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(Created page with "= After That = ''by Parménides Guie'' Some people swore that the house was haunted. The new house was probably haunted from the start. From the day it was built, on th...")
 
imported>Luciano
(Created page with "= La Noche del Zombi, Part I = The summer of 1856 was the long summer of despair for our Federalists fighting under president Keum to preserve our young Federation. The Auton...")
 
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= After That =
= La Noche del Zombi, Part I =  
''by [[Parménides Guie]]''
The summer of 1856 was the long summer of despair for our Federalists fighting under president Keum to preserve our young Federation. The Autonomists kept winning battles, and seemed to have failed to take the capital mainly out of a lack of interest. The merciless General Guang would lead his well-organized militias on forays deep into La Costa, while the harried Federalist troops seemed to retreat and lose at every turn.


Some people swore that the house was haunted.
After the disaster at Cerro Sombrero in October, 1855, when Coronel Sanpedro was killed, Brevet Coronel Persson led her Apofénicos in several near-suicide missions down into the Delta del Au, but always at great cost in soldiers, horses and materiel. In the unusual rainy gloom of the winter of 1856 she took the hill at Petronio Robilyle and held it for several months, using it as a base for operations further south. But the Federalists always seemed outnumbered and outmanoevered by the Autonomist units, who seemed to move freely through the entirety of Comuna Constitución that year, several times feinting toward Caracol but inevitably rampaging straight north, instead. Their strategy seemed to be one of destruction rather than capture, which suited their character as bandits and pirates under the nefarious Ordon-Grabb and the blackhearted McQueen. The trail of tears left by farmers and merchent families fleeing their homes throughout the south Costa for the relative safety of the Distrito, and their squalid refugee camps stretched the charity of the Chogué monks and lay workers trying to help.


The new house was probably haunted from the start.  From the day it was built, on the edge of the forest, there was a moodiness that would settle upon anyone who spent more than a few minutes near the modest, blue-tile-roofed farmhouse that squatted at the edge of the forest.
In November, as the temperatures warmed but the rain refused to abate, Coronel Persson's regiment was ordered by General Kim to defend the town of Santo Domingo, nestled along the eponymous Santo Domingo creek at the base of the Cientoocho. The esteemed lady from San Pedro del Amantes politely refused. Her regiment was at less than quarter strength, and furthermore had almost no ammunition. Of course, General Kim was uninterested in such things. So off to Santo Domingo the soldiers trudged. They camped on the northern bank of the Río Yucái, just upstream of the little floodplain from the tiny Quebrada Duraznos.  


Perhaps it could be blamed on the man who built it.  Señor Chue was a taciturn man.  He would sit on the stoop in the evenings, smoking cigarettes and scratching himself.  People said one could overhear him talking, frequently.  But he lived alone.
Their chances of surviving an encounter with Guang's forces, known be camped in the town of Colofón just a dozen kilometers southeast and clearly headed toward Santo Domingo, seemed slim.


He'd inherited the land from his parents, who had died in a bus accident on the new highway, ten years ago. He'd come back from the city, bitter and scandalously divorced at forty. The storekeeper said that Chue thought that if he built a new house, he could attract a second wife.
Now, there was a small Chogué monastery that had been built just a few years prior at Santo Domingo, on the west bank of the Duraznos and close to the town square. In this monastery there lived an elderly monk named Gabriel Ghiuletti, who typically went by the nickname "Fin", after his mother's family name, Finlay. He was not an ordinary monk. In fact, he was a rogue, and he had been a pirate. Even worse, he was a native child of the rebel capital, Cabo Inglés. But some years ago, he had decided he regretted his roguish past and, with genuine repentance after a very long night drinking, he had converted to the Way of Gautama and had adopted the grey and saffron robes. The order, in its wisdom, had placed him in an as-out-of-the-way-place-as-possible - namely, this Templo de Duraznos in Santo Domingo. And he was happy there. He had become the caretaker of a substantial tribe of parentless war orphans, who seemed to roam into the regiment's camp with all the finesse of feral animals.


