A Spinning Jenny is an advanced multi bobbin spinning wheel that first revolutionised the manufacture of cotton in the 1700s and set up the cotton trade in Lancashire and Yorkshire, kickstarting the industrial revolution , destroying the rural economy and making the farmer workers into city peasantry.
A Spinning Jenny is also what my mum would call a daddly-long-legs, or cellar spider , the type that’s all legs and tiny body. I think it was a popular name for them as Leeds was big in the cotton trade and spiders get everywhere , and those long legged ones tend to hand form a single thread a lot.
Anyway so a Spinning Jenny is to me not an early piece of mill equipment but a tiny spider with very long legs.
(all the above is entirely true)
A walloping jenny is a very large ‘tiny’ spider with very ever long legs , but as Hopeless is not the safest of environments, the front two legs have grown even longer and developed nub like clubs at the end of them with which the ‘wallop’ things. Sometimes , on those brief hot hours you might call summer elsewhere , the population booms and walloping jennies go one the rampage like a million tiny drummers… and not one of the buggers can keep time.
This can be loud but not a problem.
Urban legend says that once in a while you get a really really big walloping Jenny , then you have a problem.
Good evening. It is my unfortunate task to try and prepare you a little for life on Hopeless, Maine. I must warn you that this is a terrible place, full of dreadful, horrible things. Many of which really are too terrible to describe. I will do my best to prepare you for the dire things that you may expect to encounter and while I shall try to speak circumspectly, the more delicate amongst you should be warned that you may struggle with what I have to say. Make sure that you have your smelling salts to hand, and if you need to unlace an excessively tight corset, please do so discreetly so as not to cause anyone else to swoon in an embarrassing manner.
Prepare yourself for the awfulness of collars and cuffs. There is so little sunlight here that laundry cannot be sunbleached, and greying occurs all too often. Further, there are very few good sources of starch, making it desperately difficult to keep collars in good, stiff positions. You may be tempted to use night potatoes in this regard, but I advise against this. Night potatoes are horrid things, with glowing eyes and writhing tentacles, but the worst of it is that if you do not prepare them in exactly the right way, they can stain your clothes! I’m sorry, there’s really no gentler way of putting this to people.
You are probably used to much higher standards than it is possible to maintain here on the island. You will struggle, for example, to find anything suitable for washing your hair with. There are of course eggs, but eggs are often in short supply and you may be forced to make the ghastly choice between shiny hair, and making a cake. Do not use glass heron eggs. They work perfectly well, but your chances of losing a digit, or a limb to the glass heron are high and this offsets any good to your appearance that the egg might have achieved.
While a decent amount of cutlery has been salvaged from shipwrecks over the years, the island suffers a terrible lack of spoons. There is an ongoing spoon crisis, and you would do well to keep your spoons with you at all times. This seems to be the only way to keep them safe from whatever appalling entities make it their business to steal them. And as I’m sure you can see, it is difficult to run a good kitchen without spoons. No one wants the shameful indignity of having to drink soup from a bowl.
Fabric is also in short supply. You will need your mending skills and will be obliged to accept lower standards in fashion and neatness alike. Your stain removal skills will often be called upon. When preparing sea monsters, it is all too easy to get sprays of dark substances onto one’s clothing and they are notoriously hard to remove. Since coming here I have had to improve my techniques for dealing with scorch marks, and blood stains as well. Keeping things clean is an ongoing struggle and you may well lose sleep over it. I myself lost a great deal of sleep last week regarding the amount of tearing my clothing suffered and the difficulty of repairing my best dress. So let that be a warning to you.
Philomena Bucket looked at Reggie Upton in surprise.
“Did you make that one up yourself?” she asked, admiringly. “It’s very good.”
“Good Lord, no” laughed Reggie. “It’s by a young chap named Masefield. He’s a bit of a poet who once persuaded me to buy a copy of one of his books. It was called ‘Salt Water Ballads’, and was full of that sort of thing. That particular poem came to mind after I saw the sailing ship that had floundered on the rocks, down by Scilly Point, yesterday.”
“Oh yes, I heard about that,” said Philomena. “Do you know if there were any survivors?”
“None that I have heard about,” replied Reggie, sadly. “I am fairly sure they would have made themselves known by now.”
