A small crowd had gathered around a little, grey stone house in Tullgotha. They stared as a hooded member of the City Watch hauled out a very limp knohm enshrouded in cobwebs and somewhat pale of face. One foot dangled as he was dragged, trailing along the ground creating a feeble, disjointed jangle from a bell on his shoe. The inert body was slung onto a low hand cart pulled by a large, grey rock oafe* and Razzles was dragged off through the narrow streets to the city sanatorium.
* Unlike oaves in general, rock oaves are great, grey creatures that don’t grow much in the way of moss, fungus or other floral elements about their persons, only a smattering of green or yellow lichens. They are naturally belligerent and ructious, and not suited to normal oafely duties however, suitably drugged with the right blend of mold and sludge a rock oafe can be an almost ideal beast of burden.
Sometime later, in the ‘completely-out-patients’ wing of the sanatorium, Auger the apothecary peered down at the body through his complex, red medical lenses, rimmed by rotating dials and intricate scales and made various ‘hmmff’ noises. He applied assorted tinctures and unctions, poked relevant orifices and made a few scribbly notes.
"Dysentresse," he finally announced to his disturbingly hunched assistant, "Worst case I've seen."
Indeed, Razzles hadn't moved or reacted in any way since he had been discovered in his web-festooned home by a nosey neighbour. All of Apothecary Auger's efforts had produced no favourable outcomes.
"They go like this in the end. First, depression or drowsiness, then they fall asleep somewhere and if you don't get in soon enough it's pretty much impossible to wake them."
He tried a smart slap on the knohm's face. When this proved ineffective he put a wad of fabric up the patient's nose and lit it, waiting to see if the tingle of flame on a nostril might do the trick.
"Terrible malady," he opined, "Some disorders affect the body, some the mind. This one seems to ravage the very spirit of a creature. No one really knows what causes it." The assistant listened patiently, but showed absolutely no sign that he either heard or took the slightest bit of interest. "Some say," Auger went on, "that we all have many different forms in many different worlds and dysentresse comes when one of our selves loses all interest and gives up. Terrible affliction."
Auger tried spinning suddenly, without warning and yelling ‘wah!’ into the knohm's ear, whilst waggling his hands right over his eyes. Still nothing. Another slap maybe?
“Completely disentresse dead.”
The pair eventually moved off, leaving Razzles breathing faintly but unresponsive.
“We'll bag him up and keep an eye on him. If he starts to exhibit any disturbing symptoms put him in the basement.” Those would seem to be Auger's last words on the subject.
*****
Grimmbros slept an unnatural sleep, a whole day passing over him until a shadow of uneasiness swept through his deep dream. Initially, he slept on regardless, however, this intruding emotion would not leave his unconscious mind, it swelled to a niggling crescendo until he could, eventually, no longer ignore it. Something deep within the urgh-bane's subconscious brain hauled him out of his somnolent state with a violent lurch. He sat bolt upright, fists clenched and face bent into a scowl; the force of his resurrection was a surprise to himself, let alone the two elbhs that were presently coming to the end of a trajectory* into which they had been launched from the startled rise of the urgh-bane.
* Grimm was used to folks entering into trajectories about his muscular form, such flights often being followed up with a bit of offensive holding or intentional grounding, whatever gained a few more yards or resulted in putting something or someone 'out'.
Grimmbros rubbed and then tried to focus his bleary eyes on the two tiny creatures as they tumbled and rolled across the grass beyond his feet. One crashed with a whumpf against a stone, legs in the air, and head contorted to an awkward angle against his elevated torso. The other, his face a mask of horror, glided face down through the lush green blades, to the edge of the lake, finally to disappear over the bank with a pebble-sized sploosh!
“Am I having some kind of episode?” Grimmbros asked of the general environment to which he had been aggressively summoned.
He still had a residual feeling of being in some kind of danger; but as his senses mustered, he realised that he was still by the tranquil pond, and his assailants were, apparently, little more than two flying clowns, no more threat than a couple of half-decent breakfast sausages. He relaxed his hands and rubbed his eyes once more.
