Tales of the Peculiar Read online

  A mob formed and attacked him. Zheng struggled to stand on his grassy stumps and then to run. He fell, crushing a house under his weight. He stood again and lumbered on, laboring up a hill with thundering steps that punched holes in the street.

  The mob chased him, joined by soldiers who fired arrows at his back. From his wounds gushed liquid gold, which only encouraged more people to join the attack. All the while, Zheng was steadily growing, and soon he was twice the width of his street and three times the height of his house. His form was fast becoming inhuman, his arms and legs disappearing within the giant, earthen ball that was his midsection.

  He made it to the top of the street on tiny, waddling stumps. A moment later they were swallowed up, and with nothing left to steady him, his round form began to roll down the other side—slowly at first, then faster and faster. He became unstoppable, flattening houses and wagons and people as he went, growing larger all the while.

  He careened into the harbor, hurtled down a splintering dock, and then splashed into the sea, making a wave so big that all the boats around him swamped. Submerged and drifting, he began to grow faster than ever, his grass and earth and sand and seaweed spreading over the water to form a small island. The transformation was so all-consuming that he did not notice the approach of several of the emperor’s warships. He felt it, though, when they began to fire their cannons into him.

  The pain was incredible. His blood made the sea shine golden in the sun. He thought his life was about to end—until he heard a familiar voice.

  It was his father, calling his name.

  Cocobolo plowed into their midst with a great rumble. The wake he made knocked over the emperor’s warships like they were toys. Zheng felt something link with him beneath the surface of the water, and then his father was pulling him out to sea. Once they were away from danger and all was quiet, his father used bent coconut palms to catapult earth into the holes that had been shot through Zheng.

  “Thank you,” Zheng said, his voice a loud rumble that came from he knew not where. “I don’t deserve your kindness.”

  “Of course you do,” replied his father.

  “You were keeping watch,” said Zheng.

  “Yes,” said his father.

  “For all these years?”

  “Yes,” he said again. “I had a feeling you’d need my help one day.”

  “But I was so cruel to you.”

  His father was quiet for a moment. Then he said: “You’re my son.”

  Zheng’s bleeding had stopped, but now he felt a worse pain: incredible shame. Zheng was well acquainted with shame, but this type was new. He was ashamed by the kindness he’d been shown. He was ashamed at how he’d treated his poor father. But he was ashamed, most of all, of how ashamed he’d been of himself, and of what he’d let that turn him into.

  “I’m sorry, Father.” Zheng wept. “I’m so very sorry.”

  Even as he cried, Zheng could feel himself growing, his sand and grass and earth creeping outward, his seaweed thickening into a forest of submarine kelp. The coral reef that encircled his father linked itself to the one beginning to form around Zheng, and with a gentle tug, the elder Cocobolo led the younger still farther out to sea.

  “There’s a wonderful spot near Madagascar where we can relax in safety,” said the elder. “I believe you need a nice, long nap.”

  Zheng let himself be pulled along and, as the days passed, he began to feel something wonderful and entirely new.

  He felt like himself.

  The Pigeons of Saint Paul’s

  Editor’s note:

  The story of the pigeons and their cathedral is one of the oldest in peculiar folklore, and it has taken drastically different forms over the centuries. While the most common versions cast the pigeons as builders, I find their role as destroyers in this iteration much more interesting.

  —MN

  Once upon a peculiar time, long before there were towers or steeples or tall buildings of any sort in the city of London, all the pigeons lived high up in the trees where they could keep away from the bustle and fracas of human society. They didn’t care for the way humans smelled or the strange noises they made with their mouths or the mess they made of things generally, but they did appreciate the perfectly edible things they dropped on the street and threw into garbage heaps. Thus, the pigeons liked to stay near humans, but not too near. Twenty to forty feet above their heads was just about perfect.

  But then London started to grow—not just outward, but upward—and the humans began building lookout towers and churches with steeples and other things that intruded upon what the pigeons considered their private domain. So the pigeons called a meeting, and several thousand of them gathered on an empty island in the middle of the river Thames15 to decide what to do about the humans and their increasingly tall buildings. Pigeons being democratic, speeches were made and the question was put to a vote. A small contingent voted to put up with the humans and share the air. A smaller faction advocated leaving London altogether and finding somewhere less crowded to live. But the vast majority voted to declare war.

  Of course, the pigeons knew they couldn’t win a war against humans—nor did they want to. (Who would drop scraps for them to eat if the humans were dead?) But pigeons are experts in the art of sabotage, and with a clever combination of disruption and vandalism, they began a centuries-long fight to keep the humans at ground level, where they belonged. In the beginning it was easy because the humans built everything from wood and straw. Just a few burning embers deposited in a thatch roof could reduce an annoyingly tall building to ashes. But the humans kept rebuilding—they were bafflingly un-discourageable—and the pigeons continued to torch any structure taller than two stories just as fast as the humans could erect them.

