The Song of the Lbongo



                Borne aloft, on ebon wings

            A racaus note, his song he sings:

           "Caw-caw!  Caw-caw!" a cry of fear!

            Unpleasant to the farmer's ear...



The New Testament is primarily concerned with redemption from
sin, as if sin were the major cause of harm in the world.  In
reality, most of the harm in the world is caused by three
agencies:  overcrowding, ignorance, and bad luck.  Bad luck is
the intriguing one of the three;  it arises from the fact that
most human endeavors are affected by more variables than the
people involved can control or account for.  The hero of our
present story, a certain Dr. Wheeli Mdai-yeh, specialized in bad
luck.  He lived in a remote village roughly 150 miles south of
the Sahara desert about 500 years ago, and he was the baddest
witch doctor who ever lived.

Wheeli had just about everything going for him.  He was one of
the first to practice the so-called pragmatic approach to
VooDoo, later made famous by Papa Doc DuValier of Haiti.  Wheeli
would make up dolls which bore amazing likenesses to members of
opposition political sects, stick pins in them, and sure enough,
these unfortunates would be found the next morning, hung from
trees or lying in bushes, with a great many knives and spears
stuck through them, their faces more often than not discolored
from various poisons.  Nobody could doubt that the system
worked.  Wheeli was the master of every kind of slight of hand
trick known to the times, every kind of card trick (his income
from gambling almost equaled that from VooDoo), every kind of
fire and chemical trick, every kind of poison, every kind of
scheme involving spiders and serpents...  He had it all.

And, as if all of this wasn't enough, Wheeli actually kept an
entire flock of lbongo birds, and it was this final fact which
made the fear and awe in which he was held throughout
north-central Africa complete.  Even one lbongo bird was more
than any other witch doctor in Africa wanted anything whatsoever
to do with.  The lbongo bird, which is now extinct, was about
the size of a large pheasant or a small peacock and quite
handsome.  A glossy, satin black bird with long tail feathers,
the lbongo had diamond speckles of red and purple and silver in
his tail and neck feathers and blazing bands of red-gold in his
wings.  The lbongo could talk as well as parrots and macaws, was
graceful in flight, had a raucous attitude towards life
generally, and was the most natural and unbelievable jinx that
the world had ever seen.  It was bad luck for most people just
to think about a lbongo bird;  nobody other than Wheeli and one
or two of his assistants had ever caught more than a brief
glimpse of a lbongo and lived.

Reading from pyramid walls, Wheeli had somehow or other learned
the arcane science of handling lbongos and not suffering from
it.  He kept their wings clipped so that they couldn't fly off,
kept them fat and happy and amused by magic tricks and,
occasionally, would send one of them in a box to some
unfortunate tribal chieftain whom circumstance decreed needed
getting rid of;  those who didn't die of fright at first glimpse
of the lbongo died shortly afterwards of other causes.  Wheeli
would collect the lbongo afterwards, as the rest of the
villagers hid cowering in terror.  

Once Wheeli's agents had captured a notorious criminal and
Wheeli had tied the scoundrel hand and foot and dragged him into
the midst of the lbongo compound and left him there;  the
villagers heard this evil-doer scream for three hours before he
finally managed to untie himself and ran off through the jungle.
 Humans taste horrible to most warm-blooded predators, but it
just happened that a number of those with a taste for human
flesh were holding a convention outside Wheeli's compound when
the afore-mentioned criminal made his break.  They chased him
through the jungle for seventeen days and seventeen nights until
finally, desperate and exhausted, he ran into a human settlement
seeking sanctuary.  And, indeed, the lions and hyenas chasing
him WERE deprived of their meal;  the humans there turned out to
be cannibals who cooked him on the spot.

I should mention one final peculiarity which the villagers
noticed in Wheeli:  at the time of our story, he was about
thirty eight years of age, and had never married.  Not that he
was one of THOSE kinds of witch doctors, or that he was above an
occasional romp through the jungle with one of the village
lasses.  Wheeli actually had a little bit of the gift for seeing
into the future;  often in dreams or when his mind was
particularly well focused, he was able to see himself with the
woman of his dreams, and she simply didn't look like any of the
locals.  She was a strange looking girl, unlike anything Wheeli
had ever seen, with flowing hair the color of morning sunlight,
dressed in long robes of glossy material, again which Wheeli had
never actually seen.  Wheeli knew that she didn't live anywhere
close by, but that, when the time came to meet her, he would.

