Content note (click for details)
Threatened harm to women and children; non-graphic mentions of death by drowning; povertyedited by Ziv Wities
The monster came out perfectly.
The head of an ass. A human left arm, delicate in comparison to the elephant’s right forefoot. A woman’s torso—a whole torso, and quite naked. Provocative, but then, this was for religious purposes. An eagle’s left leg, and the right leg of a cow. Or a bull. Who but a husbandman could tell the difference? An old man’s face grimaced from where the buttocks should be, and below that a long dragon’s neck and head emitted ominous puffs of gas.
Perfect.
John Bateman, printer of Fleet Street, London, hung the folio sheet up to dry. The likeness was wonderful. As the pamphlet told, the monster had washed up dead in Rome nearly a century before, in the year of Our Lord 1496, after a flood of the River Tiber. As the great reformer Philip Melanchthon of Wittenburg had stirringly explained, it demonstrated the judgement of God Almighty against the sins of the Romish church.
Tomorrow, John and his family would fold, stitch and cut hundreds of the pamphlets. Melanchthon’s words were ripe for a new audience, and would marshal support for the defence of England against the Spanish fleet. And who could say? Perhaps they would draw the attention of Good Queen Bess herself, and a royal commission or two.
“’Tis well made, husband,” said Katie.
“Aye, ’tis well all ’round. None doth set type nicer and quicker than thou.”
“It should draw good custom.”
John considered all the hanging broadsheets. The sooty smell of drying ink filled the shop. It was a great improvement on the noisome vapours of the cesspit below the floor. The few candles that illuminated their late-night work threw flickering shadows on the paper labyrinth.
“And ’tis good service to the realm.” But yes, good custom first and foremost. And perhaps the salvation of their press. Procuring so true a facsimile of Master Cranach’s original engraving of the monster was a triumph, but an expensive one.
John and Katie surveyed the hundreds of little monsters all around them, and sighed contentedly. Their tired fingers and shoulders urged them upstairs to join their little ones, already abed.
Someone knocked on the shop door.
A gentle rap, not a pounding that would attract the attentions of a night watchman. The city was on alert for potential Spanish spies preceding the oncoming armada, and uneasy dreams thickened the air.
The tapping continued. The sound spoke as clearly as words: “I do not wish to draw undue attention, but I shall not and will not leave until my suit is known. Dare me not to knock louder.”
John pushed his heart back down into his chest, and with slow breaths ducked under the inky pages. He lifted the bar and creaked the door open an arrow-slit.
The fog-shrouded moon above gave only faerie-light to the street, but it was enough to see the figure towering above him, cloaked from head to toe. John’s mother had told him tales of monks in Bloody Mary’s reign, and in his dreams they looked much like this.
“Good even, Goodman Bateman,” the monk said. His voice was deep and, strange to say, came not from the head but the midsection. The accent was foreign; Romish perhaps?
“The hour is very late for strangers,” John snapped, allowing himself as much rudeness as he dared. After all, it was quite possible this was an agent of the Queen.
“Nay, Goodman Bateman. Thou knowest me.” He leaned forward, yet nothing but darkness appeared under the cloak. Again the voice came from below and behind: “Or rather, thou knowest my kind.”
Was the stranger threatening them? “We are not papists, nor hiders of papists, if you mean that.”
“Nay. Not precisely.” The man’s voice rose slightly, threatening a shout.
Katie appeared at John’s shoulder, Gripping his arm tightly, she drew him back, and said, “Do come in, good sir.”
John and Katie turned along the wall, the only way provided by their hanging sheets. The huge monk ducked low to pass under their doorway, and followed them. The high ceiling of the shop permitted him to stand at full height. Katie led them to a pair of typesetting tables set facing each other, each with a high seat. “Will you sit?” Katie asked.
“I shall, gladly. It has been a tiresome journey.”
John gestured toward the seat nearest the monk. As in a warped mirror, they sat at the same time. Katie drew up a third stool for herself. The upright typesetting rack would have blocked their view of a shorter guest.
John put a hand to his head. “What do you want of us?” he whispered.
“To ask a favour.”
The shadow under the cowl turned this way and that, absorbing the printed monster many times over. It expelled a shuddering breath.
“Thinkst thou this poor departed creature has aught to do with thy human squabbles? I implore thee as being, I hope, a man not without feeling, that thou wilt destroy these unauthorised images.”
“Unauthorised!” squawked John. “I paid right handsomely for these!”
“But didst thou think to ask her kin?” the monk hissed.
“I see not what business it is of theirs,” huffed John. “A monstrous birth is God’s will, God’s lesson, and God’s property, not some peasant brood’s.”
Katie reached out her ink-stained hand. “Are you of her family then?”
“Aye. I am that. So I ask again, John Bateman, that thou destroy these slanderous copies, and leave us out of thy petty affairs.”
