Tag Archives: Mrs Beaten

Hopeless Tales, Tales from the Squid and Teapot

Billy and Willy

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Reggie Upton had certainly been in fine voice, this evening.

Walking unsteadily home from a particularly satisfying night at The Squid and Teapot, Seth Washwell smiled to himself at the memory. After a few pints of Old Colonel, Reggie was always good for a tune or two. As usual, tonight’s songs were from his army days, and one in particular had lodged in Seth’s mind. Now, how did it go…?

 “I left the line and the tented field

Where long I’d been a lodger.

A humble knapsack on my back,

A poor, but honest soldier…”

 You had to laugh, though. Seth couldn’t imagine that Brigadier Reginald Fitzhugh Hawkesbury-Upton had ever been required to carry a knapsack on his back, humble or otherwise. But it didn’t matter; old Reggie was not only a good friend, but an excellent drinking companion.

 Seth had probably downed more Old Colonel than was good for him, but it would take more than a few pints of ale to get him drunk; he could definitely walk a straight line without stumbling. At least, this is what he told himself, until an icy blast bowled him over as easily as if he had been a wooden skittle. Dazed, he scrambled to his feet with difficulty, sliding about uncomfortably in a puddle of slushy snow.

“That shouldn’t be there,” he mused, and he was not wrong. Until that moment Seth had been happily wandering through a fine, albeit misty, evening in early fall. By Hopeless standards the weather had been positively balmy, but now, from nowhere, a bitter winter wind, with snow upon its breath, was weirdly raging through a gap between the ash trees.

“Well, that’s sobered me up,” thought Seth, but immediately revised his opinion when a vast, white figure, fully fifteen feet tall, appeared.

“I’m going to give up the booze, I’m hallucinating,” he thought. “But why am I seeing an overgrown snowman in September?”

Before the thought had left his, admittedly befuddled, brain, the hallucination became doubly disturbing when yet another overgrown snowman materialised, apparently bearing a comatose Doc Willoughby in his arms.

 In order to make sense of all that is going on, we must backtrack a few hours and travel some seven thousand miles in an easterly direction. We need to go to Tibet, where, you will recall, Doc Willoughby and Durosimi O’Stoat had been recently sojourning in a Buddhist monastery and, needless to say, outstaying their welcome.

I have no idea what the names of Seth’s identical ‘hallucinations’ might be, and even if I did, it’s unlikely that I would be able to pronounce them. So, for the sake of easy identification, I will refer to them as Billy and Willy. They belong to a species known to Tibetians as ‘The Spirits of the Glaciers’, but to the rest of us simply as ‘Yeti’.

When a sudden avalanche completely blocked the portal through which Mr Squash, the Sasquatch (a close relative of the Yeti)  had taken the Doc and Durosimi to the high Himalayas, there had been a nagging worry that they would be marooned there forever. This, as you might imagine, would have tested the monks’ patience, not to mention their policy of non-violence, to the limit. Something needed to be done, and done quickly, so Billy and Willy had been given the job of removing the offending rocks, before things got entirely out of hand.

 The work had taken next to no time to complete; the pair could throw huge rocks around with ease (indeed, rock-tossing has long been a favourite sport of the Yeti, as many a nervous Sherpa will testify). The next part of their task, however, was less easily accomplished. The abbot, or rinpoche, of the monastery suggested that, rather than waiting for Mr Squash to appear, Billy and Willy should waste no time in returning Doc Willoughby and Durosimi to Hopeless. This was easier said than done. You may remember from the tale ‘The Hilly Layers’ that Durosimi had gone to visit the gomchen, Dawasandup, and  was nowhere to be found. Doc Willoughby, on the other hand, took fright at the prospect of being left in the care of the Spirits of the Glaciers, and hid under his bed. When he was eventually discovered it took little persuasion for a couple of monks to drag him out by the feet. As he scraped across the floor, Doc could not help but notice that the monks seemed to be enjoying their work a little too much.

