"Ye wouldn't want them in your neighborhood either!  Out!  Out! Damned spawn!  Y'hear!  Ye daft little bastards wi' y'r funny eyes!"   said the late Danny Callaghan of Middle Wyche...

On the Beaching Point

Evan Myquest

      <MP3 link

(Psst...do you want to hear the great Renee Gromacki read this to you?   Click here for RealAudio!)

On the beaching point of sudden ocean birthed storms, a pocked land of crag and slough,

On a day with the rarest sky-blue of blue, and clarity of a multi-kilometer view

The warming sun and fairest wind’s handmaiden’s breath on the seaside meadow

Set the fabled green man walking and casting out every evil shadow.

The rare bonny warmth and brightness over the land

Chased the blue man so very far from hand.

But this land bred a people whose suspicions never retired,

And always, the pipe and fiddle lovers knew the red man could spring forth, despite a Beltane fully-fired.

It was impossible to recall last Hogmanay’s misbegotten fog.

It had filtered up as a gas from the sod, not rolling in as the usual steam from the firth-side bog.

It came first around the ankles without notice, like tentacles from evil extended.

A gaseous swirling skin crawling feeling of being held, gripped, weak and undefended.

A number of lasses dropped in their tracks and became paralyzed as if with fear,

But there wasn’t a trace of lingering effect until much after the fog began to clear.

The next month following on the fog’s heels, eight pregnant ladies waiting

In complete trauma shock over their sons and daughters’ imminent birth-dating

Gave forth with a premature ripping, searing pain

The likes of which only on their death’s day they’d feel once again.

It was an affront to the old mothers, dressed in black, who knew,

Only a devil’s trick could make the ladies simultaneously due.

And give out with well-birthed babies bare weeks to the day

The strange Hogmanay fog came, and as quickly, went away.

Of the simultaneous birthing, doctors could explain nought

Nothing of the premature pain that the ladies were brought,

Nothing of the coming curse in this wee coastal town where these hell sent spawn

Would transform life somehow, with their full sized infant aspect drawn.

It was the slap on each child’s ass, not applied casual

But applied as usual, to the usual,

That brought no telltale squalling sound at first

That signaled the end of normal life, a bubble of joy soon to be burst.

The hospital borrowed doctors from all around Middle Wyche that day,

And some still can be found in pubs and easily provoked to say,

"When slapped, looking up from where they lay,

Babies oughtn’t turn and stare contemptuously that way."

2

From the start they walked early, and even communicated infant demands, you know,

And we laughed until they glared on us with those pupil-less eye-whites aglow.

As it progressed, they had not an age in years, but a combined chronological scale

It was if they were parts of an evil organism, with no good purpose come to our grassy dale.

It was then their alien presence became a thing of fear,

Sapping and strangling the smallest ray-blaze of hope within our sphere.

And to a person, when asked, any citizen would have said,

Aye, the look of ‘em was enough to scare the family dead.

Fast gone from infant to children, in an unknown way

They appeared to pool their minds and cause our deepest thoughts to scatter and stray.

And the way they first looked from one to the other we knew--

Naively showing that they were talking without voice, that evil crew.

They demanded a full allowance to the books of the town school.

They said they needed to consume knowledge of the world they’d rule.

We decided that there was now on our part a critical need

For getting these beings acquainted with Christian alternatives to power and greed.

Born like octuplets to different mothers, to what purpose no one knows

They grew closer in appearance from their blonde hair to their small adult clothes.

Their closeness attracted jeers and taunts from enemies.

But the farm country bully mates who were given to taunt and to tease,

Never stayed healthy and strong

…For very long.

They weakened and faded away straight where they stood

Under the cruelest focus from the glowing eyes of the brood.

The evil arced and grew from youth to youth.

It left no room to comprehend the shocking truth

That with the passage of music-less nights and some otherwise uneventful days,

Good people were disappearing , some said from just the child horror’s gaze.

3

I was at the top of the hill, taking down laundry,

And watching the wind-trails in the grassy meadow sea.

When I saw the eight, mind you, with no hands laid on the cur, torturing an old dog,

Ken that it screamed and bayed like it was abandoned and dying, as one stuck in the bog.

All eight of ’em laughing, too, until one spied me.

And I swear it, it was a long way off for’im to see,

But a shiver went through my body, like I never knew…

And I ran back like a scared burrowing thing to my house, out of that one’s view.

Being of an age and a large sized woman, I told myself I wasn’t running away.

It wasn’t fear made my courage give and sway.

So…I just went to my chores in other places.

But I shuddered, thinking of the music-less green alien eyes in those laughing faces.

I swept up some ashes for spreading and carried them down the stairs to the rear door.

