It was a Tuesday, which everyone agreed was a poor choice of day for anything of significance to happen. The fog that rolled in was peculiar even by Hopeless standards: not so much thick as dense with feeling, and it insisted on hanging about the island like a guilty conscience. It was a fog that carried upon its breath the faint  scent of pickled herring that had once hoped for a better future.

Philomena Bucket was the first to spot the creature as it oozed its way up the shingle behind the Squid and Teapot, flopping into the yard with a noise like flatulent custard.

“It’s… glistening,” murmured Rhys Cranham, peering at it with a professional distaste.

The thing was roughly the size and shape of a calf, but pale and somewhat translucent. It had a fringe of tentacles where no tentacles had any right to be, and a pair of mournful, deeply expressive eyes that made everyone who looked at it feel vaguely responsible for something.

“It’s in distress,” said Philomena, crouching beside it. “Look at those eyes.”

Rhys squinted. “I am. They’re judging me.”

It emitted a low, wobbling sound, not unlike someone attempting to play a funeral dirge on a very damp harmonium. Drury, intrigued, barked twice and, having elicited no obvious response, got bored and wisely decided to go back to bed. 

The creature was nothing, if not compliant. It allowed itself to be bundled into an old washtub, where it was left to soak in one of the outhouses behind the inn. Unsurprisingly, it  was Philomena who christened it as ‘The Moon-Calf’. This was partly because the word was lodged somewhere in the distant recesses of her memory, but also that  it vaguely resembled the unfortunate union of a Jersey cow and a jellyfish.

Within hours, the mood in The Squid and Teapot  had shifted. No one was exactly poetic – thank goodness, given recent events – but everyone had gone a little quiet. The regulars sat holding their drinks,  eyes distant, muttering odd, half-finished thoughts about lost keys, missed chances, and a terrible sense of having misplaced something intangible and important.

By the second evening, folk began wandering out behind the inn for no apparent reason, only to end up gazing silently at the moon-calf as it pulsed gently in its tub. Its sighs came at regular intervals, as if it were timing its heartbreak with a metronome.

“It’s affecting the atmosphere,” grumbled Rhys. “Even Drury’s gone quiet.”

“He’s besotted,” said Philomena. “Look at his tail.”

And indeed, the skeletal hound sat vigil beside the washtub with the intense, wordless devotion of a creature who had fallen hard and fast for a wet, boneless slab of sadness.

On the third night, just as the mist began to thicken once more, there came a knock at the back door. Rhys opened it cautiously, with the air of a man expecting either a tax collector or something that required garlic.

Standing on the threshold was a figure out of a drowned man’s dream. He was lean and tall, with seaweed clinging to his oilskins and barnacles studding his boots. His beard dripped seawater onto the doorstep. His eyes were grey and fathomless, and just slightly annoyed.

“I’m here for my wife,” he said.

There was a pause.

“You what?” asked Rhys.

“The one you call the moon-calf,” said the visitor, peering past him. “She was my wife, once. That was before she offended a sea-witch, of course. It’s never a wise thing to do. Anyway, as you’ll appreciate, it’s a matter of urgency, as this is the last fog she’ll ride before she returns beneath the waves.”

Philomena blinked. “You’re… a ghost?”

“I am Captain Jabez Coaley. Drowned off the Dogger Bank in 1813. I’ve been following her for two centuries.” He removed his hat, revealing hair like damp kelp. “Love’s a persistent thing.”

Philomena gave a soft sigh that could have been mistaken for sentiment, had it not been accompanied by a firm grip on the broom she kept behind the door.

Rhys frowned. “I suppose this is the part where you carry her back to some mystical briny afterlife?”

Captain Dagg nodded solemnly. “To the Sea of Lost Lovers.”

“Of course it is,” muttered Rhys.

Drury barked once, unhappily, then placed himself in front of the washtub in a most uncharacteristically heroic fashion.

“Now, now,” said Philomena, placing a hand on the dog’s spine. “She has to go home.”

The moon-calf lifted its head. It made a low, yearning sound and seemed – for just a moment – to shimmer with a light not of this world. Then, slowly, it flopped out of the tub and across the cobbles, leaving behind a trail of seawater, slime, and unspoken farewells.

Captain Coaley opened his arms. The moon-calf eased into them, and together, they walked back into the fog.

Philomena watched until they vanished entirely. Somewhere out in the darkness, a wave crashed, and something sighed in time with it.

By the following morning, the mysterious fog had disappeared, and the islanders, once more left to enjoy good old Hopeless fog, seemed a little more themselves again. Philomena found a single luminous scale in the washtub. She placed it gently in a jam jar, labelled it Do Not Pickle, and tucked it beside the more dangerous preserves.

Drury sat in the yard for a good few hours, watching the sea.

No one said much about the moon-calf after that. But once a month, when the tide is high and the fog comes in blue and sad, you can hear a faint, familiar sighing behind the Squid and Teapot. And sometimes – if you’re very quiet – you’ll catch Drury humming along.

