The Words of the Mouth

  ******

  Jamie and I were out in the car one day, looking for an isolated farm cottage in deepest Fife, when we lost our way and encountered what seemed to me a weird series of coincidences.

  I said absently, "We should ask at number twenty-one" - and noticed we were passing a house marked twenty-one. Just then a car drove by with the license plate ASK 21,

  I remarked to Jamie, "Something's going to happen because of all these odd coincidences."

  Then we came to a place that had apparently been a brickworks; it was an area of rolling dunes made of an even-textured black slag, an incredibly bleak, desolate place. I looked at the skyline and saw a man standing there motionless in a black suit, with a crow on his arm.

  He looked exactly like the Devil.

  "This can't be real," I laughed, "it's like a joke, I've got to go and ask him if he is the Devil."

  I crunched over the cinders to where he stood and told him why I was speaking to him. He didn't seem surprised, just stood there nodding, taking it all in, not batting an eyelid.

  The old man was a miner, it emerged. He said he'd kept quite a few crows, that he raised young ones. As I put my hand out to touch the crow, it pecked me and I jerked my hand back. I asked him where the cottage that we couldn't find was, and he gave me directions. He was quite a well-preserved old man, and as he replied, I felt that something else was speaking through his mouth, some other spirit with a very powerful message vibrating through that moment.

  It only took minutes to find the cottage, see my friend who lived there, and return past the bleak wasteland, but the old man and his crow had vanished. As we passed the spot where he had been, I looked down and saw an extraordinary stone, quite distinct from the slag.

  "Stop the car," I said to Jamie, and went over to it. There were no other stones, not even pebbles; just this strange, dark piece which looked like the product of ancient vulcanism and felt peculiarly heavy, like ironstone, when I picked it up.

  With a shock, I recognized the old man's face on it, but with two horns on his head. On the other side there was a dog. An uncanny feeling shivered through me.

  I took the stone back to the house, but not because I liked it; on the contrary, it aroused my hatred. Wherever I put the stone, I felt compelled to move it, as if it were burning a hole in the carpet. Eventually I put it upstairs in the studio and drew a picture of it. A most remarkable, weird stone.