This week, Erek Vaehne takes us into the fabric potential of mushrooms.
This could happen to you.
MUSHROOMS: The technical process of making fabric from fungus or mushrooms is known as bio-fabrication. This process is basically making the fabric from the growing part of microorganisms like mushroom root. However, the interesting thing is that this process has shown the relationship between fashion and biology, and how fashion comes very close to biology. For lab production, different treatments (like lighting, temperature, humidity, essential oils & other organic techniques) have to be applied for the nutrition and growth of the mushrooms with the help of a petri dish. After 2-3 weeks, they are ready for harvest and marinated with another liquid, and then taken out and placed in the circular 3D-shaped mold. And eventually, through drying, they are transformed into garments. The advantage of this ‘MycoTex’ fabric is that the garment is made without sewing. So, this process can reduce production time and cost. Different fungus mycelium can give different appearances and hand feels for the resulting products. This eco-friendly mushroom fiber has some unique properties that are not found in other sustainable fibers. Some of its notable features are:
1) Fabric made from the mushroom fiber is non-toxic, waterproof and fire resistant.
2) Clothing made from this fiber is very thin, flexible and comfortable to wear.
3) The ingredients made from this fiber are antimicrobial and suitable for sensitive skin.
4) Mushroom fabric is strong, breathable and durable.
5) Requires less water for production.
6) It is an environmentally friendly and 100% biodegradable fiber.
So there was this one autumn when food was scarce and I ended up making a lot of bad choices about toadstools. Hunger doesn’t lend itself to being sensible. I ate grass. I ate things I found on the beach – we all did that. I ate all the kinds of seaweed that everyone agrees really aren’t for eating even if you boil them for a week. I wandered about in the woods and I found some toads, and some toadstools, and something green and yellow that might have been snakes, or eels. I don’t know how you tell.
It’s not a certainty it was the toadstools. I ended up with the overwhelming urge to make trousers. I had very strong feelings about the things I was supposed to make trousers out of – toadstools featured heavily, as did moonlight, seaweed and some rather sinister flowers that I thought better of putting in the toad, toadstool and maybe snake stew. It would be fair to say that as trousers, they failed to perform many of the key functions associated with that kind of garment.
I’m not sure it mattered. Not given what happened at the library, which we do not speak of, to protect the guilty. As hunger-induced madness goes, it was fairly mild.
The defining quality of a hermit is that you never see the whole creature. What emerges from the chosen shell may suggest something to you, but inside the shell there is mystery. The hermits do not like to be fully known. They shelter the truth of themselves inside whatever they find that fits.
They aren’t a species. All kinds of creatures can produce the odd hermit here and there. These are the oceanic introverts, the shy entities that do not want anyone to see their posteriors.
For beach scavengers, a hermit on the shore is always a tempting proposition. The shells can make them easier to catch, and it is sometimes a simple business to cook the entire hermit inside whatever they’ve hidden in. Of course it won’t be until you get the hermit out of the shell that you’ll know if they were worth the effort of baking them.
Norbert Gannicox leaned conspiratorially across the bar of The Squid and Teapot and asked, in tones barely more than a whisper,
“What do you know about absinthe?”
Bartholomew Middlestreet frowned, and paused for a moment before replying.
“It makes the heart the grow fonder?” he suggested.
“No, that’s absence,” snapped Norbert, impatiently, his voice suddenly louder. “I asked, what do you know about absinthe? It’s a sort of drink”
Before Bartholomew could formulate a suitable reply, Reggie Upton had sidled to the bar.
“I couldn’t help overhearing what you were saying, old chap,” he said. “It made the old ears prick up, I must admit. Do you really have absinthe down at the distillery?”
“Not yet,” said Norbert, “but there’s a chance I might be making some. I was wondering if anyone knew anything about it.”
“Not me,” said Bartholomew. “It’s certainly nothing we’ve ever kept at The Squid.”
