Ashcombe
By Olivia Salter
Word Count: 5,782
The town of Ashcombe had a bell that no one rang anymore.
The statement arrived already damaged. It assumed that no one and anymore referred to stable conditions, and that the bell belonged to a history in which such distinctions once held. In Ashcombe, neither assumption could be trusted for long.
The bell hung in the center of the square beneath a massive, salt-white timber frame. No two records in the parish vestry agreed on when it was constructed. Looking up at it, Miriam Vale had the distinct impression that the wood had not been joined by carpenters, but had grown directly from the cracked cobblestones like a pale, calcified knuckle. The surface felt dense and cold as fossilized bone, though bone was merely a comparison she used because her mind still craved categories.
No one repaired the frame. No one removed the iron.
To intervene required a shared understanding of what counted as an act, and Ashcombe had been losing its grip on cause and effect for generations. The bell remained because removal implied an origin, and origin implied a moment before presence. The town’s geology did not reliably support a before. It was simply there in the way a low-hanging fog is there, except fog is occasionally noticed by those caught in it.
The bell was noticed in a different manner. Watching it was not an act directed at the iron; it was a performance the iron enacted through the eyes of those who looked.
There were ledger entries detailing the bell’s use in times of catastrophe. But in the damp drawers of the town hall, accounts were unstable objects. They shifted depending on who holds them, and sometimes, Miriam discovered, they altered their text when left entirely alone in the dark.
Famine. Flood. Fire. War.
The words appeared in faded irongall ink, though it was unclear whether they described actual historical events or were merely the hollow shapes left behind when time withdrew from the valley. Some versions claimed the bell warned the town of approaching soldiers. Others insisted it only tolled to mark what had already finished happening. A third, heavily water-stained diary suggested it did neither, serving instead to confirm that something vast had passed through the hills without leaving an interpretable residue.
No version corrected another. Correction presumes a shared reference point, and Ashcombe no longer maintained a baseline. Even disagreement tended to blur into repetition after a few pages, and repetition, Miriam knew, was indistinguishable from agreement if left long enough.
Beyond the northern rye fields lay Black Orchard. Or perhaps the fields lay beyond it; direction was one of the earliest structures to weaken here, crumbling so quietly that the surveyor’s maps continued to be drawn as if lines still meant distance.
From the ridge, the orchard resembled an ordinary grove of trees arranged in an inverted V across the valley. But trees was a word applied after observation, a safety net cast over the unfamiliar. What Miriam saw first was a dense, oily negative space that resembled vegetation only if one already believes vegetation was a permanent truth.
Autumn light approached the perimeter of the orchard and failed to complete its function. It did not scatter, nor did it cast shadows. It simply ceased to progress, arriving at a boundary where illumination could no longer decide what it was illuminating. The trunks were black in a manner that had nothing to do with burning, rot, or the absence of reflection. They were not dark; they were uncooperative with brightness.
In the earliest surviving parish maps, the orchard was already present. It was not introduced by a landlord; it was not marked as a hazard. It was simply included, as if the original cartographer had dipped his pen in ink and discovered a shape his hand did not remember drawing. Land records assumed its boundaries without hesitation, though those boundaries did not behave consistently when approached on foot. A man might walk twenty paces toward the first row of trunks and find himself thirty paces away, his boots caked in a dry, grey soil that smelled faintly of copper.
Every spring, something resembling flowering occurred—a pale, silent eruption of petals that looked like shredded linen. Every summer, fruit appeared on branches that may or may not have been connected to the roots. Every autumn, the fruit fell and persisted in place.
The apples sometimes appeared already fallen, as though descent were a human illusion. They possessed the expected weight and a waxy, flawless smoothness when Miriam picked one up, but the resemblance ended there. The fruit carried no scent. Not an absence of smell, but a total refusal to participate in olfactory description. When she pressed it to her nose, her mind slid sideways into an unrelated memory of a childhood basement.
Wildlife gave the grove a wide, circular berth. Deer grazed at the edge of the rye, their ears twitching, encountering a limit that did not announce itself as a fence. Birds nested in the hedgerows but never crossed the canopy. The insects were silent.
Children were warned not to enter, though no parent could locate the origin of the warning without encountering conflicting accounts that resolved into a static hum of memory.
The first child vanished in what the town called May.
May may not have referred to a month. It may have been a shorthand for an atmospheric condition in which disappearance became noticeable without necessarily having occurred at a definable point in time.
