Out of evil some good must come. I’ve always strongly believed that, sometimes against all odds. At the moment this could be applied to just about everything. All the weirdness that was going on in our area, and all the horror that was going on in the world at large. We saw the best of people on the day of the July bombings a couple of years ago (and we also saw the worst, but fortunately they seemed to be in a minority), and we were seeing the same again now with the kidnapping of our sailors by the Iranian government. The EU talking sense for once. President Bush talking sense for once (lordy!). Tony Blair showing some human emotion. Even Terry Waite had come out of mothballs to offer to go and negotiate for their release.
“Of course most people are kind at heart”, said Al, when we were talking about it in his wagon “If they weren’t, civilisation would never be able to function to the degree that it does”.
“On a more parochial level”, I said “Jeannette’s popped up in the local news”.
“She’s been found?” he said.
“Not exactly”, I said “Bloodstains have been found on some rocks near Darklight Cove. There’s some speculation that they might be from her. That she might have been swept out to sea”.
“On purpose, by accident, or by some villainy though?” said Al.
“Impossible to say at this stage”, I said.
I think we both had a feeling that speculating about Jeannette’s possible fate would be too heavy-going, so we chatted instead about Magda moving up to ’The Shell House’, and how we would all go up there with her on that particular evening, to give her a bit of moral support. After a while he went to use the chemical loo, and I browsed through a stack of varied magazines and papers he had left on one of the benches, presumably for reference material. I avoided the trashy women’s rags, as they tended to have lurid headings like “I COULD SEE MY INSIDES! A DEADLY BUG WAS EATING MY BODY!” “VIRGIN BRIDE TURNED INTO SEX ADDICT!” and “I DREAM OF MY POOR LITTLE HEADLESS BOY!” I didn’t feel strong enough to face any of this gentle feminine stuff, so instead I picked up leaflet all decked out in pale blue with stars all over it. It turned out to be an article about Interdimensional Beings, all written in a very florid prose, and with lots of references to people’s Awakenings.
“Don’t tell me you’ve found my women’s mags”, said Al, when he re-emerged “Mrs Jackson gives them to me sometimes, says they might give me ideas for articles. I usually end up doing the crosswords!”
“No it’s this thing”, I said, waving the little blue leaflet “What on earth is it?”
“Oh that”, said Al “It’s from Henry’s church, he gave it to me ages ago. We were all having a chat out here one night, trying to guess about some of the shadowy things people have seen around here, and he said his church had done an article on the Internet about it”.
“Interdimensional beings?” I said.
“Yes you know, beings from something other than the 3 dimensions we know about, or some such thing”, said Al “Like what you said caused the Evil in Rufus Franklin’s old house”.
“Why has Henry’s church cottoned onto all this?” I said.
“Because this phenomenon of the shadow people seems to be relatively new”, said Al “Something that’s only cropped up in the past few years, and we were wondering why that is. Henry’s church reckons it’s due to an increased spiritual awareness in people”.
“People have got more mediumistic?” I said “They have more chance of seeing these things?”
“It makes a certain sense”, said Al.
“It makes more sense than aliens coming from over the other side of the Universe, I’ve always maintained that”, I said.
“Jason’s not going to let go of that one quickly though”, said Al “He quotes ’Star Trek’ at me. Says that Gene Rodenberry believed that aliens are interdimensional beings. He said that if they can appear to us, then we might appear to them as well, as shadow beings I mean. We might sometimes slip into their dimensions too”.
“Like people who experience Missing Time?” I said.
I caught sight of one heading in the leaflet: “HOW CAN YOU TELL IF YOU HAVE A PORTAL IN YOUR HOME?” (It meant a portal to another dimension, not one of Jason’s numerous portals to Hell). It mentioned cold spots (that reliable old staple of a haunted house), cold draughts, skin prickling. In some extreme cases this could also manifest as “heavy air”, and black lightening. I hadn’t noticed any cold spots in ’Barnacles’, but I was increasingly getting a feeling of being watched sometimes, and that was unnerving enough on its own.
