This is the story of just one of several scripts that did not make it on to the screen for the first series.

Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis came up with a story idea that was topical to the late 1960s. Methods of crowd control were being used or mooted at the time were little better than indiscriminate chemical warfare inflicted upon civilians.  CS gas was one, and would be used in Northern Ireland in 1969.  The American government used it in Vietnam and believed that CS gas was not a chemical weapon as it was non-toxic and did not have a long term effect and thus should not be withheld from warfare.  Mass demonstrations were flaring up in major cities around the world either in support of the civil rights movement, against the war in Vietnam, or against nuclear and chemical weapons.  In March 1968, students from New York University demonstrated against Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of napalm.   So…  What would happen if a ‘benificient’ nerve gas was used on students in order to pacify rioting students but that this was complicated by their drug taking, i.e. pot?  Add into the mix  microbiological warfare establishments such as Porton Down?

Jan Read had written a script called The Seige (sic) Cocklaws for Martin Worth who was script editing a historical drama series called  The Borderers and was hoping to contribute a second story.  He was also working with Roger Parkes on a much delayed thriller series called Suspect, and was also waiting upon a film about prison to go into production.  It was Parkes who had tipped Read off about Doomwatch, as well as putting his name forward to Peter Bryant who was looking for new ideas for Doctor Who.  Gerry Davis was amenable to Jan Read writing a script, and arranged to contact him in the New Year.  He was given the story idea called The Pacifiers to develop, with an early copy of The Plastic Eaters for reference.  Whilst waiting to begin the next stage of work on The Borderers, he developed a storyline along the lines discussed.

On 29 January 1969, Read sent in the first two thirds of the plot which he felt gave scope for some real scientific detection for the Doomwatch team, gets Quist into conflict with ‘Holroyd’ and leads into a demonstration at Beeston with Symonds making another appearance in the series.  This would allow plenty of argument over the pros and cons of places like Beeston or Porton Down.  He looked forward to discussing the story with Davis and, he hoped, Kit Pedler. 

An impatient and over-worked Quist is not looking forward to a dinner engagement at the Athenaeum club with Professor John Porteous – head of the pathology department at a provincial university.  Over coffee, Porteous tells Quist that his department specializes in tropical diseases and has a research contract with the Ministry of Health.  A few months back, a sample of a virulent strain of bubonic plague had been sent to them from Hong Kong via the Colonial Office.  It was an unusual mutation of Pastaurella Pestis which has  never before been encountered in tropical medicine.  The Ministry has questioned their results and vetoed publishing.  Quist agrees to double check  their results.  ‘This is a case after (his) own heart.’  Following some enquiries, Quist is summoned to the Ministry of Defence where Holroyd curtly informs him that security is involved and he is to drop the matter forthwith.  Meanwhile, the Doomwatch team has been investigating the sample.  Ridge checks with the W. N. O. about the outbreak  in Hong Kong whilst Bradley discovers that the mutation is man-made.  This must have been engineered at Beeston.  The Ministry of Health is pulling a fast one and Porteous is outraged.  Despite being an establishment man, Porteous decides to take his his younger students into his confidence.  A research student called Fowler challenges Quist if it is true that Beeston is making biological weapons?  Quist says that they don’t have evidence yet but Fowler gets heated and thinks there must be ways to protest effectively if they cannot publish…

Read added some notes as to how he felt the story should conclude.  The story will follow the lines of the existing story idea with overtones that the Minister lays on Quist the onus for the attack on Beeston, and Fowler is centrally involved.  Only the extremists who attack Beeston smoke pot and this does not include Fowler.  Therefore, the effect of the Inhibitane gas used by the police to subdue the students should leave him in a stupor and the others deranged..  Some should break in and threaten to smash culture vessels which Fowler will stop, knowing the consequences, and release the imprisoned Quist, Symonds and Wren who have been taken prisoner by the students.  A possible climatic moment would involve the smashing of a flask which turns out to be innocuous.  Read concludes:  ‘It has never been established that Porton-Down is engaged in large-scale manufacture or stock-piling of agents for biological warfare, and I do not think that, by implication, we should infer that this is the case.  The question can very well be left open.’ 

Gerry Davis scribbled his reactions at the end of the story line (except for wanting ‘action up front’) for the opening.  Davis felt there was an uneasy conjunction of two stories here:  escaped bacteria and the use of nerve gas.  He thought that the first experiment should be with one of the Doomwatch team or a short bit with Fowler bringing a sample of the bug to Doomwatch.  Quist was also to get more involved.

The Pacifiers was commissioned as the fourth script (project number 2249/1267) on the 28 January 1969 by Gerry Davis.  He was paid his first half fee on 10 February.  Read sent in his step outline (or scene breakdown) following discussions on the 19 March.  He hoped it would make a gripping play which would examine the long term effects of ‘innocuous’ crowd control gases.  Read had just finished his second script for The Borderers and was meeting Martin Worth the following day.

The step outline went like this:

Following an establishing shot of the University Campus, we go into the canteen of the Student’s Union where Bill Fowler, a personable young post-graduate student, a Scot and President of the Union, is taking to task Mike Duffy, whose activist group is responsible for some outbreaks of violence.  Fowler is late for his seminar where his professor, Porteous asks for some data for which his team is waiting.  Does he want to be a scientist or a politician?  In some emotion, Fowler begins a distillation and makes an error: the flask slips and smashes onto the floor.  Fowler tries to clean it up – and collapses in a dead faint.  Wren spends the weekend with Fowler and learns about the mishap and is suspicious of the effects.  Fowler is suffering from memory lapses but does not see a connection since they are investigating pesticides of the paraquat type.  Wren asks for a sample.  Wren tells Quist that the seemingly innocent pesticide is chemically very similar to nerve gases used in crowd control.  Quist agrees and wants the matter investigated.  Fowler is told by Porteous that their research programme is being wound up and his grant terminated.  Fowler, who is getting more unbalanced and emotional can’t accept this and thinks that this is a personal criticism on him.  Fowler tells Duffy what has happened but the activist says this is what happens when you cow tow to the authorities.  Wren arrives and conducts an experiment showing the true nature of the pesticide.  Under the action of heat, it becomes a nerve gas.  Porteous is furious at the unauthorised experiment but admits that their results are being handed over to the Ministry of Defence for evaluation.  The matter is out of their hands.  Fowler realises that the Beeston laboratories are not too far away, and is now aroused and aggressive.  He declares that England is not yet a dictatorship and there remains ways and means of effective protest.   Holroyd summons Quist and hauls him over the coals for their interference.  He has been informed that Fowler is stirring up trouble and Quist had better get down there and talk some sense into him.  Quist and Wren arrive too late:  Fowler, Duffy and some students are on the way to Beeston.  As it is a Sunday there are few guards on duty and they are easily over-powered.  They enter the Laboratory block ignoring the ‘Danger’ notices.  Fowler has to stop them from smashing flasks and declares they are in complete control and in a position to dictate terms.  Quist, from outside, tries to talk to them but the students want the director.  With the police on their way, Quist goes to see ‘his old sparring partner’ Symonds at his converted manor house near by.  Symonds is flustered and recriminatory and soon with the chief of police, discuss what action to take.  Symonds reveals that adjoining the house is an underground store with a new gas called ‘Inhibitone.’  It is the ideal riot control agent and he wants to use it. It would make for an excellent field trial.  Quist objects as it has not been adequately tested.  He goes back to the labs and the police use a loud-hailer to ask the demonstrators to let Quist and Wren in.   Fowler gives Quist a list of demands: no student to be punished, full publicity of the work at Beeston and for Doomwatch to investigate.  By now the Minister has arrived and coldly rejects the demands, thinking that Quist has manipulated the situation to his own advantage.  Fowler has been growing more and more disorientated  and threatens to smash the culture jars even though it means suicide and contamination of a wide area.  He thinks it is a price well worth paying.  A deadline for surrender has passed and Holyroyd gives permission for the gas cannisters to be used.  Wearing gas masks, the police and Symonds break into the laboratories and use the gas.  Fowler snatches up a 2 litre culture flask and threatens to break it – it contains a deadly pasteurrella culture to poison the whole of London.  As he climbs a steel ladder, he is gassed and drops the flask.  It smashes.  Quist is overcome by the fumes and collapses.  As Quist comes to, Symonds discovers that the flask was harmless.  Fowler is still unconscious, and Quist is furious.  Fowler has already been exposed to the nerve gas.  The doctor examining him says they don’t know if he will recover.   ‘And as Quist faces Symonds,

FADE OUT.’

The only written comment on the  outline was  ‘Excellent: but, what happened to the Pot & Nerve gas business, the reason for the script?’

The script was delivered on 10 April, a few days later than expected thanks to visitors coming down for Easter.  By now, Read was no longer keen on the given title and suggested How Safe, Is Safe, which he felt had an up to date ring to it and was relevant.  Read wrote again nine days later, surprised not to have heard from the script editor, but Davis replied saying he had been collecting comments on the script and would be in touch.  Unfortunately, when Read met up with Gerry Davis at the very end of April, these comments were not good and he was to come away rather depressed at what he felt was an unenthusiastic response to his script.  Gerry Davis did not like the characterisation of the Minister and Symonds, feeling that were not as pompous as in the pilot script.  Read was puzzled by being told that there were Pinteresque elements in the dialogue of The Plastic Eaters!  Kit Pedler wasn’t convinced by the dialogue given to the students but Read felt that the substance of what they said was correct, so the only thing to do is find a student activist and go through the script line by line for authenticity.  Read also offered to show the script to Professor Cadogan, a ‘brilliant and very human young chemist’ who he had met in his laboratories at St. Andrews, and actually once had a research contract at Porton Down. (In the end, he didn’t, fearing it would encroach upon Kit Pedler’s ground.) Read thought that Terence Dudley’s reported criticism of the Police Superintendent’s attitude towards Quist was ‘carping’, since he had discussed this with Superintendent Maclean of the Metropolitan Police who had regular experience of dealing with student demonstrations and had advised Read in the past.  ‘He tells me that Terence Dudley is completely misinformed and that the policeman would behave as he does in the script.’  There were a number of suggestions for changes to various scenes.   Fowler was to have a love interest in the form of Jenny, who was to be a junior researcher, and it was she who brings Toby Wren into the story.  Read was prepared to do a lot of additional work but wanted to know if it would be a waste of everybody’s time if he did?

Davis telephoned him on 2 May and Read decided to go ahead and have the second draft ready soon.  Read asked a militant student at the London School of Economics, John Suddaby to check the student attitudes and dialogue which he did and was very enthusiastic about the story.  The London School of Economics was being affected by student radicalism at the time.  The authorities had installed steel security gates leading to the students claiming that they made the school look like a concentration camp!

Read took scientific details on pesticides and nerve gases from recent articles in the New Scientist.  Davis was away on holiday during May as Read sent in his new version on the 29th.  The script was still not what was wanted.  Dudley was concerned that this would be an expensive script to realise and Davis wanted some explanations moved further up the script.  On 10 June, Read outlined the further rewrites needed.  Davis wanted a new streamlined opening scene, and proposed rearranging some scenes which involved scrapping the first, saving a set.  Read didn’t like the idea of having Porteous confronting Fowler and spill all the beans at the outset as he felt that there was little reason for Doomwatch to investigate, and made for bad story telling.  The several pages of notes saw a lot of planned film sequences removed, and making full use of the studio sets for scenes set outside the Beeston gates.  Scenes were to be entered into more directly, and to find a new name for Fowler and emphasise his Scottishness.  The second revision was sent on 23 June.

However, Terence Dudley made his views clear on 2 July.  He thought the script was expensive, dull, pedestrian, and contrived.  ‘It’s not got an honest, inevitable flow!’   He asked Gerry to prove him wrong and ended the memo with a lot of exclamation marks.

Although the script was accepted on 7 July, and Jan Read was paid his second half of the fee on the 10th, it was formally written off the following year.

***

Michael Seely’s Prophets of Doom, An Unauthorised Guide to Doomwatch is released in June by Miwk Publishing. 

Because of the solitary existence Blake and I had been leading in the cottage for the last few days, I’d somehow managed to forget – or at least set aside for a few blissful hours – the terrible scale and magnitude of the disaster which had befallen humanity. Hidden away in our little country retreat I’d inadvertently managed to delude myself that life might still be going on outside our ivy-covered walls, that the world was still turning with all its mistakes and miracles intact.

The visit to the retail park sharply disabused me of this particular bit of wishful thinking. The park was a big, sprawling, impersonal place – which was probably why they’d become so popular in the big, sprawling, impersonal world we lived in. It was split into two distinct halves; furniture showrooms, electrical retailers, DIY warehouses and garden centres on one side, two great ugly giant supermarkets on the other. As we trundled around a roundabout and entered the slip road leading to the park I suppose I wasn’t really expecting what was waiting for us as the huge soulless modern buildings swept into view. These places – the supermarkets particularly – were of the ‘open all hours’ variety. Thus busy professional types, insomniacs, weirdoes and trouble-makers could congregate at any time of the day or night and flash the plastic so they could stock up on provisions and the occasional impulse luxury bargain. My old world was never really asleep; there was always something going on somewhere, some place where you could go out in the middle of the night and buy something you didn’t really need. So when we drove into the retail park I just took it for granted that the place would be deserted, that like everywhere else we’d been to since the shudder we’d find that the world was just one big Marie Celeste, a planet abandoned in a hurry.

So I was a bit shocked – horrified, in fact – to find that the massive car park of the supermarket zone was dotted with a couple of dozen cars and vans. The other side of the park, the boring home improvement bit, was more or less deserted – the odd lorry or car huddled close to the buildings themselves. But as we drove towards the supermarket I realised with a sick feeling in my gut that when it happened – the shudder or whatever it was – people had been out and about here, wandering amongst the aisles with their shopping trolleys, happily spending their cash in the calm of the early hours. And then they’d gone. Just disappeared, it seemed, into thin air – leaving nothing behind except the shopping in their trolleys and their cars in the car park. A wave of despair rushed over me as the magnitude of what had happened hit me again and it felt as bad as it had the first time.

Blake manoeuvred the jeep across the car park and came to rest at an angle alongside a huge lorry bearing the logo of the supermarket into whose shadow we’d driven. The rear roller door of the lorry was open and in the darkness within we could see boxes and crates, the vehicle half-unloaded by storemen who had simply ceased to exist a few days ago. ‘Can you drive a lorry?’ asked Blake, shattering the cold silence which had existed between us since we’d left the cottage.

‘Drive a lorry?’ I said, staring at him blankly. Blake shook his head and gave me a pitying look.

‘We won’t be able to get much in the jeep and I don’t fancy making too many return visits here. We can unload whatever crap’s in the lorry, fill it up with what we need and get it back to the cottage pronto,’ he said.

I looked up at the big, awkward lorry. ‘I’ve never driven anything like that before but I suppose the principle’s the same as anything else,’ I said.

Blake was opening the jeep door. He reached for a rifle – it was, he’d told me the night before, an M16, a ferocious-looking mother with a secondary barrel which, he enthusiastically informed me, launched powerful grenades. ‘Just keep on the right side of the road and remember to stop at the red lights and you’ll be all right. Are you coming or do you want me to do it all as usual?’ That one stung a bit.

By the time I got out of the jeep Blake was already in the back of the lorry, rooting around and throwing out boxes which didn’t take his fancy. ‘Mostly bloody rubbish, no use to us,’ he said as he leapt down to the ground a couple of minutes later. He gestured towards the entrance to the supermarket. An awning covered the glass double doors and rows of trolleys were chained up at a railing. The supermarket doors themselves were closed. ‘Automatic doors,’ he said as he stepped forward and the doors stayed resolutely closed. ‘Jammed when the power finally went down. Oh, well…’ I jumped back as he raised his rifle and rattled off a rapid burst of gunfire. One of the doors suddenly frosted before collapsing in a curtain of tiny glass granules.

I grabbed his arm as he lowered the smoking rifle and proudly surveyed his handiwork. I felt a surge of genuine anger. ‘Are you fucking nuts? Anyone – anything – in a five-mile radius will have heard that racket.’

‘Chill out,’ said Blake, adopting that irritating cool-dude persona of his which really didn’t fit his hard man image. ‘We get in and we get out. Would you have preferred I pick the lock?’

Frankly, I’d have preferred it if we’d just gone home but there was no turning back now. Blake pulled a rubber-handled torch from his belt and stepped through the devastated doorway and into the darkness of the supermarket foyer. I glanced nervously back, half-expecting to see hordes of curious wraiths drifting across the car park towards us. But there was nothing there, no movement save a carrier bag caught in the breeze as it wafted over the tarmac. I hurriedly followed Blake into the supermarket, dreading what we might find inside.

Like many of these places, the supermarket was probably a converted aircraft hangar. But great skylight windows had been installed so it wasn’t as creepily gloomy inside as I’d expected. It still wasn’t a pretty sight through, to see this temple of rampant consumerism transformed by catastrophe into a museum piece, a frozen moment in time. It was dingy, quite light but there were dark shadows everywhere so we played our torch-beams across the floor, the walls, the little instore kiosks where cheery simple-minded shop-girls had only recently sold cigarettes to under-age kids and chocolate bars to fat women in shell-suits. To one side there was a little booth which dispensed diabolical ersatz coffee, to another side a free-standing display of Hallowe’en masks and cheap toys. Hallowe’en! It was only September, for God’s sake! Sometimes it seemed as if we spent our lives being bounced from holiday to holiday, festival to festival, Valentine’s Day to Mother’s Day, like human pinballs.

