Grackles
by K. Ferngall
I will begin with the first.
Pictured: it is a childhood Christmas evening. The room is small, cluttered with simple décor, a holiday feast of one sort or another lies unbussed on a hand-me-down table. The radiator hisses as the boiler struggles to keep pace with the winter torrent that awaits travelers outside. The adults, being properly drunk, sit or lean about in their fashions as my cousins and I kneel by her chair and ask her to tell it again.
“Tell what again?” she asks between puffs of a cigarette. She does not wait for a response. A chuckle.
“It was ’round about the summer of 1818,” she begins. “Warm summer, drier ’n the deserts of hell.”
It happened in the village of my youth, some hundred years prior in the time of my great-grandparents. They were the original witnesses to Jeremiah Astor and his odd traveling partner and had passed the story down to my mother eons prior.
There wasn’t much to do about town in those days, and it wasn’t uncommon for vagabonds to try their luck at work or scams in the calling-places of the uneducated from which my family hailed. Still, a new face was a new face regardless of intention—when a group of strangers came in off a stagecoach, it was cause for celebration.
“Oh, he looked like death himself,” she continues. “They all did, the folks who traveled in. But that fellah had a hard life, I suspect. Straw hair, dark eyes. Man never slept a wink, and had a funny habit of twitching if you got too near ’im. And they never once saw him set foot in a church, not that our folk were up there in the pews much themselves.”
He called himself Jeremiah Astor, and he had come to the village in search of work round about May. He looked to be forty, give or take a year, his leg was bum, his speech thick and disjointed. He could hardly lift a fork to his mouth without seizing into a fit of weakness. His mind was unwell and he often spoke of paranoid delusions. Still, he was exceptionally kind to the locals and didn’t spend much time cussing.
But she hardly would have shared a story of one polite man who happened into town a hundred years back, and I think I’d have hardly listened if she did. No, it was the other half of the traveling duo who had earned the annual recitation.
He was short, that other one. His hair was jet black and never quite clean, and if Jeremiah Astor looked to be on the verge of collapse, then his companion was a full foot nearer the ledge. He refused to be housed indoors, even during the summer’s lone thunderstorm, and twitched and quivered at so much as the suggestion that he might enter a building. He claimed to have no name on some days. On others he claimed his name, too, was Jeremiah Astor. But the name bestowed upon him by my great-grandparents, the one they swore up and down they heard Astor use when he was in his delusional fits, was Caim.
Caim seemed to like Astor quite a bit, an opinion Astor evidently reciprocated. Most days they were seen to share in friendly conversation, keeping one another close at hand. But there was a seeping stress in their relationship, a hint of a growing anger or fear of which only the edges could be divined.
The stress grew more noticeable on Astor’s manic days. It wasn’t unusual, folks said, that Astor should stay up all night, pacing back and forth and talking about figures in the woods or an odd whistling. Caim would do his best to shield Astor from interrogation on these days, squirreling him out of public eye so much as he was able. Astor seemed to deeply resent such attempts. He was convinced that they were being hunted by forces unknowable to the villagers and seemed to think Caim took the situation too lightly.
But the tensest days between the two were reserved for those when Caim would offer his services as a supernatural diviner. Astor wanted them to make money honest-like, painting fences and digging wells. But ultimately the pair were too feeble, too inarticulate, to be of much use to anyone. And when Christian charity couldn’t quite keep them fed, Caim would announce his services to any and all who wanted to pay.
“Your folks were young at the time, you understand.” She leans back in her seat at this point, always, as if in reflection. “They only saw the part of it with the dogs and the rabbits and the birds and all that. The innocent stuff. The stranger happenings, those were things their parents told them about later.”
She shifts in her chair and rattles her drink for a moment, contemplating whether or not she should fill it. She decides against it for the time being and continues.
“The kids about the town, they’d come up to Caim. And they’d tell him what animal to call, and how many of ’em, and he’d sit right down and think for a moment. Then—” she opens her mouth and a noise escapes, not quite speech but not quite the call of a wild animal, “—and there they were, exactly as they asked. Ten sparrows, a dozen rabbits, anything that was about the area. Grackles, too! Most of all he loved them grackles, nasty little blackbirds. Could make ’em sing any song you wanted, didn’t even have to pay him if you couldn’t spare it.”