 Once through the portal, Billy and Willy wandered into Hopeless with a certain amount of trepidation. Yes, they may have been fifteen feet tall and weighed a ton and a half each, but they were strangers in a strange land, and, as you well know, there are few stranger lands than Hopeless, Maine. For a start, there was no snow. How could there be no snow? This was beyond their experience. There were no mountains, either, and the sky was obscured by mist. They looked in wonder at the things with tentacles that scurried out to observe them, and having registered that these large hairy creatures were not to be messed with, the things with tentacles hurriedly scurried back.

“Let’s get rid of this fellow and get back home,” said Billy. “I don’t like this place.”

Willy had to agree. He had just noticed the sea in the distance, and didn’t like the look of it at all.

“There’s a little shed over there,” said Billy. “We can put him in there. Someone will find him in the morning.”

Although the shed doorway seemed unnecessarily narrow, they managed to ease the sleeping Doc through the gap and onto a handy seat, which was perfect for their purposes. Having made sure that he was not going to topple over, the pair hurried thankfully back to the portal between the ash trees, confident that the Doc, who would probably be totally dormant for the next few days, had been deposited somewhere where he could be easily discovered.

Mrs Beaten had always strongly disapproved of  chamber-pots, viewing them as being vulgar beyond words. Now, fast approaching the age when ‘calls of nature’ could occur at the most inconvenient times, she was beginning to regret this decision. Midnight on Hopeless is not the best time to be wandering to the end of the garden, but needs must. Luckily it was a moonless night, so even if someone was out and about at that late hour, they would not see her.

The darkness within the walls of the privy was positively stygian, but being a small space, and very familiar, she had no difficulty in negotiating her way in. With a sigh of relief, Mrs Beaten lifted her nightdress, and gently lowered herself onto the lap of the silently sleeping Doc Willoughby…

 Author’s note: Should you be interested, the song that Reggie had been singing in The Squid and Teapot was ‘The Soldier’s Return’, a popular ballad adapted from a poem by Robert Burns, “When Wild War’s Deadly Blast Was Blawn.”

Hopeless Tales, Mrs Beaten

The Rotten Shark

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Being the culinary notes of Mrs Beaten.

The shark was not an overwhelming success, I am sad to say. When reports of it, washed up on the beach came in last year, I was initially somewhat excited. Mrs Ephemery and I arranged a little team of workers to prepare the shark. I gutted the shark myself, a smelly and visceral process. Mrs Ephemery undertook the beheading. I was not previously aware that she had such a great fondness for that process.

We buried the shark in sandy gravel, as I have been informed is traditional. Although it is rather a lot of work. There were those who said we should eat what could be salvaged from the shark at once. There were others who said it was too far gone and that we might as well try something else. There were those… (and I hesitate to quote them) who said that the shark would taste of (something terrible) no matter what we did with it.

Mrs Ephemery cheerfully assured us that the meat at this stage would be poisonous, and that anyone daring to eat it before she had processed it would be likely to go blind. 

After the fermenting process, we had to dig up the shark – which to my great astonishment had not been eaten by anything else during the months of its being buried. We then cut it into strips and took it to The Crow to be dried. At this point the shark had a discernible smell, and it was not the smell of decay, but of something else altogether. It put me in mind of my late husband at his most beastly.

We waited for a further four months, during which time Mrs Ephemery and I discussed the shark on a number of occasions. I have found her to be an excellent companion. We share a passion for unusual food, and have sampled all kinds of meat together. I did not think that at this stage of my life I might find a friend, but it has come to pass. I shall remain ever grateful for the day that I saw the board outside The Crow announcing “Dead Mans Fingers” on the menu. They turn out to be an edible mushroom with only mild side effects.

I approached the day of the shark testing with great excitement. Mrs Ephemery and I worked together to remove the crust from the outside of the shark meat. She reassured me that she had been expecting this, as it was mentioned in her great grandmother’s kitchen notes. 

The texture was inoffensive. The smell… pungent and reminiscent of my late husband. Of the tasters gathered, three did not make it past the stage of smelling the meat, even though we were samping it outside. Mrs Ephemery had informed us that despite the snowstorm, outside was the best choice for eating this dish.