“I think I might be able to help, I have some experience of that particular spirit,” said Reggie. “What exactly do you need to know?”
“Everything, really,” admitted Norbert. “Mirielle, one of Les Demoiselles, was telling young Septimus Washwell that they drank a lot of it in that Mill place where she and the other girls used to work.”
“Ah, I’ve heard some excellent reports regarding Les Demoiselles, but have not yet seen them in action,” said Reggie, with a roguish twinkle in his eye. “But I think you’ll find that the Moulin Rouge isn’t strictly a working mill, as you might understand it to be.”
“That’s as maybe,” replied Norbert, “but Mirielle seems to think that I should be making absinthe. The truth is, I don’t know where to start.”
“Then it’s a jolly good job that I’m on hand,” said Reggie. “If I am to help, however, I’ll need to do a spot of flâneuring around the island, and see if I can locate some wormwood.”
“Wormwood?” said Bartholomew. “Whatever is that?”
It was at that moment that Father Ignatius Stamage chose to thrust his ghostly head through the wall, making everyone jump with surprise.
“Did I hear someone mention wormwood?” he asked. “You don’t want to be touching that stuff. It is the bitter and malignant plant that God inflicts upon the ungodly.”
The phantom Jesuit slipped back into the wall, only to manifest again some seconds later.
“Jeremiah, chapter nine, verses twelve to fourteen,” he added helpfully, before disappearing again.
There was a moment’s silence as the trio digested these ominous words, then Reggie smiled.
“Don’t worry chaps,” he assured his friends, “It will be fine. Once it’s in the bottle, it turns into a green fairy.”
Norbert and Bartholomew looked at each other in total bafflement. Maybe Mirielle had been correct when she had insisted that the English were all mad.
“We could yet be in business,” said Reggie, sipping the vodka that Norbert had given him.
It was late in the afternoon and they were sitting in Norbert’s kitchen, which doubled-up as an office, situated at the rear of the Gannicox Distillery.
“I have procured some dried wormwood from that physician fellow, Willoughby. He’s a rum cove. He is convinced that it has medicinal properties but has absolutely no idea how to use it. I agreed that, in exchange for a quantity of the herb, he could have one of the first bottles produced. When the summer comes we should be able to access fresh plants. Wormwood thrives on poor soil, and heaven knows, there’s enough of that on this island. With a little effort we could maybe take some seeds and cultivate it, somehow. It will have to be the same with the fennel. Luckily Philomena has some in storage at The Squid. In the light of these discoveries, I am pleased to report that we have, in our possession, two thirds of the holy trinity without really trying.”
“Holy trinity?” Norbert said uneasily, thinking about Father Stamage’s words.
“It is how many people refer to the three plants crucial in the making of absinthe – or La Fée Vert, as it is sometimes known. Wormwood, sweet fennel and anise – aniseed to you and me. This last ingredient we have yet to find.”
“Aniseed?” queried Norbert. “I’ve had aniseed seeds stored here for years – I can’t even remember why I bothered salvaging them.”
“Splendid!” exclaimed Reggie, clapping his hands together. “The process is very similar to gin production. Instead of steeping juniper berries, of course, you use wormwood. About a month in neat spirit will do the trick; your vodka will be perfect as a base alcohol for this purpose. After that, you simply add the fennel and aniseed for flavour. If you can find a few more botanicals to throw in, so much the better. As long as the holy trinity is included, there are no hard and fast rules to follow.”
“How do you know all this?” asked Norbert. “I can’t believe that it was in your ‘Army Officers’ Handbook’, or whatever it was that they gave you.”
“Indeed, it was not,” laughed Reggie, “but in some of the places I’ve served there was a decided scarcity of the ‘good stuff’. We had to make our own fun, if you get my drift. Needs must when the devil drives, and all that, what?”
After Father Stamage’s warning, all this talk of the holy trinity, and the devil doing the driving, was beginning to make Norbert feel more than a little uneasy.