Amusing the children was something both men enjoyed. What seemed to place Caim under some duress were the skills he employed for those who could afford to pay him. For a fee he could call in Sunday dinner—all one need do was tell him what game they wanted to eat and he could summon it over, right then and there, to sit patiently in your crosshairs. He read fortunes in folks’ honeysuckle vine, too. And divined the future weather in birds’ nests, and could tell which eggs would bear chicks just by looking at them. Hell, he was the only water diviner that ever came to town who always found a spring. And, if you paid him real good, he could call to the grackles for you and tell them to steer clear of your land, forever. Ma always said there were still farms around town that had never had a single one.
But the two men hated all of this, and the days and weekends in which Caim provided these services were bookended with weeks of back-breaking labor that the two enfeebled men could hardly accomplish. They were lousy builders and worse painters, but still they used Caim’s special knack only as a last desperate resort.
That’s why they up and left our town, according to my mother anyhow. They were out of work they were capable of doing, and the well of charity had run dry. Folks suspected they could’ve gotten fat on Caim’s talents, but the idea of offering them daily only revolted Astor and gutted his companion. By September they were gone, off to some other town to toil for their stay, and were never again seen in the village.
Here my mother pretends the story has finished before looking to her left and looking to her right and leaning in. She narrows her eyes, her countenance hardens. All she had said till now was God-given truth. But this next part is rumor, the sort of lurid gossip she really shouldn’t be sharing. But she’ll tell you, anyways. Because she believes it, and she trusts you won’t go spreading it around.
“Few years later a man came in from Nameaug City, said there was a real big commotion in town. Murder! Broad daylight, too! Said two odd fellas, one named Astor and the other one who ain’t got a name came into town. They were worse, then, worse than when my grandma saw them, raving like bedlamites. Well, they drew up some weird scrawlings on the pavement that no one could quite understand and stabbed each other in the town green, same time and everything. Died right then and there! That was the end of ’em, not even three years after my grandma saw their incredible gift.”
The story ends. An aunt shuffles towards the table to begin clearing dishes. My mother refills her glass with Scotch. She will tell the story again next year, and the next, every year until she is dead.
It’s true, you know. Mostly, anyways. I wrote a brief journal article on it a few decades back. When my mother passed it became an obsession of mine. I wanted to share the story with the world and the only way I knew how was to verify its details and spread it about my niche academic circles.
Researching the paper was no easy task. In truth, there was almost no documentation on the lives of the two men, and I never would have been able to track down the other towns in which they stayed if not for a bit of good luck. In my quest for any and all information on the lives of Astor and Caim, I had the good fortune of coming into possession of a few dozen pages of notes, ripped out of a cheap traveling journal and dated about 1820. They had been held in a Nameaug stack for years, filed with the sorting tags “ASTOR, JEREMIAH; 19TH CENTURY TRAVEL; BURIALS; CHRISTIAN ESOTERICA”. They had, up until that point, never been accessed by a member of the public. But a clerk with whom I was friendly stumbled upon them early in my research and provided them to me, asking only for a facsimile copy for their records in return.
The story told within the pages of the journal involved the ramblings and recollections of a young traveler from the village of Allerbash, New Hampshire, tasked with retrieving the body of Jeremiah Astor. Though much of the context for his ramblings was obscure to me at the time, he was a skilled enough writer in his own way. (You have already read some of his words; the line with which I opened my letter is truthfully his.) The Traveler’s framing of Astor’s life—that being one composed of three mysterious stories—fascinated me.
Further, his maps and notes regarding the trail he followed to procure Astor were so robust that it took little knowledge or skill to retrace them over a century later. The villages the two stopped at were minuscule, entirely too small to sustain newspapers, and the mysterious vagabonds seemed to discourage any serious publicity or inquiry into their lives. It was only through a combination of half-remembered ancient tales provided to me in the haunts of the elderly and the anonymous author’s own notes that I was able to chart the journey of the dying men, from the lofty heights of genuine comradery and adventure to the depths of hell to which they were both dragged.
