Table of Contents

Advance Praise for

THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN

“What a trip! What a ride! We used to write about the past, present, or future. Then we got into alternate time-lines and reality tinkerers (of which Ed Morris is a major contender if not the champ). And then there was this book! Wow!

“Reading There Was a Crooked Man is like listening to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, Charles Ives and Frank Zappa simultaneously, while indulging in a serious absinthe high and daydreaming about Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

“Morris is either a documented genius or a certifiable madman. I’ll put my money on the former.”

--Richard A. Lupoff, Author of Visions, Dreams, and The Emerald Cat Killer

THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN

Edward Morris

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Mercury Retrograde Press.

This is a work of fiction. Nevertheless any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is NO COINCIDENCE WHATSOEVER. Special thanks to Richard Lupoff and Jeff VanderMeer for playing our game.

Copyright © 2009 by Edward Morris

Cover illustration by Robert F. Sutton
http://suttonart.com

First Electronic Edition—published 2009

Mercury Retrograde Press

227 Sandy Springs Place

Suite D374

Atlanta, GA 30328

www.MercuryRetrogradePress.com

ISBN 978-0-9816654-9-8

“…North, there stood, very far away, the House of Silence upon a low hill. And in that House were many lights and no sound.… And the danger of this House was accounted the greatest danger of all these lands.”

— William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land

“Count the fingers and toes.
Count the eyes.
Number means much.
Number the eyes…

If it has too many, or not enough,
It is a monster, and it must be killed.”

— Jesse Glass, Jr., “Gnosis-M”

“The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the sons, down to the third and fourth generation of they that hate Me…”

— Exodus 20:5

PREAMBLE: NON-STOP VIOLENCE

1.)

Shit.  I’m enwombed again, just after I took a swing at Typhon, in his purple robe… Oh. Ow. That vorpal sword of his must have…

Ow. Shame.

I liked that head.

I remember dying. I think. Not important.  I’ve died a few times already. Dying sucks. So does Respawn.

I’m here in here somewhere. It’s cold in here, or maybe that’s just the chill of self-awareness in my little bundle of morphing, as-yet-undifferentiated cells.

Self-awareness too early, the warm rush of a formula in Logic that my old teacher Mandelbrot told me about, one called the Child of Destiny. I failed Logic the first six tries, at the Academy, but the sense of the formula stayed with me:

Every Thing interconnected in order to create One Other Thing. It can be mathematically proven.

E Pluribus Unum, if you will, or maybe Ex Nihil. Not mine to say. From many…Us.

How strange it must be for you Four, you Scientists, you smug lab-made Gods listening over the little mecha shoulders of the Guardians and saying absolutely Jack Shit to us about it, thanks…

How strange for you to hear this continuing deposition from one yet or sometimes unborn, a ghost who trickles down the centuries, into the ink of the canon’s mouth, and ear!

But I have been born already, variously, as Man, Woman, Creature, Plant, kicked up and down the chain so many times already by the choice I made to follow my amok cousin back in Time, and end the mis-begotten creature’s existence in every form, no matter who helped or what hindered, hell or high water, the Devil or the deep green Swamp…

Got to stay with it. Got to teach these new cells to remember the Real.

To everything, there’s a precedent, sparks of causality fanned by cold currents swirling up from the dark edge, beyond which starlight wavers weird like water, past what we can see…

History doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Nothing comes from nowhere. I have lots of time to think about all this. I think. Down at the deepest wellhead of Dream.

I remember that it was (is?) a bleak, cold winter when I and the other six of my coterie elected to leave Shang 2,  the Shining City Beneath the Hills... in soul, that is, while our bodies still twitch and piss into catheters back there even now, and report back through optical fibers in our ear canals and foreheads. (The Guardians swab us down with silver nitrous nanoracle goo, getting us ready for the next attempt.)

I remember the day we all first plugged into the Tank, yesterday, a thousand years ago the day after tomorrow. Up on the surface of Earth, in the proud towers Mom’s prouder people build and hold, that black snow was falling, falling, falling past any prediction the Guardians could make.

Even they throw up their eleven-million-apiece little metal mittens, past a certain point, and thus avoid the Kill the Weatherman syndrome all too common to Imperiums like my Dad’s. But at the time, it didn’t exactly take a weatherman to see the weather.

I remember everything Mandelbrot ever injected into my head to prepare me for riding the wheel of death and rebirth with full knowledge of doing so, to trick my conscious field into remembering the Kabbalah of its unique makeup…

I remember. But nothing, No Thing, could have prepared me for this reality. (By the way, I got the old memo about where I’m popping out next, the John Brown gimmick. And I am not happy…)

I remember the first rotation, the first permutation my teachers ran the Tank through when we willingly plugged into it through the little interfaces in our ears and between our eyes that let out our Gifts, and change us from merely Awake to…  full Illegitimi, after we go through the screaming nightmare of Bastard Basic Training.

I remember my first attempt in the Tank. I remember telefactoring back into some distant Scythian slave-ancestor’s body the very first year our Enemy roamed the Earth. (I think.)

I remember Rome. What we did there to extinguish my cousin Typhon only drove his essence so far into this time-track that we’ll never unravel his influence completely.  We Bastards of the Universe had (have?) to ramp the Tank forward, and forward, and forward AGAIN.

Just to lose more and more of our original identities every time the Guardians running the tank in Shang 2 hurl our essences further down the stream, to return in new skins again, again, cursing the first twenty-odd years of existence until we can break free of the hateful cuckoo-nests where we happened to Respawn that time around.

(Sigh) But we all got our stories, and I am the least among these.

He closed his eyes, and the Dreamer dreamed on….

2.)

Arise, Dead.  Judge and Be Judged. Let the pain wash off in the rain, and the hillsides outside Town erode ’til every coffin bobs upon the waves, backward, down the Mainline Canal to Lake Erie as the rocks rend and the graves open up, and the fierce flame of the Blessed Mother waits on the shore to catch up and carry away.  Hide yourselves under the mountains.  Fly from the wrath to come.

Fly from the wrath to come. Sky’s on fire. Skies on fire. Above, the clouds wrack and rumble and roar Melville-loud, and a trumpet blows while all good people lie asleep.

This is every green, verdigris-corroded brass clockwork figure in the Courthouse clock of dreams, all the all-but-useless armillary gadgetry ensuring that the bell never, ever tolls the right time, and rolls the trickling economic shitstorm downhill…

Into the clockwork tracks of the railbeds, breeding monsters between the ties and out on the wet-lands… Into the place Nietzsche will speak of where, when you look too long, Great Poison Swamp looks back out of your eyes, and leaves you trapped beneath its acid mere…

This is the first book of Rock Springs, Pennsylvania, which begat its first Mayor, Hizzoner Andrew Horace, who ran unopposed for a second term after a possible opponent was found at the Wayne Street Whore House with one of each flavor, sticking into one with one sticking into him, and fingered by a Carmelite Nun who burst in the door and proceeded to wallop the Selectman down the stairs…

And Hizzoner’s Administration begat the New Land Company, headed by twin politician brothers Jeb and Wade Granson (Coarse louts, both, not beloved at any local tavern.  One of them once raped a girl, though it was never proven which one…)

And the New Land Company, and the Ehrend Foundry, both begat an influx of labourers from New York, and points East, which in turn begat new growth in the areas of…

Ad infinitum, Ad Nauseam, Ad Aeternum, Ad Ardua Per Astra…All just a web of random, mutant growth that went nowhere without direction, without the…

But I dare not speak of that yet.

It’s all here in the logs. I’ll come back to it as I am able, follow the Niagara Trail of my words southward into the Chautauqua Valley to the Canisteo Stream, which empties into the West Branch of the Susquehanna River where it meets the Monongahela at the steaming caves north of here that gave us the name Rock Springs, the hot slippery juices of the earthquake fault under Town…

There is so little time.  Fly from the wrath to come. None of this is written. All of it simply was. It’s standing-room only on the Titanic at the End of Days, as the skies of all SpaceTime crack into pieces from the Future-Terminus backwards.

But not for a few hundred more years in any time-track will that begin to be an issue. Until then, every Time, my Seven run after the Human Virus, the Crooked Man, Typhon Demarest… Hungry and desperate to throw him bodily through the two-second black hole of opportunity the luckiest of our Illegitimi troops of the Sacred City of Shang 2 may singularly generate, in this endless war of temporal attrition that may never lead back home in Time for us.

May. May. May. We may never get back home. In Time.  All that’s been made mine to know, graven into my frontbrain after bodily Death, before I start again with a new ancestral tele-skin at the moment of birth. (Damned slow operating system, I know, but you get what you pay for...)

~

None of this is written. All of it just was.

I dream, I dream, I dream, this desolate dragon land in the dawn times, before the white man came, when even the Red People were new.

I dream, I dream, I dream twenty-five square miles of the Allegheny Ridge of Appalachia, before even Rome herself rose on the banks of the Palatine.

Back when the Old People, the tall people, the People of the First Snow, still spoke to the Red Man and Woman in dreams from their carven, fabulously crenellated sandstone tombs high atop the Mountain of Sorrows, on the Bluff that to this very day oddly resembles the tip of a mighty pyramid sunken in the earth, too vast for human hands to claim…

3.)

None of this is written. All of it just was.

On the eve of each New Year (the Monongahelas’ Feast of Ancestors) the local shaman and his ragtag-and-bobtail young torchbearer acolytes would don the masks they spent the whole rest of the year carving: burning and chipping them into fabulous shapes, staining them with the blood of gourds and maize and poke-berries, poison sumac orange, the yellow of belladonna buttercup and alizarin crimson of deer’s blood thickened with the fat of the great black bear.

Those masks, and the Feast-Day behind them, were the False Face Society acolytes’ one chance to cut loose from their solemn rounds at temple and barefoot-doctoring across the high passes, even unto Mohegan dwellings far in the North Woods, following the Pole Star!

The Monongahela doctors and their acolytes were known by all Six Nations, up and down the war-roads of Penn’s Woods. Everyone needs to loosen their wig sometimes. Even them. Increase one’s responsibilities to the tribe, and the statement only grows more true. (That much about the Monongahela I have no problem understanding at all.)

On New Years’ Eve, Old Crook-Staff and his wild boys of the False Face Society would drink until every star spun in two directions, then clamor at the deerhide-flap doors of any hogan they chose, and make merry, and swing from the sacred posts of the Long House.

The False Face Society would piss on your fires, rut with your wives, tickle your kids out of bed to go raise unholy hell, and generally make your life something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy…

Until you offered up something for the Dead, to turn like earth back into the light to feed the living.

When you did that, when you stood upright before Death and offered part of yourself, Crook-Staff would call off his goblin brood, and peace would reign in the hogans for another year.

To everything, a precedent. To Creation, Destruction, a time. None of this is written. All of it just was.

The Monongahela Irrakwa (in that part of the world which came to be known as Callaight County, Pennsylvania, in the tongue of the Penn) left little record of themselves. FalseTime history from that FalseTime track speaks of an assimilation of the last dying remnants of that tribe into the Cherokee Nation in Andy Jackson’s time.

FalseTime history calls the Monongahela a “lost” tribe, a decimation worthy of the Mayans in scope, if on a much smaller geographical scale.  FalseTime history is wind.

The Monongahela were nomads, but they only migrated once more as a people after the white man came. They were visionaries, seers. The migration was a diaspora. They went down to their cousins’ lands to die.

Before the white man came, that tribe of hunters, fisher-folk and herders once lived anywhere they felt like roaming and building new temporary camps, from the Crossing of Three Rivers to the South-West of Penn’s Woods, far into the granite lands up North, and even all the way East to what came to be Lancaster on the Pike Road to the City of Brotherly Love!

In an earlier time, when they first came down from New England and Newfoundland and the nearly nameless nightmare countries close to the top of the world, the Monongahela found the giants’ ruins on the far west face of what will come to be known as Locke Mountain.

They found the ruins, the big ruins that had mostly fallen down and had a good growth of scrub trees on many. Some of them were so big that they must have taken up most of the Mountain, so the Sachems decreed that the Mountain was the Holiest of Holies, and that a burnt offering must be made…

They found all the stone tombs, and understood after their own lights that their makers must have been so vast in size that it would have taken a Bad Wind indeed to fell them.

Crook-Staff and his predecessors did much to propagate this sort of oral dream-history, and pointed out that the Bad Wind may well in fact have been the fallen Broom Star that made the poison Swamp they found there when they settled.  Crook-Staff called this a great augury, and vowed to spend much time in those woods, for some reason known only to him (it is said.)

(It is also said that Crook-Staff was burned at the stake by his own people, for possession of a “Daemon Stone” he found in that Swamp, and buried in a deep hole on the property of what is now Gustav Ehrend’s vast toy-garden of an estate…)

The Sachems’ medicine-men and wise-women found the headwater of that Swamp, where the Broom Star fell, and called the ground sour two thousand years and more before the first black-robed Quaker missionary ever saw these woods.  They settled around the edge of the Valley. They called it the Valley of Death, in their own tongue, and burned their dead at the foot of the Mountain of Sorrows, and wail’d there in mourning, and buried some.

But they never lived down in the Valley. The waters of the Swamp produced monstrous children from the milk of their mothers. The Monongahela learned fast…

What a people. What a gift. What a waste. What a dump.

4.)

Nothing at all remains of the Jenuchshadaga, the tall people who built those ruins. To the Monongahela, they were the People of the First Snow. To the missionaries, they were “giants”, “Titans”, “demons”: all the snotty names they used when they translated and then hurriedly pulled down all the talking-stones, burning their notes up the chimney and going nowhere near the smoke...

Here in the Dreamtime-gateway to that terrible year (the index of it, if you like, if you think like a neural programmer, a Sysop with Illegitimi Auggies whose Dad made him have a job…) you can still visit the high temple-tip of Jenuchshadaga, on the northernmost end of the long Franks Towne Pass that wends up from the county of Huntingdon…

Emptied at last, that chill mountain city where cold winds moan over tumbled trilithons in the washed-out gullies and high, viny ravines. Most of the Old People’s places got buried so far down in the earth that few can reach them, (save miners, sand-hogs or… others).

But, in certain cow-fields the owners zealously guard with stump-witchin’ and shotgun barrel alike, on certain lost hillsides halfway between Holler and Hoot, lone dolmens that the missionaries and various other tomb-raiders missed, covered in graveyard moss, tell tall tales of a proud, fabulous people of highly dubious and fanciful appearance, who wrote their words in glyphs across a ziggurat monad-city that reached a thousand feet up, twice five miles round, and almost that many down into the still-forming poison coal…

But folks in this town tell a lot of stories. You have to know who to trust, or they’ll empty your pockets…

5.)

The Monongahela shaman Crook-Staff enters this tale, in all actuality, only as a ghost-form with a voice like a leaky member (curse Typhon’s name, in all the forms he ever took).

But when he was truly alive in his own skin (before Typhon entered his body on that bloody night when the Big Twister Wind came and the mushrooms went horribly wrong) Crook-Staff taught his torch-bearers to learn the land, to talk to the Titans in dreams and hear them answer, as the first Monongahela medicine-man to read the words in the stones once puzzled out how to do by his own lights (and then taught his twin daughters…)

After Typhon entered him in spirit ( and rode him forward in Time to spit his filthy adulterated ghost-seed into the Ironmaster’s wife), Crook-Staff also brainwashed many of them to die when the white death-gods came, to cross bodily on gunshots into the spirit-tomb World Without End and live forever in the Dreamtime as ancestors.

(Typical bait-and-switch con. He fed from the energy of every death, and no one really knows where the hell any of the Ghostdancers really went after they died. Not for sure. But that comes later in my log…)

Typhon lost that round. He knew he’d lose. By the end, he was no longer human at all. All he cared about was Death, and the food it brought him.

In the end, even if he lost, he could still take as many with him as possible, and re-seed up somewhere else.  No matter what our operative Black Rock, who was called Chief Logan then, tried to do.

Typhon is re-seeding in 1789, the year the United States gets rolling in this When. All I can do is watch, dream… I don’t know if any of our crew made it back to that year or not. I can’t get a read, Aud or Vid. All I get is static on the ’com.

I don’t even know why the Tank is showing me this incarnation, this 1789 I dream now. The Four must be crazy. Even if I was born into it at the present insertion-point, I’d still have to sit out this round, this generation, this reconstitution…

Typhon wins one here, I think. I’ve still got plenty of time to dream, you see. If I keep repeating details, I might remember where we’re all really from and not have to be taught again. I must repeat.

I must repeat. I just felt my first heart cells pop into being a second or two ago. This’ll be a while.

I open my Dream-eyes again, hit RECORD again…

6.)

Lo, President Washington, the Old Man himself, holds the reins of the new colt of state, a bronco-ghost slowly taking form as it breaks so many already on its back. The First Constitutional Convention is still in the news. Even now, red and black aren’t very good colors of skin to own in the cities, on the plantations, in the convict settlements between Hoot and Holler along the Appalachian Trail.

The new country is a damp, horrified child of gods, one that can make demons of men. I close my eyes and see the sacred grove atop the Mountain of Sorrows the way it used to be, and the empty tomb of a goddess long dead. That Mountain has been the death of many, and will be the death of many more.

I can feel Typhon’s dehumanized, devolved sick soul, gone to earth right early in this Valley of Death under the Mountain of Sorrows where far downstream in the future, mighty Shang 2 will rise underground.

But not just now, not in this prison-Time. Even now, conditions are ripe for Typhon to grow to unholy size here, strange and terrible age here, and lethal strength here to cause enough instability to crack the continuum wide, and let in… What? Can’t think that globally. The Betrayer has already chosen his latest vessel.

Don’t get me wrong. Humankind were capable of brutality before and after the Crooked Man became part of us. But it was my cousin, the Crooked Man, who fanned the flames in the time-track with which we are all too sadly familiar.

1789, this year I dream, is simply the latest-permuted year Typhon landed in, after he stole a Shang 2 public machination that was going to generate free electricity forever, and used it to create a crime against the Universe.

We seven Illegitimi Dreamwalkers who followed Typhon back through Time were part of a secret coterie at the Imperial Mental Academy.

What a fine and highfalutin’-named day-camp freak-tent we all had to suffer through there, where the only respites were magic, shapeshifting, fundamental chemical twisting of the senses on the double-quick-triple-down-low, when the proctors weren’t horning in…

None of this has been written yet. It just Is.  And there is so very little Time.

Sure, Time is relative, but…You can lose heart. You can keep going. Whatever.

See, there are no new ideas anywhere. There never were. We simply crowbar the attics in our heads to find things we thought we lost thousands of lifetimes ago. We end up losing those things again, and laughing, or putting them to their intended use and winding up miserable afterward, hungering for new worlds to conquer.

It makes me wonder, though, here in the warm blood-rich dark of whomever I’ve ended up as, this go.

(Like I don’t know… I am God’s instrument… What a bunch of horseshit. Why couldn’t I have been Ernie Kovacs, or Herodotus, or even gloomy old T.S. Eliot?!? I—

Right. You do battle with the weapons you have, not the ones you want.)

I wonder a lot, though, about the things that lurk just behind legends. All those improbable, arcane backstories from before this timetrack got seriously ugly. In the ruins of all we thought we knew as kids, two wide-eyed children gaze upward into the swirling sky as a storm rolls in, looking to the clouds to name gods lost long ago.

Memory never leaves. Memory is energy. We simply reform further downstream, and try again. But not all Pre- or Posthumans have ever gotten that honor, that sacred shining chance for an endless Do-Over, no matter what it means.

So many others, down the millennia, burned themselves from within trying to tell this same story I’m telling you now.  Their story is a hardscrabble, tall-tale life that either laughs with you or plows you under.  I close my inner eyes and see all their old souls falling in starry fire, winking out like lightning-bugs as the same old dawn rises over the same old gray and boring northern Town.

No matter what Time it is, there’s always a black cloud over this Valley. The wind howls through frost-on-the-pumpkin night coming on. Darkness creeps out from beneath covered bridges, where wild dogs and Moeb-lizards fight over the bones of hillbilly dead.

This part of the world is a strange geographical funnel in the Allegheny Ridge just before Penn’s Woods becomes New York, or whatever they’re calling it this week, on most major maps. The black cloud shrouds the mossy half-cobbled streets, the muttering retreats of endless crooked miles of endless alleys beneath a canopy of elms and oaks and maples that whisper wetly to each other just before it rains.

To the west, the Mountain of Sorrows (newly renamed a white name, after some red-coat philosopher or another) rises like the cold shoulder of a dead giantess. Across the mountain’s face, a pantheon of standing stones juts out here, there and everywhere along the Ridge and the psychedelic blaze of fall foliage.

The winds are blowing so hard. All the alleys run backward. Rock Springs, Pennsylvania.

Say the name, and feel your mind stretch through slimy stagnant seas of gossip, around a black and latticed wooden core of buried immigrations and emigrations and migrations, random deaths and happen-stance squibs on the back pages of the Callaight County Broad Sheet that the Town Council distributes once in a while, mostly to itself, to chuckle oleaginously at the tickling quill of its own wit.

Feel your mind fall through miles of Sheriff’s blotter and municipal ledger and tabula incognita.

Strange lights like oil-lamps hover at the edges of your vision, with a certain humming in your ears.

Church sextons in leather plague-masks filter behind the scenes, banging on your doors of perception from somewhere outside, come round through the grinding hung-over morning to seed the ground with salt so that no nightmare alligators will spontaneously generate in the stagnant water there ever again…

Everyone waking in the morning around here with a throbbing head wants to claw out their own eyes when they see the sewer of blood and stench this mossy old cemetery is already fast becoming behind the lines, between the pages, in the things the proverbial They… don’t Say…

A legend will be born here in Town, one that existing medical science would call a “lethal”, a sick and misbegotten birth that will survive for much, much longer than it should. Thousands of years longer, in fact, backward and forward in Time…

That lethal will filter down two centuries to late-stage Powersburg, Pennsylvania (long after Rock Springs has come and gone) in apocryphal form, as the legend of the Crooked Man, kept alive by the surprisingly unchanging oral history of the local schoolyards.

Circles of protection drawn in yellow sidewalk-chalk will ward the Crooked Man off centuries since, through the energy and safety of numbers, far forward in this Time on a side of Town the current generation won’t even live to see the barest edge of (though their distant descendants will see the Towne-ship as it is now peering out around the angles, and dimly understand what it might have been like).

Spells to walk Awake in the land of Dream are passed down in those play-yards, towards the end of  afternoon, when shadows grow threateningly tall, and grownup voices grow too loud in the strange tornado-snowstorm-light-sunshower stillness, echoing out over the half-shuttered bars and graveyards of a used-to-could mining-and-shipping town that was once a gateway to the West, in a different When, the one I dream the hardest now as I come unstuck in the Continuum…

Oh, I can’t wait to be born over. The paradoxes are making my head hurt.  Wait. I don’t even have a head, right now. I don’t even have eyes or a mouth.

Just a spark. Just a little spark from my body, back in Shang 2, back in the really real world where I plugged my stupid self into Mandelbrot’s little Tank, and broke every law Dad ever wrote doing so.

Dad probably disowned me, if there’s anything of the old bastard even left.  If I’m not cut up in some cryo-farm somewhere, me or my dear one Maeve, or any of the Bastards, if any of us have a shot this time, at…

(Sigh.) Guess I’d better say hang the sense of that, until someone or something shuts off the Tank and lets us out.

Meanwhile, we have a bug to squish. Maybe we’ll get him this time. Maybe we won’t. Either way, it sure as hell won’t be boring.

’Til I get to meet up with my Bastards again, it’ll be nice to take a break and be a kid for a while. Until then, I have to take my turn chronicling this with absolute unbias:

Between bodies, between births, down the spark-line and into your little scanners, you ivy-covered mutant professors in your ivory-colored tower, you Gang of Four who could just as easily record the whole rotten chronicle your damn selves and let us…

Let us what, exactly? It was either this, or the End of Days.

Not that anyone wants to know what the End of Days could mean again for Shang 2, long after these stupid primitives went and nuked each other the first time over some shit I don’t even want to know about.

And it was Typhon who made them do it back then, too. He already created us the way we are. Maddening, isn’t it?

But he’s after something even worse than that humiliation, this time. He’s after something worse than the status quo.

This is all a part of his plan, to surf the atomic wave out of Time itself, pop loose around Where and When, and ride the Why back…

Back, to the First Cause, the First Thought. And I volunteered to undo that.

Me… and the only six other Illegitimi candidates insane enough to follow me into the Tank.

Back to the asshole of America, the cancer on the colon of the Keystone State, where he keeps popping up. Occasionally, our stories overlap and we find ourselves in the position to call at least one shot. ’Til then, all we can do is watch…

7.)

Just west of Town is vast river-bottom swamp whose boundaries also continue to expand, encroaching on the two new, already-vast churchyards. Town entire is a harsh, desolate polis, a literal wilderness where all must learn to survive unaided by aught but the teachings got at Mother and Father’s knee.

The red-skinned savage used to bury his kings in mounds, where the roads are later. Mounds, with their picture-writing painted on the walls of undiscovered tombs hewn out of a rare earth-metal that catches and holds the light.

This is evil ground, to them, that ground I used to see in dreams and dared not skate too close to when I flew by overhead.

The Swamp eats souls and young ones belike, and the unquiet dead there want to grab me to their bosoms and tell me who they were and what they’d done in life, howl it all out over and over like they were babbling-blackout drunk and found me all by myself in the back of the bar…

“Why, if there is no Devil,” the great Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle writes, “Nay, unless the Devil is your God?” The answer to his riddle is right here.  They say all small towns are alike.  If so, then may God have mercy on us, every one.

When the first of many hundreds of local children go missing and never show up, the Monongahela will yet be blamed, though most moved on before the white man moved them.  Locals will go on blaming even each other, the old witch on the hill, the Injuns, the Jewry, the niggers in Hawk Town when they come north, the railroad Chinks, the Gypsies…

Anyone else but the true ogre, the true butcher, thief of children, budger of History, eater of souls…

To blame him would be to use responses they have not yet evolved. We cannot expect anyone to act out of their Time. Still, a few of them may show wiser heads than most of these…

At the edge of the Dysart woods on the Swamp's opposite shore is the property of Gustav Ehrend, Rock Springs’ sole ironmaster.  Gustav and Maria Ehrend are not the ogre, merely its parents and original.

In the Dreamtime, Ehrendhaus already shows me its true shape:

A mossy yellow, shake-shingled fake-Tudor bad spell. A  Pythagorean mockery everyone got wrong, even before its essence was translated here into the Dreamwalk. A  pyramid with an eye in it. A dead dog with its brains blown out the back of its head. A picked, bleached and peeled skull.

A putrefacting yellow-gray bulk, with a gambrel roof. The lead-crystal windows follow the eye, and sometimes blink back. Drugged-looking kids occasionally scream from pens in the cellar, trapped behind walls they can’t yell through when the tour groups go by, later in Time, somewhere else in phase-space...

Here begins the legend. If I tell you this dream, then maybe I’ll wake up into mine, and soon.  Pass with me under the shadow of the storm….

Lt. Taliesn Demarest, Illegitimi Field Ops

Shang 2 Seaboard, Capital City

Year 226 Post-Apocalypse

“OPERATION END OF DAYS”

CAVEAT:  EXCERPT FROM:

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF CALLAIGHT COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
BY THE RIGHT REVEREND GEOFFREY VAN DER MEERE,
Lately of Belle Fonte, Pennsylvania,
Presently Waylaid By This Charm’d Countie
And Th’ ‘Interesting Times’ Within Her Borders.

[…fragment is missing…]

Callaight County in the central region of the North Woods of the Pennsylvania Colony, gate-way to the Western Lands, was first settled by Scots-Irish trappers Nathan and William Powers between 1773 and 1775, out of lands obtained by treaty from the Monongahela in 1748.

Callaight County was originally calved off from the adjoining regions of Clinton, Potter and Lycoming Counties, further calved most Recently by Mining Concerns just due West, in the Poe Mountain region, a somewhat larger area in Geography with a greater concentration of coal to Callaight County’s rich deposits of iron ore and limestone on the east face of Locke Mountain, where Ehrend Iron Smelting & Foundry turns on and on, the Lynch-pin of the wheel that is this County.

Rock Springs and the surrounding Area sits on a bed of hard Sand-Stone and Shale, perhaps a sea-bed long ago. Before the first Settlers arrived in the Vicinity of what is now called Great Poison Swamp at Towne’s Edge, this area was sacred ground to the Monongahela Indian.

West of here, in the new Yuenger County, the few remaining Shaw-Nee Red-Skins harvest the vast Herds of Deer that lock antlers around Mating-Time. But the Shaw-Nee do not venture down into this valley to hunt the bigger game unique to this Region.

(There are other Hunters here I fain would speak of, for in speaking of them I have lost my Natural Rights in the eyes of Some Members of the Local Gentrie who would rather lure the unwary traveler into their Towne and Pick His Pocket than Stick Out their Thick Red Necks and Rid the World Entire of the Abomination which may live in these Mountains as a Wolf lives  among Sheep—)

The massacre of Nathan and William Powers, as well as Captain Ethan Plummer’s Rangers, took place twenty miles West of the Towne “Diamond”, at the Potter’s Field whence the new Sanitorium was then being erected.