There was little that either man could do now, until all of the ingredients for the absinthe were gathered together, so Reggie, lubricated with liberal amounts of vodka, regaled his host with tales of his military adventures in India and Africa. Time slipped by and Norbert, a non-drinker, realised that Reggie was more than a little inebriated.
“You’re welcome to stay here tonight,” he offered. “It can be dangerous wandering about the island in the dark.”
“I will be absolutely fine,” Reggie insisted, rising unsteadily to his feet. “I have been under the affluence of inkahol on many an occasion, without mishap. Therefore, I will bid you goodnight, dear friend.”
Norbert watched the old soldier totter out into the misty darkness.
“You’ve forgotten your cane,” he called, but Reggie could not hear.
“Never mind,” thought Norbert. “I’ll take it back to The Squid in the morning.”
Reggie had walked the path between the distillery and The Squid and Teapot many times, but never before at night, and usually when relatively sober. Tonight, however, swirling mists obscured the uneven path; at least, that was Reggie’s excuse to himself for falling over. He lay there for a moment to regain his breath, then attempted to get up. For some reason one of his legs refused to obey his wishes. In fact, he had the distinct impression that his left leg was on a mission to go in another direction altogether. He peered through the gloom along the length of his body, and was surprised to see a faintly luminous tentacle wrapped around the disobedient limb, dragging him towards a dark cleft in the ground. Instinctively, Reggie reached for his swordstick, only to realise that he had left it propped against the wall in Norbert’s kitchen.
“Well, this is a dashed nuisance,” he thought to himself. “What the deuce is a chap supposed to do now?”
Erek Vaehne suggests that feathers might be suitable for making clothes for islanders:
“FEATHERS: Chicken feathers are composed mostly of keratin, the same kind of protein found in wool. The researchers are specifically interested in their barbs and barbules, the stringy network that makes up the fluffy parts of the feather, which may have a similar feel on the skin as wool. “More than 4 billion pounds of chicken feathers are produced worldwide per year, about 50 percent of the weight of which is made of the barbs,” Yang said. The researchers investigated the physical properties of these filaments and found they possessed a sturdy honeycomb architecture containing tiny air pockets, which make them extremely lightweight and resilient. They could possibly serve as an improvement over wool due to their low cost, light weight and excellent heat and sound insulation, Yang said. However, he added they are not ready to make fibers from chicken feathers yet.”
Simon Erstwhile Jones sits in a small shed on his family farm, chewing feathers. He has been doing this for some years now, and if he ever stops or leaves, no one else sees him do so. If the pile of feathers runs low, he becomes agitated and starts to assume his Owl Man form. To stop this from happening, a team of children take it in turns to gather feathers for him. Fortunately, the feather chewing is a slow process, and chicken feathers are usually in good supply.
He chews the feathers carefully, taking them one at a time. When he is done, he spits them out again. For most of that first year of chewing, his family simply provided buckets for him to spit his outpourings into, and then emptied those soggy remnants into the midden.
Temerity Jones is the person responsible for inventing the second stage of the process. There is now a small and less slovenly shed close to where Simon Erstwhile Jones sits and chews. In that second shed, buckets of chewed feathers are emptied out, and there, Temerity hammers them. It is an intense process, involving not only the chewed feathers, but Temerity’s famous seaweed tonic – that never knowingly proved useful in any other scenario. The feathers are beaten into flatness. The tonic is applied, and the feathers are beaten again.
What results is a solid sort of fabric that you would not voluntarily wear against your skin. It does keep the rain out though, and repels insects, and people. And chickens. Chickens most especially.
No one jumps from the moon with night potatoes. Not even in the strange hallucinations that are brought on by eating the wrong sort of seaweed during a complex occult rite designed to make you think that you are in fact jumping from the moon.