From the oral tradition I learned that they claimed to hail from New Hampshire (quite possibly Allerbash itself). Astor occasionally admitted he had been once married. Caim told a few folks he had learned his incredible talents from birds kept in youth. From around 1800 on, the two men appear intermittently in wives’-tales and bar talk. Their physical health and appearance are always described as poor, as are their craftsmanship skills, but their soft-spoken kindness is widely attested to. Their nervous dispositions appear in most accounts, but grow increasingly dire in the years leading up to 1820, with an early peak being a mental internment round about 1816. The journal made note of this fact and promised additional pages discussing the nature of Astor’s afflictions, but these were not included among those that I owned.
Their appearance in a city so great as Nameaug (boasting an at-the-time impressive population of around 25,000) seems to have been an act of desperation. They had exhausted their stay in most other towns over the decades, and I’d imagined they’d have been on in years by then. Rather than monetize Caim’s tremendous gifts in any lasting way, they instead resorted to begging in and out of Nameaug almshouses.
In July of 1820, Astor and his traveling companion were entered into a city jail, charges now unknown. Astor was examined by a doctor of some sort (the second time in his life, if that offhand comment by the Traveler is to be believed) who recommended him for an insanity charge that never arrived. Of Caim only two details are recorded: his lack of a name (“A Man Unknown, Hair: Black.”) and his odd wicker backpack containing three silent grackles.
The city released them a month or so later. In the intervening seasons the two men once more disappeared entirely from any and all records. The next mention of them comes from a Nameaug newspaper in the summer of 1821, under the ominous headline: “Godless Murder, of an Insane Man Committed Against his Brother!”
They weren’t really brothers, of course. Newspapers at the time were light on fact checking. Still, it is through this article that we know they briefly left town after their prison stay. When they reappeared, their mental states had deteriorated even further. Astor is said to have lain awake at night outside the poorhouse, screaming that he and his companion were being hunted and that “the light shadows” grew ever more present. Caim, for his part, had evidently begun hoarding grackles in the intervening year, carrying around his aforementioned great wicker cage in which a few dozen were now seen to perch silently. When questioned he said only that they were his protective wards, that they comforted him, and would keep at bay those who hunted him and Astor.
Their deaths were not, as my mother had heard, a matter of mutual annihilation. Astor had set out one summer morning and purchased some lead paint, returning to the affluent neighborhood in which the men had been begging. With it he painted a sigil on the ground of unknown language and origin, summoned Caim, and stabbed him. The gathered horrified masses reported an inconsolable and weeping Astor, screaming that he had just done it this way so that ‘They’ would take him and leave his companion be.
When asked as to who ‘They’ were, the paper records him as saying “The angels! They have found us! They cannot let us be free!”
The officially unnamed man was buried in a pauper’s grave. Jeremiah Astor hung for his crime. The city maintains no information about his burial place.
I think I was surprised by how close my mother’s story was to the truth. I had pieced their incredible lives together in about six years (no small feat, if I may brag a bit) and my paper on the topic was well reviewed by the few who read it.
I have recorded here accurately the first story of Jeremiah Astor.
Although I was able to travel about the state for my initial research, a trip to Allerbash was not meant to be for some time. Budgets are finite, deadlines unmovable, and when I finally reached New Hampshire it was through personal expense and out of my own loneliness. After all, I could never quite shake my curiosity as to those “other tales” of which the Traveler had earlier written.
Pictured: I am sitting in a Grange Hall. The man behind the table is about to tell me the tale, the second tale, in a manner that I will find leaves out no juicy detail. The air is thick. Fly paper dances overhead in the draft of a fan. He is fumbling with the knot in his tie as he tells me about Jeremiah Astor, former resident of Allerbash, New Hampshire.
Jeremiah Astor was born in 1662. All narrators agree on this, and there’s gravesite proof, and I am immediately disheartened. In my mind I attempt to reconcile this with the estimated birth year of my Jeremiah Astor—around 1780 perhaps—and fail. A distant relative? A nom de plume?
“Oh, he were always rotten,” the man continues. “Rotten and godless to his bones. Now this were a godless place then—is now, too—but then as well especially. But him? Rotten man.”