In the half-light up ahead there were about fifteen aisles, a row of silent checkout desks standing sentinel at the end of each. Blake had found two abandoned trolleys and he pushed one towards me. ‘I can’t believe this place hasn’t been ransacked already,’ he said.

‘Is that a good sign or a bad sign?’ I muttered. If no-one had been near the place in the last five or so days then there’d be rich pickings for us. Conversely could it be that there was no-one left to loot the place? Was it really possible that Blake and I were all humanity had left to show for hundreds of thousands of years of evolution? It was a question I couldn’t help but keep on asking myself…

Blake was looking at the big watch strapped to his hairy wrist. ‘Back here in thirty. Take what you think we need, nothing else. No luxuries, got it?’

I got it. I really didn’t want to stay in this awful, funereal place a moment longer than I needed to. Blake rattled off with his trolley. ‘Don’t bother with the five-items-or-less checkout or we’ll be here all day,’ he called back. ‘And don’t forget your loyalty card!’ I sighed and watched him disappear down an aisle before rallying myself, taking a firmer grip than necessary on my shopping trolley, and trundling off in the opposite direction.

It was an extremely odd experience, wandering up and down the aisles, helping myself. I tried to ignore the trolleys, some of them half-laden, abandoned in the aisles. Could it really have been that the people using them had been happily filling up for the weekend when it happened? I stopped for a moment, my trolley already loaded up with tinned potatoes, tinned meats, tined vegetables, chocolate, coffee, tea, razorblades, deodorants, air-fresheners, and stared at one particular trolley. I ached with despair. The trolley was half-full, bulging with biscuits, baby food, nappies…I tried to picture it. A proud young mother, late-night shopping to avoid jostling crowds, anxious to provide for her bouncing baby boy or girl. Then she’d just vanished – disappeared from the face of the Earth as if she’d never existed. And the baby? What had become of the baby? Had it vanished too, swept away by whatever quirk of Nature had decided Mankind had been around long enough? Or, chillingly, had the baby survived, like me and Blake and Dave the biker? Had the baby awoken in the night, cold and hungry and frightened, crying out wordlessly for Mummy? I tried not to think beyond this dreadful image. I could feel tears in my eyes as I carried on shopping.

I decided to give the chiller cabinets a wide berth. It had only been a few days but there were a few unpleasant odours drifting up from the glass cabinets already and the aisle was swimming with cold water. I glanced at my watch. Twenty-five minutes already since I’d set off. My trolley was so overloaded it was becoming difficult to manoeuvre so I decided to head back to the car park.

That’s when I heard it. A sneeze. A bloody sneeze.

I stopped in my tracks, my hands clasped so tightly to the steering bar of the shopping trolley they might have been welded to it. I looked around slowly but could see nothing…the chiller cabinets nearly flush to the wall, bakery shelves half-full of mouldering bread and cakes. Then I saw the two tins of meat and a little tin-opener alongside them on the floor. One of the tins was open, half its contents missing presumed consumed. Despite my legal background I wasn’t much of a detective but even I could work this one out…

‘Who’s there?’ I said, the sound of my own voice almost making me jump. ’Is someone there?’

I could hear a sniffling noise from somewhere nearby, then a sort of shuffling. I squinted in the gloom, waved my torch around a bit, tried to locate the source of the noise. Some sort of animal, wandered in from the fields surrounding the retail park? Hmmm… an animal handy with a tin-opener, eh? Maybe in a Disney film… ‘Come out if you’re there.’

The torchlight danced across the chiller cabinets and there she was. She’d clearly been hiding out of sight behind the cabinets and now she’d come out into the open, standing there shivering either with fear or the cold. I couldn’t take it in at first. It was a girl, mid-to-late-twenties, petite, grubby, lank blonde hair, wearing an off-red fleece and jeans. She was wincing as the light from the torch lit up her face.

‘Who the Hell are you?’ I said.

‘Please don’t,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, really. I was just so hungry…I didn’t know what else to do.’ She started to inch her way out through the little gap between the freezers. I could see that her jeans were wet through. ‘I’ll just go, really. I promise I won’t come back. Just don’t hurt me.’ She was white with fear.

I stepped forward to block her path. I held up a hand which I’d hoped was reassuring but it seemed to terrify her more and she cowered back. ‘Please…’ she whimpered.

I smiled, suddenly aware of my overwhelming relief at finding another living human being who wasn‘t Blake. ‘It’s all right, it’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to hurt you, really.’

‘You’re…you’re not with them?’ Curse me for an idiot but I didn’t pick up on that one – of if I did I assumed she was just referring to the wraiths. I was just so pleased to find her – to find anyone…

‘No, no, you’re all right,’ I said, laying down my torch on top of a chiller so it’s beam spread out in a wide arc, illuminating us both. I held up my hands and smiled inanely. ‘We’re just here to pick up some stuff.’

She looked suspicious. ‘We?’

I gestured vaguely behind me. ‘There’s a friend with me,’ I said. ‘What’s your name?’

She looked surprised by the question – maybe because nobody had asked her for so long or maybe she couldn’t remember. ‘My name?’ she said. ‘Oh… Denise. Denise Charles.’

I introduced myself. I didn’t know whether it was appropriate to offer her my hand in the unusual circumstance of our meeting so I just smiled inanely again. ‘You look freezing,’ I said.

She smiled coyly. Hmmm…nice smile. I like the way that little fringe of blonde hair falls into her eyes and she absently brushes it back. ‘Sorry, yes,’ she said. ‘I was just…well,’ she glanced down at the tins on the floor, hurriedly abandoned mid-feasting. ‘I heard you coming in and I couldn’t think of anywhere else to hide. The water’s really cold. And smelly.’

I stopped myself saying ‘Let’s get you out of those wet clothes’ because she might have taken it the wrong way. I helped her step out of the water and as she jumped across the spreading puddles she stumbled and I reached out to grasp her. I sort of took her in my arms. Our eyes met for a second or two. I smiled. She smiled. She smelt a bit funny.

‘You all right?’ I said as we clumsily disengaged.

‘I think so,’ she said, making a play of adjusting her grubby clothing. ‘Look, why don’t I just leave you to it…’

‘No, no…’ I said in a panic. ‘There’s no point in you running off. I mean…unless you’ve got other people?’

Denise shook her head. ‘I’ve not seen anyone in days. What’s happened, do you know?’

‘I’ve got no idea,’ I said. ‘I just woke up a few days ago and…’ I spread my arms expansively and hoped my expression looked baffled enough.

Blake suddenly came rushing around the corner, sans trolley. He skidded to a halt, looked at me, looked at Denise, looked at me again. ’Who the fuck’s this?’ he said.

‘Denise,’ I said, as if he really should have known and was really very rude for displaying such ignorance.

Blake grunted. ‘They used to say supermarkets were a good place to meet girls but I never believed it.’

Denise gave me a ‘This is your friend?’ look. Before I could say anything Blake grabbed my arm. ‘We’ve gotta move,’ he said.

I didn’t pick up the urgency in his voice at first. ‘Denise can come with us?’

‘If we can get out of here I don’t care who comes with us,’ said Blake, glancing back over his shoulder. ‘Listen…’

I listened. Nothing at first, just silence broken by dripping water somewhere. Then another sound…a machine sound. It seemed to be drifting in from outside – not exactly an engine but some sort of high-powered motor. It was a sound I’d heard before but it took me a few seconds to dredge it up from my memory banks. My face lit up.

‘It’s a helicopter!’ I cried. I made to run back towards the entrance. Blake held me back. ‘Wait, you bloody idiot,’ he said.

‘But it’s a helicopter!’ I cried again. ‘People! More people! God, this is looking good…’

‘No.’

It was Denise. In the excitement I’d forgotten Denise. Blake and I spun round to look at her.

‘No, it’s not looking good. It’s looking very bad.’

‘What are you talking about?’ demanded Blake, ungallantly I thought as they hadn’t been formally introduced yet.

‘I think I know who these people are. I met them a couple of days ago, the last people I’ve met until today,’ said Denise. She was looking scared again, starting to back away.

I suddenly remembered what she’d said when I’d found her. You’re not with them. ‘Who are they?’ I said, dropping my voice to a whisper. The helicopter sound was quite close now, the machine clearly coming in to land right outside the door.

‘They’re trouble,’ she said. ‘Big trouble.’

I looked at Blake. I’m not sure why. His eyes were gleaming with excitement. He was cradling his M16 as if it was a part of his body. ‘Trouble,’ he said. He gave a little brittle laugh. ‘That’s my middle name.’

So there and then Blake and I had our first proper argument. We’d had disagreements over the past few days, of course – he’d sort of taken the lead since we’d met up and I’d been happy to let him. He’d done things I hadn’t approved of, behaved irrationally and unpredictably and I’d snapped at him or else quietly voiced my disapproval. But we hadn’t really argued; I didn’t feel I yet knew him well enough to engage him in verbal combat – and I couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t smack me in the face with his rifle butt if he didn’t get his own way.

But this was important. This was worth arguing about. This was very probably life and death for all of us. You see, I wanted to go outside, arms aloft, big smiles, we-come-in-peace, say ‘hello’ to the nice people in their helicopter. Denise, anxious and shaking, wanted to run away – presumably through some loading bay or other round the back of the building. Blake though, was trigger-happy. He was still lovingly cradling his rifle and his eyes were ablaze with a violent excitement.

‘So what do you think we should do?’ I demanded after Denise and I had aired our own preferred options. ‘Go out there with all guns blazing?’

‘If necessary,’ said Blake, the idea clearly appealing to him. ‘Think about it; people in a helicopter, organised, mobile…they’ve got the upper hand. We’ve got surprise, though.’

‘Well, yes, I think they’d probably be quite surprised to see some lunatic with a machine gun rushing at them,’ I reasoned. The sound of the helicopter had become so loud now that it almost drowned out our voices.

Blake nodded disdainfully towards Denise who was hovering nearby looking extremely uneasy. ‘And you’d rather run away?’ he said.

‘You know what I want to do,’ I said, exasperated, before Denise could reply. ‘Look, there are people out there, other people. We need to talk to them, for Christ’s sake.’

‘We need to be careful,’ said Denise. ‘If they’re the same people I’ve already met they won’t be happy with us being in here.’

The sound of the helicopter’s engines somewhere outside was winding down. The machine had clearly landed.

‘So let’s take the fight to them,’ said Blake.

‘Who says there has to be a fight? For God’s sake, Blake, there’s few enough of us left as it is. I can’t go on living like some bloody hermit. If there are other people alive, we need to make contact with them, it’s as simple as that,’ I said. There must have been something about the tone of my voice which brought Blake up for a moment. He glared at me and I readied myself for that rifle butt. Then he shook his head, called me something very unpleasant under his breath and started moving away to the back of the store.

‘Do what you like,’ he said. ‘You‘re on your own.’ Then he was gone.

I watched as he vanished along the aisle and into the darkness. I couldn’t believe it had come to this, that he’d run off and abandoned us – me – at the first sign of trouble. I didn’t have time to order my thoughts, to try and reason where he might go, what he might do. I just knew that he’d left me alone with Denise and with no real idea what to do for the best.

I looked at Denise, staring up at me expectantly. ‘So what do you think?’ she said. ‘Really? It could be dangerous out there.’

‘It is dangerous out there,’ I said. ‘But I can’t go on running the rest of my life. We don’t know who’s out there or what they want.’

‘I can tell you they won’t appreciate us being in here,’ said Denise.

‘How can you know that?’ I said.

‘Because I’ve met a few other people and they get very possessive about food and supplies,’ she said.

‘HELLO?’ The voice cracked out of the gloom like a gunshot, rattling around the steel skeleton of the supermarket building. There was someone in the building, near the entrance. ‘HELLO? WHO’S IN HERE?’

Gulp. Time up.

Much to my surprise, I found myself reaching out and grasping Denise’s hand. She favoured me with a nervy smile and squeezed my fingers. I felt oddly reassured by the gesture. I smiled at her and mouthed ‘Come on, it’ll be okay.’

Together we moved along the aisle back towards the checkouts. My heart was in my mouth and my free hand was so moist I could barely hold my torch. We were about to step out into the aisle in front of the checkouts when I decided it might be sensible to make ourselves – and our intentions – known. ‘Here, we’re here,’ I called out, my voice quivering. ‘It’s all right.’

We emerged from cover. Strong torch lights suddenly lit us up, blinded us, made us flinch. ‘WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?’

‘Friends, we’re friends,’ I babbled, disorientated by what looked like searchlights. The beams moved away and after a few moments my dazzled vision began to adjust to the half-gloom again. I squinted at the two men standing near the checkouts.

Two men. I couldn’t really pick out their features in any great detail at first but there were certainly two of them, ordinary men indistinguishable from millions of other men just like them who had walked the Earth a few days ago; but seeing them standing there was a sight as incredible to me as the sight of two dinosaurs manhandling shopping trolleys around the aisles would have been.

One of them was a huge, imposing black man, not much more than thirty, wearing a bobble hat and an enormous green anorak. The second man was taller and thinner and older, maybe a little over fifty, his skin pale and unshaven. He was wearing a battered check sports blazer and grubby jeans and trainers. Both men were clutching rifles which were directed right at us. Suspicious eyes glinted in the darkness, looking us both up and down.

I smiled reassuringly. ‘Thank God,’ I said. ‘We’re so pleased to see you.’ I stepped forward a pace and the two men suddenly sprang into action, leaping back and waving their rifles even more threateningly. They were shouting with almost one voice and while I couldn’t pick out individual words their intent was quite clear; they really didn’t want either of us to move. I raised my hands and stepped back alongside Denise.

‘All right, all right,’ I said in what I hoped was my most placatory tone. ‘Look, we’re not armed.’

‘Just keep back, you bastard.’ The black man spat the words with such venom even I doubted my own parentage for a moment. The thin white man raised his rifle and I could see that it was pointed directly at my forehead.

‘Bloody looters,’ he said, his voice a throaty growl. ‘I ought to shoot you dead.’

‘Looters?’ I said, appalled. ‘No, really…you’ve got it wrong. We’re not looters. You don’t understand…’

‘Shut the fuck up. You’re the one who doesn’t understand,’ said the black man. I’d already decided that he had a serious attitude problem. It seemed unlikely we were going to become close friends.

‘This area’s under martial law, son,’ said the older man. His voice sounded just a fraction softer now. Maybe we had a chance. ‘We’re within our rights to shoot you on the spot.’ Rights?

‘Whose martial law?’ I said, hoping I didn’t sound too argumentative.

The two men exchanged glances as if they hadn’t been expecting the question. The older man turned back to me and grinned. It was a yellowy grin, full of broken teeth. ‘Ours, son,’ he said wryly.

‘We didn’t know,’ I stammered.

Click, click. ‘Ignorance is no defence, son,’ said the older man. The irony of a lawyer moments away from a bullet in the brain being thrown the hoariest of old legal cliches wasn’t lost on me. But then the sudden reminder of my old life seemed to reactivate my old negotiating skills and suddenly I was fighting for my life with the only weapon at my disposal – words.

‘There’s no need for this, lads,’ I said, hoping to win them over by pretending to be their friend. ‘There’s been a simple misunderstanding, that’s all. Look, I haven’t got a clue what’s going on, what’s happened to everyone but I do know that you’re practically the first people I’ve seen in the best part of a week. If martial law’s been declared and I’ – I suddenly remembered Denise standing alongside me – ‘we’ve trodden on anyone’s toes then we’re really sorry. It’s not as if we’ve read about it in the papers or heard it on the news. We just didn’t know. We’re hungry and we just wanted a bit of food. Are you really going to shoot us for that?’

An awful silence fell. The only sound was a keen breeze rattling through some broken skylight windows high above us. Then the older man spoke up again.

‘Just the two of you, is it?’

I thought momentarily of Blake. Where the Hell was he by now? Hopefully far enough away not to cause any trouble. Although somehow I rather doubted it. ‘Just us, yes,’ I lied.

The two men grinned. I felt myself relax slightly as they lowered their rifles and moved towards us. ‘There’s a lot you need to know about, my friend,’ said the older man. ‘Let’s get you out of here.’

And then all Hell broke loose. Just for a change.

The floor in front of the two gunmen suddenly seemed to explode in little spouts of dust and chips of marble as deafening gunshots ricocheted around the building. The two men leapt back like panthers, backing away and raising their rifles which they aimed into the darkness. The older man shot me an evil glare as they moved back towards the doorway. ‘You bastards, you set us up!’ he hissed.

‘No, no…you’ve got it wrong…’ I tried to protest. M16 gunfire filled the air and bullets whizzed around the foyer as the two gunmen returned fire into the darkness.

Suddenly the confusion became even more confused. Denise grabbed my arm, mouthed something which I couldn’t hear above all the commotion, and tried to drag me back towards the aisles. But I didn’t want to go that way, back into the dark. I cursed Blake for his stupid commando assault upon the gunmen and I wanted to try and put things right, get him to put his gun down before he got us all killed. The store had become a battlefield and I allowed Denise to push me to the floor and throw an arm over my head. I managed to look up in time to see the two men, guns blazing, stumble out of the store through the broken doorway. It fell silent for a moment and I could hear raised voices outside as the gunmen presumably made their way back to their chopper.

