Beguilers Read Free

before they turned again and headed back towards the lake.
    There are puffberry bushes between the village and the forest, hundreds of them. When they’re in fruit all the children come up at dawn every morning to pick as many as they can before the birds get to them. It’s one of the best times of the year as far as I’m concerned. I’d eat puffberries until they came out of my ears. One of the best Intentions I ever thought of was to go up to that patch of hill-side every day for a month to weed out the creeping spinescutch which was growing between the bushes, choking them and making it difficult to pick the fruit. The following month several other people joined me and we had a great time working together up there. We brought all the cut creepers down to the village and made a central pile for people to use as kindling. My parents almost thought I was normal when I did that. They used to remind me of it from time to time, especially when they were particularly worried about my mood or the way I was behaving, but I think it was as much to reassure themselves as me. I had come to terms with my allergy and the way it had separated me from the other members of the community. It was they that hadn’t.
    But that night, when I was out walking on my own, I had no thoughts of sameness or difference, and I had no thought of puffberries, either. All I knew was that I had to take cover and refuse to see those beings that were dancing around in my path.
    Beguilers. No one really knows exactly what they are because no one has ever caught one. They are around during the day but you can’t see them because they have the same quality as the daylight. Occasionally, if you’re up on the mountain slopes, you might see a shadow pass through the air like a wafer of ice floating on water; not quite substantial enough to be sure that it’s really there. But at dusk they become visible, and at night they are as bright and vivid as huge fireflies.
    Some people say that they are demons drawn down from the cloud mountain to feed on human souls. Others say that they are the earth-bound spirits of wayfarers who lost their lives in the mountains and who need to lead another soul to a similar death before they can be freed from their torment. Because tormented they certainly are. The sound of their moaning, howling voices floating through the village streets in the darkness would freeze the blood in your heart. However hot the night might be, we close our shutters when we hear them coming and wrap our shawls around our ears.
    We are warned never to peep out at them from the first day we can understand the words. We are told that they are beautiful, so beautiful that people become mesmerised by them and get led astray. There are endless stories about them; of people who succumbed to the lure of their haunted voices and walked out into the night, never to be seen again; or got caught in the darkness between one place and another and didn’t return home. Every accident that happens on the mountain is blamed on the beguilers. Every time a traveller is lost on the road or falls down a precipice, the elders tell us that it was because they were following a beguiler. Our people live in terror of darkness; after nightfall we are prisoners in our own homes, waiting for the haunting voices to draw us from our sleep. It is one of the reasons that we are so isolated. Apart from the porters who have to pass through our village, carrying goods across the mountains to the coastal communities on the other side, we have no regular visitors at all.
    I suppose I never really believed the stories. The beguilers are eerie all right; they’re eerie to look at and eerie to hear, but aside from that I had never heard any real evidence that they interacted with people at all. They were a convenient excuse, though, for the fears that people have of the darkness. I always thought that if it wasn’t beguilers it’d be something else, another kind of spook designed to