That would ruin them. Did this man have no notion of what he asked, or did he not care? John’s pride in their work and livelihood shook the weights from his tongue. “Is it a petty affair, sirrah, to restore the ancient gospel from popish superstition? ’Tis well known this beast, washed up on a Tiber flood, is a judgement on Rome and its corruption! ’Tis proved by Doctor Melanchthon, in the text now translated by mine own wife. Herein he shows how each monstrous appendage represents the very sins of the pope. The ass’s head bespeaks the stupidity of—–”
Without a word, a delicate hand reached out of the sleeve and flipped back the hood of the cloak. An ass’s head stared down at them, joined in silent chorus by five hundred reproductions all around. John thought all asses had a melancholy look in their eyes, but this visage reflected a sorrow much deeper than that. In awe, he turned to Katie. A tear coursed down her cheek.
“True,” he whispered. “’Tis true. I knew ’twas true.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
They’d never said it to each other. They never had to. They knew how likely it was that the whole story was a lie. Lies flew thick and fast these days, and not all of them were Catholic ones. It was one thing to gamble all on the truth, but when you could not even be sure of that… To be nothing more than another cheap purveyor of lies—that was horrible to suppose. Yet the empty stomachs of their little ones were worse to think on.
But it was all true. And John and Katie felt no horror in the monster’s presence, but joy.
“She was your wife,” said Katie.
“She was,” it said.
Katie leaned forward. “Sir, what is your name?”
“I will not give it thee. The sounds of our speech are not such as thine. As like as not, it would only amuse thee. And I am in deadly earnest. I could, if I wished, burn this place to the ground.” It picked up a candle and made the slightest gesture towards the bottom edge of the nearest broadsheet.
“Please!” cried Katie. “Our pretty ones are upstairs! You’d not harm them!”
“I know who is in this house,” the monster said, but it set down the flame. “Thou shalt destroy these pamphlets.”
“I cannot,” said John.
The ass’s eyes regarded him with cold intelligence that a true animal could never muster. John ached to drive the monster out into the street and destroy it, he knew not how. It must have been twice his weight. The floorboards groaned uncomfortably when it shifted.
“I cannot,” John repeated, trying to implore without begging. “It would be the ruin of us. What I paid for that image, I can recover no way but by the sale of these.”
He rubbed his hands together and could not meet the monster’s eyes. His words were running out like hourglass sand. “And besides, would you deny an Englishman his chance to rally his nation against its foes? Under the papist hordes, surely you see that a printer of England would be driven from his livelihood, or worse?”
The monster stood, its head practically to the rafters. “My kind has seen kingdoms better than this sink into the sea. What will befall thy little island concerns me not. This… desecration of my beloved… concerns me very much.”
“Then why did you not trouble Melanchthon with these complaints? It was he who first brought out this image.”
“I knew not his plans when he made them. Since then, we have become more attentive.”
“How?” asked Katie. “How did you know to come to our door?”
The ass brayed once, and the voice chuckled. “The community of printers of Europe is a small one, and it loves rumours of forthcoming publications best of all. The engraving thou commissioned was uncommonly fine, and much remarked upon.” The ass regarded the closest of the portraits with a miserable eye. It huffed, or sighed, or both. “The Jesuits in thy land operate more than the one press recently confiscated, and they owe my kind some small favours.”
John could not contain his curiosity. “Yet how could you travel among us, such as you are? And so speedily?”
“If I tell thee, John Bateman, what wilt thou give me in return?”
“I promise… to think about it.”
Again, the soft bray and chuckle. “For such precious coin as that, I would dare much.” The hand reached up, gripped the edge of the cloak, and tore it off. It thumped to the floor in a heavy heap.
The monster stood revealed, the masculine version of his wife’s image. Yet there was more. Huge leathery wings unfurled. Many broadsheets imprinted themselves on the membranes.
“We travel much faster than ye humans, Goodman Bateman. Thy borders and kingships mean little to us. My wife’s wings were torn off in the flood that took her from me. I held on to her with my good claw, but we are delicately made.” He raised the eagle’s talon that was his left foot. “The waters were too strong, the rain too thick to fly in. I saw her eyes in that last moment, before she was taken. We spoke more love in that instant, John Bateman, than a penny-counter such as thou could match in many lives.”
His tail, swishing, spat out sparks that died, mercifully, on the floorboards. “Now. Wilt thou still measure my pain against thy fear?”
John stammered, searching for words that would lead out of this nightmare. “But see, you need not suffer from my small transgression. Tomorrow, think how many thousands of pamphlets will be for sale on Paternoster Row by the Cathedral, on every topic on which men will speak—which is all of them. And that counts not the illicit trade, the products of the Catholic press lately uncovered in Oxford. Every stall sells pamphlets and broadsheets and books upon books, and who can read it all? Who can make sense of it all? Shall not my little pages sink into the ocean of print, and swim in it, and vanish, and trouble you no more?”
The monster’s face was as stony as any ass’s ever was. “And yet thou hope to sell hundreds of them? Thy self-contradiction does thee no credit. But I will make thee a bargain. Thou mayst sell thy sheets tomorrow, if thou do but cut off thy wife’s face, and nail it to thy door. Then shalt thou know how I suffer, in the presence of these.”