Author’s note: Philomena had probably come across the word Moon-Calf when hearing farmers describing cattle that had been born badly deformed, the full moon being deemed responsible. Shakespeare also used the term in his play ‘The Tempest’ in reference to the monster Caliban.

The problem began, as such problems so often do on Hopeless (and indeed, at all points elsewhere, in my experience) with the well-intentioned, but deeply regrettable, act of tidying up.

Saul Washwell, in his capacity as keyholder of the Hopeless, Maine Museum (mentioned in the tale ‘The Postman’), had – with the help of Bartholomew Middlestreet – undertaken to reorganise some of the museum’s dustier corners. One such area in particular, floridly labelled ‘Miscellanea and Misadventure’, seemed to be in dire need of some urgent attention.

This was the sort of activity which, under other circumstances, might have resulted in the reclassification of some dubious Viking artefacts, the rediscovery of the museum’s second-best badger pelt, or perhaps the matching up of two previously unrelated chair legs. On this occasion, however, it led instead to the outbreak of an entirely new and deeply troubling disease.

At the heart of the calamity was a small chest. Plain, sea-warped, and locked with rusted clasps, it bore the unconvincing label:

“Property of Poet and Scholar Shrivensby Pinfarthing — Touch Not, Lest Verse Ensue.”

So naturally, Saul opened it.

The contents were innocuous enough at first glance: a stack of brittle, seaweed-bound manuscripts titled ‘The Ode Cycle of Sea-Borne Sorrows’, an inkwell fossilised to its stand, and a peculiar fungal bloom clinging to every surface like melancholia in spore form. He passed it to Bartholomew for cataloguing. Bartholomew gave it a curious sniff, and promptly began humming in iambic pentameter.

Within twenty-four hours, Saul was drafting instructions to his seven sons in rhymed couplets and Bartholomew was composing a carefully metred suggestion to his wife, Ariadne, concerning the proper stacking of firewood, ending with the line:

“Let logs not lie like lovers in dismay / but stand, erect, in rows both tight and true.”

It was only a matter of time before more victims followed.

At first, they were not alarmed. Reggie Upton, always partial to a bit of Kipling, initially took the infection as a return to form.

 “We marched in fog and clamminess, we bivvied in the bog,
And once I ate the sergeant’s sock, mistaking it for dog…”

This, he claimed, was simply an old regimental marching song, but soon he could not order a drink without invoking the Empire and rhyming “beer” with “cheer” and “fear.”

Neville Moore, in his mausoleum-like home on Ghastly Green, descended into Poe-esque despair, declaring the spoonwalkers to be messengers of death and writing odes to a small shoal of lantern fish that may or may not have existed. He was later found weeping over a dead jellyfish, and quoting stanzas that no one had heard before, or wished to hear again.

Mrs Beaten was discovered crouched behind a hedge, scribbling Larkin-like observations about the declining state of bootlaces, garden statuary, and public morals in the margins of her parish watch notes.

And Norbert Gannicox – poor Norbert, artisan distiller and generally agreeable fellow – was afflicted with the full force of Byron. He was discovered atop of his gin still, shirt unbuttoned, hair in rakish disarray, declaiming to the fog:

 “O cruel gin, thou siren of my sleep,
Thy botanicals too bold, thy spirit deep!
Forlorn I stand, amidst thy copper grave,
And toast the soul thy juniper did save!”

This wasn’t bad, considering that Norbert was, these days, an avowed teetotaller and had previously claimed that gin gave him “visions of disapproving and long-dead aunts.”

At first, some found it entertaining. Then they realised it was contagious, not to say tedious.

Mirielle D’Illay, of Les Demoiselles Dance Studio, became uncharacteristically soft and sighing under the influence of Paul Verlaine, that velvet-draped master of delicate decadence, a poet who wept in vowels and kissed each aching stanza into wilting submission.

Septimus, Mirielle’s long-suffering husband, could only wonder what had happened to the feisty love of his life as she gently whispered lilac-scented verse into her pillow and refused to wear shoes, or speak anything but rhymed French.

Doc Willoughby, always ready to seize an opportunity for self-promotion, began composing and publicly performing in his crowded surgery. The result was McGonagallesque doggerel of such forceful inelegance that some townsfolk took to stuffing mud in their ears for protection.

Philomena, miraculously untouched by the contagion, decided that enough was enough when her husband, Rhys Cranham, began writing love poems to her. Under other circumstances this would have been delightful, but Rhys had adopted the style and tone of the notorious Restoration poet John Wilmott, 2nd Earl of Rochester.

It would have not have been so bad, she reflected wistfully, had her surname not been Bucket.

With a little bit of detective work Philomena managed to trace the source of the infection to the fungal bloom within Shrivensby Pinfarthing’s manuscripts. She tentatively burned one as a precaution, and noticed the nearby Tenzin falter, brusquely cutting Tibetan poet Milarepa off in mid-couplet.

