XXXXI. You wake up at the crack of dawn—really, before that crack, because roosters have taken up squatting in the rundown windmill you still have to fix despite your wife’s yelling at you many, many times about it—for your morning constitutional. It’s super cold out and you’re cramping up both in your legs and your stomach, the latter probably because of those off mushrooms you explained to your daughter twice should likely not be eaten but she ignored you and threw them in anyway. The time has come and you’ve really got to go. You look up and, in the purple-cobalt glow of predawn, you see that the outhouse is gone. Just, like, missing. The structure has disappeared, along with the severely-splintered bench which passed for a seat, leaving a steaming hole in the ground. What the? Oh no, this can’t wait. You shamble toward the hole and squat over it. What comes out is indescribable. You finish but, as you try to stand, your legs fully seize up and you fall halfway into the horror hole. Your legs are up in the air and your body is folded at a ninety-degree angle, with your bottom, upper legs, and lower torso stuck in the hole. You wriggle and writhe but it does no good. You’ll have to wait until someone in your family wakes up and needs to use what was once the outhouse. That time comes sooner than you’d’ve expected, given how much souring crowbane “beer” everyone drank last night. It’s Hafdold. He sees you. He is apparently completely unfazed by the fact that the outhouse is MISSING and runs inside. The rest of the family—and EVERYONE is there: all of your daughters and even a few young men with whom they’ve certainly been affronting God; heavens, you hope it at least wasn’t for money; your sons and the war wives, and finally, your wife. Everyone laughs. And laughs. They are rolling on the ground, nigh-convulsing at the sight of your state. Everyone except your wife. She’s standing there, unmoving, arms crossed, stonefaced, and mutters something under her breath, it looks like (your eyesight is really failing). She turns and goes back into the hovel. Everyone else is still laughing. Hopefully someone will eventually come help you, but you have your doubts at this point.

XXXXII. You’re out in one of the fields—who knows which; you can’t even remember what day it is, except that it’s probably not Sunday—tilling the soil. Whichever field this is, you seem to remember it never producing anything edible, but fields are failing all over the moor, so you have to keep trying. What else is there to do? Give in? No, this is the Devil's whispers. You see that the only one helping you is Berkind, which is weird because he was violently ill last night. Or was that Bryland? It wasn’t Hafdold. Wait, is that Berkind tilling the soil? You squint and see that whoever is working the field a few feet from you is far too small to be any of your sons. It doesn’t even look completely like a person, you realize. You clear your throat, “Excuse me?” The “person” doesn’t move. It… actually was never moving and isn’t even holding a tool. What is that? You take a step toward whatever the thing is but step on your hoe (I mean really it was the potsherd tied to a stick that you’ve been trying to use as a hoe in these trying times), trip, and fall face-first into the dirt next to the thing. Stunned, you look up to see that it is, in fact, actually a person, but whoever it is is crouching. “John? John Johnson? Is that you?” the person-thing croaks. Spitting just terrifically and unnaturally bitter dirt and pebbles and part of a worm or centipede from your mouth, you answer, “I am called John Stinkpeat today. Who might you be, stranger?” The person-thing lets out something between a burp and a hiccup, maybe both, “Don’t you recognize me?” You don’t because despite being like ten or fifteen fingers from the thing’s face, your eyes are stinging from whatever is poisoning the soil and you’re essentially blind. You begin to attempt to articulate as such but before you can form words through the muddy residue in your mouth, the personish creature jumps away, or it looks like it jumps away, very quickly, jumping repeatedly further and further away, disappearing into the forest. Just what on God’s good earth was that, you wonder? Bells in the distance, now. Church bells. Oh no, it is Sunday and that was certainly Satan ruining your day because you ruined the Lord God’s Holy Day. One day a week. How hard is that?

