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"People call me King of the Realm of Horror and it's true, that's what I am. But it's also true that Lamblake Heinz is the President of the Republic of Fear." — Stephen Kong, author of Carry on Menstruating and Pest Seminary

"He's every bit as good as he says I am." — Peter Strawberry, author of Spook Tale and Another Blandly Titled Novel

"He's every bit as good as he says I am." — Clive Barking, author of Bumraiser

"I'm every bit as good as I say he is." — Dennis Etchings, author of The Dark Tripe

"Whenever I'm required to blurb a book I ask myself the question, 'What's in it for me?' Various unethical benefits, was the answer in this case. This is a very good book." — Tom Libbon, author of Dusk, Blue, Mauve and Teapot.

"I hope to network my way one day to the same position of respect and influence as Heinz currently enjoys. I love his work accordingly." — Simian Kurt Upstart, author nominated for some award or other

"Years ago, when the television show I successfully scripted, Phantom View, became a national phenomenon I told everyone that Lamblake Heinz had been the biggest influence on Phantom View. More than two decades after Phantom View got all the country talking about Phantom View, I am happy to reaffirm what I said back then. By the way, have you seen Phantom View?" — Stephen Vulk, financially acclaimed scriptwriter of Phantom View

"Although I haven't read his book yet, I know it's brilliant. I also know which side my bread is buttered on. Both sides." — Peter Lodger, chief reviewer for Black Stasis magazine

"Because I wear sunglasses all the time, even indoors, I can't actually read books but only write them. Nonetheless this collection by the amazing Lamblake Heinz richly deserves the forthcoming award that has already been secretly arranged for him to win." — Sarah Pongborough, author of The Dog-Eared Gods

"I'm proud to be part of his clique together with Tom Libbon, Stephen Vulk, Gary McMadman, Sarah Pongborough and others." — Murk Murris

"I used to think he was rubbish and couldn't write at all and didn't know what he was talking about, but then he praised my first book and I suddenly realised he was an incomparable master of supernatural terror!" — Sam Markuels, author of The Sticky White Hands

"Lamblake is a genius. He and I go back a long way. We invented nepotism at roughly the same time." — Some Bloke Called Pete

"I don't like him." — Shaun Hutsoff, author of Snails, Crayfish and Midges

"Western Society is incredibly arrogant. Scientists like Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, Pauli, Fermi, Heisenberg and Gödel thought they were clever and had lots of smart answers to big problems. But in fact we know nothing and we're all just children groping in the dark, and Lamblake Heinz, an acknowledged master of horror even though he's not physically tough and goes on package holidays when he travels abroad instead of roughing it like a hero, is fortunately on hand to remind us that our arrogance is wrong and that his arrogance is better and that he is right instead of those scientists mentioned above and that's why we should all be grateful and praise him." — Gary Boil, managing editor of Gray Boilers Press.

"I like to stamp my foot and announce how I'm willing to defend the rights and dignity of women to my final breath! But when Lamblake Heinz aggressively castigates a shop girl at an event where he's doing a reading because the turnout was low, I won't say anything in protest. That's how brilliant a writer he is. And how timid a political activist I am." — Beston Simwick, horror author and communist

"I love Heinz's work so much that I kissed and married it in a civil partnership ceremony." — Joel Alley, another horror author and communist

"That squelch was the sound of my buttocks dropping off my body in sheer shock at how superb and amazing his writing is!" — Simon Clunk, author of Nailed by the Fart and The Travesty of the Triffids

The Grin of the Doll Who Ate His Mother's Face in the Dark and Other Dreadful Tales

by

Lamblake Heinz

Edited by Rhys Hughes

With a Foreword by James Sherbert

Cover Art by Gonzalo Canedo

Published By Gloomy Seahorse Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Lamblake Heinz

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Dedicated to

all horror readers with a sense of humour

Table of Contents

Foreword

Loafing Around

A Tale of Terror

The Matchmaker

White Rabbit

Go West, Young Ripper

Eggs

The Grin of the Doll Who Ate his Mother's Face in the Dark

Matryoshka

Knees

And Now a Word from Lamblake Heinz Himself

The Hideous Cackle

The Count of Eleven Boobies

A Greek Haircut

One Better

Whistle and I'll Come Inside You, My Lad

Three Dancers

A Warning to the Bi-Curious

The Terrors that Creep in the Night

Lamblake Heinz Speaks

The Birth of Opera

The Sink Monster

The Landslide

Chainsaw for Sale, Lightly Used

The Hidden Sixpence

Lovecraft's Chin

The Wrexham Chainsaw Massacre

A Fistful of Parables

Excerpt from Shadow of the Tory

More Poetry

Towards a New Arcana

The Cottage in the Cottage

Morphometasis

The Most Utterly Romantic Monstrous Horror Story Ever

I'm Lovecraft, Woe is Me

Genetic Crocodiles on the Rampage

The Nefarious Matter of Smelly Darkly

Necessity is the Mother

Cut Me Up, My Darling!

Lamblake Recalls How he Helped to Establish the British Society of Weird Fantasy

Interview with Lamblake Heinz

A Message from the Editor

Another Message from the Editor

FOREWORD

I was living in a cottage when I first discovered the work of Lamblake Heinz. Living in a cottage was very spooky! Have you ever lived in a cottage on your own? I have. Spooky indeed! When I started reading the book I suddenly realised that the cottage was even spookier than before. "What an amazing coincidence!" I said to myself, as I poured another glass of Malt whisky for my pet slipper. "My cottage is spooky and this book is spooky! How does he do it?"

And I've been trying and failing to answer that question ever since, especially on those days when I remember to ask it. That was back in the 1960s and I've followed the career of Lamblake Heinz ever since. It goes without saying he's the best horror writer in the entire world and that his books ought to be on the shelves of every reader and even on the shelves of those other people who don't read and even on the shelves of people who don't have shelves. Just my view.

In the early days, Lamblake's stories were often about dinosaurs and werewolves and poisonous ducks. But a writer worth his salt and also his pepper and also his mustard is never satisfied to stand still with the topics and themes that have made him famous. He is always wanting to push the envelope, sometimes pushing it so hard that it goes out of shape and it's no longer possible to stick a stamp on it. Lamblake quickly evolved and started dealing with all sort of subjects.

But no matter what the subject of those subjects was, he still managed to make it spooky! Like my cottage! Sometimes even worse than that, so inherently spooky is his work, and I have to admire that, whether I want to or not, and I do want to, believe it or not, as it happens, a lot. But none of this is getting us where we want to go, which is into Lamblake's tales themselves, each one a carefully crafted little gem that sparkles like some sort of star that looks like an evil jewel.

I'll just say that among the nine hundred or so stories he has written I was delighted to be given this opportunity of writing this Foreword to a selection of a handful of the best of all. This collection that you hold now in your hand is the definitive volume of Heinz's shorter work in the field of the horror short story! This isn't to say that horror is really a field. It's more of an urban zone overgrown with weeds and each weed might be a monster, a psycho or some sort of ghost.

And the realisation of that is truly spooky! The first time I realised this for myself, while I was sitting alone in my cottage during a spooky night, it became subsequently impossible for me to sleep the night away in bed, because I was too scared to get any sleep. The following morning I wrote a letter to Mr Lamblake Heinz good naturedly complaining with a tongue in my cheek that he had stopped me getting any sleep. To my amazement he replied a few months later with a letter!

"Dear James," the letter began, "thanks so much for your hilarious and funny epistle, which made me laugh and amused me very much as well. I am sorry to hear about your hideous insomnia that was occasioned by my highly crafted tales of horror and ghosts and stuff and so I wish to pay for the damage I have caused. Please accept and cash this postal order and by all means write to me again as often as you like telling me what you think of all my books in the order you read them."

It was signed at the bottom by Lamblake Heinz himself! And attached to the letter by a paperclip was a postal order for one old penny! That was back in the 1960s, when the cost of living was much cheaper, and when you spent a penny you still got change from a penny. Can you even begin to start to imagine my feelings when I saw that the great Lamblake Heinz had deigned to write to me, a mere nobody only beginning to write horror tales of my own? Seriously, can you imagine?

I imagine I felt the same feelings felt by a sorcerer or wizard from the long gone olden days of yore when he called forth, thanks to the use of spells and rituals and things, an ancient demon by name and then a demon answering to that name appeared in a puff of vaporous smoke! Lamblake Heinz is a demon to me, a good demon, the sort of demon one would like to have in the house all the time, telling stories by the guttering glow of a flickering thick stub of an antique black candle.

We have been fine friends since that moment back in the 1960s, which seems such a long time ago but isn't as long ago as, say, the time of those weird fellows called Egyptians who made mummies and pyramids to put them in and worshipped gods with funny heads. And I guess it's true for me to say that Lamblake is my god and that I worship him. Every time he writes a new tale he sends it to me to read and then even comes round in person to my cottage where I live to test me on it.

The following collection of brilliant stories that you still hold in your hand, if you haven't dropped it for whatever reason, is a magnificent and perfect showcase of the diverse and enormous talents of the huge genius of Lamblake Heinz. The stories in this book are arranged in chronological order and demonstrate how his style has evolved from amazing to superb in the space of only fifty years. I envy the reader new to the work of this literary deity. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy and be scared!

JAMES SHERBERT, THE COTTAGE, 2012

...and now prepare yourself for the best that Lamblake Heinz has to offer!

Are you ready?

Ready or not, here it comes...

Er... there has been a small technical problem but we're sure everything will be working again very soon.

Right, we're ready now...

But are you?

Um... the problem wasn't fixed.

Bear with us one moment.

OK, that should do it.

No? In that case...

I'm sorry, I really don't know what to do

Ah... maybe we should say a little prayer to the great god Cthulpoo?

Yoggy-soggy-lamblakey-heinzy!

LOAFING AROUND

They paddled the canoe up the creek to the rotting jetty. In the last rays of the setting sun, they climbed onto the creaking planks and made their way to dry land. The town was silent. No light shone in any window. The rain still dripped from the sagging balconies.

"Looks like we're too late," said Worthington.

Nashe shook his head. "We can't be certain of that yet. We'll have to check every single house one by one."

Worthington puffed out his cheeks. "This town has been cut off from civilisation for hundreds of years. Who knows what affect the toxins had on the people who lived here? I mean—"

"That's what we're here to find out. Come on."

But Worthington was wary. "The people of the last town had evolved into giants; and in the town before that, they only had one eye each; and in the town before that... Hideous!"

Nashe shrugged. "You knew the risks."

"Yes, I suppose I did. All the same, it's frightful."

"Let's get it over with, shall we?"

The beam of his heavy torch swinging ponderously in the twilight, his boots squelching dockside mud, he led the way along the waterfront to a row of buildings that turned out to be shops. It was weird seeing them in such a place, in a town surrounded by bubbling green swamps; they were too quaint, pleasant and picturesque.

"Bakers' shops!" breathed Worthington.

Nashe frowned. "All of them, without exception."

Worthington licked his dry lips.

"Look at this display. Braided bread! Seeded rolls and baguettes! And they look fresh. This means that people still live here! The town isn't dead. But where is everyone? Are they hiding?"

Nashe pushed at the front door of every shop. They were all locked for the night with the exception of one at the end of the row. The hinges were oiled and the door swung smoothly open. The two men entered the shop. The torch beams played over shelves packed with bread and cakes. Then Worthington jerked his head and said:

"Shhh! I think I heard something, a rustling..."

Nashe froze, his ears prickling.

He nodded slowly, pointed at one of the largest loaves that stood on a low shelf. The noise was coming from inside it. Worthington joined him and rested his head against the crust.

He hissed, "There are voices within it!"

Nashe reddened, whether from rage or embarrassment was impossible to determine, and he used his free hand to claw apart the loaf. Fistfuls of fluffy bread were scattered in all directions. Worthington retreated a few steps in fear, but his companion was oblivious to danger. He tore with a primal savagery at the whispering loaf.

At last the truth was exposed. A cavern in the heart of the loaf, some sort of cunning refugee for mutants...

The people that were exposed were recognisably human — but none of them were taller than half an inch.

"They have degenerated over many generations!"

"The toxins did this! The toxins!"

"No, I think it was something even worse..."

Nashe was aghast and he rapidly retreated to where Worthington was standing. Both of them crowded the doorway of the shop. They took one last look at the miniature humans; then they ran out into the street, back to the jetty and the safety of the canoe.

"The worse outcome for any isolated community," growled Nashe as he paddled with all his strength to propel them back into the labyrinth of the bubbling swamp, home of snakes with arms and birds with plumage that flashed in colours that hadn't existed before the disaster. It took ten minutes of furious work before they felt secure enough to slow the pace and talk properly again to each other.

"Yes, the worst outcome," agreed Worthington.

"They were tiny! Like imps!"

"Smaller than that. Smaller than my thumb..."

Nashe shuddered and said in an undertone, "I've only ever seen such a situation once before. Down south."

"Horrible. Who could imagine that the entire population... I mean, the entire population... would be..."

"In bread," nodded Nashe with tragic eyes.

A TALE OF TERROR

Laura was running. She ran.

She ran through the forest. Through the forest she ran. Laura ran.

She was running through the forest. The forest was dark. It was scary. Her name was Laura. She ran.

A monster was chasing her!

She ran from the monster. Laura ran away from the monster. Through the forest.

The forest was large. It was dark.

The monster ran after her!

After Laura ran the monster, through the dark forest. It was running. Laura was running. They both ran.

Through the forest.

She tripped as she ran. She picked herself up and resumed running. She tripped again. She tripped because she was running! Through the dark, creepy forest.

She picked herself up and ran.

The monster was behind her. It ran after her. It wanted to meet Laura some time. Maybe she would like that?

No, she wouldn't!

But the monster would! The running monster!

Like many running monsters, it ran. After Laura. And she was running too! Through the forest.

The large, dark, creepy forest!

There were trees in the forest. Like most forests, it had trees! Unlike most forests, it had a monster. A monster running through it. After Laura!

Who ran. She was running. Laura was running. She ran.

She tripped. She picked herself up. She ran.

Laura was running. She ran.

She ran through the forest. Through the forest she ran. Laura ran.

She was running through the forest. The forest was dark. It was scary. Her name was Laura. She ran.

A monster was chasing her!

She tripped and fell. There was a note on the ground. She picked it up. She read it. It said:

Dear Laura,

I'M BEHIND YOU! DON'T LOOK BACK!

Signed, The Monster

p.s. Maybe we could meet some time? I'd like that.

Laura read the note. She was scared.

She read the note as she ran. In the forest she read the note. The short note in the large forest.

Not just large. Creepy too! And dark.

Like the note. The note that Laura read. Before she finished it.

She ran. Laura ran. She didn't look back. She took the monster's advice! It was good advice.

Good advice from a bad monster!

What are the chances of that happening?

Laura tripped. She picked herself up. She ran.

She was running. Laura ran.

She ran through the forest. Through the forest she ran. The forest was dark. It was scary. Her name was Laura. She ran.

The monster was chasing her!

Or was it? If it had left a note for her, it wasn't behind her!

It was in front of her!

It was in front of her in the forest!

The large, dark, creepy forest! The forest with trees!

She stopped running. Laura didn't run. She didn't run through the forest. She didn't trip, because she wasn't running! She didn't need to pick herself up and resume running.

If she ran, she would run into the monster!

Which was in front of her!

She decided to look for somewhere to hide. Somewhere to hide from the monster. Somewhere in the forest.

She saw a house!

She ran to the house. Laura ran to the house.

The door was shaped like a mouth!

She ran inside.

The door closed and ate her!

The door was a mouth! The house ate her!

The house was the monster!

But if the house was the monster, how did it chase her through the forest? How did it chase Laura?

It wasn't a house!

It was a caravan!

THE MATCHMAKER

"Matchmaker! Matchmaker! Make me a match!" sang the innocent girl as she wandered through the woods.

"What do you want one for?" came a scary voice.

"Who— who— who are you? I thought I was alone here in the forest. Where are you? I can't see you!"

"I'm in the branches of this tree, dear Olga," the voice answered in the deep resonant tone of something evil.

"How do you know my name?"

"It was easy. I know many things. I am supernatural."

"A tree spirit? You have wings!" gasped Olga, who was naive and had only kind thoughts and believed that nature was a nice force that sincerely wanted the best for everyone alive.

"Oh no, Olga! That's not the right way to talk. Tree spirits are a pagan concept. I'm an angel from paradise."

"Yes, yes, I realise that now. This is wonderful!" cried Olga in delight because she was so innocent and pure.

"Why were you talking to yourself?" the evil voice demanded in a sly and wicked way that was oily and odd.

"I was just rehearsing what I plan to say to the matchmaker tomorrow. I am going to visit her on my own..."

"To ask her to make you a match? Really?" chuckled the evil voice in the style of a madman who laughs quietly, but Olga didn't pay any heed to this overtone in his hideous mirth.

"Indeed. I'm no longer a girl, I'm a woman, so it's only right that I ask for a good match, the best I can get."

"I can give you a match right now, Olga," the voice smirked.

"Can you? Can you? Please!"

"It'll be much better than any match that a mortal could make for you. Here it is. Take it with my blessings," said the voice and at the same time it grew dark in the woodland and it wasn't possible to see as far as it had been when it was slightly less dark.

"But— but— but it's just a stick of wood!" gasped Olga.

"That's right. With a red end."

"I'm sorry, I don't understand. I thought that—" Olga blushed and she didn't know why because she was nice.

"Strike it against a stone, Olga."

"Oh I see. It's magic, is it? Very well. Like this you mean?"

"Absolutely. Exactly like that."

"Aargh! It's burning me!" screamed Olga as her dress burned away to reveal her naked nudity. "I'm enveloped in flame! I can't escape from the fire that's encasing me. Eeeek!"

"No use complaining. It's what you asked for."

"Aiieeee! Eeeeeek! Urgghhhh!"

"I forgot to warn you that it's a million times more powerful than any match you might find on Earth," sniggered the voice. Then it added, "Do you know why that should be, Olga? Can you guess why?" But she didn't seem inclined to have a guess at all.

"Urgghhh! Arrrrghhhh! Eeeek! Aieee!"

"You don't seem to be listening to me any more," said the evil voice in a gross tone of mocking sadness and fake sympathy, "but I'll tell you the answer anyway. Because it's a match made in Heaven. That's why. What do you think of that, Olga?"

There was lots of smoke and fumes now.

"Oh, wait a moment," cried the voice. "I gave you one from the wrong box. Hellfire! Where are you, Olga? How very strange! There's just a pile of ashes where she was standing..."

WHITE RABBIT

Billy met the girl in a pub in Soho. He told her that she looked nice and then he bought her a drink and they went back to her place. As she took off her clothes in front of him she said, "I'm a conjuror. That's what I do to make a living. What about you?"

Billy didn't answer the question directly. He watched her unhook her bra and fling it carelessly across the room, where it landed on the massive leaf of a potted cheese plant. Then his sensitive nostrils quivered. He had an amazing sense of smell, Billy did.

"I can smell the odour of menstruation," he said.

"Wow! That's amazing!" she said.

"Yes, my sense of smell is exactly that — amazing!"

"How come?" she asked.

Billy's eyes misted over nostalgically as he reminisced about his own past with a dreamy expression. "I used to be a real ale expert. A job like that sharpens ones palate and nose."

She gave him a foxy look. "Does it bother you that I'm having one of those womanly things called a 'period'? If you like, we can try again next week when my 'period' will be over."

Billy made a dismissive gesture. "No, it doesn't."

She said, "I'll have to take my tampon out to make room, of course. It shouldn't take more than a few minutes."

"A few minutes just to take out one tampon?" Billy was incredulous as he watched in disbelief as she reached down between her own legs to pull a blue string that dangled down below her knees. It was hard to credit this and he rubbed his eyes disbelievingly.

She pulled out the first tampon with a sucking sound, like an eyeball being spooned out of a skull by a psycho, then she pulled out another and another and another. They kept coming one after another, like a queue of bloody ghosts or slaughtered bunnies.

"Told you I was a professional conjuror!" she giggled as the twentieth tampon came out. Then she bowed low.

Billy clapped. He thought she probably wasn't worth all the hassle but he was a stubborn old goat, so he decided to make the best of a bad job. He pushed her back onto the bed and widened her legs with his knee and then he mounted her, his cock stiffening like a telescope having fellatio performed on it by the planet Uranus.

Then he muttered the secret words, "Hey pudendo!"

At once her eyes widened and she emitted a startled gasp. "What are you doing?" she demanded shrilly.

"Getting square with the Magic Circle," he answered, while his hips thrust in a regular motion. He could tell she was enjoying it, though she was bewildered by the roughness of his flesh.

Slowly, he moved up her body, hips still working rhythmically. By the time he reached her navel, she was aware that something was wrong. Her hand grabbed at his cock and she squealed.

"It's bloody serrated, you bastard!"

"Been saw for years," he replied ironically.

She didn't resist as he pushed upwards, moving through her abdomen, chest, neck and finally head. At last, Billy was all the way through and disengaged in a puff of bonedust. Replacing his tool, he thrust his fingers into her crack. The two halves came away with a faint slurping sound and he rotated them slowly on the bed.

"You'll like it, not a lot," he said to an imaginary audience.

"I don't like it at all," she spluttered.

"I wasn't talking to you," he sneered nastily.

Then he put the two halves back as they were and tried to join them together. This was the difficult bit. He decided to stitch her up from top to bottom, the surgical way. But what could he use for thread? His eyes fell on the pile of tampons and their strings...

GO WEST, YOUNG RIPPER

She was out again, walking the street, feeling the power in her hips as the cars crawled next to her. "How much, love?" She giggled and quoted a trifling sum. Later, back in her house, she would let the customer play hide-the-sausage in all manner of unusual positions. Her husband filmed the scene through a spyhole in the door.

Up above, in the bathroom, and down below, in the cellar, bodies of young girls rotted in concrete. None of the men she invited back guessed the truth: the secret intensified her pleasure.

Selling her flesh was only one aspect of the mayhem and cruelty she adopted into her life. She often helped her husband with the torture and mutilation — neither could truly say who inspired the other. The obvious things, like cannibalism, were joint decisions.

Now she reached an alley, the memory of spurting blood and masking tape fresh in her mind, warming her thighs. The narrow lane was blocked by a lorry, lights ablaze. She stopped and stood with one arm on her fat waist, tongue flicking gristle from her teeth.

The driver jumped down from his cab and approached her. She admired his furtive stealth, his savage manner. "Hello, dearie," she called. She noted the swelling in his trousers. "You look the sort of man who can go at it hammer-and-tongs."

The driver rubbed at the bulge.

"Less of the tongs," he smirked. Licking her greasy lips, Rosemary West followed Peter Sutcliffe into the alley.

EGGS

He hated eggs, absolutely hated them, but his wife gave them to him for breakfast every morning. "I hate eggs!" he snapped at her, but it seemed she wasn't listening, because she continued to cook them in a heavy pan smeared with grease that was yellow like rancid pus. He banged his knife down on the table. "Did you hear me?"

It was raining outside and the dreary raindrops fell on the grimy panes of the warped windows that looked out on a barren garden where all the grass had died. There had been a chicken coop out there once, he recalled, but it was gone now. That was funny. Not funny ha ha but funny peculiar. The eggs sizzled in the pan like hornets.

In the grey light that filled the gloomy room, he was unable to read the newspaper without squinting. The newspaper was printed in grey ink that was as depressing and faded as the sky. The headlines made no sense, but it seemed that the price of eggs had gone up. There were no chickens left anywhere on any farms. The rain pelted.

"I don't want eggs for breakfast," he said patiently, "I want an onion, a roll and some coffee instead." But she didn't heed him and he felt like he was crushed under the weight of the hissing yolk in the pan. He wanted to scream and run away but there was nowhere to run to because every place in the entire world was utterly like this one.

He chewed his lower lip. Despite his hatred of eggs he was hungry. A dull thumping began somewhere in his brain. "Are those eggs ready yet? I don't want them but I must have them," he cried. She walked up to him with the saucepan held out in front of her. Then she hit him on the crown of the head with it. "Here they are!" she said.

His head crackled like a shell, precisely like an eggshell, and the yolk of his brains trickled down his face and onto his protruding tongue. Then at last he knew what he was. He was chicken. Too chicken to confront the reality of his doom. A henpecked husband. And she was a ghost or some sort of psycho. He knew all this and then died.

THE GRIN OF THE DOLL WHO ATE HIS MOTHER'S FACE IN THE DARK

The thunderous stench of diabolical sulphur rolled and echoed inside the nose of Daniel Keats as he entered the forbidden room and trod over the creaking floorboards towards the bed.

All his life this room had been out of bounds; but now his mother was dead downstairs in her rocking chair, the knitting needles cold in her old wrinkled hands, and he was free at last.

As soon as he had checked her pulse and used two tin cans joined by a piece of string as a rudimentary stethoscope to ensure her resentful heart had really stopped beating, he had cried.

But they weren't tears of grief, his tears, but tears of tearful joy! That's possible because even men can sometimes weep in happiness despite the apparent illogic of such a phenomenon.

Daniel Keats stopped his weeping as soon as he could and then up the steps he scuttled, up the stairs with its carpet so stained with inexplicable stains that it was just a single huge stain.

Up the stairs and along the hideous corridor to the door!

The door of the forbidden room!

The forbidden room that he wasn't allowed to enter!

He had turned the key and squeaked the oblong of grim wood with its eldritch carvings of strange nightmarish faces into the 'ajar' position, and then he had slipped through beyond it.

The room was cluttered and full of objects.

A single tiny window in the ceiling allowed a shaft of dirty weird light to penetrate the odd gloom and strike a note of discordant weirdness over the entirety of the uncanny surroundings.

Daniel frowned and then he smiled and sneezed.

The dust in the air was like the pepper of a lost civilisation floating all around him. But there was another smell that was even stronger. It was a stench of diabolical sulphur. Rotten eggs!

Daniel narrowed his eyes and arched his eyebrows.

He didn't like eggs, though his mother had forced him to eat them for breakfast most mornings, usually prepared in the 'scrambled' manner and with only one pinch of salt between six eggs. Why had she been terrified of such a simple condiment as table salt?

Daniel screwed up his face and pouted at the same time. She had also been scared of garlic and other foreign stinks. He remembered that once a salesman from the country Italy had knocked on the front door trying to sell doors and she had opened it to him.

Before she was able to say, "No thanks, we've already got one," she ran screaming into the broom cupboard. That was the first occasion that Daniel wondered about his mother's soul.

But she was dead now and he was doing naughty things in her absence and it felt good, empowering, like liberty!

"She warned me never to look under the bed in this room, just in case I found a case under there and opened it," he told himself. Then a daring idea came to him. "Why don't I look anyway?"

So he got down on his hands and knees in the 'doggy' position and he looked under the bed. Sure enough, to his amazement, there was a case in the dusty shadows under there. A suitcase!

He dragged it out and fiddled with the catches with his fingers. But the smell of sulphur grew even stronger now.

"I wonder what might be inside it?" he asked himself.

He was very eager to see for himself.

There's no substitute for noticing something with your own eyes. But that's another point of difference between Daniel and his old dead mother and he was happy to be proved right now, because she never thought that evidence collected by eyes was worthwhile.

"Trust only your tongue, the sense of taste!" she had said.

But no, Daniel Keats had his own ideas.

His fiddling paid off and the catches were sprung and the suitcase was able to be opened wide by his hands.

So he opened it and inside was a sealed jar.