Even when you go out into the woods on a dark night, compelled to find the moon fruit that appeared to you in a dream, you will not jump from the moon with night potatoes.
If you wake, shivering in the dawn to find yourself on the roof, in the company of a donkey who is probably chewing your clothes, you will not remember night potatoes helping you jump.
They would like you to jump with them, though. It takes them hours to climb trees in straggling groups, their tendrils barely equal to the task of ascending. The lights of their eyes guide them, and might draw attention to their ascent. If you followed them, you could jump with them, but this absolutely never happens.
When the time is right, the night potatoes link tendrils and, under the watchful gaze of the full moon, throw themselves into the sky. If you stand in just the right place and look up, it will seem that they are falling from the moon. They are not. But they do certainly fall. All the way down to the cold, hard ground.
Older and more cynical night potatoes will be there to observe the impact. Eyes are collected for the making of vodka.
As the night potatoes themselves cannot or will not speak, we can only speculate at their motives. There are those who say they do it to placate their own strange gods. There are those who say that night potatoes are evil, and determined to eradicate foolishness and gullibility from their gene pool. Others speculate that it is the urge to jump from the moon that sends them up trees and that they just don’t get physics and have no idea how far away the moon is.
Whatever the truth of it, we can assume that Lovecraft would find them entirely upsetting.
Rhys Cranham stirred in his sleep. The sound he was hearing was familiar, but he knew that it must be an auditory hallucination. An interesting case of paracusia, some may have said, but not Rhys. Nor, for that matter, Doc Willoughby, whose professed knowledge of medical terms fell somewhat short of the actual truth. Anyway, whatever label one chose to stick on the phenomenon, it was a sound that the Night-Soil Man had heard a thousand times before, and never expected to hear again. His old friend Drury was gone forever, and with him the familiar scrape of bony paws wreaking havoc on the front door.
It seemed logical to Rhys that, with the arrival of full wakefulness, the scratching noise would fade away. Instead it seemed to be growing stronger, more insistent.
He climbed out of bed and looked through the window. It was still daylight outside, and some hours before he was due to start his rounds. There would be no more sleep until the scratching stopped. With some trepidation he lifted the latch of the door and eased it slightly ajar.
The door burst violently open, admitting a panting explosion of bones, which hurled themselves joyously at the unsuspecting Night-Soil Man. From his new, and decidedly horizontal vantage point, Rhys gazed up in surprise at the adoring face of the recently resurrected Drury.
“That’s a relief!” exclaimed the Night-Soil Man, regaining his composure. “Obviously, reports of your death have been greatly exaggerated.”
For the next week, Drury refused to leave the Night-Soil Man’s side. This surprised Rhys, as the dog usually liked to spend his days hanging around The Squid and Teapot, hoping for Philomena Bucket or Reggie Upton to take him for a walk. Rhys, of course, was unaware that the osseous hound had fallen out with Philomena, blaming her for sealing him into an ossuary-box.
During that week, daily life on Hopeless, Maine, appeared to trudge on as it always had. However, you could not fail to notice the metaphorical cloud now hanging over The Squid and Teapot (this is not to be confused with the collection of very real and heavy clouds that frequently shroud the island). Philomena was depressed and her dark mood seemed to contaminate everything around her. She was missing Drury.
“Why don’t you go for a walk,” suggested Reggie. “Put on your best clothes and hat. It always works for me when I’m feeling less than chipper.”
“It won’t be the same without Drury,” she said, sadly.
“He’ll come round eventually m’dear, don’t you worry,” Reggie assured her. “Why, if you get out and about a bit, you may even bump into the old rascal.”
Philomena was not convinced, but took Reggie’s advice anyway. She rooted through the clothing chests, stowed in one of The Squid’s attics, and found a colourful full-length frock, an old Easter bonnet, tastefully decorated with silk flowers, and a warm woollen cloak; after all, although it may have been springtime, the island of Hopeless has never regarded the seasons with very much respect.