  Eventually the humans grew wiser and began building their towers and steeples from stone, which made them much harder to burn down—so the pigeons tried to disrupt their construction instead. They pecked at workers’ heads, knocked down scaffolding, and pooped on architectural plans. This slowed the humans’ progress a bit, but didn’t stop it, and after some years a great stone cathedral rose higher than any of the trees in London. The pigeons considered it an eyesore and an affront to their dominance of the sky. It made them terribly grumpy.

  Happily, Vikings soon raided the city and tore it down—along with most of London. The pigeons loved the Vikings, who didn’t care for tall buildings and left tasty garbage all over the place. But after some years the Vikings went away and the steeple-builders got to work again. They chose a high hill overlooking the river and constructed a massive cathedral there, one that dwarfed everything that had come before it. They named it Saint Paul’s. Time and time again the pigeons tried to burn it down, but the humans had dedicated a small army of firefighters to the protection of the cathedral, and the pigeons’ every effort was thwarted.

  Frustrated and angry, the pigeons began setting fires in adjacent neighborhoods, at places upwind from the cathedral on gusty nights, in hopes the flames would spread. Early on the morning of September 2, 1666, their efforts were disastrously successful. A pigeon named Nesmith set fire to a bakery a half mile from Saint Paul’s. As the bakery was consumed, a ferocious wind pushed the flames straight uphill toward the cathedral. It burned completely—naves, belfries, and all—and after four days of destruction, so had eighty-seven other churches and more than ten thousand homes. The city was a smoking ruin.16

  The pigeons hadn’t envisioned such devastation, and they felt genuinely bad about it. Emotionally, it was a different thing altogether from the Viking raids. Though the damage was comparable, this was their fault entirely. They called a meeting and debated whether to leave London altogether. Perhaps, some argued, they did not deserve to live there anymore. The vote was split, and they decided to return the following day and debate the matter again. That night the revenge attacks began. There was a contingent of humans w
ho seemed to understand that pigeons were to blame for the fire, and had decided to drive them out. They soaked bread crumbs in arsenic and tried to poison the pigeons. They cut down the pigeons’ favorite roosting trees and destroyed their nests. They chased pigeons with brooms and bats and shot at them with muskets. After that, not a single pigeon was willing to leave the city; they were too proud. Instead they voted to fight back again.

  The pigeons pecked and pooped and spread disease and did everything they could to make the humans miserable. In turn, the humans ratcheted up their violence against the birds. Truthfully, the pigeons couldn’t do much more than annoy the humans, but when the humans started to rebuild the cathedral—the very symbol of their arrogance—the pigeons waged all-out war. Thousands of them descended on the construction site, risking life and wing to chase away the workers. Day after day, pitched battles were waged between the humans and the birds, and no matter how many pigeons the humans killed, more always seemed to come. They reached a stalemate. Construction ground to a halt; it seemed there would never be another cathedral on the site of Saint Paul’s, and that the pigeons of London would be harassed and killed forever.

  A year passed. The pigeons continued to fight, and their numbers to dwindle, and though the humans were steadily rebuilding the rest of London, they seemed to have abandoned their plans for the cathedral. Yet the violence continued, because hatred between humans and pigeons had become ingrained.

  One day, the pigeons were meeting on their island when a rowboat arrived carrying a single human. The pigeons became alarmed and were about to swarm him when he raised his arms and shouted, “I come in peace!” They soon learned that he wasn’t like most other humans—haltingly, brokenly, he could speak the pigeons’ native language of chirps and coos. He knew a great deal about birds, he told them, and peculiar birds at that, because his mother had been one. Moreover, he sympathized with their cause and wanted to broker a peace.

  The pigeons were astounded. They took a vote and decided not to peck the man’s eyes out—at least not right away. They questioned him. The man’s name was Wren, and he was an architect. His fellow humans had tasked him with attempting to rebuild the cathedral on the hill yet again.

  “You’re wasting your time,” said Nesmith, the fire starter and the pigeons’ leader. “Too many of us have died to prevent it.”

  “Of course, nothing can be built without peace,” replied Wren, “and no peace can be achieved without understanding. I come seeking a new understanding between my kind and yours. First: we recognize that the air is your domain, and we will build nothing in it without your permission.”

  “And why would we give our permission?”

  “Because this new building would be different from all the ones that came before. It would not be meant solely for the use of humans. It would be yours, too.”

  Nesmith laughed. “And what would we want with a building?”

  “Why, Nesmith,” said another pigeon, “if we had a building we could escape from the cold and the rain when the weather was bad. We could roost and lay eggs and stay warm.”

  “Not with humans around to bother us!” replied Nesmith. “We need a space all our own.”

  “What if I could promise you that?” said Wren. “I’ll make the cathedral so tall that humans won’t have any interest in using the top half at all.”

  Wren did more than make promises. He returned day after day to discuss his plans, and even altered them to satisfy the pigeons’ whims. They demanded all sorts of nooks and crannies and belfries and arches that were all but useless to humans, but were cozier than a living room to pigeons, and Wren agreed. He even promised the pigeons their own entrance, high above the ground and inaccessible to the non-winged. In exchange, the pigeons promised not to stand in the way of construction, and once it was built, not to make too much noise during services or poop on the worshippers.

