THE HILLS ARE ALIVE.
Ned McCann. ©2004.


The water was cold. As Titmus skipped from puddle to puddle, it seeped through the eyelets and poured in over the tops of his boots as the bog sucked him deeper into itself.
Thundering from the mist behind him, the animal plunged through it all with ease; ploughing the ground with its cloven hoofs and sowing the cold mountain air with the white hot vapour spuming from its’ dripping nostrils.
Despite the cold, Titmus was sweating. The sweat stung his eyes and as he blinked the sweat from them, his breath gurgled and burned in his chest like a poker plunged in a mug of ale.
Through the mist and beyond the bog, he saw the ground incline towards a strand of trees. He would be safe there, could climb and shout until someone came. But his boots were heavy with clabber and wisping tendrils of mist grasped at his heels as he dragged himself up the hill. He scrabbled his fingers deep into the brown pine needles and heard that thing behind him snuffling and snorting. He felt its hot breath on his neck and a sear of pain as razor honed hoofs slashed his back; and more pain as the creature’s horns daggered his shoulders and tossed him over to face it.
The last thing he saw was fire red points flashing in its bold black eyes and an opalescent globule weeping from its rampant phallus. The last thing he felt was a slashing as those horns ripped his belly open, then tearing blackness as that pulsing phallus plunged into the reek of his steaming guts.

Titmus shot awake in a bed of tangled sheets sodden with terror sweat, and the ruby red window of his clock clicking on four twenty eight.
He took a shower, sluiced the stench of fear from his body, trampled the shame of incontinence from the pyjamas beneath his feet and watched as the night sweats and terrors swirled and sobbed down the coal black eye of the drain.
He dried himself, and as he puffed talcum under his arms and between his legs he remembered the first time he had the recurring dream; afterwards, the same talcum smell from his mother’s breasts as she crooned and soothed him back to fitful sleep.
The clock in the hallway chimed five. Hardly worthwhile going back to bed, he dressed and made breakfast. By the time he’d crunched through his fruit and flakes it was six. Having nothing else to do until his bus left the corner at eight, he lay down on the couch, pressed his thumbs lightly against his index fingers and practised meditation.

Titmus awoke to the sound of the letterbox’s click and was dismayed to see the hands on the mantle clock quivering on nine. If he hurried, he could just make the nine ten. He picked up a scatter of letters from the floor and stuffed them into his briefcase, fumbled the deadlock, and made the corner as the nine ten drew away from the stop.

It was almost ten when he entered the offices of J.J Delahunty and son.
"Banker’s hours, Mr Titmus?" J.J Delahunty Jr said and the other clerks dutifully tittered as he sat down at his desk.
"The bus, JJ," he said as Delahunty thudded a pile of folders into his In tray.
"Mmm," Delhunty said and Titmus didn’t raise his head, until the office clock wheezed noon.

Titmus lifted his face to the warmth of the sun reflecting from the sandstone of his favourite lunch time spot beside the chancel door of the cathedral. Reaching into his brief case, he remembered that in his rush he hadn’t bought a paper that morning. However, there was the mail. He pulled out the letters and sighed for the trees which had gone to make up the bills and never to be repeated offers, until he came to an envelope coloured the milky blue of a dead man’s eye. The letterhead- all copperplate curlicues and flourishes- read, Callas, Callas & Tontine, Solicitors. Their chambers were in the city, and it was respectfully suggested that if he cared to call on Mr Tontine, his obedient servant, at his convenience, he could hear something to his advantage.