Sturdily constructed, it was unxpectedly made to look traditional, as if in the old country.  Señor Chue was the type of man one would normally expect to go for a fancy, modern-style house:  a flat roof, concrete walls, topiary bushes in a row in front and a Finira in the driveway. Perhaps it was an homage to his deceased father, who'd been a skilled craftsman and builder.  The house had a curving roof with rough-hewn eaves of raw wood, and sliding doors, almost like a temple building, but simpler.
Coronel Persson is a military woman, and she had little patience for children. Angrily, she and her Cabo, Takayama, rode over to the temple and demanded to see the person in charge of the children.


Some people said the man had chosen the spot for his house badly. There were some graves, in among the trees on the hillside. There are graves everywhere, in the Ardisphere. Ancestors are thick on the ground.
Instead of arguing, the rogue Fin Ghiuletti invited the commander and her sergeant to dinner. Over plates of pande, cabbage and beans, and with children swarming around, Persson found herself recounting her regiment's difficult straits. Ghiuletti, being a former pirate, had some notion of tactics and his questions were intelligent and perceptive to the extreme. He asked when Guang's forces might be expected - how long did they have? He asked how many soldiers the "Beast from Boreal" had - it was nearly 10 times the number in Persson's underpowered regiment.


Some of these graves were Señor Chue's ancestors - including his parents and back several generations, since they'd settled the area just before the Civil War.  Perhaps he'd forgotten about his grandmother.  She had been a terrible, frightening woman.  Rumor said that during the repressions, decades ago, she'd collaborated with the Guardia, and had been responsible for the deaths of several dozen villagers.  Because of her, no one completely trusted the Chue family, even now.  The Chues didn't go to church or temple, either.  They really weren't good, modern Ardispherians.
And slowly, as the night grew late and the moon crawled over the looming Cientoocho, Persson and Ghiuletti formulated a plan.


It was the temple deacon's wife, Señora Sung, who swore that the new house was haunted.  She would point out that the Chue family had been shamans, generations ago, in the old country, and that Señor Chue probably still practiced secret, pagan rituals.  He had placed some wooden ''jang-seung'' - the traditional, carved, protective totem poles - at the turning to the driveway to the house.  Probably, his father had made them.  "Superstitious," the woman spat, as she gossiped at the store.
- byline Luciano de Samosata for the ''Globo Ardiente'', July 7th, 1857.


All anyone saw him doing, though, was working his fields.  And talking to himself, sometimes.  He made a peculiar farmer - some noted that he was supposedly well-educated, with a university degree.  Supposedly, he had led a student strike, back in the time when that Nihonish woman, Shinoda, had become president.
= La Noche del Zombi, Part II =


But people dismissed the gossip, for the most part.  They just left Señor Chue alone.
- byline Luciano de Samosata for the ''Globo Ardiente'', July 9th, 1857.


Then, one spring evening, several of the older women were walking along the road by the house.  The sun was already behind the hills, making the sky orange and pink.  The air was full of smoke from burning the stubble, after cutting the spring barley.  The earth was muddy and red-black, dotted with flecks of gold.
[[Category:Source]]
 
[[Category:Ardisphere]]
The women had paused their conversation.  Suddenly they heard shouting, very clearly.  The women turned and stared at the house, across a field of freshly planted hot peppers.
 
Señor Chue came running out of his handsome house, his longish, dishevelled hair flying. He ran off among the trees, waving an axe.  The women saw him strike at one of the burial mounds repeatly with the axe, weeping.
 
Nothing was ever the same again after that.
 
