Excerpt from my novel VAMPIRE POND

King David, the dwarf, and the abbot are talking ...

“What was the miracle?” King David asked.

“Long long ago, a small lass, who was an orphan, once looked down into the town well and saw the face of the true Blessed Virgin. Then one day she was careless and dropped her mumsy poppet into the well. She climbed in after it and fell to her death. It took us three weeks to finally fish her all out… she’d been under so long she was falling apart. The well has to be closed for thirty years, of course, since we never did pull out one of her arms. So we built this abbey over the blessed sight.”

King David shrugged. “And that’s not enough of a blessing for them?”

“The bishop rejects our claim of a miracle of seeing the true Blessed Virgin, saying the girl only saw her own reflection. And they accuse us that it was a curse of ours that she drowned and a curse that it took so long to find her, and a curse that there is still an arm of hers astray. They must be jealous of us in this struggling village, in these confusing modern times of great change. How can anybody deny such an incredible story unless they are only jealous of us.”

“Has anymore miracles come from the well?”

“Aye! Sometimes I dream that the lonely lost little arm is crawling at me to my bed and it has a tiny little voice inside of it that cries ‘You forgot me!’ over and over. It is so sad to be forgotten. When I dream that, I awake feeling so sad and frightened that someday that might be me.”

King David scrunched up his face. “That’s a miracle?”

“It has to be some sort of a sign of something. Doesn’t it? It has such great power to frighten me so and twist my sleep. Dreams like that shock me, and the memory of it haunts me into the day.”

“What of the well now? Can anything unwholesome creep out of it?”

“It’s been covered with wooden bars and draped in rosaries made from the leg bones of chickens… since that’s a great sacrifice to us to slaughter so many chickens. Of course we ate them but now we have few eggs. Oh, what a sacrifice to our poor town. And does the Virgin care? I pray she does! I pray she’d noticed it all and cares mightily!”

“Does your evil pond that ruined my life have anything to do with this well?”

“I fear the evil is in the form of a monster made entirely of mud and it can sneak anywhere under the darkness of earth from well to well to pond and puddle.”

“To stream?”

“Nay. Only where the water is calm and un-flowing can this monster haunt. If the abbey and its well could be blessed by the bishop then we might be safe here in this shire. So you must dip a quill and write a letter to the bishop to send us a monster hunter. He’s already denied our miracle so he certainly can’t deny us a new request, if he thinks we can live at all. That’s our only hope.”

King David raised his eyebrows. “Dare I ask, can the monster hunter be a woman?”

“Nay!”

“Why not?”

He adamantly shook his shiny bald head. “It must be a proper Christian soul!”