Tontine peered through a pair of bottle bottom pinc nez at the solitary document on his desk. Titmus was reminded of a praying mantis, as he rubbed his fingers together and sucked on what could have been some still trembling piece of creature snagged in his teeth.
He looked up. "Ah, Mr emm," he said.
"Titmus," Titmus said.
The solicitor looked down again at the document. "Groenfeldt." He pronounced the G as if he were hawking an insect part from his throat. "Your Mother’s maiden name was Titmus. Your Father’s name was Groenfeldt."
"Groenfeldt?"
"Von Groenfeldt, to be precise," Tontine said. "Baron von Groenfeldt, to be even more precise."
He shuffled out from behind his desk and Titmus shuddered as Tontine clutched his shoulder with a liver spotted claw "It is my sad duty to inform you that your dear Father passed over three months ago," he said. "Would you care for a sherry?"
The morning drifted into a golden haze of Amontillado as Tontine poured sherries, acquainted Titmus of his illustrious genealogy, his inherent responsibilities and the full extent of his good fortune down to the last verst, pfennig and peasant.

Titmus alighted at Groenfeldt Bahnhof and sniffed deeply of his air. Before him, the Bahnhof Meister opened his arms and cleared a space for him on the crowded platform. As he doffed his tall hat in welcome, a band struck up and a small child with blonde hair looped around her ears in ringlokken came forward, curtsied and offered to him a bunch of vilde blumen. Although they were plastic, he was touched at the thought.
There were even more people outside the station, waving little flags and cheering. Titmus acknowledged their cheers by waving back, smiling and pointing his finger into the crowd as he had seen inaugurates do on television. Every outstretched hand within reach, he clutched in both of his and every proffered bouquet he accepted until his hands were aching and his arms full.
"Allow me, mein Baron." Titmus turned from the cheering crowd to the voice murmuring in his ear.
The man standing before the open door of the Duesenberg took the bouquets from him and placed them in the boot. "Stroheim." He bowed. "At your service," he said as he settled him in and fussed a rug over his knees.
As they drove to Groenfeldt Burg, the baronial seat, Titmus’s mind wandered as Stroheim, senior partner in the legal firm handling his affairs, pointed out landmarks and advised further on the complexities of his inheritance. Although the European spring was well advanced, Titmus noticed the crops seemed tardy in the growing. Most of his fields had clods of dry earth showing through the sparse green. The drooping branches of the orchard trees here, unlike those he had noticed on the journey, held but a few withering blooms. His land, he decided, had been overworked and undernourished. Blood and bone would fix it and a bit of compost wouldn’t go wrong either.
"I beg your pardon, mein Baron." Stroheim fumbled an ear trumpet from his pocket and stuck it in his ear.
"Blood and bone," Titmus shouted into it. "I was reading in the Herald’s gardening column that blood and bone is very good fertiliser. These fields look as if they need something."
"The Baron is knowledgeable in agriculture?"
"Well... not agriculture as such," Titmus admitted. "More horticulture. But it’s the same. Isn’t it? Fields are just big gardens. Make note of it, Stroheim."
Stroheim took a small notebook from his waistcoat pocket, licked the end of a silver filigreed pencil and noted Blood and Bone, as they swept through the magnificent gateway of Groenfeldt Burg.
"Get the peasants to dig it well in," Titmus inclined his head to the forelock-tugging gatekeeper. "They’ll soon get the hang of it."

"By the time I’m finished, Stroheim," he vowed. "This desert will be a land of plenty."