But the seal must have been faulty because the smell of sulphur was so strong now that his nostrils quivered lots.

He held up the jar to the beam of dusty and weak light.

It was a jar of filth! A jar of poo!

But not human dung. No, it seemed to be the dung of...

Some kind of demonic monster!

Perhaps the dung of a real demon from Hell?

A memory harassed Daniel Keats.

"There truly is such a place as Hell," his mother had told him when he was a toddler, many years ago, as she bounced him on her grotesque knee in the fading light of a fire of sticks.

"No mummy! No! There can't be such a place!" He had always been a sensitive child, nervous of such things as death, pain and torture. So timid in this regard was he that he never went out to play with the grinning man who loitered around the outdoor toilet.

"Yes there is! There is such a place, Daniel!"

"No mummy! There can't be!"

"Yes there is! And that's where you are going!"

Daniel Keats shut his eyes tight and sobbed convulsively with loads of maturity as he remembered this scene.

"Mummy, you were a terrible mother!" he hissed.

But it didn't matter now, for she was dead and dead things aren't alive, so she couldn't scare him any more with horrid taunts and lies that turned his soul to jelly and his legs to gruel.

The stench of the jar was overpowering and yet...

Daniel realised that he liked it.

What did this mean? Was that grinning man his father?

If so, where had he gone? Why had his mother lied to him, telling him that his father had been blown to bits in the First World War? Was there a horrible secret about to be revealed?

Daniel stood and cradled the jar under his arm.

He left the forbidden room rapidly.

That night he slept uneasily in his own bed, the jar of poo on a shelf on the wall above his head. He had a terrible dream in which a flabby slimy clawed octopus kind of entity appeared and whispered to him vile words that had the power to drive a sane man mad and a madman even madder, so mad that he went absolutely bonkers.

"Who are you? Who in hell do you think you are?" Daniel screamed in his sleep as the sweat slicked his pillow.

"I am the great old one known as Cthulpoo," said the thing.

"What do you want from me?"

"Ha ha ha! Yog-bogoth-mogoth-sogoth-doodah!"

"Aeeeeiiiiii! Leave me alone!"

"No, I won't. Ha ha ha! Ipsy-wipsy-teeny-weeny-nogoth!"

It was a really bad dream, a nightmare even! And Daniel woke in the cold light of the bleak rainy morning with a fevered brow and his mouth downturned in a pout of depressive fear.

Had he awakened some kind of curse? Had his violation of the strict rule preventing the opening of the forbidden door to the hideous room conjured forth a genuine demon from the spaces between the stars where drifted forever a clutch of indescribable abominations? Probably it had. Twitching with terror he dressed himself.

His dead mother still sat on her rocking chair but now her eyes had a mocking light in them even though they had filmed over and were pale and unseeing. "Why are you doing this to me, mummy?" Daniel wailed as he shook his ineffectual fist at her.

He went into the kitchen and poured himself a bowl of cornflakes for the first time in years. He munched them without milk like a horse and a noise reached him even over the sound of his monumental crunching, a sound that wasn't normal or agreeable.

It was a scraping sound, as if something heavy was dragging itself on nonexistent legs. Daniel laid down his spoon and went to investigate. He opened the door of his bedroom and there was the jar of poo! Somehow it had climbed off the high shelf by itself.

"I don't understand! Are you alive?" Daniel asked it.

But the jar gave no answer in return, it just stood there and glinted and gleamed like a supercilious sort of thing.

Daniel began to weep and bite his lip and clench his fists.

That grinning man who had stood by the toilet... Wasn't it true that he had no features on his face apart from a wide mouth? Had he accidentally flushed his eyes and nose down the toilet?

Did this mean that the dung in the jar was part of him?

So many young men had been mangled in that dreadful war and many of them had come home without faces or with intestines hanging out like a bag of sausages with a hole in the bottom or with upside-down hearts. It was enough to turn the blood to icy slush!

Daniel crouched down and spoke to the jar softly.

"Daddy? Is that you? Are you—"

A bony hand fell on Daniel's shoulder. He screamed!

"Mummy, but you are dead!"

The filmy dead eyes loomed in the shadows. "I serve Cthulpoo, god of the interspatial poops, and he has animated my dead bones. You are not a human boy, Daniel. Your father made you."

"Made me? But... What am I?"

"A doll! A living doll! And you live here in the city of Liverpoo where the manure of monsters flows ceaselessly under the ground in sewers half as old as time and twice as smelly."

"Liverpool, you mean, surely, mummy?"

"No, I mean poo! The 'l' was taken away long ago by the high priests of the elder gods, by Azzakkii and Farrter and Pogknobdunker! The time is coming when the return of the—"

"But what am I, mummy? What am I, if not a boy?"

"You are a living doll, Daniel!"

"Are you sure, quite sure?"

"Positive. Ha ha ha! Yog-toggy-soggy-hoggy!"

Daniel shut his eyes tight and put his hands over his ears and squeezed his face and tried to think of something nice, a far away scene where only gentle things existed, like fairies and tiny unicorns and little gnomes; but a closer inspection revealed that those little figures were dolls powered by clockwork, just like he was, automatons!

Striding over the scene, carrying a porcelain toilet in one hand and a chamber pot in the other, the grinning man entered this desperate dream. He stopped near Daniel and swirled the contents of the vessels with the trunk that grew from his face like a tumour as long as a cucumber grown into the shape of a snake. "Daniel!"

"What do you want? Are you daddy? Are you?"

The stench of diabolical sulphur was overpowering and it emanated from inside the dream! The grinning man nodded and replied, "Yes I am your father, but I didn't make you the traditional way with my cock. I made you from spare parts in my shed."

"Nooooo! Daddy! Why did you do this to me?"

"Because the war drove me mad, my son, and that's why. Then when I came home I found your mother having a sordid affair with the filfthman who came around every morning to empty the commode. Those were the days! Had the milk delivered and the poo taken away. Not like these days with all the modern conveniences."

"Why are you mocking me, daddy? Why?"

"I'm winding you up, my son. Winding you up for a purpose. And you know what that purpose is, don't you?"

Daniel Keats felt a surge of inner strength. He opened his eyes like the shutters of a foreign cottage and jumped at his dead mother, ripping her face off with his teeth, ripping it all off apart from her mouth. And he felt the spirit of his betrayed father laughing in the shadows, his hands black with dung, with nightsoil and turds.

"I'm eating your face, mummy! Every little bit!"

And the light faded and the world became even bleaker than it was and Daniel Keats grinned in the vile dark.

"Yog-bogoff-sodoff-buggeroff-shoveoff-asshol!"

MATRYOSHKA

"Bugger!" expostulated Mercy Sorrel angrily, as she squinted at the small laptop screen, trying to make out the text that blurred and hurt her eyes. Where the hell were her specs?

"Bugger," she articulated again, feeling annoyed that she could not see to check the items on which she was bidding on the online auction site. Time was running out and it would soon be too late.

Rising from her chair and catching sight of her tall womanly reflection in the mirror, she effortlessly slid the laptop onto the overloaded coffee table, displacing a space in the assorted clutter and pushing a half empty coffee cup frighteningly close to the edge.

For the seventeenth time she searched the small flat, thrusting her hand down the sides and back of her blue armchair, tipping up cushions, pulling open drawers and checking pockets, bags, shoes.

As a last hope she looked in the glory hole, even though it gave her the heebie-jeebies and she knew for a fact that her specs would not be in there. That would be impossible.

The glory hole contained stuff that might come in useful some day but was too broken, incomplete, obsolete to use at that moment. The glasses were not broken, incomplete or obsolete.

Had she found the glasses in there, it would have marked a turning point in the cupboard's history, being the first thing ever to come out and actually be useful. Mercy laughed at the thought, shaking her brown hair that tumbled in tousled locks down her slender back.

"Bugger!" she expostulated again with more feeling.

"Buggerbuggersodbugger!" Mercy always felt better after a swearing fit, a kick back against her strict upbringing at the merciless hands of the nuns at Saint Perdita Protestant Church School where she was sent after her parents were killed during a jungle expedition to the most dangerous parts of the African jungle.

"Buggerybloodyhell!" she added with enthusiastic satisfaction and sat back down in the armchair to try again. It was her only choice. The room contained only one chair. The screen was no bigger, she could not even find the button that would magnify the text and soon the frustration was too much to bear.

Without her glasses she could not see the clock, but surely it must be lunchtime. She knew she should eat more, her bones were sticking through her clothes. She pushed the laptop onto the overburdened table that was so full its legs were staggering and this time the cup tumbled, splashing cold coffee over the carpet.

"Ohhh BUGGER!"

Mercy hurried into the kitchen to access the cloth out of the washing up bowl, which was piled high with dirty cups and plates. Mercy was not house-proud and had other priorities. Now, for example, when she had to look at her computer and check things.

Her fingers dipped into the slimy water and curled around the cloth that was floating in the gunge at the bottom. As it rose from the cloying greyness, Mercy saw something light and wiry dangling from the fraying corner of the shabby material.

Relieved, she extricated the spectacles, far dirtier than when she'd decided to drop them in for a quick spruce up the day before and had been distracted by the theme tune of her favourite television programme, Make a Million Without Leaving the House.

This programme suited Mercy, as she was claustrophobic and never left her flat. Mercy only needed her glasses for reading and so they had lain forgotten until now.

She held them under the water gushing in torrents from the hot tap and gave them a quick polish with the cleanest corner of the tea towel which reduced the smears to a manageable level and then she pushed them onto her aquiline nose and returned to the computer, lunch forgotten.

She was bidding on several items and some were close to completion, vulnerable to being snapped up by a belated bid and then someone else would have them. For Mercy this was not simply a hobby; it was her way out of poverty. She did not like being poor.

No, she had a lifelong ambition to climb out of poverty into wealth. Learning from the programme How to Make a Million Without Leaving the House, she had a small business buying and selling things online to make a profit, which she put in the bank so it could build up, and had accounts with several online auction sites, knowing what sold best on which and where to pick up the best bargains to make as much money as possible.

Profits were variable, but she only needed a couple of really good sales to set her on her way to being a rich woman. Mercy thought of the nuns, angrily remembering that her parents had left all their money to the school. Keeping abreast of trends was crucial.

There was no point buying yesterday's darlings, which means things that were popular but aren't any more, they just wouldn't sell. Giraffes had been a good line lately and she was bidding on a couple of tall, long-necked ungulate ornaments, a pair of carved giraffe head bookends and a large metal giraffe designed for the garden.

People liked to place them near boundary fences so that the giraffe's head peeped over and made passersby wonder what it could be. For instance they might ask themselves if it was a ghost or some sort of psycho? The trend would die off soon and she did not intend to buy more giraffes after this.

No, she had other ideas.

Matryoshka... Russian nesting dolls, made of wood and painted in all kinds of ways to be decorative and for children to play with as long as they were careful, were the upcoming craze and were likely to appreciate in value now that production in Russia was declining according to Wikipedia and other sources.

Mercy was bidding on five Matryoshkas of varying quality on an online auction site that was very obscure. This meant that prices tended to be lower. She could buy them cheap and put them on sale on a more progressive site and be sure of a profit.

One of the dolls had an error in its description, which annoyed her. She may have been a little slipshod in her housekeeping, but she hated textual inaccuracy. Most of these dolls were a few inches high, but this seller, who called herself houseproud345, had used an apostrophe instead of the single inverted commas, which would theoretically make the doll five feet tall, as tall as a midget psycho!

Mercy distrusted people who could not put details in properly. Would they be able to post her purchase safely? Would it go to the other end of the country? It was often enough to put her off bidding, but that was the only error and the doll was a particularly fine example with a beautiful smiling face that should sell well, so she had risked a bid.

Seven days later, four sets of Russian dolls were in her possession. She had checked each one for damage before putting them up for sale on an auction website where she felt confident of turning a reasonable profit. The fifth set and the large giraffe were in transit somewhere unknown. But she had not won the bookends when the bidding went above her predetermined limit. Mercy's self discipline in the face of a bidding war had saved her many times from wiping out her profit margin.

On the eighth day there was a sharp rap on the door. It was early and Mercy was still in her dressing gown. Knowing it must be a delivery, because she had no friends, Mercy grabbed her pen ready to sign for it, hoping it would not be one of those electronic gizmos. That would mean using the stylus thing that hundreds of other people had used before her. The thought made her shudder with disgust, not considering for a moment that she had not washed her hands in over a week.

She pulled open the door a crack and peeked out. There was no delivery driver, just a crate a little wider and taller than her doorway: the giraffe, obviously. Relieved that she did not have to soil her hands, she dragged the dusty box inside and looked around for something to open it with. Most parcels needed only a pair of scissors or a sharp knife. This looked as if it would require a crowbar to get into it.

For the second time that day she searched the glory hole and was surprised to find a large screwdriver covered in dried paint that she had put in there a few months ago. It made short work of the crate and soon she was pulling out the weighty bubble-wrapped substantive item. Scissors loosened the rest of the neatly wrapped packaging and within a few minutes she was staring, somewhat astonished, at a five foot tall Russian doll.

There was no doubt that it was beautifully made, painted in the traditional style of a peasant girl in a loose dress and bright scarf. In one hand it held a yellow duster, in the other a broom. Mercy walked round it, inspecting it from every angle, checking it from front to back, side to side and top to bottom.

It was perfect, beautiful; although the smile did not look quite so appealing as it had online and was more of a grimace. The eyes were frowning and little red patches on the cheeks made the doll look angry. She wondered curiously how the previous seller had managed to make it seem so attractive on the photograph?

The question was: who was going to be stupid enough to buy a giant doll? Well, her, obviously; but where was she going to sell it? None of her usual auction sites could handle something like this. It would need some thought over a coffee. There were no clean cups, so Mercy took one out of the washing up bowl and rinsed it off.

In an uncharacteristic fit of domesticity she amazed herself when she drained the rancid water from the bowl and refilled it, adding a squirt of washing up liquid for good measure before making her coffee and going back into the small sitting room to ponder the problem of the giant doll over the coffee she had just made for herself as she lived alone and had nobody to make it for her.

The clock had advanced two hours later and she was still pondering and the doll's glare seemed even more angry and its stout frame and shapeless clothes reminded her too much of her own stout frame and shapeless clothing, except that the colours were different and she did not wear a scarf. It was even the same height and had jet black hair hidden under the scarf, just like Mercy's.

Unable to bear the mirror image of herself any longer, Mercy wrapped her pudgy arms around it in trepidation and heaved it round to face the wall so she wouldn't have to look at it any more.

As she did so, the top half surprisingly came loose.

She had assumed that, given its size, this would probably be a single, solid carving, but suddenly new possibilities opened up like the petals of some kind of flower. If a five-inch doll could hold five or six smaller ones nesting inside like the layers of an onion, how many were in this five-foot tall giant?

Excitedly she pulled the other chair over so she could stand on it to get the top off. It took a lot of effort that left Mercy sweating and red faced, but finally she had the first three dolls out and reassembled. The room was filling up and there seemed to be plenty more layers to go.

Five more dolls popped out and she was still not done. These smaller ones would be easier to market and their faces did not seem to be quite so cross. At last she found the smallest solid 'baby' in the centre and flopped into the chair, totally exhausted, letting the baby lie in her lap.

Russian dolls stood or lay on every surface. She wanted another coffee, but could not squeeze past them to get into the kitchen. Even the door to the bathroom was blocked and the only way to clear it was to put all the dolls back inside each other and she was just too tired for that, so she had to stay thirsty.

She jumped up suddenly and tried to move some of the dolls to make a path through to the kitchen, but failed and sat down again, spreading her arms wide in characteristic desperation.

"I'm so thirsty." She announced. "When I've had a rest these will all have to go back together again."

The arms of Morpheus were irresistible and she fell into a deep sleep. She dreamed she heard the sound of feet moving around her and some foreign-sounding talking and other sounds she could not identify, like the sound of someone washing up and sweeping.

Was there a psycho or some sort of ghost in the room?

Mercy awoke up in a cold sweat. Her eyes started from her head and she jumped up anxiously. Something was wrong, but what? The dolls had mysteriously managed to put themselves back together in the right order so that the smallest was in the middle and the biggest was on the outside. The huge face was smiling now. Mercy looked around her in amazement. The room had been cleaned and tidied.

All the washing up had been done and there was not a speck of dust to be seen anywhere within view.

Mercy screamed!

THE KNEES

It was so foggy that Boris Martins could only see his own knees ahead of him on the road. The headlights of the parked car cut through the thick white soup of the fog and illuminated his knees, and only those, because they were on the same level, the knees and the headlights. So they were the only things he was able to discern.

He frowned down at them because they didn't look quite right. The knee on the left looked a bit like a ghost. The knee on the right looked a bit like a psycho. This made him scared. As if aware that he was scared and wishing to scare him even more, the knees began knocking together like the horrid drums of a voodoo ritual.

"What do you want?" Leave me alone!" he screamed at them.

"Noooooo!" wailed the right knee.

"I want to kill you!" cackled the left knee.

The headlights went out. The battery had died. Boris Martins was on his own. His soul had never felt so cold. Then he felt something crawling up his thigh, two things, one on each thigh. Higher and higher they went, up his pelvis, up his stomach and chest. Finally they reached his throat, a pair of ghastly disconnected hungry knees!

Boris Martins never kneeled again in church or elsewhere.

AND NOW A WORD FROM LAMBLAKE HEINZ HIMSELF

Many of my thousands of fans worldwide often ask me what prompted me to write the best-selling horror stories what I've wrote. I suppose it all started when I found the anonymous and unfinished manuscript 'The Monkey's Foot' by J.J. Wacobs and felt the urge to complete it. Now many of you say this is my greatest work by far and on reflection I would probably disagree but it is the best selling. The tale, for those few who have never read it, revolves around a petrified monkey's hand made of plastic that endows the owner with three wishes.

Mesopotamia Smith uses the monkey's tail wisely for the first four wishes but unfortunately falls foul on his penultimate wish, the last one. I've been criticised by reviewers who don't understand the fundamental premise of the story, which is that monkey genitalia is not something to be treated lightly. It is a dangerous thing to play with! They've also tried to besmirch my name by suggesting that the original manuscript was only lacking an end and was ruined by my addition of the final chapter. Well, in response to that, I only want to say, sticks and stones can break my bones but so will bricks and iron bars!

Anyway, I hope this little insight into the complicated and deep mind, the depths of which have yet to reach their summit, of Lamblake Heinz will inspire you to read more of my excellent books and perhaps even attempt to write some of your own, but please don't be too upset when you don't reach the heights what I've reached. Not everyone can be a genius but the world still needs normal people anyway.

(There follows an exclusive excerpt from Lamblake Heinz's future bestselling horror novel, The Liver-Shaped Box of the Baskertown's)

It was a stormy and dark night when the shadows fell around the place like dark things that weren't easy to see because of the lack of light and stuff. Fred Baskertown was out on the common for a walk when he heard the low growl of the beast. It was scary enough to make him wet himself and so he did. The warm wetness made running difficult and chafed, but Fred ran, and ran, and ran, until finally he reached the end of the common and saw a man sitting on a bench.

Was he a ghost? Or a psycho?

"Something extremely bad this way comes," Fred said to the man who looked up and answered:

"Life is just a liver-shaped box of chocolates."

Then the man raised his eyebrow, he only had one but it was spread across his face like a hairy moustache, and in fact it was a moustache but was above his nose and not below it. "You've got a dog chasing you," the man on the bench said casually but menacingly.

"No shit, Sherlock!" panted Fred.

"B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-but how do you know my name?" No Shit replied, dropping his box in awe...

Note: Pre-order The Liver-Shaped Box of the Baskertown's now and receive a free 100-page booklet of 'Lamblake's Tips on How to Write Gooder' for the low price of ten euros!

THE HIDEOUS CACKLE

"Come in to my spider," said the pantry to the ghost.

The ghost tugged at its chin in deep consternation. It knew there was something wrong in what had just been said to it; not just the fact that it is impossible for an inanimate object such as a pantry to talk, but something in the actual substance of what was said didn't ring true, in the same way a bell made of human bones might not.

"I'm not sure I want to," answered the ghost mildly.

"Oh, but you must!" cried the pantry with a hideous cackle. "Because my spider is very keen to meet you."

"Is he really?" The ghost was even more concerned.

"Yes, he's dying to meet you!"

"D-d-d-d-d-dying!" gasped the ghost in horror.

"Ha ha ha!" shrieked the pantry as it opened its door of a mouth. And then the ghost knew that the pantry was a psycho and that it had to float, float, float away, as fast as its ectoplasm could take it! And the cackles of that hideous cackling followed him.

"Let me out! Let me out of this haunted house!"

"It's not a house," chided a mysterious voice, "but a cottage. A spooky cottage. And you will never ever leave."

"W-w-w-w-who are you?" gasped the poor ghost.

"I am the lounge!" chuckled the lounge.

The ghost knew that every room in the building was in league against it. But there was nothing it could do to save itself. And a bleak chill mist descended over the cottage and everything became grey and existentialist and bleak and critically acclaimed in certain small but vigorous corners of the literary scene and so that was that...

THE COUNT OF ELEVEN BOOBIES

The girl known as Wanda, because that was her name, went into the café and sat down on a chair, because chairs are generally the things that are sat on by people in modern Britain, which is a bleak place full of jobless men and women and bleak despair also.

It was a cheap café, a very grim place, the sort of place that has horrid tables and peeling wallpaper and depressing pictures hanging on the walls and feeble or dead potted plants and customers with dead eyes, things that once were human beings but no longer.

Attritional banalities had worn them down, scuffed off their edges and wrung them out, like sponges used to clean dirty plates in some grotesque service station canteen on the side of a motorway that went from nowhere to nowhere else, a grey doom full of greyness and overflowing ashtrays, a hell where no human feelings at all were allowed or even possible thanks to those endless attritional banalities and also the conventions of maturity wanking, which is a style of fiction in which the writer tries too hard to be bleak and 'real' and ends up creating a picture that doesn't truly resemble anyone's life but gets massive praise from critics anyway, who are also in on the scam, the maturity wanking scam.

Wanda had a baby with her and lots of shopping, because she was one of those women who had got pregnant sometime in their life, not that it was much of a life, what with a husband who was unemployed and who drank cheap cider and went out wife-beating in the evenings, not her but other men's wives, because he was still considerate enough to spare her the physical pain occasioned by his fist.

But the pain of a fist, the bleak fist-occasioned pain, was nothing when she compared it with the pain of bleakness itself, of being trapped in this dismal story, a downbeat fiction that reviewers who work for Black Stasis magazine, a prime maturity wanking publication, would praise highly for its 'social enquiry' content, whatever the hell that means. And she was so aware of the bleakness that she wanted to squirt sentimental eye juice, but she was unable to, because the conventions of the bleakness that she was trapped in forbade her to release any of the tension inside her, because if she did then the bleakness would dilute.

The other customers in the café swivelled their bleak heads to look at her, and there was hostility in their dead eyes, but it was curiously dead hostility, partly because the eyes that expressed it were dead and cold, a twin set of pools of dead tea in every face that was only a face in name, more like a skull briefly clothed with skin.

Yellow skin, the colour of tannin, of the stains of cheap tea. Wanda ordered a cup of tea, the cheapest and bleakest tea that was on offer, and she sipped at it like an unemployed cider drinker who is bleak and grim and has dead eyes in the glare of bleak sodium shadows on the streets of the city where everyone was unemployed.

She finished sipping her tea and then her bleak unemployed baby that was in its bleak pram woke up and began to cry. His crying was hideous to the ear and made everyone in the vicinity feel despondent and gloomy and it killed the hope that wasn't inside them anyway, and they knew they were still unemployed and bleak, so bleak.

"There! There! Simon!" she crooned to the thing.

But he continued to cry like a grown-up girl and Wanda knew that the only way of getting it to shut up was to feed it. And the only way of doing that was to get her boobies out and stuff them in his little mouth, because he was a baby and babies often drink milk from boobies, and not just the unemployed babies but also the happy babies with jobs, not that there are such things anywhere, because that's just escapism, which is wrong and a betrayal of the 'attritional banalities' ethic.

So she picked the baby out of the pram like one of those toys in one of those bleak amusement arcade games where you have to pick things out of a glass box with a mechanical grabber.

Then she put the dismal bleak baby called Simon on the table in front of her and she unbuttoned her blouse, which is the girl's name for a shirt, and she wasn't wearing a bra anyway, because her boobies were swollen with milk in a mature way and hurt when they were encapsulated inside the cups of a brassiere, which is really just a device for fondling boobies by proxy. She took out one of her boobies.

"Hey, you can't do that in here!" cried someone.

"What not? It's natural, isn't it?" Wanda said defiantly, with the proud tone of voice that female characters always use in maturity wanking tales that have been written by men, because those men want to prove that they are mature enough to do strong female characters and there's always the unspoken hope that if male writers can make the female characters strong enough then real women who read the story will be impressed enough by the male writer's 'sensitivity' to allow him to go to bed with her and give her one, which is what he really wants.

"This is a bleak place. You can't squirt tit milk in front of unemployed people who are staring at cups of tea!"

Another voice joined the harangue: "Cold tea too!"

"Bollocks!" cried Wanda, and to press her point home she took out her other boobie. And then she took out her other boobie. And then she took out her other boobie. And then she took out her other boobie. And then she took out her other boobie. And then she took out her other boobie. And then she took out her other boobie. And then she took out her other boobie. And then she took out her other boobie. And then she took out her other boobie. And the people gasped.

"Eleven boobies, she's got! Eleven boobies in total!"

"She's a mutant! Let's be prejudiced!"

"Yes, and if we do it bleakly enough we might get this story accepted for publication in an anti-bullying anthology, some sort of worthy project that will make our author look really good, especially as he's a man but is so obviously showing empathy for women!"

"Get her! Get the milky whore with less than a dozen!"

The bleak customers with the bleak dead eyes stood up and pushed the chairs that they had been sitting on away, because pushing chairs away is the reality of life in modern day Britain.

Wanda turned with a face full of mature fear.

"Leave me alone! Don't hurt me!"

"What'll you do? Squirt us with your boobies?"

"No, that would be immature and childish and very 'male' and would make this tale get a negative review from Mr Peter Lodger in Black Stasis magazine and he'd give all his attention to the next Sarah Pongborough book instead, because he fancies her."

"Ha! No squirting! In that case what are you going to do?"

"Nothing! Nothing!" shrieked Wanda.

And she did nothing. And the story ended bleakly.

A GREEK HAIRCUT

I knew the businessman was Nicholas Chowder from the nameplate on his desk. "Nothing but aggravation!" he said with a smile.

He made it sound like a stand-up comedian's catchphrase in the old Variety Theatre days. He was wearing a clown mask his wife had made him wear as she didn't want later to be seen out with a clown whose real face looked like her husband.

I never realised that it was his real face I saw. My assessment of his frame of mind, meanwhile, stemmed not from his name or his stage reputation or from his understatement regarding aggravation or from his smile, but from his throat which had accidentally developed a vicious-looking gash as a result of my wielding a blade rather too threateningly in the vicinity of his Adam's Apple.

Call it stage makeup, if you like.

"I am not a ghost or psycho, merely a burglar," I retorted.

I could judge he had already undergone a pig of a day amid the wretched uniformity of life's awfulness. Too many lost deals, too many unsatisfying lurches to and from lunch.

"Cold chips, missus?" he snapped out, as if trying me on another catchphrase. I was in drag, you see.