When she later decided to light the fire using the last remaining pages of Sea-Borne Sorrows, Part XIV, the resulting flames sent spores, manuscripts, a small clerihew and a surprised collection of villanelles up in smoke.

The following evening came, and with unaccustomed camaraderie the townsfolk gathered together on the beach, afflicted and strangely united in verse, to perform a final farewell ode at dusk. The mood was sombre. The metre was passable. Mrs Beaten wept discreetly into a lace kerchief and later denied everything.

By then, the spores were burnt out and the last of the rhyme had faded from the air. Silence returned to Hopeless. Awkward, blessed silence.

Only Mirielle continued to write poetry. But only in French. And only on Tuesdays.

Winston Oldspot had lived much of his young life in a state of profound olfactory denial.

His was, he freely admitted, a job for someone with a strong constitution and a blatant disregard for their sense of smell. As Hopeless, Maine’s Night-Soil Man, he carried out his duties with quiet pride and a large wooden bucket. The cloak of stench that clung to him like a second skin was generally enough to guarantee solitude, silence, and a wide berth in all public places.

Which is why, when he first heard something following him through the island’s fog-cloaked pathways, his first reaction was not panic, but surprise.

With the exception of Drury, the skeletal hound, and his friend, the anosmic Reggie Upton, nothing — and no one — ever came within a dozen yards of Winston. Not rats. Not spoonwalkers. Even ghouls, werewolves and vampires held their breath when he passed.

But something was behind him.

Something that went splorch.

He turned. The path was empty.

Only the sloshing of his full bucket and the slow creak of his boots disturbed the morning.

Then — a sudden movement. (No pun intended.)

A slither at the edge of vision. A pale coil vanishing behind a bramble bush.

Winston blinked. “Oh,” he said flatly. “It’s you.”

Word of the privy creature had spread, of course. On Hopeless, nothing eldritch stays secret for long — especially if it’s likely to disturb folk while occupied in their privies.

The creature hissed. Its many eyes blinked at him hungrily.

Winston tilted his bucket slightly. “You’re following the scent, aren’t you? You poor, misguided horror.”

He turned back down the lane, adjusting his grip.

“Fine. Let’s dance.”

Most people, when stalked by a privy-dwelling monstrosity, would panic.

Winston merely walked faster.

The creature slithered in pursuit, weaving between the trees, flitting through the crumbling stonework, occasionally poking a mouth or tentacle out to sample the air.

Winston led it on — through the marsh, past Chapel Rock, and down the narrow, seldom-used path that led to his cottage: The House at Poo Corner.

Suddenly, Drury appeared, bounding along beside him with a cheerful rattle. Winston gave him a nod.

“The back gate’s unlatched, Drury.”

Drury vanished with an excited clatter.

Behind them, the creature picked up speed.

Winston’s garden was a quietly neat affair, although a few brambles, some suspicious-looking herbs, and one ancient washing line didn’t do a lot to enhance its kerb appeal. But at the very bottom, as regular readers will be aware, there lay the Night-Soil Man’s infamous sinkhole, marked only by a capstone. Almost two centuries earlier this had been pushed upright, like a tombstone, and the letter ‘D’ scratched on it. These days the letter was faint, and no one could recall why it was there.

(See the tale ‘A Dog’s Life,’ and be sure to have some tissues to hand.)

The sinkhole was deep — really deep — and an eerie green mist swirled at what was probably its base.

Things thrown in did not generally return — not even sound.

Winston trudged across the garden and upended the bucket ceremonially on the edge.

“Come and get it,” he said.

The creature surged into view, drawn by the scent. It reared back, let out a sibilant hiss of triumph –  and it was then that Drury shot out of the cottage, with a force that sent the Toilet Terror straight over the edge, and into the abyss 

There was a pause. A long pause. Winston thought he might have heard a distant, echoing splash, but he wasn’t sure.

Then… silence.

He stood there a moment, his jacket rippling faintly in the breeze.

“You won’t be trying that trick again in a hurry,” he said to the empty sinkhole.

Drury, looking understandably pleased with himself, stared up at Winston with strangely appealing eye-sockets.

“Good lad,” said Winston, patting his faithful friend on the skull. The Night-soil Man reached into his jacket pocket and gave Drury the biscuit that he kept for such occasions. This biscuit had been employed several times as a reward for Drury. It would rattle around the old hound’s ribcage like a tombola ball for a while, then drop to the ground — all ready to be recycled.

Back at The Squid and Teapot, the team listened in stunned silence as Reggie Upton recounted the tale that Winston had told him.

“He lured it to the garden,” said Rhys, aghast. “With his bucket?”

“Apparently it was all that he had,” said Reggie. “That took some pluck, what?”

“Or foolishness,” said Rhys, flatly.

