TODAY, WE ARE THRILLED TO WELCOME OUR GUEST AUTHOR, KOOS VERKAIK, WHO IS SHARING AN EXCERPT FROM HIS NOVEL, 'ALL FATHER' #RWRTeamBlog #ReadWriteRepeat
- Jul 15
- 15 min read
Excerpt:
This is the story the painter told the boy. . . .
Harald Finn would sometimes scrutinize his own big hands with his one good eye as if pondering how he could strangle himself with them. If he bent his fingers and stared at the yellow nails, it seemed as if it was only the sheer intensity of his gaze that kept the hands off him. The very instant he looked away, the independent little beasts with five fingers would seize the opportunity to attack his throat.
Yet he could also regard his hands with appreciative fondness, recalling how often he had balled them into strong fists to earn his daily bread as a boxer at the fairgrounds.
And they had never let him down, his hands.
A particularly vicious opponent had slugged the sight out of his right eye, but his hands were still strong. Then an awkward fall from loose staging had crippled his leg, and now he could only use his hands to help set up the equipment of the other circus folk, who rewarded him with just enough food to keep him alive.
Exactly where the accident had happened he couldn’t recall anymore. After a while all the roads, villages, and towns looked more or less the same.
He still knew exactly where he had met the Creature.
It was on the edge of a wood in Brabant, near the Dutch-Belgian border, where, sweating, exhausted, and hungry, he’d slumped down on the grass, swearing he’d never take another step on his crippled foot. It only made him groan with pain and forced him to swing his arms out in order to keep his balance, so it looked as if he was always drunk. This drew sneering remarks from people, who assumed he used a stick to stay upright.
Thus far and no further. There he sat, a big, gray-haired man whose mounting years now lay so heavily on him that the thought of them ending no longer disturbed him. He’d made his decision and accepted the fact that life—like the fairground folk still visible in the distance—would go on just as well without him. Here, on the edge of the woods, he’d found the ideal spot to watch the sun going down for the last time and let his seeing eye join the other in darkness.
The gnawing in his empty stomach had ceased, which wasn’t surprising—his body seldom craved food, even if he hadn’t eaten for prolonged periods. His throat didn’t feel very dry either, in spite of the fact that he hadn’t drunk a drop all day.
But Harald Finn was tougher than he realized and while he sat there, it began to dawn on him that it could take quite a while before the blanket of death would be spread over him. His big hands were resting in his lap and he didn’t have the nerve to do away with himself. The idea that a man could actually throttle himself suddenly seemed absolutely unthinkable.
Doubts began creeping in. Perhaps life could still be worthwhile? Cripple or no cripple—what did he care? Half-blind or not—what did it matter really? And hadn’t he learned to survive all day on a crust of bread and a few gulps of water? And there were plenty of others in the traveling group who were far worse off than him. He didn’t really need much. But the satisfied feeling he’d had after he’d earned money with his fists . . . no, the fall had finished that for good and all.
Then, just when he’d decided to take to the road again, even if it was tottering and teetering, he saw the Creature standing in front of him.
Small, watery eyes peered over a stumpy little nose in a face that could hardly be described as human. The Creature’s skin was so pallid, it looked almost pure white; the lips resembled nothing more than a thin, shadowy line and the hair was flaxen blond. The small body was so flat that Harald Finn wondered how it could possibly contain a heart, lungs, and stomach. He could have crushed the ragged little body between his finger and thumb, and wondered how that feeble torso managed to support such a large head.
He had no idea where the Creature had suddenly sprung from. He didn’t know what to think about it. Neither could he decide whether it was for real or a figment of his imagination. Given the severity of Harald Finn’s physical condition at that time, it wouldn’t have been surprising if this had led to all sorts of weird hallucinations. But he was far too level-headed to suddenly believe in metaphysical apparitions. So he took the Creature seriously, and began nodding his head slowly when he was offered a suggestion. His single eye began to twinkle under the broad brim of his hat. The Creature made his intentions quite clear, although Harald wasn’t sure whether he heard actual words or not—although the thin lips moved, the voice seemed to penetrate directly into his brain.
Harald Finn didn’t like the Creature.
The clammy feeling of dread and loathing that crept over him made him literally heave, and if he’d had anything in his stomach, he would have thrown up. Now he just nodded dumbly, got to his feet with difficulty, and began to walk forward. The pain in his foot that had tormented him for so long now disappeared, as did the vague gnawing pain in his empty stomach.
The Creature had climbed onto his back. It seemed to weigh nothing at all.
