(Story by Keith Errington, illustration by Nimue Brown, lurid green aura of stench added by Keith.)

Law was scarce in Hopeless, Maine. Mostly, it was unwritten. General principles, like don’t steal from your immediate neighbours, don’t murder anyone with friends, leave the children alone, and don’t summon demons between the hours of two and three on a Sunday, were well understood by all.

What justice there was, tended to be delivered by a few good men – or sometimes a few bad men – and occasionally by the mob. Although, the mob tended to get bogged down in endless committee meetings and paperwork. Deciding what to wear for a lynching was one of the more debated topics on the agenda, for example.

Given the lack of alternatives, Islanders tended to resolve minor disputes amongst themselves. Some tried calling upon public figures such as the Reverend Davies or Doc Willoughby to adjudicate. In the case of the Reverend, they quickly lived to regret their choice, as he would often take it as an opportunity to sermonise to both parties and berate them for their lack of church attendance. (Not that the Reverend actually spent much time in the church himself, of course.)

Those turning to Doc Willoughby for a decision often found him too busy to help them. And if he wasn’t, then he might just arbitrarily toss a coin to decide on the case, or favour the person whose surname came first alphabetically. More often than not, they found him drunk.

Hopeless, Maine tended to throw up its solutions to problems, so there was one other recourse for disputants: Judge Joe.

Joe would be the first to admit he was an ordinary chap, possessed of no great intellect or force of mind, but he had seen a gap in the market and jumped straight in. Inspired by a whole batch of legal books that had washed up on the shore of Hopeless, Joe decided he would set up in business as a judge. Making himself a red robe trimmed with perigret fur, he turned his front room into a makeshift courtroom.

He wasn’t wrong about the need for such a service, and he was soon inundated with islanders who wanted to resolve their disputes without bloodshed or death. Potential litigants would have to agree that any decision Joe made was binding, and both pay a modest sum into the court’s coffers.

Judge Joe was popular, effectively being the only game in town, but he became known for his common sense, his fair play and the noxious smell of his robes. Many a long-running dispute was resolved in mere minutes within the small confines of Joe’s front room. Participants would emerge gasping for breath, safe in the knowledge that any penalties handed out by the court could not possibly be as bad as spending another minute in Judge Joe’s courtroom.

Of course, there were those who would object to Judge Joe’s pronouncements and would refuse the resolution offered. And it was here that Joe had played his masterstroke. All participants in the process also had to pledge to uphold the court’s decisions across all cases. So, they would put pressure on individuals to conform, and almost none held out under community pressure. And, of course, the more cases Judge Joe sat in judgment on, the more people there became to enforce any judgment.

Judge Joe always refused the more serious cases—murder, armed robbery, violent assault, and literary plagiarism. He stuck to more domestic themes—the late return of borrowed books, boundary disputes, overgrown hedges, and the wearing of loud ties in public in a provocative manner.

One fellow, Findus McGuigan, defied a straightforward judgement of the court, a minor fine. But Findus reckoned he’d been hard done by and kicked off about it. Everybody told him to put up with it and pay the fine, but he was convinced he’d been in the right. It was pointed out to him that he had agreed to accept the outcome and that whether it was fair, just or even rational was not the issue – he still had to abide by Joe’s decision. He wouldn’t listen. He became more and more demonstrative, even a little paranoid. He decided Joe must have been bribed. Then he told people that it wasn’t Joe he saw at all, but a friend of his opponent in disguise. When nobody listened, he started going around the town, telling people that Joe was clearly possessed by a demon. Finally, he sat in the central square screaming at people, day and night, some gibberish that aliens had come to Hopeless and impersonated Joe just to make his life hell.

Unfortunately for McGuigan, one of the residents of the Square was Gubbins Dreadson, a notorious blue squid merchant. With an evil temper and built like a Gnii factory, Gubbins was a dangerous thug who took a dim view of his sleep being disturbed by one such as Findus McGuigan. Now, it is not for this author to say precisely what happened, particularly as Gubbins is, of course, totally innocent, wouldn’t hurt a fly and is certainly not threatening my person with extreme violence. However, Findus McGuigan was found one morning slumped over and not breathing. Doc Willoughby suggested it was trauma brought on by “paranoic incidents of fantasy” and internal bleeding due to “harmful inconsistencies in his narrative”. Now, I’m not a medical man, so I guess I have to accept what the Doc says, but it’s safe to say that the majority of islanders simply thought it was natural justice. The kind of fate that would befall anyone who went against Judge Joe’s decisions.

Being a good man at heart, Judge Joe was terribly upset for a while after learning of Findus McGuigan’s death, but not for too long.

Funnily enough, no one ever went against Judge Joe’s rulings after that, and Judge Joe became more popular than ever.