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Two rows of crooked teeth grinned down at Terry.
"Well, by jimbo," said the Crooked Man, "if ye ain't the dang-diddly strangest lookin' bloke I ever did see, by golly."
Terry stared up at the stranger through a haze of pain. He noticed that the odd man had one eyeball slightly higher than the other and that both eyes looked in different directions. His nose was also askew, bending a couple of times as it travelled toward his top lip.
"Poison," was all he could whisper through a swollen throat.
"Aye, aye," the Crooked Man nodded, looking at Terry's ankle. "It is indeed, by diddly-dum-dum. Nasty stuff, too, by the look of it."
Muffet managed to struggle over next to them. Terry was having trouble staying awake but he could see that she still looked very pale and was holding her ribs.
"And another straight human, by ding-dong," remarked the Crooked Man, looking at her with amazement. "Tis indeed a day o' wonder, it is indeed."
"We have to stop the poison from spreading," urged Muffet.
"Aye, that we do," agreed the Crooked Man. "And fortunately, by doodly-ding-dang, I've got just the medicine we need."
From somewhere within his patchwork coat the odd fellow produced a bent bottle filled with some sort of clear liquid and some ragged sheets of brown paper.
"Vinegar and brown paper," the bent man proclaimed.
Muffet looked pleased but Terry wanted to shout, "No! You have to cut across the wound! You need a torniquet! You have to sterilize the bandages!"
Muffet took his hand and smiled. "Better than biffles, Terry. Vinegar and brown paper fixes everything."
He desperately tried to sit up but the Crooked Man ignored him and opened the vinegar bottle, splashing a large quanitity onto his swollen ankle.
The pain was agonising. Tongues of fire leapt through his entire body, burning his insides. He tried to scream, but nothing came out.
Then everything went black.
*****
Terry woke up.
He was lying in a bed. He could feel a dull throbbing in his ankle and there seemed to be a large weight on his chest.
He tried to focus his eyes. Above him rough wooden beams snaked across a crooked roof which had odd angles at its corners. A warped wardrobe teetered against a wall, one door larger than the other and both of them hanging askew. A light bulb hung from the roof on a cord that somehow bent in the middle.
He realised that he was in a crooked bedroom.
He lifted his head to discover that the weight on his chest was a large crooked cat. The cat drowsily opened its eyes to look back at him. Like the Crooked Man, its eyes were set askew and strange bent ears poked sideways out of its head. Its whiskers shot out from its snout in strange twisty spirals and its legs stuck out in all directions.
"Get off," said Terry in a hoarse whisper, but the cat just ignored him and started washing its paws with its bent tongue.
Continue...
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