Summary
In a nameless Eastern European hamlet where the mud itself seems to gossip, Leon Errol’s titular Buggins—an itinerant confidence man with a moth-eaten frock coat and a grin like a broken piano—arrives as a pilgrim of chaos. He poses first as a deposed prince, then as a miracle-working monk, then as a deaf-mute gravedigger, each lie braided tighter than the last until the village’s own myths begin to conspire around him. A mute girl who hears only through the vibration of church bells becomes his reluctant chronicler; a one-eyed war widow keeps his photograph beneath her pillow like a holy card; a boy who believes Buggins can resurrect the town’s slaughtered dogs builds an ark of bones in anticipation. The plot corkscrews through three escalating masquerades: a rigged lottery in which every ticket wins despair, a midnight mass where communion wine is replaced with absinthe and the congregation levitates, and a puppet court that sentences the entire village to dance itself off the edge of a collapsing bridge. When the real authorities arrive—two gendarmes so identical they share a single shadow—Buggins has already vanished, leaving behind only a suitcase lined with mirrors and a postcard addressed to himself: "Wish you were here." The final image freezes on the mute girl ringing the cracked bell: soundless vibrations ripple the river, and for a heartbeat we suspect the whole hamlet was merely Errol’s echo.
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