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…

“Six more gates!” fumed Durosimi. “Six more! When am I going to wake up from this nightmare?”

The sorcerer had found himself lost in the pages of a long-dead alchemist’s handbook, an infamous volume entitled ‘The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.’

If Rosenkreutz himself had been there to jump through these particular hoops, Durosimi would have been a happy man. The problem was that the only guest who seemed to be the centre of attention at this wedding — the alchemical marriage of the sun and the moon — happened to be Durosimi O’Stoat.

“Much more of this,” he thought to himself, “and whatever tattered shreds of my sanity are left will be gone completely.”

Even his most ardent enemies (and there are many) would not dispute the truth of this. Over the past couple of days Durosimi had been exposed to enough absurdities and paradoxes to satisfy even an absinthe-addicted surrealist with Zen sympathies. Just when the end seemed to be in sight, he was informed by the hooded, faceless creature, who offered him a steaming mug of hot chocolate, that there were six more tests for him to endure. It was all too much.

But what was there to do, other than drink his hot chocolate and wait to see what happened next?

So he drank his hot chocolate, and what happened next was that Durosimi lost consciousness.

He awoke to find himself no longer in the topmost chamber of the tower, a room that had been apparently shaped by architecture and a certain amount of reason. Now the world seemed to have suddenly flattened. The colours were somehow too clean, and the shadows all hatched at curious angles. Trees stood still as etchings; a brook sparkled in fixed droplets, unmoving.

Durosimi gulped. If he did not know better, he could swear that he had woken up inside an illustration.

The grass beneath his feet was ink. The sky appeared to be some etiolated watercolour wash, too perfect to be real. There was an aspect to it that suggested that it may have been painted by a hand that had grown bored halfway through. In an attempt to make sense of his surroundings, Durosimi gingerly turned and saw, drawn with exquisite precision, a castle perched upon a hill. Above it was a caption in Gothic script: The Castle of the Soul.

Durosimi squinted at a curlicue in the foreground, where something had obviously gone wrong. The ink had pooled. Curious, he leaned closer. That was when the ground gave way beneath him, and he tumbled sideways into the margin.

Margins can be the strangest of places. It is here that readers and writers alike allow their brushes, pens and pencils to wander, doodling and annotating as they will and, when the need arises, erasing. The only problem with this is that nothing is ever entirely erased. Everything that has been set loose in the world will always leave a memory of itself behind, and the figures who inhabit the margins are no exception.

That is why Durosimi’s stumble was not into a clean, white space. The margins were alive, with forgotten notations, botched angels, and errant scribbles that writhed like worms in a scholar’s nightmare. Half-erased faces leered from unfinished medallions. A doodle of a jester whispered lewd limericks at him in Latin. Worst of all were the small spidery squiggles that patrolled the edges ceaselessly.

Attempting to escape into the relative sanity of the illustration, Durosimi’s cloak snagged on a thorn that had been sketched hastily in charcoal. Blood (real blood) welled from the tear in his arm, despite the fact that the thorn was two-dimensional.

“Oh! So not content with humiliating me,” he muttered, “the book is now trying to kill me. How charmingly baroque.”

And that was when Philomena saw him in the lower right-hand corner of the page, jammed in among curious symbols. He was a tiny figure tangled in marginalia, waving furiously, and mouthing something that looked remarkably like, “Help! Help! Get me out of here.”

Durosimi also mentioned something about avoiding the margins, but by then she had slammed the book shut.

Philomena and Drury drifted through the silent, sleeping Squid and Teapot and into the snuggery, where the ancient grimoire, guarded by Reggie Upton, awaited them. Being in a state of lucid dreaming, Philomena was able to direct the way in which the dream unfolded, and being the faithful hound that he was, Drury followed her. Leaving the inn behind, they entered the book, landing upon a flat, yellowed expanse that stretched out in every direction; it was an endless sea of parchment. Above them, the sky was an oppressive grey, filled with strange, swirling calligraphy that rearranged itself if stared at for too long.

In the distance, they spotted Durosimi, trapped inside a cramped, woodcut-style scene. They could see a castle on a hill, which overlooked an ancient gatehouse. A forbidding path twisted down, and through the knot of twisted trees that kept Durosimi trapped in the margin of the page. He appeared as a stiff, almost caricatured figure, the ink lines twitching slightly around him as if alive.

Philomena quickly realised that the margins were hazardous. They shifted and squirmed like a living tide, filled with small, spidery creatures made of ink. They skittered and snapped, trying to tug Durosimi deeper into the border where he would be lost forever in decorative oblivion. It seemed obvious to Philomena that the only way to extradite Durosimi would be with magic; she hoped that her Rough Magic would be enough. Battling with enchanted books was not something she had any great wish to do, but her witch-senses told her that, if she were to succeed, this would have to be written magic — something the book itself would recognise and respect. Remembering her grandmother’s teachings, she bent low, pressed her hand to the parchment, and began writing with her fingertip, creating a spell in rough, crooked cursive, shaped from her will alone.

