Pitchskin

An Account from the Hinterland, Winter of 1813 In the late winter of 1813, in a hamlet lying some twenty leagues east of Lyon - where the land gives way to thickets of pine and bare pasture - there occurred a most lamentable episode which I now recount with a heavy and indignant heart. It concerns a simpleton of great stature known only as Ludo, and the cruel fate that befell him during a time of pestilence and unrest. The fellow was of prodigious build - broad in chest and arm, and towering over most grown men by a head or more. Yet his mind, God help him, had never ripened past the tender years of childhood. He could not read nor reckon, and spoke in halting syllables, oft repeating the same sounds with the dulled cadence of a babe. His nature, however, was gentle - docile as a farmhand’s dog, and harmless as the lambs he would carry for the shepherds in spring. It was said he would spend whole days fashioning small animals from wood and scratching pictures in the dust with his enormous fingers. Ludo dwelt on the outskirts of the village with his mother, a widow of quiet manner and sturdy constitution, who bore the jeers of townsfolk with the weary patience of those much acquainted with sorrow. She kept her boy clean and fed, and did her best to instruct him in prayers, though he could scarce remember more than a line or two. Most viewed him with suspicion - some whispered that he was marked by misfortune, and in him the devil had played some idle joke of creation. Yet none could say he had ever lifted hand against man, beast, or child. When the plague struck our region that winter - a strange and wasting sickness that blackened the gums and rendered its victims violent before death - the people were seized not only by fear, but by that darker instinct which seeks scapegoats when reason falters. And in Ludo, they found one. It took but the word of one drunken shepherd, swearing he had seen the boy eating raw fowl beneath a waxing moon, to set tongues wagging and tempers boiling. “He walks at night,” they said. “Speaks to shadows. Look at him - he's touched, no doubt.” No magistrate was summoned, nor priest consulted. Instead, the men gathered by torchlight and stormed the poor widow’s home, dragging the wretched Ludo into the square as she wept and clutched at his sleeves. She begged for clemency, swore upon the Bible he had done no harm, but no one heeded her. In their terror and ignorance, they turned to an ancient punishment once practised in foreign colonies - what they called a “necklacing.” A garland of pitch-soaked cloths was forced around the poor lad’s neck, and a pot of boiling tar prepared over a brazier. Some turned their faces, others shouted vile things, but the mother’s cries pierced all. I remember it even now, that shrill note of despair as they poured the burning matter upon her son’s crown. His scream was inhuman - a bellow of pain that turned men’s stomachs and caused horses to rear. The tar clung to his flesh, searing it as he thrashed and flailed, till finally he collapsed, his enormous frame twitching like a felled ox. She ran to him and embraced what remained, blackened and unrecognisable, rocking back and forth in the cinders. “He was a good boy,” she kept saying, as if the repetition might undo what had been done. They left him there until morning. The widow was not seen again. Some say she wandered into the forest and laid herself down to die. Others whisper that she walks still, searching for her son. And on nights when the fog hangs thick and the moon is high, there are tales - of a towering shadow that moves without sound, smoke trailing faintly from the ruin of its head, leaving scorched prints in the frozen earth. But I tell this not for the sake of superstition, nor to frighten children. I write it that the shame may not be forgotten. That we might remember what fear makes of men when guided not by sense, but by cruelty. Let no Christian heart ever permit such evil again.