“Oh, come on, Rhys,” challenged Philomena. “If you were still the Night-Soil Man, you’d have done exactly the same. You lot are cut from the same smelly bit of cloth.”

Rhys reddened. It was true enough. You had to be a little crazy to survive as a Night-Soil Man.

Philomena raised her glass. “To Winston Oldspot. Slayer of the Toilet Terror.”

Tenzin nodded. “And to the sinkhole. May it never backwash.”

Later that night, Philomena stood at the privy door, mop in hand. She stared at the pipework. It was still and silent.

“Do you think it’s over?” Rhys asked softly.

Philomena narrowed her eyes.

“I hope so,” she said. “That’s one visitor we don’t want returning.”

Behind her, Drury sneezed. An ancient and well-used biscuit that had somehow managed to lodge itself between his third and fourth vertebrae landed on the floorboards.

That felt better!

Drury wagged his bony tail, and with a mixture of pride and relief, lay down to sleep.

A whole week had passed since the disturbing incident with the creature that had emerged from the waste pipe of The Squid and Teapot’s flushing privy.  A thankfully uneventful week it had been too, and the inn had once more settled into a familiar mode of life that rarely rose above the level of mild dread. The privy gurgled only occasionally, the phantom Jesuit, Father Stamage, was back to pontificating in solemn tones about the importance of roughage in the diet, and Lady Margaret once again drifted about theatrically, though she now regarded the porcelain throne with deep suspicion.

Drury, the skeletal hound, ever vigilant, maintained his post at the privy door, though whether out of duty or the faint hope of more chewable tentacle bits was anyone’s guess.

But elsewhere on the island, all was not well…

In his outwardly normal, many-roomed home, the sorcerer Durosimi O’Stoat was enjoying what he termed “an afternoon of delicate conjurations.” This, in practice, involved swanning about in a velvet dressing gown while making unsettling remarks to jars of preserved newts.

Unfortunately, after several hours of consuming delicacies that other islanders could only dream of, drinking several tumblers of single malt whisky and indulging in a certain amount of questionable spellcraft, nature called.

Pleasure bound, Durosimi, swept into his small, but surprisingly elegant privy, which was generously lined with books of dubious hygiene. A stained-glass window, depicting a slightly obscene interpretation of Venus rising from the waves, made a distinct change from the usual pane of plain frosted glass, or, more often than not on the island, no glass at all.

As he seated himself with a sigh and reached for an elderly and battered copy of Old Moore’s Almanac, Durosimi  heard it…

Splorch.

A slow, sinuous slither. A faint gurgle.

He froze.

“…that was not the pipes settling,” he muttered.

It was a logical thought. Durosimi’s privy, like almost all on the island, had never known the luxury of plumbing.

Another wet scrape, and the temperature dropped. A faint sulphurous tang filled the air.

Then a pale, glistening shape pressed up through the bowl beneath him.

This was more than alarming, for to all intents and purposes, ornate though Durosimi’s lavatory was, it was still a glorified bucket with no obvious means of ingress, or indeed, egress.

With a shriek that shattered three nearby vials, Durosimi vaulted upwards, pulling his dressing gown about him like a shield. The creature surged, coiling around the pedestal and snapping at the air with its hideous, fanged mouths.

The door slammed shut of its own accord.

Durosimi was trapped.

Meanwhile, back at The Squid and Teapot, Tenzin was calmly brewing a pot of nettle tea, when a raven – one of the many who nested on Chapel Rock, not far from Chez Durosimi  – landed on the windowsill, cawing frantically and dropping a scrap of parchment: Scribbled in an unsteady spidery hand was the following message:

“HELP. TRAPPED. MONSTER IN THE PRIVY. O’STOAT.”

(Don’t ask how he managed to get this note to the ravens. Everybody knows that it’s the sort of thing that sorcerers are good at.)

Philomena looked at the note and sighed. 

“Of course it wasn’t going to stay away for long,” she said. “Things that are that flexible always have a nasty habit of returning.”

Rhys looked puzzled. “What’s it doing in Durosimi’s privy? There’s no plumbing in there. I know, because I used to have to empty it every few days.”

You will recall that Rhys had been the island’s Night-Soil Man for years, but gave up the prestige and glamour of the job for the love of Philomena Bucket . 

“Are we really going to rescue him?” asked Tenzin. “He’s not exactly my favourite islander.”

Philomena picked up her mop and  frowned. “You’re supposed to be a good Buddhist, my lad” she said sternly. “Besides, no one deserves to be eaten in their own privy. Not even Durosimi.”

Drury leapt up with a delighted rattle.

“Right then,” said Reggie, as memories of his old army glories came rushing back . 

“Privy Squad… ATTENTION!”

Durosimi, meanwhile, was standing on a rickety wash-stand, wielding a gilded chamberpot like a mace, and shrieking increasingly creative curses at the advancing beast. The creature had now fully emerged, a slick, pallid coil of something ancient and wrong, studded with grasping feelers and blinking, lidless eyes.

