By rights, this story should be appearing in this estimable newspaper’s “Sheriff’s Report.” Why it is not is a mystery to me. But then, a lot of things are a mystery to me.

But to the issue before us: I’m here to tell you — no, to warn you — that someone in our midst, someone you may even know, a neighbor perhaps, someone seemingly harmless with whom you might converse amiably in the aisles at the Thriftway, someone perhaps with outwardly normal children, is in fact a brutal sadist, someone whose entire being, whose entire reason for living, is focused upon visiting incalculable psychic pain and crippling psychological trauma upon innocent residents of this isle, residents who are good-hearted, who want only to help young people on our island to succeed and thrive in the future.

And what reward do they receive? Public humiliation and private mental anguish having who knows what long-term private and public social consequences.

I refer, of course, to the demon, the stunningly cruel and brutal being who compiles the vocabulary list for the annual island Spelling Bee. This is, as you may know, an event designed to raise money for the Vashon Community Scholarship Fund. Could anything be more well-meaning than that? Could anything be more generously public-spirited? And yet, evil enters, snake-like, insinuating itself quietly before striking the unwary.

If you are somehow unaware of this annual event (what, is your head in the sand?), you should know that teams — representing island businesses, volunteer organizations, word-obsessed citizens and students, among other verbal exhibitionists — gather in the Vashon High School theater and compete to spell difficult words which, by so doing and by drawing a large audience of people delighted to watch neighbors make fools of themselves, raises money for scholarships.

But these are not just any teams. These are people who willingly don extremely silly costumes to draw even further attention to themselves and, it must be said, to their ultimate, abject, humiliating failure in later spelling rounds.

You may wonder why I take interest in this event and, in the spirit of full disclosure, I confess that for the past three years I have been a judge at the Spelling Bee. Let me make clear immediately that this does not require me to know the correct spelling of the words that are presented to the competing teams. The organizers know only too well how incompetent I am,  and they give me a cheat sheet with the words spelled out correctly. They also give me a noisemaker, with which I make either happy or sad sounds, depending upon whether a team gets the word right or wrong. This is the only reason I participate: I love making silly noises.

But this is where the dark shadow of the vocabu-sadist draws across the stage. The shadow falls sometime shortly after the fourth round. Words to be spelled get more difficult with each successive round. This is to be expected. This is normal. But the first few rounds are a trap, luring the unsuspecting into the vocabu-sadist’s web. It is only a matter of time now before the demon strikes.

The words become bizarre. You have never seen them. You have never heard them. Placed in a sentence, they reveal nothing. Defined by the official “pronouncer,” they still mean nothing. They might as well be ancient Greek, and sometimes they are. The contestants on the surviving teams struggle; they argue quietly among themselves. They tear their hair, those who still have some. So far, fisticuffs have not resulted, but it may only be a matter of time, so diabolical is the vocabu-sadist. How long can they survive, these noble citizens? How long before the complete breakdown of civil society in the face of these insane words?

The audience in the theater hunches over their seats as one in their communal tension: They are not sure whether they want victory or blood. They are avid. Defeated teams weep in frustration on the stage. The few left standing vibrate with anxiety, knowing the end is near. They are approaching the gallows. There will be only one survivor. The anonymous vocabu-sadist grins somewhere in the darkness. They will fall. They will fall on the sword of the final word. They will fall on phycomycete. What, you might ask, is that word?  Answer: an obsolete term for a certain form of fungi.

Why the winning team knew this term is a matter for argument. Was there a leak? Had the vocabu-sadist lured everyone to the precipice and given one team a parachute? And did they sell their souls to the demon to win? Or did they outsmart the demon vocabu-sadist just this once?

Next year, you may be sure of it, the demon vocabu-sadist will return to wreak havoc on the psyches of our best and brightest. It’s still out there.

— Will North is a Vashon novelist.