“Who are you?” he asked, “And why the Rimbaldicus were you climbing on me?”
The answer, to his further surprise, came from his right.
“It is me, Mr Grimmbros, Sir: the..." he hesitated for a moment inwardly annoyed to find himself going along with his own namelessness, "Elbh!” With a startled flinch, Grimm spun round to face the voice, re-clenching a fist in the process. “Hey!” the elbh shouted, backing away a few feet in a hurried scamper. “Calm down, Mr Grimm, Sir, it is me, see?” The little elbh held his hands out in a wide gesture of revelation, simultaneously displaying his injured leg, which appeared now to have a much nicer stick, much more effectively attached. “No need to go all urgh-bane on me!”
“Elbh?” Grimmbros asked; confused: “Really? What are you doing back here?”
“Trying to help you, Mr Grimm, Sir,” he pleaded, eyes still fixed on the clenched house-sized fist. “Why? What help could I possibly procure from you? If you really wanted to help, then you would’ve left me to finish my well-earned slumber: I was in a happy place...” Grimmbros’ comments trailed off with a forlorn tone of disappointment, echoing the thought: “a happy place… happy...”
“You have been bitten Mr Grimmbros, Sir, you have been poisoned!”
“ Bitten? Poisoned? What are you talking about?" What are you talking about?"
The answer came back from his right: two more elbhs stood before him now, one decidedly drenched, the other, painfully bruised. The wet elbh, still dripping from his recent rendezvous with the pond, was the vocal one.
“It is very simple, Sirrr.” The voice of this little fellow was almost condescending, a little arrogant and most definitely authoritative: "You have been bitten by the despondicus mosquito, a native dweller of secluded waterrr bodies, such as this; a deadly little beast; worthy of serrrious consideration indeed! And you, Sirrr," he pointed rather indelicately at Grimmbros, "would surely have been its latest victim if it werre not for his deft diagnosis!” he thumbed at the elbh to his side who, Grimmbros noticed, wore a pair of small round glasses perched on the end of his nose which had one nostril oddly bigger than the other.
For some reason, deep emotions began to swell within Grimmbros again. A sense of threat; he felt completely incapable of suppressing it. The realisation that he was unable to control this foreboding sensation caused him even more internal turmoil: alarm began to brew behind this strange taste of danger teaming up to drown the urgh-bane in a sheer tidal wave of panic.
His heart became a great cauldron of boiling anxiety, massive palpitations thundering throughout his sweating body. He had no idea why he should be feeling this way; it was as if someone was forcing these feelings on him; as if someone was implanting their fears into his mind.
“These overwhelming feelings of despondency that you have been wallowing in: the rrreluctance that you have manifested to leave this grrrotesque little pond; it is all a symptom of being bitten by the despondicus mosquito,” the vociferous one revealed. As he lectured, Grimm was further unnerved by the fact that this dampened one never actually made eye contact, instead he seemed constantly to be looking at a spot near the top of Grimmbros’ forehead.
Grimmbros, felt a heaving urge to tread on the elbhs, kick a few squirrels and run and hide.* Instead, he just touched his forehead to see if anything was on there.
“And you have been injected with the venom known as ‘despairrricum’.” This final drawn-out word was accompanied by much waggling of fingers and the improbably high raising of one eyebrow and deep lowering of the other. The urgh-bane was a battlefield of fight versus flight. He was struggling with all his willpower to prevent himself succumbing to the flight stimuli, fighting to hold on to just enough composure to force himself to listen to the elbh’s explanation. He couldn’t help feel though, as bizarre as it sounded, that someone, somewhere, really did not want him to hang around to hear this.
* The thought of kicking squirrels briefly took him back to his childhood days pretending to be a Chicken Scratching hero with the other kids. Squirrels... they went a long way.
“This little crrritterrr," announced the elbh apparently to Grimmbros' hair, "secrrretes the chemical directly into your blood strream, which then travels swiftly to your brain, and it is this that creates the overbearrring unwillingness to go anywhere else.” The fast-drying elbh seemed quite comfortable as he settled into lecture mode.