It was true. Most newcomers to the island of Hopeless, Maine, seemed to turn up at the door of The Squid and Teapot eventually.
Trickster looked down at his new meat-suit with approval. It had taken little effort to persuade the drunken sea captain to drive his ship on to the fog-bound rocks. Trickster was an old hand at things like that. More difficult was the task of ensuring that the well-dressed young man, who appeared to be the schooner’s solitary passenger, survived the catastrophe unscathed. Trickster did not know, or indeed care, that the owner of the merchantman was, even then, waiting anxiously for his son to arrive on the quayside at Newhaven, Connecticut. All that the lad meant to Trickster was the means to a very desirable meat-suit; one that no one on the island had seen before.
“That chair has got four legs,” scolded Mrs Ephemery. “Break it, and you’ll be sorry.”
The well-dressed young man flashed the landlady a charming smile and dutifully eased his weight forward, allowing the chair to sit squarely, once more, upon the floor of the inn.
It was such a pity that he had to frequent The Crow in order to conclude his business. Unfortunately, it would be to here, and not to the far more hospitable environs of The Squid and Teapot, that those lads, whom the islanders insisted on calling ‘The Famous Five’, would be returned, now that they had almost recovered from their ordeal at the hands of Durosimi O’Stoat. There was still the issue of their amnesia, of course, and that was something that Trickster wanted to put right. Naturally, this was not out of any sense of altruism, or wishing to help the Famous Five. It was purely a means of making Durosimi’s life a little more uncomfortable, for if the truth of their captivity was to get out, Durosimi would become even less popular than he was at present; it might even lead to violent retribution. One could but hope.
Trickster had no wish to physically harm Durosimi; he was perfectly content to do no more than create the circumstances which would provide the sorcerer with an occasional, but generous, helping of misery. If, on the other hand, a series of events should lead to Durosimi’s downfall, then so be it. In the meantime, he would linger here in The Crow, eat their lousy food, and wait to restore the memories that those five young men had so inconveniently mislaid. Like the best laid plans of mice and men, however, Trickster’s schemes do not always come to the pleasing conclusion that he has envisaged.
The Famous Five were, by now, deemed eligible for discharge from the Pallid Rock Orphanage, where they had been hospitalised for a week or so. It was with light hearts and optimism that they set off that morning, bound for their local inn, The Crow, where a welcome-home party had been arranged. To begin with all seemed fairly normal, or as normal as could reasonably be expected on Hopeless. It was after little more than a few hundred yards into their journey, however, that they noticed how the perennial fog, which wraps itself coldly around the island, seemed to be growing unusually thick, and stealthily creeping in from the sea with all the subtlety of a well-worn Gothic cliché. Despite this, the young men wandered into its chilly embrace with good spirits, laughing and singing with all of the exuberance of youth. It was only when other voices joined theirs that they paused to listen. These new songsters sweetened the air with pure and melodious harmonies, intoxicating and irresistible to those young ears. As one, the five turned and walked through the unrelenting fog to where the voices called them, totally bewitched and besotted. They stumbled over rocks, through soft sand and sucking mud, until the cold Atlantic lapped around their feet, but still they did not stop, drawn ever onward by the seductive siren-song. Not until the water had reached their chests, and insistent, unseen hands drew them beneath the waves with preternatural strength, did they realise, too late, their awful fate. It was only then that they beheld, with horror, the hideous creatures who had serenaded them.
A solitary figure stood in the already thinning fog. He knew that summoning the sirens would have its cost. There was always a price to be paid. He really hoped that the five fresh victims would be payment enough, but he had his doubts.
Durosimi sighed, and wrapped his cloak tightly around him.
“It was necessary to do this,” he told himself. “That only leaves young Septimus Washwell to attend to now.”
As the day wore on, Trickster became more and more convinced that something was amiss, and that Durosimi was at the bottom of it. The Famous Five should have been back hours ago. Even Mr and Mrs Ephemery, who managed the inn, had given up on them, and was taking down the crude bunting that proclaimed “Welkum Home Famus 5”
With an angry kick, Trickster sent his chair spinning across the room, where it shattered into matchwood against the far wall. Freezing Mrs Ephemery’s spluttered protestations in mid-sentence with a wave of his hand, he strode out of The Crow in a rage, slamming the big oak door behind him.
