The Magog

In the hills behind his house, Frank befriends an old spirit of the forest.

There was a boy named Frank.  Frank’s house was right on the edge of the woods, and his mother told him never to play too far back there by himself, but he always did because no one else wanted to play with him.  He was a quiet boy - the kind who learns to like being alone because he doesn’t have any choice.  And so he played in the woods, moving deeper and deeper as he got older, and one day he reached a point where the woods ended in low hills which rolled off east into farmland and, eventually, sloped away toward the city where he went to school. 

The hills were mostly green, round, and perfect, sitting on the feet of even higher hills with collapsed tops.  These didn’t have any grass on them past a certain point, but the lower hills were covered with it under the scattered copses of firs that adorned their hunching shoulders.  Here, Frank played as the summer began.  School was out, and he spent all day among the trees, rolling down the hills, climbing rocks, or pretending he was a hunter with a bow and arrow.  His father told him that the hills were so perfect and round because they had been built over an old landfill and that the grass had been transplanted from somewhere else.  It was strange to imagine heaps of garbage under the hills, plastic and scrap iron and car batteries.  They were his kingdom when he played there, and he sat on a stump for a throne and ruled over green lands in a time when there were no such things as landfills.  It was in those early days of that mild summer that Frank first heard a voice in the woods and saw one of the hills waking up.

            This hill was further east than the rest, and it had the most trees on it.  It was less round, and it had a funny crook at one end.  This, it turned out, was a neck.  The blunt knoll on one side was a shoulder blade, and the dome where grass gave way to bare stone was a head that lifted out of the black earth one morning while Frank was lying on his back watching thunderheads crowd into the blue sky. 

            Before the hill began to move, though, it began to speak.  A rumbling sound came out of it, making the ground shake under Frank’s back.  And then it was louder, deeper, making Frank’s bones rattle.  He felt it in his teeth, the pulsing rhythm, and he heard sounds emerge from it that might have been words in some foreign language.  He thought the garbage might be shifting and, afraid the hill might start to collapse, he stood up and turned around, but as soon as he did the sound stopped.  He was young, and he didn’t want to leave, so he lay back down on the grass and forgot about the noise until the hill started to shift and rise.

            It took a very long time for the arms to appear, the humped back to lift, the head to rise and turn.  Frank stood aside and watched, unafraid as the hill pulled itself from the embrace of the ground.  And when, at last, the hill turned its huge face to him, he asked simply, “Who are you?”

            The hill looked at him.  Its eyes were as blue as polished sapphire, and a light came into them that made Frank smile.  Its face was made of broken stone.  Its cheeks slipped like shale, loose rock calving off as its plate lips began to move.  The first few things the hill said were in that strange, rumbling tongue.  Its voice was like the grinding of stone underground, the bouncing of pebbles over piles of rock, the hiss of heat from those deep vents that reach to the heart of the earth.  It spoke as it shifted from the soil, and Frank was moved by the sound.  Then it seemed to find words in the language that Frank knew, and it settled with its great arms folded beneath it as it lowered its head to get a closer look at the human.

            “Oh!  Hmmmm.  Oh my!”  Its words came slowly and on a gust of breath that smelled like mud and roots.  “You were so quiet…I thought you had gone.  No leaping about today?”  It looked around, taking note of the light and making sure that no one else was about.  “But it’s early yet!  My sense of time is extending, yes…stretching…as it will after so long.”  Frank waited, his curiosity burning inside him.  He wasn’t old enough to disbelieve yet.  He was young enough not to have the luxury of fear.  He didn’t quite understand that what he was seeing was impossible.  The hill seemed to know this, and it smiled a stony smile to show teeth that were like tombstones.  “Hmmmmm who am I?  Magog is what I am.  But, as for who…I’m afraid that would take a very long time to tell.”

            “Magog?”  Frank laughed.  It was a funny name.

            “That’s right.  You’ve got it!  I am a magog, and my kind are called magog.  I had a name once, but it was given to me long before names were things anyone said, and I have never really decided exactly how I should say it.”  At this, Frank laughed, and the magog made a sound that shook the boughs of the trees on its back.  “You caught me waking,” it continued, “but you look like a secretive little creature.  I think I can trust you not to tell anyone.”