“Back, foul sanitary demon!” he shouted. “I have defeated liches and lured star-things from beyond the void – I will not be devoured by some lavatorial eel!”

The thing hissed and lunged.

At that precise moment the privy door burst open with a crash, summoning in a storm of splintered wood, bones, a mop and plenty of righteous indignation.

Drury flew at the beast, clamping onto its flank with a victorious CLACK! Philomena strode in behind him, mop swinging, with Rhys and Reggie on her heels. Tenzin slipped in behind them, chanting an ancient, but only half-remembered, Tibetan warding spell that made the privy walls glow with faint disapproval.

“Hold still!” yelled Philomena.

“I AM TRYING!” screamed Durosimi, precariously perched on the wash-stand like an inebriated owl.

A chaotic melee ensued.

Mop struck slimy hide. Drury bit and shook. Rhys pinned a thrashing appendage under a fallen shelf. Tenzin’s incantations remained indifferent and inconsequential, and Reggie, mentally reliving his deeds in the Siege of Mafeking, managed to hit the beast on what was probably its snout with an old soap dish.

We will never know what was going on in the creature’s mind when he found himself suddenly  confronted by his old foes. One can only surmise, but I imagine that it was something along the lines of: “Oh bugger! Not again?”

Finally, with a combined heave, Drury and Philomena drove the creature back into the pan. Tenzin slapped a magical seal over the bowl, having finally remembered the last few lines of the Tibetan spell (which was, incidentally, originally intended to dissuade the younger members of the local Yeti community from scrawling graffiti on the monastery walls).

The privy shuddered.

A great GLUUURRPP! echoed from the depths, and the beast was gone.

—

Durosimi, wild-eyed and dishevelled, adjusted his ruined dressing gown. “You… you saved me.”

Philomena arched a brow. “Saved you again, I would say. After all, who can forget the little matter of you  being trapped in the pages of a grimoire not so long ago?”

Durosimi  looked sheepish.

“Well, I am glad you were able to come to my rescue once again,” he said. 

Philomena waited a moment or two for the footnote that would promise some form of pro quid quo, but to no one’s surprise it never materialised.

Drury, tailbone wagging, dropped a slimy bit of tentacle at Durosimi’s feet.

“I think it likes you,” said Reggie dryly.

“Marvellous,” groaned Durosimi, collapsing into the corner. 

Back at The Squid and Teapot, as they recounted the tale over stiff drinks, Philomena made a grim pronouncement:

“This thing isn’t just a pipe-creature. It’s moving through the island now and finding it’s way into the simplest of privies. It doesn’t rely on plumbing to move around. The whole place is compromised.”

Tenzin looked perplexed. “We don’t even know what the creature is called,” he said.

“Whatever it is,” said Reggie, stifling a grin, “I must say, I almost felt sorry for O’Stoat. There are few things more distressing in life than a case of defacatio interrupta, as we used to call it in the officers’ mess. Believe me, you’ve not known true panic until you’re forced to choose between finishing your business and fleeing for your life… and that is unfinished business indeed.”

Philomena sighed, patting Drury’s bony skull. “Then we too have unseen business to attend to. We had better be prepared for more trouble. I’ve a feeling this isn’t over yet.”

The Flushing Privy of The Squid and Teapot has always been a place of peculiar unrest. Not merely because it was the only halfway functional water closet on the island (though, having been in constant use for over a century, “functional” is stretching the definition), but because it plays host to two ghosts: Father Ignatius Stamage, the Phantom Jesuit, and Lady Margaret D’Avening, known to one and all as the Headless White Lady.

The hauntings of this odd couple were usually fairly arbitrary affairs. When Father Stamage wasn’t disappearing into his hat to wander the hallowed corridors of his old Alma Mater, Campion College, Oxford, he made a point of getting in the way at the most unexpected moments. Recently, he had taken it upon himself to manifest in the privy and deliver a sermon to any unfortunate who appeared to be experiencing problems, regarding the vital role of roughage in the diet.
Lady Margaret kept to her usual lack of routine, wandering headlessly about, moaning mournfully and occasionally passing through walls which she forgot weren’t doors. Lately, between the two of them, it would be a good evening if you were allowed to finish the business in hand before being hounded into a state of constipation.

But then came that night…

Philomena, Reggie, Rhys and Tenzin had just finished an unusually serene dinner of Starry-Grabby Pie and carefully harvested potatoes (long term readers may recall the hazards involved in consuming even small quantities of the island’s variety of decidedly lethal and sentient Night Potatoes).
That evening the inn was uncharacteristically quiet. The fog outside swirled like smoke around the windows, while inside the flushing privy gurgled ominously.

“I don’t like that sound,” muttered Rhys, peering towards the privy door. “It sounds like it’s thinking.”

“It’s just the pipes settling,” said Reggie, crossing his fingers under the table. “I remember an incident in Poona…”

“I accept that my knowledge of Western plumbing leaves much to be desired,” interrupted Tenzin, “but I don’t think pipes settle by growling.”