  And so an historic accord was forged. The pigeons and humans called off their war and returned to merely annoying one another. Wren built his cathedral—their cathedral—a proud and towering place, and the pigeons never again tried to destroy it. In fact, they felt such pride in Saint Paul’s that they swore to protect it—and to this day they still do. When fires break out they swarm and beat the flames with their wings. They chase away vandals and thieves. During the great war, squadrons of pigeons redirected bombs in midair so that they fell clear of the building. It’s safe to say that Saint Paul’s would not be standing today without its winged caretakers.

  Wren and the pigeons became lifelong friends. For the rest of his life, England’s most esteemed architect never went anywhere without a pigeon close at hand to advise him. Even after he died, the birds went to visit him, now and again, in the land below. To this day, you’ll find the cathedral they built still towering over London, peculiar pigeons keeping watch.

  The Girl Who Could Tame Nightmares

  Once there was a girl named Lavinia who wanted nothing more than to become a doctor like her father. She had a kind heart and a sharp mind and she loved helping people. She would have made an excellent doctor—but her father insisted it wasn’t possible. He had a kind heart, too, and merely wanted to save his daughter from disappointment; at that time there were no female doctors in America at all. It seemed inconceivable that she would be accepted to a medical school, so he urged her toward more practical ambitions. “There are other ways to help people,” he told her. “You could be a teacher.”

  But Lavinia hated her teachers. At school, while the boys were learning science, Lavinia and the other girls were taught how to knit and cook. But Lavinia would not be discouraged. She stole the boys’ science books and memorized them. She spied through the keyhole as her father examined patients in his office, and she pestered him with endless questions about his work. She sliced open frogs she’d caught in the yard to examine their insides. One day, she vowed, she would discover a cure for something. One day she would be famous.

  She could never have guessed how soon that day would arrive, or in what form. Her younger brother, Douglas, had always suffered from bad dreams, and lately they’d been getting worse. He often woke up screaming, convinced that monsters were coming to eat him.

  “There are no monsters,” Lavinia said, comforting him one night. “Try thinking about some baby animals as you fall asleep, or Cheeky romping in a field.” She patted their old bloodhound, who lay curled at the foot of the bed. So Douglas tried thinking of Cheeky and baby chickens as he fell asleep the following night, but in his dreams the dog turned into a monster that bit the chicks’ heads off, and he woke up screaming once again.

  Concerned that Douglas might be ill, their father looked in Douglas’s eyes and ears and throat and checked him all over for rashes, but he could find nothing physically wrong with the boy. The night terrors got so bad that Lavinia decided to examine Douglas herself, just in case their father had missed something.

  “But you’re not a doctor,” Douglas protested. “You’re just my sister.”

  “Hush up and hold still,” she said. “Now go ahhh.”

  She peered into his throat, his nose, and his ears—and deep inside the latter, with the aid of a light, she spied a mass of strange black stuff. She poked her finger in and wiggled it about, and when she removed it, a string of sooty, threadlike stuff was wrapped around the tip. As she pulled her hand away, three long feet of it unraveled from Douglas’s ear.

  “Hey, that tickles!” he said, laughing.

  She balled the thread in her hand. It squirmed, ever so slightly, as if alive.

  Lavinia showed it to her father. “How strange,” he remarked, holding it up to a light.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” he said, frowning. The thread was wriggling slowly out of his hand toward Lavinia. “I think it likes you, though.”

  “Perhaps it’s a new discovery!” she said excitedly.

 
“I doubt it,” her father said. “In any case, it’s nothing for you to worry about.” He patted her on the head, put the thread into a drawer, and locked it.

  “I’d like to examine it, too,” she said.

  “It’s time for lunch,” he replied, shooing her out.

  She stomped away to her room, annoyed. That might have been the end of it, if not for this: Douglas had no nightmares that night or any night after, and he credited his recovery entirely to Lavinia.

  Their father wasn’t so sure. A short time later, though, a patient of his complained of insomnia due to bad dreams, and when nothing the doctor prescribed seemed to help, he reluctantly asked Lavinia to take a look in the patient’s ear. Just eleven and small for her age, she had to stand on a chair to see in. Sure enough, it was clogged with a mass of thready black stuff, which her father had not been able to see. She stuck her pinkie inside, wiggled it around, then wound out a thread from the patient’s ear. It was so long and so thoroughly attached to the inside of his head that, to pull it loose, she had to climb down from her stool, dig her heels into the floor, and yank with both hands. When it finally snapped free of his head, she fell backward onto the floor and the patient tumbled off the examination table.

  Her father snatched up the black thread and stuffed it into his drawer with the other batch.

  “But it’s mine,” Lavinia protested.

  “It’s his, actually,” said her father, helping the man up from the floor. “Now go and play with your brother.”

  The man returned three days later. He hadn’t had a single nightmare since Lavinia had removed the thread from his ear.

  “Your daughter is a miracle worker!” he declared, speaking to Lavinia’s father but beaming straight at her.