            Frank beamed.  “My name’s Frank,” he said, “and I don’t think anyone would believe me even if I had anyone to tell!  Are you made of rocks?”

            The magog looked then as though it was thinking a great many things, and Frank wondered which of those things it would say.  Eventually, after much humming, it said, “No, little creature.  Rocks are made of me!”  It lifted a big hand then, and it took a few minutes before the magog was steady again as it placed its huge palm before Frank.  “Frank is a funny name for a boy.”

            Frank stepped onto the magog’s palm without a second thought.  “It’s my father’s name,” he explained, “And how do you know what I am?”

            The magog lifted Frank carefully to hold him at eye level.  “Fathers…yes.  My kind do not have those.  But you humans have to come from somewhere!  We watch you.  That is our job.  Or it was…while you were young.”  Frank sat on the magog’s palm and played with its thumb.  The stones of its body were covered with an interesting kind of lichen that glowed faintly in the morning sun.  The magog seemed to be woolgathering then, and Frank looked at it silently.  Birds were singing.  The magog’s breathing was like the sound of the ocean in a seashell, only much louder.  “It is good to have company, Frank.  Tell me about yourself while I wake.  Tell me about your father.  I haven’t met a human in a very long time.”

            And so Frank rambled all morning, telling the magog about his father’s job in the city and about the school he went to.  He explained why he thought it was that his classmates wouldn’t play with him, but the magog thought his reason was silly.  He asked lots of questions, too, but the magog wanted to hear about him at first and only started to talk about itself when Frank felt like he had run out of things to say. 

And then the magog went off on a long tale, one that lasted almost the rest of the summer.  It talked about secret things, about the days before there were any people, and about how so many of its friends were gone.  It talked about the earth and the language it uses, the language of rocks and fire, and it said that it hated the garbage and the people who came to shoot animals just to see if they could.  Frank listened to its stories every day of that summer, dreaming about them at night, and he drew pictures for the magog and stuck them to its hands with tape.  Sometimes the magog would hold him while Frank pointed out shapes in the clouds, and it always saw things there that Frank had never heard of.

“The clouds have dreams and plans of their own,” the magog would say, “and only the birds know them.  I have always been suspicious, though; I think the birds sometimes tell the trees the clouds’ secrets.”

Autumn came, and Frank had to go back to school.   The days began to get cold.  It had been a cool summer, and the winter was promising to be the worst in a long time, or so Frank’s father said.  Still, Frank went to see the magog as often as he could.  It was always very happy to see him, and it always told him that it expected him to have forgotten about it.  The world was different, it said, and people weren’t as present in the woods as they had been.  Frank didn’t understand that until he was much older.  In fact, there was a lot that the magog said that didn’t really start to sound true or right until Frank was an old man. 

Just before the start of what would be the last week of autumn, before the bitterest chill he would ever see, the magog told Frank it would have to go to sleep again.

“My kind,” it rumbled, sounding very old as Frank huddled in its palm with a parka and a scarf and brown mittens on his hands, “we sleep for a very long time.  I have told you that there are people looking for us.  Besides that, we tire quite easily, being so large.  And the earth calls our hearts and minds down into its depths, where there is always work to be done.”  Frank didn’t want to stop coming to see the magog, and he started to cry a little, but the magog comforted him.  “I hope you will not stop coming to see me, even while I am sleeping.  And I promise to wake up again, but that will not be for a long time.”

Frank didn’t fully understand the magog’s explanations, but he nodded anyway and give it a kiss on its huge, stone face before he had to leave.  He put a picture in the magog’s hand.  It was one that had taken a long time for him to draw and color, and it showed a bird whispering into the ear of a tree, talking about the secrets of the clouds.  The magog was touched and said it would hang the picture in its house, and Frank didn’t know what that meant, but it warmed his heart, and when he went home he felt good for the rest of the night.