He peered down the length of his large, pointed nose, which hung like a rock precipice over the bristling forest of a moustache that grew profusely under its protective shade. The elbh wore an orderly criss-cross of belts and pouches over a khaki uniform that was so crisply pressed that, even though he was drenched from head to foot, was still in impeccable order. On his head he wore a small conical helmet with an olive-green sash tied about, and in his hand was a large, ornate bow.
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“It is imperative, you see, Sirrr, for the mosquito to keep large crrreaturrres," he looked Grimmbros up and down knowingly at this juncture before returning his focus somewhere above the urgh-bane's eyebrows, "such as yourself, as near to its brrreeding grrround as possible." Grimmbros felt an urge to check his hair at the elbh's errant gaze. "This is so as to provide food for its larvae, you understand. A marvellous achievement! By causing an overrrwhelming feeling of despondency, the pathetic victim, in this case, you Sirrr, is completely drained of all motivation, and so remains rrriveted to the vicinity. A handy local larder of sustenance all ready for the hungry little chavies to satiate their rrravenous desires."
Though officer-like in appearance, the elbh was decidedly professor-like in manner, and he certainly was not shy about professing his admiration for the troublesome creature, and its offspring. As he babbled on, Grimmbros felt another assault launched by the massed ranks of the flight-brigade against his dithering determination to hang about, but he needed to see if anything useful would come out of this biology lesson. Besides, he was somewhat distracted as the second elbh periodically made odd whistling noises through his lesser nostril.
“What is more, unlike other all mosquitoes, Despondicus does not fly off once it has bitten you, oh no! And this is the real beauty of the beast: it stays attached," the elbh grabbed his own ear at this point, "injecting more and more venom as the need arrrises," this he accompanied by tugs at his lobe, "to ensure that you rrremain until the larvae hatch from their eggs, and can then feed off of your sleeping body. Then, and only then, Sirrr, will it release its bite, retrrract its magnificent proboscis, and fly off.” The elbh had produced for this exclamation, from somewhere on his person, a long cane, and used it dramatically to demonstrate the flight path of the triumphant mosquito.
Grimmbros realised that he was not half as impressed with this bug as the uniformed, professor-like elbh was, and as the flight-battalion had planted another flag of territorial victory within his heart, he seemed determined now, more than ever, to lash a wild kick at the rambling midget and run to the lake. His mind was sufficiently derailed from this course, however, by the sudden change in dialogue and some more disconcerting nasal whistling.
The elbh that had been at the bridge chipped in at this point, "That awful Norris creature used to come here to collect mosquitoes for her horrible jam. That's what made it red you know!" he pulled a face of disgust at that thought.
“We were just about to remove the bug from your ear canal, when you awoke and threw us off.” This time, the battered, semi-nasally challenged elbh spoke. He had, what can only be described as, a medical appearance about him. He was wearing a pale tunic, although now heavily soiled and a little tattered, and carried a small, dark rucksack with a big clasp on the top. His little round glasses glinted in the sunlight, as he brandished, sword-like, a bent pair of tweezers. “If we do not remove the mosquito soon Sir, you will stay here, and you will die here."
“Actually, I might add,” injected the professor elbh, “that you will be eaten alive!” the eyebrows once more scattered in disarray. Grimmbros thought long and hard, mostly hard, about his predicament. On the one hand, he considered just poking a finger into the ear in question to squash the wretched insect, followed by a bout of random small forest creature abuse and elbh booting, but he didn't know if he could be bothered.
"Might I suggest you lie down on one side and we'll get tweezering," the medically oriented elbh offered with a quick double click into the air of his implement. Notions of resistance arose in Grimmbros' mind like water in a partially blocked lavatory before draining away with a flush of pessimism. He acquiesced and the deed was efficiently done.
"Now, you won't feel much difference on the rrrremoval of the offending wee beasty," cautioned the one that Grimmbros began to think of as Major Elbh.