People came to wheeli with every sort of problem:  politicians
who needed rivals removed, businessmen who needed some
government regulatory agent removed, the sick, those needing to
contact spirits of the deceased, economists (especially
republicans), those seeking some sort of amazing ceremony for a
special occasion...  weddings too were a specialty of Wheeli's. 
It came to pass, finally, that Wheeli and his apprentices and
assistants had been contracted to arrange a stupendous wedding
for the grand chief of the Masai, which was to last for two
entire months.  In fact, the wedding did come off in stupendous
fashion, everything planned down to the last detail, except for
one thing;  Wheeli forgot that, over a period of two months,
with everybody in the territory singing, dancing, drinking the
local elixirs, frolicking, feasting, getting it on, getting laid
back, etc. etc., the lbongos' wing feathers would grow back, and
nobody thought or remembered to clip them during that time.

Among the strongest and brightest of these birds were two
nestling brothers, Lbijee and Lbey;  they began to notice the
increasing air effects when they beat their wings for morning
exercises or to stretch.  "Them voodoo dudes been partyin an
ain't bothered to clip our wings in two months..." said Lbijee. 
"I'll bet if we put our minds to it, we could flap our way right
over that compound wall and blow this chicken outfit!"  

"Wheeli treats us good..." said Lbey, "feeds us and does magic
tricks for us and, besides, with our luck, we'd just get eaten
by lions."  

"I heard all the chicks in Germany got yellow hair an blue
eyes!" said Lbijee.  

"The hell you say!" said Lbey, "Now that WOULD be something to
see!"  And when Wheeli came around to feed the lbongos that
evening, they were long gone.  

"Lord have mercy!!" shrieked Wheeli, "What happened to Lbijee
and Lbey?!"  

And the remaining lbongos said  "They done flapped on off to
Europe Boss; wanted to see the chicks with yellow hair."

"Those birds are worth a fortune" moaned Wheeli."

"Them white honkies ain't gonna have no idea how to deal with
lbongos boss...", said one of the assistants, "they're all just
gonna die."  There wasn't much in the way of options.  Wheeli
and one of his assistants began to make preparations for the
long and perilous journey North.  

They set out five days later on zebras, outfitted as best they
could contrive, wearing a great many skins and feathers since
they knew of the cold to the far North, armed with blow-guns and
bows and poison-tipped arrows, and carrying what they regarded
as the wherewithal to deal with the superstitious and
semi-civilized natives of the North:  mirrors, beads and glass
trading items, numerous and exotic card decks and other gambling
paraphernalia, small pieces of antique wood (to be passed off as
pieces of the true cross), a certain quantity of chemicals for
various occasions and, as a last resort, a small collection of
dolls and pins.  And, in order not to appear conspicuous or
attract too much attention, they went without the usual facial
paint and claw necklaces which would have identified them as
witch doctors.

Following the lbongos was not difficult;  the trail amounted to
a 20 mile wide swath of destruction and devastation across the
Sahara desert which they followed north for 43 days:  snakes
lying dead from food poisoning, small rodents which had killed
themselves stumbling over rocks, dried up oases...  At length
they arrived on the southern coast of the Mediterranean at a
small fishing village which had been pretty much wiped out by a
tidal wave.  Three fishing boats remained, one large enough for
Wheeli, his assistant, and their packs and zebras, and two weeks
later they were in southern France.  

Wheeli and his assistant followed the trail North-West along
the coast of France for several weeks and, as fate would have
it, stumbled upon one of the scenes which you read about in
history books.  

They found themselves in the market square of the town of Rouen
in north-western France.  The usual jugglers, acrobats, revelers
and such which they had grown used to seeing in French towns
were conspicuously in absence.  A large post had been set up in
the middle of the square with a great heap of kindling and dried
branches, and a strikingly pretty dark-haired girl of about
eighteen years had been tied to the post by soldiers;  the
soldiers were presently setting fire to the kindling, as a
religious official in red robes and a high, red hat recited
spells and incantations.  The crowd appeared unruly and of a
mind to rebellion and was with difficulty kept in hand by other
soldiers.  

"Man, the honkies in these parts take their voodoo SERIOUS,
don't they Baba!?!?" said Wheeli's assistant.  

"What do you blackamoors think of the way we do religion in
Europe?" asked one of the English soldiers, smiling with obvious
relish.  