The boy—Caleb Monroe, according to a copperplate census—walked away from his father’s forge and was not followed by continuity. Continuity was a fragile property in Ashcombe, withdrawing from certain locations like an ebbing tide. He was seen moving toward the square, his small wool cap tilted back. After that, sight became non-applicable.
Search dogs tracked his scent northward. The handlers reported that the scent did not fade at the orchard’s edge; it ended. Ending, in this valley, was not a disappearance. It was the total removal of further tracking capacity. The hounds stopped not because they were frightened, but because pursuit ceased to be an applicable behavior. One black retriever attempted to leap across the invisible line, froze mid-stride, and then sat down, blinking up at the grey sky as if the concept of a forward direction had been scrubbed from its wet brain.
More children followed over the decades. A girl near the millpond. A boy by the cooper’s shed. Others whose identities degraded faster than their recorded absence. At first, the town interpreted these as losses—they wept, they dragged the river, they blamed wolves. Later, interpretation itself became unstable. Eventually, nothing required a meaning in order to persist. Events continued regardless of whether they were understood as events.
Miriam Vale had arrived in late November, her coat smelling of train smoke and city salt. Officially, she was funded by a historical society to study "archival discontinuities"—settlements that appeared in tax registries years before their physical founding, or records that failed to maintain consistency across duplicates.
Unofficially, she no longer trusted arrival as a valid concept. Not since her brother’s disappearance from his college dormitory three years ago. His absence had left a room in her family home that could not be categorized as either occupied or empty without changing its temperature. The room did not feel abandoned; it felt unassigned. And assignment, she had begun to suspect during her long nights over old texts, was not a property of things, but a fragile, desperate agreement among those left behind.
Ashcombe did not feel wrong when she walked its lanes. It felt insufficiently differentiated from whatever it might otherwise have been.
The limestone cottages stood in arrangements that suggested order without enforcing it. The lanes implied direction but did not require it; she frequently found ourselves back at the livery stable when she had walked in a straight line away from it. The townspeople were not unusual in their appearance. Unusual is a comparative term, and comparison requires a baseline. They smiled at her. They sold her bread and tea. They answered her inquiries with flawless grammatical structure.
But every interaction contained a delay—a microscopic, breathless pause before they spoke. It was as though each person had to sift through a cupboard of dead versions of themselves to locate one suitable for the conversation before proceeding.
On her fourth morning, Miriam stood inside the bakery. Margaret Hensley was a small woman with flour dust embedded in the lines of her knuckles, consistently described by her neighbors as kind. Consistency required a preserved relationship between repeated observations, which made Margaret an anomaly.
Miriam watched as Margaret reached beneath the counter. An amber glass bottle appeared. Whether it was concealed or not concealed was difficult to determine, because concealment requires a shared assumption about what is visible. With a steady hand, Margaret uncorked it and poured three drops of a thick, syrupy violet liquid into her husband’s morning coffee.
The man sat three feet away, reading a week-old paper. He did not look up. He took the mug, drank the coffee to the dregs, and left the shop to stack cordwood in the alley. There was no convulsion. No change in his breathing.
Miriam stayed by the pastry case, her fingers tightening around her notebook. "What was in the bottle, Margaret?"
Margaret didn't look up from her kneading. Her palms made a rhythmic slap-hiss against the dough. "I suppose I put something in it."
The sentence did not clarify intent or awareness. It simply occupied the structural position of an acknowledgment.
"Why?" Miriam asked, her voice sounding thin in the warm room.
"He snores," Margaret said.
This was neither a justification nor an evasion. It was the substitution of an unrelated causality into a space where an explanation was expected. Nothing resolved. Nothing escalated. The wood continued to be stacked outside the window.
When Miriam brought the matter to the town sheriff, he listened with his chin resting in his palm. His listening did not indicate attention; it was merely a temporary suspension of alternative processes.
"I’ll look into it," he said, his eyes tracking a fly on the windowpane.
No looking followed in any measurable sense. The report did not fail; it did not succeed. It simply ceased to propagate through the institutional pathways that normally carry consequences forward. When Miriam returned to his office the next afternoon, the desk was empty, though a fresh cup of tea steam rose from the hearth.
When she pressed him on the street later, he merely blinked through the grey drizzle. "She’s a good woman, Miss Vale."
"That does not address the relevance of what she did."
"It does here," he said, and turned the corner. There was no argument. Only a quiet divergence of operational frameworks.