The Gydynap Hills held too many memories for Philomena. They belonged to her and Drury. It would not feel right, any more, to be walking there alone. Instead she made her way along the headland, looking out across the angry ocean, which crashed and battered upon the rocks, far below.
Reggie had been correct; the walk had made her feel a little better, but it had not banished her sadness. Her mind kept going back to Drury. If only she had trusted her gut-feeling, and refused to believe that he was really not coming back from death this time. She would always remember his baleful, accusing look when she freed him from the ossuary-box (as described in the tale ‘Walking the Dog’). So wrapped up was she in her own thoughts that she failed to notice that the wind had pitched up to gale-force, until it snatched her hat from her head and threatened to toss it into the sea. Instinctively she reached forward to grab at it, when another, more powerful gust slammed into her, hurling her over the cliff, her cloak and skirts billowing like the sails of a galleon.
“This is it, girl,” she thought to herself, her feet desperately treading on thin air. “All that magic you were supposed to possess hasn’t done you any good at all today.”
It was true. The gloom she had been feeling had suppressed any magical ability that she might have used to save herself. Fortunately, on this occasion, the very clothing that had been instrumental in her being caught by the wind, served to halt her downward progress. Her cloak had snagged upon a jagged crag, leaving Philomena dangling precariously, not to say uncomfortably, over the churning ocean and unforgiving granite rocks.
By coincidence, this was the very day that Drury plucked up sufficient courage to venture into the wide world without the company of the Night-Soil Man (who, incidentally, was, at that very moment, recovering from his night’s labours and snoring happily in his bed). When Drury spotted Philomena wandering alone through the gathering gale, the sight of his erstwhile friend looking so forlorn caused his heart to soften (yes, yes, I can guess what you’re going to say, but you know very well what I mean!). He was about to go to her and bury the hatchet, so to speak, when Philomena was suddenly blown over the cliff edge. In panic, he raced to the spot where she had fallen, and saw her suspended, helpless and frightened, just a few feet beneath him.
Grabbing the cloak between his teeth and pulling Philomena back up on to the headland presented no difficulty for Drury. Despite being nothing but bone, he possesses an almost preternatural degree of strength – although, being a totally preternatural dog, I suppose this should not come as a surprise. Once safe, Philomena wrapped her arms around his skeletal form and sobbed uncontrollably. Her sorrow, regret, fear and happiness at their reunion flowed out of her in a great welter of emotion. Drury wagged his bony tail, and, with her eyes blinded by tears, Philomena could have sworn that she felt a warm, wet tongue caressing her cheeks.
The pair made their way back to The Squid and Teapot, where the landlord, Bartholomew Middlestreet, smiled with pleasure to see the old hound slumped in front of the fire, where he belonged.
“I told you he’d come back,” said Reggie, putting an avuncular arm around Philomena’s shoulders.
“He saved my life,” said Philomena. “I don’t know how long I would have hung there before the cloak ripped.”
“Drury is your hero of the hour!” exclaimed Reggie.
“Oh, he’s more than that,” said Philomena, fondly. “Believe me, he is much, much more than that.”
Erek Vaehne has been exploring the kinds of things islanders might be able to make clothes out of. This week, we explore coffee…
“COFFEE GROUNDS: Fabric made using discarded coffee grounds is one example of an interesting textile innovation. Two companies are offering such products. Germany-based sneaker brand Nat-2™ recently debuted a sneaker that smells like coffee made using repurposed coffee grounds. The sneakers feature up to 50 percent recycled coffee grounds depending on the style, which produces a smooth and fine texture, according to the company. The type of coffee used varies upon sustainable availability. Taiwan-based Singtex Industrial Co. Ltd.’s S.Café® yarn is made using coffee grounds. The patented yarn manufacturing process maximizes the functional performance capacity of the coffee grounds. Singtex’s technology combines the processed coffee grounds and polymer to create master batches before spinning it into yarn. The company reports the yarn offers excellent natural anti-odor qualities, ultraviolet protection and fast drying times up to 200-percent faster than drying times for cotton.”