(Ha! Ha! As if there were any Health within these dank walls of beggar’s mouldy travertine, any Sanity to be had throughout the Valley entire? O mighty, torrential River of Mill-filth washing downstream in black coal-mine Brimstone, to gather Poison like Acheron and swirl down the very blood-gutter of Hell?!?)

Marching forward along the trail, the Monongahela war-party ambushed Capt. Plummer’s scouting party and let out a loud war whoop. Apparently, the local Militia were taken so completely aback that not only did they not Return Fire, they Threw Down their Arms and Ran. The Indians had longer Rifles. No one knows why. “Crook-Staff,” was all they Said.

The rattle of musketry filled the air. Initially Attack’d as they attempted to gather their Harvest near the Powers brothers’ cabin and Seven Mile trading post, after surrendering to the Monongahela chief Logan Black Rock’s war party, fifteen Colonial Troops were driven quite out of their Wits by Ingestinge of an unknown Poison, most Probably Toad-Stools or Deadly Night-Shade. Much of this has been Lost to the forgetfulness of Time.

Of seventy-five men Jack in that Company, seventy Re-Enforcement Troops sustained grievous injuries. Of the citizen Population, many Men and Children perished. One white woman was taken by the War-Party. No one ever came to Her Riscue.

The only Shot that was ever Fired came from a gun surrendered by a Ranger to Hayendeseh, son of the Sachem, who came a bit too Close in the Pursuit while his Braves were scalping the dead Rangers (as the Rangers had for years scalped their Tribe,) stripping the Bodies and then leaving them Scattered About (also a habit Taught them by the Rangers.)

The brothers Powers, however, first to erect a Cabin and Trading Post, and farm Land upon the spot, were subject to a much more Grisly Fate of which Decency Forbids Much Discourse. (However, Even the base-court, common-kissing Local Historians in Favor at the Moment believe that this Fate may have been perceived Retribution for several Rapings and Ravagings of Monongahela Squaws still unsettled-for from earlier years.)

The only part the Court-Approved Historians will acknowledge reads Thus, in Part, from the local Garrison Commander to the Pennsylvania Assembly,

"Sirs, I have to inform you that on Sunday the third of this month a party of Rangers under Captain Plummer, fifteen in number, had an Engagement with a party of Indians (said to be numerous) within three Miles of Rock Springs where Seventy-five of the Border Militia was station'd.

Commanded by Capt. Plummer, Brought in Seven wounded, Eight Kil'd and scalpt with their Hands tyd, and Murdered in the most Cruel Manner.  Most remaining able-bodied militiamen, or those who choose to Take Arms, are Wounded or Have Resign’d Their Commission. There is said to be others lost in the Woods or missing.

This Bold Enterprise so Alarmed the Inhabitants that our whole settlement is upon the point of giving way. This Countie at this time is in a Deplorable situation. A number of Families are flying away daily, ever since the late damage was done.  I can assure your Excellency that if Immediate Assistance is not sent to this County that the whole of the frontier Inhabitants will move in a few days.

I am not convinc'd that any one settlement is able to make any stand against such numbers of the Horde. If your Excellency should please to order us any assistance, less than a thousand men will be of but little relief to this County. Ammunition we have none. It is dreadful to think what the consequence of leaving such a number of helpless Inhabitants may be to the Cruelties of a savage Race...”

And on. The Common Weal, former colony and now state, of Pennsylvania, now has a Provincial Assembly and Governor.  From time to time, landed Captains of Industry petition the Provincials to make a new county in their name. (The Penn set up the first ones, last century.)

On September 11, 1787, lumber baron Joshua Douglas took out a patent from several of the same heirs of the Penn that made up the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania. The large tract of mostly-unsettled fertile bottom land along the Monongahela River, at the terminus of the Big Hot Spring, is the oldest borough in the current borders of Callaight County, though new settlements seem to emerge almost daily!

There is one Brewery, the Pierce; one Distillery, the Frohsinn; and one freed Negro slave, a Mulatto gentleman name of David Brown, who speaks English better than most whites! Shylock’s people are represented here, too, enough Jews of German and Polish stock to have their own Temple, here, a cunning stone structure called Temple Mogen David, in Old Towne very near to the American. That one is only One Storey, and also newly Completed.

By 1792, this year, the year the Quakers say they will complete their hellish Bedlam (with its decidedly un-Quaker Mesmerists and drug-happy Inquisitors keeping us All Mad, Here, Ho Ho & Hee Hee & Ha Ha, in Demarest Sanitorium where the Blackrobes may Beat a Blue Stripe on Thy Very Soul…) there are forty houses in the village, salted along random avenues of activity in the valley.

Even the Blackrobe Quaker Barstards, now, now, have a fine new meetinghouse at Croyon Village, ten miles west through the woods along the foot of the Mountain of Sorrows (so named because the Homo Indomitus still secretly burns his dead commoners, and buries his Chieftains, in the region, I may have Noted.)

There are about Sixty blocks to the main part of Rock Springs, centered on the hill at High and Wayne Streets; “Old Towne”, served by the new Canal and its tow-path, the Lower Trail, along the Old Towne branch of the Monongahela at the southern extreme of Indian Valley.

The limestone Lower Trail head leads to Alleghenia Village, thirteen miles to the east, and to Precious Crick, five miles West. This part of the Monongahela is an angler’s Paradise.

Rock Springs village has no clear centre as of yet. Even the streets of the ragtag-and-bobtail Village, from the river southward, are laid out in two different grids based on what Landowner claims to keep up said streets. Not all of the Alleys are Nam’d, and there are warrens and multitudes of those, with their Ownership very often in Dispute.

The main street is High Street, which runs through the center of Towne. A small cross street along the eastern side of the Town Common, or “Diamond”, has already been named Washington Street.

The ship of State turns tacks, and quickly. The place where the fine old houses and the Public House form a diamond shape is already a hub for holidays, parades and other town fêtes. I have seen the villagers caper and masque and throw Hard Candies into madding crowds at the one on All Hallows’ E’en. The barbarian Hibernian decorticates the local Gourds and carves the Likeness of a Scull in them, then uses the Scull for a Luminary! (They say this is to honor their Dead. I could think of several equally Dedicated Means which might involve less Travail in their undertaking!)

The artisan class, in the form of many Guild Crafts, occupies a substantial part of the area. Leatherworkers, Smitties, Joiners and Potters nearly sit cheek by jowl in the Hinter-Lands. There are more dwelling around the river-front Harbor now, like-wise more about the Inn, even a good few dozen Labourers erecting new Blocks of houses around the Estates of various Captains of Industry, some with their own stores!

But every such Neighborhood grows according to its own Map, and after its own Idiom. There will be Complications, I fear, ones I Surely shall not live to Bear Witness unto.

At present, said Captains of Industry are hard at work putting their wigs together to light a pyre under the projected Pennsylvania Canal’s Main Line through Towne. The Granson brothers operate two stone-quarries, Ehrend’s solicitor runs the Foundry into the ground, and round she goes.

The Canal is the Newest Suitor this Cut-Purse Hamlet Seeks to Woo, and even some so-called Visionary Free-Thinkers like Mr. Douglas, the one whose eldest carries a rifle for the local Militias; or the engraver Mr. Severin, who paints Land-Scapes  and smokes Hasheesh and Talks of Making Rock Springs the Pearl of the New World…

Such men have Put Forth the Proposition that perhaps a Donkey-Railroad, of Like Kind to those in English Collieries, Be Employed to Transport Goods As Far West as We may Yet.

(I know not of such Futures. The Past hath cut my Ham-Strings, and I must Fresco the Cell Walls with This Istoria, this Elogium. To the last, my Pen shall flie. I know what Awaits. It is mine to Know. It makes no Odds, not any Longer. )

The Monongahela River borders the Towne-Ship, and Despond Crick flows into the river from the Swamp, like-wise Lethe Crick on the east, which borders the Ehrend Furnace Company Towne-ship, as it is called by the Roustabouts of this region.

Here the Foundrie and general Iron-Works are housed in long structures of Clap-Board, shored up with Native Stone, and High Tin Roofs. Smoking Iron Chimblies abound with the same Regularity as drunken German, Irish and Cornish diggers from the Coal and Iron Mines all About.

The local Militia-men from the stockade Fort built to guard those Workers More than Like tosses Half their Number through the Revolving Door of the Gaol-House (conveniently enough situated nearest twixt two Public Houses, the American and Demetrios Tsarouhas’ taverna down in the Bottom-Land where the Monongahela River makes a bend in the Shape of the Letter S…)

The County Fair is usually held near Ehrend Furnace, on Mr. Douglas’ Fair-Grounds, where he talks of

putting in an horse-racing course one day soon. Mr. Douglas founded, and funds, Rock Springs’ very first local school-house, and brings students from as far as fifteen miles away, the de facto border of the new district.

Goodman Douglas also funds the Towne Library, which operates at present in the back rooms of the Towne Hall (though, as everywhere else, talk of Expansion smokes in the Pipe of Legend). The Library is open to the general populace within normal hours of Business. (To read some of their tomes requires a bribe. I’ve read them all.)

At the formation of Callaight County, as Rock Springs is being made the seat of Justice in this strange, savage Land, it is a village of perhaps sixty houses in the main, with few public buildings besides the American Hostel, Piper’s Inn, and the Several little Greek taverni down in the Furnace.

Until three years ago, the American Hostel, a House of Spirits and Bawds (and a Jewish one) was designated the site of County Courts until L’Enfant’s folly was done enough to work in! (They’d tried to put up a Hall of Justice for courts and jails Down-in-Towne before that. The first Board Frame burnt flat. No Arson was ever proved, though members of that troglodyte Johnnie Mallory’s local posse comitatus still have their ideas…)

The new Court-House is located in the Centre of Adams Avenue on the North side of Main Street.

It was Laid Out by a visiting Architect, Pierre L’Enfant, a Gentle young Man often seen in the Company of General Washington, who Spirited him away from that Endeavour to design the new capital farther South, on the Potomac.

Excavation of the County Court House began seven years ago, with Bradleigh Matthias and Yuri Noffsker supervising a crew of Twenty men Jack, who Consumed Three Hog’s Heads of Beer Per Day, Five Such Per Night, and Laid In Enough Blasting Powder to Render Two Local Septuagenarians Stone Deef, Not that Either Had Long to Go.

Those Roustabouts built the Gobbelin-Castle, the True Mad-House in stone right into the Slope of the street, three storeys high on both Faces,  topped by a tall Belfry with an half-tonne copper Bell donated by Ehrend Foundry to call together people for Court, Church, or to Arms.

The structure is just done, with the clock tower and third floor, and a carillion with clockwork Mannikins of the Arts Of Civilization to dance on tracks around the Widows’ Walks! (Folly, I tell you. The work will never be completed. The Hill-Folk would just Shoot them all down like Skeet.)

Roughly one Mile west of the “Diamond” is the stockaded Block-House of the Rock Springs Garrison of the United States Army, on the Hill overlooking this very Mad-House. Sugar Mill Stream flows westward past the Fort, with the mouth joining Despond Crick flowing North.

Although not lying on the Jenuchshadaga Indian Trail itself, Rock Springs is only a stone’s throw away from that war-path used by all Six Nations, until

[indecipherable squiggle]

A Noise, Outside.

Sweet Iesu the Lunatics have Forc’d th’door

[…fragment is missing…]

BOOK 1:  STEAL THY FACE

(1789)

1.)    PERSEPHONE
(STAND BY YOUR MAN)

When Ross Ehrend was born, something terrible happened.

He lived…

08 August, 1789

Dear Diary,

I feel like a green girl here again, Maria Ekaterina Ehrend, née Munk if you please, landed lady of the new Merchant Class in the rolling, river-roaring woods of this alien jungle full of white-tailed deer and ‘red-skinned savages’ (who are more polite than the local settlers, which is not much of a step up!)

Me, the tiny little dark wren sitting in the corner while big blonde buxom Greta and Nerisa walked off with a general and an hotelier, and Mama officially forgot I was still in the house at nineteen.

Me, Sorrow’s native daughter never called on by anyone, whom Papa sighed at, reached into his bankbook and sent off to school to be peened on that anvil into a file-clerk or a writer or something useful of that kind.  “Something a woman could do,” Papa said.  Me, who two years into my course work studying the great German philosophers and poets, touched the fuse of the first firework-rocket that carried me here.

I met that rocket, my Gustav, at the University of Vienna, dear Diary, where he was learning to run a counting-house like his myopic father (myopic from years of making his penmanship far too tiny in all those ledgers).

Gustav says that I am his Muse, his Beatrice Portinari, his Isolde, who called him to cast off the mantle of numbers and rise to use them.  It is as he says, whatever that might be. I still can’t fathom his mind.

How silly men are, running around talking so fast and so loud, flatulating “Eureka!” every time they are blinded with the momentary effulgence of That Which Should Be Obscenely Obvious.

Dear “Gus” (as the men beneath him at his Foundry have come to call him) took a ship full of the tools of his Papa’s trade, far too little money, an entire division of Hessian berserkers with him on that same frigate, and the later fiduciary blessings of High and Low Germany belike to make a back-handed stab against the empire of John Bull.

Gustav himself once called the Colonial Folly a “bird’s nest on the ground.”   My man was one of many European private citizens in Europe to aid the Continental Army, as I understand the matter. The white-glove class worked in concert with various kings and queens, as it has ever been.  But it is one thing to read such things, and another to see them played out before you in your life.

It is another thing to see a Prussian who would formerly never even speak English, or address an Englishman, embraced by the exiles of that dingy little island, and every other; speaking their tongue, smelting their iron, turning out their rifle and pistol balls, their cartridges, even the barrels of their cannon.

Through that alchemy, “Gus” has “spear-headed” the discovery of enough iron and coal on the west face of Mr. Locke’s Mountain to make a lot of hungry country bumpkins very rich, and put a lot more to work.

They have embraced him here, my man, and call him Boss Gus. He even has the bellicose local militia to look after all his own interests if he needs it (or in truth, even asks for it).

He is as fascinated with this “democracy” as the bloody English have been since the Magna Carta, though they could not admit it enough to support the experiment over here and get the good hell out of the way.   So his politics have gotten even stranger.

In his harangues around the American Public House and Mussellman’s Surgeon-Barbershop parlor, he regularly flies into a fury that the red-skinned ingrates would not join the Patriots to drive north and repel the English dogs from the shores of New York, until the fighting finished, and even until long later they didn’t go, when…

“They stay up there in the ravine, in their damned old towers, may as well be of ivory, hmmph. They sit up there and shake their bones and look into their casks, mutter their spells and talk to their little dead gods, and did they stop one lobster-back from quartering himself in our homes, taking liberties with our women, do they lift a hand for any of that? Some allies they turned out to be, no matter what that whoremaster Franklin says, now…”

There’s a lot I could say. Scarcely a by-lane, crossway or covered bridge but has its ghost… no secret that the mounds that run through town are filled with the bones of dead redskin kings!   Gus is getting better about waiting for me to reply, though. He always makes me take my hand away from my mouth when I laugh, even at him.

“No, my feisty little fraulein who nonetheless can’t get rid of her own Papa’s ghost long enough to show the world how beautiful she is when she smiles, hein?  No! We had a deal, us and them. Those Monongahela ought to thank us for letting them stay up there. Those ruins look a little Mesopotamian, to my view, all those big black blocks and towers. Hardly Christian. We ought to go in and pull them all down, let the Swamp take it back, if we could train it up that high… “

This is all one of Gustav’s pre-scripted rants, dear Diary, Number Fourteen and One Half, Treatise On Foreign Princes & Idiot Mud-Men. Myself, I admire (if only to you, Diary)  the beautiful coppery mountain-people for staying out of the whole mess that was the Rebellion, Revolution, whatever these Americans call suicide.

So funny, the way history really looks when it happens, like one of their smoky back rooms where men of the world reap to and fro and up and down, human lives no more to them than lead soldiers to be recast into new useful idiots. “Democracy”, in whatever form it will take, has come at a high cost, in a bloody birth.

Rock Springs was born in rude, quaint spokes of hacked vegetation and clapboard livery and cobbled cast-iron everything  from the park around the Fort Powers stockade to the crossings of Adams Avenue and High Street, Market-Town, which became “Down-In-Towne” nearly over a fortnight.

I wonder if the Monongahela folk are perhaps the smartest of all. They still hawk their baskets and hemp and jerked venison, down at the Town Market on the big lawn where the children fly kites every spring, nowadays. But they’re getting out.

The dwellings entire of the Monongahela, even the long-houses, look hastily-packed, like they’re living from their baggage as Gypsies, from what men in town tell Gustav, who tells me we are landed, again; swears up and down that his sons will be gentlemen and his daughters the very pearls of Penn’s Woods!

I don’t know about any sons or daughters. The very thought of bearing a child in my tiny frame, through my tiny hips like Mama’s, scares me half out of my wits, especially in these heathen mountains! Mama had to have Willi and me cut out of her gut, and Willi was born with that strange hand from having the umbilicus wrapped around his wrist all those months.

Poor, poor Willi, treated so savagely even back in dear Wien. I still miss the less brutal parts of the old home town, where the weather at least made sense and there were clocks that all told the same time, and coaches, and warm bierkellars where the folk spoke properly and not this bastard English full of obscene connotation.

But I don’t miss what happened to my twin. That was the saddest thing I have ever seen, in my young years.

Swamps can be beautiful and full of life, Diary. Just about anything can live there, and usually does. Not all of it is pleasing to the eye. But some of it is fascinating. The locals here are a big melting pot full of unknown quantities:

English jordies who work from sun to sun; Irish Catholics with gigantic families and that odd red hair like Vikings, sometimes; Polishers, with their funny antique clothes and deliciously unfamiliar speech; little yellow-haired Cornish tin-diggers; wild Indians in the hills who come to market sometimes, even an Hottentot Schvartzen and a heathen Chinee or two digging out the new mine roads in the Town Proper.

I never saw a man in all Prussia swing a hammer the way that Schvartzen did, and he only stopped going when someone ran him out a dipper of water. The sweat on his fine black muscles made me wonder quite a bit.

I know nothing of half these kinds of folk; how to address them properly, what is even seemly around them and was ist verboten. They chew tobacco and smoke and scratch and spit, drink oisadegh by draughts and bier by the big stein, both at one breath. (And you should see the men take on.)

How is one expected to behave? I keep to myself, and speak when spoken to. It is a wonderful impermeable sort of oil-skin cloak to wear. It keeps me honest and busy. My man keeps his own house in most matters, and can’t be bothered to communicate much else until the issue comes right up the tall, winding stone front stairs of and snarls at the door.

Gustav is a lesser Hohenzollern baronet himself, believe it or not, but left his Rauffenstein title and white gloves to gather dust while he pursued the marrow of Life and the distillate scent of banknotes. Anyhow, he wears these silly duelling-pistols everywhere on the property, as if the practice were still encouraged anywhere.

Gustav’s home is his castle, and he keeps it with only secondary help to delegate his firm hand. Two wolves and one rather vocal thing that looked like a Chinese pangolin or an American opossum, have been dispatched on the property by those pistols without incident.

As the new wife of the newly-richest man in Rock Springs, I lived in my own unique sphere of gossip and things overheard at first, when my feet were fresh off the boat. I kept many of these habits simply to orient myself while darkness washes across the deep bowl of my sky.

I am sounding the depth of this new American darkness, the loneliness and hunger in it. This new-world darkness a mossy, stony thing slightly green about the edges, vicious seasons whose very strength makes me grow sad and long for home.

But even home has become sinister to me. Though lovely, our Ehrendhaus was built in a hurry by three different builders. There are the occasional stairways that go nowhere in our big cuckoo-clock, badly-hung doors squalling open in the middle of the night but not staying in either state, the front windows that always follow me around the rose garden on that lawn, like eyes.

I’ve studied this effect. It appears to happen because of the position of the rafters and back wall within them, some stupid trick of the light I’ve never asked Gustav to correct. Whenever I complain about something being left undone, or done just for looks, or done strangely, Gustav just flaps one hand at me.

“I am giving them a job of work to do, Maria,” Boss Gus tells me, his right hand, craftily. “If it is badly or ill done, we can go back and fix it at a later date. For do you not know the difference between Our Savior and any other carpenter?”

I shook my head, not realizing it was a joke. He did, smirking. “The first job is done, the bill has been paid, and yet Our Savior is coming back.”

I laughed because the point was true. But this house is more than just a low-balled bid of work to any artisan. The Broom Star fell here, on this spot, and the hole it made went far into the coal, into… Under the yard. My dreams are strange. I will tell more of this directly.

But I was just explaining the strangeness of Ehrendhäus, its million little night terrors that swarm over me from the walls like fleas. Even the cold-pantry assaults my pregnant she-wolf-sharp nostrils.

Before, I don’t know how I could have ever missed the overpowering stink of boar’s blood in there from the night when that awful Hessian roustabout mistakenly butchered one of Gustav’s hunting kills on the big counter-top.

See you not, Diary, why I was slow to learn their ways here, slow to ‘drink the water’ as the roustabouts say, slow to become Persephone in the Tomb-World?  I disembarked into this Dreigröschen-Öper spook show my first year, and began to live in the New World strictly on my terms.

This has taken time, quiet prayer and reflection. Learning the names of every local piece of flora and fauna, and the larger beasts of this land after their kind, like a new Eve in a wild garden.

Some of the species I speak of haven’t been named yet. I have seen the mysterious heron in the streams, the mighty bald eagle taking fish from the rapids along the Monongahela River, and many more such avian curiosities.

There’s a kind of wood-pecker the size of an eagle, one that the Monongahela sachems call ‘Lord Creator’ and most of the loggers and barge rats in those woods call the “Good God Bird”, on account of its size. As well, there are those larger birds up the mountain.

That sort have developed some more profane appellations, but the sachems call them Thunderbirds, and that seems to stick. I wish I could sketch those fabulous bird-beasts, with their ridiculous little stubbly wings and their razor-toes in back of their legs so perfect for charging up and down the laurel-choked ravines! (Fascinating, the tools Mother Nature hands us when at birth, or when we least expect…)

They may bite like an English bull-dog and worry a man’s arm right out of the socket. But they don’t go looking for trouble. Some of the coarser hill-folk of Rock Springs like to shoot or club the big ‘mountain-turkeys’ on sight either way.

They’re tractable, easily trained if you feed them on horse meat and talk loud to them. But when provoked, they do attack preëmptively. (Gustav’s hired hand, one of the Sollenheim boys that broke away from the Amish fold, trained one in our back forty all last summer, and still has the scratches on his fore-arms to show for it.)

No, I am not too sure that those birds have a name, any more than the gigantic rainbow-coloured trouts that swam like salmon in the streams (long as a man’s arm!) or the little fishy-finned lizards that run upright in the Swamp, or those awful alligator things that Gustav says only come out in the more stagnant places in the Swamp for part of the year (this being the North Woods after all, and cold).

Those swamp-things, those weird barking alligators, are so verdammt, unglaublich ugly they look like they grew in there, like some sort of snapping infected underwater fungus grown into a pained, awful generation of spontaneous life in the twinkling depths.

Oh, Diary, my thoughts scream like out-of-true doors tonight, here in the recently-exploded section of the west wing that they rebuilt in stone after the night that Chief Logan’s men had tried to send a message with something that spread on contact, and liquefied as it burned.

Logan was recently drawn, quartered and castrated by Continental troops, and his head placed on a pike at Market. What savages we palefaces have turned out to be. But there are still black spots on some of the stones, and that whole wall’s much weaker now…

Looming above, and behind, the tall, poison-yellow manse resembles a porticoed Roman temple to a god like unto the conjoined twins in the horror and hurdy-gurdy of the freak-show tents in old Vienna where poor Willi was forced to scrape out his coin…

I can’t talk about these kinds of things with Gus, or even (half the time, and hating myself for it) even believe myself, a woman, allowed to have such thoughts! Someone might strike me down with a thunderbolt!
With all this wheeling and whirling in my mind like the funny lights do over the Swamp on warm nights, I sip my cup of chocolate and lie on my yet-flat belly on the back lawn, long black peasant skirts smoothed down, legs in high boots out behind me.

I let Gustav think he rules the roost, but when I want something, I get it. At those times, he often remarks that even his own cartridges come packaged in very small crates. He does bend. He does relent. Eventually.

But this land is nothing I want to be anywhere near. Even these four years on, it hasn’t gotten any easier to sleep in this big, chilly, extravagantly misborn house where there are no children to make it a home. No gruff Papa to chop down and haul back the Tannenbaum from the woods at the first snow.

No warm, round Mutti with her greying braid to bake the lovely Zimsterne and Stöllen cookies that made it Christmas, finally made it Christmas, made the light change to Christmas-light in the big schloss, every candle a magic lantern and all the pets waiting until Midnight on the eve of the Christ Child’s nativity to talk to each other for an hour, as Nurse imparted in the flocked velvet nursery of Yester-Time.

No, no more of that. All of that got stolen while I wasn’t looking. Gus and I have to make a new family here, have to, if only so I can sleep better, if only to heat up this weird old white elephant of a house at night.

I never tell him how I find the place. It would bruise his feelings. But that fireplace is verscheiße. It only heats the parlour, and then the rest of it goes out that cold stone back wall…

But we can make a good warmth, when the moon is right. Gus never shies from discussion of children, especially not the part about creating them. That has never been a problem with us, and can be discussed in the open forum, as they say, unlike religion, politics or the English.  Indeed, Gustav gamely welcomes all such modes of discourse, often for an entire Sabbath night!

I don’t mind. If he’s put on a few pounds, that’s just what comes with money and health. He’s still as cuddly as the big stuffed bear Nurse brought me when I was two. He’d been comely in his youth, tall and blond and broad-shouldered, with high color and a great loud singing voice. Even now, he’s no hardship to be with.

I’m fertile as a turtle, as the roustabouts say. I know this as only a woman can know, tiny hipbones or not!   But I thought dear Gus’ own cartridges were blanks. We tried, though, with real fervor. We even broke the bed once.

But es macht nicht… until this morning. Now I am very cold, Diary, and even the splash of brandy in my cocoa fails to warm me very far. I’ve bitten the pomegranate now. The seed has kindled. I have to go see Monsignor Gibson. And Gus, when he comes home again the day after tomorrow. And Franka.

Franka was a midwife before she was a cook, back in the Fatherland. Old Girl blisters my ears with hour upon hour of No Honey Until They’re Over One Year Of Age, Und Keine Katzen! Nicht! Neinen! Franka’s two youngest girls died of crib-death, and she’s still convinced one or the other of her too-many-and-former-cats stole their breath away. Not even dear Doctor Holton up the mountain at the Jesuits’ new school can convince her otherwise, and he speaks High German!

I hear Franka up in the house now, behind the big tallow dip burning in its cast-iron bucket up behind the cunning screen-nets on the back porch. Old Girl is barking for her daughter Sasha to, “Find an onion or three, while you’re below stairs, if there’s any!”

Someone is singing faintly in another room, probably Tesco, our butler Gus says we can’t really afford.

(Tesco is Dutch, and looks made of Delft China, with shiny black hair and eyes like the sloe.) I can’t hear the song he’s singing, for Franka herself is making a great banging closh and clack of scrubbing what sound like several tonnes of potatoes in the washtub I watched her cheerily fill with boiling water as she went for the stiff-bristled brush in the cold-pantry.

I don’t know what it is about Prussian women having no nerves in their hands past age fifty or so, but none I know ever hiss at the scalding of skin the way I do when it’s time to do the washing-up. Perhaps you get used to it.

Perhaps a woman can get used to anything.

In any case, I’m glad to have the option of doing dishes voluntarily. Maybe that means we’ve really made it, and the hand-to-mouth early years of our marriage will never return. Maybe.

Oh, how repulsive. I just saw Franka through the window, and noted that the stiff-bristled brush she uses scrub those big russet potatoes red is the same one that the Hessian roustabout mistakenly used in his array when attempting to skin that self-same hog whose sanguine juices stunk up said cold-pantry like an abbatoir for years, one more mess left for us to fix…

Some parts of this vast, well-lit ad hoc castle will always be alien to me. Even the country for miles round will never feel familiar.   Everything in America seems to be done ad hoc, and ends up looking like a giraffe or a hippogriff or some equally misbegotten thing.

The Rock Springs settlement in its entirety grew in just that way, with four or five different men trying to plan their villages four or five different ways. Men in town say that the Powers brothers, the first trappers to stay in this valley longer than a week, were captured by the war-party of Chief Logan the First, boiled alive in apple-butter and fed to the animals in Poison Swamp to propitiate the Bad Wind God.

But men in Town say a lot, just like Gus. Anyhow, that was before I arrived, so I can say no more.

Down the block of houses outside, through the long smeary windows, flies buzz around strings of red meat or drippy rock-candy dried on the sunny porches of many houses. Mangy dogs lurk in the cluttered yards. Thin children, with large eyes set in sad faces, sing out in the fields. I know some of those songs.

I can hear Gus ranting to someone, probably Franka, below stairs. (Franka, a good Lutheran with Whig leanings, humors him.)