Of course I partook of the shark meat. I have tasted worse. It was not wholly impossible to swallow, although I seem to be the only one who could manage much of this. Mrs Ephemery only ever tastes small amounts of food and seems to enjoy food more in terms of preparation and as a spectator’s sport. 

One of the Scientific Gentleman kindly informed me that the correct technical name for the flavour – which has the merit of not being uncouth – is ammonia.

(Written by Nimue)

Hopeless Tales, Mrs Beaten

Mrs Beaten’s Bedside Manner

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Story by Nimue.

You are feverish, but you do not think this alarming vision is just a product of your fevered brain. While you can’t stand up, you have enough mastery over yourself to be fairly certain of your own mind.

The question is, how did she get in? Surely the door was locked? She isn’t the type to climb through a window, that would be far too undignified. You feel confident this is someone who would rather die in a house fire than climb indelicately from a window.

Her hands are cold upon your burning brow. So cold. You almost like the feeling while wanting not to like it at all. She straightens your quilt, not even sickness makes untidiness acceptable.

“I do not think you are ready for soup,” she says.

This is a relief. You have never felt less ready for soup, but imagine her spooning it into your mouth, making you feel powerless in face of her. What other horrors might she insist upon? A bedbath? An emptying of the chamber pot? There are so many things to fear, and in your fevered state, that fear has a truly delicious quality to it.

“Of course you have no one to blame but yourself,” she says, sternly.

You have no idea what she means.

“I know some gentlemen consider a brisk paddle in the sea to be good for the constitution, but hardly in that bay.”

You still have no idea what she means.

“It was fortuitous that I happened to be in the area,” she adds.

You have been suspicious for some time that Mrs Beaten has been following you, but thought it best not to say anything.

“There’s a jellyfish woman in that bay. Everyone knows that.”

You did not know that, but a hazy memory returns, of translucent flesh and a desperately pretty face.

“She had you enraptured,” Mrs Beaten puts her hands on her hips and stares at you. Her judgement is intense.

“I don’t remember,” you manage to say, but your voice is hoarse.

“Of course you don’t. That’s how they get you. They make you forget, and they make you long to return to them. You’ve lived here long enough to understand that. Really, I expected better from you.”

“Sorry,” you manage.

“I had no choice but to beat her to death with my umbrella,” Mrs Beaten adds, with a casualness that suggests she does this sort of thing all the time. “I had to bring you back in a wheelbarrow.”

While this explains a few things, it does not comfort you.

“I’ve brought you a restorative from Doc Willoughby,” she says.

You can’t see the umbrella, but all the same it seems wiser to follow her instructions.

Hopeless Tales, Mrs Beaten

Mrs Beaten’s guide to afternoon tea

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By Nimue Brown

You will of course want to have afternoon tea. It is one of the hallmarks of a civillised society and absolutely essential. I shall guide you through this process.

Firstly you will require a table and chairs. If you have to make do in this regard, focus your attention on a good tablecloth. This will disguise many things, including unseemly table legs, stray tentacles and anything you are obliged to hide under the table. Good crockery is an asset, but I fear you will struggle to get anything to match. You may cheer up your table with some nice flowers. Be sure to find out in advance of your tea party whether the flowers are poisonous, venomous, hallucinogenic or inclined to attack in other ways.

It is possible to make decent herbal teas from a number of plants that grow on the island. I know, this is a horrifying assertion. There can of course be no milk or cream in such a tea, but if you’ve seen what comes out of the small cows, or for that matter the donkeys, you might consider this a blessing. Donkey milk is an acquired taste.

Further difficulties arise should you wish to serve cake, buttered toast, or biscuits with your tea. Almost no wheat is grown on the island. What grains we have cannot be relied upon and I am told that the interesting moulds that grow on them add to both the flavour and your chances of seeing something wholly unexpected. It is, I am afraid to say, very difficult to make cake out of seaweed. It is possible to make a sort-of biscuit thing that will not make you outright weep with disappointment.

One of the few things you can rely on here is meat. It isn’t always easy to come by, but for richness and lusciousness, it cannot be beaten. (That was my one joke, I hope you appreciated it.) There are few things that cannot be substituted for a really good cut of meat. Even jam. Made a cake but have no filling? Meat. Need a pie filling? Meat. And if you are trying to coax a gentleman to take tea with you, then you won’t go far wrong if you offer him some hot meat with plenty of stuffing. 