Other folks I speak to later in the week will squabble with this characterization of Jeremiah. All narrators agree that he was a bit of a deadbeat and a bit of a drinker (“a rough one,” when said politely). But some more inclined to a kind reading of Astor’s life quickly qualify that most folks were “of that way”, that he was not a moral aberration. Besides, all folks seem to agree, he had lived a hard life. That New Hampshire was a young colony, and King Philip’s War had made monsters only more monstrous.
This Jeremiah Astor—the man of the 17th century—was married, young. His wife bore their first child a few months after the wedding and was from thereon out taken with some illness or affliction which never did quite leave her. For fifteen years Astor tried half-heartedly to raise a daughter, to keep his wife from death, and to maintain the meager and unfarmable land holdings he had been bestowed as a reward for a tour of defense in his youth.
But he never could quite cobble together a decent life. The fighting and the cussing and the drinking never abated, a fundamental lack of curiosity in the world about him stymied most attempts at empathy or industry, a litigious nature burned the few bridges that had one day stood. In short, he was a bastard. And a bit of a dimwitted one at that.
Folks had spoken to him about this of course, but Astor had been of a low opinion of himself since birth. Try as they might, no one in town could quite convince him that he could make it to the heavens, that damnation was an option and not a guarantee. But he knew where he was going, and never rightly thought there was much use in changing it. He had been dealt a bum hand in life, not because of luck or fortune, but because he was marked. And it would take a mighty desperate position to shake that belief.
The man in the Grange Hall is temporarily distracted by the phone in the kitchen ringing. As he shuffles off to answer I attempt to introduce myself to his wife—the Treasurer of this particular branch—who mutters something I do not hear in response. I have intruded in their pre-meeting preparations and she is displeased. The man in the ill-fitting button-down returns to his perch. That was Gerty—her lupus is acting up and she won’t be at tonight’s meeting. He turns to me and continues his story.
“It wasn’t uncommon in those times, you know, uncommon to take away a child.” The man is correct. The fate of Astor’s family was a common one, losing his child to a sort of indentured servitude in another man’s house. The exact inciting incident that led to her removal is not known and matters little, all that is important to the story is the fact that she was taken from them in the early months of 1696. She was fifteen years old.
“He tried, Lord knows it, he really tried to get her back.” Another rare point of agreement among all narrators to whom I will speak in Allerbash, and an equally rare moment of pity in Astor’s story. The man in the Grange Hall throws his hands up and looks skyward for emphasis before continuing.
Having his daughter returned to their home was a longshot from the outset and most families from whom children were taken simply accepted their fate and tried as best they could to survive the emotional trauma. Not Jeremiah. Of all the cards life had dealt him, this was one severe enough that, in desperation, he appealed to God. He cut his drinking and talked better of his wife. He settled a property lawsuit at a loss just for the charity of it. He mended the fence at the poorhouse and didn’t even take a loaf of bread for the trouble. He began attending church regular-like, and even sat in on a few town meetings. He spent all summer proving that he could be a man worthy of rearing a child.
A moment of silence sets in, long enough that I wonder if the story is over. As I get up to thank them and leave, the old man, not noticing my movements, continues almost to himself. He sniffles.
“But when he learned she were gone for good, it was the undoing of him. No one never seen a man fall so fast.”
I have mentioned that contracted servitude for unruly children was not uncommon at the time. The deaths of those children at the hands of those assigned to protect them was likewise not unknown.
In a moment, all of Astor’s penitence had counted for nothing. He knew, in his heart, that he had been correct the whole time. He was marked.
Another silence.
“Stormy.” The old man motions outside the window at a brewing summer thunderstorm. His wife fusses with the setting of her paperwork.
Jeremiah Astor’s mood became grim before his daughter was even in the ground. He no longer slept or kept regular hours and began gathering strange talismans for himself which no one could fully explain. He spent long nights awake with the Preacher, arguing about reprobation and predeterminism. He began to talk to shadows. Sometimes, folks said, the shadows talked back.
The whole town seemed to get dragged down by his moods. The shadows began to appear all about the village, scaring cattle and children alike. The birds stopped singing altogether, and wild animals seemed to grow ever more aggressive. The day of his daughter’s burial saw the first and only buck goring in the history of Allerbash. A local indigent howled from the window of the poorhouse, each and every night, that Jeremiah Astor was preparing for a “wicked battle.”