“I tell you, it’s a hell of a fix this country has fallen into. Since the War, economic and social disruption has robbed Penn’s Woods of its backbone. A preponderance of shiftless layabout renters, working on the halves, lend a foreign and sordid atmosphere to our outlying regions even now. We are decaying from isolation, my good woman.”

“We need room to live, ach, ja...”

Gus harrumphs. “The further away from the Diamond one gets, the more coarse and debased the general mien of the people becomes, until they stop caring about the closed-door habits that are, to them, merely the way it were always done in Da’s house, y’ken, and teach you to faint at what my family do. ’Tis the Last Judgment’s fire must cleanse this place, on that Day when all the graveyards are clean of their blight’d fruit and all the butchered dead come home to their Destroyer…”

“That Goethe should have stayed a biologist, instead of becoming a poet,” I hear Franka respond without missing a moment. “You should go back to your ironmongery, Goethe. You don’t wear the doom and gloom well…”

“Oh, listen to that mouth, I ought to strap your behind…”

Gus frightens me sometimes. What this land is doing to him frightens me. I need his strong back between me and this land. I need him to be here. I need someone. To be here.

I wonder what Chief Logan would say to see our Town now, already growing like a weed that wafts its seeds far and wide on the wild wind. There is a public house called the American Hostelry, a full half-mile from the new Court-House gone up already, yet!

Many of those strange half-Swiss Amishmen puritans and their wilder neighbors up in the woods already think Town is getting too close. So they move further out into the hills, and then everyone else leaps on the same carnival wagon.

Soon enough, you have a city, a polis, whose edge continues to push even further up the Mountain, into the wild will-o’-the-wisp willy-wag woods towards Ithaca and Lake Chatauqua and the shining city on the Hudson that is Nieuw Amsterdam, the city that never sleeps.

Rock Springs herself is not yet a city, or anything close. When she sleeps (during long snowstorms, or tornadoes, or any other of half a hundred Acts of God that drive Town indoors, into the storm cellars, under the sheltering blanket of Earth and Mountain to fly from the wrath to come…)

When Rock Springs sleeps, she dreams quite deeply and profoundly, tossing and turning like Dante’s sick woman never still on her bed, the growing pains never ceasing, the fractured provincial bumpkin politics here splitting the ground seven ways from Sunday, into cracks that steam in the morning with the scent of sulfur and brimstone and paternal sin.

To save a sinking Town, involved in fire, where despair of life the means of living shews... When I dream such dreams, Diary, the ground shakes below, and far above the erring stars dispose their influence.  I see a circle of Gorgon poison spreading outward from these very woods, leaching the woods somehow, sinking into the earth.

And on the land where it washes along the rivers, perversions of Nature live and draw breath, are born and die out into that rippling stream forward to Death, forward to Much Worse, Great Poisonings like unto the Broom Star I saw fall to earth and make the Swamp in the Dawn Times.

The Broom Star, full of original poison and magic, the one that made half the Monongahela witches barren freaks with flippers for hands or feet, multiple arms turned backward, birth cauls that stayed on…

The Broom Star: that brought the alligator-things this far north, and kept their cold blood a little warmer.

The Broom Star, dealer of stillbirths and shaman children with silver eyes, brake of bloodlines, bringer of Death.

The Broom Star, whose smallest part I dislodged from the stone in the well in the half-dream nearly two months ago. In the Dream-time, the Star told me its name. It’s inside me now. In my belly. It just wants to listen. So it says.

Doc Holton will swear now it’s just female vapors, but I didn’t like that dream. I didn’t like getting caught out. There’s nothing wrong with what I was doing, no matter what the priests say. Why, some of them were randy old goats in their days, too. I read my history, and if they think I’m going to just sit around and wait for Gustav to remember that he even has a home, and a husbandly duty, then…

But June nineteenth wasn’t supposed to happen. It was just a dream, but even dreams here are different. I woke up a little sore, the way I get when Gus is drunk and not careful. Sore, and… spent. Like, inside-spent, the kind no artificial means may render but the old Wand of Moses. (Sigh.)

I thought all of it was a dream, like the ones I have now in my bad, racing sleep that never quite overtakes me entirely. In a version of Town I know I won’t live to know, I can see the points where every manufactory chemical dumped into the ground separate out from every other, lines like water along the land when seen from high in the sky as no waking human is ever able.

But in my dreams, perspective comes through distance, trickling down into the clear silver bell of the deceptive depths of the Swamp, following Life that continues in despite for at least a little while, until it dies under the weight of its own extra limbs, born bereft of eyes or ears to see or hear its last…

I hope my baby will not be born dead. I hope that’s not what the land is trying to tell me in my dreams. There are ghosts in Prussia as well, plenty I heard about, kobold and vorwalaka and all manner of monsters. But they rarely produce offspring.

Have I gone insane, Diary? I know not. I know I did not go out and find a man to keep me company until Boss Gus signed off on the books for the day and paid some attention to the rest of his life. Gott im Himmel, nein! I was raised better than that.

But I knew he’d caught me pregnant a week before. I knew the way only a woman does. And it gave me an itch like I was seventeen years of age and so ripe I was nearly ready to fall off the vine.

On that blisteringly hot summer night (with Tesco ferrying me tumblers of water from the cold-pantry whether I asked for it or not) I retired early with my bed facing the open window, the open air, the great creaking, singing, purple-and-green-smelling night in Penn’s Woods, with the great green Luna-moths dancing sarabandes in the light of the pale stars.

The dream I had that night has made me go a bit mad, I’m afraid, no matter how much I try to ignore it. I’m just scared about my boy. My…

Boy? My boy, to name Ross after his Yidische grandfather on Gustav’s side, and Paul for the middle, after my own dear Oldpappa…

No matter how much I push the dream aside, it comes nosing back like one of these hideous animals around here, wanting to snuffle, and chew, worry, and rend… It wants inside. It wants in through the front door. It wants to come home.

This dream felt… feels… like a thing which truly took place, in the world of Reason and Actuality.

As though dreams in this country actually happen. As though the world of Dream is real, and the waking life in America is in turn the dream…

2.) CROSS-CUT: MARIA’S DREAM

Cack…cack…Cack… Cack. Cack. The shutter. The black.

Shutter. Flaps. In the wind, back. And forth. Back. and

forth. Like a cemetery. Gate though why. The image

occurs to her. That way Maria cannot.

Say. She

…leans forward in the feather bed. Gustav is asleep in the den. She is lonely, and the old whale-bone dildo has no heartbeat inside her, takes so long to warm by the coals anyway, she wants she wants she wants…

Cack. Cack. Cack. The shutter flaps

forward and back. Her thighs rub

twice like cricket legs, squealing

a third sound

like sweetly muted

violin strings.

the cry

stoppers up in her throat

when her closed eyes

stay closed despite her

effort, and she feels

hands, hard hairless

muscle at places,

the beat-beat-

beat of…

This is everything and nothing. This is new. Old. Timeless. Priceless. This—

Is no dream.  This stink, this savage stink, the alien jungle, the spores and pollen its golden skin, its sap, its salt, its eyes. Its eyes. Green. Eyes.

His eyes.  Almond-shaped, witchy. A proud nose like a Galician Jew, a sensual mouth curling upward in a crinkly sneer…

Older, then, the Sachem is, than Gustav, but his flesh is ripe from the sun, proud, strong, rippling with pictures drawn upon the skin in black ink like the tatu of the Havai’ki-Man she’d seen in those same freak tents where her little brother grew old and shriveled away on rot-gut...

These pictures on skin, though, are rising suns, gods with names unknown to her, more beautiful and terrible than anything this green girl ever beheld, she…

Oh, Maria leans forward with her small hand ( fingernails pared square and short),  moans, strains forward, and touches the Titan tombs engraved on the slab of his abdomen, and asks his name without the words, and he says, he says…

Crook-Staff…

A dream-word she can’t remember, though it makes her laugh when her hand twinkles inside his buckskin trousers, like she does with Gus but so different, so different… It’s only a dream. No harm will come of any desiring here, any hot pagan blood brimming beneath the surface.

She laughs at the name when she runs her hand up and down the length of his twisted cock gone as hard as an antler in velvet, bending just the same at the end, just so, just to the right…Beat-beat-beat…

Maria wants to decide something, licks two of her fingers and begins the only way anyone can.

And then,

Ah. Ah. Ah. This. Isn’t. Dream. At.
All. Ah. God. Help. Me. Gustav!

MMPPH.

Ah.

Ah—

You. Won’t. Remember. A. Thing. Receive. My.

(indecipherable moaning, screaming)

CURSE! Gustav Ehrend, STEAMING in the eye of your white-man pride, my SEED! RECEIVE!

The False Sachem, the Bad Wind, keeps coming and coming, cursing, making less and less sense each time.

Receive the Invader, who walked down the stars from before Time, out of Time, as it was written of by the lizard-people of the First Snow in the holy Dreamwalk! Receive the Brand New White Man God to displace the old! Receive! Me!

Receive the Deathbringer who I will be this time! Receive the Destroyer, Shifter of Shape, Bad Wind God Made Flesh. to repel you all from these shores, or worse, let you stay and thrive, torch out, strangle on your own waste! It’s all the same to me…

A scream, a silvery trail drying backward on soft white skin, disappearing, away.

There are no facts in this new land, only myths. The borders of the Dreamtime constantly change shape. The Monongahela know, but no one will ask them now. They’re leaving the hills in droves, burning their hogans behind them…

09 August, 1789

(later)

I sat up in bed after that dream, tasting rain in the air from outside.  My throat felt scorched, and the basin by the bed was full of dirty water gray with soap and brown with clay, like beef broth…

Beef broth. Yes. Baby Likes. A big, hot, brimming bowl of beef broth, with onions and potatoes and cabbage floating in it. A proper stew, maybe a turnip or three if you left it on the hob all morning…

When that thought came to me I remember dreaming it. My hands moved half in and half out of sleep, shoving the potato-bin aside to hunt for the last withered turnips that hid behind it.  Tesco told me I took the upstairs hall barefoot in a nightshirt, with a tallow dip in hand. He just assumed I was awake.

I can re-trace what happened now. My mind kept dreaming about cutting up chunks of cold, rolled roast to use as stew-meat, while my feet and the candle never wavered one inch.

I suppose I took the back spiral staircase, the one that the servants use, at the opposite end of the hall on the second floor in the main part of the house.

I went out through the back, to the side yard. To the well.

I woke up at the well.  Was I still dreaming, I wondered, when I did? Even when I slept, I rarely did so very deeply. I can’t feel safe here. I can’t calm down. This land is not my home.

My thoughts raced.  I was alone out there, free from anyone’s complaint or demand or insistence.

That night was opening up my eyes inside, eyes I didn’t know I had, one in my belly that was now wide and blinking, crying out for things I could only hunger for by association, knowing only the smells at first, tastes the baby rang in my mouth in that simplest of speech from child to mother.

My first communion was over and past, but I was as scared as a girl who wakes with a sudden nosebleed, the flood at first of too much heat, too much wrong at once… I wasn’t sure if I could raise or buy what the baby was hungry for that night, it was almost like…

Beef. That was the closest I could come to the answer. That it was like beef.

The wind out by the well was making my body in my nightshirt break out in delicious goosebumps everywhere. It tasted of things rutting or rotting or barking into the great orange night where the sky meets the water, barking at the moon from the edges of stagnant pools, almost further out on that black tarn than I could see, but not quite.

I didn’t understand anything. I didn’t understand myself, grasping the windlass of the well the way she’d grasped the shaman’s crooked cock. I didn’t understand anything I craved, the thing I had become, the person whose skin I’d grown into by default.

Down, down plunged the old oaken bucket, banging from the stone walls, and…

Then I started waking up more. Why was I outside? Getting water? Out on the Swamp, the will o’ the wisps were flashing back and forth to each other the way they do, like little blue fireflies, and in the woods out back as well.

I saw the blue-white glow speak, and another in turn give answer. There were more things in Heaven and Earth than I could take in at one time.

Then, if I remember aright, the bucket hit the wall of the well hard on the way down, dislodging something that began to glow when it hit the air, burning in the water, drowning in the light.

The foxfire-green stone broke off and splashed in the water.  That glow, faint as a star pulsed under the black, murky water the servants have to boil for algae and all sorts of different hydrae and planarium-worms each and every time.

I smelled a sharp metal smell that was nothing like Gus’ iron smell that never washed off.  I almost remembered this kind of metal, tasting it hot in my mouth. There was a humming in my ears.

The wet stone walls of the well suddenly smelled moldy in my pregnant nostrils, inexpressibly nasty.

Especially the part that was burning in the water, boiling up to meet me on a strange icicle of warm, moving water, that is almost beyond me to tell of.

“So pretty,” I remember hearing myself whisper. Past that point, the rest felt as though it happened in some other woman’s life.

As though I watched from outside through a glass darkly, through a green stormcloud of smoke-signal from the Bluffs, or the smelters at the new Foundry.

“So pretty.”  My will was not mine.  That water was already starting to cloud over from the presence of the moving, burning green stone-light, shimmering silver as milk fresh from the tank, fresh from the bucket, fresh from the teat…

My hand closed around the glowing stone, through the unearthly free-standing skein of water. Then my eyes went back in my head and I was out, gone, away.

Watching myself, powerless to stop her from moving like a drugged corpse, bringing the stone into the light again. Hearing the creature in the stone hiss, feeling it remembering when it walked as Man.

It knew the light, it tasted the light, and knew, and smelled Woman, fruit of all our Woe, and asked, it asked me, I could hear It asking and feel It in my head, the same way It asked all its women, and sometimes men, oozing charm from far beyond anywhere, melting me apart...

3.) INTERLUDE: SOUND CHECK

Again. I always come back this way. There’s always a woman to hide me out.

Always this woman, this vessel I split like a ripe fruit in my coming. And coming. Little Isis, it is always you, and I am Set, and I am Sek, and I Am again, again, Again. You trap me again, for a while. I chew free. Game, Set… Match.   You can’t ever make people do anything.

Sorry, Mom… but I’m coming to think of People as a separate animal any more. I mean, no hard feelings, but it’s just been SOOO DAMN LONG since I’ve even been one in the strictest sense of the Shang 2 Library of Dream Abridged Dictionary definition, anyway…

I’ve been playing around in Time for quite a while.

Now could… I … just… suggest, Mom…

Oh, that’s been very forward of me. Do you mind if I call you Mom?

Good. Mom, could I just suggest that you place… this, ahh, stone here, from which my voice doth emanate, could you… place this stone in your navel?

Thanks, Mom. Talk to you soon.

Night-night.

4.) 29 August, 1789 (Continued)

After that dream, I woke long past breakfast to get my ear blistered by Franka about having to throw out my eggs. I waved her off, and she soon saw that I was not at all well. A soreness turned in my guts, and a headache beat and beat and beat between my eyes like a tiny fist.

The day was bright, the oaks and elms singing with a warm little breeze; little Sascha , too, singing downstairs, and… The second I stood, I barely made it to the washbasin before last night’s excellent goose dinner came back the wrong way and took the northward passage in its return.

I heard Gustav’s loud tread in the parlor, and cleaned up quickly. When we greeted each other downstairs, I was out with it in three questions. He was taking his luncheon-time at home, you see, and had gotten his latest driver from his work-place to “run him back.” You could have heard him whoop from there to England.

“My son comes!” he gushed. “Oh, schatzi, this is…”   But one look at me, and the flood was stemmed. He grew more tender than I remember since we were courting at school.  “How bad?” he asked, his big blond eye-brows beetling up.

He worked outside with the men so much that summer that they were going white in the sun, I remember. As parts of my hair are white now.  He’s so fair, fair as Thor himself, and turns as red as that Elder God must have done from walking through the fire!

“My good husband,” I remember telling him, “It is like no other kind of sick there is in the whole world. It… it flutters. It comes and goes. There is… there is some pain, but no blood or any such thing.”

I shrugged. “It is too early. I will be all right for some months, I suppose I just need to make myself stay off my feet when my belly gets a bit bigger…”

We both knew I was lying through my teeth.

We both knew about my eyes, and the dreams that tore me out of bed. The foul, silver humours in my eyes were explained by Eb Holton as no more than conjunctivitis, though no horse-doctoring ointment will make the awful vitreous stuff alter its hue!

We both knew that it wasn’t just my eyes. I couldn’t let him exercise his conjugal privilege as much. The silver humours hurt him. He bled. There, too, the hue came and went. We had an understanding. I let him dally with one of the serving-girls, and came to him when I felt I could.

But what, what, what, Diary, was I supposed to tell him? Declare, if Thou Hast Understanding.

Now if you will excuse me, I think I’m going to be sick again...

5.) ST. BASIL’S COLLEGIUM

CROYON VILLAGE, CALLAIGHT COUNTY

LOUPE ROAD, LOCKE MOUNTAIN SUMMIT LANDS

“The bairn will most probably be a still birth, or feeble,” Doctor Ebenezer Holton told her with his usual tact, resplendent in his Welsh wig and owlish spectacles. Maria thought his beard dreadful, and his manner appalling.

He needed a wash and a shave, and smelled of oisadegh. (Like any Scot, he swore up and down that whiskey truly was the Water Of Life, and claimed he could medically prove that people who liked a two-finger snort within reason every once in a little while lived longer than those who foreswore drink!)

His hands were the only parts of him that were warm and gentle, and for that Maria was profoundly grateful. Long out of the stirrups for a sweet half-hour’s nap on the fainting-couch in the parlor, she sat attentively now and pretended not to make a face. (Oh, to have her choice of doctors! Or just a plain old midwife all by herself!)

The sawbones Eb Holton saw patients in his own rooms, such impropriety, his own student rooms in the high cloisters of St. Basil’s Priory where he studied medicine with the Jesuits.  It was a long way to get this far up the Mountain, and Maria had to have their driver stop the coach three times so she could puke into the pokeberries, a lovely morning’s riding and more.

Still, she made no complaint. What would any of that have done? Holton was the only good sawbones near Town, according to Gus, and certainly the only one capable of delivering a baby.  There were midwives aplenty among the townfolk, and even the servants, but for true medicine this cheeky drunkard was the dog and lot. According to Gus. But he always proved himself...

“And what, in your expert opinion, leads you to that conclusion… Doktor??” Her close-set brown eyes were heavy with lost sleep, and silver with that weird cast they’d taken of late. (An imponderable symptom merely to be watched, Holton thought but was fain to say, lest he worry her and render far worse issue in more ways than one.)

The Scotsman was unmoved, his diction careful despite his burr. “There was no heartbeat anywhere I listened, dear Maria,” he informed her gravely. ”I know ye to be an eddicated woman, for which I thank God, but…”

Maria hitched in breath. “But I feel a heartbeat, and the little scut kicks me even this morn!” she snapped. (It was all true.)

Holton shrugged, his delicate hands that went with the rest of his big florid self not one jot carving commiseration from the dusty air of his creatively-cluttered front parlor.

“Missus Ehrend, that could be many things,” he replied sadly, his face folding and dewlapping into something that seemed twenty years older.  “I have no doubt that you do feel a heart, and I have no doubt ’tis the babby’s own.”

The young-old doctor put one of those gentle hands on hers, with no more lechery than if she were a ewe about to throw a lamb. But his other hand went to her shoulders, and he embraced her with such tenderness that he might have been her brother or her uncle.

Maria had fought off more than her share of lustful Prussian boys, in her girlhood, and knew an overture when she saw it. This wasn’t that, but something far worse, something she didn’t even dare want to understand. His lower lip quivered a bit. His medical bearing jostled around inside him, came to the forefront and took hold.

At length, Doctor Holton withdrew a fine burgundy silk handkerchief from the pocket of his less-than-fine vest, and wiped at his eyes.

“Ye must forgive me, these months,” he told her. “My dear Missus Ehrend, most of the new mums I see here in America canna tell ye the first thing about babbies. No more’n babbies their own selves, most of ’em be. Ye’ve been an easy go, fraulein, keine probleme. But this…”

Holton began to wring his hands again. Maria was still waiting for the other shoe, as her own father used to say, to drop.

“America,” he finally managed, “America is a very hard land to raise anything in, just now. And I may be wrong. There is so little we know, without being able to truly see. But…”

Eb Holton bit his lip again, wondering how to tell her about the silver discharge he observed from time to time, the heartbeat that in fact was sometimes there and sometimes not. (As if the wee bairn had decided to nip out to the inn, and return when he wished!)

“I’ve spoken wi’ yer man Gus,” he finally went on. “Tut-tut-tut.”  This salvo was directed, with a finger upside his nose and then over her own lips, when she made a cry of protest.

“What a good Catholic he is. Salt of the earth. He’d make a fine Presbyterian. Anyhoo, Gus says that ’tis one of the sacred mysteries in your own Church to bury the dead who need buryin’. When ’tis time.” Holton’s odd look grew cautionary, his tired eyes wrinkling at the corners. “But as a man of science, I canna definitively pronounce your boy dead.”

Maria’s eyes grew wide. “A boy,” she repeated.

He nodded instantly, wig slightly loose even on his big bullet of a head.  “Ye’re carryin’ high, and ye look as though ye’ve swallowed a humidor, so I assume the male pronoun.”

Despite the tears that welled up, she couldn’t stifle the giggle. That giggle was so noted in her materia medica hornbook Holton kept since she first came to him lo these many months ago with the good news.

“I can help ye through,” he went on, “I’ve seen worse. I’ll see you through for your sake, and perhaps that of the next child. Gus is a strong, healthy one. I examined him after we spoke. Not a thing wrong with either of ye, just…”

Maria thought, sitting there, that she’d never seen a doctor look so helpless.

“Just so little we know,” Holton repeated.  His brisk, intrinsically Scottish façade of cheeriness fell back over his face like a smile stitched into a plague mask.

“Now, I’ve prepared a list of instructions for the final three months of the pregnancy, food that might be good for yeh to eat an’ the like. You give that to Miss Franka, back at your lovely home, an’ she’ll know what I mean...”

6.) CONFUTATIS MALEDICTIS

In the vast master bedroom of Ehrendhaus, behind the low white oaken door, a nightmare was being born in a canopied bed on that holy day, that bloody day, that May fifteenth when all the north of Penn’s Woods was a great river of mud and everything he knew had melted down with it, running out to sea like snowmelt down firths of former understanding, leaving great scooped sections of swamp-bank where awful alligators snapped and snarled and tore each other limb from limb…

Lightning licked the black glass of the skies outside, down from the poisoned green clouds, slamming into the rock-strewn hillsides and felling trees with sounds audible from two counties hence. Holton’s spirit-lamps were burning an eldritch, chemical green, and the oil-flames were too. This was the least of the Doctor’s worries.

Their second-in-attendance, a pale tow-headed horse doctor’s daughter from over on Wayne’s Hill, was vomiting between her knees. This, too, barely moved him a jot. Franka wasn’t vomiting, but even stout Franka and the doctor weren’t enough to clamp both spasming thighs down and somehow account for the shape of the yellow thing that looked nothing like a head, crowning toward the air to be born.

“Fook’s sake!” Eb Holton screamed through the bright light in his eyes, screamed like a little girl in the middle of the night when the bogeyman breaks down the closet door. In the extent of his terror and rush, his brogue was becoming nearly incomprehensible. “Hannah, ye silly wee bitch, get ’er ’oother laig!”

His lips were skinned back from his big wooden dentures that ground together now (the way he ground off the first set of teeth in the first place) ground and barked as the umbilicus wrapped around his forearm and the baby was just there, and formed, and formed all wrong, that face like a crescent moon, like William Blake’s Ghost of a Flea coming for him, nosing up at him, snarling, stretching like standing water, it…

Maria made no sound any man or woman should hear.

“GET OUT OF HERE!!!” Holton roared, following the statement with the kind of irreproduceable storm of profanity that only a doctor can manage in a crisis. His assistants, Franka and the girl Hannah Stebbing from the village, left the room like minnows disappearing under a rock.

Under normal circumstances, this might have surprised Holton, since the later bulk of the profanity was administered primarily in Scots Gaelic. Some things supersede language, however. No one was keeping a slate.

Shouts and rumbles in the house, china shaking in the cabinets, clacking and packing sounds of firearms…   Holton cut the umbilicus with one neat stroke… and pulled.

The baby hissed at him, pulling back. A gutty, awful game of cat-and-mouse ensued, ending when Holton leaned down too close to peer through his spectacles, trying to get some idea of formation, morphology, taxonomy, what in the name of Science he was even looking at here, and—

And the malformed, polysyndactyl flipper summarily SLAPPED the good doctor across the face with everything that it could manage, so hard in fact that the doctor went spinning sidewise, hit the wall, and felt something in the side of his head let go.

In the hall, even the recalcitrant Hannah plainly saw it when Doc Holton hit the bedroom wall headfirst, crumpling in a heap on the knotty-pine floorboards.

The baby had slapped the doctor…

Little Morris-dancing pixies wheeled and strutted and clapped in the air before Eb Holton’s eyes. The abomination took off under the bed with a rustle, thump and series of awful sounds from below. Holton just knew.   It…

He…Preponderantly outsized male genitalia, fully formed gonadal structure of some kind, not positively established… was eating the cord. Eating the cord, and…

baring alligator teeth at him, slithering his face out from under the bed in a long smile behind that nose, that chin, that creature whose Certificate of Live Birth in the Family Bible prematurely announced it Ross Paul Ehrend (rather than any more fitting Biblical appellation, From Revelation, say...)

It spit blood and foul humors at him like a much older child squirting water through its mouth. Holton wasn’t fazed by such theatrics. Then he saw what lay before him, just above them, on the bed.  That fazed him.

That fazed him from the first sight of all the blood, the blood, running down the stripped ticking, pattering on the floor where the abomination that moved too fast to look at was licking it up like a dog.

Back before things got baroque, he’d begun to administer a Caesarean section, after knocking Maria out with enough tinctured opium to drop an Indian elephant. Yet…

Sitting against the wall now, Holton rubbed his sick, burning, whirling head, tasting a strange metal taste in his mouth. He was thinking about getting the scalpel out of his bag, but couldn’t quite get his head to make his body get up and reach onto the bed, couldn’t, it was beside—

Beside the dear girl who would now never wake up. He’d cut the thing from her gut. The little bastard still started trying to chew his way out from within before they even got to brass tacks. He didn’t…

He didn’t want to remember. He couldn’t remember right. This thing was tearing him in twain.

Lying there stunned, wanting to move, Eb Holton never even knew what hit him next.

The blood-soaked counterpane fluttered once, like a shroud. Maria’s head fell to the side.  Eb’s bag fell to the floor, a ringing of bright metal followed the click of the hasp. Then there was a flash of silver light.

The Welsh wig came tumbling all the way loose.

The troubled head rolled free.

Right under the bed.

There were sounds. Not nice ones.

Then a mewling Eureka cry, like a cat being skinned, echoed through the lower wing…

Franka was standing there waiting, nodding to herself. Two big butcher’s knives sheathed in pigskin resided one to an apron strap. A marble rolling-pin from the kitchen lay in her hand.

“They get so big so fast,” she joked under her breath, as though to do so would call the monster out. “He’s as strong and mean as a baboon, he is. ’Tis what happens when people have babies in these heathen lands after they drink the water. God’s mercy to put an end to his suffering…”

There was sweat in the light blonde moustaches on her upper lip. The light was long in the hall. The white bedroom door creaked the tiniest bit.  Franka peered around the outside.

“Oh, Doktor, what in God’s holy name…”

The thing with Dr. Holton’s face, grotesquely outsized on its own tiny body, was naked, swaying on webbed feet.

It keened at her, reaching with long yellow flipper-fingers attached to crooked, spindly hands themselves attached to the burled branches of a knotted set of arms that bent the wrong way every which way, and held more joints than natural philosophy would support.

“So be it. We have monsters in Bavaria, too, dybbuk.”  Franka spat, making a feig with her first two fingers and thumb against the Evil Eye, circling it as it (… he?) circled her.  The green lizard-eyes searched hers soberly. The flipper-fingers came up like an idiot child’s drawing, and began attempting to communicate.

“Sssssh,” the baby with Holton’s face stretched under his own demented one told her soberly, placing one grotesquely-knuckled index finger to scabby lips. Blood coated his black, tubular tongue.

Franka wavered, momentarily alone with the phenomenon.  The face… Dear God, that face only Hogarth could love, or that mad Dutch drug addict, what was his name… Bosch, indeed, those yellow flames of shadow in every elongated angle of that tiny, perfect Something Not Quite Like Us…

The rolling pin dropped to the ground. The green eyes drew her in, mad spiraling swamps deeper than the one outside, going back, back, ’twixt the spaces between the very Heavens themselves…

Nothing moved out there in those spaces, in the aether. Not for Franka. But Something dreamed.

Something stared Franka down with total, cosmic indifference, and told her its name, and showed her how small she was.

Past that point, Franka Hoffmann never really stopped screaming for the rest of her life.

True, air through her vocal cords came and went. But she never stopped screaming, even when her dear Karl gave up and placed her in the madhouse on the other side of the valley, after it went up a short while later, when Rock Springs was big enough for such things.

All small towns eventually grow that big, you see. Where one or two or more people are gathered, madness comes in some form or another, soon enough.