***
Harald Finn no longer needed to hobble behind the gypsy caravans and covered wagons of the other fairground folk to beg a ride beside the driver. He had his own caravan now and a strong horse to pull it, too. Moreover, he usually rode at the head of the line instead of taking up the rear in the dust. And wherever he made a stop, curious crowds gathered from every direction and money was there for the taking.
The motley company he normally traveled with had reacted with astonishment at his
metamorphosis. Of all people, fairground folk were the ones most accustomed to rubbing shoulders with weird and wonderful characters of every description, so when the crippled ex-boxer had caught up with them, swathed in a wide black cloak and with a determined look on his pale face, they’d wondered only idly where he’d been and what he’d done. They were amused to see he’d donned himself in the impressive cloak as a prop in a new act he was working on—and maybe also to help conceal his physical handicap. Whatever Harald Finn had up his sleeve, or under his cloak, they accepted his silence on the subject, as they did his refusal to continue helping them erect their equipment in the village squares and on the outskirts of towns.
The big surprise came when he finally introduced his new act.
It happened on a village square at the opening of the fair, when had folks gathered from far and wide, hell-bent on making the most of an event they could chat about and relive for the rest of the year. For after this break, it was back to the grindstone—when season followed season and chore followed chore. This year an extra buzz of excitement skittered through the crowd as word got around that they were about to witness something never seen before—a unique and entirely new act!
Harald Finn had announced himself as The Man with Two Heads.
Around noon on an ordinary weekday, he made his entrance in the village square. The black cloak rustled crisply as he raised his arms wide to steady himself, a movement that always gave people the impression he’d been overindulging in his favorite tipple, wine.
He stood still. Then, sighing resignedly, he removed his hat and glanced quickly over his left shoulder. A murmur ran through the crowd when a second head appeared from the collar of the wide cloak, turned, and looked to the right. It was an extraordinary, pallid face with blond hair and small, lackluster eyes. The thin lips were drawn in a mirthless grin and the watery eyes stared blankly into infinity.
Although Harald’s body appeared a little more substantial under the ample folds of the cloak, it was obvious to the onlookers that the old bruiser couldn’t possibly be hiding another man under his clothes. The weird, pallid face that rose so surprisingly from the cloak collar appeared to be anchored only by its thin little neck to the man’s body.
The confusion was complete when Harald began to speak. The lips of the almost transparent, white head moved synchronically with those of Harald and now and then the two heads turned to face each other, so that the big nose almost touched the small one and the two mouths laughed at each other.
The man produced a bottle of wine as if by magic.
Finn drank from it and the pallid face turned away with deep disgust. Every time Finn took a swallow, the second head burped loudly. And when the pallid face laughed, a peal of merriment issued from the man’s throat.
The crowd reacted with mixed feelings, but paid up with unheard-of generosity. Whether they dug so deeply into their pockets because they had enjoyed the spectacle or because it had given them a creepy thrill was hard to say—but there was no doubt about the amount of cash that disappeared under the cloak of the two-headed oddball.
A few villages and hamlets further, Harald had bought himself the caravan and the white horse, and his fellow fairground travelers allowed him to ride at the head of the group. Finn had grown pale and he didn’t chat as much as he used to. He just sat on the box seat of his caravan and stared straight ahead. And he drank more than was good for him, too. Anyone who kept an eye on him for any length of time would occasionally see a second head suddenly emerge from the black collar. Without looking at it, Harald would shove the neck of the bottle between its thin lips.
Nobody ever found out how he actually managed to pull it off.
After a time his strange behavior was totally accepted by the group and not a single one of them insisted that Harald should reveal the secret of his act. Respect for craftsmanship and the right to secrecy regarding the modus operandi of spectacular acts protected him wherever he went, exactly as they did the grotesque, devilish characters who traveled with the group. . . . There were only whispered comments on the fact that Harald Finn was looking paler every day. His eyes had acquired a restless look above his sunken cheeks. Worse, he hardly moved anymore and now sat like a zombie on the box seat of his caravan, allowing his horse to find its own way, and only became animated when he had to perform his act for the public.
And what went on in his caravan in the evenings was anybody’s guess.
He disappeared inside around sunset, never seeking the warmth and comfort of the campfires lit by his traveling companions and never sharing the meat that they roasted over them. It was cozy around the fires, but Harald shunned such gatherings and no longer listened to the weird and wonderful tales told by the bizarre characters in the firelight, or indeed told any of his own quirky anecdotes. He took his empty wine bottle with him inside, together with the secret of the two heads.
