Paul Durham - The Luck Uglies

Quinn, unlike his father, was still so skinny that he had to use a rope belt to hold up his trousers. He had a tendency to forget things, like his lunch, or the shopping list, or sometimes his way home. But Quinn was also kind, and he was one of Rye’s best friends in the whole world. Three times a week, he brought over a book and helped her with her reading.

Now, with time to examine Tam’s Tome more carefully, they noticed that many of its pages were burned, torn or missing completely, and its binding was covered in soot. Its contents, however, were like no book they had ever seen. Page after page was hand-scrawled in letters of varying sizes. Throughout the book, the text was packed so tightly that the thin slivers of parchment not covered by ink seemed to form phantom images all their own. Rye tried to make them out, but it was like spotting faces in storm clouds – lose your focus for just a moment and they were gone.

“We should see if there’s anything about cries from the bogs,” Rye said, and by ‘we’ she meant Quinn. She was still learning to wrestle with ordinary-sized letters.

Quinn sighed as he squinted to read the actual words. “This is going to take some time.”

Fortunately, the maze of prose was occasionally broken up by the most detailed and lifelike drawings Rye had ever seen, and Rye and Quinn spent their time studying the illustrations. There were portraits of people she didn’t recognise and maps of places she had never been. Creatures, both whimsical and menacing, seemed to leap off the page.

One image, however, plunged them both into silence. It was vaguely human, its orange hair hanging in long, knotted ropes from a skull that looked to have been broken and carelessly reassembled. Sickly skin clung to its ribs and hung in loose folds from its face. Cold eyes conveyed anger and sadness, and there was something both ancient and childlike in its expression. Dwarfed in its bony fingers was a child’s tattered rag doll; around its neck was a string of small, shrivelled feet. A Bog Noblin!

Rye shuddered and turned the page quickly, pressing her hand against the opposite side, as if the awful image might claw its way out. Quinn didn’t object.

They had been leafing through Tam’s Tome for much of the morning when Shady’s ears perked up and he lifted his furry mane. Someone was coming. Rye and Quinn cast wary looks at Shady, then each other. Quinn hunched forward and tried to shield Tam’s Tome under his arms.

The secret door opened. Rosy cheeks and big blue eyes beamed in the lantern light.

“Folly,” Rye said with relief, “where have you been? There are some amazing things in this book.”

“It’s been a crazy day,” Folly said, pulling up a chair. “Did you know turkeys have taken over your street?”

“They came out of the bogs last night,” Quinn said.

“It’s really busy at the inn,” Folly said. “I had to help my mum get ready for tonight’s Black Moon Party – got to hang Wirry Scares on the street.”

Folly’s family owned the Dead Fish Inn, the most notorious tavern in the Shambles. It was rumoured that, with enough grommets, you could buy anything at the Dead Fish. The Floods lived on the third floor over the guest rooms – Folly being the youngest of nine children, the rest of them boys. Her brothers were said to be the toughest in the village, which was good, because patrons of the Dead Fish were infamous for fighting, carousing and causing all sorts of commotion. Rye envied Folly. The Dead Fish was far more exciting than Mud Puddle Lane, and all the wild turkeys in the world couldn’t change that.

Folly slapped her hands on the table. “You’ll never guess what I heard over breakfast.”

As usual, she didn’t wait for them to guess.

“Two men came into the Inn this morning. They weren’t villagers. They looked dirty and tired, and they had weapons. Lots of them. They said they hadn’t slept in days.”

Rye and Quinn’s ears perked up.

“I heard them telling my father that they’d just come in from Beyond the Shale. While they were there they saw …” Folly paused, the words stuck in her throat.

“They saw what?” Rye asked.

“What was it?” said Quinn.

“A Bog Noblin,” Folly gasped, with a heaping of alarm and a smidge of excitement.

“You’re just winding us up,” Rye said. “They’re extinct.”

“It’s true.”

“In the forest?” Quinn asked.

“No,” Folly said. “Out there.”

She tilted her head in the direction they all knew the bogs to be. Rye and Quinn looked at each other in disbelief.

“Stop it, Folly,” Rye said. “That’s bogwash. You’re just trying to get us in a twist.”

But Rye knew Folly wasn’t teasing them. She heard the concern in Folly’s voice.

Quinn now wore his worry on his face. He flipped the pages of Tam’s Tome and pointed to the open page. The Bog Noblin with the necklace of feet stared back.

Quinn frowned like he’d swallowed a damp mouse.

“Ugh. He’s a knotty-looking one, isn’t he?” Folly said.

The drawing made Rye’s stomach hurt. She closed the book.“It’s just tavern talk, Folly,” she said matter-of-factly. “There’s no such thing as Bog Noblins any more.”

The three friends were quiet. Quinn squirmed uncomfortably in his chair.

“You’ll still come to the party tonight, won’t you?” Folly asked Rye finally.

Rye had always wanted to go to a Black Moon Party. She’d heard that villagers roamed the streets in garish clothes, carousing until sunrise. Of course, these days the Laws of Longchance brought curfews, fines and floggings, which put a damper on celebrations of the first new moon each month. And there was also that pesky O’Chanters’ House Rule Number Three.

House Rule Number Three: Lock your door with the Black Moon’s rise. Don’t come out until morning shines.

“Maybe,” Rye said. “I’ll have to wait for my mother to leave the house.”

Her mother had arranged some sort of Black Moon sale at The Willow’s Wares for special customers that night. She’d told Rye she’d need her to watch Lottie and Shady after they had gone to bed, but that she would be home as quickly as she could. If her mother was breaking the House Rule, so could Rye.

“You have to,” Folly implored. “This is no ordinary Black Moon Party. I heard—”

Rye and Quinn prepared for another tall tale.

“—that there’s going to be a secret meeting about …” She looked over her shoulder as if someone might be listening. “The Luck Uglies,” she mouthed.

‘Luck Uglies’ was a name whispered around the docks and darkest taverns, places where men played fast and loose with the laws and their lips. Calling someone a ‘cockle knocker’ or a ‘shad’ might get a child’s tongue tamed with a horse brush. But ‘Luck Uglies’ uttered in the wrong company could earn you a week in the stocks. Of course, like all children, Rye had heard Luck Ugly stories – usually round a fire after dark, or at a graveyard’s edge as the salt mist crept over the tombs – but never from her mother. Folly’s older brothers told one about a Luck Ugly who sharpened his teeth into fangs with a grindstone and fed on village vagrants after dark. Quinn’s father once told him that he’d better eat his cabbage or the Luck Uglies would come to take his dog while he slept.

It was the Luck Uglies who, ten years before, finished off the last of the Bog Noblins shortly before disappearing themselves. Neither group had been particularly missed.

“Luck Uglies?” Rye repeated quietly.

Folly nodded with great enthusiasm. “Maybe it has something to do with the Bog Noblin.”

Quinn rolled his eyes. “When is the meeting to discuss witches and sea monsters?” he asked with an uneasy chuckle.