John looked from Katie to the monster, caught between its brutal words and the no less brutal figures in his accounting book. In his desperation, for one terrible moment, he imagined himself doing what it said. And for one terrible moment, Katie saw him thinking it. So fine was the line between life and death in London Town.
John wrung his hands. “I do not suppose… you could pay me to destroy them?”
Silence hard as flint was the only answer.
Katie stood and moved around the tables to stand beside the monster. She took up the human left hand.
“Sir,” said Katie, “so unusual a form as yours can only be due to the will of Heaven. If you and your wife be not a symbol of Romish Babylon, pray tell us, whence do you come and what judgment of God do you signify?”
“I am no symbol,” it roared, tearing its hand free. “No, nor my wife neither!” Its wings buffeted the air, causing paper to brush against paper. John winced at the waste.
Katie stood still and strong. The ass’s head chuffed, and the voice sighed. Wisps of smoke rose from the dragon-tail. The monster furled his wings and sat back down, heedless of his nudity. The chair creaked.
“A symbol. Always ye humans think in symbols. Never of what is, simple and of itself. Always need ye ask, ‘What doth it mean?’ Well, then, what dost thou mean, Goodwife Bateman? In thy standing here before me, what dost thou signify? In thy rising up and thy lying down, what dost thou mean? Tell me that, if thou canst!”
Katie gazed down at the floor. John knew the look and kept his counsel. His wife was the better printer and accountant, and he knew what it looked like when she thought deeply.
She met the monster’s gaze once more. “I would say many things. I would say that to my children, I signify the love of the Provider God. To my husband, I signify the help of the Intercessor God. To many men in England, as a woman, I signify the abnegation of the Sacrificing God. I would say these things, and then I would be nothing in myself, but only a plaything of others. There are many in this land, Anglicans and Puritans and Catholics alike, who would urge me to say such a thing of myself. Therefore I will not. I am, as I do now say you are, myself and no symbol.”
The ass clicked its teeth. “Thou seest then, if but dimly, what I suffer.”
Katie held up a hand. “But I am, then, the one who decides for myself, in the constraints I am given. And I do not decide that my family should be thrown into the street for penury, to starve until the winter, when we shall at the last freeze to death, driven onto the icy Thames. I had rather we burn tonight than that. You may join us in the conflagration, if you will, and bring to an end your own plight as well.”
The heat of her gaze could have ignited the air. Finally, the ass’s head looked to John.
The printer shrugged. “My wife’s decision is mine own as well.”
“Then shall we burn together,” the monster said. It plucked up the candle and leaned forward.
“And yet!” said John.
All froze. Upstairs, a child cried out for a moment, then settled back into silence.
“This paper was expensive, and it would pain me to lose it alongside a day’s work, but I am prepared so to do. The cost I cannot bear to lose is the image of your wife. Therefore I propose to publish it—”
“Never!” cried the monster.
“Wait, sir! To publish it, not with our words, but with yours. Do you understand? Tell us about your wife, who she was, what she did. Tell us of her life and her death, and we will publish that.”
The ass’s head stared, thunderstruck. “You would do that?”
“Yes,” said Katie. “I can record your words ’fore dawn and set the text on the morrow. ’Twill be ready for Paternoster Row on Thursday.”
“There are secrets that must not be told…”
“Then entrust them not to us. Tell us only of her. Draw her portrait in words, as we already have in a figure. Make us love her, rather than fear her.”
The human hand stroked the ass’s chin. “Will it sell? Will not your little pages sink into the ocean of print, and swim in it, and vanish?”
John shrugged. “Who can say? But ’twill be our choice, and the life we make, and none other.”
The ass brayed, and the voice laughed. “Then ready your quill, Goodwife Bateman.”
Katie unstoppered an inkpot, sharpened a quill with one expert stroke of her knife, and pulled out a blank piece of paper.
“In your tongue, her name meant Hyacinth,” the monster said. “And to me she was as beautiful as the flight of eagles.”
© 2026 by Stewart Moore
2860 words
Author’s Note: I wrote this story after wondering whether people in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries felt the same way about the printing press that many people today feel about the internet: that there’s too much stuff coming out too fast for anyone to have a command of all of it. The answer is “Yes.” I also learned about the “pope-ass”, an unusual creature said to have been found dead in Rome after a flood and used by Protestants for propaganda purposes. Naturally, I wondered how the “pope-ass’s” family would have felt about that.
Stewart Moore has had short fiction published in anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow, Paula Guran and Flame Tree Publishing, among others; in the magazines Diabolical Plots, Mysterion, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet; and in the podcast Pseudopod. He also published his dissertation, Jewish Ethnic Identity and Relations in Hellenistic Egypt: With Walls of Iron? with Brill. Most recently, his story “Bound by Love” appeared in Modern Mummies from Cat Eye Press.
Stewart Moore’s work “Lies of the Desert Fathers” appeared in Diabolical Plots in July 2019. If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.
