You can say whatever you want about Durosimi O’Stoat, but he is definitely not a man known to frighten easily. During his lifetime the sorcerer has battled with an assortment of demons, ghouls and night-stalkers, each intent on finding ever more novel means of assisting him to shuffle off his mortal coil in as violent and unpleasant a manner as is possible.
On the occasion of our tale, however, Durosimi was feeling real fear. His heartbeat was irregular, his legs felt weak, an icy hand gripped his heart and his bowels and bladder were dangerously close to deciding that preparation for flight would be decidedly preferable to fighting. One could be forgiven for not daring to dwell upon the terrifying nature of the creature threatening him.
Just a few minutes earlier he had been quietly poring over some ancient grimoire when, to his great surprise, the front door had inexplicably blown open, scattering books and parchments all over the room, tipping over his desk and chair, and pinning him to the wall. Filling the space where the door used to hang properly stood an ominous figure, a pale goddess, huge and menacing, with dreadful, merciless eyes. In her right hand she carried a brazen spear that crackled and spat blue fire.
‘Oh no, it’s the Morrigan,” Durosimi whimpered as he slid to the floor, half-dazed.
When he opened his eyes, a few seconds later, some semblance of normality had returned, although the front door still dangled precariously from one hinge. Standing before him, not wielding a flaming spear, but a rolling pin, was Philomena Bucket.
“Do you have any idea what you have done?” she raged, her usually wan features flushed with anger. “Your meddling has opened the door to all sorts of nightmares.”
Durosimi wilted beneath the force of Philomena’s fury. True, to look at her she appeared small, weak and vulnerable, but this surging wave of vituperation carried upon it the combined might of countless generations of powerful witches, a force that threatened to crush Durosimi into a quivering pulp.
Despite this, Philomena could not help but feel a twinge of sympathy for the wretched man cowering in the corner. After all, plenty of her ancestors had allowed ambition to be their downfall.
“What did you do, exactly,” asked Philomena, in a more conciliatory tone. “Maybe you… we… can put it right.”
Durosimi shook his head.
“I don’t know what can be done,” he confessed. “The spell was meant to open a portal. There was no clue as to how it can be sealed.”
“And meanwhile,” said Philomena, bitterly, “all sorts of abominations are dropping through it.”
“Maybe your friend the Sasquatch might have an idea,” suggested Durosimi, hopefully. “He seems to be adept at opening and closing portals.”
“Not ones like this,” replied Philomena, “but I suppose it will be worth our while asking Mr Squash.”
“I’ve been studying this new phenomenon,” said Mr Squash enthusiastically, “and it’s rather interesting. I’ve noticed that most of those creatures dropping through it have very short lives, mainly because they are eating each other.”
“Ugh!” spluttered Philomena in disgust. “What about that man-thing that came out first?”
“Oh, you mean the Glimmer-Man? He has crept off into the forest. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of him, unfortunately.”
“But do you have any idea how we seal the portal?” asked Durosimi.
“No,” said Mr Squash. “And I don’t think that it is a portal, as such. However, I believe its presence explains a lot about why Hopeless is so strange.”
“Really?” said Durosimi, keen to salvage something worthwhile from this catastrophe.
“I call it my Fried Egg Theory,” said Mr Squash, only too happy to expound.
“Think of Hopeless as the yolk, and the egg-white surrounding it as a realm of Chaos, by and large cocooning the island from the normal laws of time and space. Occasionally people get here from any point in history, and much more rarely, some have been able to escape.”
“What about the Underland?” asked Philomena. “There’s a way out through there.”
“Only to a point,” said the Sasquatch. “As you know only too well, it’s a dead end that will take you so far and no further.’
“But you manage to come and go as you please,” protested Durosimi, not a little enviously.
“That is because I am, what you humans ignorantly refer to as, a cryptid. We travel at will through the dimensions.”
“So could you go to this Chaos place?” asked Philomena.
“Not willingly,” said Mr Squash, with a shudder. “Anything which ventures into that realm could find itself changed beyond recognition. Our friend the Glimmer-Man is a case in point. He was probably an over-curious sorcerer once.”
Durosimi paled, and suddenly felt the need to sit down.
“As for the anomaly,” said Mr Squash, “in my experience, such things heal up after a short time. Even my portals need remaking every few months. Until then, you’ll just have to put up with those things dropping out of it – but as I said, they tend to devour each other.”
“I wonder if Durosimi has learned his lesson from all of this?” said Philomena to her husband, Rhys Cranham later that day. They were sitting in the snuggery of the Squid and Teapot. Drury, the skeletal hound, lay snoring in the corner.
“Do you think that the sinkhole at the bottom of the garden at Poo Corner leads to Chaos?” asked Rhys, who had been the island’s Night-Soil Man until little over a year ago. “It has been the burial place for generations of Night-Soil Men. I’d hate to think that they’d been transformed into something nasty.”
“I really hope not,” said Philomena. “But maybe it’s a tradition that should stop.”
“There’s also a legend that Killigrew O’Stoat, the very first Night-Soil Man, had a dog,” said Rhys. “When the dog died, Killigrew was so heartbroken that he couldn’t bear to bury it, lest something dug it up and ate the poor animal. To avoid that, he cast the dog’s corpse into the sinkhole.”
The pair both turned their gaze to Drury, who had been a presence on Hopeless for more years than anyone could guess. He was snuffling and twitching, chasing spoonwalkers across his dreams.
“Maybe something good did come out of it, after all,” smiled Philomena.
Authors note: The story of Killigrew and his dog can be seen in the tale ‘A Dog’s Life’.