"Ought to keep bad spirits away for at least a couple of
weeks." said Wheeli.  

Wheeli's assistant, Djibala, had been chosen as the territory's
top linguist.  He shouted over the crowd to the girl, "Comment
vous appelez-vous?", and the girl replied "Jeanne."  "Q'avez
vous fait"  meaning "what did you do?" (so I'll know not do it
till I'm a good 1000 miles from this place).  

The girl replied "Il y avait deux jolis oiseaux..." ("there
were these two pretty birds, see...").  

"Figures..." said Wheeli.  "Ou sont-ils alles?"  ("Which way'd
they go?") and the girl pointed North-East towards the border
and, then, mercifully, appeared to pass out from the smoke and
heat.  Wheeli put the blow-gun back in the folds of his robe; 
the crowd hadn't noticed.

The witch-doctor in the red robes and high hat had finished his
incantation;  he glanced at the two Africans and pulled one of
his assistants aside. "Yon blackamoor looks to be something of a
sorcerer..." he said, "tell the people not to go home yet... the
day's still young."  But by this time, the crowd had become
genuinely unruly and Wheeli and Djibala managed to slip away in
the confusion.  

That night at their camp-fire Wheeli noticed Djibala applying
finishing touches and paint to a clay doll.  "Whatcha doin?" he
asked.  

"That witch doctor who burned the girl was an ass-hole." said
Djibala.  

"The robe had white trim and the hat came to a bit more of a
point than that..." said Wheeli, "other than that...  yeah,
that's got it.  Here, use this pin, it's longer..."  

English medical science didn't amount to a great deal in the
fourteen hundreds, but it wouldn't have helped Monsignor Thomas
Loxton very much that night if it had.

"We might could learn somethin bout bad luck in this place,
Baba." said Djibala, "These folks been fightin a war here for
the last hundred years."  

"Who hasn't?" replied Wheeli.

"NO, I mean, they been fightin THE SAME PEOPLE for the last
hundred years."  

"Come on, man, NOBODY's that stupid!?" replied Wheeli,
instinctively knowing of at least two reasons for avoiding such
a state of affairs.  "Either they'll exhaust themselves an some
third party'll take em both over, or they'll go 100 years an
only see each other's style of fightin;  somebody'll pass em
both up an they won't know it till it's too late."  

"All the same, that's the way it is..." said Djibala, I been
hearin about it in all the towns and villages, same story
everywhere."  

The two Africans were beginning to understand Europe and how to
succeed in the white man's world.  One night, they were sitting
in a tavern sipping French brandy, entertaining several of the
locals with card tricks and conversing with a trio of wandering
Carmelites on various religious topics:  "How exactly do you
Africans view religion?", asked one of the monks... "what do you
see as the main thrust or content of it?  What's it supposed to
be about?"  

"Why,", replied Wheeli, "religion is about spectacle,
excitement, mystery, terror, human sacrifice, lust, passion...
why, religion's the greatest show on earth!"  "You see..." he
continued, "the two really grand forms of entertainment which
God provided us mortals with are war and religion.  Both satisfy
man's need for experiencing terror and for perceiving life more
acutely than he ordinarily would, what you call the 'Mysterium
Tremendum', but religion is by far the less harmful."

One of the monks replied "Tis true that we have all of the
things which you mention in our own religion, but I fear you
Africans may have missed the point altogether, you see, those
things aren't what religion is ABOUT here..."  

"He's right!", replied Djibala, "The more I talk with these
people, the more I'm becoming convinced they may be 1000 years
ahead of us in some ways.  At best, people come to us when they
feel like being amused or entertained or when they have some
dirty work needing done; at worst we have to go out looking for
them.  Haven't you noticed that the common people here come to
the churches once a WEEK to donate most of their earnings to the
cause of religion?"  

"I was beginning to wonder about that...", replied Wheeli.

"You see..." continued Djibala, "religion here is about GUILT
(they call it sin) and about REDEMPTION from guilt, for a price
of course."  

"AMEN" replied one of the monks.

"It's amazing." said Djibala, "They've managed to convince the
people that every one of man's normal instincts and habits is a
sin, something hateful to God and all of the spirits.  Even such
diverse things as sloth and avarice, BOTH are sins;  think about
it, isn't it only in pursuit of avarice that a man avoids
sloth?" "You don't say!?" replied Wheeli, "there's no escape,
is there?"  