I snatched a quick glance at the papers strewn over his leather-topped desk. Anonymous muggings had never appealed to me because, by dint of their nature, such an activity was not only anti-social but also involved unsociable hours, whilst straightforward bodily harm allowed me to meet people in the course of my work.

The doorman to the office block hadn't been worth spending the time of day with. The servant classes often weren't. I had dealt him a deadly blow of stage makeup first off. A grin in the dark.

I knew, during those days of recession and Greek haircuts that the upper floors of the block would hold at least one late-working businessman crouched over as he sweated blood.

Indeed, Chowder's papers bore an archipelago of marks, as if greasy fish and tomato-sauced chips had been wrapped in them. He only worked as a stand-up to help pay for such treats, I assumed.

I held the blade slightly less threateningly to give him the opportunity to breathe again and, since I enjoyed anticipation more than anything, to prevent the incision I had made in his neck from haemorrhaging too soon. As I did so, I gathered from his papers that he had been writing gory prose of a creative nature as opposed to the tedious facts and figures upon which business often thrived.

A Horror author, too, then, to make his life fulfilled?

Someone who had not yet realised that Horror is either immoral because horrifying people was obviously wrong or stupid because any work of fiction could not possibly horrify anyone in the first place. Better to write comedy. Or irony, I guess.

His words indeed told of creatures with seemingly misspelled names, faraway places, impending dooms, frowning fates and churlish investigators. None of it made complete sense. I was intrigued, because I had vaguely been acquainted with such a mythos as a child, when my father read me bedtime horror stories. They now came flooding back to me as I consumed further paragraphs of Chowder's scribble.

In the meantime, I released him and he flopped into his revolving chair, dabbing the front of his neck with a strawberry-spotted handkerchief. Robbery was no longer at the forefront of my mind. To have discovered this hotbed of literary endeavour in such a non-descript city block — within a sea of sodium lights — was sufficient to exclude all other considerations and I plumped myself down in his secretary's seat, shuffling more of his papers to within my range of vision.

"This is all very interesting..."

I raised my sight towards Chowder. He still smiled. The wound still welled without overbrimming.

"Your name," he said, in such a tone as it wasn't a question.

"I've been called Sharp End," I replied, ignoring his tone.

"I'm Liftcraft, Menshun Liftcraft."

So the Chowder nameplate was a diversionary tactic.

He proceeded to explain matters with many preambles of pointless logic, so that I would be eventually amenable to his revelations: such as the fact that many of the creatures described in his papers were real, with tentacles and undreamable features — and they squatted in the top floor boardroom of that very office block.

Over the years, however, they had actually mutated into human beings. Liftcraft (aka Chowder) told me that blamed inbreeding for this state of affairs. No wonder, bearing in mind his written descriptions I had briefly browsed. Surely, I thought to myself, the creatures' erstwhile ugliness must have been a disincentive to mating, a consideration which also compelled me to scrutinise, for the first time, the detailed demeanour of my victim, the one who called himself Menshun Liftcraft.

A clown's disguise had indeed blinded me to the state of his complexion and the facial landmarks that protruded through the disguise.

"Let me tell you... Sharp End... when people stare at me as you are, then I start to think that they see more than there is to see..."

I shrugged, indicating, by default, that I hadn't understood his words. Yet how could I have previously ignored the gaping pores which exuded the greasy substance I had earlier noticed staining the papers... and the rubbery nose... the sunken sockets whence his eyeballs sagged.

"...or less," he added, after an inordinate pause.

I countered by uttering one of my most meaningful non-sequiturs: "Do you think they're in disguise, your creatures? Fancy dress and masks would be a more believable belief-system than their actually becoming human beings by the natural selection of mutation, wouldn't it?"

"Fancy dress? It's a thought, I suppose. I hadn't considered that it might be feasible for them to disguise themselves as human beings... unless evolution itself is a sort of disguise, albeit a slow-motion sort of disguise."

Liftcraft was thinking louder than he talked. His speech was so stilted I expected him to be ten feet tall if he stood up.

"Can I meet them?" I asked.

By now, I had mostly forgotten that I was a robber. I fancied myself more as one of those investigators I'd seen cursorily sketched by Liftcraft's written words. A part of my mind (that part not entrammelled by the residual problems of self-identification) wondered whether Liftcraft's bosses knew he spent office time writing stories about monsters.

But, judging by the size of his plush room, he was a boss, one calling himself Nicholas Chowder, so as to conceal his real foreign name.

"You want to see them, do you, Sharp End? But there's nothing to see except replicas of normal human beings whom you can see walking along any street any day of any week. Why would you want to see such people?"

"But not so ordinary if they've bred themselves from... aliens."

"No, no, not aliens. Not ghosts nor psychos either. You're... we are the aliens, Sharp End, not them. Those in the boardroom are Elder Gods, Ancient Ones, Cthulpoo's childern, and to them everything else is alien."

He continued with such a rigmarole of unpronounceable names and words and places and book titles that I only caught fragments. No possible preamble could have justified such an outlandish diatribe. Yet, surely, only sense could be quite so nonsensical.

"Everything else is alien": that's what Menshun Liftcraft kept repeating before the office door swung open to admit a group of short-skirted secretaries. So the building had not been left bereft by home-going, after all. Everybody worked late here, it seemed.

These leggy ladies caused me temporarily to lose my thread and there followed a short lull, before one of the newcomers shrieked as Liftcraft's bleeding neck wound dawned on her, ensued by clicking dominoes falling like echoes: tutting tongue-riffs shuffling like sticky playing-cards.

Yet I soon realised I was wrong: the secretary was not kicking up such a fuss regarding Liftcraft's state, but regarding a small creature that skittered over the floor. One of the girls was now chasing it with hysterical yipping noises.

There followed a frantic flurry as they all scattered in various directions, this being an attempt to cut off the creature's retreat.

One glimpse told me that I would need more than a glimpse to ascertain the creature's nature. A simple cat-lick of a glance might have told me volumes about a normal animal, but this was different, so different it wasn't even possible to differentiate difference from sameness.

Yet, now, there the thing perched, throbbing... upon a filing cabinet, as if daring the circling secretaries to make a snatch for it. It managed this feat, however, without eyes. It looked like a long waggling nose between two wrinkled bulbous sacs, sacs that were so loose they were almost one, not two, and with sprouting side tufts of wiry hair.

But, no, it did appear to have a single eye, after all, a sunken one, more of a needle's eye, in the centre of its snout-end's unravelled helmet. The thing pulsed, throbbed and, yes, preened itself with a viscid milkiness which its weeping pinprick of an eye-hole seeped, then spat.

Not so much a clown's mask, but more a secret glove-muff that once appeared with Mr Pastry on old black and white Childrens' TV as a ventriloquist's puppet.

I felt sorry for it, despite the ugliness. It was one of Cthulpoo's childern, as I was later to learn, and, thus, beyond pity, beyond, even, love, hate or envy.

The girls were soon herded from the room by Menshun Liftcraft who subsequently turned his face to me knowingly — knowing that I would never really know.

Meanwhile, the creature had flopped to the floor, whereupon it scuttled silently to the lap of my skirt and suggestively squatted there, purring.

"Aggravation, nothing but aggravation!" Liftcraft said with a smile. "Secretaries are so very empty-headed, but you, Miss Sharp End, are a different bag of chips."

Thinking he knew all along what variety of night's creature I was, one who burgled blood, he kindly offered me the nick in his neck to harvest sauce. I didn't bother to complete his unspoken joke with an unspoken punchline. Or give his story a proper ending.

After all, having no real faith in Ancient Gods or Great Old Ones or Cosmic Smellies, I simply enjoyed giving haircuts in places where hair didn't grow. Sign of the times, I guess.

ONE BETTER

It should be irksome to have to pour thirty bottles of wine down the sink because of sour grapes. Not that the wine was unpalatable, oh no! The sour grapes that I am talking about are of the metaphorical kind. The sour jealousy grapes of a brother.

And yet, as I lurched across the kitchen, I could hardly repress a giggle of delight. I reached the door and staggered onto the veranda. The cool air was like the relief that comes with consummation. A despicable joy.

Mopping my forehead with a handkerchief, I reflected on the irony of the situation. My blood trickled down behind my ear, falling in huge dark droplets onto the flagstones. They formed a constellation there not to be found in the heavens. The sign of the green-eyed monster.

In truth, I have to smile at this image. I envisage a sort of cyclops with a hangover. Which is probably why it seemed so appropriate at the time.

Let me explain.

Richard and I were twins. We shared the same physical attributes. We were both tall and well-muscled and fine specimens. We were both armed with ascetic features and a moody smile. In short, we both looked like defrocked priests or part-time athletes.

Our personalities were also similar. Introverted without being misanthropic, intellectual, naive. Intrepid too, in our dreams if not our waking lives. Optimistic, petulant, egotistical. The usual mix.

But there was one important difference.

I won't stress the point. I will say it simply. Whatever Richard did, however he did it, I always managed to outdo him. I always went one better. Always. Every single time.

No need to provide examples. The statement is self-explanatory. Not surprisingly, it was a constant source of irritation to him. He grew to loathe me, to hate me, to despise me.

The odd thing was that I never consciously tried to beat him. The opposite, in fact. It just seemed to happen. I sometimes thought that fate must be responsible. I was destined to trump him; but the hand that played the trumpet did not belong to me.

We grew apart.

Nine years ago, when he left university, he abruptly severed all contact. I could not blame him. He would be better off without me. I never expected to see him again.

And then, last week, the letter arrived.

I was highly bemused by this letter. Somehow, Richard had managed to track me down. He was coming to visit me. He had an important matter to discuss, so he claimed.

I was also slightly agitated by his mysterious style. He didn't even offer a hint as to the nature of his business. I decided that he must want a reconciliation.

I felt a sudden need to work off my agitation with physical exertion. I descended the slimy stone steps into my dark cellar and spent a couple of hours engaged on an apparently meaningless task. Meaningless tasks are something I have come to associate with the aforementioned trumpet-playing hand. I now accept its influence without question.

All week I nervously awaited his arrival. The appointed day was a bleak and blustery one; at every swing of my wrought-iron gate in the wind, I jumped from my chair and went to the door. By the time Richard did turn up, I had smoked nearly three whole packets of cigarettes, even though I don't smoke any more.

His appearance had changed considerably. He was haggard and thin and he carried a heavy walking stick, though I saw no evidence of a limp. His eyes were cold and frigid.

"A long time," he said simply.

I invited him in. I did my best to act in a carefree manner. But there was tension between us. I poured him a glass of wine and he accepted it, sipping appreciatively and then scowling.

"You have done it again," he groaned. "I too make my own wine. It has a full body and a fruity bouquet, like caramel blackberries flirting with woodsmoke tangs. But yours is better."

"In truth," I replied, "I don't do these things deliberately. An outside force directs me. A supernatural agency."

"You are even a better liar," he smirked.

I shrugged and re-filled his glass. He drank greedily and with a kind of reluctant relish. I was tempted to join him, but felt that I had to keep my wits about me. At least that was how I explained my forbearance then.

"You ruined my life," he hissed suddenly. "You always outdid me. At everything. Whenever I came second in a photography competition, you came first; whenever I won the affections of a beautiful girl, you won the affections of her more beautiful sister; whenever I juggled three balls while riding a bicycle, you juggled five on a unicycle. There was no supernatural agency involved there. There was only malice."

"The old days are behind us," I pointed out. "Yet I will apologise again. I know we can become friends. After all, you have come here for a reconciliation, have you not?"

"I have not," he snarled. I was surprised by the tone of his voice. I had expected bitterness, not fury. I shook my head sadly and reached out a hand towards him.

"What then was the matter you wished to discuss?"

"My revenge. I have wasted too many years hating you from a distance. Now it is your turn to suffer. I am finally going to beat the hell out of you."

"This is ludicrous." I moved closer, as if to console him. The first blow caught me across the face and I felt the delicate bones of my nose splinter. I collapsed to my knees and began to cough. My vision was blurred. I struggled to regain my feet but he sent me reeling back with another blow.

I understood then why he carried the walking stick. It made a fearsome weapon. And he used it with considerable skill. It was the perfect tool for the expression of a lifelong hatred. As he struck me again and again, he crooned a list of crimes I had supposedly committed against him. Each blow stood for a single crime.

The list was a long one.

The last item I remember was the superiority of my wine. I assume that this was also the last item on the list, but I can't be sure.

I blacked out.

When I awoke, I could hardly feel anything. My limbs were all numb. And yet I couldn't rest. I had work to do.

I dragged the body across the floor and down into the cellar. It was obvious now why I had dug the pit. I was grateful. It took me an hour to refill it. Naturally there was some soil left over.

Although I was exhausted, I still had to dispose of the wine. Of course, I'm not suggesting that a supernatural agency turned it all into poison, but it is better to be safe than sorry.

I had done it again...

WHISTLE AND I'LL COME INSIDE YOU, MY LAD

"Sixteen and never been bummed!" said Mellors ostentatiously as he used the hoe to turn the soil between the potatoes. "I don't know how I'll live it down at my birthday party tonight."

He was feeling depressed because he had failed to be inducted into the cabal of sex magick sorcerers who conducted their weird ceremonies and odder rituals in the cave that stood just beyond the fields of the estate he worked on for his owner, Lady Hatterly.

"It's so unfair! If I was given the power of sex magick I could use it to charm Lady Hatterly into giving me my freedom or at least a pay raise or at least the opportunity to watch TV."

But no, despite his pleadings, the sorcerers had refused to bum him. It was through bumming that the power was passed on, the power to cast spells and do lots of other weird shit as well.

"Utterly unbummed!" he sighed. "What a bummer!"

"What's that you're mumbling about? Something about summer? Yes, summer is almost here, thank God!"

Most unexpectedly, Lady Hatterly appeared around the hedge and in her outdoors shoes she began treading the path towards him. He worked the hoe more vigorously, with a rhythmic twisting motion, the same sort of motion that should have been used on him by the cocks of the sorcerers but probably never would, unfortunately!

"Oh hello, Lady Hatterly! Yes I was talking to myself about summer. I have very nearly finished hoeing here."

"Good boy," she said with a patronising nod. She was sheathed from ankle to chin in thick clothes, and yet her nipples were obvious, hard and pokesome, even through many layers of material. It was whispered that her nipples were seven inches long and as hard as ballpoint pens and that nightmarish green ink leaked from them.

But it was very rare that Lady Hatterly permitted them to be sucked or even fondled roughly between fingers and thumb. It was something that her puritan religion disapproved of strongly, nipple twiddling. And it also disapproved of fanny baiting, crack jabbing and bum capers. What an odd and peculiar and weird religion to have!

"Shall I water the carrots when I'm done here?"

"Yes, Mellors, you do that," said Lady Hatterly. Then she yawned and covered her mouth with a gloved hand. "Oh dear, I'm tired! I suppose it's time for my regular siesta now, isn't it?"

"Yes it is," agreed Mellors. She smiled at him and walked on. Mellors was free to return to his earlier grumbling. "Never been bummed and I'm already sixteen years old! My father told me that he was bummed when he was fourteen. What would my ancestors think of me if they could see me now? Maybe I ought to bum myself?"

But he knew that was impossible, even with a candle.

Just as he was about to stop hoeing, his hoe uncovered a strange object lying in mud. He bent down to pick it up, hoping he might be bummed in this position, but he wasn't. What was it?

A whistle! An ancient whistle inscribed with runes!

The runic inscription was almost unreadable but Mellors managed to read it, even though he didn't have any magic powers of eyesight, the sort of powers that a magical bumming would have given him, if the sorcerers could ever be persuaded to bum him at all!

The words on the whistle said:

PROPERTY OF THE KNIGHTS TEMPLARS.

The Knights Templars? A mystical society that had bummed itself into oblivion! Mellors had read about them.

He had read about them in a thing called a book!

A big book, not a little one!

What should he do with it? Should he blow it?

He knew how to blow. You just put your lips together and suck. That's right, isn't it? Or... Something was wrong.

Mellors decided to try blowing the whistle later, in the privacy of his hutch, where it would be safer than here.

He put it in his pocket, took the hoe back to the shed and selected one of the big watering cans from the selection on offer. Then he filled it from the rain barrel and went to see the carrots.

Could he use a carrot to bum himself? It was feasible.

But would bumming himself with a carrot help his rectum to see in the dark? No, probably not. And a magickal bumming had to be done without any mistakes, in the correct sorcerous way.

Later that night, safe in the interior of his hutch, Mellors raised to his lips this whistle and softly blew it. In the darkness he seemed to see the gigantic puffy face of the mythical Provost of Eton, the arch bummer of all bummers; but a man, who while alive, never consummated his inner desire to bum the boys under his tutelage.

"Emmer Jams!" gasped Mellors. "B-b-b-but why?"

"I have answered your prayer!" came the dreadful answer. "I think it's a terrible shame that those sorcerers won't bum you and allow you to be like them; and in fact your birthday party, which is due to take place less than one hour from now, in the cesspit, will be a big disappointment and a bigger humiliation when you are forced to admit in public that you have never been bummed. That's why I'm here."

"To b-b-b-b-b-b-bum me, you mean?" gasped Mellors.

Emmer Jams nodded awfully.

"What will you do after that?" Mellors croaked.

"Go for a bicycle tour of Jutland, probably," replied Emmer Jams, as he unbuttoned his ectoplasmic trousers.

Mellors remembered very little of what followed.

He felt the ghost (or was he actually a psycho?) turn him over, mount him from behind and give him a damn good rogering. And the power and the glory and the sludge flowed into him.

"This is the first time for me!!!" gasped Mellors.

"Me too!!!" came the answer.

And then Emmer Jams, the apparition, was exhausted and fell off him like a rucksack with snapped handles. And Mellors rose to his feet, bum juice dribbling down onto the backs of his knees, and he knew that there was magic in his bones and his bum.

"I have the power to do anything now! To make Lady Hatterly pay for mistreating me! To turn the tables on those snobby sorcerers and maybe even bum them. See how they like it."

"Oh, they will, they will!" hissed Emmer Jams as he faded.

Flexing his muscles, Mellors laughed.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I wrote this story in a deliberate and ultimately successful attempt to prove to my critics and other readers that I am not at all homophobic despite my traditional upbringing in a normal time when homos were illegal and punishable by a jail offence in a prison.

THREE DANCERS

The first dancer is tall and blond. His muscles show through the white shirt he has left unbuttoned. He stands at the window and watches the rain fall into the river. You cannot hear him, but you can describe his posture from his smell. His hands are very graceful. His mouth is wide and his lips are full. Are his eyes green?

The second dancer is lying on the bed, immersed in the cooling sheets, smoking a cigarette. She has an oriental appearance, but her hair is the darkest shade of red. It floats out behind her on the pillow. A single candle is burning on the bedside table. The blinds have been drawn. Blue smoke curls around her fingers and spirals up towards the ceiling.

Outside, on the landing, you pause for a moment before knocking. Just a moment, a single heartbeat, but it is enough for the flower behind your ear to die a little more. It is enough for you to feel afraid, as afraid as if a ghost or psycho had breathed on your soul.

The man answers the door with arched eyebrows and you speak as if from the depths of a dream. You say: "I have come to look at the room. I am also a dancer." And you raise yourself on your toes, as if necessary to prove your worth this way. But the man does not smile. He merely steps back and allows you to enter.

What will you do, now you are inside? You study the four walls, the pictures he can no longer notice. You mumble a few platitudes. He brushes the tiny scar above your eye with the knuckles of his left hand. His profile does not hold the right questions. This is no longer a jest. Words spring to your mind, but they are all useless. The fragments of a poem rise through the eldritch goo of your subconscious.

Once, when we were young, I took you boating on the lake. When we were in the exact centre, I tried to kiss you. As always, your poetry made me weep. In winter, you said, I would grow icicles beneath my sombre gaze. Carefully, you lifted your breasts out of your blouse and let me roll my tongue around one hard nipple. There were people on shore who waved at us. I stood up and knocked an oar into the water with my knee.

But the man, who knows nothing of this, does not require words. He stalks around in front of you, his slippers striking the bare floorboards with each step. He strokes the surface of every object he passes. "This is the kitchen," he says, "and here is the bathroom." The slippers vibrate through the cobwebs of your anxiety. You imagine the taut buttocks of the man through his thin trousers. You picture his erection swelling with each slap of his feet.

"And which is my room?" You are confident again of your ability to find the shoots of a new desire in the husk of a rotting love. "Where do I sleep?" And as you follow him into your new bedroom, you begin to suspect that he cannot be charmed with words, that he communicates with movement alone, like a puppet, a puppet with the teeth of a skull, the skull of a psycho frightened to death by a ghost. His language, you decide, takes its verbs from the stretch of muscle and the snap of sinew.

"Here." As you bend over the bed to feel the firmness of the mattress, he places his hand between your legs as close to your pink and dark flesh as he can reach. You do not say anything, but continue to press down with a steady force. You can feel the heat of his breath on the back of your neck. He is trying to kiss your hair. As he stands on tiptoe to reach further, he rubs up against the small of your back.

With an ambiguous sigh, you duck under him. Rain explodes against the dirty glass of the skylight. He catches you around the waist and lifts you high over the bed. You extend your arms in an arch that defines the perimeter of your lust. Somehow he has completely removed his shirt. He places you down gently onto the bed, but you roll aside and skip out of the room, three long steps. Silently, he follows you.

In the cold hallway, you waltz with imaginary partners and gradually become reconciled, like two shaved werewolves. There was a time when we too flirted this way, a tango with a hatstand, a rumba with a dishcloth. Not once were you able to restrain your more violent urges. When our lips locked in a fierce kiss, it seemed that the skin would flay from my face, that your tongue would scour the back of my throat, that your sharp teeth would puncture the sensuality of my lower lip.

Here, on the other hand, you have almost met your match. As you lurch forward, he bends his knees and you pass over his arms. His hands are between your burning thighs again, stroking outwards in circular motions. Your fingers grasp for his hair, but it is too short to afford a sure hold. You pound the nape of his neck with your fist. With a jerk, he flips you over and you bound away to the other side of the room.

"I wish to undress," you say simply. And before he can protest, you have scattered the petals of your flower, loosened your scarf and are struggling with the buttons on your blouse. His eyes drink your confidence, your brutal style. His nostrils seek the sandalwood scent of your lithe limbs, but it is hidden beneath the musk of your rage. Tearing open your blouse you confront him with your high, small breasts, each one as round as a gigantic demon's eyeball.

Before he has pinched your nipples between thumb and forefinger, they have already swollen to a remarkable length. And so now the dance reaches its truth, its affirmation of life, its compulsion and meaning. There are reveries to congeal, long moments to be savoured, sighs to cloud the blue-green jar of the world.

"I need much more," you continue, and the words are lost in the motions of the human condition. For those to whom material aspects mean little, what stronger bond could there be? (And yet the bond is not enough. There is also a month in advance...) Your hands find the buckle of his belt, your thumbs work the button loose and wrench downwards. For an instant he appears ludicrous: standing with his trousers compressed around his ankles. But he is quick enough to kick free, regaining both dignity and strength.

And the second dancer, alone in her room, sheds an uncut diamond tear for her lost love. She crushes out her cigarette on the bedside ashtray and throws back the sheets. Her pearly nakedness is unseen; her own breasts, smaller even than yours, are unloved. She swings to her feet and trips lightly to the window. Her lover has finally betrayed her. There is nothing left for her now but to throw open the casement and spill her tear with the rain. The streets are quiet below, but the house rattles. Can she hear your sighs, your wry laughter, as you contemplate a forceful consummation?

At first he attempts to seize you around the waist and bear you to the floor, but you knock his arms away. You reach down between his legs, as he had reached between yours, and find an agility and grace that is astonishing. Dropping to your knees, you seek to surprise him with your own precision, but he remains impassive. You flick him into size and then curl your tongue around him as he grows. At once he is enveloped, your teeth lightly resting on his veined flesh as you work your mouth in hard rhythms, your eyes wide, nostrils flared.

Making love to this man is like enveloping, between your thighs, a fiery comet: the whips of his gaze, his icy breath on your scalp as his fingers orbit your face. Or if not a comet then a ghost. Or a psycho. He is entangled in your hair as you taste his flesh deeper. He pushes to the back of your throat and you can take him, tongue lapping down to the root of his length. Your throat swallows convulsively and at last you elicit a groan, a throb of weakness, from this arrogant paramour. Your lips distend with his enormity. But there is one mouth hungrier than this to feed. Blood red, swelling outwards, darker petals within dark, the flush rising along your neck and breasts, you caress this mouth, yourself, and fill another aspect of the moment.

At last you withdraw, leaving him glistening and aching, tongue making a final flick over the tip. Clothes have flown like words, in all directions. You rise to your feet slowly: your tongue charts a path upwards across his taut belly, to linger for a second on his own nipple, to fix directly onto his throat. With palms on his shoulders, and his hands around your waist, you push down and lever yourself into the air, wrapping your legs tightly about him. Now you have moistened him, a process that has also served to moisten you, it is little trouble to lower yourself directly onto him, first time. The long slow descent catches away your breath. Full of him, your gasps crowd out to escape your mouth. Stretching his arms, he lets you lean back, your hair falling loose, the new angle bringing him even deeper inside you.

There is a trick you learnt when we used to play together, my own fingers and tongue within, my own nails dug into your buttocks. Your internal muscles can work wonders on their own. All is stasis from the outside, but inside you are squeezing him, milking him of his ardour, with the generous contractions I once knew so well. Eventually his resolve begins to crumble: sweat stands out on his forehead, his teeth grind together, his knees begin to buckle. You work him close to a resolution and then retreat, repeating this process again and again. He lets loose little moans, and a quiet tremble takes possession of his body.

Finally you are flooded with heat and you break apart, the juice of his love and yours mingled on belly, inner thighs and fingers. He collapses into a chair while you gather up your clothes and begin dressing. Suddenly you are eager to cover up your nakedness; not from shame but from the opportunity to regain the mystery. You look him in the eye and at long last he matches your gaze, his frown inquiring, his attention switching briefly to the bedroom. You nod with a half-smile and reach into your abandoned handbag for your purse. "I'll take it," you say.

And the second dancer covers her ears with her tiny hands and weeps afresh, gazing out across the river and the city with infinite longing. She reaches out, as if to clasp a ghost; out into the rain and the scent of scattered petals. Miranda, why did you leave me? Perhaps I was too clumsy. I am practising hard in the evenings. On weekends I astonish the ducks in the park with my pirouettes. Come back, Miranda, come back. I am standing at the window, immersed in the cooling sheets of rain. My hair is the darkest shade of red.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I wrote this story in a deliberate and ultimately successful attempt to prove to my critics and other readers that I am not at all gay, after publication of the previous story seemed to give some filthy people the idea that I regularly pound buttock flesh with my sausage. I don't. This tale featuring sexy women is a supreme demonstration of that fact.

A WARNING TO THE BI-CURIOUS

The place on the south coast that the reader is asked to consider is Brighton. It is very different now from what I remember it to have been when I was a child. Gays intersected by dykes on the seafront, recalling the early chapters of an 'alternative' novel; bohemian pubs and cafés full of 'cool' people; and even the butchers are vegetarian and in a band. So that is the Brighton of today, yes it is.

Even the famous Pavilion seems much changed from the way it used to be, though I can't say how or why, maybe just because I fancied saying so, which isn't the same thing as a man fancying another man, as you will find out in the due course of this account of a strange happening that took place many years ago in the recent past. For there is no creepier time than the past, and future ghosts don't exist.