I do apologise, I seem to have become rather over-excited and may need to sit down for a moment.

Hopeless Tales, Mrs Beaten

The Horrors of Hopeless, Maine

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By Nimue Brown

Good evening. It is my unfortunate task to try and prepare you a little for life on Hopeless, Maine. I must warn you that this is a terrible place, full of dreadful, horrible things. Many of which really are too terrible to describe. I will do my best to prepare you for the dire things that you may expect to encounter and while I shall try to speak circumspectly, the more delicate amongst you should be warned that you may struggle with what I have to say. Make sure that you have your smelling salts to hand, and if you need to unlace an excessively tight corset, please do so discreetly so as not to cause anyone else to swoon in an embarrassing manner.

Prepare yourself for the awfulness of collars and cuffs. There is so little sunlight here that laundry cannot be sunbleached, and greying occurs all too often. Further, there are very few good sources of starch, making it desperately difficult to keep collars in good, stiff positions. You may be tempted to use night potatoes in this regard, but I advise against this. Night potatoes are horrid things, with glowing eyes and writhing tentacles, but the worst of it is that if you do not prepare them in exactly the right way, they can stain your clothes! I’m sorry, there’s really no gentler way of putting this to people.

You are probably used to much higher standards than it is possible to maintain here on the island. You will struggle, for example, to find anything suitable for washing your hair with. There are of course eggs, but eggs are often in short supply and you may be forced to make the ghastly choice between shiny hair, and making a cake. Do not use glass heron eggs. They work perfectly well, but your chances of losing a digit, or a limb to the glass heron are high and this offsets any good to your appearance that the egg might have achieved.

While a decent amount of cutlery has been salvaged from shipwrecks over the years, the island suffers a terrible lack of spoons. There is an ongoing spoon crisis, and you would do well to keep your spoons with you at all times. This seems to be the only way to keep them safe from whatever appalling entities make it their business to steal them. And as I’m sure you can see, it is difficult to run a good kitchen without spoons. No one wants the shameful indignity of having to drink soup from a bowl. 

Fabric is also in short supply. You will need your mending skills and will be obliged to accept lower standards in fashion and neatness alike. Your stain removal skills will often be called upon. When preparing sea monsters, it is all too easy to get sprays of dark substances onto one’s clothing and they are notoriously hard to remove. Since coming here I have had to improve my techniques for dealing with scorch marks, and blood stains as well. Keeping things clean is an ongoing struggle and you may well lose sleep over it. I myself lost a great deal of sleep last week regarding the amount of tearing my clothing suffered and the difficulty of repairing my best dress. So let that be a warning to you.

Hopeless inhabitants

Tish Toglet – resident

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The annual church picnic is usually an odd affair. We all know there are going to be sermons and that Reverend Davies will preach about the virtues of sobriety, temperance and moderation. Picnic goers are divided into several camps. There are the people who wholeheartedly agree with him, and who will willingly eat dry biscuits as they do so. Then there are the midgrounders, typified by Mrs Beaten – people who have brought along indulgences like scones, and jam-like substances but who nonetheless are willing to listen quietly, then sing enthusiastically. Furthermore, they sing enthusiastically at the points when Reverend Davies wishes them to sing and make their best attempts at the tunes he had in mind.

Then there’s everyone else. The ones who will try and spike the soothing tea with mushrooms. The ones who are mostly there in the hopes that Reverend Davies accidentally summons Satan out of the ocean. Again. Church picnics have a knack for attracting drama and chaos, so if you have the stomach for the sermons they can be rather entertaining as a spectator sport.

Tish Toglet has been the antagonist in chief for the counter-picnic for some years now. Rumour has it she is the one who managed to get Mrs Beaten so drunk last year that she did an entirely unseemly dance and flashed her bloomers before passing out. As for how she woke up covered in jam is of course anyone’s guess. The ultimate goal for those who go along only to disrupt the picnic, is to get Reverend Davies to do something funny. If he’s capable of laughter, no one has ever heard him do it, but he is certainly equal to causing great amusement.