"No indeed," enjoined Doctor Elbh waving the extracted insect, "However, I have just the tonic. Have a slug of this,” he offered. Grimm expected something liquid from a bottle, instead, the elbh thrust something soft and chewy into the urgh-bane's mouth, "This should brighten you up a bit."
“What is it? Grimmbros asked masticating obediently, noting the thick, juicy content of the rather leathery gum stimulating his taste buds and sliding down his throat with a bitter after-taste.
"King bog slug," came the reply."It exudes a potent chemical that, not only acts as an antidote to the mosquito bite, but should fill you with a verve and ardour rarely experienced."
Grimmbros paused in his jaw movements for a moment, before making the facial equivalent of a shrug and continuing, "Not bad, I've tasted better."
Major Elbh asked Grimmbros about his purpose and destination beyond the woods. On hearing that the urgh-bane had encountered a dark ‘beest’ and done battle with it near Tullgotha, the elbhs were visibly interested. Even more so when told that the beest had escaped with an egg-like device of unknown origin.
"That beest passed through these very woods some days ago,” Medical Elbh grumbled.
"That device is evil," chimed in Major Elbh, "It is not a thing of this world and can brrrring nae good!" There was no hope of eyebrow reconciliation at this latest departure.
As Grimmbros turned back and forth from one excited small person to the next, he felt something of the old chicken scratching champion returning. His spirits were brightening at the prospect of a smiting of some kind and he felt an urge to be on the move.
"Hunt down that beest and rrrretrrrrieve the object of its intent! It needs to be in good hands." By this time Grimmbros was so enthused he was on his feet and pumping up his muscles in a series of flamboyant poses and poultry-inspired stretches before jogging off around the swamp to follow the path that Fürgůïn had taken.
*****
Fürgůïn's head felt heavy as he gradually became conscious.. Eyes still closed, he lay unmoving, reluctant to disturb the stillness of doing nothing, not wanting to move even an eyelid. The brightness of the blue butterfly was gone, but it was alright, alright being alone. Just as well. In the end, don't you always end up alone? He allowed himself a few moments of bitter moping before realising that he wasn’t actually very comfortable.
The sun’s warmth felt clammy, his skin tingled hotly, perhaps he was beginning to burn. Yet he felt disinclined to move despite the acidic heat. He became aware of a musty scent hanging like cobwebs in his airways. How long had he been asleep? Drawing a deep breath, he stifled a cough and noticed a shadow that was distinctly not a butterfly passing over his face, a slinking movement curling in deliberate slow motion. He opened his eyes, but they were blurry from sleep, a fusty thickness making it hard to breathe.
With a blink, he went to raise a hand to his brow, but a clinging stickiness pulled at his arm. Eyes now wide open, Fürgůïn saw a tapering, sickly, pink tendril lined with rubbery suckers swaying just inches above his face. As he twisted his body in an attempt to sit up, something muscular, the colour of dead flesh, coiled and tightened about his torso like the arm of an octopus.
Fürgůïn fought a bout of panic flushing through a skull seemingly clogged with glue. He was enfolded by a growth of sinuous, pink tentacles each longer than himself and as fat as his head. The more he struggled, the more the things squeezed, exuding a transparent slime that dangled in ugly, viscous strings wherever they made contact.
He felt his body being lifted up by fibrous limbs far more powerful than his own feeble arms with little hands that ineffectually snatched at grass and moss in an attempt to prevent whatever was happening. From the corner of his eye he could make out a leathery sac at the base of the tentacles where they were fattest, a lipped cyst that twitched and spasmed before belching out a thick puff of ashen spores. Fürgůïn instinctively understood that he shouldn’t allow the stagnant cloud into his lungs, but a sudden yanking clasp at his stomach forced an intake of breath that left him choking and gasping.
The spores clogging his airways, Fürgůïn knew that the fight was draining out of him. His limbs drooped at his sides as the red fungus gathered in ever- tightening coils about his torso. There was nothing that he could do except lay back and gasp in the burning, squeezing grip.