"None at all." replied the eldest of the three monks, "The
people live in terror of God's vengeance, which we refer to as
hell-fire, and spend most of their waking hours striving to
avoid it.  They see us as the intermediaries between heaven and
themselves."

"No ordinary man might avoid committing 10 sins on an average
day..." continued Djibala, "and as if that weren't enough, it is
even written in their holy books that a man is guilty of sins
which he THINKS of or imagines himself doing equally as of those
which he actually commits."  

"Unbelievable!" gasped Wheeli, his eyes wide in amazement.
Djibala continued  "The entire system has recently undergone a
refinement, some kind of a fundamental improvement in the manner
in which the purely business aspect of it is carried out."  

"He's talking about indulgences...", chimed in the third monk,
"we've more or less managed to invert the schedule of payments
for intervention for sin."  

"Pay now, sin later!" said Djibala.

"You're kidding!" gasped Wheeli, "And the people haven't
murdered all of you yet?!?"  

"Not at all!" chuckled the monk in amusement, "They buy all of
them that we can print." 

"Pay now, sin later..." repeated Wheeli, his eyes wide with
wonder.  He repeated the phrase several more times, with a
wistful look, as if hypnotized by the sound of it.  "We could
rule all of Africa with an idea like that."  

"It's a frightening thought", replied Djibala.  "Pay now, sin
later!"  

Wheeli and Djibala picked up the lbongos' trail again in the
border country, the so-called Alsace-Lorraine.  The overwhelming
power of the bad ju-ju of the lbongos had been weakened coming
through France;  the permanent states of warfare, plague, and
famine, and the utter corruption of the religion of the
territory tended to dissipate the effect of any alien or
super-natural source of bad luck.  The trail of misfortune (or,
at least, of misfortune noticeably greater than normal), which
Wheeli and Djibala could see from hilltops and high places, was
no longer 20 miles wide as it had been in Africa and southern
France.  It appeared to be about a mile wide coming through
Alsace-Lorraine and was barely discernable at all 100 leagues
later, as Wheeli and Djibala approached the end of their quest.

They had been skirting the edge of an immense forest, an
impenetrable and foreboding kind of a northern jungle, and came
at length to a road leading away from the forest and through
increasingly settled and cultivated areas.  Late that evening
they came to a small town and a castle which they instinctively
recognized as the end of their journey.  Djibala looked at the
men-at-arms attending the gates of the citadel:  "them dudes got
all kinds of knives and sharp things we ain't ever even seen
before, Baba, an we don't really look a whole lot like anybody
they're used to seein go in and outta there... we're gonna have
to cloud their minds really good to get in that place."  

Wheeli actually preceded Lamont Cranston by about 600 years at
this sort of expertise, but replied simply: "It won't be
necessary ol buddy, the people here do a pretty good job of
clouding their own minds..."  Wheeli's zebra, by this time, was
packing a great wealth of French wine and dark German lager,
amongst other things, and however clouded the guards' minds had
been prior to Wheeli's arrival, they were a good deal more
clouded afterwards. 

Wheeli and Djibala began setting up for a magic show in the
center of the court-yard, figuring to ask spectators for
information concerning the two birds, but it turned out finding
the birds wasn't going to be difficult.  Two of Lady Gretchen's
lackeys spotted them immediately, and soldiers escorted them at
spear-point to the lady's quarters, deep in the interior of the
castle on the second level.  A heavy oaken portal opened into a
room about 35' by 20' with purple draping and tapestries, a
single window of stained glass, and most of the light emanating
from rows of candles on two desks and on a rimmed ledge on the
eastern wall.  

Wheeli almost passed out at what he saw.  Lbey was perched on
the rim of a liter-stein of German beer on the window ledge,
humming a tavern song to himself.  Sitting on an edge of the
desk was the woman of his dreams, Lady Gretchen, just as he had
envisioned her with flowing hair the color of spun gold and blue
eyes, resplendent in a blue and red velvet robe, with Lbijee
sitting on her left wrist absorbed in perfecting his German. 
Two other ladies and three maids were in attendance, two of Lady
Gretchen's and one of a visiting princess's;  "Darf Ich deinen
Vogeln streicheln?" (may I pet your bird?), asked one of the
ladies.  

Lady Gretchen replied "You aren't ALL going to win lotteries or
find husbands just by petting the bird, Silly!"  The girl
started to reply:  

"But, Countess Marien did, my lady..."