I scrambled to my feet. ‘We can’t let them go,’ I said, exasperated. ‘We’ve got to explain.’

Denise was on her feet again by now. She tugged imploringly at my sleeve. ’It’s no good, they’ll never believe us now. Let’s just get out of here. There’s a bay round the back, it’s how I got in.’

I felt desperate, betrayed. How could Blake have done something so unbelievably stupid? I turned and faced the row of aisles, my fists clenched furiously. I stared down the aisles as if I could force Blake out of hiding by sheer willpower. ‘You bloody stupid fucker!’ I shouted as loudly as I could. My words flew around the building and bounced back in my face. ‘Do you have any idea what you’ve done?’ On impulse I turned back to Denise who was staring at me with frightened eyes. I pulled free from her tight grip, and ran towards the doorway.

You must realise that I was now acting purely on adrenalin, uncharacteristically leaping before I looked, if you get my drift. I ran through the foyer and through the shattered doorway out into the daylight. There was our jeep, the truck we’d been planning to load up and, just a few hundred yards away, the helicopter settled at an angle across a row of parking bays. My two new friends were already in the cockpit, strapping themselves in. I felt a chill as I saw the big and very grotesque machine gun strapped to a bracket at the side of the chopper. The black man was at the controls, powering the chopper up. The engine began to fire, the rotors lazily began to revolve. The black man spotted me in the doorway, waving my arms in the air like a lunatic, nudged his mate and even from where I was standing I could see the vicious fury in their eyes. The older man leaned across his seat and started fiddling with the machine gun, turning to bear it upon me.

‘Jesus, no…’ I cried out. ‘This is all wrong, there’s no need for this.’ But my words were lost in the roar of the chopper’s engines and the chuk-chuk-chuk of the rotors. It all happened very quickly and yet there was a sort of slow-motion quality about it all. I saw Denise appear at my side. I saw the bloke with the machine gun preparing to fire. My eyes opened wide as I realised what was going to happen next. I saw Denise in the corner of my eye. ‘Get down!’ I cried. I grabbed her and practically hurled her behind the delivery lorry Blake and I had had our eyes on. I threw myself after her just as the machine gun started rattling, peppering the tarmac with bullets and churning up gravel dust.

Now it was my turn to put a protective arm over Denise’s head as the bullets continued to fly, slamming into the side of the lorry and causing it to shake and quiver on its suspension.

This is it, I found myself thinking. This is the end. We’re done for. It’s all over. We’re going to die.

Thanks, Blake. Thanks a bunch.

To be continued…

For The Shudder Chapters 1 – 6 head to our Original Fiction section HERE.

I had first noticed that something strange was happening in March of this year. It was a gut feeling. Our plot of land (and the surrounding area) had always been teeming with wild life. Every night as the moon rose the air was filled with the distant call of wolves. Gradually, (over the period of a few weeks) the animals began to fall silent. Only the howling remained. Megan laughed but I was sure of it.

I had taken Jasper out on our usual trek. The air was brisk as dusk crept upon us, staining the amber light a pale blue. He found something strange nestled amongst the pines. It was startled by our intrusion and bolted with visceral speed. I shouted for him to heel; instinctively he gave chase. Within seconds the gloomy woodland had consumed him.

I endeavoured to track them, but the freezing air seared my tired lungs. Finally, I managed to corner him at a jagged cliff edge overlooking the old slate quarry. His eyes were filled with hatred and his mouth awash with foaming tendrils. Strange marks were peppered around his neck. He did not recognise me.

I buried him in the crisp snow, beneath the foot of a towering oak.

As I studied my blood-caked hands I could feel the scorching desert sun bearing down on me once more. I took cover as the sound of erratic, furious shots rang in my ears. In the cruel light of day the silhouettes became human, every minute feature a lucid, horrific portrait.

The cold dragged me from my recollection. I had to get back. It isn’t safe around these parts, especially after dark. I reached for my flash light. It was gone, though the sky was clear and the moon full. The wilderness bathed in its silver light; murky shapes were cast from the pines.

I washed my hands in the snow, creating a dark red pit. The flesh of my forearm had been torn and throbbed relentlessly. I applied a tourniquet and headed back. I felt as if the trees watched my every move.

Megan was waiting when I returned. She stood in a rectangle of artificial light, rubbing her arms. Her face contorted as Jasper failed to accompany me.

I could not provide her with a true account of events. The firelight flickered in her eyes as she bandaged my arm. She cried into my shoulder. I stared out of the window, watching the trees. There were so many malignant shadows, so many dark recesses.

This morning I awoke to find myself alone, a warm indentation still present next to me. I flung the bed sheets to the ground; she knew how dangerous it was to venture out.

I found her at the brink of the frozen lake. She did not respond. As I approached she turned and glared. Her features had been consumed by a feral intensity. She backed away. The snow crunched with each tentative step. Beside her lay a curious hole in the surface; as if something had burrowed its way out.

I sit at my desk, studying the woodland as logs crackle in the fire behind me. The snow is falling again in thick, white blankets. It looks so clean, so inviting; so pure.

He flings the sweat-soaked sheets onto the carpet then sits on the edge of the bed; more exhausted than he had been the night before.

The morning was grey and cold. I stood next to the kitchen table. Lately, my appetite has completely diminished; I can’t even remember the last time that I ate a proper meal. I looked at the pill bottle in my hand: Lithonate, 900mg – Twice daily. The shit didn’t seem to be working but I swallowed the tablet anyway. As usual, I washed it down with a glass of milk. It feels healthier that way.

I looked out at the ominous sky; it was a turbulent collage of charcoal and pewter. In spite of the inevitable rain I still planned to visit Priya. I grabbed my coat and set off.

I stopped briefly at the front door to look over my shoulder.

The roads were deserted. I made the journey in good time. My mind wandered as I drove. I felt so tired. I had planned to stop at a garage on the way to pick up a bouquet of flowers. I still have no recollection of doing so. When I arrived they were on the passenger seat.

I wonder how strong the pills are.

It is always an ordeal trying to park whenever I visit; today was no exception. The rusty Victorian gates stood ajar, rattling with each gust of wind. They were cradled from either side by two towering willow trees; stripped of their leaves by the cruel October chill. The rain began to fall as I commenced my ascent up the cobbled incline, causing my damp trousers to cling uncomfortably. As I approached I looked into her smiling eyes.

It has always been my favourite picture.

The plot is well maintained.

I make sure of that.

I placed the lilies in the marble vase. Rain dripped from their delicate petals like teardrops.

It has been a year since Priya was buried.

I still remember her mischievous smile. She was so beautiful. I loved her. I didn’t realise how intensely until they lowered her into the earth.

I leant forward to wipe the face of the headstone with my sleeve. I stopped dead. A beat thudded in my ears, though it seemed erratic. It paused, then it commenced again, then it stopped. It almost sounded like…knocking. I scanned the surrounding area. It was completely deserted. I looked down and listened intently, tilting my ear toward the sodden earth. The only sound audible was the patter of raindrops.

I stood and took up a fast stroll toward the gates, stopping for a glance over my shoulder when I felt that I was at a safe distance.

The plot was as I left it.

The only sign of life was the lilies, which trembled amidst the torrent.

Shadows lurk in the gloomy corners of the room as the television casts its sickly glare. He vacantly stares through it. An old Boris Karloff movie plays. He switches the T.V. off. A tear trickles down his cheek.

I took my pill about an hour ago, although I am struggling to appreciate its benefits. I feel so cold, lifeless.

He walks over to the record player and draws some vinyl from its sheath. It spins on the turntable; the needle tracing out the haunting sound of Devil Got My Woman by Skip James. He stands, transfixed by the spiralling black ravines.

The rain is harder than it has been for weeks. I have always loved the sound of it; it reminds me of childhood.

A knock startles him. The music ceases. The needle amplifies a repeated thunk.

I freeze with apprehension. A precession of three knocks echo through the empty house. It is the sound of flesh on glass, a dull thud. I approach the patio doors and stand in front of the curtains; heart pounding in my ears, my skin crawling.

With a swift motion I fling open the drapes.

A figure is pressed against the window pane.

Rain cascades down its wet hair, which hangs dirty and lank. Writhing insects and fresh earth cling to it.

Its eyes are intact.

She stares back at me with malignant intensity.

Her white dress is tattered and tar-yellow; the stomach soaked with blood.

In her hands are a bunch of white lilies, speckled with droplets of festering crimson.

I stagger backwards in horror.

My thighs connect with the armchair.

The impact sends me tumbling to the ground.

I pounce back to my feet and glare at the doorway.

It is empty; nothing remains apart from the swirling patterns of water.

I sit back down and wait, scanning the door and every corner of the room.

I set off upstairs.

He walks across the landing.

He stops briefly to glance at the spare room: It would never be used.

He caresses the banister which overhangs the long staircase, nods and looks at the glint in his hand.

1979. On the Planet Previously known as Glam. 

It really was called that, once upon a time.  Mr Glister could hardly credit it. What a shame they had changed it. The new designation – now that the planet was about to join the Loose Alliance – was the far more prosaic M-21b. Vince had been right, thought the sad dwarf. Everything in the modern day universe was tending towards the dour and glum. The Seventies were ending and everyone was feeling a little sadder and wiser.

Vince himself had wandered out into the wilderness, here on this alien world. His diminutive chum hadn’t seen him for several days. It had been Monday when Vince suddenly appeared in a thin, white cotton shift, looking all monkish and solemn. He declared that he was walking out into the crimson desert to make his tribute to the great gods of Glam. He didn’t want any provisions or any company on his pilgrimage. His face was devoid of make-up and glitter. His hair was back in its natural shade of dirty brown.

He really has changed, thought Glister. He really means it this time. He is retiring for good. He is striding out into the inhospitable wastes of Glam and renouncing his calling forever.

That morning Mr Glister had shed a tear or two for the passing of the rock star known as Vince Cosmos.

‘It’s all right, Mr Glister, old pal,’ Vince had said, grimly. ‘I’ll still be the same person. I just won’t be quite the same on the outside. We can have some peace at last, eh?’

But, thought Mr Glister, as he watched his friend shimmer on the horizon and eventually disappear like a wavering mirage… But I liked all the fuss and the kerfuffle of the rock star world. I loved the screaming crowds and the autographs, the tour buses and the concert appearances. I liked humping the equipment about and acting as his security guard. Even the boring stuff, like hanging around the studios as he worked so painstakingly on his lyrics – even all that was thrilling. And also… I liked our secret mission too. The stuff that our public never knew we were up to. Our endless, dangerous task of saving the world from the Visitors…

He went to sit in the courtyard of the old stone house. He sipped mint tea and smoked something that had been left lying around on the tiled table, which made him see double for a while. He wasn’t even sure who this house belonged to. Typical of Vince – to dump him here and go off seeking his own spiritual salvation or whatever he was up to. Glister was feeling a bit annoyed, actually. Parsecs from home and unable to even speak the language.

Here came that older woman again, in the midnight blue robes. She was so graceful and kind-looking. She had kissed and hugged Vince. Glister had wondered whether they were related. Maybe this was Vince’s mother or aunty. She smiled and nodded at the dwarf and brought him sticky sweetmeats on golden dishes. Oh, what am I anyway? thought Glister miserably. Just a helper. Nothing more than a Roadie, really. Why should I have anything explained to me, anyway?

He fell into a vexed daydream of those early days with Vince. Back before the boy was mega-famous. When they lived on the houseboat in Camden and Vince was a rising star, appearing on BBC TV’s Smashing Tunes and at the Royal Variety Performance. When Poppy Munday first joined their gang as Vince’s P.A and they had had to explain to her about the Martians infiltrating Earth show-business and how they were the spearhead of another Martian invasion force. That plucky Geordie girl had taken the whole thing in her stride… What a team they had made!

Seven years later, though, their little gang was broken. After all those years of hits and shows and fights with Martians. Now they were split up. The band had gone its separate ways. Poppy was in New York. Vince and Glister were here… somewhere down in space. The scarlet and lilac, mountainous world that Vince claimed to come from. True, he had grown up in East Dulwich, but this was his true home, he had earnestly explained. This was where his roots were. The planet once known as Glam.

Days and days had gone by and there was no sign of Vince. Glister was left to his own devices. He wasted time checking over and polishing the instruments and dials of their small spacecraft. He sighed as he gazed at all that polished brass and wood, knowing that he only really understood half of the principles that guided their spaceship’s flight from Earth. If the worst was to happen and Vince never returned from his arid vigil, then Glister wouldn’t stand a chance of returning home. At this, he shuddered with repressed panic.

The woman Glister suspected of being related to Vince came by to see him that evening as the servants brought him more of their rich, somewhat sticky dishes. She made consoling crooning noises and he nodded crossly at her. If she really was Vince’s mother, did she understand much about her son, and the life he had lived on Earth in the Seventies? Did she even understand what a Glam Rock star was? Had she ever heard the marvellous tracks that Vince had cut?

Up here, in these calm, lofty realms, all that hullabaloo seemed almost irrelevant. Something bridled inside Mr Glister at that thought. He felt as if Vince was casting off everything that had ever connected them. Everything they had striven to achieve. Like the planet itself, Vince Cosmos had renounced his glitter.

When darkness fell that night Mr Glister made a snap decision and stole a small landcraft that was docked outside the main gates of the complex. It seemed easy enough to drive. After a few false starts he got it hovering across the desert sands. No one shouted out and came running to stop him. His heart leapt up at the sudden jolt of speed as he flew full throttle into the cooling sands.

How would he even know where Vince had gone? This whole world was covered in red sand. He could lose himself in it and never get back to civilization. Just at that moment, though, Glister didn’t care. He flew blindly into the moonlit night and trusted that he would find his friend and employer by sheer instinct.

He knew Vince was going to the mountains. He had heard him mention that he intended to perform the self-purifying ritual of Pann’baaa at the Mountain of Quo. As he rode along, Glister activated the car’s small computer screen and plugged in a query. The route to the Mountain of Quo twinkled into being. The car adjusted its direction and he sighed contentedly. He would be there in just under three hours. 

Glister sat back, watching the swooping dark clouds perform a dance just for him under the golden moonlight. He found he was whispering a song or two by Vince as he anticipated a reunion with his chum.

But when he came to the mountain he was surprised to be flagged down by a very small person, standing alone in the road. A person even smaller than Mr Glister.

Glister slowed down. There was a Panda waving at him. He blinked. A toy Panda: not even a real one. And now the Panda was dashing up to the side of the space age car Glister had purloined. Oh, this was too much.

‘Hallo, Mr Glister,’ the small bear said.

The dwarf stared at him. ‘You know me?’

‘You need to come with me,’ said Panda, straightening out his cravat, which had become ruffled in the breeze. ‘There’s someone who wants to talk to you.’

‘Got no time,’ said Glister grimly. ‘I’m looking for my friend.’

‘Yes, we know that,’ sighed Panda. ‘We’ve been keeping tabs on you both.’

‘You know where Vince is?’

But the Panda was evasive, suddenly. He hopped into the driver’s cab next to the dwarf and patted the dashboard commandingly. Then he started giving directions, which took them and their stolen hovercar into the dusky foothills of the Mountains of Quo. And there, standing proudly on a gentle mound, was a double decker bus.

‘The Number 22 to Putney Common,’ gasped Mr Glister. ‘I used to catch that when I was working on the building sites…’

‘Not this one,’ Panda laughed.

Next thing, they were letting themselves aboard the bus, and Glister had time enough to notice that all the windows were obscured by chintz curtains. The hydraulic doors whooshed open and suddenly he and the small bear were standing inside what seemed to be a really messy boudoir. There was a chaise longue and an Art Deco cocktail cabinet and various other pieces of antique furniture. Items of fancy clothing and star charts were slung any old how about the place.

‘You hoo?’ Panda called.

Mr Glister fought to keep control of himself. Here he was, on a bus on this alien world. In the company of a toy someone might have won at the fair. And yet he had faced much stranger things in the past.

Panda dashed up the stairwell to the top deck. Glister heard him talking to someone. A female voice. Slightly slurred. Less than a minute later there was a slimmish blonde with purple highlights crashing down those metal stairs. She wore a tiger print frock coat and yellow plastic stack heel boots and she’d stuck golden stars on her face – just for him.

‘Mr Glister,’ she cried, sticking a tremulous hand in his face for him to kiss. ‘How lovely. I do like a nice little man.’

He scowled at her. ‘Who the hell are you?’

Her face fell. ‘Don’t you know me? Oh dear. Iris Wildthyme, Mr Glister. Transtemporal adventuress.’

*

Glister accepted a Martini and sat on the cluttered chaise longue, balancing the silvery glass in both hands. The Wildthyme woman was regaling him with all sorts of tales about how she and her Panda friend came to be on the planet formerly known as Glam. For a few minutes Glister was happy to sip his murderously strong drink – after having lived off mint tea since he had touched down on Glam with Vince a week ago.

He stared fretfully at the chattering baglady as she said, ‘What I’m interested in is why Vince is retiring now. Why’s he giving up the ghost?’

