THE STOGUMBER

“On a fresh afternoon, Bindon suggested we drive the motorcycle back to the stert peninsula as a lark. From what I'd seen on our excursion in search of the Pfingsthl, I could not imagine why anyone would want to return to such a bleak place with its smelly mud flats and peculiar, inbred inhabitants “as a lark.” Yet somehow the light, airy quality of the day had boistered our spirits to the point where we agreed wholeheartedly with this absurd suggestion.
After throwing some provisions together, we were on our way, Tyler in the sidecar and myself on the back of the bike behind Bindon. Lines of poplars, old church towers, hedges, gateways, all illuminated by patches of dappled sunlight, flew past my eyes in a sort of opiated reverie, a secret country of short vistas, deserted, peaceful, and dreamy. Gradually these winding lanes gave way to the open pastureland and mud flats of the peninsula’s end; a hard, clear, light seemed to delineate each object I gazed at with an unnatural clarity. By the time Bindon stopped the bike, my feeling of well-being turned into hyper awakeness: colours seemed over-saturated, the edges of objects jagged. I felt my temples begin pound. The others were similiarly effected - Tyler had walked to the side of the road and was being sick into a ditch; Bindon's eyes were dilated and his hands shaking. A short ways off I saw a small brick chapel - it seemed imperative to get out of the sun into somewhere dark and cool, so I gathered the other two and we began to stagger towards it.
The relief on entering the chapel was palpable; yet as Bindon noted “this isn't right either.”The interior was very dark, the only light coming from a grimy occulus some forty feet above the altar. Tyler waved us over to a small niche behind the rood screen. “What do you make of this?” he asked us. In the niche a partially decomposed head with a headdress of rotting vegetation sat in a filthy bell jar, its huge eyes glowing hypnotically out of its dim hiding place. A small wooden plaque below the head bore a grim oath:“So here’ a thought your teeth should clench: all greenness comes to withering”
As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I noticed that the jar was surrounded by offerings of vegetables and small pieces of paper, scrawled with requets for help from “the Stogumber”, presumably the head’s name. Most of these plaintive notes were from people afflicted with chronic insomnia. I found that the more of these notes I read the more I began to feel that the whole peninsula, including the head itself, was afflicted with this grim malady. With some difficulty I managed to avert my eyes from the stogumber; Tyler’s eyes were watering and Bindon was grinding his teeth. The air had gotten unbreathably tense, black spots bubbled into of my face, a spiralling of anxiety and panic. As if from a vast distance I heard Tyler stammer “We g-g-gotterrr l-l-leave he c-comming b-b-blood-die h-huge!” Somehow we got back to the motorcycle. Bindon couldn’t remember how to get it started, and pumped the ignition kick for an eternity before Tyler pulled the choke by accident.
Once clear of the Stert we began to feel more ourselves again, but the ensuing nightmares took us all several weeks to fully overcome.” ” - 1 2 3 GREENHOME -