The sickening fear descended on him as soon as he closed the door of his caravan behind him. Outdoors, where his good eye could see the sky and his lungs could breathe fresh air, he managed—bolstered by the wine—to concentrate his mind on cheerful, soothing things. Without having to laugh out loud, he could still enjoy some inner amusement recalling comic events, and without seeing the other travelers behind him, he could still feel relatively safe in their company. But once inside his caravan, in which stood two narrow beds, two chairs, a small table, and a cupboard, his courage deserted him and he felt himself delivered into the hands of the Creature. Trembling over his entire body and wavering on his feet, he took off his wide, black cloak.
The Creature held onto his shoulders with its long, narrow fingers, its legs clamped around his waist. Slowly as a sloth it inched its way down, crawled across the wooden floor of the caravan, and hoisted itself up onto a chair. Harald took a seat opposite the Creature, uncorked the umpteenth bottle of wine of that day and kept staring into its dull eyes as he closed his lips around the glass neck and drank. His back and shoulders were more painful than his crippled foot had ever been. His breathing was shallow and irregular, his lungs wheezed, and his fingers trembled. The hardened prizefighter of former times had become a timid, frightened soul, who hid himself from the outside world and only appeared in public when there was no more money for bread and wine.
The horse was taken care of by one of the fairground men after the group had agreed that it was better to help the weirdo Finn than abandon him to his fate. For one thing, no matter how far the company traveled, the fame of the Man with the Two Heads always sped ahead of them, and people paid generously to see him wherever he appeared.
Onlookers gasped and recoiled in horror when a second head emerged from the collar of the cloak and addressed itself to the first head. Spellbound, they saw how, when a bottle was raised to the lips of one that drank—the other head burped; how the skulls cracked audibly when they knocked against each other and how three eyes gazed searchingly around the crowd and beyond.
In the evenings, clad in nothing more than a few threadbare rags, the Creature would slowly clamber down the man’s back and legs. And at sunrise, he would awaken Harald and creep laboriously back up again, hook his long fingers over the man’s shoulders and clamp the short legs tightly around his midriff.
Only at night was Harald free of his burden, which was weighing him down more and more every day. The little Creature that had first appeared to be as light as a feather began to increase in weight, while Harald felt his own strength diminishing. He was scared, dead scared of this surreal freak who had turned up at the very moment he had decided that life might be worth living after all. At the time he could have crushed the Creature like a fly in his powerful boxer’s hands, but now he wasn’t even sure he’d be capable of it.
Each night he lit a candle in a copper candlestick and placed it on the floor between his own bed and that of the Creature. He had resolved to murder the cursed thing the moment it put its foot in the ring of light from the flickering candle. But the Creature stayed put in bed and wouldn’t reply to his questions or react to his endless baiting.
“Why won’t you show yourself?’ he would often whisper. “My hands will snap your back. And if I’ve lost the strength in my fingers, I’ll bury my old teeth in your skinny body until the blood gushes out. That’s if freaks like you have blood in their veins—it could be some deadly poison for all I know. Come on! Step right into the ring of light and we’ll fight it out.”
But after such outbursts, Harald Finn would lie in bed, rigid with fear, not knowing what he would actually do should the Creature take up his challenge. With trembling hands, he’d pull the blankets over his head, and when he awoke the next morning, the candle had burnt out and he staggered, half-naked, scared, sick, and sleepy, onto the wooden floor, closing his eyes and biting his lower lip as soon as he felt the long, skinny fingers of the Creature on his skin. It clambered unhurriedly up his exhausted body, clamped itself on his shoulder and demanded that Harald cover him with his black cloak so that no one would see him until the right moment.
The large head remained visible as a grotesque hump on Harald’s back. The narrow body could not be discerned at all under the many folds of the wide cloak. When he appeared before the public in this cloak, the covered “head” was clearly detectable, but once it had appeared, people wondered how it could possibly be alive and move of its own accord, since there was clearly no second body attached to it under the cloak.
“Tell me who you are, tell me what you’re thinking,” Harald often gasped during the petrifying nights, while he peered into the darkened recess behind the candlelight, trying to figure out what the Creature was up to.
But the reassuring sound of an answering voice never reached his ears. Neither did his brain pick up any verbal vibration, as was the case when he first encountered the little freak on the edge of the Brabant woods.
The Creature became as heavy as lead and the man no longer had the strength to cast off his burden. The Creature’s cheeks also began to show some color, as Harald became deathly pale. Harald’s hands lost their famous steely strength and his leg muscles had no tension in them. It was too late now to take on the frightful parasite in an all-out fight, even though its increasing weight was getting him down in every imaginable sense. Harald continued to suffer in silence, carrying out his work in a zombie-like fashion, as if he weren’t actually involved. He became a pitiful loner, who no longer showed the slightest reaction to the applause of the public, and simply went through the motions, staggering from one fair to another . . . and finally even forgetting to light the candle at night.