That day, though, the cook simply turned and stumbled out of Ehrendhaus, down the front stairs and a good ways back to Town until a few soldiers from the Dysart Garrison nearly ran her down on Summit Road.   By then, she’d hurt herself quite badly, and was making little sense.

One of the soldiers, a fresh-faced officer of nineteen, by name of Lance Cpl. Christopher Douglas, knew Franka a little from church. Goodman Chris pinned her arms back and got her in the buckboard.

The rest, as they say, was History.

7.) CROOKED MAN’S SOLILOQUY, PART TWO: I GUESS I’VE COME TO LIVE HERE

I spy with my little eye, I spy, I spy Dear Old Dad. Dear Old Dad looks drunk as shit. He’s got a big, BIG musketoon. Looks like it would take two men and a bald-headed boy to fire.

Some of the barrel’s sawed off, and there’s a brass funnel riveted on the end. He’s stuffed it with nails, pieces of crockery, anything he can find. I hope he didn’t pay too much for that thing. With any luck, I’ll watch it blow up in his big fat hand.

He’s only got one hand left. The other hand, the one I took off’n him just an hour ago when he decided to be a hero and try to be the first one in, is a bloody stub now. The stub’s all wrapped up. The bandage is looking decidedly bad.

They’ve got to do their own doctoring now, you see. Heh-heh. Today, at least. Be some time 'til they replace Holton. ’Til then, they can give him his head. But when it comes to the gossip-mill in this town, there’s no way he’ll save any face.

Dear old Dad.  Most humans, when they’re waiting in the Dreamtime for their ticket to come up, choose the parents they think they’ll want next based on the best time in those parents’ lives. They know they see through a carnival glass, and darkly, so they rose-color that glass up every damn little bit they can.

They usually choose what the folks look like based on best-case glimpse. They don’t see later on down the line, when Dad starts to feel like a rat in a trap, like a well-paid scientist, and starts shooting mnemoamphetamine in the main-line vein to recapture some inchoate vestige of his misspent youth, in the days before he got his brain cored out and became a General in the Shang 2 Kybernoidian Guard data-cops who came before those lucky, molly-coddled Illegitimi got their little flippers on everything and started mucking it up…

Or is that just me? But I escaped all that, broke loose and hid, rode the wave of mutilation from the Shang 2 Singularity Generator all the way…

Well, all the way here, there and everywhere. All the way behind this door, writhing on the floor, waiting for the new skin to take.  After a moment, it does.

This vessel won’t last long, I’m afraid. The face was an easy catch, but the body was unhealthy. Holton had…

Syphilis, the body tells me. He was taking the arsenic cure, or trying to, but... I giggle. Country doctors get all the two-legged and four-legged tail they can manage, I wot. What else…

Not much, but the syph will rot this shell right out right quick. I’ll have to feed a lot, and find a new one. Soon.

Behind the door, Dear old Dad back for round two is very pale, and gray. There are red spots in his cheeks, and wide black rings around his eyes, weighing them down in basset-hound pouches. Has it only been an hour or so?

I ate that hand straightaway, and so far none of the soldier voices outside the house sound like they have the first clue what to do. They’ll get it together, though. More food will come to me.

Dear Old Dad’s eyes twitch. His skin resembles cheese. He hisses to himself, out of his mind,

“No exorcist… no exorcism… ’Tis beyond the pale reach of our human range. Only way you kill a thing such as this is to… beat it to death until it stops moving.”

The balding ironmaster bellows out his delirium down the business end of the kludged musketoon.

“Lord God!” The walls shake. “May you hear the confession of a sinful old man, who got up to dalliance behind his wife’s back, and now must pay Venus somehow for his wanton rutting with the heathen princess Crook-Staff, stowaway in the ship of this house one blessed summer night…”

Princess!  I have to not laugh. In ghost-form, I came twice to this house to prepare. Maria was my chosen vessel. Gustav was mere dalliance.

I made him cry out, fuck me so hard it bruised him (the way some of the medical students got up to, back at his school) took his seed, and turned it, put it back into him for her.  Then I overwrote her eggs. No getting it wrong, this time. Not if I could help avoiding a confrontation with the fabled Mr. Murphy and his Law.

What is it with these American gentry and their magnificent lusts and impetus? My immediate predecessor self was gifted with a dual sex, you see. Such interdesignated Irrakwa were almost invariably shaman material. Kind of came with the gig, I seem to remember…

But that was then, and this is… Else. I cannot rest from travel, I will drink life to the lees. Or something.

The game’s afoot. Bushido!

The tall walls, cyanide-yellow, bulge and sway with unreal angles in my new eyes, non-Euclidean candy-house angles.  This house is Gustav’s own Taj Mahal built all unknowing, for my newly-dead Mutti, may she rest in pieces and deeee-licious.

This house, this eyesore I shall mutate beyond all recognition, gilded and Rococo, added onto whenever he felt like it, wherever, up, down, all around… A perfect labyrinth, but for the Minotaur late of ill issue, unspeakable past, and now feral wanton child.

It is a doom Gustav Ehrend understands. He comes to it willingly. To his credit, he comes to it like a man.

The door opens. Dear Old Dad wastes no breath on words, merely pulls the trigger. Not one iota of shrapnel goes anywhere near me.

I don’t even move. That’s how much faith I have in the armaments of this age. Little hindrance.  But even then, some of it should have grazed me, at least, nicked me; it did last time when Logan had the long-rifle at my head. But now, every hot flying fragment just…

Flattens, fans out, slows down. Drops to the floor. We both look at the fallen snowstorm crust of metal and potsherds. Dear Old Dad starts to say something.

I stump this big body on over to him. The hands are already webbing up. Wasting no time with words myself, after his own fashion, I take the smoking musketoon from his hand and pistol-whip his big pasty arse with the butt end like he was an indentured slave.

By that point, Dear Old Dad starts to remember how to talk about his feelings. He starts to blubber and plead; offers me gold, whores (Around here? Please? I’d be better off with my hand.) a seat in the Legislature that was to have been his, a…

“Look at me,” I croak. He does, after a whack. I repeat, “Look. At. Me. There is nothing you can offer me. Nothing that will prevent me from stealing your face, and wearing it on my head. You’re meat for a legend now, Boss Gus. Your mistresses will mourn you.”

Dear Old Dad foams at the mouth. He spits some teeth. The effort of what I’m about to do is tearing my host skin, twisting it, changing my shape faster, turning me yellow, now.

On the floor, Dear Old Dad sees my boundless power become my boundless agony, and rolls to one side, looking for something to pick up or brandish or swing.

I work a little faster, feeling my arms twist, new joints crackling into place with drumstick sounds, the different non-interchangeable parts, loose ligaments strumming like badly-tuned strings on a warped bull fiddle, clicking, screaming, clicking.

Dear Old Dad’s blood tastes like the best thing in the whole world. This is the most satisfying moment I’ve had in millennia.

The next several hours will be some tough sledding. But I still have Holton’s scalpel. And now I know what part of the brain to eat. Now I know how to put on the face to stay.

But Dear Old Dad will be saved for very special occasions. I think we’re going to re-secrete him away somewhere, in… Hmm… something the cave-people of this decade would tell stories about, what about…

Heh. Mom’s wedding-dress. Heh-heh. Heh-heh. The one he displays under glass in the sun room behind this one. Heh-heh-heh-heh. Perfect place to cold-store this face to put on and meet some faces that might want to meet it. At least for a while.

I’ll need to feed again soon.

A growing boy needs his lunch.

8.) JOHNNIE LAW, PART ONE

Muttering, Rock Springs Sheriff Johnnie Mallory approached the front door of Ehrendhaus, which he knew was rarely locked. The bullet wound in his knee was screaming like the very baobhan sith, his deputy Rege Nagel was probably messing around on his wife again, his own dear Mamie was laid up sick again and no one knew why, just the weird red rash that got worse when she drank milk or ate bread, or sweets, the way she’d got pale and tired easily in the last two years…

“Good old girl, though,” Mallory rasped through the handle-bar mustache he affected in honor of his former commanding officer. (A Hessian, but a good fighting man just the same.) “Long as she can still back-talk me, I know she’ll pull through anything.”

Johnnie was newly-retired United States Army stock, a Continental Line foot-soldier who’d seen twelve battles since he and fifteen other immigrant sods appeared at the American Hostel Public House one snowy morn,

“…An’ signed Oaths of Allegiance to the Province of Pennsylvania over free pints of frothy warm bitters. ‘By doing so,’ the Recruiting Sergeant kept sayin’, ‘Yeh disavow yer allegiance and fidelity to the King of Great Britain...' I said, ‘What the bloody hell took youse so long to get here with those? Give those over,  I’ll take ten!’

Johnnie talked to himself a lot in battle, in a low brogue that disarmed the almighty hell out of many an adversary (and charmed the stockings off many a fair colleen, before he met the one that bested him at Indian-armrasseling).

So far, no adversary could be seen on this cold, sticky trail, on this cold, sticky night. But Ehrendhaus stank of blood. None of the Continental men could get close, citing a bad patch of powder or untrustworthy armaments or some bollocks. They were greenies, all of them, and Johnnie was doing their job in step with his, presently.

Johnnie wondered privately if they bought their shooting irons local, but said nothing of it when Lance Cpl. Douglas briefed him on the matter. He wondered if he were indeed, as his beloved Lt. Burkhauser always groused, “beset on all sides by idiots!”

He wondered when he realized that it was battle he’d walked into, this fine morning. The wind was at his back, and the day was lovely. On the lawn, the corn in the groundskeeper’s toy garden was up a queer high growth for May, as were the hemp plants and muscadine vines out back.

He’d just been out last week to pay call on Maria, and bring cast-off clothes from poor Mamie’s cousin for the…

For the baby. Bad go, here. But it would be a good growing season.

Funny, the big Irishman in his wide-brimmed black hat thought as his high hob-nailed boots shushed through the tall fey grass. Good growth on these grounds from all this death. Like mushrooms on a corpse…

He knocked again and waited, tense and pensive, awareness chasing down perception like two hip-shot croquet balls.

That was why he was voted in Sheriff on this side of the Mountain, voted in by the spanking-new constituents of the spanking-new Common Weal of Pennsylvania, sworn in by the Town Selectmen (two of whom beat their wives, one of whom was a sot, and one he just got a bad feeling about every time the old boy walked in the room).

Folks in Rock Springs called Johnnie by other names, depending on which side of the gaol-house they favored. One of them was Grumpy. Another was Ghost. About either, the Irishman never balked.

His service record had been written of once or twice in the Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser down Philadelphia way, which was the only paper he ever took at the American (all the local ones were yellow rags, written by old Bedlamites holed up in cheap rooms somewhere, or so he and his baby brother Allen both affirmed).

Johnnie proved the mettle he preached by culling two wealthy patrons (whom he would not name, out of respect to their offices) to expand the American Hotel into a gambling-house out in front, and put the seedy riverboat card-players that passed through on their ways down the Monongahela out of business in this part of the world.

That trade had exploded after the English were mostly repelled. Suddenly, every black market had equal time. It was the climate of the new land, bustling, naming itself a thousand ways. Well and good, with limits, and a careful bit of pruning.

The prostitution, however, Sheriff Mallory took a dimmer view of. Being Catholic, he couldn’t permit it (though he was well-versed with Mary Magdalen’s place in the Scriptures). That was a perennial issue, but one he took a less punitive approach to.

He put one of the girls to work for him as a file-clerk. Another had elected to live as a mendicant with the Carmelite Sisters down in Loretto. Last Johnnie heard, that one had taken her vows and donned the habit just that September past. And on, every time he jugged one, a million variations on the same theme. These women weren’t to be punished. Just a bit of redirection.

He liked to stay silent, and let folk think he was just big and dumb as a post, smiling through his droopy graying moustaches like he was one of God’s holy fools. Until someone like that Australian two years ago left enough boot-tracks where he went at that young girl, to hang himself. (Though after Johnnie proved it in court, the local posse spared the man the trouble.)

Johnnie was no vigilante. Far from it. He told the Mayor and Selectmen that, “My job, as I see it, yer Lordships— Excuse me, you men, as we are all men now equal in the eyes of the new American law, my job…”

He remembered looking around the new Court-room that first day he was sworn in, seeing that he had the room in the palm of his hand. He cleared his throat.

“My job, you men, is to put meself out of work. ’Twas a great general, far back in the olden times, you see, who said that winning every battle doesn’t make yeh great. What makes a great soldier is to conquer yer enemy without a fight...”

Johnnie shook himself now, glancing down at the brass star in a circle affixed to his vest as if it might center his head, and knocked upon the big yellow front door of Ehrendhaus loud enough to wake elder gods in the soil.

“GUS, ARE YOU AT HOME?” he called loudly, in his big bull fiddle voice.  “ ’TIS JOHNNIE MALLORY, SURE! SORRY TO DISTURB YEH! JUST A FEW QUESTIONS!”

His mind was already replaying the curt words of Lance Cpl. Douglas, the servants that fled the house in droves when they saw the bodies (and, by some accounts, looted up all they could grab, though it would be a year of headaches for any of the fifteen separate matters to ever hold in court).  Every soldier whose small arms blew up in their hands, including the one who lost an eye.

Johnnie was an entirely different breed of Celt than Eb Holton. When he heard about all the misfires, he sent his stout little brother Allen (sixteen years his junior, just out of steerage and apprenticed to Guilio Capotosti the local smitty) back to the gaol-house, to fetch the Dragons of Last Resort.

They hung at his heavy miner’s belt now: two English fabulosities he’d liberated from a dead general whose name he knew not, at a place north, called Breed’s Hill.  The Dragons gleamed their golden heads down into flint-lock muzzleloaders with a short sword proceeding alongside the barrel of each.

Forged as though to his own hand were those brazen pirate guns, with blades so much quicker in pitched battle than any bayernet, especially with the hand-grips he’d lathed his own self and bolted in to the sides of each at his own brother’s smitty.

Johnnie Mallory loved those guns most of all when they were silent, and the red rubies in the dragons’ eyes twinkled not with the terrible flash. Any man who saw those eyes go red straight at him would likely be run through by steel as quick as a lead cartridge. Johnnie was dead-before-you-know-it fast with a knife, and he’d shank just as quick as he’d shoot.

The Dragons were whispered of far and wide in that county, as would be this house, this day, this strange thing without name or shape which had apparently taken place. This big, messy sack of heads someone had tossed into his hand.

Word traveled fast, in small towns.  More precisely, no word had trickled from the Ehrend estate in almost a day.

He’d only heard about all this second-hand when the Foundry foreman (a Robert Hazenstab, of West Loupe Road) came up to the house to get some papers signed, and fled a babbling wreck who had to be physically restrained from gouging out both his eyes with the nearest sharp instrument.

Something was terribly rotten, on this ground, and not just that damned old Slough of Despond at the edge of this estate. Johnnie could smell Wrong in his sharp nose like that poison metal in the stories about the tombs on the Mountains. The stuff he found a piece of, when he was small. The stuff that took his left thumb.

Out in the side yard, he heard someone babbling at the well. Like that, almost too fast to catch, Johnnie’s hands dropped to the pistol-blades at his belt, palming the grips on the sides, feeling the cool kiss of the metal.

One shot each. Maybe time for a re-load, if the Almighty Father smiled on him, this day.  A crow circled overhead, crying out, dropping straight down after… something. Johnnie couldn’t quite see.

Hugging the wall of the tall, pillared front porch, he slid down the clever little brick stairs that wound to the side yard and the planked footpath to the well, down where the ground sloped up into the toy woods that bordered the noxious Swamp.

Gus Ehrend was out there, winding the windlass on the well slowly. It wanted oiling. Johnnie was proud to be forty and all his teeth still his, but they still hurt when they heard that rusty gear screaming, screaming.

The Wrong announced itself to Johnnie like a choir in Bedlam from that yard. Gus didn’t quite look all right. Gus wasn’t quite himself. His head was bent funny. There was something off about his hands, and worse with his eyes.

There was a look of disgust and wonderment on that horribly boiled-seeming face. Gus was muttering to himself. And in between that, he was singing, singing a song Johnnie heard girls sing over their skipping-ropes in the schoolyard.

“There’s a hole in the bucket, Dear Liza, Dear Liza,

There’s a hole in the bucket, Dear Liza, a hole…”

That was it, a big part of everything Johnnie took in instantly, yet chewed through in his time, taking mere ticks of the clock but nonetheless feeling Too slow, too slow, no time….

“Whomever will fix it, Dear Millie, Dear Millie?

Whomever will fix it, Dear Millie, Whom E’er?”

Gus had blue eyes, all the years the Sheriff ever knew him. But presently his eyes up close were solid red with burst veins, hazing over to a kind of green in their centres, where iris and pupil should be.

“Where’s the rest of me,” he muttered to himself, “Dizzy bitch broke off part of the stone. Can’t fully re-spawn. That’s… that’s going to present a problem, very soon. Can’t… heh… wear the Sunday clothes out too often…”

Johnnie saw and noted the black slits dividing that green in turn, but from far back misinterpreted the lot. (He’d had drunk nights like that, his own self. Big Lad looked as though he’d been drug backways through a ditch. )

The Sherriff’s hands tightened where they were. Gus didn’t see him yet.  He was looking down into the well with those mad will-o’ the-wisp eyes, swinging the bucket back and forth like he was trying to… hook something, catch something, haul something up like a fish.

“Gus.” The Sherriff crossed the gap between them a bit. The bucket splashed down into the well. Gus looked up into the black mouths of two muzzleloader barrels ten feet away. Practically point-blank range.

Gus smelled bad, Johnnie noticed now. Like…

Like the metal in the rock that took your thumb.  Sheriff Mallory palmed back the locks of both Dragons, waking them to heel.

“Gustav, sir, I hear there’s been killin’ on these grounds. No one’s sayin’ you did it, or whom, nothin’ conclusive, but… What in God’s holy name went on up here? You… Oh. I. Em. See I’ve caught you at an awkward moment. Terribly sorry to bother.”

Johnnie tipped his hat. Then he started backing up. Fast.

One of the first things Johnnie learned as a supply sergeant in the Continental Army, (yea, even then were the fire-fights many and fierce, often in the hills as much as that hell on the Hudson!) was to always have a place to back up.

If that was denied you, chances are you were, as they said where he came from, fooked out of luck.

He had the woods to back up into, or dodge, parry, spin, turn and thrust this …very, very unwell man before him, into submission, then back right up to Heaven Hill Road to grab a few friendly Continentals and bring all Hell back down here.

That Town road led out of there along the edge of the Swamp quite a ways, far from what he once thought of as this new, idyllic estate, one that already felt old and seamy to him, fit to bust with clotted blood.

It would be a sacred mercy to cleanse this estate, burn it to the ground, as long as the wife and child were provided for. Gus Ehrend was the dirtiest war profiteer Austria had ever deposited on America’s shores to date.

There would be no singing at his wake from Johnnie’s clan, who lost two cousins in the Continentals, as well as numerous bits of both the Brothers Mallory. But perhaps the wake should have already happened, he thought, taking Gus in.

Everything was off about him, today. Gustav had fine wood teeth, before. But these were punching out of his doggy middle-aged gums, new and silvery-white, sharp and back-ways like those of a lamprey or a leech.

Gustav’s formerly round, ruddy cheeks were sinking, now, as Boss Gus moved now with alarming alacrity, gangling right on up to him with a body that changed even as Johnnie watched in clinical horror, a shape like unto a praying mantis, or a Punchinello puppet on stilts.

The Gus-thing waited there, bobbing grotesquely, wafting the words into his face with breath like a warm possum flat out on a hard-pan road and drying in the vast broiling sun of a Pennsylvania August.

“It was pretty bad, Mickey Finn. I ate… parts of… several of them. The sequences don’t… gibe. As you see…” And here it giggled like something that should never see the light of day.

Maria Ehrend’s small dark eyes stared out at him, swimming up to the surface of Gus’ red-green lanterns in blood. The delicate oval of her face was visible on Gus’,  for a split second, behind that grotesquely long nose and curving, upthrust chin that were starting to get even longer, and resemble a thumb and forefinger poised to pinch off every word.

“As you may have noticed, Good Sherriff of Nottingham, you… eehee... eeheee… HARK.”   Whatever it coughed up managed to locomote away. They both looked at it.

Johnnie saw his chance first, ducked down and drove in like it was mid-week on the rugby field. The handles went down. The locks went back. Hickory-dickory-dock.

The good Sheriff didn’t even think, simply dance-stepped out of the way and ducked into action, the way he had danced the two musketoons into his hands at Valley Forge and blooded his soul in the knowledge that he never, ever wanted another mercenary engagement after the rifle ball punched through his left knee and made that foot not work sometimes, on top of the God-damned thumb.

Being Sherriff was safer… relatively speaking. Or had been until presently. His own face pulled back into a grimace of wonderment as the old, fat Prussian peacock of a body before him tore open, looking all in, like a pasteboard mask left out in the rain. Something inside it was making it go, wearing it like a…

“Like a costume, of some sort,” the Sheriff breathed wonderingly. The guns didn’t lower an inch.

No more than a few seconds had passed. Something made a noise in the puckies.

Behind a flap of skin and muscle, something yellow and wizened and covered in foul humours was dancing Gus’ drained corpus around, something…

Something that convulsed into pieces five seconds later, full of smoking holes, making a big bloody show of cursing him out to the dogs and back through vocal chords that buzzed like bassoon reeds without the air to make them go, yet somehow they eventually did.

Something tried to drop from the bottom of the body’s neck and run the head off, opening and closing like fingers. Like a crab’s legs. But Johnnie had seen much worse, or so he told himself to make himself keep firing.

Those big red hands whirled at their work. The Something was in smaller pieces now. Leaky meat. Smaller. Smaller. Prime. Load. Fire. Prime. Load. Fire... Get back here… Prime…

Every time the parts moved, he re-loaded. Eventually, there wasn’t much left he could do without a potato-masher or a few stout lads in congress-boots.

When he looked up, he saw Dmitru Blaga and those two Cornishmen, the young twins he could never keep straight, Bruce and Ben Kerrigan, leading a flock of pitch-pine torches through the side yard, right to him. The goodmen of the Rock Springs posse had taken it upon themselves to join the party.

Soon, the clean candy smell of burning wood spirits thinned down the powder smoke.  The creature that Sheriff Mallory referred to as “your little crooked man, there” eventually quit moving after several more tries at re-establishing locomotion. It was some sort of homunculus, the posse concluded, like that one Mister Marlowe wrote about. Better not to mess in with it…

Blaga the Carpathian and two of the church sextons (Giuseppe Canarsa and Jamie Gennaro) spaded up the ashes and dumped them down the Ehrends’ well, but few chances were taken.  The Carpathian knew all too much about things that stole the breath and walked about when they shouldn’t ought to be up.  Boards were procured under his bellowing auspices, and bricks, and mortar.

The well was capped four times over. No living thing in the region could get through that masonry, once it dried into place. Beforehand, no living thing under forty stone could even think about making the attempt.

Before the Dutch East India company brought him there, Dmitru had dug ditches in Holland, too.  He knew how to lay stone, move earth, and even divert water. Nothing could get through the earthwork he showed them how to make. Nothing.

“This old man, he stake his life on it,” he told the crowd of torches through his two missing front teeth. “Speaking of stake, we could be gonna need a big sharp one or two if that stone does roll over, and maybe some hammers. I show you, lads…”

But not even David Brown the freed slave was unacquainted with the concept. “Soucoyante,” he said too loudly from the back row of torches.

Towering over the tiny Ibo man, Albie Bilodeaux scratched his big shaggy lumberjack head and bellered, “Quoi?”

“In West Africa, where my Mama come from, an’ in the islands, we had that kind too. That’s the word. Like what this man say, you got to pierce the skin of the soucoyante with a sword while the sperrit be out ridin’ some poor fool. Only…” He scratched his close-cropped head of gray curls. “Only, I never heard tell of one that was a man…”

The point was mooted, and Blaga had twenty sharp rosewood stakes practically thrown at him in the next five minutes. Meanwhile, Johnnie Mallory deputized all of them on the spot, by virtue of the power vested in him by the Common Weal of Pennsylvania, to break down the door of what wags in town derisively called the Crooked House after the old Limey nursery-rhyme, since Ehrend started having additions built by different architects as he could afford them, to be “Modern.”

Heh. If that was what they were calling ‘certifiably mad’ these days, Johnnie thought, then so mought it be. But then he realized that Gus was worse than dead now, and dear Maria, who reminded him so much of Mamie…

“I need the ten of yeh strongest, to me!” Johnnie bellowed from the front porch. Twenty torches broke from the fold. Good…

He’d had time to re-load from the powderhorn at his belt behind him, jammed into the belt of his voluminous trousers, riding uncomfortably against the crack of his skinny Irish arse.  Without a word more, he kicked the front door hard. Oak. No good.  That was some lovely carpentry, pegged together instead of nails, and…

Huck-huck.

CTHOOM!

The Dragon in his right hand ate a smoking hole in the lock that dripped hot brass. The next kick went home, and then the torches were boiling up the high front steps like bees, fanning out everywhere, all through the mansion in the gloaming, washing bright light and little sound over the land for miles into the big, dark woods…

When they got inside, the first thing that hit everyone was the smell. Lance Cpl. Douglas, the youngest new deputy, was noisily sick in the foyer. Given the circumstances, this was seen as no breach of military bearing by anyone in attendance. The general vernacular among the men grew quite colourful. Then Mallory was calling them all upstairs.

“EVERY MAN JACK IN THIS HOUSE DOUBLE-TIME TO THE BACK BEDROOM, TROOPS, OR I’LL LAY THE HIDE OFF THE LOTTA YEH IF I DON’T SEE THE WHITES’A’YER EYES NOW NOW NOW!!!”

By anyone’s account, it would be a long, hot night…

“He’s leavin’ bits of himself about, sure,” Johnnie observed, not long later. They were loading bloodied, partially consumed bits of bodies into Amos Claycomb’s big ox-cart. (Amos was Mennonite, and kept to himself, but lent a hand right enough in such matters, saying it was a man’s Christian duty to do so.)

The oxen were restless, and didn’t want to be anywhere near that dooryard. Johnnie couldn’t say he blamed either of the team.

“I might be just puttin’ a bold face on a cold trail, you men, which I have no doubt this is,” Johnnie said, pacing back and forth out there. As he spoke, he was still wincing through his mustache, the way he’d been through their whole cursory walk around that back bedroom graven in Doré’s Hell.

“But he may need to …oh, go somewhere and, like, put himself…” He grimaced. “Back together. Look for him to have gone to earth. Look to the ceilings, cellar floor, cellar holes, the dumb-waiter… Fooker could be anywhere, bleedin’, like, an’ we don’t even know what this demon looks like, exact. Aye, I said the word, an’ any man jack here who’s a Deist or an Atheist can bloody well stand guard here tonight, for yeh’ve less fear than yer Sherriff.”

Not one deputy questioned him, just held their torches closer to the slick snail-shimmer that dragged across the porch and all over the house, it looked like.

“What you want to bet, lads, this is some kind of an tree sprite, needs a place to go… to, root up, if yeh like, get water, or maybe blood? Not unheard of.  I saw one like that in the fens, back home. Very, very old. This one’s like that’n, just… slippery. Aaaah, an’ ’e’s long gone. Yeh can sense it, can’t yeh?”

And all any of the six deputies on the porch could do was look at each other and slowly nod…

In the end, the same story held true. In that part of the world, by the time the posse rides in, it’s already too late. The Adversary has already hopped the wall with the boodle, and in his wake only a swath of broken homes and minds and bones.

They fanned out and got looking. All of them took their time. Johnnie had served with the President at Valley Forge, and if he said the trail was dust, it was dust.

And it was.

Mostly…

9.) TYPHON’S SOLILOQUY, PART THREE

But who’s gonna fix it, Dear Millie, Dear Millie…

No matter what, I’m out now. Out of the Dreamwalk. Free. And the Bastards can’t can’t can’t put me back there again.

Not even now. The apes of this age threw me down the well, but the first thing any child learns about a bad penny is that you can never throw it too far.

Into the well, back where it all started when Iulio Bianchini and one or the other of the bestial Granson grandsons sunk that well, and hit a high shelf of granite on the first try, then stopped when they got sweet water anyway.

Into the cold black waters and moldy metal smell of the well. Into the well like smoke, the bricklayers and that hateful Romanian know-it-all covering the cover with another couple of layers they think are supposed to do something. (I’ll eat his brain last, that one, and show him how far a wooden stake can be inserted in a pre-existing hole.)

Into the liquefaction and the letting go of will, drifting and lost, remembering who I was in the life I lived before this abbreviated, rapidly mutating life.

Remembering Crook-Staff. Oh, the humans I had, the thrills and bites and agonistic exaltated ecstasies of the flesh, the stuff of legend, the sacrifices I learned to eat, and steal their faces, and wear them on mine, and hide, and run, and thrive…

The well, where the stone came from, that woke me into who I was, and all the lives. This. Me. Voyager, time-traveler, newborn on Earth, waiting for the day I get to storm the gates of the Foundry and demand my birthright.

But from whom? Those who bore me are now dead, and Papa’s golden desk left to squabbling ghouls…

Oh, this is getting tiresome. It’s making me skip out on the present day. I reconstitute when the water starts not wanting to have anything to do with my larval shape. Just the same, it’s enough. It’s plenty.