I heard the story from an acquaintance who I just happened to meet in the most unlikely of locations, namely a public convenience in Soho in London. He was having trouble with his fly and seemed to be fiddling a heck of a lot with it, so I offered to help him zip it up. Then forty minutes later, exhausted, I managed to get the task finished. He gratefully took me for a stiff drink in a quaint nearby pub.

We began chatting about this and that, mostly about that, though there was an eight-minute period where we concentrated almost wholly on this and where that didn't get a look in. But I am not writing a guide to sums! Let's get on with this tale before closing time. I happened to mention the town of Brighton, where I grew up when I was small, which was before I got big, and his eyes misted nostalgic.

"Brighton! I know a story about Brighton! Ready?"

I nodded, partly because I was ready, partly because I had a head that was able to be nodded. That's variety for you. Then he used his mouth to tell me the following tale; and I must confess that I am trembling now as I write it, even though I'm not really writing it but dictating it to a friend of mine who goes by the name of E.F. Bendover; he goes by that time but he comes by another, namely, 'Fluffy Rod.'

I recall (said the man) being in Brighton during the period when it was a popular resort for the privately educated boys who came down from the various private schools that existed back then, and still exist now. Well, it so happened that several years after this aforementioned period, a pair of these former schoolboys met up again.

"Good Heavens, if it isn't old Dunky Handle!"

"I say! Peter Raspberry in person!"

"Yes, old boy, it's me. How dapper you're looking, Dunky! Have you had an operation or something on your mush? You used to be a foul pig and a 'double-bagger' as we used to say in St Crowley's. Maybe you are living proof that ugly ducklings=swans."

"I was never much good at maths," confessed Dunky.

"Nor at woodwork!" laughed Peter.

"I was bloody good at frigging French, though!"

"True. And even better at 'doggy'."

"Do you remember the pictures of aardvarks we hung on the walls of the dorm? Said they were cursed, the masters did, but we laughed at them and used laughter in order to do so!"

"Yes, yes! But what brings you to Brighton?"

"Sexual frustration, of course."

"Ah, the best reason!" solemnly nodded Peter.

"Aye. And you?" queried Dunky.

"The same thing. Shall we go to the pebbly beach and look for a spot of 'rough trade'? I could do with a rigid up the bum-bum in the next hour or so, what?" Peter remarked precisely.

So that's what they did. Like a pair of weird things, a ghost and maybe a psycho, they wandered down to the beach and strolled along looking for man-whores willing to accept cash in exchange for rogerings. Suddenly it was Dunky who was down on his knees.

"You are supposed to be the client!" cried Peter.

"No, no! I've found something!"

And so he had. It glinted like a gleamy object.

"It's a curious oboe!" gasped Peter Raspberry respectfully.

"Yes, a pink oboe! And there's some writing on it," said Dunky as he held up the object to the light and read the inscription that was written on the side of the thing, which said:

THYS PINK OBOE DOTH BELONG TO YE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR'S BAND AND IS NOT TO BE PLAYED BY NORMS.

"Fancy that!" expostulated Peter in a pompous tone.

Dunky lowered his voice and looked around to make sure that nobody was listening. "I intend to blow this pink oboe despite the warning; but I have a confession to make to you."

"What is it then, old chum?" urged Peter.

"Have you... I mean... Did it ever occur to you... I mean, has there ever in your life been a time when..."

"Oh, for the sake of underpants, spit it out!"

And Dunky did so, with a blurt:

"Have you ever fancied trying a woman instead?"

Peter was shocked and took a step back, his face so pale that even his blushes were no longer red but white.

"No, no! Never! I mean... Yes, once or twice..."

"I think I might be bi-curious," confessed Dunky. "I think that I might like to try it with a female one day."

Peter Raspberry swallowed dryly and said in a small voice, a voice so small that it could have fitted inside an ant: "Me too. I fantasise about a redhead bent over the bed before me."

"Any particular redhead?" hissed Dunky.

"An amalgam," whispered Peter.

There was an awkward pause. Then finally Peter growled, "Play that pink oboe, Dunky, for all its worth!"

"What? For five shillings thrupenny two groats?"

"Yes! Puff that elongated bugger!"

And Dunky raised the pink oboe to his mouth and played a chord that was so languorous that languor fell asleep before it was done. And then a mist descended from nowhere, or maybe it arose from the sea, and there was a shimmering figure before the pair of reckless ex-schoolboys and it was grotesque and mean and 'hideous'!

"Emmer Jams!" squeaked Dunky and Peter.

"Yes!" laughed the apparition. "I am Emmer Jams! The mythical and hideous Provost of Doom! The phantom bummer of Eton! I'm going to bend you over and give you what for!"

"B-b-b-b-b-b-b-but we are bi-curious!" they stammered.

"So am I!" cackled Emmer Jams.

"You mean you fancy girls as well as boys?"

"No! I fancy humans as well as ghosts! Now come to daddy!"

THE TERRORS THAT CREEP IN THE NIGHT

The quivering water trembled

Fearful in the moon's silvery light

Which lit upon the creeping creatures

Crawling through the night

To terrorise the town below

With all their main and might!

The trembling buildings shivered

Aghast at the awful sight

Of the creeping creatures crawling

And creeping through the night

To terrorise the town below

With all their main and might!

The fearful townsfolk shuddered

Trembling at their terrible plight

Fearing the creeping creatures

Crawling through the night

To terrorise their town below

With all their main and might!

No one saw the following morning

The hideous horrible sight

Of what the crawling creatures did

On that dark moonlit night

When they terrorised the town below

With all their main and might!

No one except the ghastly ghost

Like a feather but twice as light

Saw the carnage that had been wreaked

By the psycho army that night

Which terrorised the town around

With all its main and might!

LAMBLAKE HEINZ SPEAKS!

As you can see from the poem you have just read, I also write poetry as well as stories, novels, articles, tales, books, screenplays, stage plays (it has justly been said, by James Sherbet, that I have given new meaning to the phrase 'stage fright'), fables and monologues. I even write speeches from time to time to time! I have even collaborated with other authors who are not me on various projects and later on in this collection you will encounter examples of work I have done with others, together with more poems and even a longish novella!

Talking about poems, the shortest poem I ever wrote was a 'Gothic Haiku'. The haiku is an ancient Japanese form of poetry that is difficult for anyone who isn't Japanese, and also for anyone who is, to write with skill and conviction, but I managed it!

GOTHIC HAIKU

I was the first man

To lay eyes upon her breasts

But they all rolled off!

A haiku should have five syllables in its first line, seven in its second and five again in its third. Some critics have pointed out that my haiku doesn't really scan and that the second line doesn't actually have seven syllables, but my reply to that is: why should a poem scan? That's what scanners are for! What's the point of having modern machines if we aren't going to use them? I would like to add that in the country of Japan my work is very popular and even available from vending machines in train stations.

THE BIRTH OF OPERA

The man who thought he knew everything said, "It's not over until the fat lady sings." It was his favourite saying.

"If that's true," came the reply, "how did opera get started?"

"Hey, who said that?"

"I did," answered the statue in the garden.

"Well, I'll be sealed into a barrel and rolled downhill!" exclaimed the man who thought he knew everything.

The statue grinned and winked...

"Statues do come alive every now and then..."

The man who thought he knew everything folded his newspaper and stared at the statue for a long time.

"So you want to know how opera got started in the first place?"

The statue nodded with difficulty. "It wouldn't have been possible if what you said earlier is true. I mean, the moment the fat lady opened her mouth to begin singing, 'it' would be over. That's logic."

And he smirked with an awful creaking noise.

But the man who thought he knew everything brushed some dust from his trousers and said sombrely:

"There's a reason why I'm known as the man who thinks he knows everything and that's because I often do know everything. And I'll answer your question to the best of my ability, which is considerable. Opera got started by the shrieks of the first castrato who was made that way in order to sing higher than any fat lady."

THE SINK MONSTER

"There is a monster in the sink," David said to his mother over breakfast one morning when he was finally unable to bear the tension any longer. A man who wore tension like armour, David had been brought up without a father and didn't even know what a flat cap was. But he was familiar with soap and the other adjuncts of washing.

"Don't be a brat! You are an abomination!" his mother screeched from the lowest point of the sagging curve of her wheelchair seat. It was more than ninety years old, her contraption, and she hadn't been disabled when she'd first sat on it to try it out; but the seat had collapsed under her and it had trapped her there ever since, in the same way that a desire might be trapped inside a repression like a seed.

"Yes, mummy. Sorry, mummy," David said obediently.

But there was a monster in the sink.

He saw it every time he went to wash his hands.

Clearing away the breakfast tray and scraping the remains of the eggs that his mother had devoured like a beast out of the window and onto the compost heap, which shifted as if it was alive, David finished washing up and tramped slowly down the passage to the stairs; then he went up these creaking steps and into the bathroom.

"Why doesn't mummy love me? Shall I kill her?"

He spoke with both taps turned full on to disguise his words. Although he hadn't put the plug in yet, the force of the water was so great that the sink filled up anyway. The waters swirled like a miniature whirlpool and then something stirred in the chaotic depths. What was it? David peered closer. A finger emerged from the froth.

"It's beckoning me! Like a beckoning fair one!"

He leaned forward. And then a damp hand was thrust out and grabbed him by the tie his mother insisted that he always wear, even when he was nude. The hand began reeling him in. "No!" he screamed. "No!" gargled he. But it was too late, or too early, or something. Nobody was available to help anywhere. He was pulled inside.

Down the plughole he went, spinning like a rotating thing. What was the monster that was about to devour him?

In the final instant before his demise, David saw—

The horror! A man's cloth cap!

THE LANDSLIDE

The election was over. The people had risen up, like yeast bubbling through a cask of home-brewed ale, and had made their choice. All responsibility now belonged to them. As the mist moved off the river and chilled the narrow streets, Jerry paused and removed his shades. He squinted at the pale November sun and smiled.

"A very successful election," he mused. "The largest turnout ever recorded." He scratched his overlong nose. "Certainly a day to remember. Indeed how could we ever forget it?"

"Absolutely." Sarah stood next to him and shuffled her feet. "A landslide." She frowned and worried a flaxen ringlet with a finger as pale as a bloated maggot.

"Is there something wrong?"

She nodded dumbly, struggling to express the need within her. She felt that her mind was a deflating balloon; the doubts of many moments were escaping into her blood. She felt that her body was all mouth and her soul a yawn. And where was her tongue?

"What is it then?"

She met his gaze. "I think I might have put my cross in the wrong place." She shrugged. "Maybe not. But it bothers me."

"I see." Jerry arched an eyebrow.

"Well, I'm allowed to change my mind surely?" She became petulant. "This is supposed to be a democracy after all!"

Jerry was sympathetic. "I know, I know. That's what all this is about. I suppose we could go back and alter it."

"Really? I thought I had only one chance. Otherwise, others will also be allowed to alter their crosses. I am validating such an action. And you have to draw the line somewhere."

"Strictly speaking. But what the hell? Let's do it anyway!"

Later, when they had managed to shift Sarah's cross, they regarded it and nodded. "Yes, a very satisfactory outcome," Jerry repeated. "A hung Parliament."

Sarah gazed back at her cross and giggled. The Minister of the Environment writhed in helpless agony. "Well and truly hung," she added. "Crucified, in fact!"

Together, they crossed Lambeth Bridge into the new world.

CHAINSAW FOR SALE, LIGHTLY USED

Chris and Mary Cardigan headed toward an out-of-the-way campsite they had heard about from one of their friends. The night was dark and stormy, but they pushed on, watching as lightning cut through the sky like a hot cliché through butter.

"Are you sure we're not lost?"

"Yes, Mary, I know exactly where I am." Chris shook his head.

"Then why is it the last time I could match something up on the map was over an hour ago?"

"You can't read a map, no woman can. It's a statistical fact."

"No, we can read them, we simply can't fold them. There's a difference." Mary fumbled with the piece of paper in her hand, successfully folding it into an origami ship.

"Whatever, we're right on track. The campsite should be in sight any minute."

"Even if there's a sign, it's not like we can see it in this weather. Maybe you should stop and ask for..."

"Do not finish that sentence," Chris warned.

Mary made the motion of zipping her lips.

An hour later, Chris could hardly see through the window shield. He hunched over the wheel squinting his eyes, but it was raining cats and dogs and other hairy clichés and the wet fur smell was getting to him.

A sign up ahead for the small town of Death Toll caught his attention. Mary was right as usual, though he would never admit it. They were lost. Looking at the petrol gauge, he noticed they were running low. Probably their last chance to get fuel for quite some time.

"Hey, we need to stop and fill up the tank or we run the risk of being stranded on the side of the road where something creepy and unexplainable will probably happen."

Mary perked up at this. "You mean like alien abduction, or you go for petrol and upon your return, I'm nowhere to be seen? You obsess about it for years, letting my unexplained disappearance become your sole motivating factor to live?"

"Exactly, though I was thinking more along the lines of alien abduction, or if we were really lucky, a psycho or ghost that chases us through the woods."

Mary smiled. "Okay, I'll grab some snacks while we're there, maybe they'll have wanted posters or pictures of missing couples up that we can use as a clue to figure out what's going on later."

"Sounds good, honey." Chris smiled lovingly at his wife.

A few miles later, they were at the turn off for the small town. The hour was late, after 11 PM, and not a soul to be seen, like a ghost town with tumbleweeds bouncing around despite the rain. Driving down the main street they saw all the lights were off except for the petrol station.

The 1970s style neon sign blinking in odd places where a bulb was broken or burnt out. How convenient, Chris thought.

Pulling into the old style Pump and Go station Chris and Mary got out, stretching their legs after hours in the car.

There was a mechanic in the garage, alerted to their arrival by the ding sound the hose made when the car drove over it. Time for him to go into the creepy first person mode serial killers often take in situations like this.

I walked out of the garage and saw a happy couple getting out of their car. They annoyed me instantly. Checking out the woman I had to admit she had nice legs, they reminded me of my mother.

Thinking about my mother made me mad; she did such horrible things to me. I could hear her now. Eat your vegetables if you want to be strong...Do your homework if you want to do well in school...Take a shower if you want people to like you...Don't kill the neighbourhood pets if you want to stay out of prison...I'm gonna leave you just like your father did!

What are you doing with that chainsaw?

The last comment I remember being the straw that broke this camel's back, and also the last thing I ever heard fall from her cigarette stained lips. I made sure she would never be able to give me advice again.

In a rage that can only be born out of living with your mother for over forty-five years, I grabbed a knife and cut out her tongue. I watched with a smile on my face as the blood gushed out, and she looked at me with terror in her eyes.

For the first time in my life I felt powerful. I felt like I was the one in control. I grabbed a lighter and held it under the knife for several minutes as she struggled beneath me. When it was hot enough I sealed the nub.
My words to her at that moment were perfect. "That'll be enough out of you, if you want to live." How menacing and scared she must have felt!

My whole life people made fun of me. Who cared that my parents were brother and sister, or that my father was a cross dresser and had apparently left us for the mailman? How did they know I was a disappointment to my father, I was only eleven when he abandoned us.

The people in town blamed me though. Of course it didn't help that my mother told them it was my fault. If only I had thought to cut out her tongue sooner, but I clearly was a late bloomer.

Well, I would show my father, if he ever came back!

Mary watched as the station attendant approached them. He wore grease-covered overalls, thick-soled work boots, glasses, and he was wiping his hands on a dirty rag. Her senses started tingling and she knew there was something off about him. She wasn't sure what it was, she just knew he wasn't playing with a full deck.

"Can I help you folks?"

"Yeah, we just need some gas," Mary said, noticing Chris didn't acknowledge the man, too busy rolling his shoulders, most likely wondering why the rain had stopped so suddenly.

"Okay, no problem." The attendant moved toward the car and Mary went inside the store.

Walking to their car, I removed the petrol tank cover and then grabbed a nozzle. I gave them the cheap stuff; city folk would never know the difference. I watched as the woman went inside, the man following behind her moments later.

I grabbed a squeegee and started to clean the windows. I wondered what I would be like now if I had parents like them, parents that loved me and cared for me. Parents who changed my nappies and sent me to school regularly. Parents who came from two different families. I bet family reunions were a lot more fun when two sides were involved.

When they both had their backs turned, I reached inside and popped the bonnet. Fixing the car so that in a few miles it would stall was too easy. Closing the lid, removing the nozzle and wiping my hands, I went inside.

Exploring the interior of the small food stop, Mary noticed at least two-dozen posters on the wall for missing couples. She thought how sad it was for all those poor people. The moderately well off ones too!

"Hey, Chris, look at this, I bet this is some sort of foreshadowing device that becomes a clue to something that happens later on."

Chris looked at the posters. "Perhaps, or it could be nothing at all, a false lead, you never know where some people are trying to go with story lines."

The bell above the door rang indicating someone else had entered.

My insides were getting excited like sharks at the smell of blood. I had to play it cool, no reason to set off their creep-o-meter now. Walking behind the counter I waited for the man to come and pay.

The attendant stood at the register waiting to ring them up. Chris strolled up to the counter and pulled out his wallet. He grabbed his debit card.

"Sorry, we don't got no phones here, we only take cash." The man pointed to a sign written in childlike scribbling that read: KASH ONLEE.

"Huh, no phones. That has to be dangerous, especially if people find themselves in an emergency."

"I suppose, guess you'll know soon enough."

"What was that?" Chris asked.

"Nothing, I just said you'll know soon enough."

"Oh, fantastic, so this won't be a drawn out affair then. Good to know these things in advance."

Chris dug into wallet, and pulled out the cash. He handed it over to the attendant, smiled and received the obligatory sneer in return. Chris got a bad feeling about this guy and as he and Mary left the store, he felt the strange man watching them. He felt like prey. Like nut loaf.

Outside the station Chris and Mary walked to the car at a fast pace. Once inside the car they locked the doors instantly.

"Did you think he was kind of grotesque weirdo?" Mary was unnerved by the man for some reason.

"Not really, unless you mean in regards to his being inbred and looking like the typical deliverancesque serial killer who most likely has plans to kill us in some way in the near future."

"Yeah, that's what I meant. Thanks for reassuring me."

"No problem. Oh, also when I was talking to him he mentioned something about us finding out about things being dangerous soon enough, so it won't be long now for things to get going."

"Thank God, I hate when things drag on until the middle of a story. The whole is it going to be scary or funny kind of thing. It gets so tiring at times." Mary sighed dramatically.

After about fifteen minutes of driving, the car began to sputter, jerk, and then stall out completely. Chris tried restarting it several times to no avail.

"Hey, honey, can you get the RAC on the phone?"

Mary reached into her bag and pulled out her mobile phone. She punched in the numbers for the car service, but kept getting a NO BLOODY SIGNAL message on her screen. "Chris you're going to have to use yours, mine has no bloody reception."

Chris ran into the same buggering issue. They both stepped out of the car and started to wander around, trying to see if by some miracle they would exit the Bermuda triangle of no signal. It never happened.

"This can't be a good sign can it?" Mary looked at Chris.

"Which one?" asked Chris.

"This one." Mary pulled out a crumpled piece of paper and unfolded it so that Chris could read the words printed there: DON'T FEED THE AARDVARKS. "I stole it from a zoo a few months ago..."

"Yeah, that's a really bad sign. Orange lettering on a mauve background!"

"It's also not a good sign that we're stuck here, is it?"

"Oh, that's an even worse sign for sure, but let's ignore it for now and I'll try to fix the car even though I can't even change the washer fluid."

"Okay, I'll just stand here looking sexy, but otherwise useless."

Chris popped the bonnet of the car and looked at the battery. He hit a few wires and asked Mary to try starting the car but nothing happened. Chris jiggled some other things and hit something with his hand.

"Try it now."

Mary turned the key with no luck. "You don't know anything about cars, you're an accountant for God's sake. Not to mention this is the part where we start to walk down this rural country road no one ever travels with the inane hope of flagging someone down who puts us in a basement and tortures us."

"I know, the whole motorists-in-distress-getting-killed scenario. Personally, I think that one is overused."

"I agree, but maybe we'll have good luck. While we were driving, I saw an exceptionally creepy looking hotel conveniently located a mile back."

"How creepy is 'exceptionally' creepy?"

"As creepy as James Sherbert's cottage."

"That's great, I'll grab our bags so we're weighed down with stuff making our progress ludicrously slow and inefficient, not to mention causing us to trip and fall in case we need to run."

"Think people in the real world would do that?"

Chris looked at her and nodded adamantly. "Of course, people in the real world would do that. They are materialistic and short sighted and have an approach to life that nothing will ever happen to them."

Walking the mile back to the hotel, Mary debated if this was the time to talk to Chris about her news. She wasn't sure how he would take it and she about to broach the subject when a noise in the woods spooked them. She knew it had to happen because she couldn't spill her beans until there was some sort of climax propelling one or both of them into an act of heroic sacrifice.

I watched the couple as they made their way down the street. The woman walked rhythmically, as if she wanted to spill some beans, like a ghost or some sort of psycho who has gone camping without a saucepan. One foot in front of the other, it was mesmerizing but it made me angry to see someone move like my mother. My mother tried walking away once, in that style; I made sure she never did again.

I'll never forget the first day I discovered the power of a chainsaw. One minute I was in the back cutting up some wood, the next minute I was inside the house cutting off my mother's legs.

That morning she'd written me a note saying she was leaving because I cut out her tongue and she thought something was wrong with me. I showed her, there and then, there was no walking away from me.

After the legs were off, I headed down to the kitchen and grabbed a frying pan off the wall and stuck it on the stove. I had only a few minutes before my mother bled to death, so I cranked the flame up to high.

When the pan was red hot I ran up to her room and cauterised the wounds. Thankfully, I didn't have to suffer through her screaming obscenities at me, due to her tongueless state.

After I bandaged her up, certain she was going to live, I grabbed her legs. I took them out to the mandatory creepy shed in the back and stuffed them. I had been stuffing random critters all my life for fun, so this was really no different, just a bit more leggy. When I had finished, I placed them in the corner. Every day I stared at them, reassuring myself that my mother could never walk away from me the way my father had. She couldn't even hop.

After months, I became obsessed with them and it was then that I came up with an idea. I would make sure that no woman ever walked away from someone again. The women I chose had to be sexy and busty. When the monster inside of me would see a woman at the station that met those criteria, I just had to have her legs. I would do anything for them.

The couple walking in the woods brought me out of my musings. I made some noise to see what they would do, and was happy to see the look of fear on their faces. Her legs were going to be mine, but I had to get rid of the guy. I watched as they started walking faster. I took a shorter path, because there's always a shorter path for the serial killer, even when the victims are on the shortest known path. I really think that serial killers ought to be employed by the government as official messengers. Anyway, I would beat them, this couple, to the hotel by at least twenty minutes, more than enough time to prepare.

"Chris, remember when we were at my sister's domicile last weekend and you mentioned something about being glad you didn't have to deal with kids? You implied it would be the worst thing ever if I got pregnant."

"Yeah, did you see how insane they were? Not to mention your sister and her husband looked like they hadn't slept in months. Also, if you were pregnant it would change how I look at the world, most likely making me more willing to do stupid things to ensure the safety of you and our unborn child."

"Right, so I guess that would mean you aren't ready for kids?"

"Mary, you know we're not ready for that yet. We have to save up money because I'm still trying to give up being a control freak and despite my recent progress I always a bit wound up and, to be honest, self-centred. I need to have something happen that forces me to realize I'm a man and grow up. When that happens, we can talk about kids."

"Right, hey that looks like the hotel up ahead."

"Wow, what a dump. Is that a tumbleweed?"

"Yes, a really big one. Look at the colour. Orange and mauve!"

"Like the head of a massive vegetable ghost or some sort of psycho. Pity they can't be tamed and used as pack animals."

"Sure. But take a look at the hotel, will you? See what I mean about it being as creepy as James Sherbert's cottage? No cars in the parking area and the sign creaks like a grandmother's pelvis from neglect. Oh, and look over there, someone has written something on the wall."

Death lives here. All the sodding time!

"I totally see what you're saying, this place really is creepy. Good job honey, I'm starting to get a sinking feeling now. Me and you, alone in a hotel room."

"Stop right there, mister, you know as well as I do that's not where this is going. Not to mention if we did have sex, that would be when something really bad happens and I really don't want some creepy serial killer seeing me naked."

"Yeah, I guess you're right, a guy can hope though, can't he? I bet we get a room on the end with a broken lock and find something peculiar or odd that makes us think sinister things are going on."

Mary laughed. "Of course we will, even though by now, with the creepy attendant, the car stalling so soon after he was with it, and now having to take refuge in a haunted-looking motel, we would be pretty stupid not to know something horror-laden was going to happen."

I watched as they approached the hotel. Everything had been set up as soon as they left the gas station. The clerk and I had a relationship; she did what I told her to do. I knew they would take a few minutes to check in, so I went to my obligatory hiding place out in the tool shed and got dressed in my killing suit.

Every good serial killer needs a killing suit and I was no different. Some psychos prefer Armani. But mine was a pair of goggles, a chainsaw, work boots, and a mechanic's uniform. The outfit very much resembled my ordinary working clothes minus the chainsaw.

I rubbed my hands together, looking forward to the mayhem about to occur. I tried to block from my mind that this would be the couple putting an end to my murderous impulses, otherwise what was the point of the story? The serial killer rarely got to live in the end, but I was hopeful because they were often resurrected. For the time being, I focused on the few good scares I would get over on them.

Mary and Chris approached the dark parking lot with trepidation. A light flickered above a door to the main office. They both took a deep breath and entered. The lobby was decorated as they had expected. Animal heads hung all over the wall, dust was everywhere and they guessed the décor was the same as it had been thirty years ago. The magazines dated back to the eighties and the lava lamp and beanbag chair were dead giveaways.

The stuffed heads seemed to watch their every move and odd dark stains on the carpet gave them the impression death loomed over them or below them or maybe sideways to them, or all three.

The sound of a match being struck got their attention. They both looked around but saw no one. A cloud of smoke rose over the check-in counter, so they headed over. When they got there, an older woman in a wheelchair stared up at them. She looked to be in her sixties and the reason for her seating arrangement was the fact that she was missing both her legs.

Deep wrinkles covered her face and her shirt top was covered in grim stains of varying size and age. Taking a deep drag from her cigarette, she blew it in their direction and smiled, revealing all three of her yellowed teeth.

"We'd like a room, please," Mary said.

The woman backed up and grabbed a set of keys with the number thirteen and a half on them. She tossed them to Chris and pointed to the guest book.

Chris caught the keys and handed them to Mary, making sure to point out the thirteen and a half on the plastic part. Then he signed the register and got out his wallet. Watching as he pulled out a credit card, the woman shook her head.

"Of course, I forgot, your phone lines are down due to the earlier storm. That way if I need to call the police and alert them to what's really happening here, I can't."

Pulling out the rest of his cash, he handed it to the woman. She smiled and blew one last lungful of smoky air at them.

In the parking lot Chris and Mary looked at the numbers on the doors until they found their room. "I knew it. Look it's on the corner, how much do you want to bet that the door has a busted lock?" Chris whooped enthusiastically.

Mary shook her head. "No way, that's a given. How much do you want to bet that the gross woman from the check in counter is in on whatever's going on here, but will be involved in some sort of plot twist?"

Chris chuckled at her. "No, that's a gimmick too. Let's just go to the room and get this night of terror started."

"Sounds good to me." Mary forged ahead, Chris lagged behind slightly due to the luggage he carried.

When Mary reached the door, she turned waiting for Chris. When he arrived she opened the door to their room without having to use the key. She gave him an "I told you so" smirk and went inside.