The year a fish somehow got into his trousers was rather memorable on that score. Then there was the year we all had letters on our picnic blankets and spelled out something rude that only he could see when he stood up to do his sermon. This year a few of us are planning to take along phallic objects and sit with them in our laps and see if that throws him at all.

So if you’re coming to the picnic, think carefully about who to sit with. Do you want to be next to Herb Chevin and his offensively arid biscuits? Do you want to be close enough to Mrs Beaten to enjoy the full power of her singing? Or are you going to come and sit with Tish’s little party? Maybe stick some horns on your hat if you do.

Births, Deaths, Marriages, Island News

Nothing is ever simple

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By Frampton Jones

Chris died after falling from a roof. It is, on the whole, a rather simple and uncomplicated death – Chris was on the roof alone, there were witnesses on the ground, a misplaced foot, a slip, a brief plummet, and that was that.  It’s rare that anyone gets such a good, quick and simple death, and it is something to admire and envy.

Or at least, that is how it first seemed.

As I interviewed the witnesses, I noticed mixed reports about how Chris came to be on the roof in the first place. “Chris acted like there was something else up there, but we couldn’t see anything,” Petunia Chevin told me.

There was nothing odd or peculiar to be found inside the house. This struck me as unusual. How does a person have a home free from all traces of the sinister, occult and dangerous? How had this been achieved?

Chris’s neighbour, Mrs Beaten said, “Chris always had the lights out at a decent hour. Always got up early in the morning. Always had spotless laundry on the line. Never buried anything in the garden in the middle of the night. I kept watching, but I never saw anything untoward, and that troubles me.”

On examining the body, Doc Willoughby pronounced that Chris had clearly been dead for at least a week and had probably drowned. I saw the starfish in Chris’s ear. I do not know what to think of this.

Births, Deaths, Marriages, Island News

Lady M – another suspected murder victim

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By Frampton Jones

What a devastating loss to the island! Cling to your remaining bottles of gin, ladies and gentlemen, cherish every last remaining drop, for Lady M has been cruelly taken from us and we may never see her like again. As far as I know, the secret of her ‘botanicals’ that transformed dubious attempts at alcohol into sustenance for the soul, has gone with her. It is a loss we are all bound to feel most keenly.

I suspect foul play. Doc Willloughby tells me that such lacerations and bruising may reflect wholly natural causes – that it is very much what happens when a person has a hungry sea creature latch onto their head. Had Lady M’s remains been found on a beach, or other body of water, it may have been more convincing. “Air kraken,” Doc Willoughby suggested. “Tree lobsters. Sky sharks. Lots of options.”

There have been no reported sightings of any such things in a while, and the last occasion was just after Armitage Chevin’s seaweed cider party. That was the night people claimed to see the Devil rising from the sea, there were eleven rather awkward instances of mistaken identity, and I ended up with a small stain on my collar.

What makes me suspicious was the way in which Lady M’s body had been carefully laid out, her hands folded neatly across her chest and her skirts straightened and smoothed. It all points at one person – Mrs Beaten, who I recently suspected of murdering poor dear Fiona.

I am not alone in my suspicions. I spoke with a gentleman who wishes to remain anonymous this morning, and he told me he was afraid that his relationship with Lady M may have led to her death, because Mrs Beaten had taken to staring at him in the street and following him round. The anonymous gentleman in question has gone into hiding for the time being, in light of what happened to Nimrod.

Someone needs to sit Mrs Beaten down and give her a stern talking to. She can’t go round wiping out beloved members of our community in this way, it isn’t proper – and that may be the most persuasive thing anyone can say to stop her. It is undignified behaviour to murder one’s rivals, it is unbecoming and unseemly. I sincerely hope that there are no further incidents of this nature.

It has been mooted that we might best honour Lady M by pickling her in gin and installing her at a public location. The consensus however, is that we want to keep all the gin we’ve got. A more conventional burial will take place in a few days time. In the meantime, careful searches continue for any paperwork that will enable us to keep her gin-making wisdom alive.