y--some chilling Gothic charmer!

What was more, the chief inhabitant of such a home seemed straight off
the grill of the gingerbread lady or the hag who forced her fattening
children to hold out fingers to see if they were plump enough for the
oven. Sufficiently chilling for a precocious mind--the place guaranteed
sleeplessness for nights on end. Visions of the old woman, cat in hand,
standing on the deck of her flag ship-like house, ghastly in its gloom,
rifled through my consciousness. The abundance of animals and the
witchy control she exerted over them, simply reinforced the spell over
an impressionable child. Every detail was complete, right down to that
proverbial one decayed tooth dangling from the centre of her facial
cavity. One could only expect her to jabber in cackles instead of
sentences for her memory to be entrenched deeper in every aspect.

More startled now than taken back, I summoned my organizational
abilities to make sense of what she had imparted to me.

"Jean ever tell you of Direxa?"

The name jolted me. I summoned forth the pieces in a haphazard way. An
old woman who traveled miles from Hay Bay into town to sell her produce
sped across my mind. Consistent to the end, she sauntered through
drudgery and routine until they claimed her sanity.

"Must be the climate in these parts," I found myself saying drily in
the back of my throat. Meg was staring at me. I made an attempt to put
my eyes off her.

I nodded my agreement indicating I had heard the name.

"Yes, Direxa. Of good Puritan stock, I added."

She spoke no agreement this time and told me to consult her if I had
questions.

"Direxa, she's long dead!"

"I know, she still talks to me," Meg whispered turning to walk away.

In a typical fashion, I thought of the lore concerning the supernatural
adolescent reading had brought me--the Superstition mountains of
Arizona, dream time and the Darling range in Australia's north, the
Snowmen, the Wendigo tales of the Coast Salish Indians. These, it
seemed, were not more exotic than the home spun tales of my province's
eastern townships, Lennox and Addington. Those two ghostly minutemen
drilling in the marshes of the Ontario Coomb, Canada's answer to the
Fens district of East Anglica. Strange, much as my presence here
volunteering information to a woman who freely talked in lurid details
concerning poor Humboldt's death but not of cars that visited these
roads at night, clairvoyance, poltergei