‘He feels like he’s old hat,’ said Glister. ‘There’s no secret about that. His records don’t sell in anything like their old numbers. Even he could see that Glam is dead. He kept on going though – through the soul revival, and Disco… and then punk and now New Wave on its way. He kept on churning out his records. He even tried his hand at a disco number.’

‘Heard it,’ Panda growled. ‘It was diabolical.’

‘Oh, I rather liked it,’ grinned Iris. ‘But it’s rather more, isn’t it, Mr Glister, than simply retiring from the music biz? Vince is giving up his other role, too, isn’t he? His more secretive and hush-hush role as defender of the Earth?’

Glister boggled at her. ‘How do you know about that?’

She batted her fake eyelashes at him and he saw that they were clogged with black and silver glitter. ‘One has one’s methods, dear,’ she said.

Glister stared at her levelly. ‘You know… I’ve had a feeling… ever since I stepped aboard this bus of yours… We’ve met before, haven’t we?’

‘I couldn’t possibly say,’ she smiled. ‘Now look, Mr Glister. If your boss has renounced his Glam ways and his Rock ‘n’ Roll lifestyle, that’s all very well. But he can’t just leave the Earth undefended against the alien Visitors.’

‘Indeed not,’ said Panda hotly.

‘We need his map,’ Iris said, leaning forward, and breathing ginny fumes into Glister’s face. ‘The special map, remember?’

*

The special map… he wondered. And he wondered hard, and he wondered some more. Glister knew that he’d shot his memory to merry hell throughout the Seventies with substance abuse and standing near the speakers at too many gigs. He had shaken the sense out of himself, was what Poppy Munday always used to say…

That was a point… where had Poppy Munday gone? When had she gone? New York, wasn’t it? She was working in the New York office near Times Square… it was okay, he could remember. And the last time they saw her was when Vince took that suite and there was the aftershow party and Jimmy Bellotron had turned up with Fiji and all their gang…

Glister sat watching the Maelstrom stream by outside the bus, and consoled himself with the thought that – yes – if he tried hard enough, he could, in fact, remember things. He dreaded the coming 1980s, though – imagining further decline in all his faculties.

Iris was in the cab of the bus, and she had taken them off into this swimmy, orange and greenish hyperspatial dimension where ‘space and time are completely buggered up’, as Panda had put it. Now they were at least a trillion light years from Vince and his Zennish sojourn in the Mountains of Quo and this made Glister feel very uneasy. But there was nothing he could do, could he? This was tantamount to kidnap by this old ratbag and her bear. He lay back on the chaise longue, pulling his afghan coat around him against the chill from the time winds. He sipped another Martini, watching the lightshow outside, smoking a gold and yellow Sobranie that Iris had given him.

Yes… he remembered the map. It was one of Vince’s most treasured possessions. Wherever he went the map went with him. It was too precious to be left in the safe on the houseboat. Glister remembered how the lines and colours on that strangely thick vellum had shimmered and morphed, as if the map was a living thing. Green lights sparked up here and there among the pulsing contours of that chart…

‘The souls of all the Martians on Earth,’ Glister said. ‘That’s what the map showed. Where all the Martians were hiding.’

‘Quite,’ said Panda, sitting right beside him. ‘And if your Mr Cosmos is retiring, then we need the map off him.’

‘But… Vince left everything behind,’ said the dwarf. ‘All of his outfits and jewellery… everything is still on Earth.’

‘We need to know where he might have hidden stuff,’ said Panda urgently. ‘His bank accounts, his safety deposit boxes.’

Glister shook his head. ‘He gave everything away. Every last penny. That’s what I found so alarming, before we set off into space. He left himself penniless, as if he knew he was never coming back.’

Panda frowned. Then he hopped off up the gangway to tell Iris. She craned her ear to listen above the screeching of the bus engines and the ear-splitting music from the speakers. Then she nodded firmly and brought the bus in to land.

Next thing, they were emerging from the swirling Maelstrom into a London street. A back street with boarded windows and a great deal of litter swirling about in the stiff breeze. ‘You’ve brought me home!’ cried Glister, pleased despite himself. He had really started to think he’d be stuck on that arid desert world for the rest of his life.

Iris came hurrying down the aisle, suddenly wearing bondage trousers and a tattered tartan frock coat held together with safety pins. ‘Yes, but not quite in your time, Mr Glister. We’ve taken you back a handful of years… To 1976.’

She opened the bus’ doors and the background London street noise came washing in, making Glister feel instantly at home. ‘What happened in 1976?’ he frowned.

Panda nudged him, and urged him outside. ‘It’s all right. Iris has got a smashing plan for retrieving the map…’

*

  

1976 was the year of Wembley, Glister realized, suddenly, as he saw exactly where they were. The vast stadium was filled to capacity on the day the bus had deposited them, and Glister remembered how that eighty thousand-strong crowd had queued up especially to see Vince. It was the largest single audience Vince ever played to and the day had been a fraught one all round.

‘Hey! I’m here already!’ Glister cried, as he joined the queue with Iris and Panda. The Vince fans spared him only the most cursory of glances. He was glad none of them recognized him. Many were plastered in Vince make-up and sporting home-made Vince costumes. Others were made up in the punkish fashion of the time. Vince was one of the few older stars of Glam who had still been respected by the nascent punks, Glister remembered. Though it was during this 1976 tour, with all its theatrical pomp and excess, that that particular tide had started to turn…

Oh, god. It was the Galactic Pharaoh Tour, wasn’t it? Glister shuddered at the very thought. The tour with the fifteen contortionist dancers dressed as lizard people. And the hundred-foot tall golden sphinx with angel wings that extended during the final number. Resulting in the electrocution of several fans in the front rows during a rainy night in Glasgow. That disastrous piece of hydraulics in that monstrously self-indulgent tour that even Vince had wound up regretting bitterly by the end.

So that’s what we’re here to see, thought Glister miserably. I’ve been whizzed back through time three years in order to witness Vince’s most witless spectacle. And, here at Wembley, the final concert appearance he made in the UK to date.

‘Oh, I hear it’s just awful,’ Panda was grinning. ‘Just shockingly bad. All the band abseil down from the top of the stadium, all of them clutching their instruments… and then, as they play the introduction, a giant golden egg is rolled out onto the stage by the dancing lizards. And then, as the first song starts, the egg cracks open and Vince himself climbs out, dressed in gold, with his hair apparently in flames, singing a B side from 1968.’

‘It sounds ghastly,’ said Iris, with relish.

Glister groaned. He remembered the whole thing only too well. He and Poppy Munday had begged and pleaded with Vince during the months of planning that had gone into this tour. Please don’t sing only your most obscure tracks! Please don’t have a gigantic sphinx and everybody on Kirby wires! Please don’t give into your wildest, most self-indulgent ideas about how to stage a stadium concert!

But there had been no reasoning with him.

They took their seats in the stadium, and all three were impressed by the size of the crowd. ‘Eighty thousand!’ Panda exclaimed. ‘Just think how popular he must be!’

‘And think how unpopular he is just about to be,’ moaned Glister. ‘He’s about to disappoint and turn off all of this lot. Just wait for the long monologues about aliens and the thirty minute drum solo while Vince changes into his kabuki costume. I don’t know why he bothered. No one more than twenty feet away could see him anyway!’

The crowd were chanting enthusiastically, carried away by the atmosphere as the sun set over Wembley and the stage lit up green and gold. Heavy drapes concealed the elaborate set design.

‘Let’s sit through the first half,’ Iris said. ‘Until the interval. Then we’ll sneak backstage and get what we came for…’ She eyed Glister meaningfully. ‘And that’s where you come in. You can show us where the map is concealed.’

‘But…’ Glister spluttered. ‘You think it’s here? You think he took it with him wherever he went?’

She nodded. ‘Yes, I do. I don’t think he let it go very far at all. It was too important. And I think you’re the one with whom he entrusted it, Mr Glister.’

Glister muttered to himself as the audience started whooping more energetically and the lightshow over Wembley intensified. Something was happening at the front of the stage…

The show started up.

The first half lasted just over an hour.

It was as horrible as Glister remembered.

The audience stood dumbstruck at the awfulness of it all.

‘Holy fuck,’ said Panda.

‘Sssh,’ said Iris. ‘I’m sure it’ll get better in the second half.’

‘It won’t,’ Glister growled.

Suddenly Iris was out of her seat, clutching Panda to her bosom, and pushing the dwarf along ahead of her. ‘It’s true,’ sighed Iris, jogging along, feeling slightly crushed and claustrophobic as they fought with the crowd. ‘I think Vince has lost it by now, hasn’t he? He seemed so uninterested in his own songs. He was caught up in the spectacle of it all… like the performers up there and all the special effects were playing out some kind of intense psychodrama of his own…’

‘It looked like crap,’ said Panda.

They struggled through the concrete tunnels, where disappointed punters were queuing for hotdogs and beer. They heard some moaning about the lack of hit tunes and others complaining about too many. It seemed that Vince could please no one with this show.

It took them a little longer than planned to get round the back and into the security area. Mr Glister realized that this was one of his functions. He was the Trojan horse for this strange duo. Only he could smuggle them behind the scenes. As they approached the security guards he was seized with doubt. Who were these time travellers after all? Why was he trusting them like this? Was it just that he was grateful for being rescued from the former planet Glam?

‘Why should I help you?’ he said, out of the corner of his mouth.

Iris raised a surprised eyebrow. ‘Because the fight must go on, Mr Glister. If Vince gives up in 1979, then someone has to carry on, don’t they?’

‘I suppose so,’ he mumbled. He knew the old bat was right. The Martians were still out there, weren’t they? Undeterred and still keen to rule the Earth. And if Vince had given up, who was going to take his place? ‘Okay, I’ll get you the map,’ he said.

*

  

But they hadn’t counted on Poppy Munday.

‘What are you doing back here?’ she cried. ‘And who are these two?’ She stared incredulously at Iris and Panda.

The three of them had been caught red-handed by Vince’s P.A as they rummaged about in the dressing room. Vince was elsewhere. Curled into a foetal shape, meditating in the toilet. The noise of his chanting could be heard in the dressing room as the interlopers hunted through scattered belongings. They were so caught up in their frantic task that they hadn’t even noticed Poppy come in.

‘I thought you were helping with the set change,’ she frowned at Glister. ‘Didn’t I just see you out there, struggling with the space dragon’s tail?’ 

‘Er, yes,’ said Glister, blushing. ‘But I’m – erm – here as well.’ He stared at Poppy’s innocent, doll-like face and sighed. He’d always adored this girl. Though he could never have told her anything of the sort, of course. Here she was just three years ago, and it seemed like a lifetime. Back when they were all together. He remembered that blue and orange striped stretchy turtleneck she had worn back then. He sighed and glanced sideways at Iris and Panda, seeing again how bizarre they must look to Penny. The only thing was to come clean, wasn’t it?

Before he could speak, Iris said, ‘I’m a groupie, chuck. I’m here because I’m in love with Vince. You’ve caught me! Oh no!’ She threw up her beringed hands in mock horror.

‘And I’m a groupie, too,’ said Panda, eyeing Poppy beadily.

Poppy looked worried. ‘You really shouldn’t be back here. Our security’s meant to be better than that. After all the death threats and so on that Vince has had…’ 

‘I imagine that the Galactic Pharaoh tour has upped the number of death threats considerably,’ mused Panda.

Poppy nodded unhappily. ‘That’s because Vince is a visionary. He’s way ahead of his time. But how do you know about the increased number of death threats?’

‘Because I’ve just seen the show,’ said Panda. ‘And it was shit.’

‘Come on,’ said Glister. ‘We better get what we came for and get out of here.’

‘Wait!’ said Poppy. ‘What are you doing?’

‘We need the map,’ Iris snapped. She wasn’t in the mood now, to quibble with this girl. ‘You know where it is, don’t you? The map that shows where the Martians are hiding?’

Poppy gasped. ‘How do you know about that? Mr Glister… how could you tell anyone about..?’

Glister tried to explain. ‘I’m from the future, Poppy. I’m from 1979.’

Poppy gasped again. ‘The world’s still here in 1979?’ she asked. ‘Well, that’s something.’

‘It’s a grimmer place,’ said Glister. ‘And Vince has retired from showbiz. He has returned to the stars…’

Poppy’s eyes were out on stalks. ‘No! He can’t! He can’t do that…!’

Glister nodded sadly. ‘I’m afraid it’s true. I went with him myself, to his home world. And I watched him walk alone into the howling desert.  In 1979 Vince has renounced Glam Rock and the Music Biz and his calling on planet Earth. We can’t rely on him forever, Poppy.’

The girl looked horrified. She struggled with her feelings and didn’t seem to know what to say. Then she blurted out, ‘You’re telling me this today! In the middle of the most important concert of the tour…!’

‘It’s his last concert,’ Panda told her. ‘The last one he’ll ever do. It’s so horribly bad that he daren’t go out on tour again. Or even go out in public much more. They bottle him off the stage in the second half. Just wait and see.’

‘Oh my god,’ said Poppy.

‘He goes off to Holland for the rest of the Seventies,’ Panda went on. ‘And there he records a trilogy of ground-breaking experimental folk rock albums using only instruments made out of gourds. And then, in 1979, he pops off into space and is never seen or heard from again.’

‘I’m afraid it’s true,’ sighed Iris. ‘We have seen the future of pop.’

‘They know what they’re talking about,’ Glister told Poppy gently. ‘Especially about those experimental gourds.’

‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Poppy, looking stricken. ‘And he leaves the Earth at the mercy of the Martians?’

‘We’re afraid so,’ said Panda.

Poppy thought for a moment or two, and seemed to come to a decision. She marched over to all the stage costumes and the folding cases that held unaccountable amounts of make-up and glitter. She reached inside a secret, pull-out compartment and produced a small scroll of paper. ‘Take this,’ she said.

They were interrupted by a knock at the door. ‘Five minutes,’ came the prompt.

Everyone froze.

Mr Glister said, ‘That’s me out there!’

There was a pause and then the knock came again. ‘Vince?’ asked Mr Glister’s voice.

Everyone looked at the three-years-older Mr Glister. ‘Tell him to go away,’ he told Poppy.

‘I-it’s okay, Mr Glister,’ Poppy called out. ‘Vince is just about ready…’ 

‘Is he all right?’ asked the gruff voice beyond the door.

‘H-he’s fine. Raring to go.’

There was another pause, as if the Glister on the other side of the door was thinking. Then the doorknob twisted and in he stepped. The earlier Mr Glister was wearing a Galactic Pharaoh Tour t-shirt and a troubled expression. ‘It’s a disaster, isn’t it?’ he said, sotto voce. Then he realized that he and Poppy weren’t alone in the room.

He saw Iris and Panda first. And then he saw himself, three years older and slightly balder. ‘Fuck me!’ he shouted.

The senior Glister looked shocked. ‘I don’t remember this happening!’

‘That’s because you’ve buggered up the time continuum!’ snarled Panda.

‘What about the Bellinivitch Time Limitation Effect?’ Iris asked crossly.

‘Don’t let them touch each other!’ Panda shouted. ‘There’ll be a huge fucking explosion!’ 

Iris shot him a glance. ‘You’re swearing a lot in this story, Panda.’

Both Mr Glisters were staring at each other, and rounding on each other like two diminutive boxers.

Poppy shouted, ‘Panda says don’t touch each other!’

‘I don’t intend to!’ yelled the younger Glister. ‘But what the hell’s going on?’

Just at this moment Vince came out of the toilet, wearing his Pharaoh costume from the start of the second act. ‘Two Glisters!’ he exclaimed.

‘I can explain,’ Iris said, waving the rolled-up map about.

The younger Glister gasped at this. ‘She’s got the map, Vince! The special map!’

‘I think we’d better make a run for it,’ Panda chivvied Iris.

‘You gave this to her,’ Glister accused his older self.

‘You’re right!’ Glister said. ‘I’ve been helping them!’

Vince looked shocked. ‘How could you? Who are these people?’

But Iris and Panda were already making good their escape, with the special map planted firmly down Iris’s cleavage.

‘Call security!’ shouted the junior Glister.

‘This is no good,’ drawled Vince in a troubled voice. Poppy wondered what he had taken to keep him so calm.

The senior Glister shouted him, ‘It’s all your fault, Vince! You threw away your whole career and so someone else has to take over looking after planet Earth!’ 

Vince looked surprised. ‘That old woman? That small bear?’

‘MIAOW,’ said Poppy, looking terribly worried all of a sudden. ‘They’ve been sent by MIAOW, haven’t they? That’s who they’re working for!’

The younger Glister turned angrily on his older self. ‘Is that true?’ he yelled. ‘Have you sold us out to MIAOW?’

The older Glister didn’t have time even to think about this, before he was assailed by his own furious self. And just as Glister punched Glister in the nose there was a pretty fucking big explosion in the dressing room deep under Wembley.

  

*

As they ran away through the concrete tunnels, both Iris and Panda heard its scintillating echoes. ‘It’s the Bellinivitch Time Limitation Effect!’ Iris shouted.

‘Fuck!’ said Panda. ‘Are they all dead?’

As they ran Iris was imagining bits of truculent dwarf flying far and wide. She imagined time punching a crack in the sky. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

They heard footsteps running behind them then, and turned to see the senior Glister hurrying up to them.