Allowing his arms and legs to relax, Fürgůïn tried to calm his panic and to assess his options. How long would it take for this thing to digest his body or render him unconscious? Days? Hours? He saw a stick at the base of the fungus tendrils - perhaps he could reach it, stab the thing with it.
The sun gradually moved above the network of branches and a fan of bright beams abruptly cut though the foliage causing the renling to squint. Partially blinded by the light, Fürgůïn noticed a large dark orb above him in the canopy. Haloed by streaming brightness, it seemed to be growing slowly larger among the stabbing rays of the sun. No, not larger, closer, descending steadily toward him.
The largest spider Fürgůïn had ever seen was lowering itself on a single thread directly over his face. He attempted to wriggle, but this again caused the fungus to tighten its coils. There was nothing that he could do except wait for the inevitable. He closed his eyes as the first exploratory touch of one of the spider's feet brushed his cheek.
The thing didn't allow its weight to press on the red fungus, rather it hung on its thread, its feet probing, examining its quarry. As the creature leaned in, Fürgůïn lifted his head and could see its eyes: two big ones, shiny, liquid blood red, a number of smaller ones arrayed above the two.
A pair of curving jaws tipped with needles parted as the thing arched in readiness. Fürgůïn winced, trying to lean out of reach. Then the great arachnid struck, scissoring into one of the fungal arms, causing all the suckers arrayed along its length to twitch in unison.
As the bewildered renling gazed on, something moved beyond the spider, appearing to part the light beams that daggered through the foliage. A single stick, probing, reaching, edged toward the spider from behind. As it made contact with the spider's bulbous abdomen, the spider froze, legs drawing inward. Fürgůïn’s head rolled back, his neck unable to support it any longer.
The stick poked forward again causing the spider to recoil jerkily a foot or so up its thread, twisting to face its assailant. There was a high sound, half scream, half gasp and the stick was flung, missing the spider by a good cubit, landing among a bunch of furred fern fiddleheads not far from Fürgůïn's trailing right hand. He could hear rapid footfalls, as if running in panic.
One by one, Fürgůïn felt the suckers clinging to his flesh slipping away, the fibrous arms becoming flaccid. The spider’s bite must be venomous, aimed at stealing the fungus’ prey. Squirming in an undignified wriggle, Fürgůïn slid from the great tendrils onto the moss below and rolled away as hard as he could.
To his horror, as he turned, he saw the spider hurrying down in pursuit. He rolled harder, faster, legs kicking and arms scrabbling straight onto another ugly, red fungus, but his momentum carried him right over it before it could respond. It unfurled, rising up in ugly curls into the path of the spider, causing it to stop, uncertain, hesitant.
This was enough, Fürgůïn summoned all his reserves, wobbled to his feet and began running in a drunken curve, all the while peering anxiously over his shoulder. To his surprise he crashed straight into the enormous thighs of someone running the opposite way. Fürgůïn recognised the faded orange, check pattern on the tight, yellow trousers before him as he gasped for breath. He looked up. Grimmbros looked down.
The renling panted as he wiped slime and web threads from his face and arms. The urgh-bane glanced rapidly around as if expecting trouble to emerge from the foliage and then he looked back down again. Fürgůïn met his gaze before checking that nothing was following him. Grimm's chest heaved and he appeared ruffled. Fürgůïn eyed him suspiciously. "Was that you back there?" he asked, narrowing his eyes."
"Was what who, back where?" Grimm replied enigmatically. For a moment there was silence.
The urgh-bane spat something brown and phlegm-like into the undergrowth and mumbled distractedly, “Razzles should have one of them king slugs, that'd stop his moping.” He paused as if something needed to be said, but thought better of it. “ Come on then! Let's get to motion. There's a lot of ground to cover and much time to make up!” Grimm seemed to have lost all of the malaise that he had developed back at the swamp, if fact he seemed energised and twitchy, blinking frequently and breathing alarmingly quickly. His pupils were a lot larger too, almost filling his whole eye area. Fürgůïn was lost for words.