It’s all I can do to stay solid as I squeeze out through a crack, a crack, and then…

Moonlight, bathing my gelid skin like the sated breath of Kali-Durga.

Into the hills, then, to feed, and regroup.

10.) MAKE STRAIGHT A PATH IN THE WILDERNESS.

The big orange Monarch butterflies had hatched to the milkweed patch in the high grass on this part of the way-side here, the one only Enola Peck knew about. The one where it was too early for them to hatch, but be damned to it, the little black-and-yaller stripes of cattypillers ate and ate everywhere, growing, changing from one thing into something else again, something else entirely.

Enola Peck was the first to behold the phantasm in the woods at the panting-dog height of high summer. Yea, the terror that crept by noonday beheld her, too, and appeared as real as a person. But then again, it wasn’t the first time for that, for her.

Enola saw people and creatures who weren’t there all the time. Elder said that came from being Sinful, and a Woe-Man. Perhaps in time, she would come to see the wisdom of that, though in the darkest secret heart she could never even admit she had, she knew that she had magic the maverick Elder did not, Big Book or no Big Book.

He may have made them all hofmute, damned, breakaways from the folds in Lancaster and Bell’s Village. But he didn’t know everything. All Mervyn Sollenheim’s magic came from that damned old book he found.

“Be ye Devil?” she called, shading her hooded hazel eyes, staring down the sallow thing squatting in the shadows by the roadside. “Kobold? How now?”

Enola would have that book from him, she sometimes dreamed, take it into the woods and set the night of this strange new land on fire. But dreams were something she couldn’t very often admit, either. (Until now, only now, at the fragile time she knew not was to be her end.)

In any case, her own spirits bedeviled her plenty, but none had ever spoken back to her in King’s English, with real words…

The little yellow-green pale mandrake man wore a jerkin of what appeared to be human hide, around a body that didn’t make sense.  “Which way do you align your sticks?” he asked her back in answer,  mind-to-mind, in Dreamwalk-Tongue. “Amish? Mennonite?”

Enola hissed with surprise. No one was supposed to speak the Dream-tongue in daylight. That was ungodly, more truly so than all the English themselves thrown into one.

“Well?” The little man was brisk, impatient, yet so utterly alarming to look at that Enola could barely talk back.

“Starry Wisdom,” she stammered proudly. “Starry W-W-Wisdom Utopian City, shining on this very hill’s side.”

The little man was melting at the seams, she observed as she looked closer, plowing on anxiously,  “Our Elder Sollenheim, the prophet of our new way, says he knows not the minute nor the hour he be the herald for the Messiah Godling told of in our Holy Writ, the young Typhon, who…”

She realized where she was again, and to what or whom she was speaking. Her face flushed.

Zealotry was Enola’s only defence in such terror, though once again, it wasn’t the first time she’d stopped by the woods in a strange gloaming to hold parlay with something she couldn’t explain. (After all, this was America.)

But merciful Fathers, the wee spirit’s poor outsized nose looked like a candle in the sun, the chin likewise and the face entire cracked and leaking black tarry ichor. Enola was talking with her hands so much now that those bird-claws appeared to stab the very air, ignoring the way the packstraps cut into her bony shoulders when they did.

Ignoring where she was supposed to have been an hour ago, bringing oats to Deacon Harris’ three spavined nags.  A horrible pride began to grow in her heart, as she stared rapturously into those green cat’s eyes, wolf’s eyes…

“Be ye Him?” she asked, clasping her hands together as piously and sweetly as a girl fifty years younger. “Oh, be ye Typhon, as it was writ of long ago…”

She couldn’t allow herself to finish. The hope was just too much.   The little man loped and limped laboriously toward her, walking with his big hands just as much as his feet.

It looked like it took some effort. Parts of him were starting to slide off.

“Who is this that darkens my counsel by words without knowledge?” he said through a mouthful of foul black filth, “Declare, Goody Peck, if thou hast understanding. Where were you when I rooted myself in the First Cause, and turned to a stone, when the morning stars sang together and the Sons of God shouted for joy? ”

Goat’s eyes. His lamprey grin was chilling to behold, even on a dwarfish leper so sick, so small…

Enola’s heart went out to the spirit and then, revolted, shrank back. Was this what the One To Come looked like?  The shape croaked up at her again from the loamy forest mast of the bank off the roadbed,

“Take me to this Elder Sollenheim. I think…” Those eyes appraised her. “I think you can help, too.”

“I?” The half-mad crone (devotee of a fully-mad mad old Amishman who, as a much younger man, stole a holy book from a Shaman named Crook-Staff, who stole it in turn from the Quakers, who confiscated it who knows where back in Merrie Old England) pointed to herself with withered fingers.

“How may I serve thee, if thou be who thou sayest?”

Ross Ehrend’s body dipped like a dowser’s wand. He appeared to consider something for no more than a second, and then flowed forward, a skein of standing water, preparing a face to meet the face he was now meeting.

“Simply…” His tongue throbbed and swelled. Every word came with much more effort. “Simply stand in place, and let Nature see to the… rest….”

But by the last word, speech was superseded in favor of much more immediate phenomena: Lurching, shuddering reactions of protoplasmic gorge as the face hanging in her own face became a melting demon tornado, and it was all over very quickly, but not painlessly.

Not painlessly at all.

11.) AMONG THE ANTHROPOPHAGI

Elder Sollenheim’s son Vernon came galumphing through the brush roughly fifteen minutes later with his mean, smelly old blue-tick hound at the end of a short rope. Vernon was in a foul mood.

“E-no-laaaaa!” he hissed down at her, squinting through the dark as he charged off the road like a witch-hunter in his wide-brimmed hat. Bocephus the hound snapped and snarled belike at her until Vernon cuffed the dog with one black-gloved hand. (The gloves went way up to the forearm, and were claw-marked fore and aft.)

“Thou’st been at m…mmm… mischief half the n…nnn..night, thou’st. I’ll see th…th..thee wh…whipped at Council-Fire for a sla…attern if thou back-talkst.”

He would have been easier to take seriously if both his eyes pointed in the same direction, but all parties involved were either ignorant or past caring.

Then, may small favours never cease, between two of Vernon’s neurons a spark finally caught from the center thrice to the utmost pole. The dark lessened around him, though the gloaming was growing and the wind howled quite loudly for summertime.

Standing under the great hardwoods, his boots sinking into black loam, goggling at what was before him, Vernon apprehended, fully grasped that he was looking at something Not Of This Earth.

Like in The Book. Like in all that stuff he only half-believed, though he dreamt at night long and long of the Jenuchshadaga, the Lizard People of the First Snow, and though he had seen his father’s Wand of Moses work galvanic miracles more than once, in the cold that called to mind every other aching winter snowstorm every other half of every year in this grudging, hard-knock place that was all he had come to know…

Vernon was no Doubting Thomas now.

“That which is conceived in me is of the Holy Spirit,” the old woman croaked at him through a mouthful of weird black stuff that looked like tobacco-juice. “I will bear a son, and you shall call his name… his name…”

Then her belly did something that no God-fearing man, woman or child should bear witness to. Vernon ran like hellfire back to his father’s house. Within ten minutes, Elder Sollenheim himself wore the same revolted yet fascinated countenance…

The Elder’s gold-ringed blue eyes were completely off-plumb, lank iron-gray hair swept back out of them into a perruke that thrust his stubbly chin into prominence like the prognathous prow of some stunted species of cave dweller left over in the hills between Titan and Monongahela times (as the Book made clear.)

“Ye must be born again,” Elder Sollenheim rasped at the swollen belly before him. Behind them, a great fire roared in the new Franklin stove. His home was lavishly appointed, though few saw the inside of it. The ways of an Elder were not for the common fold to understand.

The belly humped and rippled. Enola’s gray, boiled-bacon body flopped to and fro.

“Vernon, strap this clay down tighter!” Elder Sollenheim commanded his idiot son. “Something is happening! Something—”

Then the sounds and smell in that room were indescribable by any tongue or pen.  Something tossed body and straps aside, on the flat, shackled cot. Like it would be there for a while. Vernon struggled mightily not to wet his breeches, and did pretty well.

The Elder of Starry Wisdom fell to his knees on the parquet floor. “Lord,” he intoned through the beard he’d grown out, the hofmute moustaches, supplicating behind the tie-on goggles that hid his scarred eyes, “I am not worthy to receive Thee, but only say the word and I—”

One tiny, perfectly-formed, rawboned flipper laid along the side of his face like a hot dead fish. The Crooked Man searched his eyes tenderly with those vast green ones, the blackness within drawing the Elder down, down, down, to things he’d only read about before…

The blackness heard. “Get off your knees,” the Crooked Man croaked with effort. “I’m not your God, Amishman. I can make you a Magus. A… Maestro, like in Europe.” That took.

“You know, even though you may feel trapped on this land in body, your minds are never… Oh, never mind. I’ll save that one for a few more centuries.”

Understanding flicked into the piggy little eyes. “What would you ask of me, Homonculus ?”

The Elder managed to put on a brave face. The Crooked Man noted this. He would see him blubber and plead like a little girl, before he was done. The permanent part of him remembered well that brave faces were always the most fun to wear.

He could feel his body growing already, seeding itself wrong… In order to halt the process, he needed food. Now. Which he probably wasn’t going to get, except…

The body on the floor was old, leathery, used-up. He’d nearly smoked it dry in the re-gestation attempt. Still, it might have to do.

“Did you ever feel like this was all a bad dream,” he asked of his two newest disciples, “and you were just about to wake up?”

Somewhere in the woods, something howled. I’m surrounded by idiots, the Crooked Man thought, baring his new teeth.

“I want that fucking Book,” he snarled, “The one Magnus wrote. The spells. Back when the Bastards screwed that up, too! But I never die.” He looked around at the two debased Amish. “I never die!!!” he screamed, like they’d have any idea what he was talking about…

But in the end, Vernon and Karl understood enough.  Or thought they did.

The cold-iron shackles weren’t new. Karl had them installed for his wife, who ran mad when she opened the Biblia Titanica at random two years before and began reading out loud. Nice to get some use out of them again. He hated to part with them, had even liked a little to exercise his rights as a husband while she was restrained during the day.

But Elsa had gone on to her rewards, and the shackles were free…

“Bind, bind, bind…” Elder Sollenheim intoned sepulchrally, the hollows of his eyes like skull sockets in smoked glass above the bearded lips that spoke the words from the big hide-bound book in his hands. The crabbed handwriting in it looked prehistoric, but it was only mediaeval French. The pictures kept making Vernon get sick and see double.

“The New Jerusalem waiteth but for a spark to light its furnace. The iron is hot…”

So Vernon looked away from where he stood, nervously officiating, his fowling-piece trained on the daemon in irons, who looked like he was attempting to bash his little flipper-baby self to bits against the stone wall in fury, spewing black bile and silver blood through his teeth.

“COME ANY CLOSER, YOU’LL CATCH WHAT I GOT!!!” the Crooked Man screamed. Vernon paid no mind to the gibberish.

“…We abjure thee, Typhon, to hold still in Time until Thy Judgment arriveth, until Fortune herself comes down from Heaven to whisk Thee back to Hell, with Mercury, Thoth, Anubis, and all those Illegitimi who walk between the worlds. Bind, bind, bind, as long as there are stars in the firmament or grains of sand at the ocean’s mighty shore, Typhon Demarest, be bound…”

“YOU. FUCKERS. WILL. ALL. PERISH. SLOWLY. SLOW. LY. BY. CENTIMETERS. I. WILL. EAT. YOUR. BRAINS. WHILE. YE. YET. LIVE.  YOU SABBY?!?? MY! HEAD! THE WHOLE WAY UP! YOUR! ASS! SABBY THAT?!?!?”

“We bind Thee still in Time and Space, Typhon, until the angels come for Thee, and shower their blessings upon us for all time, as it was written of by the First People and so shall come to fruit once more…”

And on it went… But the angels never came for him.

Did they?

BOOK 2: FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN

INTERMEZZO: THE TINDERBOX

NEXT TRANSMISSION: TimeTrack B#7/6

Illegitimi Archive, Dream Library

Capital City, Shang 2 Seaboard

Lt. Taliesn Demarest,

Oracle JG, Illegitimi

Traveling over the Allegheny Ridge of Dream, I met two Waterwitches by the side of the road. The Redhead’s name was Prophecy and the Dark One’s name was History.

And they said:            Hey, Kid.  You Lookin’ For A Dream? There Ain’t No Jobs Around Here. Whattayawanna, Tell It To The World? Ya wanna Stick It To The Man? Ya wanna Be Somebody?

And I said:                  Whattaya Sellin’?

And Prophecy said:   Salvation. See, there’s this old hollow tree in the graveyard south of Heaven Hill, at the bottom of Dootch Settlement Road. We can’t go back there, because we can’t go home again.

And I said:                  What’s That Got To Do With Me?

And History said:       When we were cast out of Eden, Dad kept all our stuff. But you have the absolute power of anachronism. You are Destiny’s Bastard. Ex Nihil Unum.

And I said:                  So What About the Hollow Tree, already?

And Prophecy said:   The Tree is petrified, split by lightning in the Year of the First Snow.
There are those who called her Yggdrasil, Gramma Tree, Gran Matrix, and sat in her branches while weaving a bloody tapestry in which we all form a thread.

But we just called her Home.

Down the center of the Great Tree, there is a spiral staircase you must climb up into to descend, and enter the Rooms Beneath the Woods put on hold from one life-time ago. We offer neither an explanation nor a moving crew. When you get inside, you will understand what we seek. It’s still there. We promise.

And I said:                  Finally, we’re getting somewhere. And what, pray tell, will it be? Sawdust of the One True Cross? The Marquis de Sade’s wedding album? Or was it all that quid and bob you stuffed beneath your mattress, now worthless—

And Prophecy butted in:   You don’t even know WHERE you’re AT.
History lost her soul back there. And I lost my lighter.

And I said:                          OK. What’s in It For Me?

And History said:               Redemption.

And I said:                          Outside Of Town.

And Prophecy said:           The other side.

And I said:                          OK, I’ll Bite: How Do I Get To Town?

And History said:               Say something bad about Mayor Horace. You’ll be at St. Mary’s Hospital in about a minute.

And Prophecy said:           Town is just down the hill from the Sanitarium.

And I said:                          OK, I’ll Bite: How Do I Get To The Sanitarium?

And History said:               Hang out in Town long enough. You’ll get there.

And I said:                          I Repeat: How Do I Get To The Sanitarium?

And Prophecy said:           Now you’re catching on.

And She handed me a map.

So I rolled a left-handed cigarette with the map, and the next thing I knew I was on my way, wondering ‘Why Me?’

I was dead on my feet, only wanting to lie decently down and have dirt shoveled over me, after watching my friends get shanghaied, torn apart by cannon in the galley of some ship they never learned the name of, or left on to die of a hundred different kinds of rot under the noses of those wretched Navy doctors in the mad wards of the hell-with-the-lid-off mad-towns of Port-Land or Baltimore.

Into the hands of Hangover, into merciless wheeling morning-after claws that spelled out M A D N E S S, the country now a dream, covered with indistinct markings of lives left unfinished, scraps of my own indentured shackles whirling away in those autumn winds of Back Home, the ones that rise as quickly as they can, and freeze out the Just and Unjust Alike.

On the way, I could have sworn I saw a fallen temple on the mountaintop, like in the old dreams, the Titan-dreams, as when a Queen long-dead was young…

But for the sake of History and Prophecy, I had to press on down the slippery slope, back into the belly of the beast. This time, there was just no escaping the Old Home Town…

Then I woke up, and I was still dreaming.  There’s some sort of glitch in the Tank. I can’t get back fast enough. ’Com went out ten years ago in a lotta timetracks, and now no one knows who the fuck is where. Nobody can talk to each other. Yet.

He keeps crowding out Bastard signal. Somehow, he’s overwritten the source code of the Shang 2 Singularity Generator, from the very last Public Works log-on to the topmost tech’s log-in, almost as if…

Almost as if Typhon knew we were coming for him…

But I have some time until I need to worry about that. Just a little, you might say. This amniotic fluid is warm, and the Dreamwalk still calls me, this human uplink sputtering between it and the Tank, and… FalseTime.

“Ye must be born again.” Yeah, yeah, and I know that nobody gets a special exemption.

I hope I shall arrive soon.

:Ethelred-1, Receiving y/n?

:good evening, mandelbrot. lt. demarest has some very interesting hallucinations. do we want to monitor his iv’s, maybe change the med-cocktail up a bit—

:Under no circumstances, Ethelred, and if you even think about it you’ll have to go through me. It looks like Tally’s gonna come out in… oh, shit, look at all these different emergences. I’ll give you year by year, if you want.

: (waiting)

:you know, son, it just fascinates me that… the seven followed him back, they were able to duplicate it, but… in the name of science, i hope they know everywhere they were following typhon to. wheelhorse alone knows how many timetracks have already been contaminated with his filthy little shithooks, and every one of them has a rome, a thermopylae, a west… east… NORTH… and they have to follow typhon back to every single one and hope they remember enough on the rebirth to find him and whip his—

:stay on target, grandpa. when did you say tally’s next emergences are? any near there?
if he’s dreaming about it already in-tank, he’d be a great one to throw in at the location you mention. the big one. the bubble. FalseTime track A-1a2. that oughtta be fun. track A-1a2 is the one you called the ‘motherfucker’, if I am not mistaken, dear Teacher. the one where the world ends in 1994?

:right, right. let’s see… looks like… damn it, 1805-ish, tally will be born next. torrington, connecticut is the next time lt. demarest is again born of woman. what the bloody hell is in connecticut? never mind. anyway, after that… oh, he shows up in powersburg in 1914, on the connelly side. he… oooh, yeah, you want to keep him there for that. he’ll sustain heavy losses, but he’ll do good work.

he’s going to be a… oh, like a cop or something. and a mutant, too. gotta admire his initiative.

:so, short answer, we can’t get tally on this one.

:no. I wish we could, ethelred, truly. you know no one wants that more than i do. for Sundevil’s sake, i was his tutor for fifteen human years! i—

:you’re shouting, old mech. simmer down. no tally. affirmative. noted. can we get his young wife? same thing, pretty much, same spook-work ratio, same rrreal short learning curve…

: (feverishly searching) maeve is… already in there. semi-dormant. she says she’ll know when it’s time to pull the strings all the way, whatever that means. she says… she says… and i quote:

CLIP:

“Don’t you dare reassign me, you little old ladies! This is way too much fun, and I earned R&R, at least for a few more weeks or months.

My Great-to-whatever-power-Grandma Mamie is the toughest woman I have ever met.

She’s a Town Copper’s wife, and she’s already been through more of a ration of shit than most people could possibly imagine, in any age, on any world.

I know when Typhon tries to steal her baby. I know what is supposed to happen, and everything it’s supposed to set off. When I think about that, I find myself looking out of Mamie’s big eyes too much, noticing too many details of that barbarous, sprawling age in the dim prehistory of our own polis on the Eastern Sea-Board.

Sorry. It’s just August, now. Mamie’s drinking plum wine right now. Makes me loquacious. I’m out here in their little garden that looks out on this cobblestone joke that will be Main Street much, much later on, under a knot of tall old willows and birches all thrown together any way the remains of these forests spit them out.

In the highest fork of one willow is a tiny, tiny tombstone. There are initials on it. I don’t want to know a thing about that. We have our skirts hiked up, just now, barefoot in the grass, with a flute of that golden fuck-you-up in our left hand.

We are calling the toads, the way Mamie’s mother showed her how to do, that weird little noise you make in the back of your throat. Two of them hop across the baked clay in the middle of the yard to settle down near us and sagely watch with big gold-ringed eyes, waiting for the next part of a spell too old for either of us to remember. The toads know that. They give us room anyway.

The August sun fires the armillary sphere of the sky and the still roads out of town with a sweltering, silvery heat, a kind of liquid light, like oil paint. Cicadas sing their eternal buzz. The first crops are laid by. It is mid-day.

Towards the end of the month, Johnnie and ourselves will saddle the ponies and take a long ride up the low slope of Summit Road to half a mile out from Jeb Brumbaugh’s Croyon Trading Post that is finally starting to like to call itself a Mercantile Store.

Gentleman Jim Weiland and his Sarah always try to turn us away, but we’re just two more hands to help them get the hay in no matter how far Johnnie and the gentle giant go back.

(Johnnie took that mortar fragment in his knee at Valley Forge shoving Jim Weiland out of the way, after which the gentleman farmer has a pretext to always be around. It’s Jim Sanchez, you Guardians, semi-dormant as well, the one with the cybernetic toy collection and the runaway mouth. Next lifetime, he might have to act… Yes, we have two larval Bastards here. Plus that Zlotchin guy, the innkeeper. I think he might be Khan…

Anyway, I want to see ten Bastards here, non-dormant. Trust me. Get your asses in gear and start sending reinforcements. We are going to NEED them…)

A smart New York lawyer named Madison has just drafted several amendments to the new Constitution. We have a standing army this year.  I lay in my canvas chair near the tallest clump of willow roots, to dream lazily through this long, golden summer day before haying-time starts at the farm of my fellow embedded Bastard.

Outside my daydreams, outside my future plans, the cicadas buzz uninterrupted. Even July will pass, but the heat will linger until the green milkweed pods burst in snowy white. Then light winds will start blowing down from the north, and the heat wave will curl up and die slowly.

Slowly, too, will the afternoon slip away and the men begin coming home, moving silhouettes against the horizon, down every street, through every dooryard, in buggies and pony-traps or on foot across Town a few miles, able to walk across their whole world in afternoon (hell, even reach New York by the following sunrise…)

The bells at Our Lady and the new Court House will begin tolling the hour (wrong, as usual; it’s only five p.m., not thirteen) and Mamie’s heart beats fast for me now, with a deep and moving pleasure.

She/I rise(s) from the chair, finish the wine and place the glass on the little lawn-table to pick up later when we do the washing-up. We go in through the small house, and out onto the flagstone sidewalk, peering up the street at a landmark I now know to be the American Hotel public house…

“Where’s me big Irish drunk?!?” Mamie calls loudly. The tall man in the wide-brimmed black hat coming down the street smiles, at the end of the block of houses. He is so tired he can barely walk. But at the sight of her, and the sound of the voice, tears spring up in his faded blue eyes and he starts walking faster, boot heels echoing on stone…

I turn my eyes briefly to the flat, low skyline in primary colors, a view for which Picasso would have sacrificed his life. I feel like some happy figure in one of my own tableaux, caught in this rich scene of startling beauty. Oh, that the moment might never pass. . .

But I have to let Mamie have this part. No matter how drunk I am, the full-bore, full-throat, wake-the-neighbors-break-the-bed bout of lovemaking set to presently commence is one I will not experience with a relative, however distant. Too creepy…

Anyway, Ethelred and all you Guardians, I am still drunk. Very sorry to ramble so. Just wanted you to see location, a little, and get some sense…

Now I draw myself up into the corner of Mamie’s left eye and “pass out” very fast as he carries her on up the stairs. The last thing I see is their darkened kitchen: the big copper wash tub in the corner, two pheasants Johnnie shot when he was out Saturday noon with the boys, hanging on jute twine from the rafters…

In the Dreamwalk now, I see Light appearing over 1792, shooting far into dim Night’s bosom and making a glittering Dawn… Somewhere, far off, extended in a wide indeterminate circuit, with opal towers and battlements of living sapphire.

Chains of other worlds meet there in the Dreamwalk, hanging over this pendant one vast as stars, small as the smallest particle. In the face of such cosmic awe, our own current experiment seems meaningless. How can we compete with that eternal joy, eternal construction…

Turning my head from the Infinite now. Sorry to babble again.  I have been working, though. I’ve been streaming Mamie several martial arts from my headgear, since I got here. Never hurts to stir the soup, where Typhon’s involved.

On the clock, yes. Going out on Recon in Mamie’s skin until I see the greens of Typhon’s goaty little eyes in the cross-hairs of her absolutely beautiful man’s absolutely beautiful guns…

The guns are like the man, beautiful and deadly. Mamie knows that, and leaves Sherriff Johnnie alone when the old days darken his eyes.

Further news as events warrant. Taking a few weeks’ sabbatical in this extremely educational body for mental health purposes, after that nightmare in Rome.  Consider this my official notice to switch my Field Op status to ‘On Call’ for exactly one (1) rotation.

Goodnight, guys. Thanks for comin’ out.”

END CLIP

:(harsh mech laughter) my baby girl. i haven’t been able to keep up with her, half the time.

:send her a transmission through dreamwalk phreq. never…

:damn it, it’s not the same. PULL:

CLIP:

FROM THE DIARY OF MAEVE MAYHUE DEMAREST:

ORACLE, PLATINUM GRADE, SHANG 2 ILLEGITIMI SQUADRON

BASTARD #2, LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS,

RIGHT HAND OF FOOLISHNESS HIMSELF

TIMETRACK: A-1a2; SUB-HEAD “MOTHERFUCKER” (Hi, Mandelbrot)

SUBDATE: 20 MAY 1792

COVER BODY: MAMIE O’ROURKE MALLORY

TANK has clearly skipped me into Nearest Available Ancestor. I’ve been sitting here following the damn bouncing ball for years, you little mechanical stoners with no concept of Time, years?!?!——

Must maintain military bearing. We knew what we were doing when we signed on. We knew it was All Or Nothing. We made the choice.

You guys tried to tell us No, tried to get us out into Space, like that was going to do something if Entropy is supposed to entirely reverse as soon as Typhon causes enough instability…

We bought the ticket. I’m taking the ride. But what I was gonna tell you, Mandelbrot, beloved friend Ethelred who taught me everything I know… is that not all of it’s been a hardship.

Mamie’s a good Catholic, and would see a waking visitation as demonic possession. They still do exorcisms, in this part of the world. I saw one, once. (The girl was schizophrenic. It didn’t do a damn bit of good, they had to take her away to that new sanitorium that the Common Weal decreed should be built on the County Line, the one that doesn’t yet have a name.)

That Father Gibson knew he was licked, but talked his way out of the exorcism quite cleverly, even quoted Shakespeare:

“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?”

And for a wonder, you guys, even one of the dim-witted parents was still well-educated enough to give the Apothecary’s response to Macbeth’s plea, “Therein the patient must minister to himself.” Such schools they had, back Now, and despite the instances of abuse and the horrid, mediaeval social conditioning, such schoolteachers…

I’ve been doing some scrying, though, on my own, so decency forbids me to talk of the next Rotation to come. Except to say that Rock Springs now and forever is not overly kind to its educators. I hope I shall be reborn in my second choice, and not…

Sorry. I’ll forward you the scry. I do get ahead of myself.

Anyway, I don’t talk to Ms. Mamie liminally when she’s awake. Just in the Dreamwalk, where we can both move freely, let our hair down, hell, have a beer… I made a special set of rooms in the Dreamwalk that are just ours. Warded them with everything I have.

We train there. In the Dreamwalk. Mamie’s got a solid kick with her right leg, but there seems to be some sort of old knee injury in the left, like a bad sprain or something. (Mamie mumbles about a fall down a flight of stairs, back in Ulster in a dress that was too unwieldy…)

CLIP:

“An’ cold compresses for a week, the surgeon had to blood-let it, and… What the hell are you smiling at?”

I let her see me as I always did, in the dream, with gray mourning-dove wings and a crown of light around my sad tow-head. I kept my skin black and white, hemispherically, just like real life. Must have looked like what she knew as a clown, in the European sense, tragicomic harlequin angel of her own fevered brain.

“Probably a good thing they did, Mamie. See, where I’m from, when something like that happens… A friend had it done… The very first thing they do is drain the knee, to see how much it bled. Chances are, they improved the health of the joint when they… Ewwwwe…. When they blood-let.  At least a little. You follow?”

“I think so, Lady Tyche. ‘Joint’, where the knee connects, in the same wise as a joint of mutton…”

From there, the conversation rambled off into Dreamspeak stream-of-consciousness, as always. I tried to stay on target, but I was irritated.

I told her my name plenty of times, and why I was here. But she still calls me Tyche. “Because of yer skin…” I still wonder why, keep forgetting to Scour Tankmind for that.

“Close enough. Anyway, you’re up to the tenth form, now. Can you remember the name of this style of fighting?”

“Tie… Kwonn… Dough.”

I clapped my hands, clad in thick, biomechy Illegitimi gloves with the fingers cut off. “Yes. It’ll do for a start. Now, when the Adversary tries to kick your leg out from the back, what do you do…”

END CLIP

anyway, tally’s babbling just as much as she was, mandelbrot. what gives?

:who can say? let him hallucinate for a while. look at his chart. he’s feeling ahead, but he’s still pre-born. still between the spiritus mundi and the birth, falling like a shadow…

tally, I wish you could hear us. you seven troops are the buck-nuttiest recruits we ever got. you were the worst behaved graduating class in the history of the Academy, and you became… you became magnificent, now. you have a lot of work ahead of you, but if we can get this Tank up to full simultaneous power from… well, from Downtown, of course we have to use Downtown, what else is big enough to make that kind of juice?