 

            Winter came, cold and horrible.  It passed into spring, and the next winter wasn’t so bad.  Frank grew into a happy teenager, then into a happy man, and even after he moved away he would come to roam the hills where the magog was sleeping.  He continued to draw the magog, and eventually went to school to become an artist, and after many years passed he began to bring a girl to see the hump of stone and earth that he knew to be a living, speaking thing.  He married her atop the magog’s hill, and he built his house there, and the woods were partially torn down when a road was put where his parents’ house used to be.  He didn’t tell his wife what the creature in so many of his drawings was, and he didn’t tell his children or their children why the hill he’d built his house upon was so important to him.  He was kind and he achieved much and was well-liked, but on that subject he remained a secretive creature, even as he shrank into old age.

            At long last, though, Frank found himself alone again.  It is a thing that happens to many people, and he was sad for a long time, and he got sick and never fully recovered.  With his house empty, he went more often to sit with his hands on the back of the magog’s head, even when he did not feel well and needed a cane to walk.  And it was on one of these occasions, during what would be Frank’s last summer, that the magog woke up again.

            Frank knew the sound of its voice.  He knew what the shifting of the hill meant, the odd alarms of the birds in the trees on the magog’s shoulders.  He wished that the woods were still whole and that the farmland at the feet of the high hills had not been made into two big plazas crammed full of factories.  But these things didn’t dampen his spirits.  The magog pulled itself from the ground in the morning at the start of a mild summer just like the one during which Frank had first seen it.  It groaned, stretched, shaking black earth from its face, which lit up as it turned its blue eyes toward its old friend.

            “Ah,” it smiled, “It’s Frank!  My little creature.  Hmmmm...I dreamed of you!”  It opened its palm and Frank stepped on, fearless as ever.  He had learned that fear is a wasteful thing.  “Look how you’ve changed!  Hunched like me…but still the smiling boy you were on that cold day when last we spoke.  I am happy to see you.”

            Frank adjusted his glasses over eyes that were shining with tears.  He hugged the magog’s bulbous nose.  “I built my house on you,” was all he could think to say.

            “I know,” said the magog, “I felt you.  All the years you lived with me.  We do not sleep as people sleep, you know, and I tried to give you healing energies whenever I could.  That is my job, you remember!  It was our job of old, and it was one I was happy to do again.  I felt you, yes, but there is still much I don’t know.  Tell me about yourself, Frank.  While I wake.  Tell me about your children.”

            And so Frank began.  He told of how he made his first friends, of how knowing the magog had helped his confidence grow.  He told of school, of the works he had done, and of the fulfillment he felt so lucky to have found throughout his life.  He spoke of his wife and how deeply he had loved her.  He told about his sickness, and the magog was sad about that, but it said that sickness is something that happens to the body only and that Frank himself was still the same.

            “And now I know,” the magog said, when Frank was tired of speaking and had said everything he had been saving to tell it, “little Frank, who you are.”

            On through that summer and into a windy autumn, the magog told Frank about the things it had seen at the heart of the earth and about the dreams it had had during its long periods of inactivity.  It told of impossible creatures, of the movements of great rocks underground, and of the many faces it had seen in fires deep where no person can go.

            “And secrets,” it was happy to tell Frank.  “In the years you spent away, the birds told me some of their secrets about the clouds, because so many of the trees are gone.”

            Halfway into that dim and bitter autumn, Frank came to the magog for the last time.  This time, it was Frank who was going to sleep, and he brought another picture for the magog to hang in its house.  It was a great painting, larger even than Frank, and Frank explained that it had taken him almost his whole life to complete it.  It showed the magog in an open field surrounded by other creatures of its kind and with Frank sitting cross-legged on its wooded shoulders.  Magog cannot weep, not like people can, but Frank’s magog was sad when it was time for Frank to go.  Frank reassured it, saying that, now, it was time for him to tell the clouds some secrets of his own.

            And the magog took Frank into its hand one more time, curling its huge fingers delicately around him and around the beautiful painting, and it pressed its fist up against its stony chest where its great heart beat as it sank into the embrace of the ground again.

Author's Note

Let me know what you think! I apologize for any spelling errors, word omissions, or grammar gaffes that have escaped my notice.

Reviews

[pia Z]

This story totally kicks a*s! It's such a beautiful metaphor for man's relationship with nature, and it's told so exquisitely! Very very nice work! This reminds me of My Neighbour Totoro and The Neverending Story and all those awesome 80s fantasy movies, with a bit of The Giving Tree thrown in there. Thank you so much for sharing this!