AN ENIGMATIC NIGHT

With a touch of magic in the air, and the misery of a cold, wet season, a new star rises to the heavens...

There were three twinkles in the sky as well as the fogged face of the moon and too much cloud to make sense. Otherwise it was bleak and black, the night impenetrable, and a dank, damp cold clung to man and beast alike: and there were plenty of beasts that night, but just the one man.

And he gazed at the three twinkles in the sky and muttered to himself. There were four of us, but now I'm only one... his grumbles breathed. The dulling night air absorbed his words, muffled them, turned them to barely audible soup, but he didn't care, for they were his spell, and nobody else's.

And at his bidding out of a shadow-tree a raven rose, black as the night, but the man could see it. He had an eye for ravens, all right: if he'd never had a human friend he'd had a host of ravens calling his name with that hoarse affection such birds have.

And, black on black, that raven flew to the thatched cottage at the edge of the forest and spied a candle glowing in its window, and landed on a post by the front door.

“So you're there, Mr Raven?” quailed a broken old voice as the door opened, crack by creak.

The raven squawked, black like its feathers, a voice that cut through the dank air like a sharp knife through freshly-churned butter.

“And you've come to tell me that he's out there?” croaked the voice. “He's out on a night like this, under the trees and dripping with rancid mist? Wet through, I have no doubt, and wanting to return?”

The raven hopped onto one leg, and danced a little step like ravens can. It meant the affirmative. It was positive. Dances can be very positive when performed by the legs of ravens.

“Then you can go and tell him there's nothing doing!” grated the voice in the doorway. “You go and tell him fie and foe! I'll have none of his nonsense here! And you can tell him I'll be between my sheets before he can say boo! Between my nice white sheets, that is, and their fragrance of sweet elder from the wash, and me naked as a new-born between them, and him wet and cold out there!”

And the door creaked shut and the raven sat on his post by the door and squawked gently to itself.

Then like an extra shadow on the shadows of night it rose into the air, but not before the keen eye of Farmer Crackpot had spotted it and aimed his shotgun at it and brought it down, to lie unheeded in the damp black night, bloody feather matted with the mist and hellish night

And inside the thatched cottage a frail old piece of breasted flesh climbed between her silk-white sheets and waited, praying to this or that odd deity.

And out in the dank and dark forest the man amongst so many beasts waited, and waited, and the raven never returned. And high in the bitter skies the three twinkles became four.

By dawn the cold and the wet had won.

Author's Note

The start or the middle or the end of something .. or maybe the whole.