I know that the Singularity Generator was what caused all this nonsense in the first place, but sometimes you have to use the enemy’s methods to vanquish him.

Oh, listen to me. I’m arguing with you and you’re not even here. Everyone knows you’re going to take your father’s place as Emperor when Marek finally runs mad. If he didn’t already, somewhere in time.

You didn’t hear me say that.

Hurry up and get this done, old friend. Stay sane.

Don’t make me come in there and drag you out...

: mandelbrot.

1.)    CROOKED MAN’S SOLILOQUY, PART 4: RUN THROUGH THE JUNGLE

On the wrong side of the Mountain of Sorrows, it was always hard times up in the years when Lewis and Clark named all the animals in the garden out west, and the Froggies got rid of their kings and earls, and everything else happened in the world outside of  the back-holler ass end of the bottom of Dootch Settlement Road in  Point of No Return, Pennsylvania (located somewhere between the biggest graveyard the Monongahela ever boasted, and the Slough of Despond that kept calling me back to it… )

Let me tell you where Point of No Return, PA lies on the map. You take the fastest little pony-trap you can find, and whip that beast bloody until it dies in the traces. Then you get out and walk, hauling your every worldly good and chattel in gunny-sacks across your back.

But soon, the world makes the weight of your gunny-sack too much to bear. (Everyone carries too much. No one travels light. Humans are all the same, no matter what the hell you think.)

So, anyway, you drop your gunnysack full of the world when you can’t carry it any more… And then you run through the jungle, go wodwo as they used to say across the seas. You paint your face with black earth, and get your hands white with mud. You become a ghost.

Then, when you have run as far as you can, slipped through the trees over hill and down dale, through bog and briar, flood and fire, and you feel like curling up under the nearest tree and sleeping for the next nine years…

Then you’re there. All hope is gone. You abandoned it voluntarily by making this journey.

Then you realize what the woods are telling you, the way they’re closing in all about you in that certain mucky way like a relative who smells of shame.

Then you come to the black trees, and all the abandoned trapper’s huts along Swamp Road, with their little rag-stuffed windows, yards littered with looms and boots and skins.

You come to the ravine, and the lone goat-path that winds around it and up the west face of Locke Mountain, the wrong face. The face that doesn’t have my father’s Foundry on it. The face where the grubbies mine coal. The dirty face. The dark side.

The Foundry is a vast cabal of mismanagement now anyway, from what I hear. Ehrend’s severed insect limbs are still running around trying to carve as big of a slice of his pie for themselves as they can. There was no heir, just “Baby Ross, Died In Childbirth With Mother, Body Missing.”

Fifteen stories circulate fifteen places. Their lawyer, that drunk shitbag Bryan Monoghan, he got it all, and he’s sitting on it like a dragon, snapping at anything he even thinks is getting close…

Listen to me, already caring about this like it’s my money. But it just cracks me up, Diary. Even for as backward as these proto-humans are, there’s not just one Crooked Man in town, there are about thirty. I just happened to be the Messiah, not just the fat pale maggot on the dead sow belly of the state, oh, ye Stephen Ehgartner, ye Geoffrey and Wade Granson (twin brothers; one’s a State Senator, one a land baron and no one can ever keep it straight) and the whole merry crew of burning-eyed Inquisitors, baying for blood…

Oh ye whole Courthouse full of privateers and vultures, ye clockwork machinations, ye viruses swooping over the grounds to sell them to the highest bidder and in every other way bespatter most of the Gentry of your Towne…

There I go again, thinking about Work.

Anyway… Baby Ross. They used a name. They must think us ridge-runners and stump-jumpers up this way don’t get down to Town, or know how to read.

They used a name. That gave me an idea, which gave rise to more ideas of several other kinds. I have a short learning curve, too. That’s why I got a Free Ride to their little Academy, back in Shang 2. I don’t regret it. “Bastards of the Universe.” Ha. Bitches of the Elite. Cowards of the County.

But I can smell them close, and that sets my teeth on edge. I was sure one was already about…

I’ll get there, Diary. Anyway, I had to experience something like a childhood, if only for a year or two. Just to toughen me up. I considered it a voluntary retraining, of sorts.

It was… educational. No Dreamwalk godlet ever foaled, no haughty “Guardian” Academy robot-overseer mechaservitor (servitor, you little pricks, not ‘Boss of Me’, ever!) could ever devise the torture of growing up in a human home, having to re-learn everything.

Especially that home, where I labored at the cellular in a dark, locked cellar-hole for most of each day, feverishly racheting the seeds inside me to accelerate, accelerate… Sucking up the last bit of sunlight through the chinks in those old, cold stone walls at close of day. Sucking up all that honey-gold with my half-formed tongue.

Screaming in every cell for food, food, far apart from moldy bread, stale beer and chicken bones. The kind of food that maybe lived upstairs, and didn’t quite know how to treat his guests….

But I saw the Book, in the parlor. The old bastard used a spell out of it, him and his big galoot son Vern, to clap me in cold irons. (Magnus’ lovely little parting gift, written in for two bazillion years down the line. Ha.)

The book Magnus wrote, back in the dawn times when the Jenuchshadaga ruled from Atlantis to Rama and no humans lived anywhere. The one Nostradamus re-translated from Sanskrit in fourteen and mumblesomething. Loosely translated, Nostradamus called it the Titan Bible.

The old boy knew his public, and never published the thing. But the Brothers Dee in London printed one copy, before closing their shop. (One went east, to Tibet, and became a holy man. The other hung himself by the neck in his own barn.)

Elder Karl Sollenheim had the Book. That much about him wasn’t bullshit. He’d gone to earth out there, gone native, and surrounded himself with an army of useful idiots, a truly American Pharaoh in his own garden plot.

The animals were everywhere in that plot, and the woods were pretty dangerous. (I include humans in the former Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Homo Sap.)

I could have been really butt-hurt about choosing to be reborn from Enola, that whole stupid mistake. She had a lot of junk DNA I found I could use, once I slid inside her like a star hidden in a toxic cloud, and regrew from the barren Martian soil of her womb that had never known a man (though she knew one woman, a schoolmarm, Back When. Heh. She came so hard she almost kicked down the privy wall…)

Where was I? Oh, I tell you, before I tried to become God, I had no idea how fucking sick most folks could behave. Being The Elder’s bastard (sorry, no other word will do) cuckoo-egg mighta been tough, if I let it get to me.

But I had my eyes on a different prize. I had been planning on aging normally, growing up in Sollenheim’s house like a kind of adopted Jesus. I don’t know what happened. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

Anyway, I sped things up for a little while. I took my time. In the dark.  I called toads. I caught rats in my teeth, and sucked up the honey slurpings of Poison Swamp through the seep in the wall.

Funny, that. He bound me into the irons, but didn’t think to bind the irons to the wet stone. It Is, as the Bard tells us, To Laugh…

I was going to go upstairs, take my chances with my weakened condition, and do what needed to be done.

But then I found the drain-hole.

I felt it before I smelled it. You can tell how weak I was. But stone walls do not a prison make, nor perverted old hillbilly wizards a torture chamber. Well, all right, much of one. Still, he wasn’t shit without that Book.

At the end of my chains, particularly the one I snapped, I put my finger in the standing sump-water, and the callus at the tip began to glow.

Far across Indian Valley, in the well at Ehrendhaus , something cried out to me, twisting in fevered sleep. Something I couldn’t believe I really lost. Something that could make me whole…

September 08, 1792

WHUNK. The other big oaken cellar door lifts high, letting in a wide, gold bar of lamplight from upstairs. The smell makes me drool. Then it makes me sick.

Earlier, I daubed mud into the holes in the wall, to hold the chains until such time as they become slicing whips. I rattle them, and begin to sing:

“WELL, SHE GAVE ME THE CRABS, AND THE BLUE BALLS TOO…”

“Make no music except with human tongue, saith the Lord Thy God,” the spluttering old walrus lisps at me through his weird Dutchy accent and his three-day growth, his spectacles, his inflamed toothless gums and his pride. I shuffle and buck-dance, clanking my chains like a bloodybones,

“THE CRABS DON’T HURT, BUT THE BLUE BALLS DO…”

He’s dressed like a high-blooded Puritan witchfinder. Must have been preaching to the mutts again. I give him both Shang 2 flags, the middle-fingered kind, which he doesn’t understand except by vague context, and make motions daring him to come any closer.

“GOINT’ TIE MY PECKER TO A TREE, TO A TREE…”

“Spirit, cease thy foul bleating, and get thee—”

“GOINT’ TIE MY PECKER TO A TREE…”  My fingertips are wet with well-water that begins to iridesce silver for some reason.

I watch, fascinated, as the droplets hang in the air around my fingers. The missing sliver of my stone cries out from beneath the water table. My hands ache like the very agonies of Christ.

The silver droplets twirl in helices around my pipestem wrists and ankles, now. Iron filings and bits of chain clatter to the ground. I open the membranes on my eyes, and look him full in the face.

“Human tongue?” I unfurl mine, almost back to what it was, hollow and pulsing.

“Who is it, Karl honey? I’ve seen how you look at me, like I was one of your cult brat cup-bearer boys,” I whisper as softly as I can. “Who is it you seek, and can never say? Whose name do you dare not speak, oh… We have a winner!”

Elder Sollenheim’s eyes grow dazed, drugged. Shouldering his way past the casks of fine wine, he makes his way into the slipshod mystic circle where he had me chained with very real iron, until some other magic just…

Oh, who the hell knows? I get a name out of his head, and it’s just like I thought. A man from outside Belleville, a woodcutter who he used to sneak off and see…

I can’t steal this face, obviously. But I can make him think he sees that man.

“You have something I need,” I growl in the woodcutter’s voice, letting the light from my open eyes do the rest of the work.

He’s like Punchinello in my hands. The DNA is easy to extract. Just… Oh, no, I can’t use this for longer than a few months, I’d have to take the whole…

A line of drool runs down Elder Sollenheim’s beard. The orgasm made him lose his wits. Not that there were many to lose in the first place. I absorb what genetic material I can use, count three, pull and pray…

“Okay, Karl honey, you can live. There’s a little I can use from you, jailer, trembling like a great jelly. You and your little brood of Starey Widgets are all kind of starting to get a little ripe. Like, more than usual. Like you’re cut off from Town, and have to steal to live. I can’t do anything to you that you’re not already self-inflicting…”

Sorry, Diary, was that a bit much?

See, Old Sollenheim believed that sex with a woman outside wedlock was sinful, but that the Bible never clearly forbade children, after either kind, “for dalliance that may expiate sin, and they are only serving their Elder, true, to learn the way of the marriage bed later ...”

He put this shit on handbills, like some kind of hick Little Red Book… sorry, I don’t like to use anachronisms… Like the Puritans do, sometimes. He made them all memorize every one of those handbills at Meeting, and then went back and changed half of his little holy writs up when he needed money or wanted someone out of the way in gaol for a week or so while who knows who did who knows what and walked away clean…

Oh, I remember it all like it was yesterday, every blow to the side of the head that was supposed to do something, every belt or razor-strop in that cellar, every grunt and squeak…

“I’ll beat der teufel out of you, no matter who you really are! I’ll… uh, uh… I’ll have all Ehrend’s money while it’s still tied up in probate! I’ll crack that new Courthouse like an egg! I’ll… Oh, hold still, you’re only making it worse…”

I had to admire his initiative. That new Court House was the most elaborately-sculpted Temple of Moneychangers since the ziggurats of Babel. Karl Honey apparently wanted Starey Widget City to extend way past the County Line…

Back in those first, hardest days “up the Mountain”, the Right Reverend Karl Sollenheim of the Established Church of Starry Wisdom Utopian City, thought he was hurting me. Heh. Me. (I stole his face, and saved it for long later.)

I knew I told him too much, in the beginning. I had no issue with his dalliances, or any of the closed-door backwood crap that went on in that house.

Especially later, when the commune took my advice and started eating their own dead to feed the bloodline. Then harvesting dead from Town, since they weren’t using them out in the graveyard. Then the infirm. Then the young infirm. Then the young. For me…

I saved Karl Honey’s face for long later, against the day when I slid back into shape, (after finally mastering the long, long trick on borrowed chromatin and desperate need)…

Slid back into shape, at the other end of the long bore, the endless throat of the drain hole, through hard water and blind cave dragon-fish and the great rushing, rushing, rushing, of rivers so much further down in the limestone that it would seem there was a whole world there, a world I knew not. A world I might call home.

All too soon, I popped to the surface of my late Dad’s old well like a flying fish shooting the tube of a great wave in triumph, in darkness, needing no light to see.  Seeing in different light as the scenery grew, by my new green night-light I clutched in one achy, spindly hand.

The other piece of the stone where I hid out in between lives. Lodged there in the wall. In the clay. In…

Chisel. Chisel. Chisel. Repeat. Overhead the sun waxed and waned. I lost track of time again.

That shard. That little shard. In my fist, then up my…

“I found it! Me!” I roared, “Me! Me! Me!”  My voice startled a flock of crows from the backyard, now fallen into disrepair and given over to volunteer corn spilled from the cratch by fleeing farmhands humping every seed ear they could carry for their own scratch plots of pigshit and despair.

Inside the house, the Emperor was making his rounds, twitchy oyster-eyed Monoghan a tall slab of booze-cured meat who stunk like a goat, swinging a lantern. His stubbly face seamed in a scowl at the highest upstairs casement window as he looked out at my new night-light, and then he saw. And saw. And saw.

When I waved, a dark stain spread across the front of Attorney Monoghan’s trousers. The half-witted barrister went to pieces, then, the kind of pieces no number of quarts of beer nor shots of whiskey may ever, ever put back together.

I left him be. What did I want with his kind of meat? I had to keep a clear head, for what I was about to do, and no human drug could touch it anyway.

I found the missing fragment. Me. Me. Me. Found. And Grew. Grew. Grew….

Outgrew the well. Outgrew the well, and chuckled mightily in my throat. This body, too, was only a lemon loaner.  But the seeds were starting to go off inside me, and the protoplasm was starting to do what I wanted it to for now.

Outgrew the well, and drove Papa’s lawyer stark, staring mad. Good start. Then I loped over the Mountain to my prodigal prison, slavering…

When I got there, Karl Honey knew which side the bread was buttered on, I’ll give him that much. You should have seen Elder Sollenheim switch from Big Bad Top to Big Squirmy Bottom Fish, as soon as I stormed back into the house: seven feet tall, glowing in the dark like marshfire; and ripped the Titan Bible out of his locked escritoire with no more effort than a man proffering his handkerchief…

“You truly are the One Who Was To Come,” the old Kraut gasps, wiping sweat out of his eyes, wobbling as he genuflects in his own study. His eyebrows are beetling. His breeches are stained out in front like his lawyer’s were.

I cuff him halfway across the room with the seven big, callused knuckles on my right hand.  The noise is rich, satisfying, immediate and intense as a sort of meat bocce. I file this away.

The seed-Me’s in my arms are starting to hurt. It’s always the same. I reproduce too many times within one shell, every time, teratomas and lipomas and all manner of nasty things that end in -oma getting in the way of having a host body for longer than a damn fortnight…

But on that side of the Mountain, you make do with what you have.

Old Karl Honey stinks like sour milk from every cheesy roll of fat behind the cloak and buckskins. (He’d just gotten in the front door when I came calling.) I never saw a man I hate so. He looks like a big bald baby caught out at something. He looks like a tool.

I snarl down at him through a mouthful of cigar smoke, tipping my top hat back on my long, sleek, freshly-shaven head, chattering my teeth like castanets. “Ye shall see my face, pederast, sorceror, trafficker with the Divil and sundry daemons. See.”

But he also looks crafty when he looks at me, and that’s the part I find most dangerous. I have to knock him down a couple of pegs, and I have to start right now.

“I’m listening,” he rasps, still trying to get up off his old knees. Something in his eyes fascinates me, something I never saw before. Fear begins to coat him like a pall.

And the drool rains down my face.

“Tell me why the men in your tabernacle stain their hunting-caps red with the blood of the deer,” I mumble at him in Jenuchshadaga speech, in Titan. In Dreamwalk-Speak. He wets his pants again. The stink, the fear-stink is so thick, so thick, it’s making me making me making me…

O god no god making me

making me

(slurpsnufflecruNCH)

(Thud.)

What the hell did I just do? I ….

I stole his face, apparently. Like the last time. Just… better. These clothes are a perfect fit, but he’s… laying right there. I ate the part… right out of his brain, right through his nose, the part that… made the fear-stink, I…

Oh, I can use this. These hands feel like they’ll stay for a few years, at least. This face…

Well, the waxen mask and the robe that hides are always good theater, I seem to remember. For when I start come apart. But this one might not come apart for a while. Good German stock. (All right, maybe not the top of the line, but beaters last much longer than they ever should…)

Outside the storm lies yellow over the sky, in the thick endless sepia light of Rembrant van Rijn. I drag the body out in the yard, carrying the big cane-cutting knife his brother brought him from the Carib Islands. That sword of the Dutch East India Company is soon literally as well as ideologically bloody.

I cut the meat at the joints, then crack the ribs down the middle and halve the torso long ways. Then I build a fire, a big one, in the pit out back. The pit with the spit.

The smell soon draws them in, one or two or more of them, curious. Sollenheim’s retarded son Big Vern is first in line at the barbecue…

Sorry, Diary. I’ll pull out. Or at least not thrust the full length of the works in, betimes.

Even early on, after stealing Sollenheim’s face, the changes began to show.  I was starting to look like one of the masks my braves would wear when they knocked on your door on All Hallow’s E’en, one lifetime ago from then…

The night I edited the Biblia Titanica with a little French razor and burned the pages that the Bastards could hypothetically use against me…

Well, I think I got them all, that is. I was drunk. I can’t even remember what month that was. Just that it was cold. There was snow. Up the Mountain, that could have been any time between October and April…
I think I got most of the bits, where Magnus finally puts aside the phony, veiled language and really starts talking about ways to fuck me up right in the kidneys, the hamstrings, the…

Well, I got most of them. I’ll be surprised if the Bastards ever even learn Magnus did that. Or if they remember. It’s so funny to watch them run after me all over the temporal map like some kind of zombie Keystone Kops too stupid to realize they’re losing body parts on the way.

That night, though, I let the last of Karl Honey’s facial cheese slough off and stood before them as I was, stretching my atrophied joints and cracking my knuckles.

“Behold,” I told the little knot of thirty-five or more of them, all gathered in my name around that ugly bone-fire, “I make all things new.”

I bowed low, in my new form. I let some of them touch me. I ate one of them head-first, but everyone knew she had it coming. They applauded and huzzahed.

It was plain to see we were off to a flying start, me and the goddamn barely-human troglodytes who inhabit this timetrack…

I thought all night about that, all through the bacchanal and the wild hunt after we got good and rowdied-up. The Guardian gear-heads (the little mechoservitors that Dad says used to be some kind of barely-sentient life form in the ground, until the bombs brought them out)…

Rrrr. Anyway, they used to give us these Ethics Quizzes at the Academy, before I dropped out. They did make you think.  Okay, maybe more like the Ethics Quizzes me and cousin Tally came up with when…

But it hurts my brain to remember back that far.

Before the fruit of Dad’s first disobedience, the Fall that landed me on my feet, the zero-sum experiment I hacked into the Singularity Generator to make it a closed loop that would blow…

And rode the wave out of Time and Space, into the Dreamwalk, finally thrown free of that melted tomb-world when I learned all that the ghosts could teach, then rocketed back through the fabric of Everything, and began to root and change into what I really was…

But back in the days, in Shang 2, I remember Tally walking ahead of me, moping. He didn’t wear that look well.

“Hey,” I barked, trying to pitch my voice even and not sound like I was lecturing him.

He didn’t respond to pressure very positively, you see. Tally’s Dad kicked the shit out of him on a good and regular basis since Mr. Brain Tumor started acting up, which was most of his life.

I could see the tumor in the Emperor’s forehead when I looked at the old bastard, but said nothing. No one in the whole Academy knew I had the healer’s gift of seeing chi. Fuck them. I could teach myself to kill and cure. And I never liked Uncle Marek, anyway. He hit me one time when he was drunk.

“What did that whole gathering even mean?” Tally barked back at me, in that queer-ass voice of his like he had half his voicebox out.  We were walking down the Giants’ Causeway in Capital City, which was kind of like the main drag then.

Ha, Was… The megalopolis on the Eastern seaboard of the ancient continent Nafta still exists somewhere, but not for much longer. That time-track should cancel out soon. Goodbye, home, forever. Goodbye, Bastards. Hello, Typhon, Lord of Hosts…

Tally was a tan, raw-boned kind of twenty-one, still with that idiotically childish expression in his black eyes, that twinkle that most girls probably mistook for something besides the bone-naïveté I knew it to be.

His hair was braided back along his skull in tight corn-rows, the way the half-Makaliki Plainfolk like Tally’s Mom did (being not strictly human, their hair is a lot more malleable even than Black, Latino or Native hair. I’m jealous. Mine broke when I tried to braid it, and even thread-locks just caused a rash that it ain’t fittin’ to speak
of—)

What am I doing? Remembering? Was I ever human? What the hell did I do? I—

“Look,” I tried to tell Tally, “Even though you may feel like you’re trapped, where you are right now… just from what you said, not like I’d know—”

Tally was curious. I’d gotten to him. He always tried to play on his fear of me as some sort of suit of armor. But this was something he hadn’t yet evolved a response for.

“Your mind is never trapped,” I told him flat-out, in a big booming voice like I had a set of balls or any idea what the hell I was talking about. “Nev. Er. There is no limit.”

We were walking down the Giants’ Causeway in Capital City, in the polis of Shang 2. We were going to get a beer at this antique ratskeller that had operated ten levels below Surface Traffic for at least fifty years. The owner, Moishe Zlotchin, had a kid in the Academy, that little egg-shaped armsman and sysadmin clocker they called Khan, the one with half his head computerized in the service of an Emperor all of them wanted to slap the shit out of.

I had just hatched my big scam, from that government-subsidized condopartment in Cico Rabaud, Old City, living on the edge of Shang 2 and shooting government speed, and always just one more thing to do…

Tally was such a faker. There was never anything really wrong with him, no matter if he hurt his head when he was little or not. All you had to do was get him talking, and he was as smart as anyone…

“Think about what Mandelbrot said in class yesterday. Think about it.” I’d caught him off guard. “If you could travel back in time and satisfy your every desire, to your heart’s content, and not change History, would you do it no matter what the moral consequence to the individual…”

“Since when are you quoting the gear-heads at me?” Tally sniped, handing me a little one-hitter weed pipe he produced from his side pocket as we walked. “You’re no more Establishment than I am. That shit’s for amateurs…”

Famous last words, Tally. I will make you eat them. I will I will I will I will I will…

Your Dad’s Administration hounded me out of the Academy for what my father did and went to jail for. I had to learn everything on my own, and the whole time we were always so hungry…

But that was in another country, and besides, Tally, you’ll take at least a few decades to catch up with me. See you soon. I have more important things to remember/experience, just presently…

Like the place where I was tested as a god, for this latest rotation.To all about but its own inhabitants, Starry Wisdom City was known on maps of Pennsylvania as an unincorporated mountain hamlet called The Point Of No Return.

Frankly, Diary, a lot of Sollenheim’s debased Amish came from so many unbranched family trees that there was barely a difference to start with between them and the goblins and kobolds and Vampir they brought over with them from the Old World, the one that spit them out just as their kith and kinfolk had spit them out here.

There was a lot of microcephaly there, and phocomeli, a lot of broad moon-faced Down’s Syndrome kids who were probably three times smarter than their brothers. There were a lot of conditions that never really happened anywhere but there. (I’d know.) A lot of offspring that should have died in the wild had, in itself, other offspring, and so on down the chain.

And by God (whatever their new American God was starting to look like) they had seen Karl Honey perform miracles with that Book, that Titan Bible, miracles like Moses had done to lead the chosen people to the Promised Land, and so it would be again…

In the ring of tall stones on Council Bluffs, looking out over the Rock Springs settlement from the top of Locke Mountain, Elder Sollenheim profaned the sacred Monongahela grove with mere words from that Book when he called the thing down out of the woods to the Altar of the Blind Fawn.

The worshippers scattered, or clutched the ground and moaned. One or two tried to mate with the thing, and were thrown aside.

The thing was mostly wind and whipping vines and a thousand dead faces out of the ground, stirred into gasping muck that put out cocks and snouts and whatall... It came apart, after it did what it was told…

Poor forest-elemental, to be called to life as a special effect and then extinguished! Elementals of any type never tend to stick around here very long, and more’s the pity then for poor me, stuck behind to liberate souls  by dispatching into my essence their own pulse-waves of violence, the waves I eat, the waves that feed….… Heh heh.

I never saw these miracles they talked of, except in their own memories before I ate them. I can only imagine. For a while, I played their Fearless Leader, but the False Face came off in due time. By then, they were ready…

It was a beautiful time. It all seems like a dream now. Hell, it was a Dream. Is. The Dream.

After that, everything changed. Even the fashion for hunting caps out that way got a little darker in hue than deer’s blood, a little different-looking. Then the young ones started patching their caps with the skins of their kills, dried and chewy as old jerked beef, painted again, again.

After a while, the older hunters’ caps started looking a bit black, but there were plenty of new red ones no matter what. Plenty.  I had my work cut out for me from the start.

2.) WEILEW

I hid a lot down the shaft of the stone well in the Sherriff’s dooryard, in my travels out and about crafting Karl Sollenheim’s doom. I like to hunt, you see, like a trap-door spider, biding my time in a hole.

Closets are flashy, but children of all ages generally go a lot more quickly and quietly when they’re quickly surprised. I prefer hiding under the bed, when I’m slammed for time. They rarely even yelp until we go out the window. By then, it’s all over but the icky bit.

I was young in those days, and I got me a foolish idea. I was learning to feel again, slowly, learning that it was okay to feel things the same way human people did. Every day, I woke up with two hardons. I was growing my skin back, so far far far away from Daddy now that he could never, ever take after me again in the way he had…

I wanted to see what a pre-born brain would do to my biological integrity. It was midnight when I climbed up out of Johnnie Mallory’s well. By then, the algae was starting to like me. I think I was learning to glow brighter in the dark...

I took my chances, waited, and went on home to brood…

3.)  SAINT JOHNNIE OF SILENCE

Rock Springs stirred to life for its day of rest from the fields. A fragrant fog lifted above Indian Valley and the morning light streamed softly across the low, rolling mountains eroded down in an earlier age of the world.

From the distant northern horizon, the first fall wind blew in, smelling of wild apples roasted by lightning, clean evergreens combing the clouds on the wild hills, and the purple smell of the Pennsylvania wood that holds too many plants to name:

Red currant and mountain laurel, haygrass and goldenrod; giant red clover buds, sweet wild hemp, timothy and alfalfa: whole swaths of forest between Great Poison Swamp and the big Indian mound on the new Common, the “Diamond” of the Towne Proper.

At his fine new house on the verdant corner of Main Street and the terminus of Heaven Hill Road out of town, Johnnie Mallory closed his eyes and drank in the echoey clop-clop of horses’ hooves down the cobblestone street past all the muttering retreats of weird little side-blocks that terminated in Naught Yet But Mebbe One Day…

Opening his eyes pleased Johnnie more. Just out front, the carefully-laid stone kerb between the street and the walk was twinkly in its gutter with a slow trickle of water just down his block. That trickle came, no doubt, from the newly-christened American Hostelry and Spirits.

The stout young man who kept inn there, Avram Zlotchin, named it so lest any in town think that Rock Springs’ lone Jew innkeeper were somehow beholden to a foreign prince! Avram kept a sharp practice for any man of any creed, but when Johnnie drank in the American he only paid for every third pint of bitters or knock of ois’a-deigh.

Zlotchin would be changing the ice in his cold-pantry, a matter of near-religious significance given the expense of ice and its volatile nature in transport. Johnnie’d heard many a cussword invented in the grimy green back halls of the American while Avram and his son Kevan humped big tin buckets of what Avram called “frozen gold” back and forth between the cold-pantry, the bierkellar… and a long trough under the back bar in the main part of the inn.

That was one of Avram’s inventions. (The American boasted many.) Under the back bar, the ice would chill the bar surface a little bit, and keep pints the tiniest bit colder. (This trick added roughly five minutes of additional life to the frosted mugs from the cold pantry, the ones which Kevan would draw you a pint in for an additional penny.)

Then the ice would melt, and drain the spittoon which Avram had the masons lay into the tile just beneath the bar. All former tobacco and spit would thus be flushed out the door, and down into the flowerbeds around the side (to mix with stable mulch and feed Lulu Zlotchin’s beloved red geraniums).

Any excess water from this process drained down into the streets, to run off harmlessly into the grass in the vacant field at the end of Main Street, if it even made it that far.

Johnnie rose from his reverie in the kitchen chair, poured a dipperful of water into the wash pan and began to wash his face. Then he scuffed out to the front porch and pulled on a pair of boots equally scuffed by truncheon, bayernet, and worse.

In the long, cold, appallingly endless butchery down at Valley Forge, he’d kicked a man in the face with the left boot. Johnnie still shot south-paw, although the Sisters back home at school had whacked his knuckles so many times he managed a kind of apothecary’s scrawl with his dumb right, no more.