Drury, meanwhile, snapped and barked at the inky beasts, scattering them with glee. He had rarely had so much fun while sleeping.

Slowly, Philomena’s words formed a path, a thread of golden letters stretching across the parchment toward Durosimi’s prison. She beckoned to him. Confused at first, he eventually staggered out of the illustration, stepping carefully along the luminous trail. As he moved, the woodcut image behind him folded in upon itself with an audible snick, like a trap closing.

Just as the last of the margin-creatures lunged towards him, Durosimi stumbled onto the thankfully safe area of parchment beside Philomena and Drury. With a final swirl of determination, Philomena slapped the book shut, and in a nauseating whirl, reminiscent of the worst fairground ride in the world, snapped Philomena and Drury back into their sleeping bodies.

A few minutes later, Philomena, now fully awake, walked into the snuggery to find Reggie, who had given up guarding the now closed grimoire, snoring contentedly. Drury wagged his skeletal tail. What a dream that had been.

She gazed down at Durosimi, sprawled out in a state of collapse, and gasping on the floorboards. He was still ink-streaked and bewildered.

“You needn’t thank me,” she said, with a grin. “But that’s the last time I’m giving you a book to look after.”

Philomena Bucket and Drury, the skeletal hound, drifted through The Squid and Teapot in a state of lucid dreaming, in order to enter the pages of a mysterious grimoire. Their only reason for doing anything quite so reckless was to rescue Durosimi O’Stoat, who had somehow managed to get himself trapped within the book.

Before I reveal whether the pair succeeded in their mission, it is worth recounting exactly how the sorcerer got himself into this mess in the first place.

Durosimi was sitting in candlelight, cradling the magical tome recently gifted to him by Philomena. While the two could hardly be described as friends, Philomena would only have entrusted him with such a thing if she believed that it demanded mastery, but over which she herself could exercise no control. Durosimi grudgingly accepted that Philomena was his superior in the application of Rough Magic, traditionally the province of witches. This particular book, however, required the attention of one schooled in High Magic, and the practice of High Magic has never been the business of a witch, however powerful she might be.

It was in the deepest hour of the night when he heard it.

“It is time,” someone – or something – whispered – and with those words, Durosimi knew that the book was allowing itself to be revealed to him.

Only then did he notice the illustration gracing its cover, which must always have been there, yet somehow Durosimi had not seen it until now. The cracked leather was embossed with a faded sigil that resembled nothing so much as a confused octopus attempting yoga.

Gingerly, he opened the book, half expecting it to complain violently, but it behaved in very much the way that any self-respecting book might.

“The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz,” he read aloud, with the reverence of a man about to make a terrible mistake.

One of his candles flickered ominously. The other blew itself out in protest.

“You might want to put that book down,” said a small voice in Durosimi’s head.

“Nonsense,” he replied aloud. “It’s about alchemy, and purely allegorical.”

For a moment, the book seemed to shiver – yes, shiver – and let out a soft, satisfied sigh, like a cat curling up after a large meal.

The last candle flickered… and died.

And Durosimi disappeared into the darkness.

Thus began a journey through a book that was not quite a book, in which our scholar would learn far more about the nature of truth, transmutation, and terribly awkward wedding etiquette than he had ever intended.

Day One – The Invitation

Durosimi opened his eyes to find himself lying on a floor of black-and-white marble, the sort usually reserved for palaces, ornate chess boards, and particularly ambitious bathrooms. Overhead, a vaulted ceiling stretched into darkness, strangely punctuated by mechanical stars and gilded cogs, each one ticking softly.

He sat up, groaning slightly. His robes smelled of candle smoke. The book was nowhere to be seen.

The table before him was long, ornate, and quite possibly alive. Vines of silver crept across its surface, winding around the legs of a bronze bird whose single glass eye followed Durosimi’s every movement with a look of vague disapproval.

At the table’s centre, on a silver charger, lay a vellum envelope, sealed with crimson wax. The sigil was of a rose entwined around a cross.

The paper inside was crisp and scented faintly of frankincense and foreboding. It read:

You are cordially invited to the Royal Wedding of the Century (or thereabouts). Attendance is not optional.

You are expected to bring: your wits, a willingness to transform when necessary, and a suitable offering.

The ceremony will commence at moonrise.

Failure to arrive on time will result in your possible disintegration.

Dress code: Alchemical Formal.

Durosimi blinked. The writing was elegant, looping, and faintly smug. There was no signature. After a few moments the invitation gradually faded from his fingers. 

“Well,” he muttered, “that clears absolutely nothing up.”

A polite cough echoed behind him.

