The Book Of Lost Things

“A bellyful of gold,” said the Crooked Man. “It is agreed. I will come to you tonight, and I will give you all you can eat in gold.”

They shook hands on the deal and parted. That night, the Crooked Man sat and watched as Manius ate and ate. He consumed two whole turkeys and a full ham, bowl upon bowl of potatoes and vegetables, whole tureens of soup, great plates of fruits and cakes and cream, and glass after glass of the finest wines. The Crooked Man carefully weighed it all before the meal began, and weighed the meager remains when the meal was over. The difference amounted to many, many pounds, or enough gold to purchase a thousand fields.

Manius belched. He felt very tired, so tired that he could barely keep his eyes open.

“Now where is my gold?” he asked, but the Crooked Man was growing blurry, and the room was spinning, and before he could hear the answer he was asleep.

When he awoke, he was chained to a wooden chair in a dark dungeon. His mouth was held open by a metal vise, and a bubbling cauldron was suspended above his head.

The Crooked Man appeared beside him. “I am a man of my word,” he said. “Prepare to receive your bellyful of gold.”

The cauldron tipped, and molten gold spilled into Manius’s mouth and poured down his throat, scalding his flesh and burning his bones. The pain was beyond imagining, but he did not die, not immediately, for the Crooked Man had ways of delaying death to make his tortures last. The Crooked Man would pour a little gold, then allow it to cool before pouring a little more, and thus he continued until he had filled Manius so full of gold that it bubbled behind his back teeth. By then, of course, Manius was very dead indeed, for even the Crooked Man could not keep him alive indefinitely. Eventually, Manius took his place in the room full of glass cases, and the Crooked Man would come to look at him sometimes, and he would smile as he remembered this most splendid of tricks.

There were many such stories in the Crooked Man’s lair: a thousand rooms, and a thousand stories for every room. One chamber housed a collection of telepathic spiders, very old, very wise, and very, very large, each one more than four feet across, with fangs so poisonous that a single drop of their venom, placed in a well, had once killed an entire village. The Crooked Man often used them to hunt those who strayed into his tunnels, and when the trespassers were found, the spiders would wrap them in silk and carry them back to their cobwebbed room, and there they would die very slowly as the spiders fed upon them, draining them drop by drop.

In one of the dressing rooms a woman sat facing a blank wall, endlessly combing her long, silver hair. Sometimes, the Crooked Man would take those who had angered him to visit the woman, and when she turned to look at them, they would see themselves reflected in her eyes, for her eyes were made of mirrored glass. And in those eyes they would be allowed to witness the moment of their deaths, so that they would know exactly when and how they would die. You might think that such knowledge would not be so terrible, and you would be wrong. We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal). Those who were given that knowledge found that they could not sleep or eat or enjoy any of the pleasures life had to offer them, so tormented were they by what they had seen. Their lives became a kind of living death, devoid of joy, and all that was left to them was fear and sadness, so that when at last the end came they were almost grateful for it.

A bedchamber contained a naked woman and a naked man, and the Crooked Man would bring children to them (not the special ones, the ones who gave him life, but the others, the ones he stole from villages or those who strayed from the path and became lost in the forest), and the man and the woman would whisper things to them in the darkness of their chamber, telling them things that children should not know, dark tales of what adults did together in the depths of the night while their sons and daughters were sleeping. In this way the children died inside. Forced into adulthood before they were ready, they had their innocence taken from them, and their minds collapsed under the weight of poisonous thoughts. Many grew up to become evil men and women, and so the corruption was spread.