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Chapter 19: The Hollow Fen
Light is a wonderful thing. It distinguishes night from day. It grows flowers and plants and trees. It reveals what is hidden. It brings things alive, and it gives hope. Light is safe.
But fog, fog does a funny thing to light.
Fog isn’t as bold as dark thunderheads of a stormy sky. It isn’t as impenetrably gloomy as a deep cave. It isn’t as obscure as the floor of the ocean, and it isn’t as thorough as nightfall. Fog isn’t even as shadowy as a shadow.
Fog is dull. It is dreary. It is drab. It is somehow like turning on a light while the room remains doggedly dark—a false hope of being able to see when, in fact, almost everything is just beyond view. Everything is vanishing. Inside a fog’s ghostlike paleness, light is broken. Inside a fog, light reveals very little. Light is an empty promise—one left unfulfilled.
In this way, fog also does a funny thing to Time.
There are hundreds of little things people see and hear and smell which tell them time is passing. The sound and sight of traffic may swell during the morning and late afternoon when people are traveling to and from work and school. Birds may coo and chirp more busily as they share gossip or conspire about plans for a new day. Dogs may bark as they shake off a night’s sleep and warn their owners against the imminent attack of garbage trucks rumbling slowly down residential streets. Pedestrians may flood sidewalks and crosswalks, dodging past each other on their way to important meetings with important people about important events. Drivers may impatiently tap their feet on brake pedals, wishing red lights wouldn’t take so long and school bus stops weren’t so numerous. Smells of coffee, baked goods, and diesel exhaust may fill the air while distinct whiffs of cologne and perfume hover over men and women like scented halos. Trains click and clack noisily away from their stations. Airplanes roar away from their runways. Ferries churn away from their docks, blowing brassy blasts from their loud horns.
But fog—the strange wraith of mist and chill and haze—distorts these things. The visible presence of school buses and garbage trucks and pedestrians disappear inside a fog. Birds and dogs and trains sound more muted, hushed, and far away. Freshly baked donuts and coffee and pretty perfumes do not percolate through a fog; they only exist in tight pockets of smell—here and then gone.
Fog does this. Fog distorts and deforms those little things people see and hear and smell which tell them time is passing.
And because the fogs of the Hollow Fen were full of broken light and distorted Time, it is where the Clokkemakers—the Wisps—the secretive Kohanim—had decided to live.