The Jubilee Mass in honour of his homecoming was celebrated by the Dioscean Bishop in the Baron’s private Chapel. A Te Deum, composed especially by his Kapelle Meister, included references to his long line of illustrious ancestors interred under the time worn flagstones. After the ceremony, as he shared a bottle of Cherry brandy in the vestry with Stroheim and the Bishop, Titmus glanced down at a lead embossed flagstone. "All my ancestors are buried here?" he said.
"All of them," the Bishop replied. "If I’m not mistaken," he focused his monocle, "where you now sit is on Alaric der blutig, who died in four hundred and fifteen AD"
"Four hundred and eighteen, your Grace," Stroheim corrected.
"Whatever," said the Bishop.
Titmus moved his chair.
"And where you now sit," Stroheim advised, "is on Muttar, the even more bloody, his half brother."
Titmus stood up and wandered carefully around the vestry. "My Mother," he said, "BlessedTitmus of Ashfield, was cremated and her ashes interred in a niche at Northern Suburbs Memorial Rose Garden."
Stroheim found something of interest in a simpering Cherub on the vestry’s ornate ceiling.
The Bishop placed his glass on a vestment chest. "That," he said, "is not how we dispose of our dead. Your ancestors grew from this land." He rapped his crosier on the flagstones. " And when they died, returned to the land. Giving nourishment, in payment for that which they had been given."
"Except for your dear Father." Stroheim swivelled his gaze from the cherub.
"What did my Father die of?" Titmus asked, as he filled their glasses yet again. "No one ever told me." He looked around the floor. "And where is he buried?"
"You won’t find him here, mein Baron. Stroheim glanced hopefully at the Bishop.
"Your late Father," the Bishop explained," died at sea."
"At sea?’ Titmus smacked his lips on the Cherry Brandy.
"His yacht, the Graf Spee Zwei sank in the Baltic with all hands," Stroheim added.
The Bishop tutted. "A dreadful break with precedent." He pointed a twig thin finger to the Gothic arched vestry window. "And that’s what becomes of it," he said.
Peering through the mullions, Titmus could just see part of his vast estate. Bounded to the north by a blue haze of mountains, a crescent of shroud green pine forest, scarred with the ugly brown of dead and dying foliage, curved from east to west. He opened the window and looked beneath him to where a patchwork of Teutonic order hemmed fields of struggling crops.
He pointed to a herd of snow-white cattle picking at the sparse pasture. "They’re a strange looking beast, Stroheim," he said, "Santa Gertrudis?"
Stroheim looked to where he was pointing. " Oh no, mein Baron. A much older and purer breed. They are descended from the sacrificial cattle sacred to the druidic peoples who used to, and in fact, still do hold fief in your lands."
Titmus frowned at the corrugations of the creature’s ribs and resolved to replace the brutes with Friesians, Leghorns, or something. There would be a book about in the library. So much to do, he sighed. So little time.

During the buffet lunch, where he mingled and met with the Mayor and other dignitaries, it was suggested he might care to be taken on a tour around his domain. He waved the suggestion away, along with the guides and advisers milling around the Duesenberg. "I’ll walk," he told them. "Why don’t you all go back to the castle and get hoed in to the plonk?"
Raising his hand against the protests, he strolled down to the gatehouse. "Stroheim," he called back. "Tap another barrel. I should like to meet with my people alone."
He pulled an alpenstock from the rack. "I want to walk in their shoes," he said. "Feel their pain."

Titmus spent what was left of his day in exploration of his fiefdom. He acknowledged the tugged forelocks of the ragged peasants and the curtsies of their thin wives with a courtly nod. He listened to their litany of complaints of murrain amongst cattle, grain withering on the stalk, and grapes souring on the vine. Patting the scrofulas of their pale faced children, he assured them that something would be done, and that better times were coming. They kissed his hand in gratitude. Even the very trees seemed to press forward their roots and branches for a touch of him and the ground beneath his feet to tremble in anticipation of the coming fertility.

On the outskirts of the Village, he stopped to admire the harmonious curve of thatch on the gable end of a cottage roof. From the cottage garden, tall hollyhocks, foxglove and lavender waved to him over the boundary wall. Amongst them, a bent and gnarled old woman, tending to a heap of compost, raised her head as he called hello. When he introduced himself, the crone peered into his face and he watched her rheumy eyes flicker as she searched each and every radial of his irises.
"You are indeed a Groenfeldt," she said and invited him into her cottage. Titmus followed her, ducking his head under the drying fronds of herbs looping from the roof beams.
"Will you sit and take some wine, mein Baron?" she asked.
"Thank you, no," he said and patted the heartburn that had been bothering him all afternoon. "I’ve drunk quite a lot today."
"Ah, yes," she said. "That rotgut your steward serves while he keeps the good for himself."
He patted his chest again. "The Goldwasser did seem more than somewhat …flinty?"
"Don’t think I don’t know what goes on up there," she nodded to the window from where his castle could be seen silhouetted against a blood red sunset.
"Shepherd’s delight," Titmus said.
"A good omen, mein Baron."