“Jason’s worrying me a bit actually”, said Al “I know he’s got an over-active imagination, but it’s going into overdrive at the moment. He seems to be getting an obsession about that apartment block up the road that Magda was going to buy”.
“The one with all the cracks in the walls?” I said.
“He says he gets ’strange vibes’ when he goes up that stretch of road”.
“Jason gets strange vibes everywhere. He should have been around in the 1960s, he’d have fitted right in!”
“He reckons that when he and Robbie drove past it one night recently”, said Al “The temperature gauge in the car plummeted, and there was some strange old woman wandering about on the roadside”.
“There are a lot of those round here”, I said, thinking of the many old hags I had seen in the area over the past year “I’ll have a drive up there sometime, and see if I notice anything”.
That night I dreamt about Jeannette, and I knew then for certain that she was dead. Quite how she had died was another matter entirely though. I had had a few of these dreams since she disappeared, but this one was the strongest one yet. I dreamt that we had all been invited to attend her funeral, and it was taking place in a snow-covered churchyard. Bizarrely, there were 3 other funerals going on at exactly the same time, and in the dream Robbie joked that it could get very confusing. Henry walked into the churchyard carrying a child-sized coffin in his arms. The Archbishop of Canterbury was officiating at the graveside, and whilst he was wittering on in his annoying geography teacher-ish way, I was protesting that the coffin in Henry’s arms couldn’t possibly contain Jeannette, as it was too small.
Suddenly some kind of opening appeared nearby, revealing a line of large ovens, disturbingly similar to those used by the Nazi’s in concentration camps. A man in a mortician’s apron walked past them, wheeling Jeannette’s corpse in a wheelbarrow. I found myself staring with morbid curiosity at her. She appeared very waxy, like a figure from a waxworks exhibit. Her mouth was set in its usual grim line, but the rest of her face appeared peaceful and at repose. I couldn’t stop staring at her, and all the while I was thinking “can it be that she’s really dead?” and the ridiculous question “what must it be like for her?” I woke up then, so was spared the sight of her being stuffed into one of the ovens.
It was with some annoyance that I had to turn from all these profound things that were going on, and deal with yet another stupid e-mail from my sister. As was to be expected she was somewhat miffed that I had turned down the golden chance of having Arthur to stay, and expressed herself “shocked and speechless” (oh if only!) that I could do this. It would do me good to have Arthur to stay apparently (finish me off more like), and that (and I quote): “it will give you something to do”. The absolute breath-taking chutzpah of this was almost more than a human body could stand. There was no way I could reply to this outrageous remark in anything remotely resembling a civilised manner, so I didn’t bother replying at all.
On Easter Saturday we had a tedious visitation from that blast from the past, Toady, still looking for Jeannette it would seem. I felt as though we were back where we were several months ago, when Jeannette had high-tailed it to Spain. This time he was truly irritating.
“She’s a cruel woman”, he wailed “All I wanted to do was look after her”.
“That’s the trouble, that’s all you want to do”, Robbie suddenly spake forth “You’re the same as Henry, you just want to keep her back as she was when she had the cancer!”
Quite honestly, as I was now utterly convinced that Jeannette was dead anyway, I felt that all this was totally irrelevant. And I really wasn’t interested in Toady trying to justify himself. I had go this measure a long time ago. He’s the sort of person who wants everything his own way, and when he can’t get, will resort to every bit of emotional blackmail under the sun to achieve it. I have him Rowland’s address, and told him to go and speak to Henry. I couldn’t have made it clearer if I’d tried, that I never wanted to clap eyes on him again.
I’ve been called a lot of names in my life, some of them extremely unpleasant ones. But one that creeps cropping up is Decadent. Decadent because I don’t put much prestige in traditional family life (god rot it), decadent because I believe there is more to life than meets the eye and sometimes you have to look below the surface for answers, decadent because I do not believe authority should be obeyed blindly, decadent because I think there is one and one only rule that should be applied to sex - and that is that it should be between Consenting Adults, within that framework, as far as I’m concerned, anything goes - and decadent because I am still virulently anti-war.
