’The Amityville Horror’ is a pretty under whelming film (not a patch on the book), but there is one part in it that I do find genuinely quite unnerving, and that is the scene where Kathy Lutz goes to the back door and finds a leery old man standing there, clutching a set of beer cans to his chest, and asking if he and some pals can come in. This doesn’t sound much I know, but it is quite effective, because it’s the sort of thing that happens when you live in an area of high strangeness. Peculiar strangers turn up unexpectedly out of the blue, who have something about them that simply doesn’t feel at all right.
We had had our fair share of these in Shinglesea of late. On our local elections day, I saw another one, and no it wasn’t a politician. We had had to forcibly drag ourselves along to the community centre to vote. Never had I felt less enthusiastic about an election, but this one seemed even more pointless than most. There simply was nobody to excite the blood. In the end I voted for the landlord of ’The Ship’, who was standing as an Independent. There was no hope whatsoever that he would get in, but I felt it was a more grown-up protest vote than spoiling my ballot paper (which I did once before in a previous election).
Outside the doors of the community centre stood all the gurneying rosette wearers, reminding me of beggars hassling you at a cash-point! Amongst them (not wearing a rosette) was a young woman who reminded me of a spider in human form. She was short and very dark-haired, with heavy dark features and hairy bare arms. She turned to look at us as we left the building, and gave us a leery smile which wasn’t in the least bit pleasant.
As we reached the corner of the pavement I turned to look back, and found that she wasn’t there.
I was so laid low by this horrible encounter that Misty was convinced my depression (which he seemed to treat like a particularly nasty cold) had hit me again, and suggested that we go and meet Al and Xanthe at ‘The Ship’ for a drink.
We found them sitting outside in the May sunshine. The weather (plus perhaps the election) had brought a lot of people out, and the place was busy. A young girl had one of those horrid little dogs that looks like an overgrown rat on a lead. This creature was clearly her baby, and she had even stuck a jewelled collar round its neck. She was now parading about trying to find something to tie it to. Having exhausted the possibilities of chair legs, street-lamps and the branches of a tree, she finally sat down with the wretched mutt in her arms.
The others were having a mad conversation about what life would be like if dinosaurs were still around.
“You could be driving along”, said Xanthe “And fin d a woolly mammoth blocking the road”.
“That’d get on your wick wouldn’t it!” said Al.
Under the warmth of the sunshine I took off my jacket, and saw that a purple bruise had appeared mysteriously on my arm, just below the elbow join. It certainly hadn’t been there earlier.
“You look like you’ve had an injection”, said Al.
“The aliens must have been at me again”, I joked.
“You shouldn’t joke like that”, said Misty, crossly.
“What else can I do?” I said “Anyway, neither of us has noticed any Missing Time this morning, so at least it is just a joke!”
On 10th May, Tony Blair finally did the decent thing and resigned. Previously, I had always thought that I would greet this news with champagne and fireworks. Instead, I felt curiously muted (apart that is from a spasm of rage at that stupid old tosser, Neil Kinnock, dismissing the bloody debacle of Iraq as “a short-term thing”). But with Bliar, it was a case of what I had been feeling for a long time, let the hand of history stretch out its bony, cadaverous claw, and drag this deeply misguided and foolishly naïve man back into oblivion, where he belongs.
And somehow, SOMEHOW, many of the rest of us have to come to terms with all the anger, bitterness, frustration and sorrow that he has caused.
“But his place in history is assured”, said Al.
“So’s Hitler’s”, I replied.
Brighton, with its own inimitable flamboyant way, acted as a medicine. A wise man had once said that you go to Brighton to regain your health … and then to promptly lose it again! Away from all the high strangeness of Shinglesea I could devote myself to Misty, and I realised (once again) that without him nothing in my life would be worth a damn thing.
He loved the pier and the seafront, so we spent hours there. The seaside is somewhere you can stand and stare into space for as long as you like, and people don’t automatically assume you’re Care In The Community. I got chatted up by an old Italian running a kiosk, ogled by a portly bloke with a shaved head on the prom, and then again by another one cutting the grass outside the Royal Pavilion (blimey, there’s life in the old dog yet!). Misty got more and more disgruntled with all this, and then we got caught in a heavy shower, which had hardly improved his mood. I took him into a coffee-shop, where he was fussed over by a camp little love who exclaimed “Where is all this weather coming from? Don’t you worry, my dear, a nice hot coffee will soon warm you up”.
Only in Brighton …
When we drove back to Shinglesea, I found I was loath to return straightaway to the ongoing chaos of ‘Barnacles’, so instead I parked the van up by the public loos, so that we could go and look at the beach by ourselves. The tide was out, and it all looked beautiful in the early evening light. But there was a ferocious wind blowing, which practically whipped the marrow out of your bones as soon as you stepped out of the van, and set out teeth chattering like those ones you buy in joke shops. It wasn’t exactly the moment for a great, profound conversation.
The strange mood of change that had settled on me in Brighton persisted though. Added to that the house felt horribly musty and cold, as though we had been away for years, not a couple of days. We managed to avoid the others that evening (although Al had left us a note saying that Henry’s old house was finally scheduled to be pulled down in a few day’s time). The next day I took Misty into Fobbington, just to have a walk round.