“It is time to go to The Squid and Teapot,” he muttered. “At least there I can plot my revenge on O’Stoat in something resembling civilized comfort.”
This rather troubling snake (snak…. snek…) was discovered by Rhys Quinn back in the summer.
Now, we’ve had this conversation before about worshipping things. There are a lot of beings on the island that will try to persuade you that they are Gods and you should do their bidding. I remind you of that whole business with Ctholin.
Whether all of the things on the island claiming to be elder gods really are such things it is hard to say. However, this is your friendly reminder not to offend The Cuttlefish Overlords nor to cause the Ire of the Unspeakable Being who resides in the rafters of the church.
Roz White, who has previously been accused of Making Things Up, might well have made this one up as well. Unfortunately, proof could be hard to come by insofar as there is a chance that, if true, the subject of this report has made off with said evidence. On the other hand, if the assertion turns out to be false, how are the missing pieces of paper from Ms White’s notebooks to be accounted for?
It all began when she opened her back door one blustery day (there are so many of those on the island that it is impossible to nail the date down any further) and saw a sheet of paper scurrying away. It rapidly vanished under the larder door and she thought no more of it – until she went to retrieve it later (a Later involving coffee and a mild lacing of rum)… and it was not there. Every now and then, Ms White noticed other sheets disappearing, breezing along the floor even when there was no breeze for them to breeze upon. It became bothersome when she made the correlation between the missing sheets and vital notes to her latest attempts at Making-Things-Up.
Thus she came to the conclusion that her notebooks were indeed a new lifeform. Named Paperthins, mainly for what they are of course, what they do, where they go and more importantly what they eat (always a vital question on the island, of course) remain so far shrouded in Mystery, and may indeed be merely another literary device intended to excite curiosity and hopefully an Urge To Purchase (Ms White is, after all, somewhat dependent upon such Purchases, and so her part in this ought surely to be suspect). But in the meantime, caution is urged, and as a preliminary measure it is recommended that all sheets of paper be nailed to the surface on which they rest. Much in the manner of errant Vampires…
“I would hope that Mirielle will now have the good grace to apologise to Septimus,” said Reggie Upton. “She did not believe him when he told her that he had amnesia, and now that those fellows have returned with the same symptoms, it proves that he was telling the truth.”
He paused for a few seconds, then added, “But, sadly, knowing Mirielle, as we both do…”
He let the sentence hang in the air, unfinished. The nod of agreement from Philomena Bucket was enough to tell him that there was no need to say more.
“It seems as though he got off lightly,” said Philomena. “Septimus is only suffering from memory-loss, whereas those other poor lads seem to have lost their reason altogether.”
“Hopefully it’s only temporary,” said Reggie. “Still, it’s a dashed mystery where they have been all this time, and to get into such a state.”
The reappearance of the five young men, who had been secretly enslaved by Durosimi O’Stoat, had caused quite a stir on the island. Most people had given them up for dead. When they eventually emerged, blank-eyed and brain-addled, having been subjected to a toxic mixture of drugged ale and Durosimi’s cloaking spell, they were deemed by some to be little more than walking corpses. Fortunately, Septimus Washwell’s refusal to drink the drugged ale had allowed him to escape after just three days, with nothing worse than having no recollection of where he had been.
It was generally decided that, rather than return them to their homes immediately, the young men should be temporarily housed in one of the empty dormitories of the Pallid Rock Orphanage, where the ghostly Miss Calder, and her equally ghostly assistant, Miss Toadsmoor, would be able to keep an eye on them, and monitor their progress around the clock. There was a certain downside to this arrangement, however, as both of these ladies are – as the word ‘ghostly’ might suggest – no more than shades, albeit friendly and helpful ones. As such, they would be unable to carry out the various physical tasks associated with nursing care. It had been hoped that Reverend Davies and his wife might be willing to lend a hand, but strangely, both had found their diaries to be unusually full for the foreseeable future.