For a brief moment though, whilst our sailors were being held in Iran, I had actually come to terms with the idea that is this stand-off led to a war, then so be it. Now they were back home again, I saw how deadly and absurd that would have been, that even an old cynic like me can get caught up in ridiculous, self-righteous patriotic fervour. And now here they were, our brave lads and lass, selling their stories to trashy newspapers for extortionate amounts, whining about their iPods being nicked, and how their leaving present goody-bags hadn’t been up to scratch, and I’m thinking: I WAS PREPARED TO SEE US ALL GOING TO WAR FOR THIS LOT??!!!! And meanwhile, the bodies of the truly brave were being brought home.
Life is one long chastisement sometimes.
The weird dreams continued. In one, the roof of ’Barnacles’ came away and I was left lying in bed, looking up into a rapidly-changing cloudscape, in which a particularly angry storm-cloud was gathering strength.
Mundane matters also continued. A local author - who lives in a converted barn up on the Downs - had been on at me for some time to let her do some kind of Local Blog on our website. Foolishly, I had given in and let her. If I thought that long, detailed (and horribly smug) descriptions of an arts-and-crafts fair were boring enough, that was nothing compared to the endless dull rubbish she wrote about her pet tortoise’s daily activities (or lack of them). I was having to curb a growing desire to tell her to snap out of it!
Fortunately I was taken away from all this for the day by Magda, who was finally moving up to ’The Shell House’, and we all volunteered to help her. Whilst up there, I went for a walk along an old abandoned footpath which took me up close to the main pat of Rattlebone Farm.
I wandered further than I had intended, and thought I’d better get back to Misty, who I had left nursing a cold in our van, when I realised I had reached the back of the farmhouse. There was a fat, middle-aged woman perched on the windowsill near the kitchen door. She was leaning against the window in a drained, disconsolate sort of fashion.
I fully expected her to shout at me. After all, technically I was trespassing, and farm people are never usually backwards in coming forwards when informing you of that. We exchanged eye-contact briefly, but she couldn’t seem to rouse herself to speak. Her hair and her complexion both a greasy, unhealthy look.
Suddenly an old lady, well under 5 ft tall in height, appeared at the back door. She was waving an old £1 note in the air (I haven’t seen one of these in over 20 years). The woman on the window-sill finally roused herself, and went over to the old lady to send her back into the house.
“Is he from the newspapers?” the old lady asked her.
“No dear”, said the younger one, steering her into the kitchen and shutting the door behind them.
I made my way back to ’The Shell House’. Misty was still sitting in the van. Even though it was warm, he had done a Xanthe and kept his scarf wrapped round his neck. I had told him he could stay at home and nurse his cold there, but he had insisted on coming, and was now giving me his you’ve-made-me-go-somewhere-I-didn’t-want-to-go look. He’s not the most logical of people at times.
“Alright”, I sighed, as I got into the driver’s seat “Let’s go home”.
I wanted to take Misty away for a night or two, to be by ourselves, away from Shinglesea. I thought also that it would help us to decide if getting out of Shinglesea altogether would be the answer. We settled on Brighton, as being a place at a convenient distance that we both knew. Finding a decent hotel wasn’t easy. Customer reviews on the Internet abounded with horror tales of rampaging stag and hen parties, until you could be forgiven for thinking that you’d spend all night listening to screaming drunks, and then have to wade through corridors of vomit the next morning! To add insult to injury one guy (gay) said that he and his partner had met with hostility when they turned up to check in. In BRIGHTON??? The one place in Britain I would not expect to encounter homophobia!
“Perhaps you could say I’m your idiot brother”, said Misty “And we have to share a room as I need constant looking after”.
“I’ll give you a smack in a minute!” I said.
Of course some people will complain about anything. One guy moaned because Sky News was frozen on his t.v, another that the waiter had stuck tissue-paper into the spout of his teapot (!), and a woman seemed to think the entire hotel should be geared exclusively towards looking after her baby (who from the sounds of things will undoubtedly grow up to be another bloody Arthur).
In the end I booked a room at a cliff top hotel a few miles up the coast from the city, for a month’s hence, and hoped that it wouldn’t be too full of stag and hen parties / coach loads of pensioners / corporate drones in suits. There were gay-friendly hotels to be had of course, but I didn’t feel strong enough to cope with them!
