The week running up to Halloween was unseasonably warm and mild. I took advantage of this to get as to get as much work done as possible, whilst the light was so good. Misty took care of the chores around me, and Xanthe occasionally popped in to fill me in on anymore gossip she could glean about PVT (including one snippet that he had a growing reputation for being snide and sarcastic with women, resulting on one occasion to cause one lady to walk out of a Seafood Gourmet Night being held at a local restaurant).
All in all though, in spite of hearing about him, it was a pleasant time. I think we were just so relieved to find out that our night-intruder was only a flesh-and-blood human being. That he was a nasty, furtive neo-Nazi didn’t stop me finding him pathetic, idiotic, delusional, cowardly, and just downright completely laughable.
One morning I remember thinking “this nice time probably won’t last, we’ll have to make the most of it”, and we celebrated by buying an early box of mince pies.
And then we had a phone call from Jason.
He was stopping off in Barrow on his way back down to us. This information was like being doused with a bucket of cold water. I still liked Jason, but in all truthfulness we had enjoyed not having his exhausting presence around. It was as if we were going to be shaken up again, and I didn’t like it. The news wasn’t helped by the announcement that he was going to be bringing a friend with him, and I knew with a dreadful certainty that this “friend” was going to be one of the authors of those juvenile books I had hated.
“I did send you a postcard telling you we were coming”, said Jason “But I expect the postal strike’s held it up”.
To my surprise even Xanthe was downbeat about this news, and I got the impression that whatever brief dalliance she had enjoyed with him was now firmly over in her eyes. She was now too busy playing Shinglesea’s answer to Miss Marple, and finding out all she could about PVT and Andrea. It was a shocking fact that in only the 2 months that he had been gone, we had all moved on considerably. But then, life is like that these days.
I would dearly like to draw a veil over Jason’s return, as I hated every minute of it, but I guess that’s just not possible. I was surprised to find that Keith (one of the authors of the crap books) was quite a bit older than I had expected, by about 30 years!!! I had anticipated a wasted, waif-like student, instead I got a monstrously obese man knocking on 50 years of age, with a beard. I have never been into beards (the sort that gays call “bear-hunters”), and I was hardly likely to start now, if this one was anything to go by.
He was so huge, so mountainous, that Jason’s van rocked precariously from side-to-side every time he got in and out of it, and he could only walk (hobble) with the aid of a stick. He spoke with a grating public-school accent, and prided himself on being a “scientist” (he is nothing of the kind), and “the scourge of paranormal charlatans and bad psychics everywhere” (the scourge of Mankind everywhere would be closer to the truth). This was when he wasn’t banging on about his “childhood in the colonies” (somewhere in the Far East I think).
I could see I was going to have to be polite and put up him for a day-or-so, but after that time my duties as an old friend of Jason’s were (in my mind) well and truly discharged, and he was going to have to go back from whence he came. Jason though had other ideas. He had bought Keef (as he called him) along because Keef wanted to write a book about “The Shinglesea Beach Phenomenon” (oh give me a break!), and Keef was looking at renting a place in the village whilst he completed his “ground-breaking” masterpiece.
“Just to rubbish everything?” I couldn’t help but saying “Like you did in the West Country?”
“Oh that”, said Keef, waving a hand to airily dismiss his putrid paperbacks “I call them my novels, they were heavily fictionalised, although of course many of the events happened. We just jazzed them up a bit”.
(I never did find out what had happened to his “co-author” on those books. Death by drugs overdose? In rehab? Broadmoor? Got a job as a banker?).
“You fascinate me, Gray“, he said (by now I could have cheerfully committed murder) “Have you ever wondered, with all these things that have happened to you, that you may be the lifelong guinea-pig of a government observation project?”
“Who the hell do you think I am, Truman?” I exclaimed.
“Observing him for what?” said Misty.
“To see how people react to these odd things”, said Keef.
Quite frankly this was the most ridiculous theory I had ever heard. It made no sense on any level. Our local MP can’t even dress himself properly (in our parish newsletter, his most memorable contribution had been about how he had turned up for a radio interview with his t-shirt on inside-out), let alone take part in some sinister top-secret spying programme!
“You’ve seen UFOs in this area?” he went on.
“We’ve seen odd things in the sky it’s true”, I said.
“I suspect [he said this in all apparent seriousness] that if you had looked closer you would have found someone in a van nearby projecting holographic images into the sky. Just to test your reactions”.
I feel there aren’t words adequate enough in ANY languages to express quite the level of contempt I have for this person. All I know is that I don’t have the power to keep him out of Shinglesea, but I can stop him coming into our house. I made up my mind about this one evening when Xanthe had come in to watch Most Haunted Halloween Live on our TV set.
The 3 of us were in the middle of watching this, and I was wondering just how many more séances Yvette Fielding was going to inflict on us, when Jason and Keef called in on their way back from the pub.
“You are watching this shite?” said Keef.
“Looks like it doesn’t it”, I said.
“I once wrote a spoof of this for my website”, the twat said “Spoofed them all as stoned out of their heads, and had Yvette getting raped by all the ghosts …”
That was it. That was enough. The end of the tether had been reached. I threw the fat git (not bodily, needless to say) out of the house, and not a moment before time. Misogynist I can be at times, but I hope I will always defend a lady’s honour. Particularly when it’s being attacked by a brainless ego-centric old sod like him.
We saw a UFO this evening in fact. It was around 5 o’clock. Now that the clocks have changed, it was just going dark. It was a bundle of lights hovering at a lopsided angle over the patch of scrubland that stands between us and the sea-wall. It’s hard to explain, but you know, you just KNOW, when something you are seeing is not of the every day run of things.
Just a cluster of orange-coloured lights. But strangely beautiful, like the lights we had seen in the sea last year. However hard they try, the Keefs of this world can’t take the pleasure of seeing it away from us.
I have a very real far of what is going to happen around here when he moves into his cottage (one of the holiday lets just up the lane from us has been earmarked for him apparently). I have a bad feeling he’s going to turn Shinglesea into a circus. But me being defeatist in thought is not going to help matters. So all I am saying is:
Bring it on.