At this point, the women noticed Wheeli and Djibala and the
guards.  "The last girl who had anything to do with that bird
got burnt at the stake" said Wheeli, "I was there."  

"I heard about that" replied Lady Gretchen, "a dark-haired
lass, was she not?"  

"You're never going to believe this, Boss" blurted out Lbijee,
"we're actually GOOD luck to these people!"  Wheeli was
beginning to notice that all of the people in the room other
than himself and Djibala were blonds, including the guards.

This last bit of news took several seconds to sink in.  Wheeli
scratched his head;  "Then why haven't you availed yourself of
the good luck which appears so plentiful here to find YOURSELF a
husband?", he asked. 

"Alas, I'm what is known in these parts as an old maid..."
replied Lady Gretchen.  "I'm 27 years old and nobody is looking
for a bride of such advanced years.  When I was of a
marriageable age, there was a great battle between our people
and the Lithuanians and Mongols and, two years later, there was
a fearful outbreak of the plague.  There weren't a great many
eligible bachelors then and I simply missed my chance."

"I've got to return the two birds to their habitat", said
Wheeli.  "You've been lucky so far.  It's only through the grace
of God that some really great catastrophe hasn't broken out here
due to their presence."  

"I figured as much..", replied Lady Gretchen, "we were
expecting you.  I had the guards apprehend you before the people
or one of the idiot priests took you for sorcerers or demons and
burned you.  It's a shame though, the birds were teaching me
about voodoo and I was beginning to enjoy them.  My father has a
problem with a despotic uncle who owns most of the land to the
North and East of us here, and I was hoping to learn just enough
of your art from the birds to enable me to do something for him."

"The folk hereabout make a great deal of burning and torturing
so-called magicians and sorcerers, especially uncle Reinhold; 
he's a religious fanatic, who spends a great deal of his time in
his dungeons, torturing innocent victims, you see, the judges
and torturers inherit the property of their victims...  We have
no real wizards or sorcerers of anything remotely like your
stature" continued Lady Gretchen.  "Uncle Reinhold is a
hypocrite;  he wishes to obtain magical powers and spells for
his own purposes, but he wants no one else to have them...  he
is an amateur compared to yourself...  the two birds have told
me a great deal about you."    "It's a living" replied Wheeli,
"but I feel safer practicing it in Africa."  

"Perhaps you could be prevailed upon to practice just a tiny
bit of it here before you leave us", spoke Graf Manfred Von
Schaurstein, Lady Gretchen's father, who had entered the room
unobserved.

"Your uncle Reinhold?" replied Wheeli, and continued: "Perhaps
you could describe this gentleman for us... I'd be interested to
know what color his hair was, since that seems to affect the
nature of some of my techniques in these parts..."   

"Why, Uncle Reinhold has dark brown hair, almost black.."
replied the Graf, "but Uncle Reinhold's the luckiest man who
ever lived.  He's always winning lotteries and gambling games...
 we've tried poison, and killed everybody in the room EXCEPT
Reinhold, we've hired the best archer, only to have a raven fly
into the path of an arrow meant for Reinhold.  It's enough to
make a grown man cry."

"It sounds like what I would call a challenge." replied Wheeli,
pleased at the thought of some amusement before the long trek
back to Africa.  "There is normally a small fee for this sort of
pest removal, however...", he continued, "and what I had in mind
in this particular case, if I should succeed at it..., you see,
in Africa, 27 is not regarded as beyond marriageable years for a
woman."   

"DONE!!!!, if you can succeed at it!" roared the Graf, slapping
Wheeli on the back as he departed the room, immensely pleased at
the prospect of solving TWO problems where he had thought only
to solve one.   

"Vater!!!..." cried Lady Gretchen, but it was too late.  And,
as the thoughts of several of the alternatives which she had
been seeing re-entered her mind, the prospect of ruling the dark
continent with the mysterious witch doctor began to seem less
than terrifying.

"You're not going to have an easy time getting near Uncle
Reinhold..." she said, "his lands are sealed tighter than a
drum."  Perhaps one of our little friends here..." mused
Wheeli.  

"Sending one of the birds to visit him was the first thing
which occurred to me", she replied.  

"Wrrarrrk!" moaned Lbigee,  "Falcons chase Lbigee long way
home, 57 leagues, bad day, wrrarrrk, poor Lbigee..."  Wheeli
noticed clotted blood and several missing pinion feathers on the
bird's left shoulder.  