Some might claim that it was purely a burst of community spirit that saved the day. My own view is that the main driving-force was curiosity. Whatever the reason, there was soon a constant flow of island residents, each eager to see, for themselves, the ‘Famous Five’, as the lads were now known, and every visitor was expected to do their bit to help. Such expectation was often greeted with dismay, but Miss Calder’s undisputed charm, coupled with her unnerving habit of absent-mindedly replacing her very pleasant facial features with that of a grinning skull, were enough to convince most that it would be wise to comply.
One person who managed to avoid carrying out nursing duties was Doc Willoughby, who insisted that he was visiting in his capacity as a medical professional, declaring that he would certainly be able to diagnose the problem and suggest a cure. Following a stream of important-sounding “Ahs” and “Hmms”, accompanied by a series of pokes and prods, he pronounced the five to have a rare and life-threatening condition, known to the medical world as Urtica dioica.
“Unfortunately,” he announced gravely, as he left, “there is no known cure.”
“Could you smell alcohol on his breath?” asked Miss Calder, as she watched the Doc wandering unsteadily down the pathway.
“Yes,” replied Marjorie Toadsmoor, with a flickering grin, “and he’s just diagnosed the lads to be suffering from stinging nettles. It must have been a bit of Latin that he heard somewhere, and it stuck!”
The two phantom carers shrieked with laughter, causing the hair of more than one passer-by to turn prematurely white.
Not everyone celebrated the return of the ‘Famous Five’ with enthusiasm.
For the past week Durosimi O’Stoat had been cowering beneath his bed-clothes, terrified that the huge demon toad that had foiled his plans to gain access to the Underland would pursue him. When Doc Willoughby came hammering on his door, bearing news of the reappearance of the five young men (whom he had recently diagnosed as having a nasty case of stinging nettles), the sorcerer was not thrilled. He realised that he had been made a fool of, and there was only one being who frequented Hopeless who was able to pull off such a stunt. Trickster!
To the Doc’s great disappointment, he was dismissed with unseemly haste, and not a mouthful of whisky for his trouble. Still, he reflected, it was probably all for the best; when Durosimi was in this mood it was as well to be as far away from him as humanly possible.
Durosimi paced the floor, smouldering with anger, his mind racing.
Why had Trickster saved those youngsters? That was not his style; what could he up to?
Did he plan to use those five young men against him? That must be it. Well, two could play at that game. But no… that was not right.
Durosimi was well aware that, despite his magical skills, he was no match for Trickster. The old rogue was as old as time itself, and if he had you in his sights, then you were done for. But Trickster was not infallible, not by a long way; he made mistakes. He had even been chased, while in the guise of a white hare, over a cliff by a band of spoonwalkers (as was related in the tale ‘The Kindness of Spoonwalkers’).
Durosimi smiled to himself grimly. He would tread carefully around Trickster. But those young men – what was it that people were calling them? The Famous Five, they were his immediate problem, his weak link, his Achilles heel. Them, and the Washwell fellow. The effects of the ale and the cloaking spell would not last forever, and if the truth of their abduction was to get out, there would be condemnation and a thirst for retribution, which even he might have difficulty in controlling. All six of them needed to be silenced, and sooner rather than later.
“They must all disappear, and this time for good,” he said aloud, and the air around him grew icy.
Image by Sarah Snell Pym, further text by Nimue Brown.
The lesser spotted Alaric was in fact spotted by Sarah Snell Pym, who is the island’s resident expert when it comes to the many and various curious habits of the Alaric.
On the whole, Alarics tend to be shy and subtle creatures. Many of us will never knowingly see one.
The firestarting capabilities of these beings had been thought to simply be folkloric wishful thinking. The island is so cold and damp, that of course we all long for easy ways to make and sustain a good fire and it is only natural that there are many tales of things that do this, despite the general lack of scientific evidence to support such claims. Who amongst us has not struggled to get passably dry kindling to burn?
However, the resident expert on the Alaric has now confirmed that the fire-making abilities are real. We advise against any sudden attempts to lure Alarics into your homes, and remind you of that time we all got very excited about what the black eyed meese were supposed to do and exactly how badly that went for people. There is a noted risk that the Alaric will burn your home down, and this is not a threat to take lightly.
No one knows for certain who it was that made the Jessica Law doll. There are some who say it was Jessica herself, although even they argue about whether the doll is a product of some terrible occult action, or some equally terrible scientific madness.