And there was another of the children, watching, this time from our side of the moor.

I stumbled and I dropped that full pail of ash

From catching that child’s eyes reflecting the sun’s very own blinding flash.

There of a sudden, I felt momentary shock, struck dumb of speech.

A terror chill up the spine, and that from getting only slight eye contact’s reach.

I was in a magnet’s pull, fully uncoordinated of limb and tension,

Soul-robbed and limp, in the grip of that child’s attention.

It was pure fright to feel my temperature whipsawing up and down.

Feeling my own will to run melt and drown.

And my senses rapidly disappear.

While that one sent its thought bolts of paralyzing fear.

It wasn’t until the dear salvation of the country music that I felt the loosening change

Of blood and fluid control that started to range

Between pipe and fiddle beats, strong and then weak, feeling the extremes of chill and fire,

T’was the music made me no longer a statue, limbs locked, and my mind a confused mire.

The child that had me in thrall

Heard the holiday pipe and fiddle from the radio down the hall.

Your judgement says it can’t be happening to you.

Your lungs pressured like a hundred oceans squeezed, face turning blue.

The light searing through closed eyelids in rays that blind

A blazing pain growing ever sharper in every joint and muscle bind.

You know a child cannot draw your fear up so tight.

You know a child cannot will you to actually die of fright.

Distracted by the radio, the child looked away, and like a puppet string let go, my knees buckled and I fell.

I only thought it was forever how long this nightmare had me in its spell.

My Tom found me in a numb-seizure heap,

Unable to believe, unable from then on, to rest, let alone sleep.

4

The first death occurred on the first full rain day of autumn.

We’d been inside when the news had come.

The young minister was dead of an unknown source.

Signaled by the unfettered wandering of his old swayback horse.

Reverend Father Burke, said they, had hit his head on a sharp rock in some gorse,

A pace or two from the Bally footpath, in a fall from his shying screaming horse.

But most knew that bay mare wouldn’t ordinarily shy from even a coiled and striking snake.

It was old and sullen, not at all given to fright and sudden rear and frenzy shake.

When I heard the news I let out with a banshee sound.

Father Burke was like an uncle, and it was from then I was wheelchair bound,

It figured the eight would have it in for a minister of God.

They’d always avoided the village church, couldn’t abide the consecrated sod.

I was making it my business, their progress to follow.

As I remembered about the screaming animal from the hollow,

And as the village commented on animal corpses that increased in size,

I knew they were doing it with just their damned alien eyes!

The village elders held a meeting and barely escaped from the mercat square hall,

As fire raged through the building from a freak lightning fall.

Yet early in the meeting came an end-to-it-all plan.

The children would have to die, agreed all, to a man.

We knew it wouldn’t be a talking thing, a way to kill children who find

It easy to spy on what’s only in your mind.

We all knew they were too strong of will, so it couldn’t be the direct approach we’d try.

No cornering and killing like hunting game, more like trapping, murderous and sly.

It was luck that I remembered the music that stopped the one in his murderous intent.

The pipe and fiddle tugged at something human in all that evil resident.

Music of the highland and shore

Stopped them from mind reading and spell casting and more.

We’d use our village’s best musicians

To hide from them our own scheming intentions.

Aye, it was chosen to use the killing cave on the firth’s pounding shore.

Elders know it fills with the tide and has trapped and killed hideaways by the score.

The only plan is to lure them to the cove, lure them with no way out.

Lure them where pounding surf will cancel any shout.

Let the crashing surf claim their evil intent

Let the crashing surf lay waste to their burgeoning evil bent.

So it was, the elders appointed them a rendezvous across the plain of mud

Under a mental cloak of pipe and fiddle on a quest of blood.

They descended the serpentine trail full confidence in their ability to man enslave.

When the backtrail was rocked shut like Jesus' cave.

And as the tide filled in around them they spoke few words.

But overhead, the screeing, soaring birds

Plummeted thumpingly to sod and turf.

Their only sin, trespassing on that cove mouth’s pulsing, drowning surf.

Then the cove walls expanded like a sighing chest and collapsed on that place.

The avalanche covered the beaching point, destroying all trace

Of an invasion of innocence, of lowest, perverted means

And the return of unbothered, soaring gulls were accompanied by eight mothers' screams.

Only then did the village of Middle Wyche relax and breath its evening mist.

Knowing full well it had survived the redman’s laughing kiss.

And by homeland's pipe and fiddle had narrowly escaped Hell’s plan

To become the village of the damned.

Copyright ©MMW January, 1998

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06/21/10

In case you didn't get it, this is dedicated to John Wyndham,

and all the other Village people