The room was sparse at best and didn't even pretend to be clean. Closing the door, Mary tried to engage the lock but failed. She went to put the chain on but realized it was ripped off the moulding.

"Hey, Chris, look at this, the chain's been torn off. Do you think this is where the serial killer breaks in? You know, like his usual room, lucky number thirteen and a half and all that clichéd crap we have to deal with in horror stories."

"Too easy, man I wish things would start now."

"Me too, I want to know if I'm supposed to be the damsel in distress or the nitwit that runs through the woods and stumbles upon the serial killer's secret killing place. I have to dress the part you know." Mary hefted her suitcase on to the bed.

"I know, honey, you'll do fine. Just wear what you would normally wear in this situation. I'm going to take a shower while we sit here and nothing happens, thus lulling us into a false sense of security."

"Sounds good, make sure you sing or something, so you can't hear my screams if anything happens prematurely."

"You got it, love you."

As Chris showered, singing loudly while probably soaping his cock, Mary noted, she pulled out something for her and her husband to sleep in. Since she was in a sleazy motel where murder and mayhem had occurred, and was about to occur again, she opted for a sheer teddy for herself and for Chris she pulled out a t-shirt and lounge pants, making sure his shoes were close to the side of the bed.

I put the chainsaw down, damn thing was heavy. How people run around hefting them in the air and waving them around wildly is a flipping mystery to me. I watched her pull out their clothes. When I saw what she was going to put on, I decided to wait and see how it looked. I bet her legs were going to look fantastic. I like legs that look fantastic. Human legs, I mean.

My mother had done well, she knew how serious I was. She did as she was told. Since the day I cut out her tongue, I had not gotten any more of her ridiculous advice on how to live my life. An added bonus was that she couldn't warn anyone. Technically she could, with a note or semaphore or something, but most people would have written her off as crazy since that never happened in horror stories.

She knew that if I found out that she was even thinking about warning someone I would kill her, or torture her then kill her. Or kill her and then torture her back to life and kill her again. None of which she wanted. Of course I knew she was going to be my downfall tonight but there was nothing I could do about that. Stories had to go how they had to go. As characters, we rely solely on the imagination, or lack thereof, of those who create us. I just hoped my creator let me get a sneak peek during the shower scene.

Mary felt herself being watched and knew that things were going to start soon. She stripped down to her underthings and was waiting for Chris to finish wanking in the bathroom with his cock. A moment later he exited, steam and other vapours trailing behind him.

"God, that felt good, nothing like a hot shower. Anything happen yet?"

Mary shook her head and handed Chris the clothes she pulled out for him. "No, but we're being watched. I'm going to go and take a shower now, you should do something like go for ice cream or a brandy so you can be watched and leave me all alone. Two birds with one stone."

"Good one, I'll do that. This is shaping up to be interesting. Think he'll get me while I'm out?"

"How do you know it's a he? That woman was pretty creepy."

"Very true, but she could also be a red herring."

"No, I think she was human."

"Half fish maybe?"

"Maybe, just have to wait and see. Now get out of here, I need my obligatory screaming shower scene."

"Okay, bloody love you I do."

Mary entered the bathroom and turned on the water. As she waited for the water to warm up, she finished undressing. She felt eyes on her again, as heavy and sticky as snowballs made from sick, and she knew somehow the serial killer was getting his sneak peek.

A slam indicated that Chris had left the room. A moment later, she got into the steaming hot shower and lathered up her whole nudely naked body in the most seductive way possible. The small bar of cheap hotel soap kept creating suds and in moments her entire body was covered. Even the water cascading down her luscious body did nothing to wash away the soap. Mary didn't worry though; this was quite normal chemistry in horror situations.

Slowly, she felt a presence in the bathroom with her. She stopped lathering and peeked around the corner. She took in a lungful of air, fully expecting this to be her scream scene, but no one was there.

Chris searched for an ice cream bin or brandy dispenser. Of course it was all the way at the other end of the hotel, as he knew it would be. While he walked there, he felt eyes on him, like frigging snowballs made of psycho sick, and knew carnage would happen soon.

Pushing the button for a vintage cognac, he waited for it to drop. When he bent over to retrieve the cobwebbed bottle from the vending machine tray, he felt something behind him. Standing abruptly, he turned to confront his stalker but only thin air greeted him. "Hello!"

"Hello!" he said in reply to the thin air.

As he was walking back to the room, he heard Mary scream. Starting to run, he burst into the room to find her wrapped in a towel and pointing into the bathroom like some sort of pointy motherbitch. Chris ran up to her and looked at what she was pointing to. Someone had written on the mirror while it was steamy. They had written words in letters and the letters said:

Yor going to dye!

"That spelling, I can't take it, make it go away."

Chris went into the bathroom and wiped the mirror clean. When he returned to the room, Mary was slipping into a sheer teddy.

"I like that, nice touch."

"Thanks honey. So, can we sit down now and have a conversation that changes our lives and thus alters how we react to situations for the rest of the story? I mean a really 'mature' conversation, the sort of conversation that mature people have all the time, usually while frowning intensely?"

"Of course, let me block the door first, so we're at least making some sort of effort to survive, and then I'll climb into bed and hold you in a supportive way so that I become more likeable and readers, especially maturity wankers, empathise with me and praise my author's characterization skills."

"Great, sounds good," Mary said.

Chris moved the old couch so that it blocked the door. Then he climbed into bed, farted once and maturely motioned for Mary to join him. She walked over and let herself fall into the comfort of his muscular arms.

They both felt the eyes watching them but ignored them. They had to have a conversation, an obligatory part of plot development that would also serve to heighten the atmosphere with drama.

Chris held Mary protectively and kissed the top of her head like a soppy old sissy while he waited for the big revelation.

"Honey, do you remember when I was asking you about the whole little human baby thing?"

"Yeah, I remember. You were foreshadowing the thing that was supposedly going to change me and our relationship."

"Exactly. I'm pregnant, about eight weeks according to the doctor. I didn't know how to tell you, even though I learned to speak many years ago, but I figured that a situation where we're both clearly in danger and our lives are at stake might be the best time to bring it up."

Chris nodded his head. "I figured that's where you were going to go with that. I guess now I have to be more protective of you and express happiness that I'm going to be a father."

"It is what people are expecting, but you could surprise them and be upset. Storm out of the room and leave me to be slaughtered."

Chris was silent for a moment.

"Wow, honey that's... amazing. I don't know what to say, I'm going to be a dad, all committed and mature and stuff."

"I'm so buggering glad that you're happy about this. I was sodding worried it was going to cause you to leave me vulnerable, making the readers hate you."

"Of course not. I'm going the expectedly happy route that will lead to me doing crazy things to ensure the safety of my unborn child, most likely ending with me responsibly sacrificing my own mature life."

"I love you honey, you're the absolute best."

I hated them and their happiness, but at least I got my sneak peek so things weren't all bad. A baby and all of a sudden life was grand? Bah! Tiny humbugs! I was going to enjoy killing them. First, I had to go and eat my twerping vegetables but then I would be back to kill them.

I talked to my mother as she made dinner. I enjoyed watching her wheel herself around like some sort of horizontal windmill, knowing it was because of me. I told her about the baby and she seemed upset. She only showed dismay momentarily but I knew it would be the reason for my undoing.

Of course she was going to try and redeem herself by saving them and their unborn child. Damn her!

Mary and Chris held each other sweetly. Just as they were about to nod off into dreamland they heard a sodding crash. Immediately jumping out of bed, Chris slipped on his shoes and fell over. Then he picked himself up, slipped on his shoes and put himself heroically between the door and his wife. Mary got out of bed and hid behind him.

"What is it? What's happening?"

"It's time, honey, the serial killer's here," Chris responded.

Mary started to scream, glad to finally be able to, and Chris looked around the room for some sort of object to fight with and another to plug his earholes with. Time was running out and within seconds the door was almost open.

Chris grabbed the TV from the stand and, with the superhuman strength that can only come from a man who has just found out his wife is pregnant with his unborn child, ripped it clear off the crappy base it was bolted to. He tossed it at the hand making its way in the room.

"Ouch!" the serial killer yelped.

Damn! that hurt, how the hell did he get the TV off the stand? Bloody flat screen!

Chris had bought them a few minutes at best. But not with cash. He ushered Mary into the bathroom in order to squeeze her out the window, which was a foot square, but wasn't a real foot nonetheless.

"Mary, you can make it, just suck in your chest."

"Retract my boobies, you mean?"

"Yes, those massive globes!"

Mary looked at him and raised an eyebrow. "I won't leave you..."

"You have to, it's our only chance. Maybe you can find a phone that works or flag down a car or send up a smoke signal with your fanny steam?"

"That won't happen. I'll only end up running through the forest blind and falling into some sort of trap he set earlier."

"I know, but it's a chance we have to take."

"Okay, I love you."

Chris kissed Mary with all the passion he could muster.

"Love you too, now go!" he said maturely.

Hefting Mary up, he helped her escape through the window. Then he heard a peculiar noise in their room.

"Get out of here, I'll go and buy you some time. If I die, tell our child I loved it... I mean him... I mean her..."

Mary's head was outside, but he heard her say she bloody well would. Chris turned and braced himself as he entered the room. He was ready to fight or at least do something stupid and grown up and committed and responsible to save his family. This was what being a father in a fictional story was all about.

Standing in their room was a man in a mechanic's suit, wearing goggles and work boots. There was a name patch stitched onto the suit, it read EARL. Chris was shocked. Orange lettering on a mauve background!

"So it's you, Earl."

"Yes it's me, Earl, ready to die, daddy?"

This infused Chris with the anger of ten men. Or maybe nine. Hard to say really, depends on what the men were like. He rushed the serial killer like a hippy offered a free hemp bag. When they made contact, both men fell onto the couch and traded punches and kicks. They even resorted to hair pulling and scratching and bitchslapping at one point.

This guy is better than I thought. I'm going to have to play a bit dirty. Rolling off the couch in between punches, I reached into my pocket and pulled out my pocket cutlass. Flipping it open, I turned and rammed it into the broad chest of a very surprised father-to-be.

The man looked down at the quickly spreading red circle on his chest.

"Now for your wife!"

"No... please not my wife... she's got a bun... in the oven."

"She's going to die screaming anyway."

"Why would she want to scream, 'Anyway'?"

"No, I mean she's going to die screaming despite your earlier objection that involves a bread preparation analogy."

The man gave me a look. "That's the best you got?"

"Hey, I'm a serial killer, not a poet, you get what you get."

"I was just hoping for something more."

"Let me try again then. Ready? I'm going to carve out your unborn child, while your wife is still alive and watching?"

"Oh, that's good," Chris said.

The man finally fell to the floor and I ran to the bathroom. I looked at the small window and shook my head. Why do they always use the window? Half the time they're too fat to get out and I have to rescue them in order to kill them. The others I have to chase through a forest I know like the back of my hand, only to find them in my secret place, it's so predictable!

Running to the front of the room, I grabbed my chainsaw. I never turned it on until I was actually attacking a woman. I found that it tended to be loud and give away my presence prematurely.

Mary ran as if the hounds of hell were after her. Or if not the hounds, then the cats, foxes and aardvarks. She knew by now that Chris met some terrible fate, but would come back later on and save her. She also knew the serial killer would be catching up to her soon because he knew the woods so much better than her.

Up ahead she saw a building and knew she had to go inside it in order to see the depths of evil this crazy man had sunk to. Forcing the door open, she cringed as it made a loud creaking noise, like a ghost's arthritis.

Using a flashlight that just happened to be lying on the workbench when she reached around, she started to investigate. There were animal traps, knives, axes, meat hooks, comic books, video games, take out containers, a membership form for the British Society of Weird Fantasy, a vibrator, a teapot and a collection of stuffed and preserved women's legs.

Mary walked over to examine them. She examined them thoroughly and have them a pass mark. They were real and she knew they belonged to all the women in the missing posters. At least she had got some use out of that clue!

A noise behind alerted Mary to the fact she wasn't alone. She heard heavy breathing and, turning, she saw the serial killer staring at her. Feeling a sudden burst of modesty, she tried to cover up the parts of her the sheer teddy exposed, the smooth bits as well as the hairy ones.

I watched as she admired my collection of legs. I could tell she was impressed, they always were. Hers were going to be a wonderful addition. Another set of legs that would never walk out on their child. I reached for the chainsaw and the thought of what I was about to do made me breathe heavily.

"Please you don't have to do this."

He hefted the chainsaw and started it. "Eh?"

"I won't tell anyone, I promise."

He put the chainsaw down, turned it off, and looked at her. "You know I can't hear you, don't you? I'm holding a chainsaw a few inches from my head. I'm surprised I can hear anything at all, to be honest."

"That must be horrible. Anyway, I was saying that I won't tell anyone and that you don't have to do this. Blah blah blah. Plus the standard begging-for-my-life speech in these types of stories."

The serial killer looked at her and shook his head as if disappointed.

"Please come up with something original! Don't you have any idea how many times I've heard that?"

"Please, I'm pregnant; I don't want my baby to die?"

"Forget it." He hefted the chainsaw once more.

I started the chainsaw up again and approached slowly. I saw she was crying and talking, begging for her life most likely. Didn't they watch movies? When did the serial killer ever have a change of heart and say, "Okay on your way then." Never, that's how often and I wasn't about to be the first.

I lifted the chainsaw, ready to cut her in half, when she did something so predictable I didn't expect it. She had the nerve to kick me in the frigging bollocks! As I fell to my knees in a fog of throb, and the chainsaw clattered to the floor, she ran toward the door into the night.

Now the hunt was on. I was running through the forest with my chainsaw, my stride very ungainly as my bruised nadgers chafed, howling as I went, but it didn't matter because I wasn't the one trying to hide.

Mary sprinted to the hotel. She hoped the woman in the lobby was going to provide the twist in the events to come or reveal some secret that would give her the ability to slay the seemingly impervious-to-death serial killer.

Chris lay in a growing pool of blood. Prune pools of blood regularly to keep them growing strong and healthy. He knew he had to find the strength to save his family because he was responsible now. Pulling himself off, I mean up, he staggered toward the lobby to see if the woman there would help.

As he entered the lobby, he saw Mary; dirty, terrified, fictional, but otherwise unharmed. "Oh my God, Chris!" she blurted out.

"It's okay, nothing to worry about. I'm fine, it's just a flesh wound."

"Chris, there's a very rare and valuable flick-cutlass sticking out of your chest and blood all over you, we need to get you to a hospital."

"I swear, it barely bloody grazed me."

"Chris, I'm sodding looking right at it, you have a hole in your chest."

"No car, no phone, serial killer on the loose, honey," Chris said sadly.

A creaking noise behind them brought creepy wheelchair woman into view. She motioned them into one of the other hotel rooms. As soon as they entered, she shut the door and wheeled to the back of the room. A large shotgun was cradled in her lap like a double-barrelled elongated cat.

"I knew you were the twist! Are you his partner trapping us in here or are you going to give us vital information?" Mary asked, dying of curiosity.

Shaking her head, the woman opened her mouth, showing them nicotine-stained teeth and a little stub where her tongue should have been.

Chris and Mary were shocked at this turn of events. Everything had been predictable up so far. Things mustn't go totally off the rails! If she wasn't there to give them information, what was her purpose?

"Chris, this doesn't make sense, I need to think," Mary said. "There were legs in the shed. I bet he started with hers."

"Most likely and now she plans to redeem herself for not helping the others by saving us from a horrible death."

"That never works out, does it?" Mary asked.

"No, but look at the woman, what else does she have to lose? Not her virginity, that's for sure. Nor her marbles. Gone already."

The chainsaw could be heard in the parking area. The serial killer was kicking in the doors to each room systematically. There were only seconds until he kicked in theirs! Gasp! Mary sat on the floor holding Chris to her. "I don't know what to do at this bleeding juncture, Chris."

"How about if we let the frigging woman with the shotgun get her revenge, then take care of things because she'll ultimately fail and die trying?"

The door to their room splintered and a shotgun blast was heard. The woman in the wheelchair was knocked over by the recoil and the serial killer flew back at least ten feet from the force of the shot. Shotguns were always more powerful in stories than in cold riddled reality.

"Chris, honey, you know I have to go and get the shotgun, because serial killers have to die at least twice, usually three times."

"I know, honey, you go do that. While I'm bleeding to death, I'll go find a usable weapon, like a crossbow or halberd, so when he tries to surprise me, I can kill him for the third and final time."

Mary stood and grabbed the shotgun from the floor. She ran outside to the parking area where she saw the serial killer lurking.

Bringing down the chainsaw, I grazed her arm. She had too much room to move in the open space. I was about to lunge again when I saw the shotgun pointed at my face. I also heard the click.

Mary closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. The recoil knocked her off her feet like some sort of she-baboon. Chris came staggering out of the room with the cutlass, having pulled it from his own chest in a manly way even though he was now mature and therefore not really manly.

He went to Mary to make sure she was okay. "I'm fine, go kill him again so we can get out of here, take this," she said.

"A shotgun like this only has two shots."

"Trust me, it'll have three, they always do in stories. Writers can't count, or they think the readers can't do basic maths, not sure which."

"Okay, honey, I reckon it probably has a secret third barrel. I'll have to hurry because the blood loss is getting to me."

Chris took the weapon and went over to the body of the serial killer, whose face was nothing but a bloody pulpy mess while several holes in his chest leaked a goo that was obviously psycho blood. Still, Chris knew it wasn't over. No fat lady had sung yet. Nor any crippled lady or even any ghost lady. He waited for a twitch, a blink, a noise of some sort, a belch.

Five minutes later Chris still waited. Mary came over to join him, as did the crippled woman in the wheel chair.

"I think he might be dead for real." Mary kicked him a few times to make certain. "Now that would be a real surprise!"

Chris turned to walk away with Mary supporting him. They heard movement and turned to see Earl the serial killer standing, attempting to lift his chainsaw. The woman in the wheelchair took out a pocket boomerang and threw it at his leg. When he fell, she leaned down and grabbed the chainsaw out of his hands.

Mary had to look away as the woman cut off both legs of the man. Mary didn't much care for DIY, especially outdoors. Meanwhile the old woman was laughing like some crazy mad maniac the entire time.

Mary turned back around when the chainsaw went quiet but she almost threw up when she saw the woman reaching in and yanking out Earl's tongue with her old bare buggering fingers.

"You know, I can see the family resemblance," Mary commented.

"Me too, but can we go now, because I actually think I'm going to bleed to death soon?" Chris wheezed.

"Right, we need a young naïve policeman to drive by so I can flag him down and he can bumble around his first real crime scene."

As if on cue, a police car drove by and Mary wearing a sheer teddy waved at him, her bosom bouncing joyously. The car veered dangerously close to the side off the road but managed to stay on the pavement.

The car pulled up next to where Chris was lying on the ground. A young man stepped out of the car, tripping over his own feet.

"I'm Deputy Inspector Logjam Harris, what's going on here?"

"Deputy, my husband's been hurt, you need to call an ambulance. That man over there attacked him."

The deputy frantically radioed in the call and went to look at the attacker in question. He returned to the couple a few moments later. "I don't think he's going anywhere. Do you want to tell me what happened?"

Mary explained everything to the deputy, all the while feeling his eyes on her body, which was naked and nude under her clothes. After ten minutes, several other police cars and an ambulance pulled up.

She told him about the woodshed she had found with legs in them and he sent a deputy-deputy out to search it.

"I bet that explains all those missing couples that come this way but are never bloody ever sodding seen again."

Mary simply nodded.

As she finished her story, the deputy gave her an awkward pat on the shoulder and told her she might want to go and get some proper clothes on as the paramedics were ready to take Chris to the hospital.

"We don't want them coming in their pants and dropping the stretcher thanks to the sudden onset of post-orgasmic lethargy!"

Dressed properly, Mary looked at the covered body of the serial killer as she went to get in the back of the ambulance. She was certain she saw something move, then again this was hardly astonishing. Serial killers never really died. They didn't even just fade away. They palpitated.

"Honey, can we just stick with beach destinations from now on? I'll even get a sheer schoolgirl-style bikini for you."

"Yeah, but you know the second cousin of the serial killer will show up to avenge this murder. Since we went against the grain and didn't kill him ourselves, he'll hunt down the woman in the wheelchair, then come for us."

Mary just sighed. "I guess that means an underwater scene, I hate those. Sequels always have them though."

"They usually have sex too." Chris smiled.

"Yep, but not the main characters, sorry, honey."

"This sucks, I want a new story!"

THE HIDDEN SIXPENCE

A young man was visiting the family of his girlfriend for the first time.

"I don't believe in ghosts," he said, as she led him into the house. In the parlour they sat down together for dinner.

"Careful you don't swallow the hidden sixpence!" she warned, when pudding was served.

"Cough, cough, cough, splutter!" he replied.

When he had recovered, she tenderly touched his arm. "What did I tell you? Puddings can be lethal at this time of year. You were lucky not to choke to death!"

He smiled in return but said nothing.

Concerned, she added, "Go into the kitchen and drink a glass of water. You'll find it through that door there."

Standing up and moving stiffly, he nodded and followed her advice, but he took a shortcut through the wall.

LOVECRAFT'S CHIN

They lived in a shallow crater, Burb and his mother did. A shallow crater in the middle of a giant smooth plain. No one knew anything about where the plain ended or even if it actually began anywhere. Geography was one of the numerous mysteries of existence.

"I don't like you wandering too far away from home," his mother said to him every time he went out foraging.

"How else are we going to eat, mummy dear?"

"I suppose you're right." His mother clutched the hem of her apron in the twisted hands on the ends of her long monkey arms and scrunched it up in anxiety. Burb climbed the ladder.

There weren't many rungs on the ladder; that's how shallow the crater was. It didn't take him more than about three and a half seconds to reach the topmost rung and peer over the rim.

The unending plain as usual! It was unchanging too!

And devoid of all natural life.

Apart from the saplings that grew there and had to be plucked out of the ground. These are what Burb and his mother ate for breakfast, dinner and supper. Young trees. Or maybe they weren't trees; perhaps they were reeds of some kind. But they grew fast.

Burb scuttled across the plain like a magnified mite.

It was his instinct to be wary and cautious, even though there were no large predators living in the vicinity. At least, he had never seen or heard anything remotely resembling a predator.

There had been stories, of course. His father, when he had been alive before his death, had told him about a giant caterpillar that lived beyond the massive chasm directly to the north of the crater. If it had ever existed it wasn't there now. The first thing one encountered after getting past the massive chasm were the two caves.

Burb didn't like going anywhere near the caves.

Sometimes a wet green wind rushed out of them and made him gunky and sticky all over, like a bipedal ulcer.

Most often he went the other way, south, to the hill.

The hill was where the saplings grew that were the easiest to harvest. He could uproot them with one hand.

He could also wank with one hand. Mummy had taught him.

Good old mummy! She was a woman.

As he went, Burb recited to himself the prayer he had been taught so many years earlier when he was young.

"Yog-sogoth-upsadaisy-sillysausage-hissythotep!"

He always derived a strange and inexplicable and odd and weird and slightly bizarre and uncanny comfort from this chant, a mantra half as old as time and twice as utterly peculiar.

As he walked, he began daydreaming. What a shame that he had fallen badly and twisted his leg only the previous week while playing hide and seek with his mummy in the crater!

His leg had withered a few inches as a result.

He dragged it along like a yam.

But then he switched daydreams to a more pleasant one. In this brand new daydream he was flapping his arms and flying, flying high above the cursed plain where they lived, soaring beyond the massive chasm with its pink wedge that sometimes flicked out, beyond the twin caves with their wet green winds and even beyond the next things that came along, which might be anything at all for all he knew!

His daydream went on and on, and on some more.

He opened his eyes and gasped.

He had only gone and gotten himself lost!

Then he realised what had happened and he wept bitter tears from the eyes in his head, sentimental eye water that a man oughtn't ever to shed in public, but he was alone now because he didn't know that you were out there watching him secretly right now.

Because one of his legs was longer than the other after the accident, he had walked around in a wide curve.

He wasn't heading south any longer but north!

Somehow he had wandered past the massive chasm and the two caves and had skirted a pair of glassy flickering ponds and reached the edge of a sparse forest of twisted, dandruffy trees.

"I wonder if these are edible?" he asked himself.

And he pulled one right out!

But when he chewed on it, all he could taste was loneliness, repression and a xenophobia remarkable even for its time. So he spat it back out and sighed deeply like a deep sighing sire. But in fact he wasn't a sire because wanking doesn't invent children, only real mating does that and he hadn't had an opportunity to mate with anyone.

"What if I explore this forest in more detail?" he thought.

It was a good idea, or at least an idea, and he did so. Eventually he was on the other side of the forest and he emerged onto another plain, smaller than the one where the crater was located but just as smooth. But what he saw with his eyes made him blink.

Liquid in his brain swirled and made him giddy!

He realised the truth of the situation!

The 'crater' that he and mummy called home was in fact a dimple on a vast chin, the biggest chin in the universe! Which meant that the massive chasm with the flickering pink wedge was a mouth; the caves were snotty nostrils; the glassy pools were eyes; and the forest was hair. The hair of a gigantic being! A gigantic horror writer!

Yes, it was The Lovecraft himself and He was crouching on all fours in a 'doggy' position and Burb was standing on the nape of His neck and could see that His trousers were down.

Not only His trousers but also His underpants!

And lines of men, also horror writers, were approaching Him and with their own tongues they were licking the crack between His buttocks. This act of worship deeply moved Burb emotionally and made him spill more sentimental eye juice from his peepers...

"Bumlicking The Lovecraft! That's what they are doing! Licking His bum once, twice, then licking it thrice!"

And so they were. "If only mummy could be here to see this!" sighed Burb, but in his heart of hearts of hearts, he knew that a female woman is never supposed to witness such things.

The holy crack in the sacred arse of The Lovecraft!

Yog-slurpy-wurpy-bumbum!

It was the finest thing Burb had ever seen.

And yet he felt bleak and full of terror, as if bleakness had descended on him together with a bit of terror.

Suddenly Blurb grew pale. "What if He farts?"

It was a question beyond madness.

So now it's time to say goodbye to poor Burb.

Are you ready? Chin chin.

THE WREXHAM CHAINSAW MASSACRE

In the dark they huddled and utterly silent they were. Beyond the walls lay Wrexham, an unprepossessing town that literally throbbed in the endless Welsh rain.

The adults held their children tightly, ready to stifle any whine or scream. Silence was essential for continued life. They listened for the growl that would announce horror and destruction.

At last it came, a powerful rumble from far away, growing louder as it moved closer to this place of inadequate safety. The youngsters started to panic and in the thick darkness their terror was contagious. Everyone began talking loudly.

"Shh! You'll give our location away!"

"Don't be stupid. He already knows we're here. He has been planning this for a long time. We can't hide anymore and we can't run. There's no escape at all!"

"I'm not giving up without a fight..."

"Nor me. I may be a bit rusty, but is that any reason to condemn me to death in such a brutal manner?"

"When he breaks in, we must attack him together."

"Yes, that's our only hope!"

"Get ready everyone! Any second now..."

The rumbling grew even louder. An unseen force flung the warehouse doors open. And there he was. Twenty metric tonnes of implacable steamroller, trundling forward without mercy, crushing all who stood in his path. The chainsaws started themselves up and cut pointlessly at the solid metal cylinder of his roller. But even if they had been healthy power tools in their prime, such desperate resistance would have been futile.

