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by Davide Mana
It was the crooked little fellow again.
He emerged silently through the greenery and stood there, arms akimbo looking at the sky and the fading orange light of the sun behind the trees. Alice could imediately see that this was none like the satyr she had imagined looking through the window at night.
Oh, he had hooved feet all right, and muscular hairy legs, and indeed it did not wear any clothes - which was rather indecent, she admitted - but all similarities with the mythological creature ended there. No horns, to begin with, stood on his head, and while being downright grotesque, his face was not at all human, but resembled more that of a long snouted dog, or a babboon, or a strange mix of the two. His whole body was covered with thick, wiry black hair like filaments of bakelite and it had quite a lot of yellow teeth in its huge mouth, and a long tongue licking his thin lips, and now was fixing her with unblinking yellow eyes from a distance.
He did not seem to be about to play a dirge on a wooden flute.
"So there you are, Marianne!" the creature barked with an impatient gesture, and approached with some incredibly nimble steps, like some kind of classical dancer.
Instinctively, Alice took a step back.
"Still playing with your likenesses instead of setting up House for the Council!"
His breath was bestial, full in her face.
He shook his head, walking a few steps around her. "You've been out hunting alone some more, I see," he continued. He emitted an appreciative chuckle. "Nice setup" he observed "British, from the look of it. Half wish I found it myself. But you could do something for the filthy dress."
Alice was rather taken aback by all this familiarity. Apparently this weird, unpleasantly smelling creature had mistaken her for someone called Marianne - a hunting girl by the sound of it - and was expressing unsightly opinions on her attire.
"But time is short!" continued the creature before she could try and set things straight. "Be a good ghoul, run to the House and fetch my glasses."
He pointed to one of the monoliths. "I'll need the Fourth Chant for this night, and now that the scrolls are gone..."
The yellow eyes turned on her again. "Well? You still here?!" A hundred yellow sharp teeth flashed in the dusk "Run, you cursed thing,. and fetch the glasses for Uncle Douglas. C'mon!"
Stunned by an explosion of pestilential breath, and frightened by Uncle Douglas chompers, she started running in the general direction he had indicated with his last outburst, soon discovering a path in the undergrowth and following it.
"His niece or hi servant or both!" she told herself as she ran. "And how can such a thing mistake me for one of its kind is above me," she added, piqued.
But she better get the thing's spectacles, she concluded, before he discovered its mistake; she was under the impression that Uncle Douglas could be really nasty if contradicted or discovered at fault.
The thing had its amusing side: it's not every day you run errands for a dog-faced satyr.
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Soon, her steps led her to another, smaller clearing, and she was in front of a sheer cliff face, punctuated by small caves opening at different heights in the sepia colored rock.
The closest to the ground, alone of them all, had a small polished brass plaque fixed by the side, which read "Douglas Kimball, Esq."
There not being a door or any other impediment, she got in.
After a steep plunge, the cave branched into a series of smaller niches and alcoves, the majority filled with musty old books. The air was as foul-smelling as the master of the house, and many bones were piled in a corner - a fact this that struck Alice as only logical, because it is a well known fact that dogs do collect bones, and it figured that dog-faced people did too, and in a more organized way.
At the very bottom of the main tunnel, half sunk in a foul pool of hardened yellow candle wax on the cover of an extremely large book, a geographical atlas of some kind - the title read "Regnum Congo", and Alice knew enough Latin to get it - was a pair of small wire-framed glasses with squared lenses.
She picked them up and tried to clean them as best as she could.
The light from the mouth of the cave was fading fast, and still the air in the stone chamber was hot and foul smelling and dry.
An old bottle covered in dust and stopped with an old cork, abandoned all alone on one of the rocky ledges lining one of the walls caught her eye.
Her mouth still tasted funny after the mushroom dinner, and she did not see a good reason why she should not take a sip to was away the dust from her lips before she took the glasses to funny old Uncle Douglas, so that he could peruse the stone inscriptions at his leisure before his precious Council.
She unstopped the container with a musical pop, and - having sniffed the contents for good measure - drank a fine measure of the contents.
It was sweet and thick and not at all like the one she had found on the stone terrace.
It went down slowly in her throat and made her feel dizzy and disoriented almost instantly, dropping a thick crimson veil in front of her eyes.
She felt as is she was boiling all of a sudden, and as if her legs were turning to water.
She tried to support herself by leaning on a wall, but found she could not move, and the place she was in was getting small and cramped, and indeed her legs, now she looked down, _had_ turned to water and were boilng, and then all started rolling very fast and she was no longer looking up or down, but all around at the same time, and was running like a foaming wave down the floor to the door, filling every room and each nook and craddle of the place, submerging the books, and the bones and every little piece of dirt cluttering the floor, making the air rush in front of her and thank goodness the entrance corridor was tilted upwards, and she did find difficult to climb the incline, otherwise she would have been spilling out in the clearing and through the gras leaves and then what of her?
The grinning snout of Uncle Douglas peered through the door above - or was it besides - her and retracted swiftly with a surprised exclamation.
