VI. Manevolence

The sizzling heat of summer had passed on. The vibrant, colourful people hurried along in their city gait to various appointed destinations or some were perhaps merely glad to be outdoors on such a lovely, crisp late afternoon in October. Along the Gold Coast of Chicago, the thick, black carefully attended to revered trunks were encompassed by low, ornamental wrought iron fences that protect them from pedestrians who raced and weaved between them in snake-like formations in their hurry to get ahead. In their self-absorbed travels, they rarely bothered to gaze upwards in observance of the windswept movements of the skeletal boughs. During the long commute to his estate, the pillar of stone kept thinking about what the trees meant, troubled as he was by each and every gesture. The man beside him at the window seat looked stoically at the passing dull, gray scenery of building and building, station after station, with each depot stop bookmarking a dwindling denseness of population until the distant places where the wild, empty mid-western prairies had been tamed into expansive, manicured lawns of exquisite and formidable mansions. The elucidator of the eerie rarely ventured anywhere on this particular eve. His client remained silent as the singular meditation on the meanings of trees remained caught in a revolving doorway of fear. Prim marveled at the wealthy antiquarian's extensive library of first edition books. "What a warm and cheerful study. Although you are alone here with mere servants and without any intellectual peer, you should still feel quite at ease." Drafting his advance payment as requested at the writing desk, the antiquarian continued to mumble on about the night of all nights until the precision of the appointed hour. In the lamp lit pathway to the large, rectangular pool, the dry, yellow leaves rattled their bones caught up in preternatural shear of wind giving the ghost its form. The shape had an otherworldly geometry of a lurching then pouncing physiognomy; for a moment seemingly still but with perceivable oscillation. An entity or demon would be a misnomer. Before the materialization, Prim knew from past experience that there was little he could do to ease the man's trepedation, yet his presence began to calm him. "This is the most malevolent and frightening elemental-ghost of all my encounters; though hinting of manifestation through other organics, I assure you that it's fixed in place and time. Fear not the future, Mr. Tallow, for I have now seen this also, and I assure you that you are quite sane." The elucidator of the eerie's homeward journey was profitable, a rare tome of Maupassant given along with his payment. There are luminous and darkening phases through the year; however, this was the darkest moon of them all with an absolute absence of meaning and light.