Durosimi turned to find a liveried footman standing there, and holding a tray upon which lay a mask: the left half was the sun, the right half, the moon.

“For your face, sir,” said the footman in a voice that dripped like candle wax.

Durosimi sighed, and accepted the mask with a degree of resignation.

“This fellow Rosenkreutz, the one who’s getting married,” he said. “I can’t say that I know him.”

“Herr Rosenkreutz was not the bridegroom sir,” replied the footman. There was a slight hint of mocking condescension in his tone. “He was purely a guest, as are you.”

“Was?” Durosimi looked puzzled at the footman’s choice of the past tense.

“Indeed sir. Herr Rosenkreutz had his opportunity, but he made no great impression. It is your turn now.”  

“My turn…?” began Durosimi, but the footman was nowhere to be seen.

Then the great brass doors creaked open, and the wedding began.

Day Two – The Tower

Durosimi awoke in a tower.

This in itself was not entirely unexpected. Sorcerers, he reasoned, tended to find themselves in towers sooner or later. Still, he had no memory of going to sleep. The wedding, if it had happened at all, had been little more than a blur of golden light, masked figures, and a disturbing number of doves. 

Durosimi couldn’t help but wonder if he had enjoyed himself.

Now, he sat on a narrow bed beside a window that was too high to see out of, and the walls were bare stone. A spiral staircase led downwards into darkness and upwards into a shaft of brilliant blue light. 

The only furniture on the room was a small writing desk, an hourglass, and a cracked mirror that did not reflect him as he was, but as he might have been – somewhat younger, noticeably thinner, and, unaccountably, wearing a powdered wig.

There was a small notebook on the desk. Durosimi picked it up and opened it, hoping that it might provide some clue as to what exactly was going on. Inside, a single sentence stretched across the first page:

TO ASCEND YOU MUST FIRST DESCEND.

“Why does that not surprise me?” Durosimi uttered with a sigh.

He turned the hourglass on its head and began the long walk down the staircase, which narrowed with each revolution. The light dimmed. Symbols began to appear on the stone. Some were alchemical, some anatomical, and one in particular was a very rude graphic in anybody’s language.

He passed a door marked ‘Calcination’, behind which came the unmistakable sound of something being enthusiastically reduced to ashes. This did not seem to be the sort of place where he should linger.

The next door bore the word ‘Dissolution’. Durosimi sensed a discernible dampness seeping through its timbers. He quickened his pace.

When he reached the door marked ‘Separation’ he heard the sound of sobbing. Tentatively, Durosimi stepped inside. He found himself to be in a small room, warm and dim, and utterly silent save for the weeping. In the centre sat a figure hunched over a basin of black liquid. The figure looked up.

It came as something of a shock to see that it was none other than Durosimi sitting there.

Or rather, it was a version of him, bedraggled, tear-streaked, wild-eyed and whispering something over and over into the basin.

Durosimi took a cautious step forward.

“What is this?” he asked, confused. 

“You,” said the other Durosimi, without looking up. “The bit of you that pretends not to care.”

The real Durosimi, if indeed he still qualified for that title, stared. 

“I care perfectly well,” he said stiffly. “I just don’t like to express it.”

“Exactly.” His double offered a thin smile. “You might want to do something about that.”

The basin trembled. For a moment, Durosimi noticed several faces flicker across its surface. First of all he saw those of his dead parents, then his daughter, Salamandra. More surprisingly there followed the faces of Reverend Davies, Philomena, Reggie Upton, Tenzin, Doc Willoughby, and even Granny Bucket. People who, unaccountably, seemed to suddenly matter.

He quickly closed the door behind him and kept walking.

Confusingly, the staircase began to lead upwards again, slowly widening, brightening, and warming as it rose. The topmost chamber was filled with golden light, strange perfumes, and something that smelled faintly of breakfast.

A robed figure stood at the centre, faceless, and holding a jug of what looked like hot chocolate.

“Welcome,” it said. “You have passed the first gate.”

Durosimi, exhausted, slightly soot-smudged, and desperately hoping that this was all a bad dream, took the offered mug.

“The first gate?” he asked warily. “You mean that there’s another one?” 

“There are seven,” the figure said gently.

Durosimi closed his eyes.

“Of course there are,” he said, through gritted teeth. “Of course there are.” 

To be continued…

Author’s note: Readers with long memories, and nothing better to think about, will recall that Reggie Upton came across the “Chemical Wedding” when ransacking the attics in the tale “About Time.”

As there were no obvious mishaps when he opened it, I can only imagine that the book was hibernating. 