That was part of the reason why he became a soldier, but not all. Most of it had to do with a day out on the bog, a day he saved his brother’s life…

Faintly, up the instep on the inside of the right boot, a long toothmark that got wider at the end was still visible, as though the tooth had been yanked by mere friction. It had. One of his own men, that had been, a Private Baker, essaying at stealing the very tobacco and pipe right out of his gunny!

Johnnie boxed his ears for that, gave him a kicking and saw to it that he was thrown in gaol and publicly caned by the Old Man himself, General Washington (a presence, a force, Johnnie often thought wryly, and one in whose vicinity you would do well not to frig about.. .)

Oh, not for the tobacco.  But Johnnie knew that Baker had been planning to desert, and the kicking somehow elicited a full, and entirely unsought, confession.

Those old hob-nail boots told many such tales of woe. To Johnnie, they felt like a second skin. One with teeth. This also pleased him, as did the long river-clay pipe of tobacco he found and lit up.

As did what he was about to walk into. Good or ill, the job had its wonderments.

He stood to his full, cadaverous height, absently scratching at his mustaches with one scrimshaw thumbnail. Mamie was acting truly squirrely, nowadays, jumping at shadows and the like. Something lay behind it, but the ways of Woman were not for Johnnie to understand.

It was the new country, the new season, the new Church, what have you may.  Any way round, uprooted and transplanted was a hard state to find Grace in, hard for anyone to take, particularly married folk doing it together. No matter what the Monsignor said.

When he came back in the house, he found his wife in the kitchen, bent over the roaring stove, turning sizzling strips of pork-jowl bacon.

“Just gonna sear these,” she called brightly. “And put them in some red beans and rice for youse to take with you down to the Courthouse, if you have to go back for long.”

Mamie’s serpentine mouth pursed, witchy violet eyes always full of that one more thing she wasn’t telling him. “Do you?”

Johnnie’s big Adam’s apple went up and down. Me pants will need dealt with soon, several seams let out in several places, and the hem at the ankle will also be an issue, at this rate… Mamie saw him smiling, and knew by her own light what that smile meant.

Smoothing a sun-whitened lock of bangs behind one ear (one that had fallen out of the love-knot in her coal-black hair,) she wiggled across the room in her house-dress and apron and kissed his stubbly cheek, running one small hand along the curve of his jawline and looking into his eyes.

After a moment, Mamie took the bacon off the fire, and covered the flame anew. Her skin and eyes were very dark, dark as the little Picts of old, and always got that way when she was out long in the garden, in the sun, naming things…

“When’re yeh goin’ to tell me the rest, Saint Johnnie of Silence?” his young bride sniped in that voice like the deepest part of the Monongahela at the bottom of Summit Road, where he liked to fish, betimes.

Using the large wooden fork she liked, from the rack in the niche above the stove, she carefully transferred the bacon onto a plate with an old towel on it to catch the grease. They both heard it when Johnnie’s stomach rumbled, but this wondrous stuff that the old Monongahela lady at market called “grits” wasn’t quite melted enough into the coating of butter she’d cut atop it, or the gooey molasses, either.

“Who’s taking those wee ones, an’ more each day?” Mamie asked with her usual alarming lack of tact, stirring the pot. “Why ain’t youse rousted him out by now and hung ’im from the highest…”

Johnnie held up one hand, cautioning her.  “Comic it took yeh this long to say, and yeh’ve been here two years,” he sighed, looking her full in the eyes with his own piercing ones.  Mamie stepped back a bit. One hand went to her not-unremarkable bodice, which she’d unlaced to an improprietous degree whilst cooking.

His boots rasped on the hard pine boards of the kitchen floor as he approached like Grim Death in his black vestments. Grave-digger’s vestments, Mamie often thought privately, not without a touch of superstitious admiration.

Johnnie was a sexton at Our Lady when they called him to do it, which wasn’t much; Messrs. Horace Clark and Iulio Bianchini usually juggled that duty like the snarking pair of besotted gore-crows they both were, and God love them for their dirty faces and dirty jobs, too.

(“Never saw a damned spook or spectre in either boneyard,” Iulio was fond of saying in his cups down at the inn. “The C of E one, or Saint Mary’s where I dwell, friend, in my trim ’n warm little gardener’s shed with the lamp and the cot an’ the fine stew pot, among the dead, never saw nothin’ worse than my own self…”)

“D’yeh know,” Johnnie rasped back at her now, through that Prussian mustache he took to wearing in the service of General Washington, now as prematurely iron-gray as the rest of his hair, “my dearest love, what I will be most grateful of, this year?”

Mamie tried to say something. Nothing came out. Johnnie smiled distantly. “I shall be happier than the proverbial hog rooting in the proverbial offal, my bride, when the temperature gets above seventy degrees Farenheit.  An’ d’yeh know what happens then?”

He waited. Mamie put the dish-towel back on her arm. They never had servants, though Johnnie might could afford a cleaning-woman one day (if she’d ever allow it; Mamie made one sort of superfluous).

“The rainbow-trouts, in these streams,” he explained, “Yeh should come see it, about the end of May. When it gets that hot, love,” he was talking with his spindly hands, hell-burned voice going musically up and down, completely fired like a stove by whatever he was on about, the way he got,

“They get as big as yer arm, girl. An’ that warm, they come flockin’ ’round, to eat the gnats and the May-flies when they all hatch, like. Yeh could fairly walk on them like Our Lord across the waves, yeh could.”

Mamie pouted. “Yeh said that last year. And what’ve yeh brought?” She wrinkled up her little round button nose, making an exaggerated shudder. “Bluegills. I’m up to here with fookin’ bluegills, fither. One thing I’ll be glad of, an’ that’s when winter comes. Then I’ve got my man all to myself, an’ don’t have to brain him for comin’ home half shot in the arse drunk an’ no trouts for me.”

She looked disparagingly at the old cast-iron stove. “May we not get one of those new Franklin stoves, this autumn? Old Mister Lusardi down at the store says he knows where to send for one.”  She opened the stove and drew out the biscuits from the tiny rack above the fire.

Mamie loved Sal Lusardi’s Towne Store, with its long, L-shaped front porch and familiar group of soap-box whittlers and pipe smokers (both tobacco and hemp) and small-beer drinkers, discussing politics…

“It ought to be like it was in the old days,” they griped. “With the new country just in place, King Mob still reigns. Men’re bein’ called from their homes at night to be whipped, sometimes to be tarred and feathered. The farmers up in New York’re startin’ to raise hell to get to keep their home brew what the hill-folk taught ’em to make, no differn’t’n the damn Tea in Boston Towne.

“It’s just the mess things are in. We talk too much and let ourselves get excited. It’s a topsy-turvy world. Why, even our own house is not in order—”

Down the road, the Courthouse tower could have filled with that cacophonous caucus and fallen like Babel…

“Saints preserve us, O’Rourke, you’re worse than that Judge Coopersmith’s wife. Rachel’s always wanting something else, some other thing they don’t need.”

At that moment, the Sherriff was thinking of the depleted stock of food in their larder and the whorish rent Avram Zlotchin’s father collected on their property. To Johnnie, Jews were Children of Israel same as Catholics, but there were still some men who greatly irritated him irrespective of lineage.

He was contemplating the purchase of a brace of new English shotgun pistols he’d read about, and all the while the mind of his energetic wife envisioned ripping out all those old stone tiles to put the new stove in. ”We’ll just have to get along the best we can. D’yeh think I’m made of money, love? That I’ve got it fallin’ out me backside?”

His voice got even raspier when he was fooked off, Mamie had learned early in their courtship. That made her giggle. He never took it to heart.

She made as if to check his bung for errant shillings. He twisted her wrist away, just playfully, and then he was sweeping her off her feet and kissing her face all over with hard, dry butterfly-kisses, like he was trying to find something or figure something out, and then she stopped his mouth with hers and flamed and melted to a bubbling cinder, then came back to the subject at hand, half-breathless.

He was hard already. She let him sort that out, mopping her rosy face with an apron. “You’d better soon find a way to, ahem, produce hard coin that way,” she said to the floor,  “If we ever kindle right, The Get will find a thousand and one ways to make yeh wish yeh could, dearest man in all the world.”

“Aye, he will,” Johnnie agreed, nodding his head soberly and putting his thumbs in his black braces. “But the’ tend to pay for themselves, me own fither points out. One way or aught.”

“Ahem… He? His wife had nine kids! Anyway,” Mamie hadn’t forgotten, “now forget yer bluegill aspirations an’ go poach us a wild boar, or mayhap one of those Northern ally-me-gators from the dry riverbeds, which Father O’Gill speaks to me of at Choir practice...”

She was immediately sorry she said it.  Her Law-Man husband blanched visibly, smacking one leathery fist on the palm of the other hand.

“Has that nelly priest been eatin’ them blue mushrooms from the cow-field again? He’s no business tellin’ a woman, and the finest who ever walked,” here she ducked in and kissed his stubbly cheek for that, lingering long.

Johnnie grunted, as his face did that alien smiling thing she could make it do sometimes, but continued,

“…Such loorid tales, of the filth that creepeth by night, and crawleth on its belly, out in them there swamps! I’ve tracked many a man, out there, an’ many a stolen child, as well, like…”

Johnnie swallowed again, but not from the heat of rut. This swallow now tasted like an old black blood clot. This swallow tasted like several recent failures he’d had to choke down. Several dozen recent failures, tell the Truth and shame the Devil, to wit, with weeping parents. Failures that, when added into a sum total, had made his hair go entirely gray that year.

“Many a child, indeed. The claws of the Swamp get most of ’em, in the end. Sometimes we have to fire cannon to make ’em come up to the surface. Often, that don’t even work, we just find a shoe, a bonnet, bits gnawed by them wretched ally-me-gators, or whatever animal’s been at ’em…”

Shuddering moodily, Johnnie slipped between the covers and listened to the rain against the window panes.  His warm candle-flame of a girl, his Mamie, sat at the edge of the bed, sniffing the fragrant Carolina Bright tobacco still everywhere in the air from the pipe he’d smoked earlier. Her hands itched to be doing what they did best, as they did at all hours when she thought of such things.

Mamie could not wake up in the morning without planting, watering, potting or pruning something. It was as intrinsic to her nature as the way she walked. That bothered Johnnie, in the first years of their marriage, because he thought that meant he had to keep up.

But his blushing young bride caught him by the shoulder, that day when he dressed down in his family’s way (stripped to merely shirt and vest, with his tie off) and got out in the front flowerbed mucking cow shit and daffodil bulbs until he thought his poor eyes would burst from his head with the eyestrain.

“The Lord gives us all a little of our own magic,” Mamie told him brightly, kneeling there past the low brick flowerbed wall, in a wide straw sun hat and an old cotton sack of a dress like some ridge-runner’s wife “up the Mountain” would wear. “Not a pagany thing in it, John, for ’twas the Lord who guv it unto us, and not the Adversary, as Father Gibson calls him. Plants are mine, but I think yours is…”

She leaned in, and her hand found the Wand of Moses, that day, and squeezed it once. And Johnnie smiled, and forgot to scowl. And the point was made.

The light in his eyes amazed Mamie, that present morning. I could swoon, she thought wonderingly, not knowing where this sudden burst of the Amazon reflex to maul him down right there on the kitchen floor had come from.

Her old man shook himself, noting the way she noted him. That alone could hark him from the tomb.

“All right, then, wife,” he managed. “Let’s have a wee chat. I must take you into me confidence, as an Officer of the Court, an’ swear yeh on the Good Book to—”

“Johnnie—” she squeaked in exasperation like the very baobhan sith.

He winced, but didn’t laugh.

“Do you, Mamie Shannon O’Rourke Mallory, swear in the name of the Fither, Son and Holy Ghost to niver, iver repeat one iota… of what is about to come under discussion in this very room?”

The morning sun was shining like a red carter’s lantern. Mamie bit her full lower lip, and nodded.  Johnnie put his hands on her soft, round golden shoulders, looking into those big eyes that dragged him out of Hell time and again.

Smelling her, the soft, clean scent of All Woman, as he’d said, the very Acme of Woman to him, this sulky, obstreperous blacksmith’s daughter who might someday be carrying his child, his son, their heir.

“When Ross Ehrend was borned,” Johnnie began to explain, the soft music of his brogue rising and falling in the room as the sunlight grew brighter and their shadows crouched before them. “It was said, something turrible happened…”

4.)  TYPHON AT WORK: May 19, 1793

“Old-Papa… how come you… changed?”

One of the little corn-cracker Sollenheim commune  spawn (one of Big Vern’s with Sister Sue, I think; so hard to keep track)  has managed to make his way over the pongee-stake fence (smeared with ammoniac shit from the starved mountain-turkeys that run the grounds) and somehow break into his late father’s sumptuous house.

This is a world he has never seen: The deep carpets, the rich furniture. The clocks. The books. The food…

I can’t remember his name. His nasty little nose is running. He’s got dishwater-blond hair. Eyes that don’t match any more than his hand-me-down buckskins do. Dumber than a sack of wet mice. Merle. I snap my fingers.

“Merle… the past year or so has been hard on us all,” I point out.  He nearly shrieks when I touch him, more when I touch the skin on my face that changes as the bones are a’changing, the skin as yellow as the kitchen lamplight, yellow as the smell of potato bins, palaver and cadaver.

“Try to understand. Now, if Elder Sollenheim were here, he… Oops!” I clap my hands to my mouth, and let the tongue roll out, then back in. “Cat’s out of the bag!”

Merlin Sollenheim’s warm terror tastes like vodka on the air. His brain throbs as ripe as a peach. These things shouldn’t be so easy.

He has nowhere to back up. I grin so hard my face hurts. Grinning like a baboon.

“Did you ever think—”  I come a little bit closer, let him see me in a little more light. He shrieks. “That this was all a bad dream, and you were just about to wake up?”

THUD.

Bump-ty-bump-ty-bump….

Everything goes stark black-and-white in my burning eyes for a minute. Merle’s doing a horizontal buck-and-wing on the floor.

This falls out better than I could devise…

“And every one of them, he gathers power,” the old blind priest told his acolyte. Father Tommy Grattan, beloved of the eldest yobs in Callaight Parish (some only a few years his junior), looked as though he might stick his dirty nails back in his mouth and start biting them again.

Monsignor Gibson uncorked the good Scots malt whisky for this little discourse, the kind the Lord in His Infinite Mercy reserved for Natural Disasters, Acts of Himself, and Abominations. The young Father was still working on a tall double shot, sipping it as though it were fine candy, occasionally grimacing.

This dalliance with the Serpent’s fruit was not from something either of them had done, but something the two of them were about to do.  The Jesuits at the collegium turned up their Froggie noses at “rural superstitions” and “heresies.” They threatened to have Gibson excommunicated, and turned their backs on any further Church involvement in the rash of missing children in that forty-mile radius of Allegheny Ridge for the past two to four  years.

They heard about all the dead, and the missing. And they did nothing.

“The very Devil has come to Penn’s Woods,” pale, spidery old Gibson breathed, almost in wonderment. “You know, all this time, well… the Holy Father says, in confidence, he says ’tis human to doubt, to question one’s faith, some time or another… But to see, with your own two eyes, the craithur burst from out of one of yer own confessionals…” His voice and old-man lower lip both trembled piteously, “And snatch up Timmy Gatehouse right out of his cassock, an’ only leave one shoe…”

The two priests shook their heads and poured. Soon would they be with Johnnie Law at Ehrendhaus …

Lord, Have Mercy.
Lord, Have Mercy.
Christ Have Mercy…

Overhead, the sky’s gone as poison-green as the waterlogged page of a notebook found in a deserted house, green as the waters of the Monongahela around the drains from Stefen DeCasper’s putrid little textile mill at the bottom of Adams Hill.

Into the hills, again, to search for another closely-guarded heat source, another grownup face to steal for my file. Into the weird forest, under the poison leaves and alien birds, the chittering soil cools my webbed feet…  Running, I hit the tunnel through this side of the hill for a while, then crawl through a hole in the rock. (These tunnels are older than me.) I go down, down, back down the oldest part, past the coal mines, and…

Oh. A cellar-hole, way out here in the Down. A cute little baby distillery-set. I sniff. Corn liquor.Yummy. And the stairs lead up into…

(Smell of cedar…)

“Papa, Papa!”

Orgie Duncan bursts in the cabin door.  “The up-mountain folk are runnin’ mad, them in the black buckskins, with the wide hats and the silent feet! I done seen two of ’em take Baby Shannon right out’n the road to the schoolhouse! No one even stopped to—”

It got dark too early today. Little Orgie falls to his scabby knees and begins to bawl. Papa (the only person who could make fun of him for being ascairt of the shadows that crowd in so close in the forest, like they was laying for him, make him forget to be ascairt) is presently done for with drink in the rocking chair.

Dejectedly, Orgie tosses the belt-sling full of his schoolbooks across the room. It makes a tremendous noise when it hits, but Papa doesn’t twitch an eyelid. Papa looks funny. Papa’s…

Papa’s all over booze, by the smell and the oily shine of it. That corn liquor that Mad Dog Schibler from Kan-tah-kee way showed him how to make. Papa’s eyes look worse’n usual, even when he were good and out on the piss. And it…

“It’s the bleedin’ middle of the day,” exasperated Orgie, who’s had to play the grown-up more than once already, hisses through his buckteeth, “In the name’a’God, Papa, have a little…”

THUCK.

Papa’s troubled head rolls free.  The eyes are still open. When it smacks on the floor, the gray face makes a noise…

Like back home, in that little Geordie village he once saw, where they rolled the big cheeses down the hill every year, and raced them down on foot, and everyone got drunk.

When it hits, Papa’s face sounds like the noise the cheese made when it hit the turf of Merrie Old England, in that moment when the crowd grew silent, just before it began its descent down the long, slippery slope, with the mad mob in hot pursuit.

What must the cheese think, Orgie wonders distantly, standing there in those scant few minutes, How, then goes the run, of its last cheesy thoughts on earth, before going to pieces, trod underfoot, standing alone…

Just then, at the other end of the house, the back end, Orgie knows it’s the big cedar wardrobe he hears when it begins to bump up and down.

Yes, the bleedin’ middle of the day, indeed. Don’t think about it. Don’t look at it. What’s that in the road, ahead? Oh, his mind were the child in the corner today, it seemed, the one with the loud mouth, wearing the tall white cap. He could not—

Aye, I can, for I’m man of the house now and it’s mine, mine, mine, none can…

Oh, Da?!

A tear welled up in one eye.

BUMP. BUMP. BUMP.

TY-BUMP,
TY-BUMP,

TY-

BUMP. “Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death…”

Even a rabbit will sometimes bite. Orgie knew about being the grown-up. The grown-up would go back in that room, and yank open that wardrobe door, he would have…

“…Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me…”

Papa’s pistol, that Orgie knew how to cock and load. Now he was starting to smell Papa, when he stumped over on his short keg-legs in his short school trousers and fumbled the big, heavy side-arm out of Papa’s equally heavy black belt.

CLACK-CLACK. He was growling, low in his throat, crossing the cabin in ten steps, kicking open the door that led to the back part, and the room was bright and oh GOD oh JESUS GOD CHRIST the wardrobe door is off its hinges, and It has to crane its neck to—

The gun went off once, in the back room. One round was all there was.

Orgie met the Crooked Man. The Crooked Man’s naked, yellow belly looked distended and bulgy.

The bulge was Orgie. The tenth one that month, twenty-seventh that magic summer.

Resolved, That the Men Jack of this County will immediately form Militiae, and prepare themselves, in order to defend the beleaguered Rock Springs Region.

Resolved, That each Towne-ship shall be immediately notified to assemble themselves; That Officers, when chosen, shall make out a Roll, and each man shall subscribe his name in said Roll; and that the Captain shall immediately transmit a copy thereof to the Committee of Correspondence at Rock Springs.

Resolved, That the Committee of this County shall purchase all the Powder and Lead in any store that may be had within the said County, and have the same put up in some safe Magazine in the Towne of Rock Springs, for the use of the said Soldiers; and that each Company shall, by subscription, make up a proportionable part of the same; which Ammunition shall not be distributed without the orders of the Committee of Correspondence of the said County, or until it shall be thought necessary by this Committee or a majority of them, when such a Decision may be agreed upon Unanimously at a Sane and Reasonable Hour.

Resolved, That each Company in this County shall use their utmost endeavors to purchase or provide all the Ammunition they can, so that no person in the said Company shall have less than one pound of Powder, and Lead in proportion. We have not the Coffers of King George, gentlemen, so Pull Your Weight!

(My Valet handles our own stores of Powder and Ball. He pays no attention to Politics.)

Resolved, That as soon as the said Companies are formed, they and each of them shall be subject to military regulations and discipline, in the same manner as any other of His Majesty's Troops are (corporeal punishment only excepted.*)

Resolved, That in case any person or persons in this County shall refuse to subscribe himself in a roll of some Company in the said County, in order to defend the cause of liberty now contending for, or by any ways or means whatever discourage or disunite the said Associations, that then he or they so offending  shall be immediately reported by some of the officers of their respective Townships, to the Committee of  Correspondence at Rock Springs, in order that such steps may be taken as by the said Committee may be thought most prudent; and that, in the mean time, no person or persons within the said County shall, directly or indirectly, have any dealing or commerce, by either buying or selling, borrowing, or lending to or with any of the said offenders.

Resolved, That all persons within this County that are not at present provided with Guns, Swords, or Tommy-hatchet, in case of ability shall provide for themselves, and in case of inability, that the Captain of each Company shall immediately transmit their names, or their number, to the Committee of Correspondence at Rock Springs, that proper measures may be taken in order to provide for them.

Resolved, That each Township shall meet and choose their Officers, and make return agreeable to the above Resolves, within the space of ten days from this date.

By order of the Committee of Correspondence: Harald Anslinger, Clerk
The Militia Battalions Of Callaight County

(*Love, did you mean to spell it this way? Non-corporeal punishment seems a bit outside of your scope….

Your Humble “Valet”, W.H.)

5.) CROOKED MAN’S SOLILOQUY: UPON THIS ROCK

On the dark side of Locke Mountain, the wrong face that didn’t have a Foundry on it, up the hill from the two mine-tunnels each that managed to turn out a bit of coal, a shit-ton of iron, and even some hornblende…

While the century turned over, while drunken poets crawled in the woods to sleep through an old order of being, and become anachronisms…

The commune got built back up. Starry Wisdom City started looking more like a Yankee fort. We dug in, and built high stockade walls. Everyone could do something, even the ones with no hands or whatever.

Out of the last two rakiock trees in the region, we constructed a mighty trebuchet that could hurl Greek Fire down on Town, were we so inclined.  We re-built the Titan pyramid north of our settlement. Well, part of it, anyway, the biggest tentacle tip that was already kind of wearing out of the soil to begin with, the way the settlers were overgrazing and overlogging, down below. All things, you see, serve the Lord. (You’re Welcome.)

Sure, we had our share of fatalities. How do you think we paid the rest of the work crew? In meat. Funny, when you make people think they have to cross a line, or tell them some Book said to do it…

But that’s for wiser heads than mine. I had a business to run, in those days, and the multiple bottom lines were about all I knew.

Oh, that hornblende intrigued me. I couldn’t wait to play with steam, and extraction, heavy water…

But for the grander schemes, I had all the time in the world.

I even took Big Vernon Sollenheim into limited confidence the week after I ate his father’s pineal gland. He was strangely cooperative, almost as if he’d been through similar before to the old wheeled sedan chair, the shackles, the laudanum and trephination chisel…

The patient tolerated the procedures well, and left the surgeons’ theatre much transformed. (A few minor alterations to the brain-pan: some items stitched in, a few more soldered on with a wood-burning iron and some tinner’s flux. Nothing fancy. You go to war with the technology you have.)

Big Vern was the first of those. There were more. Some went mad. Some… didn’t. And some bred.

Soon enough, the changes began to show. But I see things differently, and knew that no true devolution would happen for a lifetime, at least…

Over the next two years, I raised my own army on the wrong side of the Mountain. I had an unbelievable amount of resources available to me, for that day and age, a whole commune full of thinking cattle, a ready-made slave labor force capable of reproducing (sometimes), and of barn-raising up some serious monumental architecture.

They had guns, and powder, even a cannon or two someone stole from some supply-train or another.  If that sort of thing kept up, I’d be the next Sawney Beane…

Wait, Diary, this old head hurts. I think I was once Alex Beane, on the Scottish highlands, monster of the mist who snatched the warm and bleating meat off the tourist-roads from Merrie Old England…

Well, sounds fun, anyway. I don’t remember, at the moment. No one briefed me. I can’t be expected to keep track…

Anyway, right around that time, I got me a foolish idea.

I was young, and thought I could take them all down. I was hurting, and I wanted to rip and tear. I was drunk on their moonshine, drunk on their blood, drunk on the legends of me that were already starting to circulate.

Oh, how I remember Mamie, every warm soft smell and murmur and inch of leg of her. Oh, it was damnable. Why is it that the most beautiful women always fall for the biggest schmucks? But that’s a human question, and no longer mine to sort. My aims were different.

I wanted to drink from her dreams, this wild sulky colleen with the sun-streaks in her hair and the give-’em-hell false face of her own. Inside, I knew the way she really was. And it stole my breath and my heart like a Goya ape seeing God in a sunbeam.

Yeah, I fell hard for the Sherriff’s wife. But there was a lot more to it than that. Even at first.

They used me as a tool of their neurotic civilization from the beginning, you see. If you don’t mind your Paw, the Crooked Man will snatch you right out of your own closet and eat you off’n your bones! Now do we see all the ways in which the zeitgeist informs the culture?!? Declare, if thou hast understanding. And pass the ketchup. I’m little Willie’s punishment from on high this week for swearing on Sunday…

Where was I? Oh, yes, the former Mamie O’Rourke, until Johnnie Mallory swept her off her feet and brought her over here on their little coffin-ship to the land of black lung and mass cirrhosis. Mamie O’Rourke, whose own parish priest once told her that if she diddled with a boy before marriage her womb would turn black.

Mamie, who read more and climbed and hiked and drank and swore and even smoked a fag a time or two, who could lick every boy but two in County Tyreelin and out-curse most of them…

Sweet Jesus at Morning, the Irish girls in this time-track! I could smell every woman down in Town when they kindled with child, down to a quarter mile or more, but the Irish girls, kindled or not, oh…

It’s something in the brains, I’m telling you. Children the most of all. I go mad for it, and root like a wild boar. There’s really no self-will involved, just biochemistry…

It’s just that when they’re Irish, you see, they burn a certain kind of way, through the meat-tallow candles of their little lives. They burn like wet tinderboxes, stuffed full of that which flames brightest and hottest in a woman, the tip-top of St. Bridget’s own flame producing the greatest heat…

Sorry, Diary, where was I?  But let’s not talk about me.  The former Mamie O’Rourke lived in a clapboard house on the clean side of the railyards, three blocks up from the American Hotel.

I knew just from listening down into the hills, listening to the gossip that runs ridges and jumps stumps, getting the trees to tell me what they heard that afternoon… The universe neither condemns nor condones me as an experiment, and the land talks to anyone who will listen.

I knew that Mallory rented his back lot out to friends from home to keep their swine or horses or milk cows, whatever stock needed the room. Some years, there were ducks, and once even a brace of laying hens. I knew more than I knew what to do with, so I filtered most of it out.

I knew a lot. But I wanted to know that child. It would be a boy, I could smell (and see, for that matter, she was carrying high and looked like she’d swallowed a perambulator!)

Oh, but Mamie looked fine when finally pregnant, the way her black Irish hair streaked white in the sun, the high red color in her face as her first trimester brought her out of doors more to work in the picking-garden at Our Lady, teaching the young Father Grattan and old Msgr. Gibson the finer points of pruning lilacs and mending walls.

Oh, I wanted to take her right there in the Garden as the Serpent took Eve. But needs must, as her own folk say, when the Devil’s spittin’ on yer doorstep. Needs must.  I was barking my idiots to muster, back home, to increase my essence while stuck in this time-hole, feed my Singular self, take back my father’s holdings and buy out the Courthouse…

I had to wait. It had to be quick, and clean. As Sun Tzu wrote three thousand years before any of this stupidity, it was necessary for me to strike so that I needed not to fear the enemy’s vengeance…

Ha! Ha! Oh, and ho! Ho! Ho! Ha!   Mamie looked fine pregnant, as I was saying, even ten times more radiant than before.  Her tanned skin that she didn’t inherit from Papa’s side of the family seemed to burn with its own faint, mythic heat, round breasts wide enough for a big raw-boned handful, deliciously contoured at the swelling sides, under her small round shoulders and sweet neck.

Sweet Mamie, with your sweet little nose and your sweet little black eyes that sing to me of the Pict so much more than the Celt, the dark little people who were being burned out of England even back in the time of William the Conqueror, and before…

I hid my face from your hypnotic eyes, the Marian flame of your grace. I watched your life from your wardrobe so many times, sweet Mamie, I felt like I knew you. I wanted to.

Oh Mamie, while you are not safe I am not safe. I see all the filth that men do. I have no filter for it. All their ways are known to me. How, then, are we to behave?

