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Wedge of the English Donkeyby Thomas Foley
I checked my watch however that was of little use since I could not remember the day. I drove northwest on Old Corchaug Road past manorial Oakdale to the historic colonial town of Pautachek on St. Oda's Pond, but why I drove this way was a mystery. My mind was befuddled as to what induced me to stop in front of a tatty bookstore identified as Styggmann’s Oud Tym Boek which was an archetypal attempt at style and sophistication but missed on both accounts.A puckish elderly man with gold wired glasses stood behind a shabby walnut counter, folded his knotty hands on the counter and watched me enter with a shrewd stare. He greeted me by some strange and unfamiliar name and welcomed me back. I furrowed my brow in confusion; this elfish man knew me and asked him why he addressed me thus. With an impish smile, he pointed to the leather bound tome in my hand. I was not aware that I carried it with me until that moment. I handed it back to him. He said that he had another book for me that I may find more interesting.
Oud Tym Boek, such that it was, swirled with a dusty haze and the musty stench of damp moldy paper. I followed the strange man to a bookshelf full of rotting volumes. He pulled a thin shabby book and handed it to me. The leather cover’s gold lettering was an ensemble of bizarre, ancient, foreign and familiar. With a questioned look, I asked him what the title said and he insisted I read it aloud. I read, "De Weg van Een Donkore Engle" and translated "The Wedge of An English Donkey, was it a children's book?"
He had a peculiar glisten in his fiendish eyes, made a decadent chuckle and sheepish nod. He agreed that the British could be asses. He gave my arm an encouraging squeeze and bid me to enjoy the book. He assured me that it was not a children’s book. He directed me to Managasett Park which was full of purple flowering Datura trees, fragrant white thorn apple bushes, petunias and jimson weeds. He told me that just like last time when I borrowed a book, if I liked it then I would pay for it. I agreed in a daze, walked to the sweet smelling space, found a bench inside a nearby white gazebo. A familiarity itched my brain with sensations of déjà vu.
Surrounded with nature’s perfume, I opened the slender children's book and read aloud the title and author's name: "De Weg van Een Donkore Engle written by Geheime Schrijver.” I let out a childish giggle at the author's nom de plume, the last name meant Scribe. I may enjoy this little fairy tale in a foreign language and perhaps even understand it. The first page had a small watercolor print of a sinister road similar to Old Corchaug Road and the flora to the park: the Datura trees, thorn apple bushes, petunias and jimson weeds. I repeated the title: it meant ‘the way’ or ‘the road’ to somewhere.
As I turned to the second page and read aloud the poetic verse, there was cry of a white faced, lavender blue jay that dove past my face and landed on a tree branch. With obsidian eyes, it watched me and let out another gull-like scream of alarm. In a flurry of high-pitched rusty pump shrieks, the bird skipped with agitation among the weeds, flapped its wings of blue, white and black, screamed more warnings and approached me even closer. I held the book up and it took flight and was gone.
The next page had another odd illustration of a magpie seated on a sleeping child’s chest. It filled me with nervous dread. Was this something forbidden? I held the book and read aloud the eerie foreign verse on the opposite page that was like a vague and familiar form of English. The sing-song fairytale was like a poetic bedtime story, a nightmarish mixture of anthropomorphic animals, small horrified children, metaphysical alchemy, and cannibalistic creatures. Page after page filled me with dread and threatening fear as the verse and illustrations became ominous and harsh.
As I read aloud, a frightful impression of being watched crept into my heightened awareness. The grim colonial cedar shingled buildings scrutinized me with a surreptitious loathing as if some previous conduit of wicked insight opened up. I felt the dark windows of the compact white clapboard cottages stare down at me and dare me to continue reading. In defiance, I continued aloud since I could not comprehend the words in silence.
Lost in the cacophonic sound of the dissonant prose, I did not know how much time had passed. I did not know the day or my name save for the strange moniker the old man had addressed me. My watch had stopped and the sun remained fixed in the lower western sky over St. Oda’s Pond. I was aware of the single din of church bell for what seemed regular but it never sounded more than once to mark the hour.
The harsh discordant poetry began to make sense. The book spoke of blood, of eating flesh, of mallards and magpies,of an old woman that skinned a young child alive, of unnamable horrors wrought in tiled rooms, of black butchery, of shunned beasts, of a feast, of poisonous plants that opened the mind and soul to severance and of consciousness transformed. A shadow surrounded me and tore at my skin.
In Managasett Park, I stood up and saw all points of time at once: as it was now, yesterday, ten years ago, fifty years ago, a thousand years ago and more. In a nightmarish trance I saw a fantastic revelation of all time in a single moment. Time no longer mattered, hundreds of thoughts shouted and that begged my attention from a dark abyss within my mind.. A journey once begun had to end. I turned to the last page which was blank except for a small gossamer wisp of gray penciled thread that slithered on the page into the name the old man called me.
The cursed jays returned and they surrounded me in a lavender blue whirlwind that screamed through my soul and lifted me into the menacing black night sky. They surrounded me not for an attack but to plead to stop. They were saviors, redeemers and rescuers of St. Oda. Their deafening shrieks and warning cries forewarned of a perpetual hopelessness to come. A deafening howl of ecstatic pain and wretched agony shrouded me in gloom.
Higher, higher and higher I was lifted in the tumult of fury. I screamed and struggled but the deafening roar drowned out any other sound. The sickening sweet scents of Datura trees, toxic white thorn apple bushes, venomous petunias and lethal jimson weeds choked and poisoned me with their overpowering stench. Their lethal notes transformed and distorted my consciousness.
The terror of living existence waned from my body as my soul tore free with excruciating pain of being. There was an abrupt black silence. My soul was free and I watched my twisted, agonized body fall the ground with a lifeless thud in Managasett Park as the heraldic jays descended upon it to feast.
I no longer cared for the entrapment of life and it’s never ending pain and sorrows. I was free! Free! FREE!
The book had shown me the way! The lucid revelation was all too clear to me now. Liberated from my physical form I had learned "De Weg van Een Donkere Engle." The old man from the bookstore opened the black night sky for me to enter into an eternal light: the everlasting fires of damnation. I was home and in tormented harmony. That old devil had shown me The Way of a Dark Angel!
I had indeed paid for the book: with my soul.
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© Foley, 2008
Thomas Foley was born in Amityville, New York. He is an avid reader, collector of comic books and a movie fan. In college, he studied music composition wrote many musical works, short stories and scripts. In 1986, Thomas graduated from the University of South Florida with a degree in Pre-Med. He returned to USF to study business. He has worked in various governmental agencies for over twenty years. He is a member of the Mystery Writers of America.