Despite her more-than-occasional wish that Durosimi O’Stoat would take an extended holiday somewhere far, far away – at the bottom of the Atlantic, for instance, or possibly on the dark side of the moon – Philomena Bucket could not shake the feeling of guilt that had been gnawing at her for some weeks. Was it a coincidence that Durosimi had been missing ever since she, in a moment of poor judgement (combined with a slight feeling of panic), had given him the ancient grimoire that had so demanded her attention while foraging in the dusty attics of The Squid and Teapot? Regular readers will recall that Philomena had originally tried to foist this book off on the Hermit of Ghastly Green, Neville Moore, but it was obvious that Neville would not be able to control the unruly tome. It needed someone versed in The High Magic, so who better than Durosimi?

“Don’t fret, m’dear” Reggie Upton told her, as he laced up his shoes in preparation for a spot of flaneuring. “A scoundrel like Durosimi would never do anything that he didn’t want to, so you are definitely not to blame for whatever it is that has befallen him.”

Others had said very much the same sort of thing. Even the ghost of Granny Bucket – who usually made a point of materialising at only the most inconvenient and embarrassing of times – had come to offer her granddaughter some words of comfort. Drury, the skeletal hound, had done his best but was less than helpful, his reassuring gestures mainly consisting of wagging his bony tail enthusiastically, while knocking over a coal scuttle and a bottle of Old Colonel ale.

Yet none of this seemed to assuage her guilt. The image of Durosimi’s eager, if slightly malevolent, grin as he took the grimoire haunted her every waking hour. She ought to have known better. A book that hummed ominously and occasionally snapped shut of its own accord was not something to blithely hand over to a sorcerer, much less one of the O’Stoat variety.

And then, quite out of the blue, the blasted thing had reappeared.

To her great surprise Philomena discovered that it was back in the attic, precariously perched atop of an almost complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (it was the 1910 -1911 edition, published by Cambridge University Press, should you be interested in such trivia). It was almost as though it had never left, but something was different this time. The grimoire no longer trembled with barely contained menace. It no longer growled, or at least, not audibly. Now, it sat as demurely as any respectable tome might, slightly foxed around the edges, and its cracked leather binding sporting a distinct patina of green mould. It may have been her imagination, but Philomena fancied that once or twice she caught a faint whiff of brimstone, but otherwise the book behaved perfectly bookishly.

Philomena eyed it with suspicion.

“Behaving yourself, are you?” she said aloud.

The book, as if keen to preserve its newfound reputation, remained silent and motionless.

With great caution, and a poker from the fireplace firmly in hand, she prised it open. The action raised a small dust cloud, but it wasn’t that which caused her to catch her breath. There, etched in the corner of one of the elaborate, full-page illustrations, was none other than a tiny Durosimi O’Stoat. Unusually, at least for an illustration, he was waving frantically from the confines of an ink-and-wash landscape, looking very much the worse for wear but unmistakably alive – or at least, no worse than his usual pallor.

“Durosimi!” She gasped. “For goodness’ sake! What have you done now?”

He appeared to be shouting something, though of course no sound emerged. Philomena squinted and tried to lip-read, but all she could make out was, “Help! Help! …. Oh, and whatever you do, avoid the margins.”

Slamming the book shut with a decisive thud, she hurried down to the snuggery and made straight for the corner by the fireplace. There, Granny Bucket’s ghost lingered in her usual state of slightly disapproving semi-transparency.

“Granny,” Philomena said, not bothering with pleasantries, “I need the benefit of your wisdom.”

The ghost’s expression softened. This was the sort of thing that Granny liked to hear.

“This is about that no-good sorcerer, O’Stoat, isn’t it?” she said.

Philomena nodded.

“I think he’s trapped in the grimoire,” she confessed. “In one of the illustrations. And I mean to get him out.”

“That’s a noble aim,” Granny admitted, “but a foolish one, in my opinion. I wonder if he would lift a finger if your positions were reversed?”

Philomena had no answer to that.

“Oh well… if you must. There is a way, child,” Granny continued. “There’s always a way… for those prepared to pay the price.”

She drifted closer, peering at the book under Philomena’s arm. “Of course, it won’t be as simple as turning the page and pulling him free.”

Philomena sighed. She had suspected as much.

“You’ll need the right tools,” Granny said. “A candle blessed at both ends. A drop of ink from a cuttlefish that dreams of the open sky. And – perhaps most importantly – someone to mind the book from the outside while you go in.”

Philomena’s eyes widened. 

“Go in?”

“Oh yes,” Granny said, with a thin, spectral smile. “If you want to save him, you’ll have to step into the story yourself.”

The fire crackled in the hearth, casting dancing shadows on the wall. Outside, a storm was gathering, heavy with the promise of strange happenings, not to mention rain. Philomena felt a chill run down her spine, though whether this was from the draught blowing through an ill-fitting window frame, or from Granny’s words, she could not say.

But one thing was certain.

One way or another, she was going to get Durosimi O’Stoat out of that book – although, it seemed that in order to do that, it would mean throwing herself feet first into its pages.

To be continued…