Al thought I was mistaken to place too much credence on what the old lady had said at the farm. His theory was that her mind had gone. OK, that sounded very plausible, but even so …
“They come out with some bizarre things when they’re in that state”, he said “I had an old Aunty went that way. She was utterly convinced that she had once gone to Africa with Margaret Thatcher! You couldn’t shake her from it!”
“I was just wondering if there was something in the past”, I said “Where perhaps they’d had a lot of press interest, and that was where she was confused”.
“Well if there was”, said Al “You can be sure Jason will dig it up!”
I went back into the house. The radio was playing Nina Simone singing ’Mad About The Boy’, a song which always brings me to a standstill, as it evokes Misty for me so completely. I knew then (as if I’d ever completely forgotten!) that it was him who was important to me, not all this other horseshit.
I looked forward to taking him to Brighton to prove it.
At the end of April the depression re-asserted itself (enhanced no doubt by Charmless Pillock The Builder re-appearing in Kristy’s garden, plus computer viruses, Internet trolls, and my sister sounding like my father on the telephone. Not on the level of Darfur I know, but soul-destroying all the same). Sometimes it felt as though some hostile being was following me around, chucking a black blanket over me, which I was constantly trying to throw off. I was a bag of nerves, and jumping out of my skin at the slightest thing.
The insanity wasn’t just confined to me it would seem. People were going bonkers all over the place. One bloke even cut his dick off in the middle of a busy London restaurant! I found I could no longer be philosophical about things. Too many people were saying the world was insane for me to dismiss it as simply More Of The Same.
Misty got short-fused with my pessimism. I was being Annoying, apparently (actually there was no ’apparently’ about it, I know I was being annoying). He said he didn’t understand why I was focussing on all the negatives when there were so many positives around. Dear Misty. His terrible upbringing had been so bad that everything that had happened since seemed like a blissful dream by comparison!
Being called Annoying wouldn’t rate much on most couples’ Richter scale of marital disagreements, but for us it was serious, and for the first time in a long while I faced the thought of what it would be like to lose him. I steeled myself to get help. I even looked at The Samaritans’ website!
It was Jason (of all people) who came to the rescue. He had been doing a lot of spadework on Google, and came in to ‘Barnacles’ one evening to tell us about it. I wasn’t initially in the mood for any of this, but he had gone to a lot of effort, and I didn’t have the heart o send him away and pull the drawbridge up.
There was a lot of (quite frankly) boring stuff about Rattlebone Farm. There had been some UFO flap there in the mid-1970s (along with a fair bit of the world it would seem), and Jason thought that was where the old lady had got confused and wondered if I was from the newspapers. The young farmer’s wife at the time (the middle-aged woman I had seen outside the house) subsequently admitted that she had “jazzed a lot of it up” for the sake of the press. I wasn’t remotely surprised by this. It seems to be a perennial problem in the paranormal world, and that’s what ensures that so much of it will never get taken seriously.
It wasn’t that that really excited him though, but the prospect of a portal in the area. Not to Hell (for a change) but into another dimension. Over a few drinks this led to a rather interesting discussion, and one which - for the life of me - I had never expected to have.
“If we did find one”, he said, as Misty bustled around refilling the glasses “At Magda’s place, at Henry’s old house, at the apartment block, wherever, would you be interested? Would you cross over?”
I looked at Misty. He came over and put his hand gently on my shoulder.
“Yes”, I said, without hesitation.
“Of course there’s no knowing what we would cross into”, said Jason.
“It doesn’t matter”, I said “Who else is in on this?”
“Everyone”, said Jason “Al, Xanthe, Robbie, Magda and Aleck. What have we all got to lose? None of us fit in this damn world as it stands at the moment. What about you, Misty?”
“I certainly don’t fit in!” he exclaimed “I never have! I just want to be with Gray, he’s my life”.
“Wherever it would take us?” said Jason.
“Wherever”, said Misty.
“You guys are so cool!” said Jason.
