In the Anno of our Lord 1633 the world turned like a maggot towards its dark plagued eye and the coming cold New Year.
The soil was a frozen black tarn and the mists hung on the trees like ripped swaddling. Brutal was the ice that split the bleached skulls garnishing the field, reducing the honeycomb to tooth picks for the ghosts of eaten men.
Fur and teeth were all that remained of the leveret curled up in the bole of the oak. It's last rite beneath the ancient crown, spent, beyond it's life, the bull's-eye sling of death daylight robbing it's wild brains.
Yet a rustle in the leaves spoke of a visitor. It crawled by the tree unseen, unheard, save its fingerprints on the frost and ... stopped. The invisible thing entered the leveret and stirred it into motion, loose yellow molars dropping to the ground as it's dead jaws stretched.
Tucking itself in, it squatted and sniffed, the snow-fat air laced with scents, barren and decayed. The jerking fur-beast searched for something more, something sweet, something secreted in the woman world, deep in their peat-lit hovels without the lightless forest on its edge.
Chattering it ran. It ran out of the oaks, along the row of infants' graves, where it burrowed for it's pleasure, sniggering, chatting, the patter of defunct paws a whisper of the terrible lies it will spin to stow itself in the shivering homes of women that New Years Eve, where lonely wives knitted weaves of prayers, their husbands fighting in far-off wars or dangling on the Town's rope pole, both doorways to the feral fields of Hell.
In a cottage apart, the occupant, a washer-woman, encumbered, pregnant and beset, placed a wooden King Melchior a step closer to the crib, the others waiting for each day to move and meet the God Child on the Sixth. She sat in the window praying for mercy for her man, her husband without hope, condemned to death for stealing bread off the Lord's sil, the gallows now for sure his final strangled slumber.
The ice flowers on the glass, a bouquet of frost, spoke of manless winters in her garden of grief. There would be no stay, no pardon, no tender sentence passed. He would be hung and it would be done. Her unborn baby knowing nothing of it's Father, plumping in the womb like a Childermass goose. Born and hung. In God's name, she would give her life to keep them both.
Another knew it too. The dead-hare-beast, wigging and truffling into people's lives, an unwelcome guest as the yeast of the year took root and rose anew, like blood in the yolk, a clump of fur souring the milk, a stranger's finger on the baby's fontanelle. None must find a footing. None.
The leveret-thing was giddy; jumping, hopping, skipping, a devil-may-care carolling up the path. It stopped and pricked it's ears. Ah, yes! The sound of a noose, taught and sweet, the slap of a neck snapping to boot. Beautiful! Her husband hung and dusted. Hoorah! A somersault of joy, for now the scheme was clear and the demon's ingress a good hare's paw closer than before.
Nearing the door, the furred one stood, an apparition of the gallowed husband, all smiles and livid red cheeks, the untied shoes covering the cloven hooves.
Knock, knock!
What! Is this the King she wondered? Melchior or better still ....
"Yes! You may stare for it is I my good wife, your man, pardoned and unexecuted, let loose in the nick of time, the noose already tightened round my apple, my voice now raspy as an adder!"
"Oh my love, my love, is it really you, the first foot too? In God's mercy I have lay with child this past nine months praying for the day and here you are on New Year's Eve. Oh Lord, come in, relieve yourself, eat, slake your thirst and caress my babied belly, the seed you planted, the strapling ready to burst this New Year!"
The hare-husband dropped to his knees, unbuttoned her apron and kissed her plumping gut, listening to the unborn clamour within, sliding his hairy palm across the mound and then below between her legs, smiling up at her with dreadful uncanny wanting she'd not seen before.
Is this her husband true?
"I doubt you've brought me salt and coal my dearest man, for this year's wallet and our good fortune, but I wonder what have you got in your pockets?"
Standing he emptied them, placing items on the table: a hare's loose teeth, a bloodied paw, an infant's tiny skull and a length of tattered noose.
The woman screamed and covered up her belly, retreating to the fireside for a iron.
He smiled again and licked his lips, the husband's jellied face revealing the old dead leveret beneath and deeper still, the sweating scarlet countenance of something much much worse.