After a long time of silence, out of the blue, Nicolas suddenly blurted out, “We’re looking for a Clokkemaker.”
He had a growing sense of being lost and hoped conversation would help to drown it out. Other than Aldus’ instruction to enter the Hollow Fen, Nicolas had no idea where or how to find the Wisp, Remiel.
They had been slowly making their way through the strange moorland for about half an hour, and the path was not very wide. It was like the Lonely Road, except it wasn’t hedged in by thick groves of trees, only moss and heather and yellow-leafed crowberry plants. Nicolas, walking at the lead, had kept his head down, watching carefully for ruts made by occasional cartwheels and horse hooves, while little Cornelia, mud-spattered and increasingly tired, had decided to trudge along at his heels. Star-grass also grew on each side of the path in occasional clusters. Each flower had six, yellow petals, like bright, little footpath lights, which made finding the path a bit easier. Adelaide had already plucked several, telling the boys the cheery flowers would help them to stay well after they were steeped in a hot tea. Ranulf carefully and quietly led the pony, and Benjamin walked last in line, every once in a while touching his sore head tenderly.
“A Clokkemaker?” Benjamin asked with some reluctance. He reached down and plucked a quick handful of purplish-black crowberries. “I thought,” he said as he gulped them down, “that all Clokkemakers were evil ghosts which haunt empty castles and possess ravens. Maybe even little goats.” He grinned at Adelaide, showing off his purple-stained tongue and teeth.
She stuck her tongue out and flashed him an annoyed look. “The fat lardyman I worked for said Wisps came in the night to steal flour and barley, but I never believed him,” she said. “He was always trying to come up with excuses when customers accused him of cheating. I don’t think he really knew what a Wisp is. Still, it makes me nervous to think we’re trying to actually find one.” The young Healer anxiously looked around. “Actually, this whole place makes me nervous. I wish there wasn’t so much fog.”
“I don’t think they’re all evil,” Nicolas said, although he didn’t sound certain. “However, I was told about one raven, the raven that followed Aldus into the room where we all slept; that one has a Wisp inside it, but I don’t think a Wisp ‘possessed’ it. Aldus said the raven was a special kind of raven that had ‘room’ for ghosts—and it just happened to give that room to a Wisp,” Nicolas explained. “I don’t think Wisps really ‘possess’ anything.” He stopped for a moment and looked around. The fogbank they were in had thinned, but twilight was settling in quickly, and the day’s light had become much weaker. “I don’t think Aldus would have sent me—us—to find this Clokkemaker—this Wisp—if it was an evil one.” Secretly though, Nicolas didn’t know what to expect. He wanted to tell the others about his encounter with Remiel when he was with the tall man and the donkey in the forest, but he didn’t want to scare them. Instead, he simply said, “Aldus thinks this Clokkemaker will help us.”
While the other three spoke, Ranulf had been grunting and tugging at the pony’s lead rope, trying to coax it or force it over a patch of soft earth. Aggravated with the stubborn pony, he took a break and said, “Straight Hammer actually liked Wisps, but I think that was unusual for a giant. I once heard Bragnof, a giant who owns one of the larger smithy shops in the Iron Quarter, tell Straight Hammer he’d rather eat hot coals and drink molten metal than have anything to do with a Wisp.” With that, the older boy gave a firm jerk on the lead rope. “C’mon!” he said, urging the pack pony forward, but the pony wouldn’t budge.
Suddenly, there was a soft sucking sound. And then another. And then another. It reminded Nicolas of how his father’s wellies—his dark green rubber boots—sounded when he was walking across the sheep pasture next to the Bennett’s home after a good rain. Everyone stood still, listening, unsure of what was making the strange noise. It was coming from beneath their feet, and Nicolas, like Ranulf, Benjamin, and Adelaide, began to stare intently around them at the grey-green turf, but they didn’t see anything peculiar. Except a small swell of wavy hair grass gradually rising between Ranulf’s boots. Abruptly, the swell of grass flattened out. Then, with the same soft sucking sound, it disappeared underground entirely, leaving a small hole.
Immediately, Adelaide shouted in a clear panic, “Don’t move!”, but even as she did so, Ranulf’s right boot sank up to his knee beneath the surface of the pathway. Then his other boot vanished. And then, without making a sound, he vanished. Nicolas leapt toward the older boy, trying to catch a fistful of his weather-cloak. But he was too late.
Ranulf was gone.
“Ranulf!” screamed Nicolas, as he scrambled backward from the enlarging hole in the ground. But there was no reply. Only more of the soft sucking sound.
The pack pony, now free of any guiding hand on its lead rope, turned and bolted back in the direction of the Woodcutter’s Forest, knocking Benjamin on his seat. Before anyone could do anything about it, the pony had disappeared into the mist with its load of kindling and bulging sacks clattering wildly against the wooden cross-frame.
“Benjamin! Don’t move!” Adelaide was clutching Cornelia to her chest and tears were streaming down her face, but the insistence in her voice was firm and steady. The boy-thief slowly nodded and sat where he was, eyes as big as saucers, clearly terrified but ready, too.
Nicolas was shaking. “What just happened?” he asked, his chest heaving with deep breaths. “What just happened?!”
Adelaide sniffed and wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “We’re in a featherbed bog,” she said quietly, tensely.
“A what?”
“My uncle used to call it a featherbed bog,” Adelaide explained, clearly frightened. She was still sniffing, but she’d kept control of her voice. “Some call it a blanket bog. There’s wet hollows hidden beneath the surface. They can be treacherous to walk on, but sometimes there is something more—maybe…” Her voice trailed off and she looked like she might be sick. Another tear fell down her face.
“Maybe what, Adelaide?!” Nicolas pressed. He was still in shock over Ranulf’s sudden disappearance. The little he knew of bogs and mires was what his father had once told him about the North York Moors National Park in Yorkshire. The Bennett’s had been attending a Dark Skies Festival in Dalby the Great Yorkshire Forest outside of Pickering, and his father had chatted on about the plants and animals and landscape of moors and bogs. But nothing his father had said included people disappearing into the earth. “Can we get Ranulf back?” he demanded impatiently. There was something in Adelaide’s reaction which also frightened Nicolas. Something more than sinkhole bogs.
A fresh wave of tears rolled down Adelaide’s cheeks. “I don’t know,” she cried helplessly. “I don’t know.” She sat there rocking her little goat back and forth and shaking her head.
“I’m going after him.” Benjamin’s quiet voice seemed small and faraway. Nicolas looked at the boy-thief, who was still sitting, trembling on the ground. His smallish face was as pale as the mist surrounding them, and his lips were quivering. “I’m small. I’ll go in and get him,” he said again, almost whispering.
Nicolas stared at him and suddenly heard a steady voice say, “Me, too.” It was his own. It felt removed from the wild alarms crashing about in his mind.
Benjamin nodded and slowly turned himself around onto his hands and knees. His mouth was set in a grim line. Nicolas glanced at Adelaide. She was staring back at him, still shaking her head. Pretty locks of her hair bounced against her shoulders. “Don’t,” she pleaded quietly.
Nicolas tried to sound brave. Cool and calm. “Why not? It’s just a bit of mud and muck, right?” The young girl just kept shaking her head, miserable.
And, like a nightmare that wouldn’t go away, the soft sucking sound returned.

