Three Men in Black Said "Don't Report This!"

There had been portents aplenty, and omens, and yea even harbingers, though the good brothers of the Benedictine Abbey of Perigon were not entirely clear on the correct spelling of the word, and half the time they said 'harbringers' instead. Then came the eve of the Feast of Saint Peasemold, when Brother Bartholomew stayed awake in a private vigil before the Icon of the Dribbling Madonna when all else were asleep, mortifying his sinful flesh with privations and penances which he TOTALLY DID NOT ENJOY -- only to be interrupted in the course of his vigil. And loud were the alarums and excursions as Brother Bartholomew fled through the cloisters like a stag pursued by the frivolous, inbred scions of a decadent aristocracy, to rouse the Abbot with wild tales of a great leech-like creature resident within the Magdalene Chapel. And great was the consternation within the Abbey.

Now Hist quoth the worthy Abbot Euphemius, seeking to sooth the agitated brothers who were all a-flutter, like chickens surprised by a torpedo. I believe it to be hungry. But surely it is a creature of God just as much as you or I or the lowly box-turtle, so it is our duty to feed it, just as we would tend to the needs of any wandering traveller of our own kind who does not carry enough gold to make it worth the while of robbing him in the course of the night.

So to placate the unearthly beast, they offered it whatever mean provender the Abbey could provide: beef, and venison, and that funny wormwood beer, and black pudding, and trebuchets, and little chocolate petits-four. But to each blandishment the creature's maw dilated, and many an eldritch shriek issued therefrom, such as would chill the marrow of the very wolves of the Savoie mountains that howl when the moon is gibbous. Until at last the brothers tired of its intransigent demands, and returned to their beds.

But the marvels did not cease thereat, for in the morn when the Abbey arose for their shared orisons, their unearthly guest was found to have sprouted an appendage like unto the protruding penis of a beached cetacean. And with this proboscis twitching and extending in a most un-cetacean way it was pursuing a small star around the Magdalene Chapel. Or if not a star, then a flower, but mobile and evasive.

So at this juncture, Abbot Euphemius ordered the great door of the Chapel to be thrown open, that had been sealed since the Holy Year of Pope Bonifice. And the star or flower fled into the courtyard, and from thence across the meadows with the creature in hot pursuit as if following a spoor, the former moving with inconstant alacrity and flickering as if to disappear, as if leading its pursuer on with a guise of evanescence.

Ha, sighed the brothers in unison; it is gone, no more to trouble the even tenor of our endless cycle of devotions. But not so. For on the morn pursuant to the Feast of Saint Peasemold, which is known among the laity as "Peasemold's Hangover", the starborne entity appeared again in the Chapel, this time in the company of another of its kind with which it held discourse. While of Brother Bartholomew there was no trace, so that the more worldly among the brothers revived old rumours of his friendship with a certain washerwoman of Perigon.