Subterranean

1 SOME MIGHT CALL IT SHAMBHALA -- AND SOME MIGHT CALL IT SHEOL Setting out on his mission, eager to follow the stranger, Duff Duffel heard the soft-headed boys sniggering at him as he left the only surviving village pub in Tonsell-by-the-Stream, Cornwall. "Dee old Dee!" called the boy Bosky, as Duff clutched his old Navy coat about himself in the late afternoon May drizzle and shuffled past the alley where the young wastrels clacked their dice and their skateboards. The boy Bosky wasn't such a bad sort; he had to give the old man a jeer or two, but he was never one to call him a stinking old drunk, like that Upson fellow. Duff gave the jeering no more thought than he gave the chattering of squirrels in Smithson Wood. He knew the locals thought him daft, called him Daft Old Duff, wrote him off as a senile guzzle-guts, and he cared not a speck, because in his time he'd seen marvels and dreams come to life, indeed he had. His soul had left his body and flown to the Palace of Phosphor; he had bestrode the rings of Saturn and he had seen dryads dancing in the circles of stone. He belched a memory of the three ales he'd drunk -- drunk them watching the stranger in the pub -- and he picked up his pace, beginning to wheeze in keeping up with the interloper, who was now fifty yards up the lane, heading for the edge of the village. Mr. MacCrawley was this burly, sharply dressed toff's name -- so the pub keeper had called him, when he'd settled his bill for the drinks and two days renting the little flat out back of the pub. Now this MacCrawley was striding away down the lane, but Duff had seen him in the smoky pub clear enough: a stocky man, wide-shouldered, with iron gray hair cut short, almost bald; black tufted eyebrows, pale gray eyes, and a jutting block of chin. He wore a fine Savoy Row greatcoat, the color of fog, and shiny new black shoes. On an index finger was a ring with a great red cabochon, on which was carved a symbol few would know: a dragon with its body curved into the shape of anS, twining the letterT. Duff knew that crest, for he had been the apprentice of a true magician in his time. Duff's drinking and whoring had caused Master Scofield to turn him out, but it was Scofield who came a cropper -- for he vanished into the Deep Barrow, and never did return. The magician was dead, surely, while Duff still tottered about, drawing the dole and getting by on odd jobs, doing his little castings now and then, just to keep his hand in, but afraid to go far with it. If a spirit did answer his conjuring, it was only to laugh at him. Duff passed the flower and gift shop -- it would scarcely survive, were it not for the American tourists, buying supposed "Celtic pendants" and the like -- in the window of which was a placard advertising the "Flower Show and Jumble Sale in Aid of Preservation." Up ahead, MacCrawley had turned the corner. "He's off to that barrow in the wood, he is," Duff muttered. "I knew it, too, did I not? I did!" Duff hesitated about following MacCrawley into Smithson Wood. He had only a half pint of whiskey on him in his old Navy coat, and he was not sure so little drink would see him through a visit to the barrow, a place he had not visited these twelve years and more. Still, it was Duff's mission to protect this village from the likes of MacCrawley -- from those who bore that sigil on their rings, and the dire disembodied who served them. Old Duff was not appreciated for his efforts, no not by half. More than once he'd driven away those harridan mists who fed on the bone marrow of old men and women, so that elders could not fight the sicknesses that came and died of pneumonia. The villagers laughed at him, as he ran through the village waving switches of ash wood at what they supposed were scraps of fog, but Duff forgave them, they didn't know better, and more than one of them had given him the price ofShirley, John is the author of 'Subterranean ', published 2006 under ISBN 9781416503446 and ISBN 1416503447.