That evening, the clouds dropped so low they touched the chimneys. Miriam walked toward the square, her boots clicking against the stones, when she saw the child sitting on the steps of the general store.
He was feeding birds. It was the boy from the census description—Caleb. He wore the same coarse wool trousers, though the hem was frayed into grey strings. A sparrow descended from the eaves, its small clawed feet settling into his open palm.
Miriam froze, her breath catching in her throat. "Caleb?"
The boy didn't look at her, but his hand closed around the sparrow. There was no struggle, no flutter of feathers. A brief, localized blur occurred between his fingers—a momentary softening of the space between skin and bone. When his hand opened again, his palm was empty. There was no blood, no feather, nothing that could be classified as a bird.
"They get upset," the boy said, his voice flat and clear.
"Who does?" Miriam stepped closer, her heart hammering against her ribs.
"Everyone."
"Why?"
The question did not require an answer. It was a test to see if questioning was still a functional human behavior. Miriam could not form another word; the space where an explanation should have emerged remained open and cold between them until the boy stood and walked into the fog toward the north.
Driven by a mounting, cold panic, Miriam retreated to the church. The basement was not reliably below the nave; she accessed it through a narrow door behind the altar that sometimes led down a spiral stone staircase, and sometimes opened directly into a long, level corridor lined with rotting cedar shelving.
The archives were vast but unordered. Bundles of vellum were tied with rotting hemp twine; pages repeated themselves without being identical.
Then, the bell rang.
It was not a mechanical event. There was no creak of old rope, no strike of a clapper against bronze. Sound was not produced; it was encountered as something already present inside the room. It originated in the square without requiring a location.
Miriam felt it vibrate through the stone floor, then through the soles of her shoes, until the iron resonance was shaking her teeth. Hearing was the wrong term. Her ribs were the bell; her skull was the frame.
The world shifted. Not spatially—the walls did not move. Not temporally—the lanterns did not go out. But the town redistributed its attention.
Through the high, dirty window of the cellar, she saw the townspeople. They did not run toward the square. They did not look up in alarm. They became situated within a configuration in which movement was no longer meaningful.
The sound grew louder, turning the air thick as tallow, and then it ceased to be attributable to the square. Source itself became an obsolete category. The sound was no longer behind her. It was not ahead.
It emerged from Black Orchard. Or rather, Black Orchard became the only available interpretation of an emergence.
Miriam stumbled up the stairs, her limbs heavy, as if the air were resisting her identity. She reached the lane. The northern fields were gone. They had not been swallowed by darkness; they had simply failed to stabilize into fields. The orchard was no longer a destination down the road. It was what remained when the road forgot to be a line.
The townspeople stood in the grey light, their faces turned toward the north. Orientation occurred without decision. Fear was present, but not as an emotion—it was a physical recognition that separation was no longer functioning.
Miriam looked down at her hands. Her fingers were pale, the outlines soft against the wool of her coat. The skin was losing its assignment. She was no longer Miriam Vale, an archivist from the city; she was a temporary arrangement of attention around a grief that did not remain consistent enough to be named.
The bell rang again from the black heart of the wood. It was not a signal. It was what remained when signal and the absence of signal could no longer be distinguished from one another.
And Ashcombe, if it could still be called a place, was only the faint, dissolving persistence of a gesture that had not yet decided whether it was still being observed.
Exhibit G: Pocket Notebook (Black Oilskin)
Recovered from Church Crypt, 03 December 1926
November 24
The notes from the 1712 ledger are accurate. The traveling priest (Father Thomas? The name in the register is partially illegible, appearing sometimes as Thomas and sometimes as Timber) was tracking the exact same semantic decay.
He notes that the orchard "refuses to come to a point." I felt this today while standing at the edge of the northern fields. If you look directly at a single branch, your eye slips off it. Not because it’s moving, but because the brain treats it as an error in the field of vision. It’s like trying to remember a word that is on the tip of your tongue, but experiencing that frustration as a physical landscape.
The townspeople aren't hiding anything. That’s the mistake I made during my first three days. I was looking for a conspiracy—a cult, a secret pact, a local poison. It’s much worse than that. A conspiracy requires a highly organized structure of intent. Here, intent is what is dissolving.
When Margaret Hensley dropped that violet tincture into her husband's coffee, she wasn't murdering him. When I asked her about it again this morning, she looked at the empty amber bottle on her shelf and asked me who had left it there. She didn't forget that she did it; she forgot that doing things has a trajectory.