‘Are you okay?’ Panda asked. ‘We heard a very loud bang.’

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘The explosion thingy was enough to distract them, and for me to get away. Fuck me, though. This time travel thing is a bit of a chew on, though, isn’t it?’

‘Certainly is,’ said Panda.

‘Hurray anyway,’ said Iris. ‘We got the map! Mission accomplished!’

They turned the corner and found they were amongst the milling crowds again, as fans started returning to their seats outside. Everyone was buying up extra bottles of pop and beer, ready to lob them at the stage. A tannoy voice was announcing the second half of the show.

‘Sounds like Vince is okay to perform,’ said Glister.

‘Time will return to the way it was before,’ said Iris. ‘Everything is back on course.’

‘Do we have to sit through the rest of it?’ Panda pulled a face.

‘Of course!’ smiled Iris. ‘It’s an historic moment in pop history!  And besides, I’m dying to see the bit when Vince flies up to the top of the sphinx and the sphinx’s wings spread out and they soar over everyone’s heads…’

‘Yeah, that bit’s great,’ Glister admitted. ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing that again.’

Iris told them, ‘You two get back to our seats. I’ll fetch us some drinks, eh?’

They complied, but Panda cast a glance back at Iris, whom he knew was up to something. She had that note in her voice that meant she was about to do something mysterious, nefarious and the kind of thing she didn’t want the others to know about.

Blithely Iris shouldered up to the bar and asked for three gin and tonics in plastic glasses.

The woman in the Vince Cosmos T shirt behind the makeshift bar had a livid scar down one cheek and her hair was cut in a very severe bob.

Iris recognized her at once.

‘MidaSlike,’ she nodded, as the woman poured out the gin. ‘The head of MIAOW herself. I am honoured.’

MidaSlike pursed her lips as she twisted the cap off the tonic bottle. ‘This is an important transaction, Operative Wildthyme. I had to do it myself.’

Iris nodded, and glanced around at the thinning crowds. Then she leaned forward and produced the rolled up map from inside her cardigan. Mida’s eyes lit up greedily at the sight of it.

‘Give me the thing, first,’ Iris snapped, as Mida reached out.

The head of MIAOW sighed. Then she reached under the bar and produced a small, clouded memory crystal.

Iris nodded. ‘Everything’s on here? All the evidence? Everything to do with my work for MIAOW? There’s nothing else to show that I ever worked for you?’

‘That’s it,’ muttered Mida. ‘From this moment, we set you free, Iris. You are no longer an operative of ours.’

‘Good,’ said Iris, with feeling. Then she handed the map of Martian souls over to MidaSlike and the organization known as MIAOW.

‘Thank you, Iris. We shall make good use of this.’

Iris turned to go. ‘I’m sure you will.’

Then a series of cascading, doom-laden chords from Jack Bronson’s guitar heralded the start of the first number of Vince’s second act.

There was a huge roar from the crowd as they hefted their bottles ready for throwing, and Vince took to the stage in Egyptian Pharaoh drag, and Iris Wildthyme quickened her pace in her bondage trousers, keen not to miss a single moment of the show.

  

Hang Onto Yourself © 2012 Paul Magrs/Obverse Books

Hang Onto Yourself is taken from the new Obverse Quarterly volume Lady Stardust, available May 2012.

Gavin Winters looked around the room at the faces watching him intently. Every pair of eyes stared directly at him. Unblinking. Concentrating. The situation should have unnerved him, put him on edge. Instead, Gavin just stared straight back at the sea of eyes, looking each one in the face directly.

As he finished the last sentence of the story that he was reading, his class of six year olds all cheered and smiled, the happy ending very much to their liking.

Gavin closed the book and smiled back at the children still seated on the floor in front of his chair. Some of the children were sat cross legged, others laying down on their stomachs, propping their heads up on their elbows.

“Well,” he said. “That was a wonderful story wasn’t it children?”

The class all nodded their head in unison and Gavin smiled.

So much youth and innocence were in this room. It brightened his spirit to see them happy. It gave him a warm fuzzy glow inside to know that they were listening to his every word, drinking it all in.

He looked down at his watch to see just how long they had left.

His digital watch told him that there were only five minutes left. Five measly minutes until the end of term. Two weeks of holidays for Christmas, when the children would travel far and wide. They would meet up with long distance relatives on the other side of the country and, in a couple of cases, the other side of the world.

Gavin was always sad at the end of each term or half term, knowing that he would have to wait so long before seeing his class again.

Of course, his class changed every single year. A fresh batch of young people would pass under his tutelage, ready to be passed onto junior school. But he got to know every single one of them personally. He would learn their full names and exactly how to pronounce them, not always an easy task. It was something that he enjoyed, connecting as he did. Even the parents liked him.

There was at least two or three different sets of parents every year that would thank him personally by buying him a gift. He wasn’t supposed to accept such things without passing it by the faculty first, but the gifts were of such little value and normally were picked out by the children anyway that he hardly ever reported them.

Instead, he would take them home and display them proudly, until the next year, when he would pass them on, normally to a charity shop or the local orphanage where a child would get the most out of them.

Gavin was well liked, well respected.

He stood up and grinned widely at the group in front of him. “Ok, children. Almost home time for Christmas. What say you all clean up the toys and books before the bell rings?”

The nods were in unison again.

“GO.” He said.

The children all popped up from their positions and began running around the room, grabbing dolls, bears and cars. They knew exactly where they belonged and, as the bell for home time rang shrilly, the room almost looked like it had before they had walked in that morning.

The children liked Mr Winters, but their loyalties and priorities lay elsewhere now. As they threw on their coats and grabbed their bags and satchels, a few children paused in the doorway to wave at their teacher. Most had disappeared out into the corridor before the echo of the bell had dissipated.

Gavin was left in the room alone, his hands on his hips.

He finished off the clearing up by himself.

By three thirty, he had shut off the lights and locked the door, grabbing his own coat and bag from the faculty room before walking out to his car.

The car park was almost empty, most of the other teachers either long gone or having planned ahead and caught the bus into work so they could attend the faculty Christmas night out.

Nothing said inappropriate more than a teacher on a drink drive charge.

He had turned down the invite from his peers once again, just as he did every year. The other teachers were jaded, didn’t understand his zest for the role, even after all these years. Some had grown curmudgeonly or bitter. Others had grown depressed, counting down the days, even hours, until they could retire.

The Christmas night out was an excuse for acceptable excess, if there ever was such a thing. Gavin had seen the pictures from a couple of the parties and swore never to attend. He wondered what the parents would think if they ever saw what the authority figures that they trusted with their children’s futures did when they let their hair down.

He doubted that many would leave their heirs under the supervision of drunken miscreants who revelled in their one night of debauchery every year. There was a certain level of pride that he felt as he distanced himself from the other teachers. He felt it gave him a purer bond with the kids in his own class, gave him a righteous path on which to steer them.

Not that he was a religious man, far from it. Ever since his father had been caught stealing from the rectory, he had eschewed the cloth. Even as a child, he knew that the bible had promoted forgiveness. It smacked of hypocrisy that the church had pursued a conviction so vigilantly, unwilling to give his father another chance.

So he had struck out on his own path in life. A path that allowed him to enjoy it as he saw fit, but to ensure that he did it safely, without reproach or risk.

The vocation of teaching was an obvious one, where he could help shape the minds of the young and helpless. To assist them with the dangers of life, to protect them from the numbing truth until they were ready.

Throwing his coat and bag onto the passenger seat, Gavin climbed in to the car, pleasantly surprised that the temperature had not dropped too severely. The car was frost free and started without any argument. He carefully negotiated the car park, making sure that there were no hangers on, no children still playing around the school. Flicking the indicator, he turned the car onto the main road and headed for home.

On the way, he decided to treat himself and stopped at the local convenience store. He stocked up for the evening ahead with a couple of magazines, a DVD and some sugary and savoury snacks.

Pulling onto his driveway, he glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It told him that it was a few minutes before five. The commute to and from the school was laborious and dull, but he knew the price to pay when he moved to the suburbs, to escape the relative rat-race of the city. The main intention had been to escape the noise and light pollution, but he also realised that the air was so much better here.

Stepping out of the vehicle, he grabbed the plastic bag of goodies from the passenger seat, shoving his coat into it and swinging his work bag over his shoulder.

Pressing the button twice on the key fob, the car automatically locked and alarmed itself with a familiar beep, the indicators giving a visual confirmation, almost a knowing wink.

Gavin walked up the steps to his front door and, after dropping his keys twice, eventually opened the door. He closed it behind him with his foot and made for the kitchen, kicking off his shoes as he wandered down the hall.

As he entered the kitchen, he froze. There in the dark, a pair of green eyes glared accusingly at him.

“Sorry buddy.” He said, moving forward once more and placing the bags on the sideboard. “I’ll get your dinner for you now.”

He switched the light on and the room was flooded with a warm glow. The black cat that had sat near the sink jumped down to the floor and proceeded to criss-cross in between Gavin’s legs, purring and meowing.

“You’re gonna trip me up in a minute, Rasta.”

Gavin bent down to pick up the cat’s bowl and ran it under the tap, washing away the dried remains of breakfast. He picked out the first pouch he saw as he opened the pantry cupboard door and scooped the jellied meat into the bowl with a fork, throwing the utensil into the sink when he had finished.

He placed the bowl on the floor and refilled the water bowl with fresh liquid, placing it next to the food. The cat meowed in thanks before tucking into the meal, his tail swishing without purpose.

Gavin rested against the sink and looked at his bag from the store. He picked out one of the magazines and flicked the switch on the kettle. One of his little routines was to always have a strong coffee when he got home, especially if he had any work paperwork to complete. Thumbing through the pages of the movie magazine, he wondered if there was a review for the film he had picked up.

A noise from upstairs startled him, making him drop the magazine to the floor. The cat jumped and ran as the magazine landed not two feet from him.

Gavin looked up, as if trying to see through the floor with x-ray vision.

Another noise. A bang this time. No, a thud.

As if a heavy footstep had been planted on his bedroom floor, one storey above his head.

The house had no alarm system rigged, but that was another reason that he had moved out here. The relative calm and peace. The crime rate was one of the best in the county, almost unheard of.

But now, here he stood, frozen to the spot by a noise from above. Already he’d convinced himself that the noise was a footstep of an intruder. A burglar. Or worse.

“Hello?” He called. Straight away, he cursed himself for doing it.

His voice sounded strained, nervous. Scared.

Whoever was up there now knew he was home, if they hadn’t worked it out already. Now they knew he was afraid. The advantage was all theirs.

Gavin waited, as if expecting some kind of response, but nothing came. Until he heard the floorboards start to creak.

A sure sign that whoever was upstairs was moving.

He hoped that they were trying to make their escape, maybe to jump out of an upstairs window, but deep down he knew that they weren’t.

Moving slowly, he edged across the linoleum floor, careful to make as little noise as possible but keeping his eyes on the kitchen door, which gave him a perfect view of the bottom of the staircase.

He felt his backside touch the kitchen worktop and turned his head, making sure that he opened the right drawer. He pulled open the sliding wooden compartment and grabbed the biggest knife he could see.

His grip on the hilt of the blade increased his personal bravado and he span it in his palm, so that the cutting edge was facing down. He moved forward slowly but purposefully, his gaze back on the stairs.

Feeling flush with courage, he called out again. “I’ve got a knife. Leave now and I won’t hurt you. Hell, I won’t even call the cops.” He was surprised at the gallant tone that he was able to muster considering the situation and wondered what response, if any, he would receive.

The response was immediate, but not what the schoolteacher had hoped for.

The loud thud of a boot on the bare top step. A sound so laced with dread and evil intent. If the intruder was fearful for their own life surely they would have said something, called out their plan to leave. Instead, a single thunderous footfall on the top stair belied their actual strategy. Gavin knew that it wasn’t to leave quietly, if leave at all.

The pluck that had filled his body and mind only moments before when he had picked up his weapon now drained from his feet as if a million little holes had been drilled into them, the bravado pooling on the floor around him. The strength in his convictions quickly turned to an icy realisation that he was not in any kind of control of this scene. Fear now overtook him.

Thud.

Another step down was navigated.

Thud.

It was as if each stair that was traversed was the sound of a timer ticking down. Each moment a countdown to Gavin’s doom.

Thud.

The sound was almost maddening. The sound was loud and bassy. The steps were bare wood, Gavin having ripped the worn carpet from them the previous summer, but surely they shouldn’t be creating this kind of volume.

Thud.

Thud.

Two steps taken quickly this time. Whoever the intruder was, they would be nearly halfway down now. Their descent as near completion as it was near commencement.

Gavin edged forward, both afraid of what he might see, but transfixed and eager to know who it was.

Thud.

Gavin reached the kitchen doorway, the steps now making him jump. But he knew he would now be able to see the legs of the stranger in his midst.

Thud.

Knife still in hand, he stopped and looked between the slats that held the banister up and saw a pair of black boots. Despite the dark shade, Gavin could see that they were old and covered in a multitude of colours. Stains and marks that made Gavin feel sick. Then the stench reached his nostrils and he threw up.

The smell was unbearable, like a hobo that had soiled himself.

Thud.

The legs moved down even further, providing Gavin with a view of the person’s legs.

It looked like the boots had a fur lining, but it had grown grimy and was in tatters as it spilled out over the beading. The legs themselves were covered by an off colour brown pair of trousers.

No, they were red. Barely.

Thud.

Gavin realised that he was caught like a deer in the headlights of a car and snapped himself out of the trance. The midriff was now in view, a belt made up out of a thick rope wrapped twice around a spindly waist and tied off in the front.

He cleared his throat and spoke again, although the voice was unrecognisable from that of a few moments before. “Who… Who are you? What do you want?”

The stranger stopped. Then they turned slightly towards Gavin, as if they could see him through the ceiling that broke their eyeline.

Then, they turned forward again and completed their path to the bottom of the stairs, moving quickly.

Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.

The figure in front of Gavin left him dumbstruck.

It was a hobo.

In a very bad Santa costume.

The red coat was as marked and stained as the trousers. The left arm was hanging on at the shoulder by maybe two or three stitches. The white fur that ran up the front was matted and covered in muck, as if an albino cat had taken a mud bath. At least Gavin hoped it was mud, but that stench told him otherwise.

The beard was real, but it wasn’t fluffy and fully of volume. Instead, it hung limply from the man’s chin, wiry and coarse. As he looked at the man’s face, Gavin felt his breath catch in his throat, as if it had been choked there.

Hobo Santa’s skin was pale and dry, almost rotting. His eyes were sunken and raw, cushioned by layers of bags under them. There was no white in there at all, the sclera as dark as the rest of the iris and pupil. The colour was more of a dark orange that almost glowed.

As Hobo Santa noticed the look on Gavin’s face, he grinned.

A smile that presented a row of blackened and broken teeth, indented with occasional gaps, through which Gavin could see his tongue lolling around. The muscle was dancing, twisting around itself as if it were independent from the mouth itself. Unattached somehow.

There was no hat. Just a balding dome where the remaining hairs hung disparately, hanging on as pathetically as their brethren hanging from his jaw.

His mouth dry, Gavin licked his lips and tried to speak, but found only a slight whimper escape. In response, Hobo Santa cackled darkly and began to advance.

Gavin felt the knife drop from his hands, a combination of the smell approaching him and the fist connecting with his cheek knocking him out cold.

The fire leaped, dancing in the grate as Hobo Santa stoked it with the metal poker.

The sight was strange, almost blurred and fantastical to Gavin as he opened his eyes.

He tried to lift his hand to rub his jaw, but found his arm unresponsive. Looking down, he saw that his limbs were tightly bound to one of the kitchen chairs.

Trying to speak, he heard a mumbled mishmash of words and saw Hobo Santa turn and break into that same salacious grin as he stood, leaving the poker in the fire.

Within no time, he was at Gavin’s side and grabbed his hair, pulling his head back quickly and painfully.

He leant into the schoolteacher’s face, his own mouth centimetres away. The foul stench that escaped from his maw attacked Gavin’s senses and he heaved again, the vomit running down his chin and pooling in his shirt pocket and between his legs on the chair.

Spitting out any remaining residue, Gavin found his voice again. “What do you want? Take anything you want. Just leave me alone and get out.”

Hobo Santa tipped his head to one side and shook his head, his smile now gone, replaced by a saddened frown. He straightened up and backed away, stopping by the fireplace once more. He bent down and pulled the poker from the flames.

Gavin knew that the metal spear had to be hot, the iron pole a perfect conductor for heat, but Hobo Santa just grabbed it with his gloveless hand and held it up, pointing it at Gavin.

The fear of being branded by the poker was offset by the fact that Gavin knew that no human could hold that object without suffering serious burns. He wondered if the man in front of him was on PCP, having heard on countless cop shows that the substance helped the user to be oblivious to pain. So many questions ran through his mind, tied to his own chair, in his own house. But all he could muster was one single word. “Why?”

Hobo Santa’s eyebrows raised, as if he was in genuine shock, Gavin’s question surprising him.

Carefully, he put the poker back into the fire and advanced towards Gavin, fishing in his pocket. He bought out a faded piece of paper and unfolded it. Running his finger down the page he stopped about three quarters from the top and turned the page towards Gavin.