Situated along a short coastal stretch of southeastern England, in Devon County to the east of Cornwall, is the modest beachfront borough of Torbay. Torbay’s quiet marine inlet is fringed by three, seafaring towns: Torquay in the north, Paignton in the center, and Brixham in the south. Summer tourists on holiday there might visit a medieval abbey with gardens and a tearoom, Oddicombe Beach, the fortified manor house of Compton Castle, or the sixteenth century Berry Pomeroy Castle ruins. But this small area of England has another curiously unique distinction. It has been occupied by people ever since the Palaeolithic Era. Indeed, the oldest human bones in Europe were found lying in Kents Caverns in Torquay. But long, long before even then—ages before prehistoric man gathered together to sharpen stones for tools, or to scavenge for wild animals, or to forage for plants—worms, giant worms over three feet in length, burrowed deep within the damp earth under the borough of Torbay. It is thought, these prehistoric worms only came to the surface to drink … and to feed.
On a brisk, early spring morning a few years before, Nicolas’ father, Peter Bennett, had been sitting quietly in his study when he suddenly waved his Sunday edition of the Cumberland and Westmorland Herald in the air, and loudly exclaimed, “They’ve found giant worms in England!” Nicolas, who was halfway through a second helping of grilled oat cakes, sausage, and fried eggs, dropped his fork and raced into his father’s study, hoping to see graphic pictures of enormous, slimy creatures as if they had come alive right out of an old science fiction film. He was disappointed. There were no pictures, and Mr. Bennett merely stabbed an enthusiastic finger at a boring page of newsprint, which discussed a recent find of the worms’ fossilized burrows. “Just imagine,” he’d told Nicolas excitedly, wriggling his fingers in front of him, “giant worms as tall as you are!” Nicolas had asked a few questions, still hoping for some kind of ghastly alien description, but after a few minutes, he lost interest and hurried back into the kitchen before his eggs turned cold.
Now, standing in the pale light of a cold fog along a narrow path somewhere within a perilous moor, Nicolas again thought of that long ago Sunday morning. He regretted not finding out more about the prehistoric worms. This long-forgotten memory suddenly came to Nicolas’ mind because of what was coming out of the hole into which Ranulf had vanished a few seconds before—the bulging swaying head of a gigantic bog worm. Out of the rubbery, wet flesh of the bog worm’s mouth came the soft sucking sounds. They were the sucking sounds of a bog worm feeding.
Adelaide screamed and buried her face against Cornelia’s little body. Benjamin, with his mouth hanging open in shock, back-peddled as fast as he could on all fours. Nicolas, however, just stood there. A thick terror was beginning to paralyze his mind, and his thoughts were becoming stiff and dull. Yet a single thought remained stubbornly vivid and alive—the grisly knowledge that his friend had just been consumed by the repulsive mass of ribbed worm meat in front of him. His friend, Ranulf son of Renfry, had vanished inside that spongy, wet, sucking bog worm’s mouth.
Nicolas’ hand grasped for the small flat dagger hanging around his neck. He jerked it free from its leather cord, and without any plan or strategy, he shouted madly, “We have to save him!”
Nicolas, the boy who called himself a Wren, jumped at the hideous bog worm, slashing his small knife downward toward its squirming flesh.
And as he jumped, the grey daylight around him became dark. It was as if someone had turned the lights off in a room, leaving it in the gloom of evening shadows.
And the air around Nicolas instantly chilled, biting into his skin the way the icy dampness of a hard frost had done on many dark winter mornings. The air also smelled—familiar—like almonds and burned earth. Something he’d smelled once before in the woods with the tall man and Cherry Pit the donkey.
Meanwhile, the bog worm, which sensed Nicolas was close by, had swung its fleshy head toward him, hungrily searching. Its huge throat muscles and thousands of little tongues were sucking excitedly against rows and rows of knobby, bony teeth. But just as Nicolas sprang at the worm, he was thrown back violently and crashed to the ground with the wind knocked out of him. At first, Nicolas thought he’d been struck by the bog worm’s writhing body, and the thought flashed through his mind that he was about to be pulled inside its mouth and eaten alive. There was a sound like the roar of an avalanche, and the massive bog worm began to violently twist and lurch upward, raising its fleshy body up. In Nicolas’ dim mind, the worm looked like a snake about to strike.
But it didn’t strike.
Instead, the bog worm gave a final furious spasm and, miraculously, as if the gloomy, icy air itself had seized hold of its squirming, bloated body, the gruesome worm ripped completely in half, hurling chunks of fatty tissue and bits of bony teeth out across the boggish moor.
And in the slippery, gooey mound of bog worm guts, Nicolas—on the edge of blacking out—saw a human hand.
So he grabbed it.

