There Was A Crooked Man by Edward Morris

Author:Edward Morris
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780981665498
Publisher: Mercury Retrograde Press
Published: 2009-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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