"Now, this is a wine," she pulled a demijohn from beneath the sink. "It’s Parsnip. Make it myself and guaranteed to settle the stomach." Titmus gave in and sat where she motioned.
"I knew your late father well," the crone said, pouring a pale golden fluid into two rough blown goblets. "Many’s the time he sat where you now sit, warming himself at my..." Here she hesitated, searching as some old people do for an everyday word momentarily eluding them. "...Hearth." She had found it.
The mantle clock ticked softly, and Titmus could almost feel his Father’s lap, warm beneath him.
"And your grandfather, before him, " she added, handing him his glass.
"We cannot drink to their health, but we can drink to their memory." She raised her glass. "To the blood of the Groenfeldts."
Titmus smiled at the quaintness of her toast, and drank with her.
She filled their glasses again, but this time, instead of drinking, poured a libation on the packed earth of the kitchen floor. "To the good earth," she said." From whence we all came and to where we will return."
Titmus did the same. "Tell me," he asked. "How come your land appears so fertile, while that around is barren?"
The old woman explained of the delicate balance of nature. Of the hierarchy of Dryads, the guardians of the Earth, who took care of all growing things. their likes, dislikes and their needs until the room grew dim. Despite the dimness, she noticed his empty glass and hovered the flagon towards it. Head reeling from the potent brew, he attempted to stay her hand.
"Ach, no, mein Baron." She poured against his protests. "An empty glass, like the Earth, cries out to be filled."
Titmus determined this would be the last. He understood only a fraction of what the old woman had told him and believed even less. Blood and bone, he decided, was definitely the way to go and watched as she splashed some of her parsnip wine into a pot simmering on the hob.
"Wild mushroom soup," she said. "You’ll surely have some before you go."

Titmus’s arms, as he took the shortcut the crone had shown to him, hung from their sockets like two lead sash weights. Although the bowl of soup she had pressed upon him had exhilarated his mind, sharpened his vision, her wine seemed to have had the opposite effect on his body. To even lift a foot, place it down, and lift the other was taking increasing effort. His alpenstock stood stuck in a bog puddle somewhere behind him. No matter how hard he had tried, he just did not have the strength to pull it free. It was most peculiar.
Rime was gathering in the lengthening shadows where some of his cattle huddled and gazed at him through the veil of their shaggy white hair. And it was cold, although the ground beneath his feet felt strangely warm. It was the low end of the field, tending to marsh and he sank to his ankles in its’ moss. The whole field seemed to be composed of moss, billowing and heaving as if beneath it some animal was stirring, breathing. It fascinated him, rippling and changing its’ colour at each whip of the wind. He knelt down and ran his fingers over it, cupped his hands in the warmth of it. And feeling the throb of its’ life force, pressed his face to it. Breathing of it, he ran his tongue across it until he knew it. And grasping a hand full of it stuffed it into his mouth and chewed it.
He looked up to where the twinkling windows in the castle lit the way of his coming and swallowed. The land was now truly part of him, and Titmus knew that he would be forever part of the land.

Behind him, an old bull whetted its’ horns on the sap bleeding trunk of a pine tree. It pawed the ground with its’ needle sharp hooves and sowed the crisp mountain air with the white hot vapour spuming from its’ dripping nostrils.
As he scrabbled his fingers in the brown pine needles, he felt searing pain as the creature’s hooves tore into his back. And more pain as its’ razored horns turned him over to face it. The last things he saw were fire red points flashing in hellish black eyes, and the opalescent globule weeping from the tip of its phallus.
The last thing he felt was a slashing, tearing blackness as it ripped him apart and trampled his blood and bones into the starving earth.