It was dark—past grimlock, the witching hour—when Nicolas next opened his eyes.
He was lying on the narrow pathway. Someone had thrown his bear skin blanket over him, and his first thought was that this was odd, since he remembered seeing the pack pony run away. Slowly, he sat up. Lying next to him, rolled inside another bear skin blanket, lay Ranulf. The older boy was breathing evenly, and he was sound asleep. He looked unharmed, although his skin looked very pale and his dark hair looked several shades lighter. A few yards further up the pathway, Nicolas could see the flickering flames of a small fire. Benjamin and Adelaide were sitting by the fire, and Adelaide was speaking in a low voice to someone else—a very little person, perhaps only half her size, who was kindly petting Cornelia. The little person looked quite old and, in fact, had a pointed and tidy little beard. It wore a fitted leather cap and was dressed in a boiler suit—a pair of earth-stained coveralls—with little round-toed boots on its feet. A few steps away from the fire, Nicolas could see the pack pony, munching contentedly on clumps of wavy hair grass. Next to the pony, but more difficult for Nicolas to clearly make out in the shadows, stood a very tall figure. It was dressed in a dark hooded robe and held a slender staff in its hand.
“You’re awake!” Benjamin’s voice sounded happy and good. It confirmed that Nicolas was alive and was not dreaming.
“Yes,” Nicolas said weakly, his voice croaking like it might after a long night’s sleep. He smiled. “Yes, I’m awake.”
The smallish boy-thief hopped up and ran over to him, nearly knocking him over. “Thank the endless heavens!” he cried. “You dropped to the ground like a dead man right after you pulled Ranulf free, and we thought you both had died and had your souls collected by the tusk moon.” Benjamin squeezed Nicolas’ hand. “I’m so glad you’re awake.”
Nicolas shook his head, trying to remember what had happened. “Me too,” he said. Nicolas looked around. “What happened? Where’s the worm?”
“It was ripped in half,” Benjamin said with a grimace. “And what was left of it, slowly slid back into the hole.” The boy-thief had a slightly sick look on his face. “We heard other sucking noises. I think another bog worm must’ve ate it.”
Nicolas felt his heart thump hard in his chest. His foggy mind tried to make sense of what Benjamin has said. “It ripped in half? There are other bog worms?”
“Yeah,” Benjamin said, as an answer to his second question more than Nicolas’ first, “but not around here. Not any longer. Not after what happened,” Benjamin said with smug satisfaction. He gave Nicolas a reassuring pat on his arm.
Nicolas wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, but he suddenly felt tired again. He felt his mind slipping back to sleep, back to darkness. He let out a long sigh of relief. He glanced over at Ranulf. “Is he okay?” he asked weakly.
“I think so,” Benjamin said. “Got all his fingers and toes as they say. I tell you, Adelaide is great. She carefully cleaned him and gave him tea with some kind of potion mixed in it after the Clokkemaker revived him.”
Nicolas struggled to pay attention. “A Clokkemaker?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Benjamin said and pointed to the tall figure standing next to the pony. “The Clokkemaker. He says his name is Remiel.”

• Update #2 - Book-Signing Event Success! Aug. 4, 2016

  Last night's book-signing event was an out-of-the-park success! We sold a ton of books, and I had the chance to meet a lot of new people …

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• Update #1 - The book launch is LIVE! July 8, 2016

  We jumped the gun a little early and started the book launch at 11:09 p.m. on Thursday night... 30 days to go!!

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