SCARECROW

Had a great idea for a short story the other night while walking Sam under a shrouded and obscured moon.

It will involve a Scarecrow who suddenly becomes conscious of himself three nights before Halloween. He is unsure of who or what he is, he knows only that his name is Teleman (the “distant man” or “man from a distance”). On the first night he is “pinned to his post” and can only observe what happens around him.

At nightfall of the second night he is able to “come off his post,” and wander around where he eventually encounters a beggared demon looking for someone to inhabit, a bull so fierce that it will allow no approach, a ghost whose voice and appearance hypnotize and terrorize, a man-eating bear, a monster made of shifting plagues, a pack of hungry and relentless wolves, witches bent on producing a “changeling”, an occultic warlock who plots to become a king, and three evil men (murderers working as a team). But these things are not necessarily encountered in that order.

Sometimes an encounter leads to Teleman’s near destruction, sometimes to his “hammering, burning, and folding,” and sometimes to his strengthening. Each encounter changes Teleman and eventually transforms him into something else.

Eventually, on midnight of Halloween he “returns to his post” a totally transformed thing.

So ultimately Teleman becomes both entirely different from a scarecrow and something to be entirely feared in his own right.

The story will be a metaphor of two separate but related things: the pathetic cowardice of modern man and how he can be transformed into something courageous and something once again to be feared, and the smithing and transformation and constant reworking of base raw materials into a useful weapon, a sword.

This will be my Halloween short story for this year. I will begin writing it next week and hopefully it will be be completed just before Halloween. I will write it as I’m finishing up The Vengeance of Tôl Karuţha.

I already have the first line the story. It will be either, “I awoke at my post, but knew nothing of my Nature.” Or, “I awoke who I am, yet knew nothing of my Nature.”

Actually that was the line that initially inspired the entire story and plot as Sam and I walked in the woods at midnight.

I am thinking I will include some verse in the body of the short story.