November 27
The room in the rectory where I am staying has five corners now. I didn't notice the change until I tried to set my small brass travel clock down on the washstand. The stand sits against the north wall—or what I have been calling the north wall. The clock fell between the wood and the plaster, but it didn't hit the floorboards. I can hear it ticking, but the sound is coming from somewhere near the window frame.
I tried to write a letter to the Society in London today to request an early withdrawal of my stipend. The pen kept writing Ashcombe regardless of the sentence I intended. “Dear Sirs, I am writing to inform you that the Ashcombe is currently experiencing an Ashcombe of the historical records. The weather here is Ashcombe and I find that my health is Ashcombe.” I tore the page out and burned it in the grate. The smoke smelled like scorched linen and wet copper. The same smell as the apples.
November 29
I found Caleb Monroe again. He was standing by the well in the square. I asked him how old he was. He told me he was "three houses old." I didn't correct him. I knew what he meant. He doesn't measure his presence by the turning of the earth around the sun; he measures it by the number of structures that have remained stable enough to shelter his identity. He remembers his mother, but only as a specific shade of blue wool that sometimes appears near the livery stable.
The bell rang at three this afternoon. This time, I didn't try to close my ears. I opened my mouth to let the pressure equalize, but my breath came out gray. A fine, dry vapor that didn't dissipate in the room but settled on my sleeves like powder.
My brother’s room at home—the unassigned room—is here. It isn't a memory anymore. It is a physical encroachment, wedged precisely between the heavy iron hinges of the church door and the first row of oak pews. If I turn my head sharply to the left as I enter, the ancient Norman stone architecture shears away, replaced by his varnished pine dorm desk. His small, green glass student lamp sits squarely upon the rim of the stone baptismal font, its brass pull-chain dangling over the consecrated water. The lamp isn't turned on, but its green shade remains stark and hyper-specific, entirely uncooperative with the damp shadows of the nave.
I think he came here because he ran out of assignments. When the world stops telling a thing what it is supposed to signify, this is where that thing falls.
[Undated - Written in a heavy, erratic hand]
The stairs to the crypt are gone. There is only a slope now. The stones have smoothed themselves out, losing their edges like sugar under a tap.
I am writing this by the light of a single candle, but the flame isn't yellow. It is a small, upright oblong of absence. It shows me the words I am writing, but it doesn't show me my fingers holding the pencil.
it is not a wood
it is what happens when the observer gets tired
the bell is just the sound of the attention snapping
The priest was wrong about the Mercy Garden. It isn't a state of mercy because it is kind. It is merciful only because it stops asking you to maintain the weight of a name. My name is Miriam Vale, but the Miriam part is already thin enough to see through, and the Vale is just a direction that doesn't mean distance anymore.
The bell is striking from the orchard again, but the orchard is now inside the vestry. The trunks are coming up through the floorboards. They aren't breaking the wood; they are simply occupying the same space as the pine planks, as if the floor hasn't decided whether it wants to be a room or a grove.
I am going to step off the edge of the stairs now. Not because I am jumping, but because descent has ceased to be an applicable behavior.
The clock has stopped ticking near the window. It is just counting now. Without numbers.
Document Ref: MSS-1712-C (Priest’s Journal Extracts)
Condition: Severe water damage; ink migration
September the 4th, 1712
I have arrived in the valley of Ashcombe by the northern cattle path. The descent is steep, and the horse showed an uncommon reluctance as we neared the lower ridge, turning her head repeatedly back toward the high common.
The settlement is small—some forty hearths of local limestone—but it sits in a peculiar hollow where the sun seems to lose its sharpness early in the afternoon. The light here does not die by degrees of gold or red as it does in the south; it simply grows thin, like milk turned with water, until one realizes the trees have no shadows left beneath them.
The curate, Mr. Thorne, is an aged man whose tongue is too large for his teeth, or perhaps he has merely forgotten how to shape our ordinary English tongue with speed. He received my letters of presentation from the Bishop without reading them. He held the parchment in his palms for some minutes, turning it over as if it were an object of curious weight rather than literacy, and then said: “We had a name for the Bishop once.” I asked him what had become of it. He did not answer.
September the 6th, 1712
This morning, intending to map the parish glebe for the tithe commissioners, I walked past the northern rye fields toward the valley floor. The tenants were at work with their sickles, yet their labor passed in a silence that felt heavy upon the ears. When a man dropped his stone, there was no sharp clink against the flint; the sound was small and flat, as if the soil had swallowed the echo before it could rise.