What better way to round off the month than to have an earthquake? The earth moved for us early one Saturday morning. The epi-centre had been near Folkestone, but we had felt the tremors. I got Misty out of the house, and at the same time tried to calm down Xanthe, who was convinced (yet again) that the world was ending.
When I was sure that all was safe I went back indoors and threw a few more clothes. I saw Kristy standing by her shed in her dressing-gown, and went out to see if she was alright.
“Someone’s vandalised my shed”, she said, looking very pale “They’ve broken into it and … done things”.
Of course, one’s imagination runs riot as what ’things’ could be. I couldn’t help thinking of someone I knew once who had had her flat broken into, and the yobs had defecated in her bath-tub (still I suppose that way it’s easier to clean up!).
I went into the shed to have a look. My first thought was what a miracle of neatness it was (compared to ours I mean), as it contained only her lawn-mower. But closer inspection revealed that somebody had scrawled obscene messages over the walls. These were pretty pathetic to be honest, along the lines of ‘ARE YOU WET?’ and ‘HAVE YOU CUM YET?’ It was as if a particularly cretinous obscene phone caller had been let loose in there with a black marker pen. I asked her when she had last been in here.
“Only last Monday evening”, she said “When I mowed the lawn. So it must have been done this week sometime”.
“I suspect it’s kids”, I said “The messages are pretty juvenile”.
“What about this then?” she pointed at an object on the shelf.
It was a statue. An ugly one of a grotesque woman lying down with her huge overgrown bush exposed, and a sickly leer on her face.
“Did you do it?” she asked me, desperately “Do you hate me?”
“Of course I don’t hate you!” I exclaimed (I just find you a bit boring sometimes that’s all) “I know I’ve been a bit bonkers lately, but I wouldn’t do anything like this to you! Anyway, I haven’t done any sculpture work for years”. (There isn’t room!).
“I’m sorry”, she said, emotionally “I know you wouldn’t do it, you’re a nice boy really”.
(BOY????)
“Also I’d like to think if I was going to scrawl you obscene messages, I’d do something a bit more classy than THAT!” I said, which at least made her give a smile (albeit a bit of a pained one).
“It’s horrible”, she said, looking at the statue “I don’t even want to touch it”. “Fetch me a bin-liner”, I said “I’ll put it in your dustbin for you”.
When I had disposed of it for her, I went back to ’Barnacles’ and washed my hands thoroughly. I felt curiously as though I had just handled turds. Not a pleasing sensation. Robbie and Paul were eating cereals at our kitchen table, and Misty was boiling the kettle. Everybody was full of suggestions as to who could have done it.
Robbie suggested that Owen Maddock’s frustrations had finally got the better of him, but I didn’t really feel that a man in his fifties (unless he was a complete pervy oddball, and I had never really got that particular impression of Owen) would pen messages like that on a shed wall. Paul suggested Rowland, which seemed more like it somehow.
“He hates Kristy”, he said “Henry told me so recently”.
“Hates her?” I said “A bit extreme isn’t it?”
“I think she’s a bit too full-on for him”, said Paul.
(The entire female sex is a bit too full-on for Rowland if you ask me).
“Mrs Jackson was saying that Kristy’s getting a terrible reputation round here”, said Misty.
“Only amongst people who indulge in mindless gossip!” I said.
“Rumour has it that she had sex in the loos at ’The Ship’”, said Paul.
(For one highly surreal moment I thought he meant Mrs Jackson!).
“I’ve heard that too”, said Robbie “And the kids all snigger at the way she dresses, all those little strappy tops and short skirts”.
“Yeah, a woman her age should wear a nice pair of trousers instead”, said Paul.
“Will you listen to you two!” I said “You sound like a couple of nutty Islamic preachers! You’ll be growing long beards next and ordering women to wear the face-veil in public!”
“No, just saying that there’s such a thing as mutton dressed up as lamb, as my Gran used to say”, said Paul.
“What’s wrong with being a bit more classy as you get older?” said Robbie.
“However she dresses, she didn’t deserve obscene things to be left in her shed”, said Misty, which was the most sensible comment anyone had yet made!!!