Until, in a final burst of anger, triggered by fear, he decided to put an end to it once and for all.
If he couldn’t fight the vile parasite, then he’d do away with it in the most drastic manner he knew: he’d commit suicide and take the Creature with him. There was no alternative—he simply couldn’t take the weight of the Creature any longer. His muscles were almost completely paralyzed and the energy was being steadily sucked out of his body, while the Creature was becoming stronger, heavier, and more demanding with each passing day.
***
Harald stepped down from the box seat of his gypsy caravan. It was a day like all those other halcyon days of summer, with a clear blue sky and a bright sun shining high above the earth. As the company had traveled on, the landscape around them had changed, and they now found themselves in a rocky region of the Belgian Ardennes.
Barely aware of what he was doing, the old man stumbled along a narrow path that led upwards. His head was bent low under his wide-brimmed hat and he supported himself on his stick. Panting and sweating, he tore his skin open on sharp stones and thorny bushes when the path fizzled out and he was forced to clamber over rough ground. But he felt no pain. The prizefighter’s hands that had once knocked out champion opponents with powerful left hooks and uppercuts now bled and trembled. He reached the top of the steep hill and looked down into the depths of a ravine.
After what seemed like endless months, the man could finally summon a sort of smile. But it was a mirthless effort—a hopeless grimace. He felt nothing when he bit the inside of his cheek, and failed to notice that he was standing on the jagged edge of a projecting rock. Harald Finn was no longer able to think for himself, and when he leaned too far forward over the edge, it was because the Creature had given his shoulder a shove.
***
Whoever takes a good look at the painting will not see a traveling group of fairground folk following Harald Finn across the landscape.
The man on the box seat is unmistakably Woden, also known as All-Father, the ancient Germanic god. This is revealed by his one eye, his broad-rimmed hat, and the stick that replaces his spear. He is accompanied by his white horse, his wolves, and his ravens. The men who follow him are part of his Army of the Dead. Whoever died in battle became a member of the dead warriors’ army that once tracked throughout Northern Europe and is still sometimes seen here and there by solitary wanderers.
But the god was threatened with obscurity. Woden became weak, yet had no wish to bid his farewell to the world. So he was changed into a mortal man by Time, which manifested itself in the form of a small Creature that ultimately wrested the last vestiges of power from him.
***
With his arms spread wide and his legs tucked under him, Harald Finn soared through the air. His gray locks flapped wildly back as the wind swept off his head. It caught his wide, black cloak, spreading it out and making him look like a giant raven.
The body of the man thudded sickeningly onto the rocky ground in the ravine below.
Mercifully, a few seconds before the fall, Harald Finn had already lost consciousness. So the final impact that shook the last vestiges of life from him was beyond his suffering. The cloak covered the broken body. Two big, callused hands lay flat on the stone; the yellow nails were torn and broken.
All was silent at the bottom of the ravine.
It remained silent when the Creature inched its way cautiously from under the dark cloak and began to crawl slowly upwards toward the seductive sunlight. Upwards, to a world full of people . . . and perhaps another ancient god who could be its next victim, who could bear it on his back until, like a bloodsucker, it had drawn the last ounce of energy from him.
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AUTHOR BIO
Koos Verkaik is a Dutch author of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and children’s books. He wrote more than 70 different titles. Started writing at the age of seven, composing adventurous stories in notebooks, and had his first writing assignment with the comic character Scotty Clay in the weekly Sjors when he was sixteen, writing four pages every week. Verkaik wrote his first novel, the science fiction thriller Adolar, during one weekend when only 18 years of age. The novel was published immediately. A seasoned children’s book writer, one of his series of books has sold over 450,000 copies in just the Netherlands! Koos has worked as a copywriter, script writer for audio books, song composer, and has written hundreds of scripts for comic books published all over Europe. Master of creating sensational works full of magic, horror, mystery and adventure, this terrific author called “the Dutch Stephen King” (European Penthouse Magazine).
He is contracted by different publishers in the USA, Europe and India. Books in English, Dutch, Hindi and Greek! Sales worldwide via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, Flipkart, Bruna etc. and bookstores.
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COMING SOON: On Sunday, 19th July, we are delighted to welcome guest author, Maria Vickers who is sharing Chapter 1 of her novel, 'Captain's Obsession'.
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