"Uncle Reinhold keeps lots of falcons", added Lady Gretchen,
"and they're all light-colored;  the Lbongos' art doesn't seem
to work on them."

Wheeli was half listening to the birds and to Lady Gretchen and
half admiring what seemed to him a particularly splendid example
of Northern ju-ju hanging on the outside wall.  "What they lack
in ju-ju here they make up for with TECHNOLOGY" said Lbey, "the
time-tells they make are wondrous."  

"Clocks", corrected Lady Gretchen, "not time-tells."
"Wrrarrk, whatever." replied the bird.

"Sort of an ornate thing, and a good deal more complicated than
I've ever seen before." said Wheeli.  "Would such a thing pass
as a gift amongst you Germans?"  

"Why certainly" replied Lady Gretchen, "and the more ornate and
complicated, the better."  

"That's fabulous" said Wheeli, "fabulous...  I need to speak
with one or two of the craftsmen who make these..." he said,
still staring at the clock on the wall.  "We're gonna put
together the damndest Christmas present your uncle Reinhold ever
dreamed of."  "By the way," Wheeli continued, a kind of a
wistful look on his face, "do you pay now and sin later?"  

"Doesn't everybody??" replied Lady Gretchen.

"In Africa, you won't have to." said Wheeli, "We'll be selling."

Wheeli spent the rest of the day in the company of two of the
village clock-makers, one Johannes Gloecklerstein and his twelve
year old son, Hans.  The next morning, as the sun came up over
the horizon and through the portals of the east wing of the
castle, in which the Africans along with their birds had been
quartered, Lbey, perched on the back of a chair, woke up to the
sight of the two Gloecklersteins working on a clock and Wheeli
making a tiny image of himself.  

"AAARRK!!!!!!,  BOSS NOT MAKE BAD JU-JU FOR LBEY, AAAAAAARRRRK
!! LBEY BE GOOD BIRD, NOT FLY AWAY AGAIN!"  

"Relax, dummy!" replied Wheeli, "The bad ju-ju's not for you...
 we just need something that LOOKS like you for this clock we're
making.  Sounds like you've got a real problem with that
conscience of yours though... maybe you should consider
purchasing one of these indulgences?"  

Five days later, Wheeli, Djibala, and the two clock-makers
invited Lady Gretchen and the Graf Von Schaurstein, along with
their minister of affairs, a certain Baron Von Epstein, to view
the Christmas gift which they had concocted for Uncle Reinhold. 
It was a wonderfully crafted clock of a sort altogether new and
strange, such as the Germans had never seen the like of:  using
German mechanisms and technology and Wheeli's inimitable
artistry, the trio had constructed a clock which resembled a
little wooden cottage with windows, a fence, a clock face on the
front and a small double door above the clock face, a small
perch just below the double door and, wonder to behold, every
quarter hour, a small model of Lbey would come out from behind
the double door onto the perch and sound the quarter hour with a
loud "Wraarrck!!" and, on the hour, would flap its wings and
announce the hour with an appropriate number of "Wraarrck!!"s.

The Graf spent a long time just staring at the marvel.  "It's
wonderful!" exclaimed Lady Gretchen, "I've never seen anything
like it!!  

The Baron Von Epstein walked over to Lbey and asked  "As this
'bad ju-ju' or whatever you call it goes, my little friend, just
how bad is this particular example?"  

"Real bad"  replied Lbey, shaking his head slowly, almost as if
in disbelief, "real bad... in fact, I never saw anything like
this before;  if I didn't know what the boss was up to, I'd be
scared shitless!"  

"That's good enough for me" replied the Baron, "I say we go
ahead with it."

The new clock was presented to the wretched uncle as a
Christmas Gift, a sort of a forgive-and-forget,
let-by-gones-be-by-gones token.  The Graf Von Schaurstein didn't
know quite how much to hope for or how soon.  Christmas was a
private celebration amongst noble families in those parts, and
the Graf and his family saw little and heard nothing from
Reinhold or his branch of the family during the Christmas
holiday.  However, at the annual family poker game (which they
called "skats") on New Years Eve, two weeks later, the Graf Von
Schaurstein and Wheeli, whom the Graf introduced as his new
Minister of African Affairs, cleaned Uncle Reinhold out.