Suddenly, a screech tore through the privy wall, followed by a clatter and a splash. The temperature in the room plummeted. Father Stamage’s ghostly voice yelled, “Unclean! UNCL – ” before cutting off with a shriek. Lady Margaret’s form came sprinting backwards through the corridor, arms flailing, head rolling like a football at her feet.

Philomena, grasping her trusty mop like a knight with a lance, edged toward the door.
“Someone ought to check on the lav,” she declared, with the air of one who really hoped that it wouldn’t have to be her.
Reggie made a feeble gesture that might have been a volunteering hand, or, more likely, an attempt to bat away the rising scent of elderly plumbing.

Before anyone could decide who had seniority in a lavatory-centric emergency, the privy door burst open and slammed against the wall, shedding flakes of peeling paint and something that looked suspiciously like ectoplasm.

“Something has come up the soil pipe,” wailed Tenzin, as if that somehow made things better.

The thing that emerged was wet. It was pale. It was impossibly long, like a sock full of nightmares, and smelt like the inside of a fisherman’s boot. A dead fisherman’s boot. It had too many eyes, none of which agreed on which way to look. A long filamentous tongue flicked out, tasting the air, and then…

It lunged, hissing wetly as it launched itself across the room.

“Not in my inn, you don’t,” yelled Philomena, swinging her mop like a cricket bat, and thwacking the creature in what was quite possibly one of its stomachs. The thing squealed, with all the mellifluousness of a deflating accordion, and recoiled. But then it surged forward again, wrapping around a coat stand and dragging it into the wall with a splintering crash.

Reggie looked around unsuccessfully for his sword stick. Bereft of his weapon of choice, and his military training temporarily forgotten, he executed a perfect vertical take-off, which not only belied his years, but deposited him up on to the bar.
Tenzin, meanwhile, emitted a falsetto scream that might have been impressive under other circumstances, and began chanting something ancient, arcane and possibly illegal south of the Himalayas.
To no one’s surprise, the Thing kept coming

“Rhys, the bucket,” yelled Philomena, urgently.
With a skill honed over a decade of servicing the privies and cesspools of Hopeless, Rhys sent the full bucket skimming across the floor without a drop of liquid splashing out. Deftly hooking her mop under its handle, Philomena flicked the bucket into the creature’s snout, simultaneously stunning and soaking it through.
Ignoring this quite touching example of marital harmony, the beast shook its disgusting head, and lurched forward again.

Suddenly the pandemonium reached new heights when an extra layer of noise, reminiscent of a bag of fish knives being hurled from a trebuchet, was added by Drury, the skeletal dog of indeterminate breed and indomitable enthusiasm. The old hound hurled himself into the fray at chaotic speed, and with a delighted rattle, leapt upon the strange creature.

There followed a squelching, thudding, yelping melee. For a brief moment the beast tried to escape up the chimney, but Drury followed, managing to ascend to a surprising height before crashing down in a cloud of soot and slime, having seized the monster by what might have been its tail or possibly its uvula.
“To the privy,” commanded Reggie from his vantage point on the bar, all of the old spirit of command coming back to him.
Drury happily obliged, dragging his prey through the privy door. The monster howled in annoyance, making a sound not unlike that of bagpipes being played under water. Badly.
Inch by precious inch Drury wrestled it down the pan, and back into the depths from whence it had come. Joining into the spirit of cooperation, the toilet obligingly flushed itself with a final gurgle of exhausted triumph.

Silence fell. Father Stamage had already retreated into the safety of his hat and Lady Margaret had disappeared into the privy’s stonework.

Philomena patted Drury’s boney old skull. “You deserve a biscuit for that little demonstration, old friend.”

Drury wagged his entire bony backside. The biscuit would rattle around his ribcage for a bit, and eventually drop to the floor, but the thought was there.

“Well,” said Reggie, still standing on the bar. “I suggest we use the outside privy until further notice.”

Everyone agreed. Even Tenzin, who generally preferred the warmth and luxury afforded by indoor plumbing.

For the rest of that week, whenever the privy gurgled suspiciously, a skeletal hound could be found dozing nearby. He was dreaming of adventures, and the possibility of sparring with whatever nightmares the waste pipe might next regurgitate.

It began, as these things often do, with underwear.

Or more specifically, the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of a pair of industrial-strength lavender bloomers, belonging to Mrs Beaten. She had pegged them securely to the line behind her cottage, on one of those rare mornings when it seemed that they wouldn’t get wetter for being outside, only to find them vanished by afternoon, with the clothes-peg still bravely clinging to a length of empty string.

