Being Dead Part Nine.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire springs to mind...

The hag that pushed her way into Tiller’s cottage (or shack as it seemed to me) was hideous beyond belief. She was old, there could be no doubt about that, older than anyone I could remember seeing alive in the past, and she looked to be almost on her last legs with a grubby face covered with angry pustules and stranded grey hair seeming to fall carelessly in an unwashed cascade down half of her face covering one eye and brushing against her smock, the latter badly in need of a good visit to a laundry. And she stood there before us, legs apart giving her an impression of having power and authority despite her appearance, a kind of assumed superiority that wasn’t completely wiped out by her dishevelled appearance.
“A witch!” she screamed, “To the burning field with her! And the half-clad swine with her! Only then will the torment our Lord has sent onto us be halted and our suffering come to an end as the fiends and witches face the fires of justice!”
“Don’t you dared!” screamed Megan as the woman reached out for her, “Keep your filthy hands away fro me!”
“Leave her alone!” I snapped, fearing that my voice would hold little power in it against so vile a woman.
And all to no avail, for the woman suddenly cried out and almost immediately seemed to be surrounded by a veritable army of children, all small but no doubt old enough to do mischief, which they proceeded to prove they could do. There were both boys and girls, though it was far from easy to decide which individual was male and which was female. They were all dressed in rags, though the girls’ rags were possibly less masculine than were the tattered threads of the boys.
And they leapt upon us in a move that seemed to have been both orchestrated and rehearsed. And the fact that they were small didn’t necessarily mean they were weak or in any way incapable of doing the revolting woman’s bidding.
Our knowledge that they were children helped them because neither Megan nor myself can tolerate the idea of hurting the young. And by the time it was clear they knew what they were doing and had actually erupted in a sea of arms and legs and even biting teeth, both Megan and I were bound and were being carted off. Our shrieked protests made no difference to the determination with which the vicious little devils carted us away from Tiller’s shack.
“To the burning field!” roared the hag, wav the hoard onwards.
A small crowd had gathered near a dry pile of timber already as word must have got out that there was going to be a burning. But before anything like that could happen the mass consciences of the villagers had to be soothed by an imitation of justice because Megan and I were thrown to the ground in front of a tall and austere and elderly man who I thought was probably from the big house I had noticed earlier, because in stark contrast to our captors he looked at least moderately clean.
“Who have we here?” he demanded, “What creatures from the dark realm have you brought to me for my judgement, and justice?”
“Witches!” cried the children in screeching young and yet uncouth voices, “For burning! Now, now, now!”
“How say you that they are witches?” demanded their inquisitor, “where is your evidence? Tell me the story!”
By that time the hag had appeared, having struggled to keep up with the gang of scruffy kids who had bound us and were forcing us any old way along. Breathlessly she pushed to the front of her juvenile army and looked up at him.
“Your Greatness,” she screeched, “It was he… the one in tiny and unChristian pants, who proved they are from the necromancer’s foul realm, for he mentioned rats and the fleas they adore!”
“Rats, you say? Our friends that scurry here and there and clean up behind us?” sneered our inquisitor, for there was no doubt that was what he was.
“Cursing them and claiming they bring the death that is decimating our village,” she said, and coughed, “and is already laying claim to my own ageing flesh,” she added, coughing furiously again.
“Then it is proved!” shouted the tall man, “strike a light! We will consign the two of them to the cleansing justice of fire!”
At that a hunch-backed old man appeared from behind him, carrying a wooden box in which there was dry tinder, and a flint with which to strike it.
“Bring flames to the dry timbers!” shouted our judge, “let us create heat and fire, let us see justice done!”
The hunch back proceeded to try to strike a spark from the flint, and he actually succeeded, but the sparks flew everywhere but into the dry tinder.
I had a silly idea, because I still had the lighter in my pocket, and I shook myself free from the urchin who was still holding me and withdrew it.
“Is this what’s on your mind?” I shouted, or at least, tried to shout above the rabble and noise of the crowd, and so I flicked it.
A finger of fire shot from it, a clean white flame that made the random sparks the hunchback was striking into existence look like childish accidents.
The noisy crowd became suddenly hushed with shock, for, of course, they had seen nothing like a flame that apparently could be commanded into existence before. The army of filthy children started retreating and even the prosecuting judge and jury took a step back.
The hunchback had also retreated from his tinder box, and with what I hoped was an evil grin on my face, though I’m not quite sure I can actually look evil, I plunged the lighter into whatever dry material they put in their tinder box, causing it to spring suddenly into flames.
“This?” I demanded, “is this what you want?”
And then I went a step too far as I threw the tinder into the prepared funeral pyre and watched as the timbers caught.
“Satan calls them!” shouted someone, a woman with a hooked nose and one blind eye. “So take the sinners and burn them!” she added, her face one of delighted anticipation.
“Justice calls them!” confirmed the tall man, and then the army of urchins reappeared diminutive magicians and suddenly I felt myself being man-handled or rather child-handled towards the increasingly angry flames.
I heard Megan scream as the same thing was happening to her.
I heard my own flesh sizzling and smelt the roasting scent of it, not unlike that of a roasted steak of pork on Sunday, and then I knew no more because in the blinking of an eyelid I was here, on this marble slab in Doctor Jones’s pathology lab, and he was looking at me through keen eyes with the sharpest of scalpels in his hand.
And irrationally I saw I was still wearing my shorts, though they were now far from pristine and clean.
© Peter Rogerson 03.09.24