At the boundary of the parish land, the rye ends against a ditch. Beyond this ditch lies what the inhabitants call the Black Orchard. The grove occupies an inverted V shape in the dip of the valley. From three furlongs distance, it presents the aspect of ancient damsons or pears. Yet upon closer approach, the eye is troubled by a geometry that refuses to come to a point.
I crossed the ditch to inspect the timber. The first tree stood some ten yards inward. Its trunk was of a thickness equal to a man’s waist, but the bark was smooth—unnaturally so—and of a blackness that cannot be likened to any natural substance. It was a black that seemed to have no surface at all. When I extended my hand to touch it, my fingers encountered the wood exactly three inches before my eyes expected the impact. The sense of sight and the sense of touch were out of square by a measurable degree. The wood was cold—not the cold of winter frost, but the dead, dense cold of iron left in a well.
I looked up into the canopy. The leaves were narrow and hung straight down like strips of lead. They did not rustle, though a sharp breeze was blowing from the ridge that kept the rye behind me in constant motion. Through the branches, the sky did not appear blue or white; it was gray, but a gray that seemed to have been scoured of all distance. One could not tell if the clouds were forty cubits above the trees or resting directly upon the topmost twigs.
September the 7th, 1712
I have spent the night in a state of great unease. My right hand—the one with which I touched the black trunk yesterday—remained cold until the cock crew. When I held it to the candle, the flame did not cast the shadow of my third finger upon the whitewashed wall. The shadow was simply a blunt, gray thumb.
I returned to the ditch at noon, determined to find if any fruit grew within the grove. I took with me a young pointer dog belonging to the innkeeper. The beast ran merrily enough through the rye, but as we reached the gray mud of the ditch, he stopped mid-bound. His tail went between his legs and his ears flattened, yet he did not growl or whine. He simply ceased to look forward. His eyes became fixed upon his own paws, and though I called him by name and shook the leather leash, he remained as still as a stone dog on a squire’s gate.
I left the dog there and walked into the first row of trees alone. The ground beneath the canopy is covered in a gray moss that has no root. It lifts away from the earth in greasy sheets if stepped upon. After twenty paces, the sound of the reapers in the rye field died out completely. The silence here is a weight that presses against the temples like water when a man dives deep into a river.
In the center of the grove, I found the fruit. It hung from short, black spurs—hundreds of apples, each the size of a fist, their skins as smooth and yellow as lard. They hung perfectly still on their stems. I plucked one from a low bough. It came away without that sharp snap which a good fruit makes; it simply separated from the wood as if it had only been resting there by agreement.
The apple had no weight. When I say it had no weight, I do not mean it was light like a feather; I mean that when I placed it in my palm, my hand forgot that it was holding anything at all. If I closed my eyes, my arm fell to my side as if empty, yet when I opened them, the yellow shape was still there between my fingers.
I brought the fruit to my mouth to taste it. There was no skin to bite through. My teeth entered the meat without resistance, as if I were chewing grease or cold air. It had no flavor of sugar, nor of acid, nor of earth. Instead, as the pulp lay upon my tongue, a terrible thing occurred: I remembered with absolute clarity the room where my mother died forty years ago—not the room as it was when she lived, but the exact arrangement of the empty chairs after her body had been carried out to the churchyard. I saw the dust on the rungs of her stool; I saw the latch on the window that did not quite catch. These were things I had never noted when I was a boy of seven, yet they arrived in my mind now with the force of a blow.
I spat the meal upon the gray moss. It did not sink into the ground. It lay there, white and dry, like salt.
September Nuremberg [The entry has no proper date, the word written and scratched out three times]
I have been in the church basement for two days, though Mr. Thorne says it has only been an hour since the sun went down. The staircase did not have thirteen steps as it did on Tuesday; I counted nine, and then I was at the bottom, though the ceiling here is higher than the steeple.
The records of this parish are all wrong. There is a registry for the year 1640 in which the names of the dead are written in the column for marriages, and the births are recorded as if they had occurred in the winter of 1750. When I pointed this out to the curate, he smiled and rubbed his floury hands together. “The years don't hold their ink well in the valley,” he said. “They run together if the weather turns damp.”
I can hear the bell from here. It is not the church bell—the ropes above the porch are rotted through, and the jackdaws have filled the cage with twigs. This sound comes from the orchard. It is a low, flat chime that does not ring out; it rings inward, as if someone were striking a great kettle inside my own chest.
