Read Online The Guardian Stones by Eric Reed - Free Book Online Page B

around to punctuate her words. The wild hair falling in disarray over her shoulders glowed preternaturally white in the lamplight. She shivered. “A curse on that devil Hitler. Someone should poison his dinner and give him a nasty death.”
    â€œSomething in the herbal line?” Edwin suggested, surprised at her sudden change of mood.
    Martha smiled grimly. “I could give his cook a few suggestions. And speaking of devils, about the Guardians…”
    Edwin adjusted his glasses. “Yes?”
    â€œWell, now.” Her momentary gloom lifted immediately. “T’is said a wise woman who lived in the forest went to the top of Guardians Hill every time there was a horned moon and there she worked persuasions.”
    Edwin noted her choice of words—persuasions and wise woman rather than spells and witch. “What do you mean by horned moon?”
    â€œWhat you’d call a crescent moon. It exerts a malign influence. Them as is born under the horned moon is born close to the devil.”
    â€œCursed, you mean?”
    â€œDepends on how one looks at it. Close to the devil’s a powerful place to be.” A shadow passed over her face. “But we was talking about persuasions, not curses.”
    â€œGoing to the hilltop, wouldn’t that mean working these, er, persuasions in full view of the village?”
    â€œWhy not? The villagers consulted her for help.”
    â€œAnd these persuasions were for good?”
    A sly smile quirked Martha’s lips. “Some say so, some say not. But as time passed, whenever things went wrong, when a cow lost a calf or a wife strayed or a family member fell down the stairs and broke a leg, she got the blame. Soon it was said she danced with the devil, and meant to kill everyone in Noddweir one way or another. A dozen men from the village decided to do something, went up one moonlit night, and never came back. In the morning there were thirteen stones standing up there. All the men and the wise woman, who had turned them and herself into stone. And there they remain.”
    â€œBut why are they called the Guardians?”
    â€œBecause the men are guarding the wise woman, making sure she can’t do harm or get away.”
    Edwin had not yet counted the stones in the overgrown weeds but he guessed there were more than thirteen. Then too, they were not nearly man-sized. And wasn’t it strange that the wise woman had apparently also turned herself into stone? He kept his doubts to himself. Folklore was not necessarily rational. Instead he asked about the barrows which eluded him earlier.
    â€œOh, them moundy little hills in the middle of fields, you mean? What we call tumps. Nobody knows anything about them. Not worth bothering with if you ask me, but if you want to poke about one, you don’t have to go that far. There’s one closer in the forest. Just follow the path coming out on the other side of the pond behind Susannah Radbone’s house. It’s the house with the red shutters.”
    Martha continued to ramble, telling stories about the village. Edwin learned of a quarrel about a horse that resulted in one family not speaking to another for several years and that the election of Meg Gowdy as head of the local Women’s Institute caused lingering ill-feelings, certain villagers objecting on the grounds of “her being an outsider and all.” And this despite the fact that she and her husband had run the Guardians pub for years.
    Noddweir was one of those places where one who wasn’t a native remained eternally an outsider. Edwin hated to imagine what sort of alien creature the villagers considered him to be, a man from another country altogether.
    The lecture went on. When Martha began to repeat something she’d just told Edwin five minutes earlier, he gently reminded her.
    â€œAh, well. If you say so,” she said, resignedly. “It’s old age, you know.”
    Aside from that her mind