By the end of the week, the missing laundry list had grown. Socks. Petticoats. Norbert Gannicox’s long-johns. Some rather fine silk culottes also disappeared; they were last seen fluttering cheerfully outside the Dance Studio of Les Demoiselles de Hopeless, Maine (previously of the Moulin Rouge, where wearing such garments was almost compulsory). Even Reverend Davies’ second best cassock disappeared – though this was later retrieved from the roof of the Pallid Rock Orphanage, where it had become a temporary nesting site for a group of spoonwalkers.

The fickle finger of blame, as so often happens, turned to Drury.

It was an easy accusation. After all, he was known to have a fondness for pilfering odd items – especially laundry – and his idea of fun is to fling stolen objects into the sea and bark at them. Besides, who or what else on the island had the motive, the opportunity, and a history of dragging things about in his jaws?

“It’s got to be him,” insisted Norbert Gannicox, standing beside the line where his thermal long-johns had once proudly fluttered. “No other beast would steal a man’s winter smalls. He’s probably got a whole den of undergarments somewhere!”

But Reggie Upton, resisting the temptation to point out that it was not winter, and the items in question were by no means small, refused to accept the accusation.

“Rubbish,” he declared, arms folded firmly across his chest. “Drury is a lot of things – undead, excitable, and an occasional pain in the fundament – but he’s no thief… Well, yes he is, but to be fair, not of this magnitude, at any rate.”

He was sitting at his usual table in the Squid and Teapot, on this occasion eschewing his usual tankard of Old Colonel to loyally imbibe a pint of Rhys Cranham’s latest experimental batch of nettle beer, and attempting not to think about the aftertaste. Drury, sprawled happily under the table, gave a clatter of tail bones against the floor in appreciation.

“He doesn’t even have a soft mouth,” added Reggie. “He’d shred lace bloomers without meaning to. I’ve seen him try to carry a sponge. It disintegrated on contact.”

“Well,” said Philomena, bringing over a dish of Starry-Grabby pie, “either Hopeless has developed a poltergeist with a penchant for nether garments, or someone else is helping themselves. Maybe it’s time for us to do some laundry-based detective work.”

Reggie straightened in his chair. “Are you suggesting a trap?”

“I’m suggesting,” said Philomena, “that we hang out a decoy washing line and see who comes calling.”

That evening, a selection of garments was pegged to the line outside the inn with theatrical flair: a pair of Reggie’s old regimental underpants (once white, but now approaching a more ambiguous shade), one of Philomena’s more flamboyant petticoats, and a highly provocative brassiere that someone insisted had once belonged to Miss Calder, when she was alive. This, however, was hotly disputed, mostly by Miss Calder.

Drury was positioned in the undergrowth, tail wagging eagerly, while Reggie and Philomena kept watch from the Snuggery window with a spyglass and a flask of Reggie’s home-made absinthe.

“Three-to-one odds on spoonwalkers,” muttered Reggie.

“I’m still not ruling out a spectral laundress,” Philomena replied.

The night passed slowly. At around midnight, something shifted. A shadow moved at the edge of the garden—small, low to the ground, and very quick. Drury tensed, then sprang from hiding with a delighted clatter and galloped after it.

By the time Reggie and Philomena caught up, Drury had the culprit cornered behind the compost heap. It was a small, hunched figure, clutching a bundle of garments to its narrow chest.

“It’s the Tomte!” gasped Philomena.

You may remember that the Tomte had arrived on the island many years earlier, in the luggage of a Swedish gentleman, Mr. Blomqvist, who set up home in what became imaginatively referred to as the Blomqvist House. When Mr Blomqvist eventually shuffled off his mortal coil and went to find his own version of Valhalla, Bartholomew and Ariadne Middlestreet moved into the now empty house, and the Tomte moved out. This was on the grounds that the Middlestreets were not sufficiently Scandinavian, and therefore did not warrant the benefit of his house-keeping services. It was only when Philomena, with crossed fingers, persuaded him that her adopted children ticked the right Nordic boxes, that he moved into The Squid and Teapot.

The Tomte blinked up at them with large yellow eyes.

“They’re pretty,” he explained, gesturing to the stolen garments. It sounded a strange thing to say, in his gruff Swedish accent. What he said next was even more incongruous.

“They’re soft and all floaty floaty. They smell like nice soap and skin.”

Realising that he was probably giving the completely wrong impression, he added hurriedly,

“I don’t wear them. I just nest in them.”

Philomena softened. “At least he’s not stealing out of mischief,” she said. “It probably reminds him of home.”

“I daresay that stealing some poor devil’s washing would be the first thing that a Viking raiding party thought of,” muttered Reggie, but then he too began to feel sorry for the little man.

He rubbed his moustache thoughtfully. “Pinching a decent blanket would have made more sense.”

“Well he only had to ask,” said Philomena. “There is plenty of unwanted stuff up in the attics.”

“It doesn’t smell so good,” grunted the Tomte, and, to be honest, nobody could argue with that.

A deal was struck; he could choose whatever he needed from the attics and Philomena would wash it, and ensure that it was as fragrant as a new bride’s trousseau. The only condition was that he return everything else.