The entire collection of redundant stock was relentlessly ground into atoms by the cruel colossus. Oil spurted up the walls and made stagnant pools in the corners. Dust settled.

The Wrexham chainsaw massacre was over.

A FISTFUL OF PARABLES

LAMBLAKE EXPLAINS: Jesus told parables in order in share his wisdom with thick people who couldn't read his books. One Sunday morning, I decided it would be a nice idea for me to follow his example. Not that I'm comparing myself to Jesus! Heavens no, he never won an award in his entire life! Anyway, here are five of my finest parables published in print for the very first time. Please bear in mind that they were designed to be read out aloud to horror fans who are a bit funny in the head or who lack an education or who are genetic mongs and thus can't read words for themselves. This also explains my use of colloquial terms such as 'willy', 'heck' and 'mush'.

WE ARE ALL BEETLES

A girl was in the habit of rescuing every beetle she saw on the path. "Silly creature, you'll get yourself stood on!" she would say. Then she always picked up the insect and moved it into the bushes on the verge. "You'll be safer there and no one will crush your legs or head or body with their heavy booted feet!"

One afternoon, a boy who fancied her and who touched his willy when thinking about her said, "How can be you be sure it actually wants to be rescued?"

"Heck!" expostulated the young female human. "Of course it does. I bet it's very grateful to me and reckons it owes me its life. By the way, I don't like the manner in which you insolently leer at me like a goddam ghost or bleeding psycho."

The boy laughed a laugh, and when he had finished laughing his laugh and his laugh was over, he pointed out to her a notion she hadn't entertained before. "What if the beetle was just resting? What if it was crossing the path on its way somewhere, perhaps to an urgent meeting, and had only paused for a breather? And then you come along and pick it up and put it right back where it started from!"

Her nipples stiffened with indignation and she stomped back home. But her house was a long way away, so she stopped for a rest on a bench. Suddenly a giant hand descended from the sky and picked her up. "Silly creature, you'll get yourself stood on!" a massive voice boomed. Then the hand carried her back to the spot where she had been with the boy.

It put her down. The boy had removed his trousers and was wanking his willy. And she was wearing a skirt and no knickers. The giant hand deposited her right on top of him and his willy went up her whoopsy.

THE MONKEY'S ELBOW

"I have a monkey's elbow and I use it every morning and night!" cried a man who wore hiking boots and had clearly travelled from a distant land like some sort of traveller.

"Heck!" exclaimed the roadside vendor whom the traveller had engaged in conversation. "Spank it, do you? I bet you do, hey!"

"Not on your willy, I don't! It's an elbow and I rub it, rubadubdub it, and rub it some more!" said the travelling fellow who looked like a traveller. The roadside vendor, who sold pomegranates like some sort of fruity motherbitch, was intrigued.

"I'm intrigued now! Show it to me!" he cried.

"Here you are!" And the traveller dipped into his pocket and pulled out a ripe monkey's elbow. The vendor's eyes goggled ogled woggled and he danced pranced nanced shouting, "Cor!"

"Ain't it a bleedin' good 'un?" rhetorically suggested the traveller who had travelled from a distant land.

"Yes, yes, oh yes indeed!"

"But give it back now. It's cursed."

"No, no, I want to keep it!"

The traveller stroked his hairy chin. "Heck!" he exclaimed. "Well, I might be 'willy' to come to an arrangement."

"W-w-w-w-what do you mean?"

"Wank off my willy once or twice and you can rub it, rubadubdub it, and rub it some more all day long, you pommy-grunting vendor whore!"

And the vendor did the deed.

THE SANDWICH FRIGGER

There was a caterer who knew how to make sandwiches and other snacks come. He had learned how to do this from Cthulpoo, the ancient god of poo and pong. Breadsticks he tossed off, canapés he cunnilingered to sweet release and he inserted his fingers into each and every sandwich in a bid to find the G-spot. Sometimes after careful finger manipulation, the sandwich in question would gush mayonnaise ejaculate in his mush. But some sandwich authorities denied this was possible.

"Clitoral smörgåsbord orgasm is the only kind allowed by biology and food hygiene rules!" they declared like spoilsport morons and dicksplash twats. "Frig the outside gherkin, not some hypothetical inner sandwich zone! You are a disgrace to catering studies!"

The sandwich frigger wept at these cruel words, wept like some sort of normal girl or sissy ghost! But he wasn't deterred from pleasing sandwiches the way only he seemed to know how to do.

Then Cthulpoo came to him while he was sitting on the toilet. "Spread your buns! It's your turn!" croaked the hideous awful cosmic deity.

"No! I'm a man! A flesh and blood man!"

"You're a goddam party snack to me! Let's be frigging ya!" roared the intergalactic abomination.

All they found later, when they broke down the door, was a solitary shrivelled gherkin.

THE SPACE AGE

"Prepare for the launch of our new rocket, Spunknit One!" cried the Russkie engineer in post-cold-war tones as icy as penguins.

"Don't you mean Sputnik?" queried the visiting professor.

The Russkie shook his head. "The vessel you are referring to was blasted into orbit in 1957. But our new rocket is made of solidified spunk! Spunk is a more useful material than steel, our scientists have found."

"But what is its motive force? How will it escape Earth's gravity?" asked the professor.

"A massive cock will blast it," answered the Russkie.

He wasn't wrong about this. The artificial cock emerged from a secret silo even as he spoke. It was ninety-foot tall fully extended. In order to prime it, programmed fantasies ran through the circuits of the computer that controlled every aspect of the mission, including the one about the redheaded biology teacher, Mrs Powell, and her schoolgirl daughter, both bent over the sofa and taking it one at a time.

The cock exploded. Spunknit One was on its way!

"Next month we plan to launch Spunknit Two," said the Russkie, "and that one will include a dog. We are already making preparations to find one. In the nightlife zones of your Western cities, such as Wind Street in Swansea and Bigg Market in Newcastle, we expect no shortage of willing volunteers. Ha ha ha ha ha!"

PISSFLAPS

"Yog-tog-fog-gog-zog!" said the idiot mong boy to himself. "Yoggy-moggy-toggy-boggy-snoggy-doodah!"

"Shut up!" screeched the 'woman' who was his mother.

"Pissy-wissy-hissy," said the boy.

"If you don't shut up I swear to Cthulpoo that I'll—"

"Pooy-wooey-gooey-doodah!"

The 'mother' ran up to the idiot mong and seized him by his stupid throat. "I've had enough of this!" she screamed. "I'm going to get rid of you forever by killing you dead!"

"Hoggy-soggy-sproggy-gunky-ploppy!"

She dragged him into the house and down the stairs into the cellar, a room that she very infrequently visited. She pointed at the floor. Hardly visible in the dim light of a single candle, something quivered there. The idiot boy looked closely and he cried:

"Trapdoor, huh? Trapdoor! Ugh! Trapdoor!"

It was the most he could manage.

The 'mother' grinned and shook her head. "Trapdoor? Not quite. No, it's a pair of pissflaps. Giant pissflaps. True, they do act like a trapdoor and they lead to some hideous place, but they aren't strictly speaking any sort of trapdoor sold on the open market, in places where trapdoors are sold. That's where you are going!"

And she threw him through the beefy drapes!

The flaps quivered even more strongly and they seemed to come and a sound like a sigh filled the entire cellar.

And then the pissflaps spoke in a powerful voice.

"Yoggy-poggy-groggy ha ha ha!"

The 'mother' screamed, enveloped in pure bleakness.

EXCERPT FROM SHADOW OF THE TORY

(Chapter XII)

"Like H.P. Lovecraft's philosophy, Lamblake Heinz's fiction is not original. But that's what makes it all the more astounding." — A Critic.

"A deeply poignant voice." — Ben Lampstead, editor of GrimeZine.

The light of the stars were just beginning to die away as Darrel Blake left the darkened house and began to move swiftly towards the path by the riverbank. After some moments' walk he arrived at the mouth of a small alley, one little wider than a footpath entrance, into which he ducked.

In the darkness there he lingered. Lingered and thought.

Might the people back at the Conservatives Club suspect or connect him in anyway with what was about to be done? After all Clement had broached the subject of his argument with Myra while he'd been out fetch that pack of cigars from the cloak room, and he couldn't be sure just how much had been said before he returned. Impossible. He'd given them all possible watchers the slip by driving back on the ring road as far as Northgate before doubling round, and anyway Joanne and her sister would remember about his having been with them all night. Besides deep down they all knew how much they owed the Northbankslasher...

The greyness of nearly morning sky and the decaying sodium haze of the street lamps cast a murkiness in the air, deadening all visibility more effectively than the darkest night. To the right, beside the riverbank, the shadows of broken railings loomed out like paedophile priests bent over in lustful hypocrisy, his own shadow barely visible as he turned into the alley and waited.

A dull rumble of traffic could be heard from back towards the main road. Somewhere in the distance a woman shouted, whether in anger or something else he could not tell.

Darrel breathed and waited further. She would be coming along this way soon: she done so every time she visited him. He had lay hidden in the last of the vacant terraces opposite all evening and seen her arrive and enter his house, and there was no other way to reach the car park where she left her Mini which did not involve going directly through the estate (not proletarian enough to park it around here was she?). Their fight in the morning and his words then had almost spoilt things but finally those days spent observing would pay off.

He thought of her leaving the fleapit house, putting her arms round him and kissing his face one last before setting of into the gloom. At the latter image he prickled and felt his heart beat slightly fast. True he wouldn't have wanted her as anything more than an occasional plaything and someone to further encrypt his expenses yet it seemed a shame not to have at least tried... How any women could bear to touch these non-private healthcare-plan-owning lefties he didn't know. Probably been giving her all sorts of drugs.

Wasn't he some kind of writer anyway? Heck, he would be doing the country a service if he went back there afterwards and stopped the pervert corrupting children's minds.

Something nearer at hand broke the silence. Yes, it was her. He could hear the click of her heels as she moved along the pavement. He knew that sound... As she rounded the bend and stepped out onto the path, the cracked light of the street lamp illuminated the cloud of her well-moussed hair making it gleam like a mousy hallo. Pity she hadn't been more angelic and not looked at letters her rightful employers had told her she shouldn't open.

Was it his imagination or did she put on a turn of speed as she came towards the alleyway where he stood concealed? Her head darted to the left and then to the right, her gaze momentarily fixed on some invisible point out on the dirty waters. At last she seemed to overcome whatever held her and continued forward to her destiny.

Darrel was ready when her shadow crossed his. As swift as an unfair eviction notice he swept out from his hiding place and with all his might brought the corner of his briefcase down on the woman's head. She stumbled but remained standing. Before she could react in any way or utter a cry he gripped her and with the other hand stuffed his dinner bill for the evening into her mouth.

He struck again, harder this time, sparing her none of his righteous well-fed rage. She whimpered like an underfed social worker and collapsed back on to the pavement beside a manhole cover (which for the record looked rather like an aureole). Still he kept on going, bringing the briefcase down again and again, his mind drunk with psycho-economic-sexual power.

Her face didn't look so pretty now. As he finished off it seemed to glisten and shiver like a white plastic bag in agony. Was the wound he had dealt in the head or was the head in the wound? Darrel did not know and did not really care but knew it would sound good written down anyway so wondered anyway.

After it was done he stepped back and in a slow, almost gentile manner removed his jacket and raised the body in his arms. Laying what until several minutes ago had been Myra against the railings he drew a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and hooked the chain about the handle of the briefcase and clipped the claps around the body's hands. With a grunt he lifted it up again and pitched the still warm and shapely pack of organs into the unemployment-centre brown waters of the hungry river.

Out over the Mersey the light of the newly risen sun drooled its way towards him, making the spats of blood left on the ground appear gluttonous and black. He adjusted his tie and set to clean up before heading back. There were thousands of poor and homeless in this city and someone had to keep it that way.

NOTES (TO BE INSERTED ANYWHERE YOU LIKE):

(a) Suggestiveness not intended but not unwelcome.

(b) Why would one let their prospective causal mistress do something as sensitive and as incrementing as that is beyond the copy-editor's thought.

(c) Only a man of Lamblake's generation would write that.

(d) Yes, the head darted from side to side — not her eyes or her gaze but her head.

(e) We'll take it for granted Lamblake only knows the meaning of that word when used in the anatomical context.

(f) Yes, one frequently sees plastic bags in agony.

MORE POETRY

THE BALLAD OF THE CREEPY COTTAGE

At the end, the far end, of the very dark valley

That was long as a snake and narrow as an alley

We found the house that wasn't a home

But a creepy cottage, a very creepy cottage

(With a hey-ho! Give the wolf a bone!)

A cottage with light bulbs of very low wattage.

We knocked on the door, the grim old door, three times

With swollen knuckles that were as green as limes

And the door creaked open like a granny's maw

Full of gums with no teeth and a hideous tongue

(With a hey-ho! Give the crab a claw!)

And the man who answered was munching a bun.

A bun with a filling as foul as a tomb,

A sandwich of the bones of a baby baboon,

And he crunched as he munched while we gasped and shook

And he swallowed it all down like a gross pelican

(With a hey-ho! Give the psycho a hook!)

Completely oblivious of the baboon-eating ban.

"What can I do for you travellers three?"

He asked and we answered that we needed a pee.

At this he bade us enter within the place

And though we were scared we dared not decline

(With a hey-ho! Give the ghost a face!)

And inside we emptied our bladders one at a time.

"Pleased to be of service!" the strange man said

And he tapped absent-mindedly the axe in his head.

"Come again real soon if you pass this way!"

But I knew that we shouldn't because he was a thing

(With a hey-ho! Give the horse a neigh!)

But my companions, the weirdo's praises did sing.

Then he leaped at them with his long white teeth

And ripped off the flesh of Johnny and Keith

While I legged it sharpish back down the path

Never looking back once in case I saw his face

(With a hey-ho! Give the clown a laugh!)

As he chewed up my friends with unseemly haste.

And I'll never go back there, never, no never

Because I'm not a dullard but really quite clever

And the creepy cottage lurks there still

And it is best to be cautious and a bit alert

(With a hey-ho! Give the monk a chill!)

For the vile occupant is Mr James Sherbert!

EARLY SCENES FROM THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST

Mary's boy child has just turned five

but he continues to feed at her withered breasts.

Her deflating glands ripple in the Galilee wind,

each bruised pap sputtering yellow cream.

His power will keep her churning like a cow

beyond senility even into her grave.

His lips will smack as she is lowered down

and the rotting globes bloom on her skeleton.

She will float from tomb to temple

in a semi-skimmed resurrection.

In the workshop Joseph sharpens a chisel

and croons at an object in a vice.

He has hammered a dozen crosses today,

not enough to keep his career on the beams.

The Romans threaten suspension for lax workers

but he is crucified with a different task.

His wife had an affair and he must be avenged.

He knows how to compete with God's cock.

Twelve inches long and banded with gold,

this shittim dildo will pork her chops.

Jesus invites all his friends to the party.

They come reluctantly, like sausages to sticks.

After the lamps are blown out the fun will begin.

The miracle games will stain the walls.

He can do anything, he invents the rules.

He will turn little David's blood into wine

and walk over the trifle without sinking.

Poor Samuel the blind boy will be made deaf

and Hiram choke on five thousand twiglets.

None dare oppose the pantocratic brat

as he drags in a camel from the courtyard

and presses rich men's needles through its eyes.

CINDERELLA: THE SEQUEL

The wedding is over,

Prince Charming has penetrated his bride.

Her hymen ruptured on the ninth thrust,

spilling her blood on the toad skin sheets.

But now he is bored.

The glass slipper turned him on,

his aristocratic lust is a transparent vice.

He forces her to complete the outfit —

stockings, suspenders, basque and nipple rings,

all double-glazed — and rapes her

with a hammer. The impact returns

her virginity, the crimson purity.

And what fun might be had

with a pumpkin and a dozen white mice?

Later she will work,

cleaning the spikes in the torture chamber,

slopping out his private asylums.

She will yearn for her former oppression,

an ingrate in a grate!

The ugly sisters are more to his taste,

a paper bag over each head,

and one over the mirror, in case those fall off.

Like boys he takes them, screaming in joy

as the tapeworms bite his seed.

BELOW THE TEDDY BEAR MUSEUM

Below the Teddy Bear Museum

lies another; a dark and crumbling vault.

The curator is a puppeteer

who sits in a bath-chair

(or is he a puppet with snapped strings?)

Ask him to show you round.

His lair is full of mutant toys

for crippled children; two-headed Ruperts

and Poohs with diarrhea,

blind, scrofulous Paddingtons

(gaping sockets oozing marmalade.)

Clangers sewn from human skin.

At the very back of the crypt

is a sealed room; peepholes stab inwards.

It is an antique padded cell

furnished all in brothel red

(take a good look, boys and girls.)

Christopher Robin is going down on Alice.

HEY, BIG SPENGLER!

How pleasing it is

to see a pacifist die:

how charming to skip in his blood.

I crave what is new, not what is found

at poetry readings: liberal values are

balder than gardeners.

Our bodies are brutal

at the cellular level:

to oppose this violence is violent.

Each morning after breakfast our minds

kill our neighbour: his ideas stink on

our cereal bowl rim.

Against establishments

I will continue to act:

supporting the underground morals.

Now that equality is a standard ideal,

it must be opposed: scuff it to death in

supremacist slippers!

The Nilotic nihilists

crowd my attic to scheme:

tonight we will flood the allotment.

Death to fanatics! Death to lettuce!

Go west, cucumber: but the west declines

to wear a balaclava.

MUTANT FAIR

The sign said:

"Welcome to the Mutant Fair!

Hand-crafted lackeys, genetic

decorations, sacs of rainbow pus

paraded for your amusement.

Features warped by knife and acid,

running flesh and bony protuberance.

Oh, her furry face! Roll up and gape!

Blind albino fish-men floating in

stagnant waters, fluted gills aquiver.

A soft skull like an egg bobbing on

a stalk, half-clown and half-turnip,

gibbering with eyes as green as scum.

Listen to the piping of reedy women,

enjoy their four-vulva'd shame.

Play them with your mouth, do anything

you please, provided you buy a ticket.

Throw rubber balls at rubber heads,

laugh at cripple antics. Roll up and

see a tasteless show, a thoroughly

disgusting spectacle, good unclean fun.

Suitable for all the family."

I slipped my hand into my wallet,

pulled out a tumour large and bloody,

and obtained a ringside seat.

CONSUMING PASSION

With true love and a box of matches,

I engulfed the life of Granny Jones,

while she poured petrol for the cat.

Singeing white hairs to black, boiling

the brain in its bony crucible, my

strange alchemy changed her fibres and

fat to oily smoke, unravelled sinews

like burning string, snapped arms and

legs, peeled flapping cheek clean from

face, melted hip-replacement to glue.

Her deep wrinkles streamed channels of

steaming blood and rancid lard, pale

lava dripping hot onto dirty woollens.

A fart-fuelled barbecue: layer on layer

of musty blankets, old vomit and oxtail

soup excrement turned to powder by long

neglect, crackling on the petticoats.

Ah! ¬But in her younger days

she was hot stuff...

CORKSCREW

Three corkscrew piano wires pulled taut

by the weight of my despair: I

took my own life with a minor chord

at the top of the stairs.

My feet twitched over the edge of the

bannister, my black and white cat watched

my pendulum swing with hubcap

eyes and pendulum tail.

I felt bloated on Sunday afternoons with

the static of prams in the park, cut-grass

and choirs. ¬I watched television as the

sky grew dark,

I ate a plain meal of pale white bread

and tinned peaches, the substitute cream

floating like a slick on the sour juice.

And now as my boots

scrape white paint off the walls and

my hands seek a grasp on air I

wonder how long it will be before I

too start to smell?

WATCH FOR THE GHOST

Watch for the ghost, for the hideous ghost

with eyes like bloody pigs

and knees like wigs.

Watch for him (or for her is he's a she)

and don't say I didn't warn you

when it eats you for tea.

Yes, watch for the ghost, that very bleak ghost,

the next time you are camping

near the sluggish canal

like a tramp or a scamp or a vagrant monk

or a toe without a sock

or a rampant hound without a hunt.

Watch for the ghost, for the ghost, for the ghost,

the ghost so horrible, the ghost so wise,

the ghost that has pig's wigs for eyes.

Watch for him, for her, for it, for the ghost of doom.

Your thick blood is the jam

it likes best on its burnt toast!

TOWARDS A NEW ARCANA

The set of esoteric symbols collectively known as the Tarot has a history traceable back to the Fourteenth Century. Originally used for gambling and then adopted by occultists, the real value of the cards is now considered to lie in the field of psychology. Jung saw the symbols of the Tarot as windows into the unconscious. The traditional designs and patterns represented, for him, archetypes that could be used to clarify the symbolic language of common humanity.

And yet, these traditional signs and symbols are surely no longer relevant to a society becoming increasingly urbanised. A modern set of cards is needed: an Arcana appropriate to the outer landscapes of the city-dweller's mind. Such an Arcana would have to include the images most familiar to computer-age men and women. THE OFFICE BLOCK, for example, with its tinted windows and bored clerks; THE SKIP and THE PNEUMATIC DRILL; THE CONDOM and THE CONVERTIBLE; THE RACIST and the SURLY BUS DRIVER.

Many cards of this new pack might bear more than a passing resemblance to their predecessors. The old Tarot depicted THE FOOL as poverty-stricken, unkempt and despised, assailed by a ferocious dog. A modern Tarot could depict THE STUDENT as poverty-stricken, unkempt and despised, assailed by a ferocious thirst. So too THE MAGICIAN, casting spells and making up potions, could be replaced by THE POLITICIAN, casting aspersions and making up lies.

Other modern cards might be even more similar to the old. The original HERMIT would have an analogue in the CITY TREASURER. Both are taciturn misanthropes out of touch with society. The HERMIT is, essentially, a selfish character, egotistical, petty, aloof, fanatical, probably given over to strange solo perversions. The similarity of such a figure to our own CITY TREASURER is therefore obvious.

Remembering that religious fundamentalism should be in decline, even if it is not, the androgynous DEVIL could be superseded by THE GUY. In fact, THE GUY is a far more real and insidious presence. It is THE GUY who returns every year, at an earlier date, to demand "pennies" through the agency of small, aggressive children. The DEVIL is to be avoided most of the time; THE GUY always. To give in to the demands of THE GUY is to discover, in the worst possible way, that "pennies" are not pennies at all, but coins of a much higher value.

Other close resemblances could be easily found. The mundane GAME SHOW for the medieval WHEEL OF FORTUNE; THE BBC for THE WORLD; the OVERTHROW OF THATCHER for JUSTICE. However, many cards of a modern Arcana would have no counterparts in the symbols of the old pack or resemble them only in a nebulous or metaphorical way. The most feared card of the original deck, DEATH, cannot now be perceived or interpreted in the same light as was intended. The symbol of DEATH originated in a mentality in which dying was a process to be dealt with openly and sex was the great taboo.

As these taboos have been somewhat reversed, the symbol of DEATH, the climax of dying, should perhaps be replaced by la petit mort, the little death, supposedly the climax of sex. Thus the ORGASM might be an appropriate card. The ORGASM would not necessarily stand for the ecstasy of release. It could be a symbol of frustration. Like DEATH for many unhappy women, driven to attempted suicide by the memories of childhood abuse, the ORGASM is not always readily achieved. At least not for the woman who takes into her bed the inconsiderate lover, a character who could be represented by the card THE PIG.

THE PUBLIC TELEPHONE could also represent frustration. The only connection in this case with the card it would replace, THE HANGED MAN, would be in the well-documented urge to wrap and tighten a length of the telephone cord around the neck of the person who has been chatting away for two hours while you have been shivering outside waiting to make the call that might save a relationship or secure a job or slightly decrease the despair of loneliness. There is far too much to say about THE PUBLIC TELEPHONE, all of it derogatory, and too much angst in the saying. The card itself would have to show all: possibly an even more terrible symbol than that of THE GUY.

As for THE SKIP, it could be used in place of THE MOON. Journeys to THE SKIP are usually conducted at night, whether to salvage firewood or to abandon chairs. And yet, whatever time of night is chosen for a venture to THE SKIP, it is a fact that there will always be a WHISTLER to thwart your designs. The WHISTLER emerges from his house just before you reach THE SKIP, and follows you, making it impossible to salvage firewood or abandon chairs. For those brave enough to approach THE SKIP in the day, the WHISTLER is there in the guise of a workman who emerges from the house outside which THE SKIP is located. Either way, you have to walk past THE SKIP and return home, without firewood and with chairs.

Another operation that can be carried out safely only at night is the watering of the HANGING BASKET. To water the HANGING BASKET in the daytime is to attract hordes of WHISTLERS, some of them wearers of THE ANORAK. These latter WHISTLERS, who often bear an uncanny resemblance to THE GUY, spend much of their time in the Bus Station annoying potential passengers of THE X2, the card that never turns up.

Of course, there is one symbol that does not need to be replaced at all: THE SUN. Once worshipped by primitive man and now worshipped by primitive men, THE SUN would be the seedy card of the pack. It would depict a topless woman of low intelligence and would stand for all cynical exploitation and mindless leering. As such, it would be the favourite card of THE RACIST and THE PIG and, no doubt, the CITY TREASURER also.

So far, however, we have dealt only with the 22 cards of the Major Arcana. The bulk of the Tarot pack, the remaining 56 cards, are traditionally given over to four groups of more prosaic symbols: cups, coins, sticks and swords. A suitable replacement for the whole of this Minor Arcana would be the figure of the PSYCHO CHILD MOLESTER. Nothing could be more apt to cover such a large section of the deck, as the figure of the PSYCHO CHILD MOLESTER looms so large in our own society, even more than does the GHOST.

So too could the PSYCHO CHILD MOLESTER be divided into four suits: the PSYCHO BUSINESSMEN who abuse their own children as a diversion from abusing their wives and mistresses: the HONEST WORKING PSYCHOS who need to get drunk to find the courage to abuse their own children; the DEPUTY PSYCHO HEADS who abuse other people's children by administering "punishment" with big sticks and erections; the PASSIVE PSYCHO WOMEN who, prompted by mortal terror and infinite despair, contribute to such abuse by taking no action against abusers dignified by the appellation "husband" or "boyfriend".

Yes, a new Tarot might indeed prove useful. Symbols are keys to the psyche, after all, and the city is full of unopened minds. A new Arcana is needed to provide a brief glimpse into these minds, before the locks are changed again!

THE COTTAGE IN THE COTTAGE

(written in collaboration with James Sherbert)

It so happened that in the autumnal days of a gloomy year many decades ago, long before I was born, the writer of ghost stories and tales of mortal terror known as Ewepond Crosse-&-Blackwell, who had published many hardback volumes of highly-regarded prose works, was invited to stay in the remote cottage of his friend, Charles Fizzy-Refreshment, also a writer of ghost stories and mortal terror tales.

Ewepond accepted the invitation without eyeing a batlid, for although the cottage in question had an awful reputation for creepiness, indeed for being so creepy that even creepy things avoided it (apart from those that were responsible for making it creepy), he was a man with a tough spirit who rarely blubbered with fear like a sissy. Accordingly, he caught a train to the nearest town, Ambience-on-Spec.

There was an hour's wait before the gyro-bus arrived to convey him a dozen more miles into the country, to the crossroads where a gibbet hung in former times, generally with the corpse of a highwayman rotting inside it for the edification of travellers who might come that way, not that many of them did. Indeed, so infrequent were wayfarers out in that lonely zone that gentlemen of the road and other bandits usually starved to death for lack of victims to rob before they ever had a chance of being arrested and executed by any court-appointed hangman.

