To whom it may concern

The dandelions had gone to seed, and in the deep and hidden places of the Eerie Woods, flicking lights danced over the puffy white seed heads.

The faerie dressmakers were out in force, the silvery gleam of their scissors flashing in the attenuated sunlight as they pinked and pruned and separated white down from brownish stem with the quick and easy motion that came with a thousand human lifetimes of practice.

Concealed in the shade of a deep hollow, Marshall and Simon looked on in wonder.

It looked like the Faerie Queen's wedding dress would be even poofier this year.

Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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"Close your eyes," said the voice from the woods. "Close your eyes and reach."

Marshall Teller, pale blue eyes now full of green and growing things, shook his head. For a moment, it seemed like the trees were shaking with him.

"No," he said, forcing the words out with difficulty, as though his mouth was stuffed with peat and loam. "No, I don't think I will."

Now the trees did shake, though it was the anger of some ancient, hungry thing being thwarted, rather than a motion carried by the sympathetic magic of the Harvest King.

"Coward," the forest hissed.

Ongoing Verse: Harvest

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"How are the hazelnuts?" asked Tod.

"They're good," Marshall said. He set the spoon down, the chocolate-hazelnut roulade on his plate still mostly uneaten.

Tod looked pleased.

"Harvested them myself - did you know they grow wild in the Eerie Woods?"

"I didn't," said Marshall, whose experiences within the borders of the Eerie Woods did not generally lend themselves to foraging.

"Every now and then, you find a sweet one," said Tod. "It's because that hazelnut lived a good and kind life, and it affected it's taste."

Marshall blinked.

"Are you messing with me?" he asked. "Because I can't always tell."

Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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Marshall felt it the moment Snooter began to unfurl, a tangle of browny-green scales melded alongside greeny-brown feathers, and a long, long beak that jutted from a smooth, round head that seemed too small in comparison to it's great snout.

Yellow eyes focused along the scope of a Pinocchio-level nose, peering expectantly at Simon. Simon, for his part, had managed to get his feet onto the wriggling pathway formed by the iron chains and was inching his way towards the relative safety afforded by the rest of the Eerie Woods.

"They're good names," said Marshall. "Suits them."

Snooter hooted cheerily.

Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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It wasn't that the Garbage Men were faster than she was, Janet thought, bounding through drifts of red-gold leaf litter that layered the forest floor in a crunching, crackling blanket of noisy traitors.

It was just that, as the arbiters of all that was correct and orderly in matters of time and space, they knew exactly where she would be at any given moment.

She pushed up the sleeve of her oversized sweater, checked the three watches strapped there. Clock-faces of sea-glass and sand stared back, unnumbered, handless and blank.

Janet knew she had to get back to the lake.

Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Ongoing Verse: Milkman

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Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Janet jerks her hand back, her eyes full and spilling over with the shock and the pain, and a sense of betrayal that almost drives out the crashing grey waves that have nearly drowned the brown of her irises.

Her fingers are hot and slick with her own blood, and even now it's a relief to feel the heat and see the colour, because it means the Baitshop hasn't yet managed to crawl all the way inside her.

Then the deep gouges are healing, and instead of scar tissue there are thin lines of gleaming scale in the knitted flesh.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Ongoing Verse: Harvest

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The trees grew thicker here, and what little sunlight filtered down through the overhanging branches became green and murky the further it penetrated.

Knots in the gnarled wood looked like screaming human faces, and in the spots where the bark had rubbed away, viscous red sap oozed like blood from a welling wound, filling the air with the copper tang of old pennies.

The path that Janet was on was lined with sea glass, and despite the blazing August heat and the many days that had passed without rain, the ground under her feet was damp, and smelled of salt.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Ongoing Verse: Harvest

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It takes almost an hour for the Kingswood to depart, the last twist and barbed curl of bracken slipping out of the still-open window and slithering away off the street.

Marshall's room is full of leaf litter, dead leaves and broken branches and wildflowers crushed underfoot, though there's no longer a root system binding them to the thick pile of his Jersey Giants-blue carpet.