The apple I spitting out is still on my tongue. I cannot wash it away with wine or water. Every time the bell chimes, another piece of my house in Wiltshire comes back to me—the shape of the garden gate, the iron ring on the stable door, the name of my sister’s first child. But they are coming back to me as things that have finished being real.
The orchard does not teach cruelty. It only shows what remains when the names of things are allowed to slip away. If compassion is learned, what happens when the lesson ends? The world becomes very quiet. The names fall away first. Then the shapes.
I am writing this with a piece of charcoal I found in the grate, but the letters are becoming very long. They look like the branches of the trees outside. They are uncooperative with the white paper. They are trying to become something else.
Document Ref: T-1712-09 (Exchequer Transcript)
Condition: Vellum brittle; severe lateral shrinking
[Item 14: Regarding the Northern Demesne]
To the Commissioners of Her Majesty’s Treasury, greeting. Be it known that in the measuring of the northern parcels for the tithing of rye, wheat, and mast, the surveyors have encountered a great impediment in the drawing of the chains. The land which lies three hundred paces beyond the sheep-fold of Bartholomew Vance cannot be cast into acres or roods by any ordinary rule of the rod. When the chain is cast out by the left-hand man, it measures forty links; yet when the right-hand man doth tell the iron, he finds but twenty-six, though the link itself be not bent or doubled in the grass.
In the old rolls of the Abbey of St. Jude-in-the-Fens (now defaced), this parcel is not recorded as a tenement or common, but is set down under the name of The Mercy Garden. The name is an error of the tongue, or perhaps an indulgence of the old monks, for it is no garden that may be fenced with quickset or ditch. The boundaries of the said Mercy Garden are noted not by stones or water-courses, but by the behavior of the cattle when the evening bell is struck. Where the beast turns her back upon the hedge, there the Garden is said to have its entry.
[Item 15: The Bounds as Declared by the Inhabitants]
We examined on oath Simon Garrow, elder, who hath lived seventy years in the shadow of the ridge. He being asked where the parish land ends and the Mercy Garden begins, made answer thus: “The boundary is where the water forgets its downhill path.”
Being pressed by the King’s Clerk to give a more certain testimony for the purposes of the tax, he declared that the Garden hath four corners, which may be known by these signs:
- The First Corner: Is marked by a gray ash tree that stood in the reign of King Harry the Eighth. The tree is no longer there, but the place where it stood remains cold in the summer, so that no weed will sprout from the mold, and the crows will not light upon the earth where the shadow used to fall.
- The Second Corner: Is where the northern lane becomes wider than the fields it passes through. A man may walk three abreast with his sons upon the road, yet if he look over his shoulder, the lane appears no broader than a ribbon between the stones.
- The Third Corner: Is the place where the bell-sound is found to be thickest. In this corner, if a man speak a word, his voice does not cross the air to his neighbor, but remains in his own ears for the space of an hour, so that he must wait for his own silence to return before he may hear another answer.
- The Fourth Corner: Is no corner at all, but is that point where a man realizes he hath been walking toward his own home for two leagues, yet continues to see the black trees ahead of his horse’s ears.
[Item 17: Concerning the Discontinuance of Tithing]
Nil. Out of the Mercy Garden nothing may be gathered for the Queen’s grace or the Rector’s table. The fruit which grows there hath no value at market; for though it be fair and smooth to the sight, it is found to be empty of all substance if brought past the church ditch.
The tenants who gather the windfalls for their hogs report that the meat of the apples does not rot in the cellar, nor does it breed worms. It remains white and clear like tallow for years, but if a man eat of it, he loses all desire for honest bread, and will sit by his hearth with his mouth open, listening for the chime from the wood until his fingers grow gray and thin like the twigs of the damson.
Furthermore, we do certify that the land of the Mercy Garden is increasing its borders by small degrees each autumn. The surveyor’s stake which was driven into the rye field in the year of the Great Frost (1709) was found this morning to be three yards inside the gray moss of the grove, though the wood-ward swears upon his soul that no tree hath moved, nor hath any seed been planted by human hand.
The names of the tenants who held the plots adjoining are this day struck from the tax roll. Not because they have died or fled the country, but because their houses cannot be found by the collector, though the smoke of their chimneys may still be seen rising from the middle of the black wood when the wind is from the north.
The record ends here. The lower portion of the vellum has been eaten away by a damp mold that leaves the surface smooth, dark, and entirely uncooperative with the pen.
No comments:
Post a Comment