The battle never came, of course. About a year and a half after the moods set in, some pretense was found to search Astor’s house and drag him before the court, in the hope that it would put a stop to the whole sordid affair.
The woman in the Grange Hall settles down her papers and tucks them neatly beneath the building’s ceremonial Bible. She speaks up.
“The things they found in that house, unnatural. He won’t tell you that, doesn’t have the stomach for it. Think the wife was worst of all.”
As those who sought a hanging began pushing into Astor’s home, they found those trinkets and talismans which he had been hoarding. The records spoke of men’s teeth and strange hides sitting atop heaps of poppets and colanders, unearthly patterns painted on his walls intersected with unreadable scrawlings on his floor.
But strangest of all were the birds. Everything in his home—properly everything—was coated in a thin film of bird shit, owing to the hundreds of black-feathered birds which sat about his house, watching, waiting, always silent.
The birds watched the mob as they delved deeper into the shadowy abyss of Astor’s home, perched atop latticed honeysuckle growing unnaturally from the cracks in the floorboards. As they neared the final chamber and found Astor, asleep with the remains of his seemingly long-deceased wife, they heard the muffled cry of a man in a language unknown to them come bellowing from the shadows. The birds awoke from their trance and swarmed, pecking and gouging the intruders, until Astor jumped out of bed and yelled to the unearthly voice.
“Don’t know what he said to get ’em to knock it off, don’t even know who he said it to. But it did the trick.” The old man is now fully devoted to the recitation of the story and has slid his own paperwork to one side. “Few folks blinded, everyone shook up pretty good. But no one died, and Astor went peacefully. Only man in town to ever be brought up on charges of diabolic consortion.”
Trials of the time were a raucous thing. Any and all could enter the meeting hall to partake or else jeer, and this one was no exception. At no fewer than twelve points is the transcript interrupted with a note alluding to some sort of public pandemonium in need of quelling.
Among the chaos came revelations from those in whom Astor had confided that he believed himself to be a reprobate, inescapably destined for the pits of hell. He had made requests in Portsmouth for the Ars Goetia and other diabolical texts of the Key of Solomon. He had been heard to speak in unknown tongues around the nesting fields of the blackbirds and crows. He was seen tracing his fingers along the honeysuckle vine, as if in a meditative trance.
When interrogated, Astor spoke of himself as a chained and beaten dog. He called his collections and behaviors “an affliction forced, and of a nervous sort”, and stated simply that he was sentenced to death of neglect for crimes he could never repent of. He pleaded silence over innocence, and held that, if he could receive a closed and honest trial, he would admit to that which they hoped to hear and throw himself at their mercy.
Incredibly, the plea for a second trial closed to the public was granted. Its details were sealed but its outcome was swift and widely celebrated. Guilty, all counts. Few questioned his guilt. Fewer questioned that which he may have revealed behind sealed doors.
I am soberly informed of the date of the hanging (around summer 1698) and am asked politely to leave. The meeting will begin soon, and I am a non-member.
As I turn to the door, the old man calls back to me. He has a flair for the dramatic and savors the opportunity to present the story as theatrically as possible to a stranger who wants only to listen to him and his words. I turn to face him once more.
“My father used to say, his father said there was more to it than that. That there was more to that second trial behind them doors!”
Intrigued and seeing an opportunity to sidetrack, I ask him about a man by the same name who traveled about New England in the 19th century with a dark-haired companion, about the story I had heard in my youth. I receive the same reaction I will receive from every local to whom I raise this other story: icy condemnation. I have intruded upon their story, their legend, and have added to it details and addendums which they do not want to hear.
I take my cue and enter the developing thunderstorm.
All persons I spoke to in Allerbash presented similar stories, with a few extra grisly details thrown about where appropriate. All hinted at the edges of a broader conspiracy of one sort or another, a conspiracy that was implied to be knowledge unavailable to outsiders but which, I now believe, was something that they themselves had lost to time.
The proper dates of Astor’s life—1662 to 1698—were confirmed by a headstone I found in a local colonial burying ground. The inscription follows.