"I'm not helping you clean this up," says Syndi, even as zephyrs scurry this way and that amongst the debris, pushing it into manageable piles that can be easily tackled with a dustpan.

"Thanks," says Marshall.

Ongoing Verse: Harvest

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Ongoing Verse: Teller Family History

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Ongoing Verse: Weather

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Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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From a pile of blankets and sleeping bags on the floor of Marshall's bedroom, Simon stirs, opens his eyes and blinks in sleep-fuddled confusion. The room is full of green light and smells of hot-house vegetation, and the carpet beneath him is crushed grass, damp with dew.

"Marshall?" he croaks, struggling to sit up in a makeshift bed turning to moss and bracken even as he lies there. "Mars?"

"Simon," his best friend says, in a voice that belongs to his best friend, and belongs to something far older. His hands press against the window and his fingers are strange.

Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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Ongoing Verse: Harvest

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The pine trees had been sodden with the unending rain, and the sudden cold snap froze the water beneath the bark so they swelled and creaked and cracked loud in the quiet of the deep woods.

Marshall Teller walked on, feeling the eyes of unseen and unseemly things watch him from the dark places. Something giggled in the underbrush, the sort of laugh that fit better on a knife-wielding porcelain doll than some fluffy-faced forest creature.

Maybe it was a doll. Certainly there were things in the Kingswood who had eaten enough lost Royalty to start taking on human affectations...

Ongoing Verse: Harvest

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Ongoing Verse: The Children

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The tree was riddled with fairy houses, springing up like fungus from the place where it's twisted roots met the ground to beyond the tallest point Marshall could see.

No bigger than a silver dollar, each one had a promise inscribed along the lintel and strange flowers growing from little pots beside the front step. There were letter boxes where unwary humans were encouraged to slip pieces of paper bearing their name, and circular apertures of clear glass, lit from within by a rainbow hue that shifted and sang and smelled of wild strawberries.

Night fell, and the doors opened.

Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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It was known locally as the Kingswood, the patch of land where the Eerie Wood met and merged with Deadwood Park. Here the trees grew tall and straight and the leaves never fell. The animals had human eyes, or human hands, or human hungers..

Normal folk didn't go into the Kingswood, the townspeople whispered, apparently classifying themselves amongst the normal even as they laundered straitjackets and sealed their children into giant rubber caskets. Or if they were normal when they went in, they weren't once they came out.

Marshall Teller straightened his Harvest King crown, breathed deep, then marched ahead.

Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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Ongoing Verse: Harvest

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There were flaming skeletons walking in the Eerie Woods. Or rather, there had been, but a combination of April showers and undergrowth left to grow unchecked had proved difficult for the undead hoards to navigate. Now piles of bones lay here and there, tangled amongst the bracken and smouldering sadly.

"Shouldn't this be trash pickup, rather than paranormal investigations?" asked Simon, using a grabber shaped like a Great White to deposit a faintly-smoking rib-cage into a heavy-duty refuse bag.

Marshall though about it.

"If we frame Chisel for bank fraud, the judge might get him to do it," he mused.

Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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The air was thick with the scent of nutmeg and cloves, and candied fruit crunched underfoot as Tod entered the BF Skinner Junior High Home Economics Room and Test Kitchen.

"Hey," he said, pulling down an apron and opening a drawer full of cookie cutters carved like dread invocations to sleeping gods. "What're you making?"

Janet let go of the wooden spoon handle and tried to shake some feelings back into her arms. The spoon stayed upright, mired in a solid brown mass that half-filled the mixing bowl in front of her.

"Christmas pudding," she said. "It's not going too well."

"Oh yeah?" said Tod, using a rolling pin to smite an Infernal Imp that tried to stop him reaching the flour. "Good thing it's the middle of March, then."

"You know me," said Janet, eyeing a half-empty egg carton and wondering if adding another would help or hinder her efforts. "I like to be prepared."

Tod glanced at the still-healing blisters on her palms, souvenirs from a weekend spent burying crates of energy bars and bottled water deep in the Eerie woods 'just in case'.

"Yeah," he said ruefully, showing his own identical scars. "That is something I know."

Ongoing Verse: Janet

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