However, it was only a matter of time before the good people of Hopeless stared mournfully into their especially hairy coffee mugs and wondered. Could there be something better to do with the hair than putting it in our mouths? The sensation was unsettling at best, all that waving silky threadiness, even if it did give you a lift, of sorts.
Hairy coffee can be harvested quickly, especially if grown in large, open trays where it gets more room and light. The threads are best harvested at about eight inches in length – longer than that and they are too fragile for use. It takes great care and patience to spin them into a more substantial yarn, but it can indeed be done. Thread can then be woven or knitted at need.
At present, this is a highly experimental fabric type. There are three known hairy coffee jumpers at large on the island. They are said to be warm and very soft, but you should not wear them at night as they will make you go down to the sea and sing filthy songs to mermaids. At least according to Idris Po, who assures us this is why he was recently found doing so. Until further research has been undertaken, it may be safest not to make blankets out of hairy coffee threads. But then, we’ve been saying for a while that hairy coffee probably isn’t safe to drink and yet people see hairy coffee and continue to be willing to imbibe it.
“He is definitely dead,” announced Doc Willoughby, in matter-of-fact tones.
“Obviously!” snapped Philomena Bucket testily. “But other than that, what’s wrong with him?”
The Doc peered down at the pile of bones heaped before him on the floor.
“Miss Bucket, I am neither a veterinarian, nor an osteologist. I suggest you try and find someone who is. Otherwise, you would be well advised to deposit these remains in a suitable ossuary or, better still, throw them into the sea.”
“But Doc,” there was a hint of panic in Philomena’s voice, “this is Drury we’re talking about here.”
“Precisely,” replied the Doc. “I rest my case.”
The curmudgeonly physician stamped off into the foggy morning, leaving Philomena tearful and helpless as she stood over Drury’s motionless form.
“I’m afraid that I have nothing to suggest,” said Reggie Upton. “I have had plenty of experience with dogs in my time; you know, fox-hounds, beagles and the like, but as far as dogs who are already dead, m’dear… well, much as I liked the old chap, I fear he’s beyond help.”
“But this is ridiculous,” wailed Philomena. “Drury is probably the oldest creature on the island. Nobody knows much about him, but he seems to always have been here. He can’t be dead… well, not dead again, anyway.”
It was true. Drury was the dog who had refused to recognise the fact that he was no longer alive, and had been resident on Hopeless for an extremely long time. Grandparents told sleepy children bedtime stories that featured tales of Drury’s mischief – tales that they, themselves, had heard as infants. The awful possibility that the old rogue might not be around anymore was unthinkable (except, of course, to the cheerless few, like Doc Willoughby, who had no time for him).
A tear rolled down Rhys Cranham’s cheek; he could hardly believe the news. Was Drury, really properly dead? He had been the Night-Soil Man’s faithful companion, accompanying him on his rounds for over ten years, ever since Rhys took over from his late, lamented predecessor, Shenandoah Nailsworthy. Life would not be the same without the old, osseous hound, rattling along at his heels in the misty moonlight.
Philomena had been pondering Doc Willoughby’s words. If she had to come to terms with the fact that Drury was really gone forever, then she wanted to make sure that his bones were treated with respect. They certainly would not be tossed into the sea. What was the other thing the Doc had said? Deposit his remains in suitable ossuary. That was it. Unfortunately, she had no idea what he meant.
“Ossuary?” said Reggie. “Why, yes, as far as I’m aware it can be a room or container in which bones are stored. Are you thinking of something like that for our dear friend?”
“I am, now you’ve told me” said Philomena, sorrowfully. “I’ll ask Seth Washwell to make a suitable box for him. We’ll keep him somewhere in The Squid and Teapot. I’m sure that the Middlestreets won’t mind. Drury loved it there. I know that if he’s in The Squid, his bones will be safe.”
