Free Curse of the Pogo Stick by Colin Cotterill

track and approached the house. As he got closer, he began to feel a peculiar sensation. There was a sort of physical presence, not spiritual, not the usual friendly house and field spirits that protected the Hmong, but a tangible threat. It was as if the vegetation around him seethed with resentment. The pathway through the arched trees leading to the house was barred with a symbolic fence of interwoven bamboo latticework. It was grotesquely daubed with dried blood and chicken feathers. This too Siri had seen before in front of the houses of Hmong suffering from sickness or of women in the throes of childbirth. It merely signalled that a visitor should not enter. But none of the fences in his memory had been this elaborate. Nor had they shown evidence of such wholesale massacre of fowl. Nor had he witnessed the presence of handmade dolls. Crudely formed from straw and sticks, they sat or lay around the fence in the hundreds. Some had begun their lives as vegetables or tarot roots, others were simple twig people.
    Beyond the latticed fence, four land bridges had been erected. These small bamboo structures were miniature reconstructions of actual bridges but in this case they had no water to cross. They traditionally offered a shortcut for lost souls to return to their host. One was customary. Four suggested a hell of a lot of souls had gone missing from this particular house.
    “Hello?” Siri called. “Anyone there?” Silence. “Do you need any help? I’m a doctor.”
    He tried again in Hmong. The language flowed effortlessly off his tongue. This was one of the peculiar side effects of discovering his shaman roots. Until two years earlier, the language had remained dormant inside him like a mammoth frozen in a glacier. If his unknown parents had been Hmong, the old woman who raised him had given no indication of it. The only legacy he had from them was his eyes – greener than the lushest of grasses on the hills that rolled all around – and this language he’d never learned. But it drew no response. He thought he heard a sound – a low continuous growl – although he couldn’t be certain it wasn’t coming from his own head. He wondered whether the place might be deserted like all the others. There was no padlock on the door but he wasn’t about to break the taboo and enter a marked house without permission.
    The trail continued up into the mountain. The branches of bamboo gutter had converged to become just one single aqueduct at ground level. He followed it for another hundred yards and there he found a spring and a small rock pool. It looked coolly inviting but he had better manners than to bathe in the village water supply. Instead he removed his clothes, sat to one side of the pool, and used a long-handled gourd to ladle the icy water over himself. The sensation was exactly what his body needed. Every gourdful sent a million tiny needles into his skin, Mother Nature’s own acupuncture.
    The deeper he plunged the ladle, the icier the water, the more alive he became. Then he scooped too low and brought up sand from the bottom of the pool. He was about to empty it out of the gourd when he noticed that he’d caught something other than grit. He reached into the ladle and pulled out a button. Someone had lost a light green button with two sewing holes at its centre. It wasn’t an astounding discovery but something made him reach over to his shirt and slip it into the top pocket. And he thought no more of it. There was too much in his mind to invest a great deal of thought into a button. He had been abducted and had no idea where he was. He was certain there was a negative force nearby, but none of that seemed to matter. He was having a marvellous bath and as he washed the dust out of his snowy white hair he began to sing. It was a Hmong nursery rhyme he’d picked up somewhere along life’s way. It seemed appropriate.
Mtnmmm … be good and stay quiet, little baby, Sleep well and deep, For in only a