1662 – 1698
Yung M. Aster now lies in root,
Son of Adam and Eve,
For in life he tast’d of the fruit,
May he on Judgment find reprieve.
It is worth mentioning that, while the words and ornamentation of the gravestone were period accurate, the tooling and base materials were of a harder stone uncommon in the 17th century. Further, the creation of an elaborate gravestone for a hanged and reviled man seemed an odd touch, especially in a town with a potter’s field available for such undesirables. These inaccuracies led me to the early conclusion that the tombstone was not authentically of the 17th century but would have likely been installed around the mid-19th century, near the time of death for the Astor of the earlier story. Upon this speculation no citizen of Allerbash would comment.
The general assumption of Astor’s late-life deeds seemed to be that he was raising a demonic army of one sort or another to strike vengefully at the village which he felt had wronged him. Such a tale is so robustly attested to in the American folk tradition that I need not elaborate further. But suffice it to say that the folks of Allerbash seemed to really and properly believe it with the same intensity that my mother had believed in the tale of a couple of wandering vagabonds of a possibly magical bent.
I had gathered this, the second story of Jeremiah Astor, in a matter of weeks. While I had initially hoped my trip would provide something I could turn into a peer-reviewed paper, I realized quite quickly that there would be nothing of academic interest to salvage. As a treatise on folklore, the tale was simply too generic. And as a treatise on history? What history had I found? A phony gravestone, legends of an impossibly large and labyrinthian house (built at a time when even three rooms would have been indulgent!), a closed trial with no details or documentation, magical angry birds—none of this would survive any decent editor. No, there was nothing left to learn. I transcribed my notes, settled my tabs, and dropped a promised facsimile copy of the notebook pages off with a Preacher whom I had encountered at the burying ground (he being the only person in all of Allerbash who had taken a genuine and non-vitriolic interest in the first tale I earlier related).
I left Allerbash forever some fifteen years ago now, imagining I would seldom reflect on the two stories of a man named Jeremiah Astor and never really believing I would learn of the third.
I have recorded here accurately the second story of Jeremiah Astor.
It was a few months ago, round near January. Pictured: my office—you’ve seen it—is a poor place to host a long-unseen acquaintance, and I immediately set about clearing stacks of paper off my only spare chair. I offer a cup of coffee (“it’s burned, but I can put on a fresh one if you’d like”). The Preacher is older now, by about fifteen years, and looks like shit.
He apologizes for dropping in so unexpectedly and comments with some pride that he’s glad I still recognized him. He’s wearing a thick woolen flannel that separates slightly at the seams. He tugs at the threads as I drown his burnt coffee in sugar.
“The half a journal you found, do you remember it?”
I do and tell him as much. I go to dig it out of a pile of grave rubbings, but he tells me not to worry, that he brought the copy I made with him. It has weighed on his soul greatly over the last fifteen years.
“You mentioned to me that there were two stories, that the man who wrote this,” he waves the pages about for emphasis, “was obsessed with learning the third. That you couldn’t quite figure that out.”
I acknowledge that this is true while silently refreshing the details of the stories in my mind. The preacher takes a sip of coffee and explains, slowly, that he has come to tell it.
“Likely you’ve heard about the whole bird incident,” he mutters. “Folks don’t like grackles anyways, nasty little bastards. But we never could shoot ’em all up in Allerbash. Always seemed to be a plague of them.”
The Preacher waits for me to voice an opinion on grackles. I have none.
“Well, what were said, to call the birds off, it’s in the record, you know. Of that second trial. And I had seen the record, you understand, seen it and thought not much of it. Most folks hadn’t seen it.” The Preacher is nervously dancing around the subject. His rambles sputter to a halt and he mutters the words that had, a decade earlier, inspired his own fascination with the journal and the story of my youth. The words that had shaken his faith in the known tale of Astor, just as it had the faith of the Traveler, over a century earlier.
“End this, Caim. This cannot be our way.”
The Preacher sighs.
“Maybe he felt bad for those men. Maybe he needed to hang to make all the pieces fit together. Can’t say anyone could tell you for sure.”
