A Natural History of Hell: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

eased back in her chair. “It’s completely mad,” she said, flicked her ash on the floor, and smiled.
    “What about this?” I said and lifted the sickle off the table.
    She blinked, pursed her lips, and said, “Mower Manc. That was the end of the whole shebang.”
    “The end of the ritual?”
    She nodded. “In the early 1880s, word dolls were still part of the local culture. Who knows how much longer they would have carried on with the 20th century coming full speed ahead. But in that last year, somewhere around mid-summer, a fire started in the minister’s barn one night. The place burned to the ground and the minister’s wife’s buggy horse died in the flames. Every one suspected this boy, Evron Simms, who’d been caught lighting fires before. The minister, knowing the boy’s parents well, decided not to pursue punishment for the crime. Come the equinox, only a week later, Evron was due a visit from the doll maker, and the doll maker came.
    “Some of the folks I interviewed in the ’60s knew this boy, grew up with him. He’d told more than one of them that his field friend was Mower Manc, a straw hat brim covering his eyes, a laborer’s shirt and suspenders, calloused hands, and a large sickle. In other words, the doll maker made Evron a word doll whose very job was to toil in the fields. That doll maker, I discovered, was none other than the minister’s wife. You can’t be sure that her choice for him was malicious or that he didn’t change the aspect of what was initially given to him, but if she did knowingly make his only plaything in the fields work itself , that would be hard-hearted.”
    I looked down at the sickle and said, “This doesn’t sound like it’s gonna end well.”
    “Hold on,” she said and put her hand out like a traffic cop to stop me. “Harvest starts, and Evron’s sent out into the fields with that sickle you see there and is given a huge plot of hay to cut. By many accounts he immediately set to work and worked with a kind of ferocity that made him seem possessed. By sunset the field was mown, and the boy had a violet pallor, froth at the corners of his mouth. Even his father, a severe man, worried about what he’d witnessed. He wrote, ‘I never thought I’d see an instance where a boy could work too hard, but today I seen it. My own Evron. I should be proud, but the sight of it wasn’t a prideful thing. I’d describe it more as frightful.’ ”
    “People passed by the farm frequently after that first harvest to catch a glimpse of the boy mowing hay. They noticed that he had taken to wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat to block the sun. When the minister passed away, among his papers was a sermon he’d written about the boy’s mowing. It’s a very elegant document for what’s there, predictably linking Evron’s sickle with the scythe of Death, but half way down the page the minister runs out of words. There are marks on the paper then, circles and crosses and a simple sun. At the bottom he writes— Elegast. ”
    “What was that?” I asked, unsure I’d heard correctly.
    “Elegast, an entity from the folklore of the Dutch Low Countries. A supernatural creature, like the field and forest in human form. Only the minister made that connection, though, whereas most of the local folks were convinced Evron was just touched in the head. Three years at the harvest and his look became more distant, his words fewer and fewer. When not working he’d sit perfectly still, eyes closed, and sniff at the wind. During the following winter, he was working on a hay wagon, changing one of the tin-covered wooden wheels, when the axle splintered and the cart fell and broke his left leg. That’s when the real trouble started.”
    “Because he couldn’t work?” I asked.
    “Exactly. They had to tie him down to keep him from tending to the horses and cows, or shoveling the snow off the path, or keeping a low fire going in the barn during the frozen nights. He struggled to get