Von Epstein left the poker game grinning ear-to-ear, holding
his sides, and chuckling "Ich kann es nicht vertragen!", but 
Von Schaurstein wasn't totally convinced:  

"It must have been a fluke or something", he said as the three
of them rode home.  Nobody had ever seen Reinhold lose in poker
before.  Again, for a time, nobody saw Uncle Reinhold.  

The villagers viewed Reinhold Von Scharnhorst with a curious
mixture of awe, dread, and superstition.  For a great many of
them, the highlight of any High Mass was the chance to view the
magnificent and splendid Graf Reinhold Von Scharnhorst, the
luckiest man in the world and, hopefully, to figure some way to
get some of the luck to rub off without ending up in one of his
dungeons.  For this reason, a great many of them were visibly
disappointed when Reinhold missed the mass of the feast of the
Epiphany;  it was rumored that he had gotten his leg tangled in
a new mechanical device in his dungeon which had failed to
function properly, and that the intended victim of the device
had escaped.  Ads for an engineer began to circulate bearing
Reinhold's insignia, the former holder of the position having
been terminated rather abruptly.

It began also to be rumored that the Graf Von Scharnhorst's
fabled luck had taken a decided turn for the worse, and that
gigantic flocks of crows and ravens had taken up what appeared
to be permanent residence at Castle Scharnhorst;  that they all
cawed and "wraarrckked" the hours with the Graf's new clock.  It
was rumored that the streets of the castle were thick with the
filth of crows and ravens and that people were becoming sick,
and that Reinhold Von Scharnhorst was suffering from signs of
nervous tension and fatigue.

Several weeks later at mass,  Wheeli and Djibala were in
attendance at the cathedral in Christian clothing, along with
the Graf Von Schaurstein, the Lady Gretchen, and their retinue,
and a fair number of people from the nearby towns.  They were
somewhat surprised when Graf Reinhold, along with a small
company of his officers and henchmen entered the cathedral,
Reinhold walking with a noticeable limp.  Several of Reinhold's
men-at-arms knelt at their customary places and began to pray,
but Reinhold walked to the front and the shrine of the Virgin,
lit a votive candle, and then paced over to the right side of
the nave where an oil rendition of the last supper hung next to
a large stained window.  He then set the candle on a pedestal in
front of the figure of Judas Iscariot, there being no patron
saint of hypocrites, the best he could do.

"SURELY THOU KNOWEST BETTER THAN THAT!" thundered father
Erhardt, from the pulpit.  

"I have grown weary of being a closet hypocrite !!!" exclaimed
the miserable wretch; "I want the entire world to know that I am
a hypocrite and that I'm damned proud of it!!!!!  In fact, I am
forming a hypocrites' rights action group and will be taking
membership applications after the service."  

"I think we'd better leave here..." said Wheeli to Lady
Gretchen and Von Schaurstein's company, "this could get really
bad."  Father Erhardt crossed himself, Wheeli, Djibala, Graf Von
Schaurstein's party, the common people, and even Reinhold's own
men all instinctively took several steps back and away and then,
from a cloudless sky, a gigantic bolt of lightning shattered the
roof of the old cathedral.

There followed a scene of chaos, the people being obliged to
dig themselves out from huge heaps of rubble and debris and it
was several minutes before the dust cleared sufficiently for
anyone to see or access damage.  Miraculously, nobody appeared
to have been killed or hurt, other than for cuts and bruises; 
aside from the Graf Reinhold Von Scharnhorst, that is.  Reinhold
was not to be found in the rubble or anywhere nearby;  there was
only a pile of charred ashes and debris close to the spot where
he had stood.

Afterwards, Castle Scharnhorst became an uninhabitable ruin
populated only by crows and other such birds which eat carrion
and do not sing for the glory of God or of nature, but only
croak and caw.  Wheeli and Lady Gretchen returned to Africa with
the two Lbongo birds and ruled their dominions in happiness for
a long time although, it must be said, that Wheeli never had any
luck explaining the notion of sin or selling indulgences there. 
Djibala was persuaded to remain in the Graf Von Schaurstein's
service as a linguist and eventually took orders and entered the
priesthood as the Von Schaurstein family priest.  Within ten
years, he became a Bishop of the holy church.  

It should also be noted that the two Gloecklersteins, father
and son, continued to manufacture the new kind of clock and
that, rather than use the lbongo bird as a model and risk
further bad ju-ju to the surrounding territory, they used as a
model the little cuu-cuu bird which abounded in the Black Forest
nearby.  Such clocks may be seen even today.