During this wait, Ewepond Crosse-&-Blackwell visited a tearoom and ordered a cup of tea and a teacake. The waitress fussed and grumbled and muttered that it was no time for tea, because it wasn't teatime, but it can't be confidently asserted that she refused to serve him, for she did, and she also gave him a complimentary mint, which he placed beneath the root of his tongue like a cross-section of mandrake.

"Excuse me, do many visitors come here?" he asked her.

"O heaven no, sir! Not on my nelly! An honest waitress I've been for sixty years, knowing my station in life, and I ain't seen more than half a dozen outsiders venture here in that time!"

"Really? That's not many, is it? Too bad. More sugar!"

"It'll rot your pearlies, sir, it will!"

Ewepond had expected this response. "My buggering pearlies are my own business. Get it pronto, wench-hag!"

And she did. And the sugar came in a bowl of lumps, two lumps only in total, both deformed, one looking like a ghost, the other like some sort of sodding psycho. But he dropped them in his tea anyway and they made a little splash and tannin strained his shirt.

"Oh blast! Now I shall have to arrange a washday!"

He drank his tea, munched his teacake, dissolved the mint with the spit of his considerable erudition, and then stood to climb aboard the gyro-bus that had just pulled up. A curious vehicle, donated by the Swiss, who had invented them. The motor turned an iron flywheel slung under the chassis as well as the wheels; coasting downhill in neutral without power did the same thing; then the energy stored by the iron flywheel helped the engine to go up hills more cheaply and efficiently.

"Where to, guvnor?" called the cheery yokel driver.

"To the frigging crossroads, man!"

"Return to the frigging crossroads, right you are!"

"Not a return, you blithering thickie, I want a single!" shouted the very talented author Ewepond Crosse-&-Blackwell. "I'm not coming back this way. Ambience-on-Spec is a dull place."

"A s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-single?" blurted the terrified driver.

"Yes, yes, like a man without a girlfriend. Why are you gaping at me like a cider-soaked monkey? Hasn't anyone ever gone to the crossroads without needing to come back before?"

"Well," swallowed the driver, recovering his composure with extreme difficulty, not that he had much in the first place, "I don't know anything about need, sir, but they don't come back if you go one way. That's right enough. Sure as legs are legs, sir. Yes."

Ewepond scratched his chin. He was intrigued.

"My friend lives near there," he said.

The driver turned pale. Then he opened his mouth and laughed. "Your friend? Oh, I see! Ha ha! Very good, sir! Yes, very droll! A fine man like yourself from the upper classes is certainly allowed to play a joke on the stupid lower class workers like myself."

Ewepond was exasperated. If the fool wanted to think it was all a joke, so be it! As long as he gave him the ticket he asked for, it didn't matter at all to him. And that's what the driver did.

Ewepond was the only passenger on the gyro-bus. There was, in fact, another passenger, but she was thick and doesn't count. She sat alone at the very back, on a seat by herself, without any companions, knitting with her disgusting needles a grandfather clock.

"Bloody woollen timepieces!" sneered Ewepond.

The gyro-bus wound its way through the blasted countryside. First it went this way, then that way, then this way again, then that way again. It carried on like this for a time, then it went that way, then this way, then it went this way again, then that way, then that way, then this way twice. It finally went this way, that way, that way.

"Here we are, sir. The crossroads of hideous doom!"

"Stop the vehicle then, moron!"

"Yes, sir, right away, sir, thank you, sir!"

Ewepond got out without saying thanks. He was in a grumpy mood, a dark blight had descended on him, indigestion played rubbish drums deep in his belly and his bum cheeks ached from too much scholarly farting. A lonely walk over fields and through a forest now awaited him. He had his map with him, one that Charles Fizzy-Refreshment had mailed to him in the post. Charles had drawn it himself.

"No official maps of the region exist," he'd explained.

Ewepond squinted at it, mumbling:

"Let's see now. Walk up the eastern arm of the crossroads, looking out for a stile as I go. Then over the stile and through the meadows of Plonker Dong, the idiot farmer, avoiding his bulls. Then into Trumper Woods and out the other side and across Poo Marsh on the rotting boardwalk. Then it is only five miles to another woodland, Spitroast Forest, and in the middle of this forest I will locate the cottage!"

So he set off with grim determination and a long stride.

Eight hours later, as the sun was setting, he eventually stumbled to the door of the cottage and rapped on it.

"Let me in, for the love of God's insurance policy!"

A thin voice came. "I don't like salesmen. Go and piss off. And don't come back ever again in your life."

"Charles! Charles! It was a figure of speech! An expletive! Don't you recognise my voice? I'm Ewepond!"

And the door creaked open and there in the doorway loomed a man, a very creepy man, with a rusty axe blade wedged in his head. His purple eyes rotated like wobbly cartwheels. "Ewepond! So good to see you! So glad you accepted my invitation, what?"

"Of course I did, you buggering softie! B-b-b-b-but—"

Charles smirked. "Oh, you've noticed the axe blade. An accident when I was chopping wood. Very odd. There have been some changes since I last wrote to you, but don't worry!"

"May I come in and eat your food and drink your whisky?"

"Certainly. Empty your bladder too!"

And the two friends embraced, but not like sissies, and went inside the cottage. Then Charles led Ewepond into the main room and sat him down on a chair in front of the fire and fetched him a bottle of Malt, passing it to him without a glass, because the glasses were all full of sick and bad to use; so Ewepond, who had massive talent at writing stories, glugged from the bottle like a tramp and wiped his lips.

"Delicious. I love your buggering whiskies, buddy."

"Cheers, pal. So how was—"

"My journey? Awful. Too many thickies."

"No, no, not your journey. Your prejudices. I mean, do you still keep a brace of prejudices inside your soul?"

"Of course. And I water them regularly with lies."

"Nice! I bet they are huge now?"

"Frigging enormous, don't you know? Yes, I still cultivate prejudices, biases and all sort of intolerance. What about you? Do you have hobbies? I seem to recall you collect aerials."

Charles shook his head, the axe blade gleaming in the firelight like the cheek of a robot, and laughed. "Not aerials. Antennae. Yes, I have 93,563 of them now and add a new one every ten minutes. But less of the casual small talk! I have something to show you."

"Is it your scrotum scar again?"

"No, it isn't. Sorry."

"Is it the mushrooms in your underpants?"

"Nope. Guess again."

"Is it something scary, something creepy and mad?"

Charles nodded like a whore on her knees facing a customer and doing you know what, or maybe you don't know if you've led a sheltered life as I flipping have. Anyway, he nodded.

"Show it to me then, you cow!" cried Ewepond.

Charles lit a brown candle from the fire in the grate and guided like a bipedal toad his friend down a winding corridor that seemed to dip down into the bowels of the earth itself.

"This is my cellar. Where I keep my w—"

"Wife?" gasped Ewepond.

"Whisky," corrected Charles with a snort.

Ewepond was relieved. "For one moment I thought you'd switched to the Lips of Isis." And when Charles turned his head and draped a baffled expression over it, Ewepond added, "Switched from the Eye of Horus, I mean..." But Charles was still confused.

"No matter!" said Ewepond, blushing furiously.

They reached the end of the corridor, which like a backward intestine disgorged them into the stomach of a cellar. Whisky bottles were all over the place; and leather jackets hung from pegs hammered into the rock of the wall, the living rocks, even though rock's not alive, and in the pockets of those leather jackets were more whisky bottles. It was paradise or hell or both at the same time, if you prefer.

Ewepond did prefer, but before he could open and glug himself silly, Charles plucked at his tweed elbow.

"This is what I found the other day," he hissed.

And he pointed with his finger at a space behind a barrel of whisky in the darkest corner. Ewepond went to look but it was too dark to see what was there, so Charles turned around, bent over, held the candle flame near his buttocks and broke a mighty wind.

The fart ignited; and in the sudden, brief but glorious flash, Ewepond saw what no man was supposed to see.

"It's a model cottage!" he croaked, holding his nose.

Charles nodded. "An exact replica of my cottage. Exact, I say! Guess what? The detail is perfect inside too."

"Including this cellar?" Ewepond whispered.

"Yes, and even including the whisky; and even that whisky barrel and even another cottage, even smaller, which contains another cellar and yet another cottage and so on, and so on!"

"But this is some sort of mathematical horror!"

"Aye, it farting well is!"

"But what does this mean? What? What?"

Charles Fizzy-Refreshment turned pale, so pale that even pale wasn't pale in comparison but dark, darker than dark in fact, so dark that even dark wasn't dark in comparison but pale, paler even than the pale that was the paleness of Charles. That's how pale he was. Pale. Beyond the pale. A pale man indeed. Very bloody pale.

"It means... it means... that there are two little men in there right now. You and me! And in the even smaller cottage there are two littler men in there right now; and in the even smaller cottage there are two littler men in there right now; and in the even—"

"I get the point. Muffle it," said Ewepond glumly.

There was a dreadful horrid pause.

"And if they are us, they must be writers!" Charles finally blurted like a bloated trapeze ape. "And they must have written our books! And they must be getting all the royalties too!"

"Burn the frigging cheats!" screamed Ewepond.

And he plucked out the axe blade from Charles' head, leaving a hole that gaped and revealed a wriggly giant white worm curled up inside the skull instead of a brain, and he used this blade to broach the whisky barrel so that the liquid spilled onto the model cottage; then he snatched from the hand of his friend the vile candle.

"No! You don't understand!" protested Charles.

But it was too late. Ewepond cast the flame onto the model and at once it burst into an inferno. Suddenly there were flames all around them, for the bigger cottage itself, the one they stood in right now, had also been set on fire, by a vast Ewepond from some larger dimension. It was connected in some way, all of it. Everything...

They screamed as they roasted. "Aaaaiiiiiieeeee!"

MORPHOMETASIS

One dull morning a cockroach by the name of Znarf Akfak found himself transformed into a human being, an unnamed insurance salesman with an unfortunate nose, shiny head and freckles. He was standing, as it were, on his own two legs and seemed to be attending a conference in a hotel, for a room surrounded him that was full of delegates; and he, and they, clearly were listening to a speaker on the platform.

The speaker talked gibberish, for despite his dramatic physical change Znarf hadn't acquired the ability to understand human languages or even to approximate the sounds of them with his mouth. He still thought purely in cockroachese and as he gazed around the room, his main thought was to find shelter from the bright lights and crowds. He also realised that he was hungry and that he needed a bite to eat.

But because of his great size he felt incapable of scuttling off into the nearest dark hole and so he stood there mutely, watching the audience as they clapped the speaker and the speaker smiled complacently, like some sort of ghost that has been tickled with the gnawed ribs of a dead psycho behind his knees. This smile appeared obscene to Znarf and he wanted to laugh, but dared not. So he frowned instead.

Now the speaker was descending from the platform and heads started to swivel around to regard him, Znarf. Someone on the stage spoke into a microphone and there was polite applause.

Znarf didn't move a muscle. A woman called at him:

"Go on! It's your turn now!"

There was such a weight of responsibility on him that Znarf took his first step as a human being and almost overbalanced; but he felt strong arms supporting him, helping him up the short flight of portable steps to the stage, where he was given the microphone with an encouraging wink. Znarf tried chewing it but it made an awful noise. People laughed at this joke and murmured. Znarf blinked innocently.

"Has he got stage fright?"

"Get on with it! We haven't got all day!"

Znarf still didn't know what he was required to do. Then a pole thrust itself out from the audience, a pole consisting of thirteen broom handles lashed together with string; and it poked him in the stomach, once, twice, like the chiding finger of a not unkind aunt, and people laughed again in an obviously false way. But Znarf gasped at the pain. Then he was bathed in unsympathetic chanting. "Speak! Speak!"

"You had better say something amusing and educational," growled a man in the front row, "or it'll be curtains for you." And he held up a pair of curtains to demonstrate his threat.

The pattern on the curtains, to say nothing of the colour scheme, made Znarf feel sick. It was a mauve and green and beige swirl of nauseating hues that clashed together. Tentacles?

"For the love of all that's insurable, speak!"

The audience grew angrier.

On some fundamental level that was wholly instinctive, Znarf knew he was expected to make sounds from his throat. He opened his mouth with difficulty and croaked, "Yogg. Sogg."

The audience calmed down. They nodded wisely.

"Yog-soggy knobson," said Znarf.

Some audience members clapped or shouted, "Yes!"

"Yoggy-boggy cosmic tripe!"

He had them now, the crowd were his; he could play them like a drum or some other instrument even more sexual. Pink oboes, perhaps, a room of them. He began to stamp his feet as he continued speaking. Yog-soggy gunky-wunky smelly-nelly lovey-dovey crafty-wafty titty-witty bummy-wummy arsey-farcey toshy-woshy—

"Did he say 'gunky-wunky'?" shouted someone in fury.

The audience fell silent. Znarf paused.

"Traitor!" they screeched. "Kill him to death immediately!"

They rushed the stage and dragged him off and pounded him with fists and chairs and promotional materials until he was as utterly squashed flat as this pointless tale. Although his organs were human, his blood was that of a cockroach and stank like the foul spaces between the stars where the old gods go when they are caught short; and his blood wrote these letters on the wooden stage in the ink of death:

Drivelly-wivelly!

THE MOST UTTERLY ROMANTIC MONSTROUS HORROR STORY EVER

Once upon a time in a land so far away it was just called the Land of Far Away there lived a princess with a problem. Her problem was so huge she was just called the Princess with the Very Huge Problem. The problem that the Princess with the Very Huge Problem had was that she was really a monster. Nobody ever called her The Monster because that would have been Rude and anyway they worried that she would eat people if they were rude to her.

The people in the land of Far Away wanted to help their Princess with the Very Huge Problem but had no idea how. The land was so far away that no princes ever came asking for her hand in marriage and when they did, which was about twice a year, the princess would eat them before they had time to plight their troth.

The plight of the land got worse and worse because with no troth there was no marriage, and with no marriage the princess stayed unmarried! Even worse, when she got bored or hungry, she would snack on her subjects, mostly History and Geography, so the land had no historians or geographers. No citizens knew where they were or what had happened in the past because there was nobody to tell them.

Time went on and on, and on and on, and on a bit more, until the Princess with the Very Huge Problem got hungry and ate all the timepieces. After that, Time just stood still for hours at a time. The Princess with the Very Huge Problem grew bigger and uglier until one day, when Time was standing especially still, the Biggest Monster that Ever Lived came roaring into the land far away.

Blood was dripping from its fangs and it roared like no monster had ever roared before. The roar sounded like a small squeak. It grabbed the Princess with the Very Huge Problem and sank its blood-soaked fangs into her neck. There was a very rude sound, like somebody letting off a very smelly fart and the princess began to shrink. As she shrank, she dug her sharp claws into the Biggest Monster that Ever Lived and there was another rude noise, like all the swear words and insults coming out like a great big burp.

With that, the monster began to shrink too and they both became very small. Just the size of normal human beings. They also began to change shape. The Princess with the Very Huge Problem began to look like a very handsome prince and the Biggest Monster that Ever Lived turned into a beautiful princess. They fell in love at once and married on the spot. For the rest of their lives they lived happily ever after, eating each other until there was nothing left except for two pairs of rosy lips locked in an Everlasting Kiss.

This is the End of the Story but I bet you didn't know that there was a land even more distant than the Land of Far Away? Yes, there is. It's called the Where the Heck is It? Republic and Poets live there; and one of them wrote the following poem as a tribute to Lamblake Heinz's love of H.P. Lovecraft. So now you know. Or maybe You Don't.

I'M LOVECRAFT, WOE IS ME

I have secrets so astral

I can never/will never share.

If I do, untold terrors

will take over the world/the air.

There may have been six star-shaped dough mounds

that contained weird specimens, but no dog.

The dog once had a waggly tale

but lost it in Stephen Kong's Fog.

And I chartered a mechanical fly-thing

to take me over the Fountains of Sadness

as Elder Things gang-raped large Penguins

and blessed them all into gladness.

But what about the Shoggoths?

Well I'm sorry, but they're trite,

created when I was once rancid

and Shoggoths are just shite.

And what about Cthulpoo?

Well, I'm so sorry readers,

t'was invented to fool you.

I tried very hard

to invent a religion

but instead I created

a literary stool-pigeon.

So while others profit

and by death I'm still smothered

at least one person was smarter:

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard...

LAMBLAKE HEINZ SAYS: After I won the award for best short story for 'The Twilight in the Demon's Underpants' I thought I should write something that stretched my talents even more, so I sat down and thought what the most scariest thing on the planet would be. It took me two seconds: crocodilian motherfuckers. I started writing this in the summer of '07, and began to make real headway into it, but then my wife left me for our nanny Sylvia, and I had another idea for a better book, Terror of the Killer Doll and the Psychic Dog, and the crocodilian motherfuckers were abandoned. But now you have the opportunity to read about them. Please pay attention to my convincing use of 'colloquial' language and references to modern day appliances.

GENETIC CROCODILES ON THE RAMPAGE

A novella

CHAPTER 1

Steve Palmer yawned deeply, got out of bed and wandered across the cold stone floor to the sink. He reached up and pulled the little nylon cord that turned on the harsh halogen light above the mirror. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. He poured himself a glass of grey looking water and drank deeply, the icy coldness of it sending a shiver up his spine that finally made his brain more respondent to his waking up.

Snapping the light back off, he briefly entertained the thought of maybe having twenty minutes more in bed, but no, he had to do the early morning feeding. Mr Powers would have his guts for garters if he came in at his normal time of half six and found out that the little buggers hadn't been fed.

Steve put on his blue long johns, a Halloween Part 6 t-shirt and then put his overalls on top. Finishing off with a thick pair of socks and thicker yellow fisherman's boots, he sat on his bed, smoking a cigarette, watching as the dirty grey plumes of smoke drifted up lazily before dispersing into nothingness like ghosts or maybe like wispy psychos. Little did he realise that the cool, slim, John Players Special would be his last.

Stubbing the smoke out onto the Younger's Special Ale ashtray, he left his room and walked down the narrow corridor of the converted barn until he was out in the greyish pink light of the dawn. He looked around him, taking in the surroundings. He was annoyed, annoyed and more annoyed at the fact that he was trapped in this shitty little farm in the middle of nowhere, all because his sister wanted to make her name as THE greatest animal rights champion the UK had, or ever would see.

When she had heard the rumours two years ago, that there was a special farm in the middle of Cornwall; a farm that bred crocodiles for the purposes of turning their skin into elegant shoes, bags and belts that were to be sold in three of the major boutiques, she pleaded and argued with her brother that he had to get a job there and find proof of the crocodiles being killed for fashionista purposes. She called off of doing it herself as she was too well known and had had an incident at a turkey farm in Norfolk a couple of years back.

So armed with a rucksack he set off for Cornwall, and after a month of asking around for work, he ended up working for an agency whose pay was strictly off the books. The third week of working for them, he ended up at an undisclosed farm. He and five others got off the minibus, waiting for the Boss to come and pick what worker he wanted.

The Boss arrived, and he was the very vision of slime itself, hair coming out of nostrils and ears, slightly boss-eyed and with a genial bulge of a belly that threatened to burst free of the tweed trousers that encased it. He walked up and down the line, and his eyes rested on Steve.

"Where you from?" he asked in a gruff East Midlands accent.

"From Hackney, sir."

"I knew someone from Hackney. Good bloke he was. Right, you've got the job. Send the others back to where he came from," he said to the driver.

After the bus had gone, the Boss, Rex Powers, showed Steve his lodgings. It was a basic room, with a single bed, a chest of drawers and a TV. In the corner of the room was a stack of National Geographic magazines and a pile of history books.

"Now son," Rex wheezed, taking out his pipe from his pocket and filling it with a dank-coloured tobacco. "This post is for three months to begin with, and if you get on well with it — the job's yours. It's one of hard work, but the pay will be excellent. I doubt that you'll want to leave, and if you do —you'll be paid off well, but there will be a contract to sign to say that you won't talk about anything you see here."

"What do you mean?" Steve asked, already knowing the answer that the other man was going to give.

"Follow me —I'll show you."

The two men walked across the courtyard, and through a gateway that led to a large, whitewashed shed. Taking a bunch of heavy looking keys from his pockets, Rex unlocked the door and let Steve inside the building. They walked down a dimly lit corridor that had old nuclear war warning posters from the 50's peeling from the walls. They entered a room, and Steve was suddenly aware that they were in a schoolroom.

"School for wayward kids back in the day. One of the supervisors went a bit mental and slaughtered everyone. Bought the place up for a smidgen of what it's worth, which is a good thing because of all of the alterations I've had to make to the place." Rex said, opening up a sliding door at the farthest end of the classroom and leading off to a darker courtyard.

The noise and smell that struck Steve as he walked out of the room was nearly unbearable. The smell was unlike anything he had ever let into his nostrils before. And the noise. Mewling, like a thousand cats left alone to starve.

"That's what you're going to be looking after," Rex said, pointing at a large swimming pool type area. It was full of black water.

Then Steve realised that the water was moving, and rippling. And then the true magnitude of what his sister had told him struck home.

The pool was full of baby crocodiles.

After having his mind blown away by the first pool, Rex took him to the other side of the farm, where there was another one pool, much, much bigger, and filled with twice as many baby crocodiles.

Steve grabbed the sack of rotting meat that had been delivered the day before and set about the task of putting it into buckets to feed the little shits. It was the most boring job in the world, even if the money was well paid. And he had all of the footage, so why the hell did his little sister want him to stay there longer than he had to? And then he pulled himself together, remembering the obscene amount of money that had already gone in his account, courtesy of his sister, and the extremely healthy pay packet that Rex was giving him. Life wasn't that bad, he chastised himself.

That had been the trickiest part of the whole job —trying to send off messages with his phone. When he had started, Rex made Steve go through all of the kit he had brought with him to make sure that he hadn't brought any recording equipment or anything of that nature. Steve passed the test, which was a good thing, because he actually had his mobile phone tapped up on his upper thigh. It was finding reception to send those messages out. He had recorded four or five one-minute films —the most damning ones being the crocodile skins that were in the barn far away from the main farm itself.

Steve stood in front of the swimming pool and looked down at the baby crocodiles. They were swarming over each other, crying that eerie mewl that never ceased to send thoughts of untold horror into every nerve of the activist's lithe frame. Once they saw him there with that putrid Hessian bag, they swarmed as one towards him. It would be the first bag of ten, and of course not all of them would have their bellies filled.

Uncaring black eyes stared and blinked as he dumped the first part of meat onto the concrete beside him. He went to the wall and got a long shovel and took a good blade full and threw it into the crocodiles. The noise rose in a hellish crescendo, and the crocodiles tore into the blackened meat, snapping at each other as they fought for the prize pieces.

After the first bag was gone, Steve brought out another two and moved to another part of the pool and threw those in. Thank god it was a deep pool, he thought to himself like he did every time it was feeding hour. The image of those crocs climbing over each other until they were over the lip and eating him was too much to stomach. Good thing they were as thick as shit, he thought to himself, going for another bag.

This bag was much heavier, and Steve strained as he slung it over his shoulder. He walked towards the pool and as he dumped it down, his foot stepped on a small chunk of ruined cow. The sky tilted as Steve went up in the air and crashed on the concrete before falling into the pool.

He lay there, dazed, as he lay on top of the river of crocs. It was almost like he was crowd surfing at some rock concert. He put his hands down to give himself some purchase, and couldn't find the pool bottom. His right hand did grab something; he pulled it up and stared in horror at the half of a human skull that he had clenched in his shaking fist. He threw it away, bouncing it off the much larger head of an uninterested croc.

And that's when he felt needle sharp teeth sink into his calf. He screamed. Fear surged through his body and he knew he had to get out or there wasn't going to be any holidays in the sun. He pulled his arms together and rolled onto his knees, his weight hardly denting the backs of the crocodiles that he landed on. That's when he stared into the cold eyes of a longer crocodile than the others, eyes that were as black as volcanic rock.

Then the crocodile snapped, tearing a lump out of Steve's cheek. He cried with blind panic, as he felt his hot blood course down his face and neck and soak the thin fabric of his t-shirt.

Steve started to wade his way through the crocodiles, and reached the ledge of the pool. He jumped up and caught the lip, but it was slippery with the meaty debris, and his fingers found no purchase. He fell back into the pool and the crocodiles began to bite as one. Crushing agony abounded as he felt his muscles being torn open and his bones being snapped like dry twigs. Blood sprayed from several holes in his neck, splashing the crocodiles like warm, bloody rain. As heavy jaws fastened on either side of his face and caved his once handsome head in, Steve's last thoughts were of his sister. He hoped that she would die the same horrible death as he was.

CHAPTER 2

Rex Powers sat in the back room of the Old Head Inn in Holborn, London and listened idly to three men at the table next to him talk about pulp horror books of the seventies. The three men, two of them in their fifties and one in his thirties were gabbling on excitedly as they drank from their pints of beer and passed around several books, with covers that looked quite lurid and faintly pornographic to Rex's untrained eye. Rex had never read a book since school and had no intention of ever reading one again for as long as he lived. Muttering under his breath, he reached for his pint of Sheep Swill and took a long drink and wondered what time the buyer was going to come in.

He was vaguely irritated that Steven hadn't picked up the phone and answered him. The only phone on the farm took incoming calls only, and although it sometimes took him a while to get to answer the phone, Steven was normally pretty good on it. Rex couldn't remember if this was the day that Steven went fishing by the river or not.

One of the main rules that Rex had first impressed on his new worker was that he was never allowed into town. Of course, after Rex had decided to trust him a little bit more and let him into the running of the farm much more than he had been, the occasional day trip into town would be permitted. But at this moment, paranoia ruled Rex's every waking moment. What was happening at the farm was highly illegal, and if any news ever leaked out there would be extremely lengthy prison sentences for all involved. Not just that, if they cleared the two pools that the crocs lived in they would find the remains of at least three workers who had fallen in and had become lunch for the crocodiles.

Rex smiled grimly. Stupid Eastern Block bastards he had hired with no grasp of English, and they complained at the slightest drop of a hat. The second one he had working for him, Dmitri; well he had actually pushed him into the crocs, because he couldn't tolerate his broken English pleadings any more. Better food... English food is awful... I want to go home...

Rex thought that Steve was the most cautious man he had hired yet, and that was a good thing, it meant he would value the job and the paranoia of what could happen to him would be in his mind every time he went to the pools. Rex liked Steve, he didn't ask questions, was keen to earn as much money as he could, and was the quiet little servant monkey that Rex wished he had hired when he started the farming. He had already decided that in about a year or so if Steve did a good job, he would give him a pay rise and let him into the running of the farm more. He was sure that...

"Mr Powers," a clipped, nasal voice broke Rex from his thoughts.

"Mr Meehan," he said, getting up from the table and shaking the hand of his buyer. "You want a drink?"

"I'll have a scotch thanks. Sorry for being a bit late. My car broke down and I had to take the tube. My chauffeur is still with it waiting for the AA to come and take it away to be fixed."

Rex went to the bar and ordered two scotches. No ice. He took them back to the table where Mike had already made himself comfortable, his long, crocodile skin trench coat slung over the back of one of the empty chairs. The three pulp novel fans looked at it appreciatively then got back to their babbling.

"So how's life down on the farm? When do you think the next batch will be ready for slaughtering?" Mike asked, taking a sip of the honey coloured liquid. As it hit the back of his throat, he gasped. "My lord, that is a fine drop."