Before Astor’s feet had left the gallows platform, the strange happenings that he had in life brought to Allerbash intensified. The shadows that flickered about town grew worse in the decades following Astor’s death. Nuisance birds seemed to be in a higher supply than usual, and deer stayed clear of the whole place. Wells ran dry while the brooks that supplied the surrounding fauna seemed to flourish. Lightning struck houses and men with an increased zeal and seemed to all but ignore the mighty birch trees which surrounded the village. For nearly a century the whole of the community seemed haunted by the wood that engulfed it.
Then, in the summer of 1784, all activities of an unexplainable sort ceased. Folks seemed to be at first greatly relieved, before superstition reared itself and settled in. A town watch was established to keep an eye on the long disused gallows hill grave site on the off-chance that the sudden silence was a portent of some grim happening. Around September, their abundance of caution paid off. A man, matching roughly the description of a greatly weakened Jeremiah Astor, was seen lurching from behind a shadowy thicket and running into the night.
The men at the watch gave chase and believed they would have caught him if it weren’t for the appearance of a second man, reeking of sulfur, appearing out of seemingly nowhere and chasing after Astor himself. In the light of the moon, they could see only the contours of his head, upon which sat a mop of dirty black hair.
Believing at first that something of a demonic invasion had begun, the town records document a population paralyzed with righteous fear. Debates as to how to best prepare for the times of John’s Revelation raged daily, then weekly, then monthly, until suddenly folks were able to come to their senses a bit and realize that nothing at all had happened for two damned years. The shadows had stopped, sure, and a couple of men who may or may not have been drinking saw a man who sort of looked like they had heard a man looked a hundred years before. But if there was to be a diabolic invasion it certainly hadn’t happened.
But they resolved to keep their ears pricked up anyways, just in case. For thirty years they waited, until someone happened upon an article in a newspaper down in Connecticut that mentioned, by name, a vagrant who called himself Jeremiah Astor.
The Preacher nervously drums his fingers on a stack of files. His eyes twitch very slightly, as if he is searching for the correct words to introduce the next half of the story.
“That is,” he begins, before trailing off. “That’s part of the other story, I suppose. Folks were scared, you understand, details lost.” His words falter and fade. “Well, it isn’t an excuse for it, maybe, for not unsealing the second trial. But it’s an explanation. Didn’t want folks to lose sight of what everyone thought was a God-given truth, that he was an evil man. A demon-raiser.”
I can see in his eyes that he is looking for me to say something, to absolve him in advance of a deed he has not yet disclosed. I say nothing.
“The young man who wrote the journal, that’s the story he knew, anyways. That’s the one that he said no one said anything true about. When he signed up—when he volunteered, to track Astor down, to have him baptized or hanged or some other such thing—in his view he was hunting down a murderer, an evil wizard, a summoner of Legion.”
The Preacher breaks eye contact and stares at his feet for a moment before continuing.
As the young man set down south to Connecticut, collecting stories of Jeremiah Astor and his mysterious magical companion, he slowly began to realize that he was not tracking an evil wizard. Astor, having faced nearly a century of damnation, was a soft-spoken man with a bit of a slow wit. He was a man who cared deeply for the fallen and the hunted. He fixed fences for starvation wages, returned lost pets to children just for the decency of it, fought to get drunks off the bottle. He loved the damned and the innocent.
And he loved Caim. The “demonic horde” was, in fact, a dear companion of Astor’s who matched or outpaced Jeremiah’s own selfless deeds. With growing bitterness and shock the Traveler recorded the tales of two sincere and impoverished vagrants, perpetually unwell, with nothing to their names but their fondness for one another and their devotion to their reformation. They had not been raised from the shackles of damnation. Together, they had been freed.
The Traveler was too late, of course. By the time he reached Nameaug, Astor and Caim had left. The next he heard of the pair was the lurid article describing Caim’s death, which I have much earlier described.
Any attempts by the Traveler to intervene in the murder trial failed. When Astor hanged, the young man gathered up his body and brought him home.
It is beginning to snow outside. I reflect upon the odd coincidence that, each time I hear a tale from the life of Jeremiah Astor, it is in poor weather.
Once he had returned to Allerbash, the Traveler began sharing this truth. There had been more to the life of Jeremiah Astor, perhaps he had properly repented in his way, perhaps his view of things wasn’t so off-base. Tensions flared as those who had a vested interest in keeping the mystery opaque struggled to stem the flow of theological debate about the nature of good and evil and reformation and other such silly things. Finally, unable to shut him up, the powers that be brokered a deal.