Normally Fobbington is choked with tourists, so I was surprised to see how empty it was. It felt like that old episode of ’The Prisoner’, where Patrick McGoohan wakes up to find that everyone else in The Village has disappeared. The only people that seemed to be about were a handful of German tourists in the Church, a couple of kids playing in The Gun Garden, and a waitress staring forlornly out of the window of an empty tea-shop. Even the car-park at ‘The Black Anchor’ was empty.
As we strolled around, I felt like a ghost, as though I had come back from beyond the grave to revisit the places I had known the most. In the Church I was reminded of meeting Andy for the first time. Down by the harbour I thought of Anna Turnball. In the cottage opposite the Church I remembered poor old gentle Laurence Freeman being mauled to death by some huge, monstrous bird-like creature. At the top of Fishgut Alley I was reminded of Rufus Franklin. It was a very odd feeling.
Would this odd curse-like thing that had seemed to be on the area for the past couple of years be lifted somehow if I left? Was I the link pulling all this together? I was the connection between Rufus Franklin, Tara Mitchell, the Temples …
It felt as though I would have to do some bizarre Pied Piper act, leading the alien rats away. Walking around the town I knew how much I loved it and how it would break my heart to have to leave.
I had left the van in the car-park down by the harbour. The covered flea-market nearby (where we had bought the iron box in which we had stored Rufus Franklins’ jar) was locked. Again, like the car-park at ‘The Black Anchor’, this was something I had never seen before. We decided to leave the town via the road of terraced houses where Andy had lived. There was an old pub, ‘The Queen’s Head’, on the corner. A bog-standard old spit-and-sawdust drinkers’ den, which had always done a thriving trade as far as I could see. It was boarded up.
Over the level crossing, past the station. I thought I knew this area like the back of my hand, and yet suddenly, glancing out of the side window, I saw an old abandoned railway track I had never noticed before. The road was quiet, so I pulled over to have a better look. It led off into the far distance, lined with trees on both sides.
“I know this is going to sound a silly thing to say”, said Misty “But when did that appear?”
“It’s not a silly ting to say at all”, I said “Not where this area’s concerned!”
Personally, it didn’t make any sense to me that Gray should blame himself for what was going on in Shinglesea. I knew he had been under a lot of strain of late, but he had seemed to have been pulling out of it. He had given me no indication at all that he intended to disappear, even though he had said to Jason that he was interested in the idea of escaping into another dimension.
I had thought though that he was coming to terms with it all. He was looking to the future more, and showed a lot of interest when I said that I was thinking of re-starting my training for my cross-channel swim.
There was some disturbance at ‘Barnacles’ the night before he and Misty disappeared. All I could get out of Xanthe was that Misty had told her that Gray had woken up in the night, convinced that there was an intruder in the house, and he had chased it out of the back door. He said that this intruder had come out of the sea.
Gray was in a strange mood the following morning. Some of us had gathered in the lane to watch Henry’s old house being taken down. Kristy was there and was filling us in on some local news. It was a catalogue of woe. Rowland Richards had tried to gas himself in his car, and was currently recovering in hospital. On top of that Henry had got himself into trouble in town. He had come across a man snorting cocaine in the Gents loo at ’The Crab’ in Fobbington. With incredible naivety he had immediately marched out to a cop car parked outside, and had tried to tell them what was going on. Another bloke came out of the pub after him and said that Henry was drunk, and didn’t know what he was saying. This mysterious man then lifted Henry up under his armpits and carted him off, never to be seen again (not as of yet anyway)!
Incredibly, the police didn’t purse this matter, which made my journalistic hackles rise, as I was convinced that the police were in it all. All this sent Gray into a weird sort of fug, and he said something like ‘think of the payphones in ‘Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers’”. Kristy then stared prattling on about how she had recently been made redundant, and that upset him too.
Gray and Misty went out for a drive. When they still hadn’t returned by the next day, I suggested we go and look for them. Xanthe said that Misty had mentioned to her something about an old railway track appearing on the outskirts of Fobbington. We parked at the station, and went to look for it. I was pleasantly surprised when we actually managed to locate it. We went walking through the woods on one side of the tracks, and stopped for a breather, as it was quite a warm day.
I remember the incredible silence of the place. A heavy silence. No bird-song, that sort of thing. Then we heard footsteps in the undergrowth, and I glimpsed a man and a woman walking nearby … both of them completely butt-naked. Jason made some joke that it was a good job the track was disused, or commuters would be getting an eyeful! The nude couple gave no sign that they were aware of us at all, and they seemed to wander off through the trees in a sort of zombie state.
We’ve all been upset by the disappearance. Everyone was fond of Misty. You couldn’t help but be fond of him, and Gray has been a good friend to us. Not many would put up with us lot camping in their front garden all these months, let alone taking Henry in! Jason was particularly upset about it all, far more than I was expecting. He said he wasn’t going to stay in Shinglesea, and that he and Robbie were going to go and investigate rumours of Cold War bunkers and UFO sightings in a small town in Wiltshire. My experiences in Clag Heath, in Cornwall, have put me off all that malarkey, and Xanthe and me have elected to stay here instead.
“We’ll keep the home fires burning”, she said.
She is convinced they will come back some day, and I hope to God they do. I miss them.
Alan Perkins
‘Barnacles’
Beach Lane
Shinglesea Beach
May 2007