There was a long list of names, some of which Gavin recognised. Most, he did not.

Some had been crossed through, like a shopping list. Where Hobo Santa pointed was Gavin’s name, clear as day. The top of the page had a single underlined word in bold, capital letters.

BAD

Gavin stared at the word in a confused state. He wondered what it meant if the name had already been crossed through. He wondered who this man standing in front of him, a grubby list in his hands, was. Mostly, he wondered what was going to happen next.

Carefully, Hobo Santa folded the paper again and slipped it back into his pocket.

Then he shrugged and grabbed the poker back out of the fireplace, the tip now glowing orange.

Gavin began to cry, his shoulders dancing uncontrollably. He knew deep inside the answer to his third question. Probably the first too.

Between sobs, a spit bubble growing on his lips, drool following the path set by the vomit, Gavin asked again. “Why?”

Once more, Hobo Santa looked surprised at the question, almost dumbfounded.

Without putting the poker down again, he juggled it into his other hand and delved into his other pocket, pulling out a small set of what seemed like card shaped pieces of paper.

One by one, he threw them like Frisbees at Gavin’s head. They hit him hard, the corners sharp and pointy. One struck him in the eye, the edge slicing the eyeball itself. Gavin realised that these were not normal pieces of paper. These were photographs.

The pictures continued to rain into his face, a steady barrage of cuts and slices before they fell to the floor out of sight.

Finally, one photo landed directly in his lap, sticking to the small patch of sick.

With his one good eye, Gavin looked down and saw the picture and recognised it straight away. Part of his personal collection that he had printed off of the internet, the picture displayed a scene of a small child, naked and committing a sexual act on an adult.

Gavin gagged and emptied his stomach again.

Looking up at Hobo Santa once he had finished, he saw his name being crossed off of the list.

The intruder tucked the page away in his pocket again and strengthened his grip on the poker, the tip still glowing.

He advanced on Gavin as he muttered his final recognisable word.

“Sorry.”

 

We found Denise three days later. She was cold, wet, tired, hungry and above all very frightened and we – well, more accurately I – found her cowering behind the freezers in a damp out-of-town supermarket.

Three days later? Well, if you really want me to I can give you a step-by-step, blow-by-blow account of what happened when we ventured away from the garage but, in all honesty, you might find it a bit dull. It was fairly uneventful – a bit of a relief after all the B-movie antics of the day before. So, long story short – because it wasn’t all about guns and running and explosions.

After a fitful hour’s sleep in the cab of Blake’s jeep we stumbled out into a cold, dewy morning. We found the showroom’s service station, which we hadn’t noticed when we’d driven in earlier in the gloom. Blake crowbarred the door and I busied myself gathering up sandwiches and drinks from the not-very-chilly chiller cabinet (plus a few bars of chocolate to satisfy my sugar craving) as he managed to get the petrol pumps working. He filled up the jeep’s tank and as many canisters and containers as he could find and loaded them into the jeep with all sorts of other assorted bits and pieces – candles, torches, batteries; anything which might be of practical use somewhere down the line.

Back in the cab we feasted in silence, munching on sandwiches, pies, crisps and chocolate, all of which we washed down with fizzy Diet Coke. It was the finest meal I’ve ever had.

We buckled up and prepared to leave the garage shortly after 9 a.m. Just before Blake started up the engine we heard a distant sound  – a dull ’whoomph’ –  which was unmistakably an explosion. I gazed down into the city, and I was shocked to see a raging fire somewhere in the vicinity of the civic centre, plumes of greasy smoke rising up into the morning sky. There were a few more fires too, dotted here and there. I turned to Blake, puzzled.

‘What’s going on’ I said.

Blake turned the ignition key and the jeep’s engine roared into throaty life. ‘Don’t get excited. There’s probably no-one down there. It’s just another reason to get away from built-up areas. Gas leaks, faulty electrical wiring…when whatever happened happened the other night it probably didn’t shut down all the power stations. Places are just going to go up. Cities will burn. D’you want to ring 999 just in case?’

I ignored the comment and looked away from the window. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said as frostily as I could manage.

We trundled out of the garage. I was quietly contemplating what I’d just seen – the city starting to disintegrate – and realising just how distanced I’d already become from what I would come to regard as ‘my old life’.  Now and again I’d glance across at Blake; he wasn’t the small-talk type – besides which he was lost in concentration as we drove through a suburban wilderness, a part of the outskirts of the city I’d never had much cause to visit. The tree-lined streets and avenues looked frighteningly similar to the part of the city I’d called home and I began to realise just how homogenised and insular my life had been just a few hours before. I’m ashamed to say I felt a thrill of excitement, a sense of liberation as I realised there could be no going back. Things weren’t going to return to normal. There was no cavalry ready to stampede over the horizon to put it all right again. I wasn’t ready to accept that I might never see Lis again yet but I was starting to accept that this was my life from now on. Life in a world as alien to me as if I’d fetched up on Pluto.

Blake pulled over to the side of the road. We were in ‘identikit street’, a road designed and built by council planners with no sense of imagination or originality. ‘I have no fucking idea where we are,’ said Blake, his hands tightly gripping the steering wheel as if he was battling to control his impotent rage. ‘This place is like a bloody maze. How could you live like this?’

‘It might help if we had some idea where we were going,’ I said boldly. Blake said nothing but I could see he was quietly simmering. Then he seemed to relax – he almost smiled, for God’s sake. He reached behind him and burrowed about amongst all our booty. He found what he was looking for and casually tossed a small A-Z folded street map into my lap.

‘Look for Covington Road,’ he said as I started to unfold the little booklet. ‘That’s where we are now. We just need to get away from all these bloody streets and…shit, shit, shit!’ Blake slammed the jeep into reverse and I looked up to see the cause of his outburst. Three wraiths were out there, just a few feet away from the jeep, bearing down on us with that disturbing motionless gait. ‘Hang on!’

I hung on to my seatbelt as, with a familiar squeal of tyres, Blake spun the jeep round and ran through the gears as the jeep roared off back in the direction we’d just come from.

Hang on, I did say ‘long story short’ back there, didn’t I? I’d forgotten about that little close encounter and thought it was worth mentioning because, at this stage, the wraiths were still very much an unknown quantity and we not only had no idea what they were and where they came from, we equally didn’t have a clue where they’d pop up next. Nothing much has changed in that respect.

Anyway, courtesy of my hitherto-unsuspected map-reading skills, we managed to shake off suburbia and we headed for the hills – literally. The city was nestled in a low valley and we managed to find our way to a road which led in two directions – out onto the motorway or up over the hill towards the next valley which wasn’t quite so densely-populated. The road rose steadily; to the right it looked down over an industrial estate – one or two fires were burning vigorously and looked set to spread right across the estate and God knew where else beyond – and off to the left was a heavily-overgrown area called Leckington Forest. I was familiar with Leckington as it had been fundamental to some of my more vivid childhood nightmares. Before the city grew into a modern monstrosity in the mid-to-late 1990s, the forest overlooked the city like a dark green frown. There’d been rumours that the forest had a bit of a history – witchcraft rituals and so on – back in the 17th century and there was something about the place which seemed to resonate with the past even though the hill road which bordered it and the buildings which had sprung up alongside it had robbed it of much of its mystique. But even as an adult I still found it eerie and forbidding; this dense cluster of tall, tightly-packed trees, their green canopies hiding multitudes of unspoken and unspeakable sins. It was the sort of place I could imagine coming alive at Halloween – naked chicken sacrifices, virgin deflowerings, men in robes bearing bloody daggers. Hammer horror stuff really but Leckington Forest made me think that way.

As Blake changed gears to navigate his way up the winding hill road, I tried to look straight ahead because I didn’t want to look at the burning industrial estate and I didn’t want to look at the forest, even though it was the middle of the day and reasonably bright. Bugger me if I didn’t inadvertently glance off to the left at one point and I swear to you I could see something weaving in between the trees – little pillars of shivering white which could have been ghosts but in all probability were wraiths – if they weren’t the same thing. I looked away pretty sharpish, as you can imagine.

We came upon the cottage a few minutes later. Well, Blake came upon it really. We were some distance up the hill and fortunately thick vegetation off to the right obscured any view down over the industrial estate and the city itself which would have been in plain sight by now. Blake suddenly slammed on the brakes and if I hadn’t been wearing my seat belt I’d probably have sailed right through the windscreen. Cheers, Blake.

Fearing more wraiths I gripped the dashboard and scanned the road ahead. But Blake wasn’t looking in that direction. He was looking at a gate and a gravel drive beyond it just off to the right. ‘What is it?’ I said.

‘Not sure,’ said Blake quietly. ‘Maybe somewhere we can bivouac for a day or two.’ To my alarm Blake undid his seat belt, grabbed a rifle and opened the door.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to bivouac just yet – even if I knew exactly what bivouac meant. Surely we were still too close to the city? After all, we’d only been on the road for a couple of hours, and at least half of that time was spent driving round and round in circles.

I didn’t fancy getting out of the cab – it felt warm and safe – but then I didn’t much fancy staying there on my own either. Blake was wasting no time. He was rattling the locked gate.  He jumped over it and disappeared from view as he strode up the drive, gravel scrunching underfoot. Cursing and swearing, I unclipped my seat belt, quietly opened the door in case the sound attracted unwelcome attention, and hurried after him.

By the time I caught up with Blake he was at the door of a small, rather quaint cottage at the end of the drive, maybe fifty feet from the main road. It was picture postcard stuff; a two-storey whitewashed cottage, ivy around the door and crawling up the walls, a well-kept front garden, a small ornamental well in one corner, a red mini parked at an angle outside the adjoining garage. Blake moved cautiously around the building, trying the doors and windows. I hovered by the front door, looking anxiously back down the drive, making sure I could still see the jeep where we’d left it. Blake returned a couple of minutes later. He was smiling.

‘Self-sufficiency types,’ he said. ‘Vegetables, fruit, the lot out back. Potatoes, apples…not a bad haul.’

‘No-one at home?’ I said hopefully.

Blake pulled a face. ‘What do you think?’

‘So what do you want to do?’ I said, a tacit acceptance that, for the moment, Blake was our leader. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for a power struggle; besides which, I still needed Blake far more than he needed me.

Blake grinned, turned round and gave the front door a hefty and unnecessarily noisy kick. It gave a crack and flew open. Blake grinned at me again, raised his rifle, and strode purposefully into the cottage.

Cursing under my breath, I followed him inside.

It was a sad, sad place.

The cottage clearly belonged – had belonged – to an elderly couple. They were everywhere, in the floral, old-fashioned, comfortable furnishings and curtains, the musty books on the shelves – a mixture of military biographies and histories and farmhouse cooking and gaudy Victorian melodramas, the his’n’hers clothes in the wardrobes (lots of tweeds, hiking boots, heavy greatcoats) and the fussy little kitchen dominated by a well-used Aga. I felt desperately unhappy as we investigated the empty, cheery rooms; I felt like an intruder callously invading someone else’s space and time. By the time we’d searched the place from to bottom – and it didn’t take very long – I almost felt as if I knew the people who lived here. He was in his sixties, big, bluff, white handle-bar moustache and loud booming voice. She was mousy and long-suffering, her white hair tied back in a bun, spending her time in the kitchen baking bread and watching her husband pottering happily in the garden. Where are they now? I wondered as I stood in the kitchen and looked out at the square garden with its rows of cabbage patches, the apple trees, the greenhouse full of tomatoes and strawberries. What had become of them?

‘This’ll do.’ It was Blake, in the doorway behind me.

‘Do for what?’

‘For now,’ he said. ‘It’s quiet, it’s off the beaten track, it’s easily defensible. Well-placed too.’

‘You want to live here?’ I said wearily.

Blake grimaced. ‘I don’t want to live anywhere. But we need to rest up, take stock, make plans. This is as good a place as any.’ He turned and disappeared into the adjoining living room.

I couldn’t be bothered to argue. There was no point. Besides, what was there to argue about? Blake was probably right. If it wasn’t here it would be somewhere else. I didn’t much fancy another night in the jeep but then I didn’t really fancy violating someone else’s home either – even if those people had disappeared forever to God knew where. I looked around the kitchen, the tiled walls, the spice rack, the utensils hung on nails, the cupboards, the racks of plates…

There was a sign on the wall just alongside the kitchen doorway. Flowers curled around comfortable, ornate lettering: ‘NO PLACE LIKE HOME’.

I suddenly felt more miserable and desolate than ever before. My earlier elation at my newfound freedom had deserted me. I felt dead inside.

So it was that we moved into ‘Ivy Cottage’ (no, really…well, it could have been worse, ‘Dunroamin’ or something).  It wasn’t a very taxing move; we didn’t have van loads of furniture and treasured tat in packing crates to find a new home for. Blake shot off the rusty lock on the gate and reversed the jeep up the drive. Incredibly, he’d half-inched a couple of chunky padlocks from the filling station so he re-secured the gate before unloading all our ill-gotten gains on the sitting room floor.

By nightfall we were in. Blake considered shoring up the front door with planks of wood but decided against it in case we needed to make a quick escape. He propped a couple of chairs against the door and stood back to survey his handiwork with amused satisfaction.

I had no idea how to fire up an Aga or what you did with one when you did. Blake was willing to have a go but I didn’t much fancy burning the cottage down in our first night in situ. Luckily the old couple’s self-sufficiency hadn’t prevented them from filling the garage with gas canisters and Primus stoves and I found some still-fresh bread and thawing frozen food in the freezer. I grabbed what looked salvageable and manage to rustle up a bizarre meal of bread, pizza and fish fingers.

So Blake and I led a quiet, rustic existence in the cottage for a couple of days. Blake spent his time studying maps and sharpening knives and stripping down rifles. Nice work if you can get it. I wandered around the garden and dug up any useful crops – what was the sense in leaving them to wither and die? Neither of us ventured from the cottage and luckily it seemed that we were out of sight enough not to attract the attention of any passing wraiths. My secret fear was that the wraiths could and would just materialise from nowhere – we’d seen them do it already. So even though I was unutterably exhausted I found it difficult to sleep (there were two bedrooms and Blake and I had one each, in case you were wondering) because I kept imagining closing my eyes and opening them to find something white and shiny and very horrible looming over me. So I’d doze for a bit and wakeup with a start when the house creaked or the wind rattled at the windows.

I tried not to think long-term. Short-term was bad enough. Obviously we couldn’t spend the rest of our lives holed up in Ivy Cottage but it offered a respite of sorts, a chance to recharge our batteries, gather up our energy before thinking about what to do next. It was on the third day that Blake announced it was time to go shopping.

‘It’s time to go shopping,’ he announced as he bit into a slice of slightly-stale toast. I’d scraped most of the mould off and hoped he wouldn’t notice. I daresay he’d eaten worse. I was tucking into corn flakes doused in bottled water. Not as bad as you might think.

‘Shopping? Shopping for what?’ I said between mouthfuls. Blake shrugged.

‘Anything we can find. We’ve got to start hoarding. Any non-perishable foods, tools, weapons…the stuff out there won’t last forever.’

‘So you think there are other people?’ I said. In our time in the cottage we’d kept ourselves to ourselves; any conversation had been peremptory and superficial. I don’t think either of us was ready to look at the bigger picture in any real detail yet. I was glad of the chance to talk about something other than what to eat next.

‘I suppose there must be,’ he said grudgingly. ‘And wherever they are they’re going to be stocking up too. We don’t want to be left with nothing.’

‘So what are you suggesting?’ I said.

‘There’s that retail park, you know it? McCardle Valley?’  I knew it. It was a curious thing. By the end most people didn’t bother much with town centres for their shopping needs. The malls had arrived. Great big sprawling developments, out-of-town, blocks of shops offering huge bargains on warehouse goods, everything from clothes to jewellery and food and all points in between. The great unwashed would descend on these places (mainly at the weekends, turning them into my dictionary definition of Hell on Earth) in their vans, their family saloons, their trucks, and spend hundreds upon hundreds of pounds on things they really didn’t need but just couldn’t resist because it was all so damn cheap.

McCardle Valley was one such place. Discount stores and garden centres on one side, huge supermarkets – three of the buggers, all competing feverishly against one another – on the other. It had been open for about two years and it was practically a magnet for anyone in a twenty-mile radius with a credit card.

‘I just think we ought to get there before someone else strips the place – if they haven’t already,’ said Blake.

Personally I wasn’t convinced that anyone else – still assuming there actually was anyone else – would be organised enough yet to even begin thinking about looting (for that’s what we were talking about) but he certainly had a point. Our supplies were becoming depleted and even if we weren’t planning to live out our lives in happy retirement at Ivy Cottage we’d need to restock at some point just to get us through the next few days.

So I didn’t argue with him. God knows I didn’t want to go out there again – out on the streets, out in the open – but we couldn’t just sit in the cottage and wait for life to pass us by.

After three days in Ivy Cottage we set off together in the jeep and headed for McCardle Valley, about six miles away out in the countryside.

That’s where we met Denise. Did I mention Denise?

THE SHUDDER continues in the next issue of Starburst Magazine.

Decisions, decisions. Snap decisions. Live or die. For terrible, endless moments we both stood there, rooted to the spot by the dreadful sight of these things, these wraiths flooding like steam through the walls of the pub. We probably had seconds to make up our minds… Live or die? 

‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Blake, gathering up his rucksack together with his wits and backing away from the advancing wraiths. He rushed behind the bar and began wrenching open the locked door behind it. I was still standing there when the door flew open and he disappeared through it without even a backward glance in my direction.  I gave a little yelp and ran after him, slamming the door behind me, pressing my back against it and gasping for breath. So the wraiths were quite capable of passing through solid objects and I was no safer on this side of the door than I would have been on the other but I just needed to get my bearings for a second. Blake was in front of me, his flashlight beam dancing around the dark narrow passageway. A telephone stood on a small table near the door, a hat stand loomed out of the gloom. A flight of stairs led up to the first floor and there were three other doors, one leading to the kitchen and one down to the cellar. The third door was pretty much just a sheet of frosted glass in a sturdy frame and it clearly led out into the yard at the rear of the building.

‘Where’s the jeep?’ I said, moving away from the door to the bar.

‘Parked in the access lane behind the pub,’ said Blake, striding towards the rear door. He grabbed the handle and cursed when he discovered the door was locked. ‘Stand back, I’m going through,’ he said.

I grabbed his arm. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Those things may be out the back too.’

‘What do you suggest?’ he snapped. ‘Stay here and invite them for a lock-in? Shut up and let me get us out of here. Now get back.’

Before I could protest further – which I don’t think I was inclined to do anyway – Blake pushed me out of the way, took a few steps back and, his arms crossed protectively over his face, ran straight at the glass door. I closed my eyes because I couldn’t bear to look but I heard the crash of the glass as he ploughed through it. A second or two later I looked up and saw that the glass was gone and that Blake was on his knees amidst the debris in a square cobbled yard outside. I looked back nervously, saw to my horror that something white and wispy was starting to drift through the door from the bar, and I stepped as gingerly as the situation would allow through the shattered doorway into the yard.

Blake was picking himself up, brushing bits of glass off his clothes and skin. I could see that his hands were bleeding and he’d cut his forehead. ‘Are you all right?’ I said.

‘Always looks easier in the films,’ he said, clearly a bit winded. He swung up his torch and in a second we could see that the yard was a small enclosure with a wooden gate at one end and barrels and crates piled up every which way. ‘I remember that gate,’ said Blake. ‘The jeep’s in the lane on the other side.’

‘But we’re locked in, surely?’ I said. Blake was already at the gate. A big padlock was swinging from the handle. He drew a small hand pistol from his belt, took aim, fired once and shot the padlock off. It clattered to the cobbles. He tore open the gate and disappeared into the darkness beyond. My ears ringing from the gunshot, I ran after him.

My relief was almost a physical thing as I stumbled out into the damp, dingy little lane and saw the jeep parked a few yards away. Blake was swinging himself into the driver’s seat and the machine quickly sprang to life, its headlamps cutting through the darkness of the lane like searchlights. The jeep was moving – rolling slightly  – as I sprang into the passenger seat. Blake kicked the jeep into gear and the vehicle sprang forward, hurtling down the lane and out on the main street. We veered wildly across the road, crossing the carriageway in a manner which would have, in the normal scheme of things, guaranteed Blake a fistful of penalty points on his driving licence (sorry, that’s the lawyer in me coming out). The wide headlights picked out the dark shadows of buildings, traffic islands, bus stops. It also picked out a number of wraiths, idling in the road or on the pavements. ‘The Half Moon’ swam into view and I could see what looked like dozens of white shapes, clustered so close together they were practically one glowing mass. They were besieging the place, disappearing into it either through the door or through the walls or through the windows. They became even more formless when they moved through solid objects but I remembered with a shiver the way they seemed to resolve themselves back into their human parody shape when they came out the other side. What the bloody Hell are these things? I asked myself as Blake turned the jeep in a tyre-screeching U-turn and raced off in the opposite direction.

The subsequent journey out of the city was a bit of a blur, to be honest.  Blake was driving like a bloody lunatic, mounting kerbs and grass verges and turning even the sharpest of corners at suicidal speeds. There was a look of grim determination on his face and his hands were gripping the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles were white. As we rattled through the streets I could see vague white shapes here and there, sometimes just feet away from us. Blake dodged them expertly, screeching along narrow roads and maneuvering into tight passageways I never knew existed and crashing through debris left in the streets by the civilisation which had passed away the night before.

After a few minutes which felt like an hour or more we were on the outskirts of the city, moving back into suburbia. Tree-lined streets, dark, sullen houses, only the odd white shape, lost and forlorn, drifting spectrally through the darkness. We stayed silent during the journey, lost in our own private thoughts.

Predictably, despite the terrible reality of what was happening all around me, I was still trying to deny it all, something in the back of my addled mind desperate to convince me that this was all a particularly-vivid dream and I’d be coming out of it any minute now. Rambo/Blake? God knows what was cantering through his mind; guns, death, bombs and naked girls, probably.  Much as I needed human company and much as I was brutally aware that he’d now saved my life twice I wasn’t sure how much more of Blake’s Hollywood-fuelled testosterone I could take…

I was still knee-deep in my own thoughts when I noticed that the jeep was starting to slow down. I looked across at Blake and saw him craning forward, studying the road ahead. It was starting to rain, a miserable drizzle smearing the windscreen. ‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

‘We need to park up,’ he said. ‘I think the engine may be attracting too much attention. I’m trying to find some cover for the night…what’s left of it.’

I realised I had no idea what time it was or how long I’d been asleep back in the pub. I glanced down at my watch. I could just make out that it was a little after 5.15 a.m. As I looked up I saw that Blake was pulling off the road and through the open gates of a car showroom. A big glass-windowed warehouse building was displaying gleaming brand new cars and the courtyard area was clustered with other vehicles. Blake slipped into first gear and made his way through the forest of cars, found a quiet spot somewhere at the back of the yard and killed the engine. He released the steering wheel, sat back in his seat and let out a long, low gasp. ‘Jesus,’ he said.

‘You okay?’ I said.

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Just need to rest up for a bit, an hour or so.’

‘Then what?’ I said. ‘We start looking for other people?’ Blake looked at me as if he thought I was a complete idiot.

‘Other people? What makes you think there are other people?’

‘Well there must be. There’s got to be. There’s you, there’s me…Dave the guy on the motorcycle. We can’t be the only ones. You’re not going to tell me you think we’re the only survivors in the whole world?’ I said.

He didn’t really seem to care. ‘I really haven’t thought about it much,’ he said.

‘It’s this shudder you told me about – that’s the key to it, that’s what’s caused all this. Something happened and somehow we came through it. But it can’t only be us, can it? Not if this is happening…all over.’

‘We’ll probably never know,’ said Blake. ‘All we need to know from now on that the world’s changed and we’ve come through it. Survival of the fittest?’ He gave me a rather contemptuous look which I found offensive but decided to let go.

‘So there’ll be other people then. There’s got to be,’ I said.

‘If those spooks haven’t picked ‘em off,’ said Blake. ‘If anyone else came through they may not have had their wits about them. I wouldn’t hold out much hope, mate.’

‘I can’t believe we’re the only ones. I won’t believe it,’ I said, becoming more animated. ‘We need to get out there and start looking for people.’ 

Blake regarded me with one lazy eye. The other was closed; he was cat-napping, his arms folded across his broad chest. ‘We?’

I was taken aback. It hadn’t occurred to me that we wouldn’t stay together now we’d got this far. OK, maybe he wasn’t exactly the person I might have chosen to survive a world-wide cataclysm with and I had my doubts about him in the long-term but at least he was human. My experiences early the day before had brought home to me quite clearly how incapable I was of functioning adequately as a single, isolated unit. I knew Rambo/Blake would need to be treated with kid gloves and that I was going to need all the patience and diplomacy I could muster but Hell, he was better than no-one…

‘Just help me to find some others,’ I said. ‘I don’t expect you to tag along with me for keeps. I can see that’s not your style. It’s your life at the end of the day and you can do what you want with it.’

Blake grunted approvingly. ‘You said it, friend. It’s my life and I’ll play it my way from now on.’ He paused for a moment, as if amused by some private joke. Perhaps he’d just realised that he was free, maybe freer than anyone had ever been before. So was I, of course – but the difference was I didn’t want to be. ‘Maybe I’ll stick around for a few days. I doubt you’d make it to breakfast without me behind you.’ 

‘Breakfast?’ My stomach rumbled as soon as I said the word. Our snacks in the pub seemed like a long time ago. Blake pointed out through the window. The garage we’d holed up in was just outside the city, and from where we were we had a pretty spectacular view down over the city itself. I used my sleeve to rub away the condensation and felt a cold clamminess in my heart as I saw the grey towers of the city, dark and lifeless, its once-beating heart suddenly silenced. Just over the horizon the sun was starting to rise, the first orange fingers of a new day spreading out across the black night. There was a mist-haze in the air.

‘Looks like it’s going to be a nice day,’ I found myself saying.

THE SHUDDER continues in the next issue of Starburst Magazine.

Bright sunlight. Cheery/cheesy birdsong (delete as applicable). The unmistakable aromas of freshly-brewed coffee and lightly-toasted bread; maybe even a bagel or two.  Hmmm – this is Heaven. Who could ask for anything more?

I opened my eyes slowly, reluctantly. Daylight was streaming in through the window as Lis, facing away from me, pulled open the floral curtains, whistling so tunelessly that it was hard to tell if she was making it up as she went along or if there was a real song in there somewhere. Perched on the edge of the bed was the breakfast tray; a bowl of my favourite snapping and crackling breakfast cereal, a rack of hot brown toast, a plate of scrambled eggs, a mug of steaming coffee.

I heaved myself into a sitting position, yawned and stretched and scratched my belly. I squinted at Lis, fussing at the curtains. ‘What’s the occasion?’ I said woozily.

Lis just shrugged. ‘Saturday morning,’ she said without turning to face me. ‘I thought you deserved a treat.’

‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining,’ I said, reaching carefully for the precariously-balanced breakfast tray, conscious that I was starting to salivate. ‘It’s just that a man could get used to being treated like a king.’

‘Make the most of it,’ said Lis. ‘It’s back to serfdom for you when you’re done.’

I grinned and was about to tuck into the scrambled eggs when there was a knock at the bedroom door. I heard the sound but it didn’t really register. A knock at the bedroom door?

‘Oh yes,’ said Lis brightly. She was still busy at the window, still turned away from me. ‘You’ve got a visitor.’

‘A visitor?’ I protested, struggling to put the tray onto the bedside table with one hand while pulling the bedcovers protectively up over my chest with the other. ‘I’m naked here! What are you doing, Lis, we don’t have visitors in the bedroom? No-one has visitors in their bedroom!’

The bedroom door swung open. Oh God. Oh dear God…

It was Dave. Dave Dutton was standing in the doorway – and he was bleeding. He was bleeding from his mouth and he was bleeding from his nose. He was limping as he shuffled across the threshold and he held his lacerated arms out imploringly towards me. ‘You left me,’ he groaned. ‘Why’d you leave me? I never had a chance…’

Puzzled, frightened, I looked across towards Lis. She turned slowly towards me but, in turning, she seemed to fade away before I could even make out her features…and in her place stood a tall, vaguely-defined figure in white, a shimmering hazy translucent shape of fog and mist. It was a wraith and somewhere in its faceless face I could see cold, scared eyes staring unblinkingly out at me…Lis’s eyes…

‘Lis!’ I cried out. ‘Lis, I don’t understand! What’s happening?’ The creature – the wraith – drifted towards me, moving across the room like a cloud. Dave was coming closer too, dripping fresh blood onto the carpet.

‘You shouldn’t have done it, darling.’ It was Lis’s voice but it was coming from nowhere and yet it was everywhere in the room. ‘You shouldn’t have left him. You shouldn’t have left me. I was so frightened, darling, really I was. And you weren’t there. I thought you were going to protect me? I thought you said you’d never leave me? But you left me, Paul, you left me all alone. I knew you would in the end. I knew you’d just think about yourself. I never really mattered to you, did I? Not really. If I mattered to you, you wouldn’t have left me, all alone in the dark and so scared…’

I was cowering in bed now, the sheets pulled right up around my throat. I was staring at the wraith and then back across to Dave, reaching out pitifully towards me. ‘But Dave’s here, too,’ the everywhere-voice of Lis went on. ‘So it wasn’t just me you let down. You let everyone down, don’t you, darling? Even the people you say you care about get left behind. Even the people you love…’

The wraith was suddenly right at my bedside. I stared aghast at it and watched appalled as the featureless face seemed to resolve itself out of the mist…and became the face of my wife, the face of Lis. She looked down at me and the look of contempt was enough to turn my blood to ice. Then her face became a grimace of agony and then her mouth fell open. Blood started to flow from her mouth as she started to scream…

‘Lis! Lis, no….No!!!’

I sat bolt upright. It was dark and I was cold. My scream had disappeared but the dream was still there. For one awful moment my mind was a clean slate; I had no idea who I was or where I was and then it came back in a giddy rush. All of it. Lis, home, the day before, the wraiths, poor Dave and his bike, crazy Rambo… I felt physically sick.

It was some time well after dark. I’d fallen asleep at the table in the pub and, in the gloom, I could see that the seat across the table from me – where I’d seen Blake drift into a fitful sleep before dozing off myself – was empty. Beer bottles lay all over the table and the floor and the remains of our impromptu savoury picnic were on the table as well as still on my tongue. Seeing that Blake was gone threw me into a flat panic. I sprang to my feet, felt a bit woozy, made my way unsteadily around the table to the bar. My eyes were slowly adjusting to the dark – and boy, was it dark.

‘Blake?’ I hissed. ‘Blake, where are you, you bastard?’

The only reply was the gentle sigh of a breeze outside on the street. I could just about see that the door to the pub was closed.  An awful thought came to me. Blake had woken up, seen me sleeping, decided he wasn’t particularly bothered about me and what might happen to me and, not to put too fine a point on it, buggered off and left me. Jesus…was I alone again?

Before I could even begin to think about what I was going to do next I saw a shadow pass by outside through the opaque glass of the pub’s long window. Then the door handle began to rattle. I had two choices; I could either lose control of my bladder and/or my bowels (and there was a distinct chance that this was an option over which I had no control) or I could take up arms and defend myself. Well, I was no Rambo, bristling with grenades and flares and pistols and rifles and other things which went ‘bang’. I grabbed the nearest empty beer bottle and prepared to brandish it at whoever – or whatever – was about to come crashing through the pub door.

The door flew open and bright torch light swept into the bar. I could see a figure just behind the beam but the unexpected glare dazzled me and I dropped my bottle and heard it smash. ‘Stay back,’ I cried out, moving away. The torch beam danced around the bar before falling right onto me, blinding me so I had to look away. I heard footsteps as someone came towards me. ‘Stay away from me!’ I shouted in what sounded suspiciously like a girl’s voice.

‘What if I don’t?’ growled a voice which seemed familiar. The torch beam moved away and behind it I could see Blake grinning like a halfwit. ‘What’s your plan? Gonna lash out with your handbag or just burst into tears?’

Relief swept over me like a tidal wave, quickly replaced by anger. ‘You stupid bastard,’ I found myself saying. ‘You nearly gave me a bloody heart attack.’

Blake shrugged. ‘One less idiot for me to worry about,’ he said. ‘I thought you needed some beauty sleep. I was planning on coming back in three months.’

‘Funny man,’ I said. ‘Where have you been? How long have you been gone? What have you been doing?’

Blake grimaced. ‘I thought I’d heard the last of all that shit when my girl vanished. I went for my jeep, for your information.’

‘Your jeep? But I thought that was in town…’

Blake was busy at the bar. He’d produced some sort of rucksack and he was busy shovelling bottles into it – beer, lager, spirits. ‘It was,’ he said absently, studying the label on a bottle of malt before leaving it on the bar. ‘But you knew I was planning to go and get it. Thought I’d leave it till dark. I didn’t need you following me like some old woman, slowing me down.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ I snorted, secretly more than a little relieved that he’d gone off on his little adventure on his own. I’d not been looking forward to going outside again. I’d have been quite happy to spend the rest of my life hiding in ‘The Half Moon’ pretending that whatever was happening outside wasn’t actually happening at all. ‘What’s it like out there?’

Blake stopped what he was doing. He’d stood the torch on its end on the bar and an umbrella of light lit up the centre of the room. ‘Weird, man,’ he said. ‘It’s dark…like, really dark. There’s no street lights, no lights in any of the buildings and it’s cloudy so there’s no stars or shit. The only light is…well, from those fucking things. They’re sort of shining like they’ve got those little candles inside them, lighting ‘em up. I only saw a few of ‘em, but they’re still out there, just wandering around glowing…’

His vocabulary may not have been all that impressive but he’d painted an evocative, chilling picture. I didn’t have to open the door to imagine the streets of the once-bustling city dead and dark save these strange, drifting figures, pulsating with their unearthly light…

I tried to blot out the image and thought about something else. ‘So where’s your jeep?’

‘Parked it round the back, tradesmen’s,’ said Blake, zipping up the bulging rucksack. ‘Don’t need to draw attention to ourselves, at least not until we’re established.’

‘Until we’re established?’ I said. I felt relieved; at least he was figuring me in his future plans. ‘So you think we should stick together?’

