The Hopeless, Maine, Night-Soil Man is not known for inviting others to join him on his rounds. This is just as well, as any RSVP would be greeted with a certain amount of disgust. As readers of these tales will know, the all-pervading stench accompanying the office’s incumbent tends to send any creature with a fully operational olfactory system running for the hills.
Fortunately, young Winston Oldspot, the current collector of the island’s night-soil, has no need to lead quite as solitary an existence as his forebears. Reggie Upton (formerly Brigadier Reginald Fitzhugh Hawkesbury-Upton, of The King’s Own Royal Regiment) contracted incurable anosmia during his army career and is happy to be the exception to the rule. Reggie frequently ventures out with Winston and incorporates these excursions into his duties as the island’s postman. The fact is, he has always been an inveterate walker and rumour has it that, back in his army days in India, he could often be seen going out in the mid-day sun to take the occasional mad dog for a walk.
On the evening of our tale, the fog was thick as soup and twice as indifferent. It clung to the tufts of lichen on the wind-warped trees and slipped uninvited beneath the wooden doors of the various privies, without fear or favour. The only sounds were the slosh of Winston’s burden and the occasional metallic clink of his bucket and spade.
Winston was servicing Neville Moore’s privy at Ghastly Green when Reggie spotted a barely discernible glimmer cutting through the fog. Two faintly glowing eyes, floating a few feet above the ground, seemed to be drifting silently between the shadows.
“Don’t look for too long,” murmured Winston, without turning. “The Glimmer Man doesn’t like to be seen.”
But Reggie stared nonetheless.
The sight brought something sharp and distant slashing through his memory. A jungle. A ruin. And an unholy light.
——————
It had been 1884, and Reggie, then a dashing young captain, had been stationed at a remote British outpost near the edge of the Northwest Frontier, just a stone’s throw south of the Afghan border. He had brought little with him to India, except impeccable sartorial taste and a disturbingly profound underestimation of his own mortality.
The jungle there was dense, hot and suspiciously watchful, and the local people spoke in hushed tones of a vine-smothered ruin half a day’s march from the camp. They called it The Place Where The Gods Stopped Listening, and would not go near it. Reggie had asked the local guide, a wiry old man named Ajmal, about the stories. Ajmal merely muttered about “Daanav ki Drishti” – The Demon’s Gaze – and spat on the ground.
Naturally, Reggie was intrigued. The warnings were so vague and poetic that they fairly begged to be ignored.
The next morning, with only a lantern, his service revolver, and a copy of ‘The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’ in his breast pocket, Reggie set out into the steaming green unknown. Hours passed in the humid heat before he found the ruins. Ancient stone steps climbed from the undergrowth, flanked on each side by toppled statues whose faces had been weathered away into anonymity.
At the summit of the steps stood a crumbling temple, it’s walls overgrown with banyan roots.
The entrance yawned like a dark, wet mouth, faintly exhaling a scent that was both sacred and rotten. It smelled, Reggie thought, like incense left too long in the sun. It made his nostrils twitch and his stomach tighten.
He lit his lantern and stepped inside.
The interior felt unnaturally colder than the air outside. The lantern’s light picked out fragments of frescoes on the walls: scenes of rituals, and geometric symbols that seemed to shift when not directly looked at. There were no bats, no monkeys, no obvious signs of life – just the low, slow drip of water, echoing like distant footsteps. Then, something stirred in the gloom.
Two eyes blinked open.
Not the sort of eyes that you or I might recognise, but discs of amber light, hovering several feet from the ground, unwavering. They did not glow so much as shimmer, as if some unknowable force behind them were peering out through a thin gauze of reality.
Reggie felt his thoughts begin to unravel, and the weight of time pressed right through him, compressing centuries into seconds and then stretching them apart until each heartbeat felt like forever. He stood frozen, the lamp dangling forgotten from one hand. In that moment, he could not have told you his name, his rank, or what he had eaten for breakfast that morning.
The eyes did not move, but they seemed to enter the very essence of him, slicing open not only his memory, but something else, something deeper. Reggie would never quite be able to articulate what it was that passed between them. A communication, perhaps. A recognition. Or simply a mirror held up to his soul.
When he awoke, he was lying at the base of the temple steps, drenched in moonlight and his lantern extinguished. The jungle was thick with night-calls and the rustle of unseen creatures. Everything seemed to be in order; his revolver was safe in its holster, and the Rubáiyát was still in his pocket, although now it’s cover was bizarrely marked with a thumbprint in ochre.
Strangest of all, upon returning to camp, he realised that his sense of smell had entirely deserted him. Burnt coffee, pipe tobacco, even the latrine trenches failed to register. His body remembered odour, but his nose was no longer able to deliver.
Reggie resolved to tell no one, not his commanding officer, not the medical officer, not even old Ajmal, who watched him with narrowed eyes for days afterward. Back in the mess tent, he laughed louder than usual, drank more than was sensible, and threw himself into duty with the grim zest of a man fleeing something large and silent behind him.
A full ten years passed before he mentioned the incident; it was to the woman who was to become his lover, the theosophist Annie Besant. If anyone would believe and understand him, Annie would.
He remembered how she had frowned, in that infuriatingly knowing way of hers.
“Your thoughts,” she told him, “are still tied to that place. It is clear to me that, although you left some part of you behind, you brought something else back with you.”
“In the way of a gift?” he asked, hopefully.
Annie gave a faint smile, but made no reply.
———————-
Now, on Hopeless, the eyes in the mist were watching him again.
The Glimmer Man hovered at the edge of visibility, not moving toward them, nor away, but just watching.
“It’s time we left,” said Winston, urgently. “As far as I know, the Glimmer Man is harmless, but I don’t want to put it to the test.”
They walked on, both lost in their own thoughts, while behind them, the eyes slowly faded into the fog.
——————-
When he arrived back at The Squid and Teapot, Reggie was surprised to find Rhys and Philomena still awake and sitting in the snuggery.
“Oswald had a bad dream and managed to wake Caitlin up,” explained Philomena. “They’ve settled now, but we thought we might as well make a pot of nettle tea. Do you want some?”
“No thanks, I’m fine,” said Reggie, thinking of the trusty hip-flask nestling in his jacket pocket.
He paused.
“I don’t suppose,” he said quietly, “that either of you ever get the feeling that this island is occasionally less of a place and more of a mirror?”
Neither said anything for a moment. Then Philomena replied, “I think that, now and then, it shows us things we’ve tried to bury. The problem is, nothing stays buried for very long on Hopeless.”
Reggie pursed his lips as if to reply then, changing his mind, bade them both goodnight, and retired to his bedroom, to mull over Philomena’s words.
“Nothing here stays buried, eh?” he mused.
That hip-flask (which had been filled with some of the Gannicox Distillery’s latest, and most successful, batch of absinthe) was feeling more and more welcome by the minute.
To be continued…