The Traveler would be given access to Astor’s closed-door testimony, and the town would commission a proper Christian gravestone for Astor. In exchange, the young man would leave town forever. He would stop spreading the stories he had heard. He would tear his journal in two. One half would remain with the elders of the town; the other would be discarded in Nameaug, the site of his exile.
The Preacher thanks me for my hospitality and rises to leave. The rest of the story, he explains, isn’t his to tell. It isn’t mine, it isn’t the Traveler’s, it isn’t anyone’s but Jeremiah’s. He places a bound packet on the table and draws the collar of his flannel about him. The door opens, and a man of shaken faith departs into the nor'easter.
As the courtroom was sealed on a bleary afternoon, Astor begrudgingly conceded to the gathered that, in the face of his own tribulations, he had begun consorting with a lower demon. He swore up and down that he was not hoping to raise him for aid or vengeance. He found in him a kindred spirit, heard his cries as one chained and damned and sympathized with him in his lot.
When the trial ended, he explained, and he was cast into the inferno, the two would find each other. And they would escape. He had spent his time preparing for his descent into the catacombs, learning the ways of the bureaucracies of heaven and hell and securing the required earthly components for their daring plan. Caim, for his part, would assemble those ingredients which were needed below, each chiseling at the veil from their side of it and narrowing the passage between hell and earth.
The few gathered behind closed doors laughed openly.
“You trust Its Great Deceits?” cried the presiding judge. “You are but a pawn, the plaything of the Cunning Exiled!”
I cannot know for sure the cadence or tone of Jeremiah’s response, but I reflect on the soft-spoken man of my great-grandmother’s youth as I read his words.
“We are chained dogs, and we shall not strike at he who has freed us.”
“And of the desires of the whole of the Legion?” begins a man recorded only as ‘P’. “If They should not want to feel the warmth of a Sun from them withheld?”
“I need free no Legion. For only one Dog I will be felt a Decent Man.”
There was no pity for Astor, not from God or the gathered. He hanged the following week.
Of course, the plan worked eventually. He had done well enough to sever the bonds of reality from above, and Caim and Astor escaped the grips of Diabolus that moonlit night in 1784.
As the two men traveled across the countryside, Astor became increasingly aware that their gambit could not last. During his 1816 medical internment, the Traveler records, the damned man was already near total mental and physical collapse. Jeremiah had begun to see visions, he wrote, visions of white-clothed beings like lighted shadows stalking them in the wood. He stayed awake most nights, watching Caim sleep, listening to the sound of the heavens slowly opening to consume them. At first, he could hear only a soft whistle, but as the years wore on and God above sought to recast those He had damned, the whistle grew to a piercing and constant screech. Caim for his part had tried to comfort him, create talismans to protect them from the horde that pursued them, assured him the two men would win in the end. That, even if they were caught, no Righteous or Just powers could see fit to indenture them. That surely they had now been redeemed.
But as the veil between earth and hell had been slowly pierced in the pursuit of their great escape, so too had that between heaven and man in His great quest to collect them and send them back once more.
A clipping of Caim’s death notice is pasted on the final page in the journal, the same one I had read so many years earlier. Astor’s words are underlined in dark ink.
“The angels! They have found us! They cannot let us be free!”
I have always found theology to be something of a dull and tedious topic. But my mind seems to wander always back to those two men from whom the coolness of earth’s sun is now forever withheld. I think of their decencies and indecencies, and the 38 years they found freedom from chains of darkness. I think of their condemnation. And, try though I may to avoid it, I often find myself reflecting on that arch-being which saw fit to condemn them.
I have recorded here accurately the final story of Jeremiah Astor. May he be pitied on Judgment.
K. Ferngall (he/him) was raised in the Last Green Valley and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. He is fond of weird horror, genealogy, public transportation, and history. He is less online than he once was, but still maintains a profile on Bluesky (@lifemadesimple.bsky.social). This is his first piece of fiction published under this pen name.
“Grackles” by K. Ferngall. Copyright © 2026 by K. Ferngall.
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