Blake scooped up the torch and the beam bounced around the room again. ‘Why not? I don’t need people around me to survive but I reckon you do. I wouldn’t honestly give you twenty minutes out there on your own.’

I felt honour-bound to disagree but two things stopped me. Firstly, he was very probably right and secondly…well, I didn’t want to risk him challenging me to get by on my own by abandoning me. Besides, he might not have needed the company but I certainly did. ‘So what do you think we should do?’

Blake looked oddly pensive, as if he’d thought about it but not really made up his mind. ‘Well I reckon we ought to get out of the city for a start.’

‘Fair enough. But where do we go? I mean, what do you think it’s going to be like out there, away from the cities?’

‘No idea. But we’re drawing attention to ourselves staying around here. Whatever those ghost things are they seem to be hanging around the city because that’s where they think people will be. Maybe out in the country it’ll be a bit clearer, we’ll have a chance to think a bit.’

I was impressed by his logical thought processes. But one or two things bothered me. ‘But do you think we ought to go too far? I mean, we don’t know that all this…whatever’s happened…is permanent. Maybe tomorrow things will be different…’

Blake grabbed the rucksack and slung it over his shoulder. He was grinning again and shaking his head sadly. ‘I don’t know what fucking planet you’re on, mate, but it’s next door to cloud cuckoo land. There’s only one way things are gonna be any different tomorrow; they’re gonna be worse. Much worse. Haven’t you got it yet? This is it, the world’s done, knackered. I haven’t got a fucking clue what’s happened; maybe it’s the Arabs and their chemicals, maybe it ain’t. Maybe we’ll never know. But the world ain’t going back the way it was, pal. Not tomorrow, not ever.’

‘You can’t know that for sure,’ I said, but I sounded pitiful and I knew it.

Blake was starting to lose his patience. ‘You wanna hang around here and wait for the buses to start running again, that’s up to you. Me, I’m out of here and I’m not coming back. You’re either with me or you’re not.’

‘I’m with you, you know that, it’s just I’m not sure we should write everything off just yet,’ I protested.

‘All right, maybe the Yanks will come sailing over the horizon tomorrow morning and tell us it’s all been a War Game, a bloody big laugh. That’ll be great and we can all have a beer together. Until then, I think we should fuck off out of the city while we still can.’

‘Yes, but…’  I fell silent. Was it me or was it getting lighter outside? It was still dark and gloomy in the pub, of course but, even with Blake’s torch pointing in the other direction, I couldn’t help noticing that there was some sort of light source outside, clearly visible through the thick grey glass of the pub. Blake had seen it too.  ‘Oh fuck…’ he said in a whisper. ‘Wait here…’  He put down his rucksack and crept towards the half-open door of the pub. I wasn’t inclined to wait anywhere so I followed him. He was at the door, slowly prising it open.  ‘Oh bollocks…’

‘What is it?’ I looked over his shoulder and craned around the door to look out onto the street. I instantly wished I hadn’t.

Yep, you’ve guessed it. Out on the street outside the pub, milling around aimlessly but drifting slowly towards our hidey hole, was a little gang of twenty of more shapeless wraiths, glowing with that eerie iridescence and quite clearly aware of our presence.

‘Shit, shit, shit,’ said Blake slamming and bolting the door. He had a pistol in his hand as he backed away, almost knocking me over. ‘We shouldn’t have hung around so fucking long. That’s thanks to you and your fucking yakking.’

I was going to protest but I knew he was right. If only we’d gotten out of there when he’d come back with the jeep…  ‘What are we going to do?’

‘Jesus H!’  I turned to see what had caused such an extreme reaction from Blake. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Some of the wraiths were coming into the pub – but they were coming right through the walls and the window and the door; they were just melting through it like mist through gossamer, floating towards us, reassuming their shapelessness and with what could charitably be referred to as their arms reaching out mistily towards us…

Thank God we were in a pub. If I’d ever needed a drink I needed one then.

THE SHUDDER continues in the next issue of Starburst Magazine.

The black powder was an annoyance to brush off. He beat at the feathers with a small hair brush and blew through cracked lips to clear the dark stain. As tricky as the camouflage was to remove, it was coming off ten times quicker than the blood.

Saphrael beat his wings violently in an attempt to shake the black powder from the white feathers; the down-draft caused him to rise several feet into the air. Stray papers were blown from his desk. Perhaps he’d left it too late this time; maybe he should have risen a little earlier.

Weak grey light spilled in from the large windows above him. His chamber was cold this morning, he’d forgot to set the heating last night. He regretted that now, standing naked on the stone floor, dripping wet from his shower and with the December chill leaking into the place through the thin stained glass above.

Confident most of the camo-dust was off, he picked up yesterday’s damp towel from the floor and dried himself the best he could. Already the sounds of children’s voices filled the air, floating up from below. Not long left. Finding the iron, he plugged it in and set it on the ironing board as he went in search of his robes.

‘Never hung up’ he mouthed to himself as he searched the chamber for his ceremonial attire.

It had been the same since his school days. All the other Cherens had seemed very able to wash, iron and hang up their robes well before an important ceremony. Saphrael was always left to forage for his like a squirrel trying to find the nuts buried before winter. His unpreparedness had always been of interest to the Head-Fay, who, as Saphrael arrived late and crumpled to ceremonies, would always point it out to the others gathered there and embarrass the young Cheren.

‘What a prick’ he reminisced.

He thought back to the Theocracy lessons that same Head-Fay had taught him and the other Cherens. The sound of his deep voice still seemed to echo around Saphael’s chamber, even now after 15 years.

“…and what, class, is the main difference between a Fay and a human?”

Silence from the younglings. One finally raised a chubby little arm; not Saphrael.

“We don’t have any DNA, Master. The humans do.”

“That’s correct”, said the teacher, “and why don’t we have any DNA? Saphrael?”

The other children turned to look at him: all those boys who were further along with their reading, singing and flying. But he knew the answer, everybody did.

“Because God made us in his own image, whereas the humans were a mistake. They grew like weeds in the garden.”

“That is also correct, well done little one.”

‘Patronising cunt’, thought young Saphrael.

“But we must remember”, continued the adult, “that daisies are weeds, and yet they are quite beautiful. And so it is up to us, up to all of you one day, to protect the daisies from the other weeds, to allow them to grow and to allow God to select the ones he feels have earned passage into heaven”.

He remembered that day, mainly for the fight he got into later with another Cheren who called him scruffy, but also because it was the day he’d decided he didn’t believe what they were taught.

‘Weeds and daisies!’ he laughed then clapped his hands together in celebration as he discovered his robes, hiding below his cot. The left sleeve was stained with chocolate.

‘Fuck’.

*****

‘And then’, said the Archbishop, ‘they were all joined by the Wise men. So do we have any Wise men in the congregation?”

Saphrael watched from the high ledge outside of his chamber as several dozen children, dressed in various kingly styles, moved away from the gathered crowd at the centre of the cathedral and toward the High Altar platform. There, they sat with shepherds, donkeys and assorted little bodies with heads wrapped in dish cloths. At the centre a young girl and boy squabbled over a semi-naked doll. The perfect nativity.

Saphrael smiled as he noticed that the group of slowly gathering children contained many wizards and fairies, goblins and elves. He loved it when mythologies mixed.

Directly below him, some sixty feet to the floor of the cathedral and behind the Christmas Eve congregation, stood a verger. Saphrael forgot the man’s name but remembered watching him one night as he vomited fiercely outside a pub and then following him all the way home. Keeping to the shadows of the rooftops, he witnessed the man barge and shove other revellers that he passed. Another great servant of God, he thought.

The cassock-clad man peered upwards, found Saphrael’s perch and raised a single finger. Saphrael took this signal to mean ‘one minute’ and not ’stick that up your arse’ as others might have. Saphrael gave the man a slow, broad smile, purposely flashing his pointed canines in a passive aggressive manner; always a thrill to watch the humans’ reaction to that. The verger merely looked away, back toward the High Altar.

After adjusting the red sash he had tied around his arm to cover the chocolate stain, Saphrael listened once more to the amplified voice of the Archbishop.

“And then they had some very special visitors; visitors who came from very far away indeed. The Fay. So do we have any Fay here today?”

Whoops and cheers from the children revealed that the majority had come dressed as Fay; little white wings bobbed amongst the crowd as at least 30 or 40 of them appeared on the Altar platform to take their position behind the others; boys and, ridiculously, girls. Saphrael could see that the children ranged in ages from three up to about twelve, and were it not for the visible elastic straps holding the feathers on, they could be mistaken for a host of real Cheren.

‘They do like to pretend to be what they are not’ he thought, as he ran his hand through his hair and ruffled his light-brown curls.

“Is that all the Fay?” continued the Archbishop, his many chins wobbling with false enthusiasm, “I thought we had at least one more…?”

This was his cue. Without bothering to look down at the ‘thumbs-up’ signal from the verger, Saphrael leapt from the ledge, spread his wings and glided down the length of the cathedral’s interior. Below him he heard gasps and cheers from the children, silence from the adults. Once above the Altar platform he flipped forwards in mid-air and landed precariously close to the Archbishop who could not help but flinch. Saphrael knew he would later laugh about that to himself.

He gave the Archbishop the same broad and toothy grin he had given the alcoholic verger, before joining the other ‘Fay’ at the rear of the nativity scene. The children there were enthralled by him and wanted to touch his wings and white robes. Saphrael merely smiled pleasantly and waited for it to be over.

Watching him go, the Archbishop said “Well, here he is; our special guest. And that means our scene is complete. If mums and dads would like now to come forward and take a few phot…”

The horde advanced. Hundreds of flashes snapped before Saphrael’s eyes, dozens of cries of ‘Andrew, this way darling…’, ‘Celia, look at mummy’, ‘Girls, girls, smile for daddy!’ He closed his eyes against the flashes and hoped the Archbishop wouldn’t notice. He then stretched his wings out to their full size; telescopic bones beneath the feathers popped and snapped into position to attain the maximum thirty feet width. He heard the children around him cheer again and the artificial clicks of digital cameras increased. He knew some of the photographers had to be press; he wondered what the Christmas day front page would look like.

“Well thank you all so much,” said the Archbishop, somewhere beyond Saphrael’s eyelids, “both boys and girls, mums and dads. I hope you all have a very merry Christmas. May God bless those that deserve it.”

Saphrael heard the crowd applaud, most probably to the disgust of the Archbishop, and then the incessant questions began from around him.

“How do you fly?” “How old are you?” “What is your name?” “Can you pick me up?” “What do you want for Christmas?” “Where do you live?” “Can I have a feather?” “What’s it like to be a Fay?”

They were the same questions that children always asked, but Saphrael knew he wouldn’t have to answer them; he knew he wouldn’t have the chance.

“Right then children, let’s leave the Fay alone now shall we, he’s a very busy person.” The Archbishop approached and took Saphrael by the hand as if to lead him off. By then the parents of those children closest had already come onto the platform to usher their own little ‘Fay’ home.

As the crowd cleared from the High Altar and the congregation began the traditional procession passed the life-sized model of the manger scene, the Archbishop spoke quietly to Saphrael.

“See,” he said, still all smiles as he too knew that the press were present, “wasn’t too bad was it?”

“I was nearly blinded.” Said Saphrael, not bothering to smile anymore.

“Well it’s done now. Best be off back to the tower, no need to cause a scene anymore.”

The Archbishop flicked his hand up to the ledge from where Saphrael had appeared and then stepped down from the platform to speak with other members of the High Clergy. They shook his hand, patted him on the back and shot the occasional suspicious glance to the Fay.

Saphrael turned from them, toward the departing children and said loudly, no need for amplification: “Merry Christmas kids. I hope Santa brings you everything you wanted!”

The children go crazy at this, and satisfied he has pissed the clergy off sufficiently by mentioning Santa Claus, Saphrael beat his wings and took to the air, swiftly flying back to his chamber in the bell tower; cheers and camera flashes in his wake.

He could feel the eyes of the Archbishop burning into his back as he soared.

*****

He enjoyed night time in the cathedral; no scolding clergy, no gawping tourists and no daylight streaming in through the stained glass windows, illuminating the images of sinners being damned. It was far easier to feel less guilty at night time.

Saphrael sat alone in the middle of the huge church at a grand piano. He would play in short bursts; violent and erratic things, loud and powerful to the point where his fingers ached and the piano moaned. He took in a deep breath, blocked out the sounds of a car passing outside and thundered away at the keys. Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor; fast, emotive and very loud. As he played, a piece he’d known well since a Cheren, he stretched out his great wings and allowed them to flap and fold, quite lost to the music.

As he played his mind wandered. He thought of this place, this cathedral, his new home. Quite why he had been given this particular assignment, at such a high profile church, he couldn’t guess; especially considering his history and tendencies. But the order came through, direct from the Vatican, to take up his new position here as the Cathedral Fay and Heavenly Guardian, only three months prior. The decision had depressed him deeply.

He took his mind from such thoughts and concentrated on the music. At least now he could play as loud as he chose.  When he first arrived here the cathedral was protected at night by a team of security officers, who would patrol the building and watch the many CCTV monitors from the Control room. With the arrival of their very own Fay to guard the place, the Archbishop and High Clergy decided that these men were to be promptly made redundant; who needs mere men when you have God’s own soldier at hand. As regrettable as the men’s dismissal was, it did now leave Saphrael all alone to do as he pleased at night. Playing the piano was just one of the many things he enjoyed doing.

Of course he was paid to be there; even Fay occasionally need money. All food and accommodation were taken care of with Saphrael having his own quarters in one of the bell towers. A monthly salary was paid into the Vatican bank account by the High Clergy, of which a mere fraction found itself to Saphrael. He didn’t mind this, knowing that the money went toward things like the Cheren School and medical care for the Blessed Ones.

He stopped playing; his fingers froze. Always the same when he thought about that.

He remembered the image of his mother, not of her face but rather the memory of a photograph he owned until just a year ago. He never knew her; she died during childbirth; his birth. They all do.

“Blessed?”

Contrary to what children are told, those same children who gathered around him earlier that day, Fay do not fly down from Heaven. They are in fact born like any other human. Saphrael is constantly amused by humanity’s idea of an immaculate conception, but in reality, that is how Fay come into being. Some girls pray all their young lives to become one of the Blessed Ones, devote themselves entirely to God and the teachings of the Omega Book. To some it happens, one day they awake with a low and deep pain in their stomachs; the seed has been planted. Others it happens to quite accidentally; girls without any belief in God or the Book find themselves pregnant, and as soon as the ultra-sound detects tiny forming wings… well, it’s a death sentence.

Everyone dies. Everyone that sires a Fay either dies during the birth or during the final stages of the pregnancy. The human body is incapable of coping with the stresses put upon it by the developing foetus, despite modern medical innovations. Some girls, the ones who do not wish to die for the glory of God and the Fay, attempt to terminate their unwanted babies as soon as they discover they are pregnant. But since this act was deemed heresy almost 900 years ago, and punishable by incapacitation until the baby is born, most just accept their fate, or kill themselves.

Saphrael’s mother was one of these.

She lived in the small town of Longyearbyen on the arctic island of Svalbard, and when she discovered her pregnancy she attempted to commit suicide by taking a drug over-dose. She failed and was imprisoned in her own home by her own father, a devout believer. Saphrael burst from her womb eleven months later. She was 14.

He remembered the photo, lost now by an accident he couldn’t have avoided, of a young girl, a mere child. But it was still his mother.

After his birth he was immediately taken to the Cheren School in Saexland and he had remained in that country ever since. Apart from the brief visit he had paid to his human grandfather three years ago, after learning of his mother’s fate. The smile crept back onto his face as he thought about that.

He stood up from the piano, stretched his arms and his wings and took to the air. He flew the short distance upwards to the entrance to his chamber and went inside.

There was a smell of damp and the occasional dripping sound from the internal drainpipe but over the past few weeks he had grown to quite like his chamber. He had put a sign on the door leading in from a spiral staircase which read: ‘Fay here. Enter and die’. The vergers had joked with him about the sign, but he meant it;

“Invade this space, even by curiosity, and I will kill you”.

The shared jokes with the human staff soon stopped after that exchange.

He looked to the old clock on the wall: 11:56pm. It was time. Stripping himself naked of his ceremonial Christmas robes, he padded across the cold hard floor to a metal locker and retrieved a canister covered with language and symbols he had never understood. Shaking the can, he began to spray its contents over the fine white feathers of his wings, coating them all in a thick black powder.

Saphrael then dressed in a special outfit he had been working on for months now; all black, with interlocking plates of hardened plastic; a light-weight suit of armour.

So clad, he stared at himself in the mirror. It was time to go out now.

He wondered what would happen tonight. It was Christmas Eve; would that have any effect on the humans? No doubt their guard would be lowered more than usual.

He thought again of what the front page of the Newspapers would be tomorrow morning and took flight, his smile now bigger than ever.

The End

Howard has worked as an actor, stand-up comedian, cinema usher and Roman history tour guide. His influences include H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Alan Campbell, the creepy cycle path near his house and the month of October. He writes science fiction, fantasy and slipstream. He lives at www.howardmosleychalk.com and welcomes you to visit. He has a wife and a baby daughter who likes to point at him.