XXXXIII. You’re inside your hovel sitting on the floor because your chairs are broken and the tools you have to fix them are broken when one of your daughters—one of the smaller but, well, “wider” ones—knocks the door off the hinges that are just long gone, screaming about “mad dogs.” This is serious. You’ve seen a man gone sick with the scarewaters and it was something you’ll never forget, you think. Maybe you didn’t actually see that and John… Johnson from the family of well-diggers just told you about it so many times that it’s your memory now. In any case, it’s bad. You run to the shed which is strangely missing several wall planks to grab something with which you might defend your family. The only thing you can find is the majority of a clay pot, but it’s a dense little guy and maybe you can put an eye out. You take it and run through your hovel (it only takes like a quarter of an eyeblink because it’s just the one room), everyone just staring, sitting, kind of ignoring the situation. You stand atop the muck in front of your doorway, pot in hand, ready to smack a mad dog or two in the head. You hear a horrible sort of pant-barking off in the distance, to the north of the more shrubby edge of the forest, and there they are: A pack of four, obviously mad, dogs. They’ve got the rage and are completely in the grip of their gnashing insanity. They smell you. They sight you. They start bounding toward you at a terrifying speed. You ready the pot in hand and look behind to reassure your family that you will do anything to protect them, even offer up your own life, even suffer the fatal agony of scarewaters to keep them from harm. A few of them seem to have wandered off; the war wives are chatting away in giggle-squeak-chirps while Hafdold picks at his toenails with twig; your wife is leaning on the counter with her arms wide apart, head hanging, whispering, “Where is the fucking gravel wine I know he knows where it is I told him he can’t keep hiding it…” You must now, despite your family it seems, defend the hovel. The dogs draw nearer and once they are within five speltstalks of you, you heave the pot at the head of the lead dog. A direct hit! The cur falls to muddy earth and seizes. The three other dogs, madder than all heck, take no notice. You look around for something else—anything else—that you can use to disable the deranged hounds. From behind you, you hear a sudden and percussive, “Ey, you dogs, you go and fuck off now, you hear me?!” The dogs, mouths frothing like the frothiest pond you’ve ever seen—probably that one when you were little that was turned into a fishing spot by a gang of retired beggars—stop at once. Then, calmly and orderly, they about face, and trot off back toward the shrubbery. You turn your head slowly to look and see who it was that was able, by word alone, command a pack of rabid dogs to call off their assault. “Who among you said this? Who among you has the power to speak to madness?” you demand, your voice quivering. Everyone is looking around like they don’t want to be called on to answer a question or own up to eating the last bit of groats at the end of a sharp autumn. “Who did this!?” you demand a second time, now with more anger than incredulity. You then see your swarthy, obese grandson, whose name is unpronounceable, toddle out of the shed. Everyone in the hovel, including your wife who wasn’t even looking, begins pointing furiously at your dark heir. “It was he who did it!” they say. You, though, do not know what to say. You stand for a moment, literally dumbfounded, and then open the special cellar usually reserved for unruly children and when there are ducks, to retrieve something hard to drink. Within moments, you hear your wife absolutely shrieking, “So it’s there you’ve hidden my drink! How dare you, man, do this to me? Am I not your wife? Have you no respect for my needs? Have you no dignity, that you would deny me the only happiness I have ever known?” You see that your kids aren’t paying attention and missed that last bit, which you figure is probably good. “Do you not hear me, John?” she yells at the side of your head, now closer. You wave her away, drink the entirety of the gravel wine in one go, and wave her off again. Now she’s the dumbfounded one. 

XXXXIIII. Your well has gone dry. It’s a pretty weird thing to happen given that it’s been raining almost nonstop for a month and a half. You’d think that at least some would have just leaked in but no, totally dry. You realize that it’s maybe not the worst thing in the world. That water from that well was always a bit dodgy and it went foul three times in one year once. But where to get water? The stream is a little more of a hike than you’d prefer, and hell if any of your daughters who might happen to be slouching in or around the hovel are going to be a reliable source of aid. (It should go without saying that your sons would never fetch water, as this is women’s work, but such are the times.) You have to find a doodlebugger but you don’t know where to start. First, it was outlawed at some point—too close to witchcraft for the new branch of the church that’s taken over the parish—and second, the doodlebuggering family that once lived on the other side of the wider fen vanished right around when their trade was outlawed. So what to do except go doodlebugging yourself? How hard could it be, you think? All you do is see where a tree branch bends when you hold it like a gambler or a thief. You head to the forest and after but a finger-to-the-sky’s time, you find just the stick. You look around to see if anyone is around to catch you taking wood for the purpose of what is “perhaps sorcery,” which is punishable by what would be tantamount to buggery if it were not legally redefined not to be. You start doodling around the small field once used for tubers but needs to lay fallow for a few years before it will yield anything edible, let alone nourishing. You walk and walk, but nothing is happening, and you are certain you are holding the branch exactly like the carnivalers do. Then, as if grabbed by the very talons of the Devil, the branch points straight in front of you and slightly downward. You look, but your vision, this really is just the limit. You move in the direction the demonrod pointed. It’s the well. Enraged, you break the stick over your knee. It was a lot thicker than you thought and damn your leg hurts now.

XXXXV. A strange man has just arrived apparently out of nowhere today wearing what you can only imagine to be some sort of uniform, though of what variety you haven't the scarcest idea. He is somehow very clean despite the fact that everything everywhere is always dirty. He’s got a leather satchel and in it, when he approached you when you were trying to get your bare feet stuck out of the muck to the left of what was once the outhouse, you fell to the ground in shock, almost falling into that terrible hole again. What a misadventure that would have been, but at least there would have been someone there to help you or so you hope. He stares down at you and has a vaguely recognizable face, not someone you know but not one of those frowning nun-types or the damn war wives. He speaks to you in a dialect of your language which you can more or less understand, but you have to ask him to repeat himself several times, which he very much doesn't like, giving the impression that he is in something of a hurry—but to where? There’s nothing for miles. He says something to the effect of, “I have something for you which is very uncommon. It's called a “letter” and it was sent to you from far away.” He reaches into his satchel, groaning for 12 or 13 moments, and starts cursing under his breath in that horrific clicking tongue of the foreigners. Great, another one of them, at least he looks like you. Eventually, he fishes out a largely-rectangular bit of folded… paper. That’s quite a sight and you give a yelp-squeak at the sight of it. He stares at you and sighs, gripping his temples with his free hand. He hands you the letter and the thing is just super weird. It’s got writing on it, you realize, which should be obvious, though you’ve no idea what this “letter” is, what it means, or why it has the same name as the squiggles you don’t recognize. You look up from the paper to see that the oddly-clad satchel-bearer has gone all the way up the south crag before you could ask him to read it for you. Holding it like a precious bit of slightly-more-useful iron slag or a hen’s egg that might be edible if you’re lucky, you see that it has a way of being opened. You open it, breaking off a blue circular bit that was keeping it shut, and unfold it to reveal yet more writing. A lot of it. And a bunch of the squiggles look like weird squiggles, not the squiggles you grew up with. These squiggles look really unpleasant. You take the letter inside and hide it inside your bark-burlap pillow so that no one will think you are a sorcerer.