The old soldier had to turn from her and blink away his tears. He had only known Drury for the few weeks that he had been on Hopeless, but the dog had joined him every day for the past month for his morning walk (or flâneuring, as he called it). He would miss him dreadfully.
Seth was only too pleased to be able to do something to mark Drury’s passing. Being not only the proprietor of the island’s sawmills and foundry, but also a skilled carpenter and blacksmith, he had all of the resources necessary to make a splendid ossuary-box, fashioned from his finest timber and finished with ornate, wrought-iron cornices. Drury’s bones were laid upon his favourite blanket, and, amid tears of farewell, was placed reverently in a corner of one of the attics, immediately above Philomena’s bedroom.
Philomena’s walks seemed empty in the days that followed. She had lived on Hopeless for some years now, and nearly every afternoon and early evening, before the inn became busy, she and Drury had wandered deep into the mysterious Gydynap Hills, sharing adventures and enjoying each other’s company.
A week had slipped by since Drury’s bones had been laid to rest. Everyone was still coming to terms with his not being around, half-expecting him to come bounding in at any moment and causing havoc. To make things worse for Philomena, she had been sleeping badly. Any sleep she had managed to get was fitful and filled with unpleasant dreams. Tonight, however, was different; slipping easily into a deep slumber, she found herself back in Ireland, sitting in Granny Bucket’s cottage. Granny was in her rocking chair, smoking her clay pipe. Angus, her old mongrel-dog, lay stretched in front of the fire, snoring contentedly. Philomena had seen this scene a hundred times before, when Granny was alive. On this occasion, however, Reggie Upton, in the full regalia of a comic-opera general, and Rhys Cranham, looking very relaxed in a cream-coloured lounge suit and matching Panama hat, had joined them.
“Ah, you three must love Old Angus to death,” Granny mused, blowing smoke-rings up the chimney. “It’s nothing but walk, walk, walk, morning noon and night for the poor old fella. No wonder he’s dog-tired.”
Granny laughed at her own joke.
“Angus has been dead this past twenty years,” Philomena explained to Rhys and Reggie. “But don’t you think he’s looking well on it?”
“Oh yes, but we expect even dead dogs get tired,” replied the pair in unison. They were holding hands.
The words echoed in Philomena’s dream, dragging her to wakefulness.
“Even dead dogs get tired,” she repeated to herself, then suddenly things began to make sense.
For a month, or more, Drury had spent virtually every hour of the day and night being taken for a walk. Having all the instincts of a flesh-and-blood dog, it would never occur to him to refuse the chance of an amble out somewhere. Drury had just been tired. Dog-tired. Dead-tired.
Even dead dogs get tired!
In a sudden panic, Philomena dashed up to the attics. She could hear the scraping before she reached the top of the stairs. Grabbing a crowbar from a pile of tools stacked against a wall, she prised up the lid of the ossuary-box, expecting Drury to leap joyfully out. He did not do so, but stood looking balefully, and accusingly, at her.
“Oh Drury, thank goodness. I am so sorry. We thought you were dead… or, you know, properly dead and not coming back.”
She wrenched open the side of the box, allowing him to walk stiffly out.
When she made to put her arms around him, Drury growled and, moving out of her reach, made his way unsteadily down the stairs.
Philomena put her head in her hands and sobbed.
“What have I done,” she wailed. “Will he ever forgive me?”
We’re delighted to be back at Woodchester Mansion for Beltain and to be part of a much bigger event there. Things are really building on the Steampunk side in Gloucestershire (we don’t actually live on a haunted island off the coast of Maine all the time) so we’re getting to do more events closer to home.
For our Woodchester set, we aren’t just going to be the regular four Ominous Folk. We’re going to end the evening in big band mode, with at least three of our local friends joining us on stage for the last few songs. It’s a delightful prospect. Watch this space as our collaborators become illustrated versions of themselves and we let on who is in the team.