Over the next few days, parcels of folded laundry began to appear on doorsteps across the island – some cleaner than when they’d left, and all of them accompanied by a small lavender-scented sprig.

Much to Mrs Beaten’s discomfiture, Reggie mischievously volunteered to return her lilac bloomers personally.

Drury was cleared of all charges and awarded half a Starry-Grabby pie for services rendered. He carried it around for three hours before burying it under a rhubarb bush.

And thus ended the great undergarment panic, with Hopeless restored once more to its usual level of misery, vexation, and occasional sock loss.

After a difficult night dredging up old, and best forgotten memories, (as related in the previous tale, ‘A Glimmer in the Fog’), Reggie Upton trudged wearily down the stairs and into the kitchen of the Squid and Teapot. It was barely six o’clock, but the kettle was already whistling tunelessly on the hob and the comforting smell of baking filled the kitchen.

Philomena Bucket was making a batch of the inn’s ever-popular Starry-Grabby pies; flour speckled her apron and an odd strand of flaxen hair fell tumbling into her eyes. She looked up as Reggie entered, and nodded towards the woodstove.

“ You’re up and about early,” she said. “So, if you’re having a drink, you can make me one too.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” admitted Reggie. “It’s always the same whenever I spot that blasted Glimmer Man. He was around again last night, hovering about Ghastly Green like the Ghost of Misgivings Past. The blighter always puts me on edge.”

“He seems harmless enough,” said Philomena. “After all, what mischief can a couple of floating orange eyes do to you?”

Reggie fiddled with his tea cup, suddenly flustered.

“Oh, he’s such an odd sort,” he said. “Not threatening, exactly, but not what you’d call reassuring either.”

“When you came back from helping Winston,  you  definitely looked shaken.” Philomena said, quietly. “You don’t have to tell me anything. But if there’s something you’re carrying, it might help to talk about it.”

Reggie was silent for a long moment. Outside, the sun began its futile daily attempt to break through the fog bank that envelopes the island.

“I keep thinking,” he said finally, “that I’m not the man people think I am. They see the medals, the military bearing and moustaches and think: ‘There goes a chap who’s stared down the enemy and returned with a tale or two to tell.’ But there are tales I’ve never told. Not to anyone.”

Philomena said nothing, but poured him a mug of nettle tea and waited.

Reggie stared at the rising steam. “It was on the Frontier. India. 1880.  I was a subaltern then, all polished buttons and ignorance. I’d been given temporary command of a small company. They were young lads, mostly. Eighteen or nineteen. Barely old enough to shave, let alone die.”

Philomena flinched slightly but didn’t interrupt.

“We were escorting supplies through a narrow gorge; it was supposed to be a simple march, but someone had tipped off the local dissidents. We were ambushed from above; gunfire, rocks, screaming. It was over in minutes. Maybe seconds. We hadn’t a chance.”

Reggie’s voice cracked like an old window frame.

“I remember falling. There was blood – so much of blood – and the weight of Private Camm slumped across me. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. But they didn’t check the bodies. They assumed we were all dead.”

He swallowed hard.

“So I stayed there. Perfectly still. For hours. Underneath the corpses of the men I’d led. Boys who’d trusted me. I lay in silence while the birds came to peck at them. And when night fell, I crawled out and made my way back to camp.”

Philomena reached across the table, placing her hand gently over his.

“I told the colonel that the lads died bravely, and that I had fought on, against all odds, until I managed to send those cowardly scoundrels scuttling off, back up into the mountains.The army gave me a commendation. Within the year I was promoted. They even wrote a letter to my mother.”

He gave a short, bitter laugh. “She had it framed.”

“And you’ve lived with this ever since,” said Philomena softly.

“More than that,” he said. “I hid under those boys. Let them die while I played dead. That isn’t courage. It’s cowardice, dressed in a uniform.”

Philomena shook her head. “It’s survival. War is not all honour and bugles, Reggie. It’s chaos. You lived because you had to. And perhaps – just perhaps – you lived because someone, or something, wanted you to live.”

Reggie looked up sharply. “What do you mean?”

“I mean this island doesn’t collect souls by accident. You’ve seen too much to be ordinary. Maybe the Glimmer Man wasn’t a warning, but an invitation – to stop hiding under the weight of guilt and walk into the light of your own truth.”

He frowned. “That sounds suspiciously like something Annie Besant would have said to me.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” said Philomena.

A silence settled over them, gentler now. Outside, the sun was still fighting a losing battle with the fog. Reggie exhaled long and slow, as if releasing something long held.

“Thank you, m’dear,” he said.

Philomena smiled. “Nothing stays buried on Hopeless, remember? But some things can be laid to rest.”

Reggie nodded. For the first time in years, he felt a little lighter. Almost – though he’d never admit it – hopeful.

A faint glimmer hovered outside the kitchen window. You could almost imagine that they were eyes that watched and quietly approved, before slipping back into the fog.

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…