"My house is filled with essential plasma!" he exclaimed, and started barking something else that she was unable to catch, as part of her was now busy sipping through a crack in the floor of a secondary chamber, and this felt oddly pleasant, like being tickled by her grandfather's beard.
"It's those young turks again!" cried another voice, as steps clicked closer and other voices added their coughing and jabbering to the chorus, making it unintelligible.
More dog-babboon faces peered through the entrance, and more mumblings were exchanged.
"They did not feel content that they burned our Scrolls!", offered someone. "They had to destroy poor Doug's book collection!"
"My books!" exploded Uncle Douglas canine yelp "What of my books!"
Alice - or what was left of her consciousness in the splashing subterranean lake in which she had turned - knew in a very general way what was happening of the precious books. They were being digested, as she was growing.
Part of her found the idea of being in the process of digesting texts rather amusing, and a ripple of laughter flowed through her being, splashing the ceilings as bubbles of her mirth exploded on the surface.
"And poor Marianne is down there trapped!" cried Uncle Douglas "I sent her to her doom chasing for my spectacles!"
To which there was a general murmur of consternation, suddenly interrupted by the cheerfull voice of marianne herself, as the girl - that Alice imagined as very similar to herself, almost exactly alike, but smaller - came forth and revealed that not only she was not trapped anywere she said - very unladylike - but nobody ever sent her looking for spectacles or glasses or anything else.
The moon was beginning to gently pull her, and this made Alice feel light-headed and silly. The idea of her poor lookalike up there facing all those strange pompous old men from inside a bottle or a bucket or something equally undignified once again cheered Alice to no end, and again she started bubbling with unrepressed laughter.
"By my lights, " someone observed from outside "the cursed thing is laughing down there in the pit!"
"I say! How can this be?" someone else asked, and once again the hubub grew, with a single voice sometimes taking the forefront.
"Whaddyamean an unknown girl, you jackass!" someone started, and noise surged again to subside immediately.
Finally silence fell once more.
She perceived someone clearing his throat, sounding embarassed.
"We'll have to send someone in..." Uncle Douglas said.
She felt him shuffle his cloven feet.
"My foot we'll have, you blunderer!" interrupted a deeper, autorithary voice "You did the deed, so down you plunge in this Sadoqua cursed protoshoogoth broth to look for the corpse and the spell, I say."
Various lower-voiced bystanders reluctantly agreed.
Kimball tried to justify himself somehow but to no avail.
Soon, as the first thin slice of moon was peering over the edge of the cave, the grotesque form of the creature appeared in the entrance, flexed its legs tentatively a pair of times, looked around, grinned sheepishly - a strange sight, on a dog's snout - and then crouched, pinched its nose and jumped in.
He plunged through her, small bubbles of air escaping through his pressed lips as it swam forward.
Alice felt funny, like being tickled from the inside, which was rather pleasant again but did not feel proper at all. In the background of her mental landscape the simple idea of being violated in such an utter way by a babboon-faced satyr was making her cringe and laugh at the same time, but on the surface - so to speak - she was too curious about the new experience to mind such details. Now and again she did lose track of the swimming intruder, but not often and not for long and she saw/tasted/noticed when he reached the end of the complex, and after getting his bearings he picked up his wireframe glasses and an half consumed book, and turned back.
Soon, as she marvelled at his endurance, he was out, surfacing with a short barking gasp, and many black haired arms helped him out.
"Gone!" he finally said."The girl's gone."
"She was probably the one that caused all this devastation in the first place." someone said "Did you get the book?"
There was a brief silence and then many expressions of disappointment.
"Useless! The thing's absorbing the stuff as fast as it can. all my collection gone, and in it many irreplaceable pieces".
There was more discussion, and exchanging of suggestions and opinions, until the majority agreed that the best course was seal the mouth of the cave with big chunks of stone and move Kimball somewhere safe.
"Safe for him and for us," the deep voiced speaker added.
So it was agreed, and someone was fetched to the Gug Stone Circle - where did come this knowledge from - to fetch the appropriate spells and cognitions.
"But not you, Kimball! You've done already for a night!"
So someone else went.
Alice knew what was coming.
They'd go to the stones and find and learn and share a spell - Alice herself somehow knew about a dozen of them that could have caused the cave mouth to collapse - and chant it waving their arms and she'd be imprisoned down here for the rest of her existence, that she knew would be extremely long and placid and somehow not unpleasant at all. Everything considered, Alice felt that being buried alive in a subterranean complex for all eternity was not a bad prospect at all.
And this did not feel right.
It was wrong and made her scared, and as the chanting outside began and the nature of gravity altered she suddenly felt strange, and wrong, and trapped at the bottom of a hole, and collected herself as best she could and surged with a mighty roar through the entrance, splashed like a colossal breaker over the assembled ghouls and rushed on, far from their surprised shouts, through the trees and far from that place, deep in the forest. She felt animals running in front of her, and zoogs running for their lives and the world going silent as she flowed on and finally she was out of the woods and under the black sky, the full moon over her, and there was a vast plain in front of her and between her and the plain a silent figure in a yellow mask that she recognized
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