<span style="font-size:80%">- Translated from [[Gohangukian]] to [[Ingerish]] by [[Melissa So]] from the original story, "그다음에," published in 1954, and printed in the [[Arksbury International University|Arksbury International University Press]] collection ''Literature of the Gohanian Diaspora, Part II, 20th Century'', 1985. Released by author and translator to the public domain.</span>

Latest revision as of 05:04, 1 May 2019

La Noche del Zombi, Part I

The summer of 1856 was the long summer of despair for our Federalists fighting under president Keum to preserve our young Federation. The Autonomists kept winning battles, and seemed to have failed to take the capital mainly out of a lack of interest. The merciless General Guang would lead his well-organized militias on forays deep into La Costa, while the harried Federalist troops seemed to retreat and lose at every turn.

After the disaster at Cerro Sombrero in October, 1855, when Coronel Sanpedro was killed, Brevet Coronel Persson led her Apofénicos in several near-suicide missions down into the Delta del Au, but always at great cost in soldiers, horses and materiel. In the unusual rainy gloom of the winter of 1856 she took the hill at Petronio Robilyle and held it for several months, using it as a base for operations further south. But the Federalists always seemed outnumbered and outmanoevered by the Autonomist units, who seemed to move freely through the entirety of Comuna Constitución that year, several times feinting toward Caracol but inevitably rampaging straight north, instead. Their strategy seemed to be one of destruction rather than capture, which suited their character as bandits and pirates under the nefarious Ordon-Grabb and the blackhearted McQueen. The trail of tears left by farmers and merchent families fleeing their homes throughout the south Costa for the relative safety of the Distrito, and their squalid refugee camps stretched the charity of the Chogué monks and lay workers trying to help.

In November, as the temperatures warmed but the rain refused to abate, Coronel Persson's regiment was ordered by General Kim to defend the town of Santo Domingo, nestled along the eponymous Santo Domingo creek at the base of the Cientoocho. The esteemed lady from San Pedro del Amantes politely refused. Her regiment was at less than quarter strength, and furthermore had almost no ammunition. Of course, General Kim was uninterested in such things. So off to Santo Domingo the soldiers trudged. They camped on the northern bank of the Río Yucái, just upstream of the little floodplain from the tiny Quebrada Duraznos.

Their chances of surviving an encounter with Guang's forces, known be camped in the town of Colofón just a dozen kilometers southeast and clearly headed toward Santo Domingo, seemed slim.

Now, there was a small Chogué monastery that had been built just a few years prior at Santo Domingo, on the west bank of the Duraznos and close to the town square. In this monastery there lived an elderly monk named Gabriel Ghiuletti, who typically went by the nickname "Fin", after his mother's family name, Finlay. He was not an ordinary monk. In fact, he was a rogue, and he had been a pirate. Even worse, he was a native child of the rebel capital, Cabo Inglés. But some years ago, he had decided he regretted his roguish past and, with genuine repentance after a very long night drinking, he had converted to the Way of Gautama and had adopted the grey and saffron robes. The order, in its wisdom, had placed him in an as-out-of-the-way-place-as-possible - namely, this Templo de Duraznos in Santo Domingo. And he was happy there. He had become the caretaker of a substantial tribe of parentless war orphans, who seemed to roam into the regiment's camp with all the finesse of feral animals.

Coronel Persson is a military woman, and she had little patience for children. Angrily, she and her Cabo, Takayama, rode over to the temple and demanded to see the person in charge of the children.

Instead of arguing, the rogue Fin Ghiuletti invited the commander and her sergeant to dinner. Over plates of pande, cabbage and beans, and with children swarming around, Persson found herself recounting her regiment's difficult straits. Ghiuletti, being a former pirate, had some notion of tactics and his questions were intelligent and perceptive to the extreme. He asked when Guang's forces might be expected - how long did they have? He asked how many soldiers the "Beast from Boreal" had - it was nearly 10 times the number in Persson's underpowered regiment.

And slowly, as the night grew late and the moon crawled over the looming Cientoocho, Persson and Ghiuletti formulated a plan.

- byline Luciano de Samosata for the Globo Ardiente, July 7th, 1857.

La Noche del Zombi, Part II

- byline Luciano de Samosata for the Globo Ardiente, July 9th, 1857.

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