The Raggy Man

The Raggy Man

by

John McConnochie

The Raggy Man hurried to answer the bell which was tinkling over the doorway of his shop, 'Mortimer's Second Hand Goods'. His name was Mortimer, but everyone called him the Raggy Man and he had not been addressed by his real name for a very long time. The name Mortimer was dignified, befitting someone possibly shabby yet still genteel, whereas he was simply old and smelly and decayed: his body as noisome and decrepit as the ragged old clothes he wore.

It was lunchtime and the sign in the window quite clearly said 'Closed', so the visitor must be one of the Raggy Man's very special ones, and he thrilled with anticipation at the thought of the pleasure which was to come.

The Raggy Man opened the door which led onto the narrow, dark back-street in which his shop was the only remaining inhabited building. He peered into the gloom of the overcast day and there espied the most favoured visitor of all.

"Young Tommy!”, he cried with joy, "Come in! Come in! Ready for a story from your old Uncle Mortimer?”

Thomas Wright, six years old, angelic of feature, quiet, biddable and - greatest virtue of all where the old man's stories were concerned - attentive, stepped over the threshold.

"Where does your mother think you are? Out playing with the other children? Good! Good!”

He allowed himself a sigh at a world grown so mistrustful that it could read the possibility of sexual abuse into an old man's stories, but he had to be careful, even if that meant deceit.

The Raggy Man hurried Tommy through his shop, which was filled with sagging, overflowing shelving and disorganised piles of treasures and almost-treasures (but mostly junk), and into the little parlour at the back which he maintained for visitors in a condition which, while it might not have actively embraced the concepts of cleanliness and tidiness, was at least markedly more civilised than the squalor of the flat above the shop in which he actually lived.

"Milk? Biscuits?”

Beaming at the head-noddings of assent from the child, he scurried around the little kitchen at the rear of the building and reappeared with a greasy glass and a chipped plate piled high with chocolate digestives.

"Here you are, Master Thomas! And what have you got there?”

The child had picked up a triangular-bladed dagger from the debris on the floor by the chair in which he sat. Its hilt was of stone carved in the shape of a monstrous demon.

"Ah that!” said the old man, "That's a sacrificial dagger. Quite genuine, I believe, and very old. Sold to me only last week by some silly old biddy who didn't know what it was. Here, here, give it to Uncle Mortimer now! It's very sharp. You could hurt yourself.”

He plucked the knife from the child's hand.

"We can look at it later, if you like.”

He sat down on the sofa next to the boy's chair and fondly patted him on the knee.

"So!", he said, his hand stroking the boy's thigh, "Another of old Mortimer's stories, eh?". His face creased in a smile. "Well...”

"Once upon a time there was a country in what is now Eastern Europe, although none of the people who lived in that country would have recognised the concept of Europe - do you know what a concept is, Tommy? It's just a fancy word for an idea.”

“Anyway, there was a country, and this country had a king. Now, I'm talking about a time when kings were really kings, when they could do anything they wanted to do. Kings these days have to ask permission of just about everyone before they're allowed to draw a breath, but the king of this country, well, as I said, he could do anything he wanted. If he didn't like somebody's face he could have the skin stripped from it, and he sometimes did just that. He was what most people these days would call a tyrant. Do you know what a tyrant is, Tommy? No? Well it's a word that foolish people apply to those they're jealous of, because they've got the power to do the things that they secretly want to do. Do you see?”

“Just move a little, Tommy and let your old uncle get a little closer. That's a good boy! Relax now, and listen...”

“So, where was I? Oh yes, well this king, he had what you might call a restless nature. He was ambitious.”

“What? Oh, 'ambitious' means that he wasn't content to have second-best. Just wait and you'll see.”

“Yes, as I said he could do anything he wanted but after a while he found himself becoming bored. After all, there are only so many things you can do with people: he invented lots of interesting games to play with them, and a great many of his subjects didn't survive his little fancies I'm sad to say. But that didn't matter so much because he was their king - what mattered was that there were limits to the things that he could do.”

“So what did he do about that, you may ask. Well, he found that he wanted to control people not just by fear, but on a deeper level. He wanted them to be like puppets, you see. And not just people, but other things too.”

“Eh? Like what? Well, like thunder and rain and the waves and so forth. Oh, and he wanted to live forever too.”

“So, he sought out knowledge that would help him to be like that. We would call it magic, and he looked for it in all the places that he could think of. He found a lot that wasn't true magic, and I'm afraid a lot of his subjects got rather badly damaged in the process, but of course they didn't matter much. And in the end he found what he was looking for.”

“He made a pact - that's like an agreement, Tommy - with what the know-nothings of this world would call demons, but they were really gods, gods from a much older time, a time before human beings had even been thought of. So what this agreement said was that if he would serve these gods then they would teach him their secrets. And that's just what they did.”

“They told him to write the secrets down in a book, so that all he had to do when he wanted some special thing was to look in the book and do what it told him to do. But his subjects got jealous of him, as people with little souls always do, and they made up terrible stories about him - why, they said that in order to live forever he ate the heart of a little boy or girl every once in a while! Can you imagine such a thing?”

“Now don't fidget, Tommy, there's only a little more to this story, and if you sit still and listen Old Uncle Mortimer will give you a very special treat. There, that's better!”

“Now, where was I? Oh yes. They got jealous. And they rebelled. They tore down his palace and they burned his book and cast the ashes on the sea. They couldn't kill him - he was immortal, you see - but they forced him to hide in the wilderness like an animal. And a terrible thing happened to him: without the secrets in his book he grew old - even though he couldn't die - and he couldn't get anyone or anything to obey him any more.”

“So, what did he do? Well, what his silly subjects didn't know was that the book was immortal too! Oh yes, you could burn it, or tear up its pages, but in the end it would always mend itself and be whole again. And so, of course, he set out to find it. And he's looked for it ever since: always sad, always alone, but someday he knows he'll find it."

The Raggy Man paused.

"Why Tommy", he said, "I believe you're not even listening to me! And look at the mess you've made of that chair! Still, when you bring me a delicacy like this I could forgive you anything."

The Raggy Man nibbled daintily at the bloody morsel in his fingers and sighed with pleasure.

January 1st 1997