At first, the priority had been simply to have a suitable sacrificial knife. None of the knives in Quentin’s parent’s kitchen had seemed appropriate. They were too small, too mundane, too often used for cutting up root vegetables. Also, they would be missed, and he didn’t fancy having to explain things.
In the search for a suitable knife, he started breaking into abandoned houses. Hopeless was not short of abandoned knives left to gather dust and weird inhabitants in the abandoned drawers of abandoned kitchens in abandoned houses. Really, you could see enough of that to get properly sick of it. Unfortunately, all of those unloved and encrusted knives were the same as the ones his parents kept and had clearly been used for sacrificing somewhat edible things to the mild gods of culinary activity.
Where could a committed cultist get a suitable knife for doing really impressive and powerful sacrifices? There wasn’t a shop for it. The blacksmith threatened him with a hammer when he asked. When he went to cult gatherings, Quentin felt obliged to stay at the back and just watch, all the while hoping the people around him – resplendent with their own, really dramatic sacrificial knives – would assume he had one somewhere under his big cloak.
The big cloak had been made out of a very old sheet, whose once white surfaces had gone a nasty grey despite all attempts at boiling it back into brilliance. As far as Quentin could make out, this was probably how everyone else had sourced the raw material for their ritual attire, too. But the knives were a whole other matter. He wanted one of those knives, with the nasty looking blades. It occurred to him that perhaps the right way to get one was to kill someone who already had a knife, and take theirs. Maybe it was a right of passage. Maybe figuring it out was a test.
For his birthday that year, Quentin’s mum gave him a really large butter knife. It was so blunt that he couldn’t even cut the donkey butter with it. He wondered if she was trying to tell him something.
For a while, Quentin took to following other cultists home. He thought about breaking into their houses and stealing their knives, but his housebreaking skill level turned out to be far too low for actually entering a building. Sometimes, in the early morning light he would go through the midden heaps of other cultists in the hopes one of them would have thrown away a perfectly good sacrificial knife at some point. He found quite a few knives this way – mostly small, bent and/or rusty. Nothing you’d be able to stab anyone with unless they were already a lot more squidgy than the average block of donkey butter his mother made.
Then word got around somehow, and people started giving Quentin their useless, broken knives. The ones that had never held an edge, or had been bent out of shape using them for some unknifelike purpose. The knives no one wanted any more. A pile built up outside the family home, and sometimes, late at night he could hear spoonwalkers going through them in the hopes that in there somewhere, would be a spoon. Once he tried stabbing a spoonwalker with one of the broken, rusty knives. It just stared at him with big, sad eyes as its rubbery flesh indented somewhat under the pressure.
In a fit of desperation, he arranged all of the knives, handle side pressed down into the bare ground outside his home. Then he jumped on top of them. The muddy ground took several extra inches of handle, and Quentin ended up with quite a lot of bruises, but apparently he lacked the knife skill to even significantly scratch himself.
In a final act of wanton desperation, Quentin offered himself up to the Scientific Society on the off-chance there was something properly weird about his relationship with knives. Intensive research followed, during which Quentin discovered that the Scientific Society owned at least as many threatening blades as his cultist brethren. In several cases, these were clearly exactly the same blades, although he had enough sense not to ask about that. Science, it turned out, was no more willing to let him have a sharp implement of his own than religion had been. Science was willing to hit him repeatedly with spoons, and attack him with forks and kept stacking rusty and unusable bits of tableware outside his house.
Islanders are fond of superstition, and willing to adopt anything that might improve their chances of survival. And so it came to pass that making offerings of unusable knives outside Quentin’s house became really popular for the best part of one winter. They got ever sillier – knives made out of wood, out of clay, knitted knives, fabric knives, pictures of knives… It turns out that you really can have far too many sacrificial knives.