I want to know your boy, Mamie. I want to know if he will get the same lines under his eyes you do. Every line in your face is a laugh-line. Every—

A boy, possessed of uncommon strength and wit, but stubborn and given to tall tales. (I strained to file this one retroactively, but of course the genes never say a name. The parents do that…)

6.) TAE KWON DO

“No. I’ll not leave you a gun. Have you lost it? Lead’s bad for the baby…”   Words out of Time itself, the kind of words people look back on for the rest of their lives. Aristotelian words, words which one life comes before… and another after.

The words we live to regret. But how the Hell was my Johnnie supposed to know such a thing? How could anyone? Who will even hear this mad prattle I spin with myself, sitting here in this dumb-waiter that has not been put to use for at least one tenant…

If I draw my knees up, I can manage. A few times, I’ve caught myself actually falling asleep. But that will never do.

When I speak to St. Bridget in dreams, or whoever she claims to truly be, she tells me that this was all foretold. There are no mistakes in God’s world, she imparts, which is a true enough lesson. No mistakes. No regrets. Just a deep breath… and an act of Will.

A deep breath… and an act of Will.

How. The. Hell. Could. ANYONE. In this shit-ass Towne be sharp enough to know that I was coming for them? Mamie wasn’t a witch back home, I don’t think, so why would…

Oh. No. No. Nononononono——

The dumbwaiter burst open like an exploded tomb. I was starting to remember the other half of Irish girls: Bridget with her flaming sword, Queen Mab, the Baobhan Sith…

I was starting to wish I’d stayed up at the Point partying. I was starting to wish I’d picked someplace else to land. I looked in this trog’s violet eyes… and she had someone else looking out from behind.  And it was Maeve Mayhue from back home. From Shang 2.

There are no words for my embarassment, my shame.

Not that I still won’t eat her brain for this. But you can rest assured I’ll be pretty screwed-up about it.

“Avaunt, Fiend, in the Holy Name!!!”  Mamie Mallory shrieked down at me, still holding onto the big cold-iron cross that formerly hung on their front door, like a two-handed shovel beaten into a sword. (Celtic cross, too, and nice ironwork.)

I opened my mouth to protest, and my jaw clattered like a bloody castanet on the other side of the room.

“Ow. Huck—”

The Sherriff’s wife closed the distance between us, wielding the Celtic cross two-handed. “Faith an’ yer so fookin’ loud, boggart, half the county could’ve heard ye mookin’ abaht in this house, this house of a fookin’ lay minister in the Holy Roman Catholic Church, and—”

CRUNK—“Stay still, yeh Crooked Man, or I’ll track you to Hell an’ hunt yeh inside!” Oh, this was priceless. Priceless.

“I ish Oscar Ilde uz here to—”

Then the Mister stormed in the door, dressed in his black undertaker’s suit with the brass star on the lapel.

“I dealt plainly with him,” Mamie said. “Not goin’ to Confession for this. Ever.”

But the joke was lost. John had the Dragons on, loaded down with powder and ball, and reloads at his belt.  “I thought we been through this twice, now, Mister Ross Ehrend if-you-please!” he barked. “I’ve been waitin’ two years for this, daemon. This won’t be quick…”

And I had to Not Laugh. In his free hand, the Sherriff held the edited edition of the Biblia Titanica.

Of course, like any Bastard, he found the one page I forgot to cut, and the spell laid me low. I could still see…

He had to be Tally, had to be… I could smell Shang 2 all over him…

But any further fingering of a larval Bastard operative was sadly, momentarily, lost when those hob-nail boots began to fly, and the truncheon to swing. I dummied up and played Possum. Better Luck Next Time.

See, they don’t know. About the spare Me in the cellar, up the Mountain. Under the froth of mold in that closet. Waiting for me to key open the eyes. Yeah. I had time. I was simply surrounded by idiots. That doesn’t make me one…

7.) THE VOYAGER

“I ain’t had a drop since Sunday last,” Mad Dickie was telling Allen Mallory, who stood with his arms folded and his big pugilist’s face as impassive as the russet potato it greatly resembled, in some aspects. “I… Well, there’s a lot I better tell your big brother, I suppose.”

Mad Dickie was just what they called him in town, a knock-off of the Christian first and last name he signed his store bills with. When asked his own name, he called himself Hoc-Sa-Go-Wah.

Nobody knew where Hoc-Sa-Go-Wah came from, or when he’d first arrived in the village. The oldest soul in town was Czieslaw Matko, the old Croat who roomed above the American and mucked out the stables for a few coin and just as few glasses of pilsner beer. Even Matko couldn’t remember.

“Dickie Lupoff? Oh, I met him just after the Injuns signed that treaty with the Penn’s folks in Albany and let whites go west and south through the Cumberland Gap, and alla that. English didn’t allow it, so we whipped them.  Dickie said it was a bad idea, anyway, but that his folk had no choice. ‘Our hands were tied and our arms were lopped off,’ he says. Never forget that if I live twice my years. Is he still above ground, yet? Hehn… Him and his weird talk about redskin cities, folk from other times and places, makin’ the lightning run machines… Nuts. Drank himself nuts. But dead-before-yeh-knew fast with that big bow…”

“And what would that be?” Allen sniped boredly in the reedy treble that looked so out of place coming from that buffalo skull, that mop of hair and mass of black Hessian great-coat just like the one his lout of a big brother wore (only with no brass star). “I hear you’re a cardsharp and cut-purse from up-state, here under false papers. And a short-eyes. Now what was the matter?”

Mad Dickie’s haunted, eagle-like face became something awful to behold, wise beyond its years, wise beyond even the century it was stuck in.

“Who among us are really what we say we are?” he countered. “Even you.” The look in his eyes caused Allen to back up a step. “Even you, horse-thief who took a boat to save a rope.”

He looked like a little kid telling stories by the fire, hooded eyes and hatchet angles of bone structure pronounced and dancing in the light of the torch he held. Allen was torchless, but held his father’s scrounged Virginia rifle with its home-made bayernet. This he kept at port arms.

“Say on, blind Tiresias,” Allen sneered. “Yeh know as much as me own brother, an’ he’s thrown me in the jug many a time. Ireland has no… how would Johnnie Law say it… extradition procedure for the rustling of the faster Irish deer that’d feed a whole family of seven need not ever know the size of the hooves.”

Dickie shrugged, looking skinny and reptilian in his black buckskins and pitch-sole moccasins. . “Nothing to me. Now you’re listening.  Anyway, I saw somethin’ that looked like your… your demon, may my ancestors forgive me… we called him Crook-Staff, the Betrayer, like your Devil… Anyway, I saw him snatch up two little blonde girls from off the Old Dootch Settlement Road when they was out playin’. Your brother said he’d put me in the lockup for drink. That was two years ago, near, it…”

“Ellie Parkes,” Allen remembered one set of weeping parents in particular responsible for more gray hairs on his good brother’s head than most of the other cases combined. “An’ the twin of her, her sister, she…”

“Aimee.” The old Monongahela (if, indeed, he could claim that vanishing tribe) with the long black-and-gray queue in his hair like a Chinaman leaned uncomfortably forward, stabbing his finger into Allen’s chest for emphasis. (Allen looked at it.)

“You think… some old drunk red-skinned savage don’t pay… don’t pay attention to what goes on in the town that, by his creed, is still his? Yeah, I saw your Crooked Man take Ellie and Aimee Parkes. When I was huntin’.” He spat. “I had a bead on him, and I let him glam me, and he ducked out. I’ll testify, if’n you catch him. ”

The younger Mallory brother was very wroth, and his countenance fell. “Was anyone out on the road to corroborate you? Anyone… sober and of sound mind?”

Dickie hung his head. “No. But I can show you where he took ’em, and how he got past you. I tracked him.” He shuddered. “Tracked him…home. Bear with me, gentlemen. I trust you’ll begin to see the sense of it. After what I saw…”

He talked for ten more minutes. By then, the posse were restless, and Allen had the shakes even worse than Dickie.  “Nay, me gold-skinned cousin, don’t you go anywhere. Have yeh ever discharged a firearm?”

Those were Allen’s own trade, and he was turning a mint in those years. He’d taken moulds of the dragons from Johnnie, and was formerly one of Karl Ehrend’s most demanding small-order clients.  He thought of rousting Justin Kassarly out of bed to go ride as Revere had done through every farm, down into Town, blowing on a bugle. Men would come. (They always did, no matter what the quarry or kill.)

Dickie waited, wiry arms folded on his chest. “I may have done.  Or I may not have. I have walked long and long many a different mile. What of it, Allen Mallory?”

“Deutsch Settlement Road only comes out one place,” Allen responded. It was getting late, and he desperately wanted a chew of tobacco. “That shantytown with the mad Amishman preacher. Guns’re the only thing those hill-billies understand.”

Dickie grinned. “Ever draw a bow? I could send an arrow through one and out’n two more. Just been waitin’ for a reason.”

Allen put his thumbs in his own braces, looking so much like his brother that Dickie had to snort, and not say anything. He cleared his throat.

“We’d be… we’d be honored if’n you join us…”

Dickie looked at the ground.

“I don’t need your invite. I’ll be sitting in a blind. On that you have my word as a medicine-man...”

Allen’s beetling brow furrowed. “A which?”

“Pretty much.” Dickie looked all about them. “So, where’s the lynch mob meeting tonight?”

“Court House lawn, around the front side. We’ll… we’ll want to hop to it.” Allen swallowed hard. “Me baby sister-in-law nearly decapitated the thing, but it run off anyways, did you ever hear the like…”

They talked the whole way there, and by the end there was a lot that neither of them ever wanted to know again…

Allen remembered Da’, and the day with the bog-man, in little bits and flashes, colored slides that made no sense. When the Trouble started, and Johnnie kept saying he’d seen things like this before, though, Allen called to mind…

8.) THE GUNSMITH SPEAKS

“Don’t yeh go near the bog, Allie, there’s water-horses.”  Mum, dear Mum with her red Norman-Irish hair, dead lo these seventeen years when her poor big heart give out over the stove and she sat back in her chair like it were the most natural thing in the world.

Mum, Mum, young and strong then, Mum who put whisky on my babyteeth sockets and taught me to keep me guard up when I swung a fist in the play-yard, Mum telling me to stay away from somewhere must have meant that there was some forbidden fruit that came with a heavy bite of heavy teeth from a heavy trap…

Oh, but the woods were lovely, dark and deep on the long way back from the school-house, in the little village that did not yet have a name the English gave it. (They hadn’t yet bothered to.)

Oh, but out on the bog the lights were lovely, dancing blue, to and fro, up and down and skimming across the surface, then shooting up into the sky in random schools, like fish, turning in that frost-blackened gyre…

Oh, but there… was someone here. A man. Out this late, in the cold, wearing… a cloak and little else, kneeling… to drink. Kneeling to snuffle his face through the thin crust of ice on the bog and drink, and drink…

The bog-man turned to grin at me with black, loamy teeth. His skin was yellow, full of veins in which ichor the color of the loam beat sluggish, slow and strong. He had no eyes.

I’ll always remember that, just before Johnnie came tear-assing out of the brush and took the thing’s head off with Father’s old lobster-back army saber. It had no eyes. We gave it to Monsignor Kelly, whose lips grew as tight as the good Father’s bung, which commenced to suck such a mighty gale at the sight of the felled creature that the sign-board down at the Pig and Whistle blew into the street, it was said.

We’d been playing soldier, that afternoon. Johnnie always said he loved to play soldier, if only he got to fight the English…

That night, Da’ and Johnnie took turns caning me to within an inch of my life, for going out on the bog. Ma’ just hid her face and cried. She came in and put some kind of sheep’s oil liniment on my bum, after, whispering, “Thank the Lord Jaisus and the Blessed Moother youser in one piece, like. I’ve na’heard of a Nuckelavee cuttin’ up so since I was a wee girl back in ould Donegal…”

Hizzoner Andrew Horace, Elected Mayor of Rock Springs (for there were no more Lord Mayors, any more, or so even the French were starting to believe that it was wise to tell the people, if you wanted to keep them in line…) stood at the head of two divisions of armed local militia.

He saw bayernets, home-made halberds, long-rifles and repeaters and musketoons, and every kind of pistol and shot-pistol the smitties could make or send away for.

More than that, the warty old lizard of a Mayor saw scythes, sickles, two-handed mauls. He saw marble rolling pins, and horse- and buggy-whips. He saw mothers without their daughters. He saw fathers without their sons. He saw rage.

Behind the half-arsed local soldiery (all the boys picking at their noses and the waistbands of their pants, frigging about with loaded arms, ill fitting in their pork-pie hats) the latest local muster looked like about two hundred men. Maybe ten women. (The Mayor had his own ideas about that, but kept it quiet.)

“CITIZENS OF THE TOWNE-SHIP OF ROCK SPRINGS, YOU HEAR YOUR MAYOR NOW!” Andy Horace bellowed in that gargoyle squeak that some wags said could stop the very Court House clock when he got going. The low ROOBA of the lynch mob cycled down to a babbling brook of expectant whispers.

They waited. He goggled at them out of his big brown pop eyes, fiddling with his nasty old wig.

“Whatever happens tonight, your good Sherriff and I are both in complete agreement, as are your Captain Quirin and Sergeant-at-Arms Mercier… in that what happens tonight stays in Towne.”

He let that sink in. He watched their faces. He liked what he saw.

“Do not tell anyone else what we are to do, this night.” He looked to the west, and crossed himself like an altar-boy. “It will only give the daemon power. We march tonight, and we clean our own house. This is our affair. Our…” He sniffed. “Our business.”

In the crowd, the old Carpathian Dmitru bellowed his assent. Gino Palazzi the butcher, Avram Zlotchin of the American, and several other shop-keepers began to do the same. Mayor Horace looked on this, too, and saw that it was good…

9.) SOUR GRAPES

They ran it all backwards. They tried to run it all backward.  What fools these mortals be. Like they ever read the Book, or even saw the outline… They shrove all the bodies (well, what was left of all the bodies). That blind faggot Gibson and his little ass-pony altar boy Grattan left the holy water at home. They brought coal oil, flint and tinder and big new sulfur-matches. You want revenge, call any mob. You want Nasty, call a priest…

Up the swamp road, a gigantic farmer with a crow-feather in his high hat came riding slow with a brace of bloodhounds.  Gentleman Jim Weiland, the hemp planter from Town, was visible by his pale skin and goatee even before the Dream-light in the eyes of Mamie Mallory fluttered on, and flashed blue-blue-blue, color and surge:

:Maeve, this is Jimbo Sanchez, over?

:Copy that, ya big ornery galoot. I smelled you five years ago. Thanks for keeping in touch.

LwoundedJ Thanks yourself, stranger. What’s this “Off Active Duty” shit?

L You weren’t in Rome, funnyman.  I had a breakdown. I saw Tally get his head lopped off right in front of me.

:(shock) Oh, shit, Lieutenant, I am so sorry. It’s nice I got such a big mouth, so my feet can fit…

:(dismissal) You look sharp. I’d nail you.

:(blushes) Don’t play the flute unless you want the snake up out the basket. I’ve been watching you and Mamie as well. Tryin’ to look out for you both. You… know what’s probably gonna…

:(!) I’m done. I’m done. Fucking done. Fucking well and truly…

:Kid, pay attention. I would have got through sooner if I could. We couldn’t get enough operatives in, or… the Tank malfunctioned, or something, just… Look, I know it’s not fair…. I…

[silence]

One ham-sized hand fell on Mamie Mallory’s shoulder. She looked up into the dark, twinkling eyes of Gentleman Jim. His beard and moustaches were waxed and pointed, and he looked every inch an oak that perhaps even this baby-eating goblin would have a hard time chewing through.

“My dear Missus Mallory.” He bowed.

: Get a fucking hold on yourself RIGHT NOW, we had NO CONTROL over this, Maeve, and it DOESN’T MATTER! We’re gonna go BACK to the DREAMWALK and we’re gonna FIGURE OUT an EASIER, SOFTER WAY to SKIN THIS CAT if I have to DRAG YOU by the PRETTY WHITE HAIR of your WITTLE TOW HEAD so you BETTER JUST QUIT—

“—I see you are instructed in the use of firearms.” The big lug looked sheepish. “You know anything about hunting hounds? I have the very Devil’s own store, pardon my language, with all eight of these fellows. They have the scent. I need a good gun to lead the other four.”

In his head, of course, Jimbo Sanchez (the Bastards’ bug-man, wire-man, radio-microphone-directional-listening-type-ear-of-the-year-and-eye-in-the-sky man who did stand-up comedy in the pubs of Cico Rabaud in Shang 2, about being born Bastard in the first place) had heard the whole fuming argument between Sherriff Mallory and his pregnant wife who had just single-handedly almost done away with the very monster that half the Towne-ship couldn’t catch.

Mamie cried when the doggies howled over every corpse they found. They never found any live children hidden anywhere, though. Just a few who had died waiting. A few he’d brought with him, the whole bit of time he was squatting in the basement of Ehrendhaus, eating them slow, brains first, perhaps dreaming of the days when he could put on his father’s clothes, his father’s shoes, and…

Everything inside they saw, everything they found, and sewed their lips shut on, and turned their backs… Every protogator that was rounded up, butchered and burned on a pyre at the foot of Locke Mountain, where old Dickie, the mad Monongahela rag-man said that his folk used to burn their dead, the ones that weren’t of chiefly stock and got buried in the mounds that stretched all over town, so far down…

The front porch went up first: the great Ionic columns, the whole faux-Tudor mess. Every widow’s walk and inch of black cast-iron arrow, every leaded window that followed you like the pop-eye of some hideous toy.

And the smoking foundation would be seeded with salt.  Most of the Town Council considered it good riddance to an eye-sore.

They whooped like Injuns to see Ehrendhaus burn, and in so doing rooted the Crooked Man forever into the dreams of a land and a people.

Who could ask for anything more?

…..Diary, Mad Dickie said his people left the region “Because you shit in our tombs and you’re too big to kill. We had cities. Now we have the smallpox, the scarlet fever. Half our animals are gone…”

Of course, he was telling the whole truth, and no one listened. I used to hear him out crying in the wilderness all the time, after he’d got ahold of a jug and went out raising Cain in my part of the forest…

I was learning fast. I closed my new eyes on the scene, and opened them where I was, back up the Mountain. Back where I started. Back in the self I’d stored away in the loam.

I let the silvering black water fill my mouth, silver as the moon shining down above the place I woke in sleep.

I am not the author of this disturbance… But I’ve been woken up now, of course.

And now I can hear them, Diary, just like always, with their rasping shovels and muttering torches. These Fools, Bedlams and Outlandishmen want to drag me out of my little flowerbed here, beat me and smear me with shit, and put me in a cage for the County Spring Fair-Day…

Perhaps it’s time to change the key. I squeeze out silver in a mist through the ground, and pray for a temporary shell….

“Oh, God… Johnnie, don’t yeh point those guns at me!”   Mamie nearly dropped all four leashes, standing there with her baying blood-hounds and horrified gaze, as Johnnie Law’s hob-nailed boot crossed the squashy patch of ground, the moss that bred mosquitoes in the summer months, and she saw… saw… saw…

“DON’T BREATHE IT IN, JOHNNIE!! DON’T SHOOT ME!!!” But he did inhale the silver cloud all about his head, and he was about to, and he…

And then there was something rearing up out of the ground, tired of waiting.

Something that left bits of itself behind. They were a long way back in the forest, and the torches were starting to go out.  In the woods, the smelly buckskin corpses hung back, but they knew they were still waiting. Détente…

Until the ground exploded, and the glow fell over the land. Until Mamie heard the smacking lips, and felt the Crooked Man’s fetid breath fall on her face from too far away, and dropped to the ground, and then something

Passed

By…

WHOOOOOOOO…CK.

TthuckCK.

TOCK.

(clang)

Mad Dickie stood tall on a thick oak branch, above and behind them, tall as Orion the Hunter, tall as Hiawatha, looming against the stars. The wind in his bowstring screamed like a bald eagle circling down, down, down…Out.

The crow-fletched, steel-headed arrow had made a hole, a hole, a hole… and sparked on stone.

The Crooked Man looked dumbly around, a questing noise through the new mouth in his throat.

His long black tongue, torn out, was stapled to the tree behind him.

That was all the time Dickie needed. His arrows sang the night alive in flight like a harpsichord quill chorus of black wind death, down, down, down…

Then the wall of newer torches blocked off any immediate escape, and formed a circle, a ring of gold that shone so bright, tighter and tighter, back up to that same tall old elm tree…

A rope was produced. Very little was said. By that time, very little was left to say…

CODA: OSIRIS DISMEMBERED

They therefore brought him out, to do with him according to their Law; and first they Scourged him, then they Buffeted him, then they Lanced his flesh with Knives; after that they Stoned him with stones, then

pricked him with their Swords; and last of all they burned him to ashes at the Stake.

But while they are dead, I shall live from age to age. They did that to me from the beginning. Since Rome.

I was bored with this shit before I even began…

10.) MAMIE: The Shortest Distance

She pushed me out of the way. She wouldn’t say why. When my man died on that field of battle, St. Bridget of the dream made me run like All Hell.

Just when Johnnie got himself back, and the Crooked Man left his eyes… No one in the militias or the posse knew who started firing first. Several of the younger louts screamed like little girls that they saw the Crooked Man in the crowd, there! No, there! No, there!  And the guns began to blaze. And before…

(page is wet with something spilt; teardrop-sized)

or I could do anything at all, I was a widow, my dear Diary, a widow at twenty-two with a bun in the oven, and the best man in the whole world laying dead in the street with a hole in the brass star on his chest, grinning with red teeth.

I will see him in Heaven, Diary. And I will see this Demon back in Hell. But first, I’ll see my baby boy Allen John Mallory born in Philadelphia, where I shall learn to paint, and become something more than any of my family ever were.

The other Allen’s coming with. No more then, for your Mamie, of country life, thanks very much… There’s no sin in needing a man by my side right now, more than ever, and Allen’s a good enough Catholic to know to keep his Hands to Himself until I say, mayhap, in a few years when his place in my house grows warm, and in the shape of Himself. That’s as may be.

But no more full moons in the wilderness for Mollie O’Rourke’s first daughter, nor the howls of things without a name that shriek in fear at impending Nature. No more the noisome stink of that Swamp, and the green light that might as well have been Ross Ehrend’s eyes, every single time.

I sleep with a dip burning now, and leave the laudanum alone, though I want it badly. To sleep, I sing to my baby boy inside me, Mother and Son creating that circuitous circle of hands, voices, hearts. That warmth against the chill of the first thought you ever had. That love.

Maybe I’ll come back, someday, when I’m old and grey, just to look at how much Down-In-Towne looks like it wants to be Philadelphia’s little brother, and how small it seems, how mean…

I wonder if there’ll be anyone left, or a post in the middle of Towne with an indecipherable word burnt into its bark.

I wonder if he’ll remember my name, the way I heard that mad Grendel whisper it wetly in dreams.

I wonder if I will be able to dispatch him outright, after I’ve mended from the birth. In my sleep, Lady Tyche, who is St. Bridget to me, whispers Yes, We Can, then never tells me why she laughs when she says it.

Still, I am hopeful… And in that hope, I smile as the horses gallop on to Philly. I roll over on the bench seat and return to sleep, beneath the vast bowl of stars encircling the road out of Town.

EPILOGUE:

PACOLL:

10 November, 1793

[Recovered Fragment,

Pennsylvania Collection;
Letters CD 18:A: Pre-1812 Americana, Rock Springs

Callaight County Library

Dr. Cricket Bennigan, orig. Redactor]

…But in our present shattered situation, a full company muster cannot be expected from this County when our Militia Companies are entirely broken up, and whole Towne-ships laid to waste, so that the communication betwixt our upper and Lower districts is Entirely broke, and our apprehensions of immmediate Danger are not lessened, but greatly aggravated due to the distressed situation of the County. Because of the incursions, many of the residents had fled to the eastern counties of the state.

Mr. President, I and my soldiers found that most, if not all, of the outlying houses were abandoned by the settlers. No Indians were encountered, though. The Army crossed over Locke Mountain near the southernmost end of the valley and arrived at the house of George Welsch, which, unbeknownst to them, had just been abandoned by the family.

U.J. Smith made it known that Mr. Welsch had pierced the walls of his home with loupe-holes in order to defend it if necessary by force of arms.

Reports from the ironmaster’s home were Wildly Divers. We found the House Burnt to Ashes, But found no Person Killd at that Place.

We decided to Make Camp upon the grounds, made and ate our night’s repast, and then settled in for a sound and dreamless night’s sleep, after which we awoke to find ourselves surrounded by Debased White Men painted and garb’d much in the manner of Indians.

These Low Men fasten’d combustible materials to their arrows, set them alight, and Rain’d them upon Our Company. One must wonder why they felt the East Face of the Mountain to be a better place to massacre United States Army troops than the West Face.

My men fired numerous rounds and arrows into the Degenerates, which took a long time to lie down and decently die. Most of their number ran into the Woods Surrounding, Like Apes, And Hid. This is a lot of Ground, and We May Be Days in Flushing Them Out.

The Colonel and myself found many of Rock Springs Garrison Commander Hammell’s men tied to trees with numerous arrows pinning them there, and the thongs cutting into their struggling flesh. The Colonel noted that all the men had been scalped. Using our own Methods By Which to defeat Us, was all he said.  He had the men cut down from the trees and buried at the spot.

Truly, such a scene of Barbarism and Desolation makes me want to find a Canoe and go back out on the Susquehanna River, past all those islands of trees that grow from living Rock, and from there on to some point in Canada, north on the war-paths and deer-paths to the Bright Ice at the Top of the World.

I care not who you Are or where you have Been, every man has a limit to how long he can look upon such Things. I shall file my Next Memorandum upon this Matter when I am a Bit more Able, Mr. President. You may think me unlearned and young, an impudent stripling speaking out of turn. But I, too, read much, from the lowest ranks, and wish to serve my country with mind as well as back.

I Beg To Remain,

Sergeant-At-Arms Pierce Stewart

Rock Springs Garrisons, United States Army

TO BE CONTINUED

Special thanks to Richard Lupoff and Jeff VanderMeer

In its final form, this first story from 1987 is for

•         Edward and catherine morris,
with malice toward none, with charity for all

“I love my parents dearly, and if they ever came to one of my shows, they would probably die of shame.”

— Oderus Urungus, GWAR

•         All Bastards of the Universe and Their Families

•         Serena Blossom Appel, First & Last & Always

•         Donald Morris, Merlin of my Amber

•         Holly and Amy Morris, History and Prophecy

•         House Larkin, House Willig/Collett, House Eckert-Cooper (Point B Represent)

•         Kevin Salisbury

•         T.J. Yarbrough

•         Jon Davenport

•         Jonathan “Egon” Goldman

•         Jason Barndollar

•         Somya Gutshall

•         Wendy Hoffman Stitt

•         Jill Doyle

•         Don Pierce

•         Josh Emerick

•         Crystal Conrad

•         Alisa Piotrowski

•         Ericka Macharola Lear

•         Lou Antonelli

•         Neal Asher

•         Kage Baker

•         Laird Barron

•         Stephen Vincent Benét

•         Jerome Bixby

•         Paul Di Filippo

•         Washington Irving

•         Douglas Lain

•         Mike Mignola

•         Ken And Jen Scholes

•         Harry Turtledove

•         Manly Wade Wellman

And every Dreamer in between.

… Because I’m not the only one.

R.I.P.

Stiv Baytors

William S. Burroughs

Pilar Dallman

Thomas M. Disch

Philip José Farmer

Mike Kozlowski

Cornelius Lusardi

Joe Matko

John & Ruth Morris

Patti Saylor

Shannon Thomas

And everyone else who left the party
before I was done with this.

March 24, 2009

Hawthorne District

Portland, Oregon

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Edward Morris was born on Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina in 1975, and grew up in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. He graduated Temple University in 1998 with a BA in Film, and lived in the Bay Area for a year before transplanting to Portland, Oregon, where he lives and works with his Muse, gallery artist and graduate art therapy student Serena Blossom Appel. Morris was nominated for the 2005 British Science Fiction Association Award, the 2009 Rhysling Award, and the 2009 Bram Stoker Award.

Morris’s novels include The Frank Principle, Blood of Eden, O Fortuna, and Atlantis 1999: a Memoir. His shorter works have appeared fifty-five times in four languages and seven countries, including a three-shot run in Murky Depths, two in Interzone, and the Stoker-nominated Sasquatch story “Lotophagi” in the very last issue of the late Farrago’s Wainscot.

Morris collaborates on a regular basis with Campbell nominee Lou Antonelli and is a member of the Portland Literary Offensive. (www.portlandlitoffensive.com) Most recently, he is finishing the Crooked Man series and developing an alternate history novella about soul singer Jackie Opel. There Was a Crooked Man is his first collaboration with Mercury Retrograde.

WANT MORE?

Visit the Crooked Man page on the Mercury Retrograde Press website

http://www.MercuryRetrogradePress.com/ThereWasACrookedMan.asp

for even more of the alternate reality of There Was a Crooked Man--and a sneak peek at the first chapter of Edward Morris’s next Crooked Man novella, Boom Towne.