The Jessica doll is two feet high – considerably smaller than the original. If you take the doll by the shoulders and engage it in a walking motion, the head swivels slowly from side to side and the eyelids go up and down. It is a most disconcerting effect. What is more troubling however is the way in which the doll moves any time you aren’t looking at it. These movements are often small and are seldom intrinsically threatening, but it is certainly the case that the doll declines to stay still for long.
If you find the doll inside your home, my advice is not to make it walk, nor to attempt to engage it in conversation. Treat it with respect and allow it plenty of space. That you could find the doll unexpectedly in your house is a distinct possibility. Do not, under any circumstances allow your children to play with it. While there is no clear evidence that the doll has evil intentions towards children, may I point out that it is both a doll, and clearly haunted and that a risk to children is a reasonable inference.
Of course the doll primarily raises questions about the whereabouts and activities of the original Jessica Law. There are some who say they saw her in the sea some months ago, and that she had grown tentacles, or perhaps reverted to her original and tentacular form. There are others who claim that she has become a terrifying bird-woman and now spends most of her time on the cliffs screaming at the sea. Others assure me that she was a mermaid all along. Any of these things are possible. Perhaps all of these things are possible and she is a creature of many shapes and natures. If that is so, then perhaps the Jessica Law doll really is Jessica herself, in her current manifestation.
“The British Empire,” declared Reggie Upton, proudly, “is the greatest and most powerful that the world has ever seen. It is rightly called The Empire Upon Which The Sun Never Sets.”
“Pah!” exclaimed Mirielle D’Illay, dismissively. “That is just as well. No one would ever trust an Englishman in the dark.”
Reggie managed to stifle a smile, although his eyes twinkled with merriment. Despite Mirielle’s apparent Anglophobia, the old soldier could not help but like her. He had witnessed her vulnerability in recent weeks, when her husband, Septimus, mysteriously vanished. The patrons of The Squid and Teapot had scoured the island looking for the young man, but to no avail. When Septimus suddenly reappeared after a few days, having no memory of where he had been, Mirielle was torn between anger and relief. This was something that Reggie could understand and empathise with, for these were emotions that had plagued him a dozen or more times during his military career.
“Would you two please stop bickering,” groaned Philomena Bucket, totally misreading the situation. “We all need to focus our attention on what is important, as we are no closer to finding those lads who went missing from The Crow than we were a week ago.”
It was true. The young men seemed to have disappeared completely. While such occurrences were not rare on Hopeless, for five people to simultaneously go missing from the same place, and for no apparent reason, was a little odd.
“Philomena,” said Mirielle, gently, “we have looked everywhere. I cannot help but feel that those boys are a lost cause by now.”
“We shouldn’t give up,” said Philomena, defiantly. “I still think that Durosimi O’Stoat is behind all of this and I’d bet anything that he knows where they are.”
Philomena would have won her wager, for Durosimi did, indeed, know, but he was not likely to tell anyone; not about the hidden cave, or of the zombie-like slaves toiling deep beneath the surface of the island.
For long years, Durosimi had been desperate to find a route to the Underland. He had stumbled upon vague rumours and references to the existence of such a place, but there had been nothing concrete, no first-hand accounts from explorers. Then that blasted Bucket woman, along with Gannicox the Distiller and Middlestreet from The Squid, had found a secret passageway that led to its entrance. Oh, it was so unfair, that this meddling witch should accidentally chance upon the very spot that he, a great and powerful sorcerer, had been seeking for decades. To make matters worse, the foolish woman had recently destroyed the tunnels before he could find a way of getting into them. She had deliberately made the magical cavern inaccessible to anyone, declaring it unsafe.
Durosimi had fumed and brooded over this for months. Of course it was unsafe! It was meant to be unsafe! The Underland was no place for amateurs like the Bucket woman and her cronies to be tramping around. It was meant for the wise, for the initiated – for himself.
It had been Doc Willoughby who had inadvertently sown the seeds of hope that another way might be found to the Underland.
“I overheard the Bucket woman telling Ariadne Middlestreet that she had successfully destroyed the first hundred yards of something she called ‘the west tunnel’,” the Doc had confided, holding out his glass for a refill of whisky. “Although, I must admit, I have no idea what she was talking about. I thought that you might be interested, though.”
