed in his face and the deranged giant ranted, raved and degraded them with the bones of the saints.

Nothing mattered anymore to Rattenhaut except finding the damned treasure.

His men, as corrupt as they were, had grown wary of his burgeoning wildness and a dark malady festered in their stomachs, a gnawing angst fattening the closer the year swung round to the massacre's first anniversary.

Their dreams turned sour and fear set in like the black fog thickening on the peak above. Only drinking helped, the stupor of ale.

And so it came to pass that on the night of the anniversary the dead rose from the ashes on the hill and walked in single file down the slope carrying the charred tools they held as they were burned alive. The hammers, chisels, saws, planes, axes, knives and gesso pales.

In the village the drunken enemy slept in the square, the enslaved women trapped beneath their fat loathsome frames, their pillagers' bellies full to bursting from the larders and the copious cellars, now drunk dry. Their gluttony sounded through their open mouths as great snoring growls and drool dripped onto the womenfolk, whom they'd whored till they were spent.

But the women knew that their men and children would descend from the slopes and free them that night.

One year on they slept with both eyes open and waited.

They came as they knew they would, silently with the calm of the dead, the tools noiseless in the night.

The subotniks began from the outside, holding the mouths of the sleeping foes shut and slowly slit open their skins, dragged out their bones and drained them of blood, storing it in the large gesso buckets.

Gradually with no sound at all they reached the central fountain, where the enormous chief infidel himself lay sprawled, his porcine figure atop four smiling women.

The village dead slit his vocal chords and to his silent horror each corpse urinated black piss into his open maw and once emptied,  nailed him face-first to the wooden crucifix from the hill, where his baggy breeches were pulled down and each and every one of the deceased sodomized him until they were spent of their necrotic seed.

The corpse children then lowered the flaccid bastard and swiftly cut him open, ripped out his massive engorged bladder and pulled off his huge sagging balls. Each child in turn climbed into his corpulent abdomen and took an organ or a muscle or a bone until he was but a deflated meatless sheet to be used as the table cloth.

The women cheered and sang and danced with their beloved dead dearest and gladly cooked a feast of the enemy's warm blood and Rattenhaut's roasted testicles, brazed bladder and a magnificent tray of his liver, kidneys, heart, brains, lungs, ribs and joints.

The revellers were wholly satisfied and the village flourished once more. It was never invaded again, as word spread of the wrath of Plasnitz and it's vengeful subotnik of the dead.