Durosimi had found it useful to invite Willoughby to his home occasionally, ply him with copious amounts of alcohol, and listen to the gossip circulating in the Squid.
“Hmm… it might be worthwhile to find out what she meant,” said Durosimi, his offhand tone in direct contrast with the excitement welling up inside him.
Metaphorical wheels were soon set in motion. It had not been too difficult to find a convenient means of ingress into the earth, and from there plot the line leading westward from The Squid and Teapot, to the portal of the Underland. Neither was it difficult for Durosimi to recruit some gullible young men to do the heavy lifting for him. The whole project, however, required great secrecy. Fortunately, Durosimi was very, very good at secrecy.
Of course, young Washwell had proved an annoyance, managing to escape as he did. Still, an annoyance was not necessarily a problem. Durosimi congratulated himself on securing the hidden cave with a cloaking spell, which also served to render his slaves totally unaware of where they were, or why. Except for this small detail, everything seemed to be progressing well.
It was under the cover of foggy darkness, during the few days that fell between the waning of the old moon and the waxing of the new, that Durosimi went to check how the work was progressing. He carried with him a bag containing a few meagre rations; food must be running low by now, and those youngsters would need all of their strength for the task before them.
He wandered deep underground, down the steep pathway to where his slaves toiled. He noted, with satisfaction, that the dim lights he had set into the wall still glowed with an eerie luminescence. Despite this, the all-pervading silence told him that there was something wrong. Upon reaching the cavern where the work was meant to be going on, he found it deserted. The light in here was even poorer than in the passages, so Durosimi lit the lantern he had brought with him and held it aloft. It took a moment or two for his eyes to adjust to the comparative brightness, then he gasped in horror. What he had imagined to be a mound of rocks proved to be a huge toad, towering above him, warty and squat. The toad’s eyes glittered and regarded him with unbridled malevolence.
“You are not welcome here mortal,” it rasped, its wide slash of a mouth leering unpleasantly.
“My workers… what have you done with them?” said Durosimi, his voice trembling.
The toad said nothing, but flicked its long tongue disconcertingly close to Durosimi, deftly relieving him of the bag of food that he was carrying.
Durosimi froze. The next time that tongue came out, it could be the finish of him.
“Be gone, and do not return, unless you wish to join them,” said the toad.
Durosimi cautiously stepped away, not daring to turn his back on the repulsive creature until he was safely out of range of that awful sticky tongue. Then he ran. He ran until he was well clear of the cave, to fall gasping and retching upon the doorstep of his house.
What had those lads unearthed? What was that awful thing?
Well, it was a demon, that was for sure, but none that he had ever heard of. These thoughts rushed through Durosimi’s mind in a torrent. He knew his own limits and decided, there and then, that it would be nothing but folly to go back into the cave. That thing had probably lived down there for years – hundreds of years, or maybe more. Discretion, Durosimi decided, was, on this occasion, the better part of valour.
Deep beneath the surface of the island, the toad stirred. It shook its huge body and, if anyone had been foolish enough to be an onlooker, they would have been more than a little surprised to see it start to shrink, gradually becoming as diminutive and shapeless as a deflated balloon. In that half-light they would have witnessed a figure lifting itself from the rocks around its feet, and casually dust itself down.
“Well, that was fun,” chuckled Trickster, smugly. “It has been far too long since O’Stoat was last put in his place.”
He looked about him at the five young men who stood unmoving in the shadows. They were still zombiefied, Trickster noticed, but there would be no permanent harm. Well… probably not, but that was not his problem.
“Come on,” he said, “it’s your lucky day, lads. After that satisfying little episode with O’Stoat I’m feeling unusually generous. Let’s all get out of here now – and I haven’t visited The Crow for ages.”
David Feasey has spotted a three new island creatures, and one we are pretty sure we’ve seen before. Experts from the Hopeless, Maine Scientific Society suspect that the leaf crawler might in fact be a gutter creature, although arguments continue about whether there really is a head at each end, or whether David might have observed a pair of them engaged in some kind of unconventional mating activity.
We are reliably informed that the Benistanto Batiliot is delicious, if somewhat chewy.