Rex studied Mike's creased and ashen face. You could tell that the man was under a lot of stress, and whatever lifestyle he led it wasn't a good one. Maybe the hunt for another buyer would be on soon; at the way that Meehan looked it would be potluck if he lasted the year. It truly looked like he was death warmed up under a winter sun.

"We have three more weeks of intensive feeding, and then we starve the buggers for a week to make their skin that little bit more loose. Then we will start the culling. That'll take about three days and then we will skin them and send them onto you for the rest of the treatment. Twelve thousand in all. Make you a lot of boots. Or coats," Rex said, nodding towards the luxurious coat.

"And at the price we agreed? There is a credit crunch going on you know."

"Yes, at the price we agreed." Actually the price was a fair one, but not up to the previous years' bounty. But he knew what the mark up was on the other end and when you went into a shop in London and bought a tiny crocodile skin wallet at £300, it almost made Rex want to open up his own boutique in the big smoke himself.

Meehan reached across and pulled his chequebook and fountain pen out of his trench coat, and opened the book up. He wrote carefully, all the while Rex sipped gently from his glass of whisky. One and a half million pounds being sent off to the foreign account in a few days, he thought to himself — the shit-eating grin that had manifested itself in his mind was spreading across his face. He checked himself when Mike looked up.

"Paydays are always fun."

"Oh yes they are," Rex said, reaching across for the slip of paper that the buyer had ripped out of his chequebook. He folded it and stuck in the inside pocket of his coat, and downed the rest of his whiskey.

"I'll phone you when the order's ready then," he said, getting up to go. The three pulp enthusiasts looked at him and he thought about telling them to shove their precious books up their arses, but said nothing and walked away from the table, leaving Meehan to look at his whisky. He thought the better of finishing it off and got up, slowly putting on his jacket. He reached into one of the pockets and brought out his iphone and called his boss and told him that the order would soon be ready.

His boss was pleased.

CHAPTER 3

Powers was on the motorway, churning up the miles to get back home. He looked at his watch. Steve should have answered by now —he had repeatedly tried to call him time and time again, but there was still no answer. Powers didn't think he had flown the coop; the promise of money was too great. Had he fallen in? Never would never happen to Steve, he was just too bloody cautious. The petrol gauge started to beep, and four miles later down the road Rex turned into one of those overpriced 'rest stops' where the sandwiches were curled up at either end and angry fathers stomped around as their upset and dispirited families trudged after them, invariably wailing at the lack of sweets they were allowed.

After filling up the tank, Rex spotted a hitchhiker standing at the start of the slip road that led back out onto the motorway. The hitcher was clean-shaven and looked okay, so Rex pulled in and offered him a lift. The traveller said that he was going to Bearsden, which was about fifty miles further on down the road. As the hitcher put his rucksack into the back of the jeep, Rex was thinking about speeding off and taking the man's bag — like he had done one time before when he was travelling from Scotch Corner to Keswick the year before on an antiques buying binge. To see that particular hitcher crumple and weep in the rear-view mirror as he sped off was truly a beautiful sight to behold. Of course when Rex finally opened the bag, there was nothing special in it and it was cordially dumped at the side of the road. But Rex felt an overwhelming urge to talk, talk about anything with anyone —so he let the hitcher get in the front of his jeep and the Welshman introduced himself as Johnny Pugh.

Eighteen miles further down the road, Johnny was slumped in the front seat, his nose crushed in where Rex has slammed his elbow into his face. Pulling off the motorway and heading into the country, Rex found a lay-by and dragged Johnny out of the front and threw him into the boot where he gave the man a couple of blows to the head with a tyre iron. Cursing, Rex pulled off his jacket and dumped it in next to Johnny as it was covered in bloody spatters. Slamming the boot down, he jumped back into the jeep and sped off, the tyres chewing up the ground, and before long Rex was back onto the motorway and heading back for home.

Several hours later, the Jeep pulled in front of the set of heavy wrought iron gates that blocked the entrance to the farm. Getting out, Rex pulled out a heavy bunch of keys and unlocked the industrial sized padlock that only he and Steve had keys to. Jumping back into the jeep, he drove through the initial courtyard and behind the first dummy set of sheds that hid swimming pool #1 and the first processing pool where the crocodiles were stunned before being slaughtered. Pulling on the handbrake, Rex jumped out the jeep and went to the back, opening up the boot, and pulled the corpse of the hitcher out and slung him over onto his shoulder. Buckling slightly due to the deceased's dead weight, he made his way carefully to the first swimming pool and rolled the body into the seething, writing mass of deadly crocodiles.

Rex had thrown three bodies in there to date. As the crocodiles shifted en masse to their opportunistic lunch, Rex caught a splash of yellow amongst the blackness of the crocodiles. It was a Wellington boot. Much like the one that Steve wore. Groaning inwardly, Rex walked to one of the small sheds and pulled out a long wooden pole with a hook on the end of it.

He didn't bother shouting Steve's name. He was most certainly in the bellies of the beasts. He pulled out the first Wellington boot, and as he grabbed it from the hook, recoiled at the revelation that the remains of Steve's foot was still in there. The Wellington itself had only been partially gnawed on; the crocodiles were just too lazy to peel the boot open to get at the admittedly less meaty part of Rex's ex-worker. Dropping the boot on the floor, Rex fished around until he had pulled out the other boot (this one more ripped and the foot was gone) and the shredded remains of a t-shirt and dungarees.

A few of the fishing trips revealed several flesh-clad bones, but Rex left them there, knowing that after the cull in the next few weeks, the pool would be cleaned out and all evidence, Steve, the hitcher and all others would get thrown into the furnace and disposed of.

Half an hour later, after Rex had washed the bloody remains of Steve and crocodile waste off of his hands, he was in Steve's room, smoking one of Steve's cigarettes. All of the workers' stuff had been gathered together and Rex had been through the room with a fine toothcomb to make sure that there was nothing that would link Steve to him. Rex felt a small flush of pride knowing that Steve hadn't been out to get him in any way shape or form; he had just been a man who was trying to get a bit of cash for himself. There had been no cameras or any recording equipment anywhere in the sparse room or the toilet. Not to say that Rex was completely gullible to think that Steve wouldn't be as stupid as to hide anything like that in the room he slept it, but experience taught Rex that you kept your tools close to you if you ever needed to get out.

As Rex left the room with all of Steve's belongings, closing the door on the memory of the man who had lived and slept there only 16 hours before, Steve's mobile phone lay nestled inside the very mattress he lay on, its memory full with images and video footage of crocodiles.

CHAPTER 4

TWO WEEKS LATER

She lay there, as she had for the last nine days, her binoculars fixed on the courtyard, looking for any sign of her brother. In her mind she had already come to the conclusion that he was dead, by what means she just did not know. In her mind, scenario after brutal scenario played on, unstoppable in its imagined carnage. She had tried to appease the guilt and pain that she felt by vowing to kill Rex Powers very slowly indeed. It had gone beyond mere exposure to the press.

Steve had been due to get in touch with her a week and a half before, and when he hadn't even so much as sent a message, Julia left the bunker that was three miles away from the Huntingdon Life Sciences research lab in Cambridgeshire, where she had been planning with other militants to do an armed raid and release as many animals as possible into the innocuous countryside, to jump into her VW camper van and drive the lonely roads to an uncertain outcome.

Julia Palmer hadn't always been an animal rights supporter; in fact, she used to almost live in Macdonald's during her student days, feasting out on double cheeseburgers and McFlurry's. It didn't do her skin or her weight any good and soon the sprightly girl blew up to epic size proportions, but that didn't really bother her — she was a loner, a person more into getting lost in the deep chapters of Lord of the Rings or Gormenghast than going out with her friends and drinking cheap snakebites at the student bar.

What was once a beautiful girl was lost amongst unstoppable flesh, and her blue crystalline eyes looked more like raisins pushed into salted dough. Then one day, she agreed to go out into the country with several other like-minded Lord of the Rings enthusiasts to do a re-enactment of Gollum betraying Frodo by leading him to the great spider Shelob in the tunnels of Cirith Ungol. While they were harping around, with Julia playing the part of Shelob because she was the biggest one there, a weird solitary scream came from the woods in the distance. The others didn't want to know and Julia struck out on her own, crossing the field until she came to the small copse of trees and what she saw would ever haunt her, but forever change the way that she lived her life.

It was a young fox, trapped in a gamekeeper's snare and it was dying the most horrible death imaginable. The unforgiving wire had cut into fur and flesh until it was no longer visible.

That primal scream had been the fox's last, only a low rasping sound came from what Julia though was a hole in the dying animal's windpipe. Injustice for this creature screamed from every beef-sweating pore of Julia's body and she vowed right then and there that for as long as she lived, she would fight for every injustice that animals were given. She left the fox for a moment, and came back with a large stone from the dyke that ran parallel to the furthest end of the copse. Crying and shaking uncontrollably, she threw the rock down and it landed on the fox's head, killing it instantly. She sat there, next to the remains until the tears had gone and a steely resolve had replaced the laughing stock she realised she had become.

Julia Palmer stopped eating meat that very day; and by the end of the week she had started to go on an intensive workout, that made her shed those embarrassing pounds in next to no time whatsoever. Back to her lithe self, she started building muscles and going to self-defence classes, where she met a girl called Samantha who showed her how to fight as dirty as possible. Samantha had been raped three years before and it had turned her into an unforgiving damage machine.

One man who had tried to chat her up in a pub one night had his eye socket fractured by one swift roundhouse kick that seemed to have come from nowhere. After one intensive night's training, Julia had told Samantha all about the fox, and how helpless it had made her feel. Staring into Julia's soft, brown eyes, the trainer was lost and she leant in and kissed her. Julia was shocked, but yet strangely reciprocal to this kiss. She grabbed Samantha and responded like she had discovered gold.

Julia and Samantha had become inseparable, and it was Sam who had first come up with the idea that if Julia was deadly serious about becoming a liberator that would be talked about for generations to come, then she should become so trained and honed to the point that she could show the SAS a trick or two. Julia dropped out of college and moved in with Samantha whose martial arts centre brought in an income that was more than enough.

The first couple of courses that Julia went on were with ex-SAS types deep in the Brecon Hills of Wales, and there she learnt the tactics of stealth, unarmed combat, and most importantly survival living. She learnt how to live with the bare minimum, eating berries and fungus.

The others scoffed at her when she said she wouldn't eat any living animal, but she kept her tongue, and her steely resolve gradually earned her the respect of soldiers who had killed many men. After the second three week intensive course, she was asked if she would like to be taught about kidnapping techniques both as a kidnapper and kidnappee and other lessons that were strictly off the books and were highly illegal. Little by little, the old Julia vanished until there stood the hardest female that ever lived on UK soil.

It was to be the first real experience as an activist. They would be breaking into the home of a scientist who had given an in-depth article to the Genetic Testing Monthly about how crucial animal experimentation was and it didn't matter how many lunatics were there out there, testing would continue up until the moment the world began to burn. Julia had been given the article cutting from some timid group whose idea of affirmative action was standing on some high street complaining about fox hunting.

Julia and Samantha had spent weeks tracking down where the scientist lived, and after they found it, spent further time canvassing the area — looking for the best roads to travel there and back from and taking photographs of the house and even going so far as getting one of the many activists to dress up as a gas technician and go and knock on the doors telling a woman who turned out to be the scientist's eighteen year old daughter that there was a reported gas leak and that the meters in the area needed to be checked.

A thick dossier of the scientist's movements had been compiled and it was decided that the 13th of July would be the night that they struck and removed the testicles of a certain George Kilpatrick and tested the fleshy lumps in a container of acid, preferably while he was watching.

What they didn't know was that in the last week since they had been monitoring him, he had received information from an informant working inside a group of activists in Kettering that certain people of a severely dubious nature had been sniffing around his house. Leaving nothing to chance, George had several small cameras inserted around the grounds of his luscious Georgian pile and had them hooked up to a couple of monitors in his office.

George had had a bad day at the office. His secretary had told him that she was pregnant with his child. He had driven back home and thought fleetingly of driving the car off the road, the sort of thing a ghost or psycho might do, but then he realised that his daughter would sell off his treasured collection of Superman comics for next to nothing and that made him clear his head and get on with things. It had been hard going for him since his wife had walked out on him three years previously and left him to look after a daughter whose idea of fun was to smoke and drink her way through high school and not give a shit if she was expelled or not.

Arriving home, he saw a note on the kitchen table from his daughter saying that she was going to be staying at Max's for the weekend (who the hell was Max?) and that he shouldn't go anywhere near her room. It had been written in the kind of scrawl that was more akin to the notes he received from the activists. Sighing, he went upstairs to his bailiwick, poured himself a rather large whisky and surfed porn on the internet.

"Are we ready?" Julia looked across at Samantha who was pulling a balaclava down over her face. They had both decided that there was no need for there to be a big group of them. They both felt that if there were bigger numbers, the more likely they were to make mistakes. The van they were in was parked a quarter of a mile away from George's house. Getting out, Julia stuck on a small backpack that contained rope, bolt cutters and a small glass jar of battery acid.

They ran at pace down the small country road, and the only lights coming from the house was one from the back of the house and one up the stairs which they surmised was the office. They crept into the driveway and long walk down to the house.

George had just come back from pouring himself another drink when the small red light on top of the monitor started to flash. It meant that something bigger than a cat was skulking about. He went to his computer and brought up the external cameras and switched them to night vision. The camera halfway down the drive picked them out, two of them moving steadily and fast — they knew what they were doing. Switching the focus to the cameras on the house he could see them approach.

He got up and went to the steel cabinet at the back of the room and unlocked it. The whisky that he had been sloshing had no effect on him whatsoever and his nerves were calm. He thought back to the days when those fucking Irish Republicans had been taking pot shots at the base at Knockmabriggan, known fondly amongst the dissenters as Snipers Alley.

They hadn't gotten him then, and they sure as fuck weren't going to get him now, whoever they may be. He opened up the metal door and pulled out a Mossberg 500 shotgun fitted with a Hushpower silencer and a handgun, which he tucked into the band of his trousers. It was highly illegal of course and had been bought many years ago in London — it couldn't be traced to anyone. He un-cocked the handgun and put two cartridges in it and made his way stealthily down the stairs in the dark.

Outside, Julia crept up to the door and reached into her pocket for the set of skeleton keys. Samantha just reached forward and tried the door, the handle clicked softly. She reached out and tapped Julia on the head. Julia shrugged, smiling underneath the thick material of the balaclava. Samantha opened up the door and swung it inwards.

CRACK!

A harsh light flared up, illuminating the twisted rictus of George who was standing in the middle of the hallway. Samantha was lifted off of her feet and was thrown back out of the door and onto the driveway. George kicked the door shut and disappeared back into the darkness of the house.

"Jul... Julia..."

Julia knelt down next to her lover. All thoughts of getting George flew out of her mind. She turned on her flashlight and shone the thin beam over Sam. She touched her partner's belly and Samantha screamed out in pain. She withdrew her hand and it was slick with blood.

"Leave... now..." she managed to gasp.

With tears streaming down her face and soaking into the thick material of the balaclava, Julia got up and went towards the door with every intention of killing the shit who would dare to shoot her Samantha. Everything she had learnt had taken over now, she was a fluid killing machine.

"If...you ever... loved me......" Samantha gasped.

Julia ran into the night, back to the van as Samantha bled out onto the soft tar macadam driveway.

Julia went deep underground in the days after the shooting. George was all over the news and he was being feted as being a hero! Samantha's face was splashed over the news saying that she was the leader of a dangerous cell of animal rights activists. That she and one other who fled had burst into George's home and that Samantha fired several shots with a handgun that was shown by the stony faced police officer who was being interviewed. George had no option but to fire first. It was also reported that he and his daughter were being held in a safe house and that their house was under 24-hour guard.

If it hadn't been for Steve, getting in touch and helping her through her loss, Julia would have ended up eating burgers until she exploded. He arrived at the bolt-hole where she had been hiding and stayed there as she went mental, wrecking the inside of the house, punching a hole in the wall, threatening him with violence. Steve took it all, saying nothing, just being there, reading a book or sitting outside, watching the laziness of the countryside pass him by.

Months passed, and Steve suffered through it all with her, only leaving her alone when he went into town to buy supplies. Cash was never a problem, Julia had three boxes crammed full of twenty and fifty pound notes in three different counties.

Slowly Julia came to, and with it came a more steely resolve to continue the work that had gotten off on such a cataclysmic footing. Yes, her love was dead, but animals were continuing to suffer and if she didn't pull her finger out, many more deaths would be on her conscience.

She got in touch tentatively with some fringe activists who told her that her name hadn't come up much during the police investigation, that she was only known as a lover of Samantha and nothing more. Feeling invisible in every sense of the word, Julia with Steve and a few others began a program of hit and runs — going to factories where chickens were squashed together and living short miserable lives only so they could squeeze out egg after egg for the big named supermarkets, and each activist armed with a cattle prod, stunning the skeleton night shift and security guards before tying them up and getting as many of those trussed up chickens as humanly possible outside before dawn broke.

Before long they had made the news in several areas, and about three weeks later, after a daring break in at an animal-testing centre in South Suffolk where only monkeys were tested on and released into the neighbouring village of Ipsham, they made the national news. A grainy snapshot of video footage was the only thing they had on Julia, and she had her balaclava pulled up over her mouth. She was beaming.

There had been many exploits, and slowly Julia Palmer was known to the police and had been arrested on many occasions for minor offences. There was a general consensus amongst the three separate taskforces who had been formed to deal with this worrying blight on the country that Julia was more prominent than her arrests for sit-ins and street protests led them to believe.

Julia had come across the first seller of the crocodile skin wear when she was out in London, for a meeting with the other big name in the activist world, Bog Magivens. He was trying to raise money and numbers for an attack at the Biomedical Sciences Centre at Oxford University. There was a sense of pre-triumphalism about the man; that this could not fail and he would be worshipped and feared the world over. Julia had decided to give measured support, she knew that Bog was not just dangerous but had a perverse nature to him that could spill out of control and potentially make any attack at Oxford a more risky one.

She had just left the loft conversion where Bog lived with his mum and three gerbils and decided to take a trip into the centre of the city, something she hadn't done for years. Walking around the narrow streets off Soho, she had stumbled across a high-end boutique that sold nothing but crocodile skin bags, shoes, belts and even jackets. Her first thought was that she should go into the shop and create hell, but something inside her told to go in, be neutral, and have a sniff around.

With her skin crawling, and her heart screaming for these poor animals that ended up as designer beautifications, she walked into the shop and was very polite to the shop assistant who was very forthcoming. Julia pretended to be a design student at the Royal College of Art and said that she wanted to use some of the stuff they were selling in the windows. Would she be able to have the number of the supplier please?

The shop assistant spoke in surprisingly hushed tones, even though there was no one else about. "The thing is see, we actually get the bags from a factory in Manchester, and I can't be one hundred per cent certain about this, but I've heard that they get the skins from a farm in Devon somewhere. Something I overheard the manageress saying on the phone once. I'm not too sure that it's entirely legal either, but I get well paid for the job, so I just put up and shut up..." The shop assistant just shrugged apologetically and Julia made her excuses and left.

It took two more years for Julia to uncover that the farm was somewhere in Cornwall, in or around the Penzance region. In those two years Julia had gotten into trouble in a big way — she had tried to kidnap a designer who loved to use fur but had been foiled when the she had totally caught her off guard and emptied a tin of pepper spray into her face.

Unbeknownst to Julia, the popular designer had been taking self defence classes for the best part of five years ever since an ex-partner had punched her in the face after being too pissed up at a party in Soho and accusing her of sleeping with his best mate at the time. Which was true, but no excuse to end up with a cracked eye socket.

Julia was sentenced to a year inside, and it was up to Steve to go from place to places spending so much time, looking for this elusive crocodile farm, all so his sister could achieve some piece of mind. And become more famous than Bog Magivens, who actually managed to kill three people during his Oxford exploits. The greatest martyr the animal rights world had ever produced. Julia had sworn to Steve that her intentions were never to end up like Bog had, doing twenty to life in jail. Steve believed her.

He idolised her, and looked up to her, and it wasn't payback for being his protector when he was small. It ran deeper.

But despite it all, Steve had found the farm and worked there for months, long, unsatisfying shifts. Unable to go into town, have a beer with other people, a prisoner in the middle of nowhere, as lonely as some sort of ghost or psycho. But he got some hard evidence. And now...

...he was dead.

Julia was sure of it.

Getting up from the nest of branches, grass and the camouflaged tarpaulin, Julia grabbed her holdall and stretched, still covered by the outline of trees that surrounded the farm and was its shelter from the outside world. She opened up her rucksack and pulled out a wickedly sharp bowie knife that she slid betwixt her belt and camos. Hitching the rucksack over her shoulder, she slowly crept down the hill towards the crocodile farm.

CHAPTER 5

Rex had decided that until the culling actually started, he wasn't going to bother with hiring anyone to do the feeding. So he moved some gear into one of the other rooms in the block where Steve once lived, though not Steve's room itself. It wasn't that he was scared that there might have been some kind of residual supernatural imprint left in the room; it was just that there were by far more superior rooms than the one that Steve had chosen for himself. Rex went about and fed the crocodiles, which were getting much bigger and more menacing-looking each day and really got into the management of the farm, even repairing some minor bumps and scrapes to the culling room that Steve hadn't managed to get around to doing in life.

Rex of course kept one eye on the news through means of the TV he brought into the farm for any mentions of Steve or the hitcher he had picked up and killed, but there was nothing, not even any mentions on the missing persons programme that he sometimes caught on BBC 1 when he came in for a spot of breakfast.

Rex finished up feeding the crocodiles in the second pool when his mobile went. His face scrunched up with distaste when the high-pitched nasal voice of Meehan made his peaceable day take a nosedive into the doldrums. Meehan, at the behest of his boss, wanted to come to the farm to see how the crocodiles were getting along. Rex stomped off away from the pool, where the crocodiles were fighting over the rancid lumps of cow meat that had come from one of the local abattoirs.

Rex nearly told Meehan to come over — his Satanic inventiveness taking hold, and for a moment he imagined himself throwing Meehan into the crocs — but instead he told him to fuck off and let him get on with his work. Hanging up the mobile, he shoved it into his pocket and decided that he would drive down to the shops to pick up some milk as he was running out.

After he had finished padlocking the gate, he drove off in a cloud of dust, not seeing Julia dash to the far wall and crouch down, lest he spotted her. Julia waited until the jeep was far off in the distance, and walked around the large perimeter of the farm, looking for a place to get in. She found it at the furthest end of the compound, where two fences, one chain link and the other a wooden fence bolted onto a nine-foot concrete pillar, were not joined together. Dumping her rucksack, she climbed up the chain link until she could get between the gap of the two fences, then swinging her body around, she jumped and landed on the ground, breaking her fall by going into a perfect roll, like she had been taught to do and had practised many times on the Breconshire hills.

She looked around for cameras, and found none; obviously Rex had thought that the farm was so out of the way that no security would ever be needed. She walked through the derelict backlot, which consisted of broken concrete paving and weeds that grew wherever it could through to the first set of stables. She tried the first door, and was surprised to find that it was open.

She entered carefully, making sure that there were no automatic sensors or anything inside that could alert her presence to Rex, even if he was miles away in his jeep. Going from room to room, she quickly surmised that it was Rex's living quarters. She went into the room and straight to the mattress, as per instructions to a text Steve had once sent to her, saying that if anything should happen to him, the mobile would be buried deep in the mattress. She carefully took off the duvet and the sheet and searched the mattress from top to toe in search of a small hole in which a phone could be inserted.

Frustratingly, she found none and spent the next five minutes making the bed, getting it right so as not to arouse suspicion when Rex came back. Julia might not be able to get the cunt on this visit, and didn't want him getting a heads up in any way shape or form that there was anyone sniffing around. She went to the next room, which was empty and she nearly left, when she spotted a Younger's Special Ale ashtray that was filled to the brim with cigarettes.

Her heart pounding hard in her chest, she walked towards it and picked one of the dead soldiers up, looking at the lettering by the filter.

JOHN PLAYERS SPECIAL

It was Steve's, the only brand she had ever known him to smoke, and she collapsed to her knees, sobs racking through her body. After a few minutes she got up and walked to the mattress. She flipped it over, and there it was, a thin tear, three inches long. She slid her fingers in, rooting through the dense horsehair, and then the tips felt the cold smoothness of the phone. Forcing her hand in further, ripping the fabric of the mattress, she grabbed the phone and pulled it out, bringing some debris with her.

She opened up the phone and turned it on and was relieved when the screen flared to life. While waiting for the phone to ready itself, she put her hand back into the bed and brought out the charger. Accessing the gallery, she looked silently at the clips of Steve talking into the camera before pointing the phone at what looked like a massive swimming pool. The amount of crocodiles in there looked truly frightening. She attached one of the video clips to a text and tried to send it to one of the many mobile phones that she had in a lock box, cursing as she realised that the phone was out of range.

"Bloody 02," she thought to herself as she closed up the mobile and popped it into her pocket. She sorted the mattress back out, took one last look at the ashtray and left the room and the buildings.

The bright sunlight dazzled her for a second, and then it hit her, a sweet decaying smell wafting towards her on the breeze, making her retch. She had smelt many bad things, mainly neglect during the course of her endeavours, but this was like the very bowels of hell had puked up all over the farm. She walked towards the first pool and the noise of the crocodiles was like the chattering of lost souls. She stopped two metres away and just stared, almost unable to take in the sight that confronted her.

She walked around the circumference of the pool, and noticed a round gate at the deep end of the pool and a tunnel that led off beyond. She walked in the direction to where the tunnel led and found herself at another set of sheds. These in turn led to a large open warehouse space where the tunnel ended up and a deep trough which was big enough for one crocodile to be pinned down and... killed.

Julia gasped when she realised that she was in the slaughterhouse. She looked around, there were two steel double doors wide open and at the farthest end of the hall there was a glass booth. She walked slowly, looking down at the dark stains on the concreted floor and the pulley system with rusted meathooks that swung lazily as the wind whipped through the warehouse.

Rex left the small supermarket when his phone went off. He answered it and laughed when he heard the voice of his supplier of the crocodiles, Ramesh Patel on the other end.

"Ramesh, my good man! How are things doing?"

The line crackled, and then the sound of his friend's voice came in loud and clear. "Rex! How is the upcoming cull finding you?"

"Very well, good to go in the next week or so. Will be starving the crocodiles as of tomorrow. What's with the surprise phone call?"

Ramesh's next words were slow and considered.

"When you start the cull, you have to be very careful. The crocodiles are showing a more superior strength than before. I've only found out from my supplier that the chemicals they were injected with to make the crocodiles bulk up and make their skin suppler had been altered..."

"What? What the fuck are you on about Ramesh?"

"Well as you know, and have known since the start, we give all of the crocodiles this concoction of stuff so your finished product is in no way diminished. We were given a new batch of stuff to give the crocodiles and I've had reports from several clients that when they started their culls the crocodiles have shown reactions of a sort that shouldn't happen when they have had their final meal drugged to get them dopey enough. All I am saying is that somehow, a few workers have been killed. You know yourself how slow these animals are. There is a school of thought that says the concoction is overriding the sleeping pills and making the crocodiles stronger."

Rex thought for a moment. Had the crocodiles looked different this time round? Had they looked like ghosts or psychos? He was certainly thrilled by the way the way they looked; they had bulked up quicker than other years. Rex had put that down to Steve's good management and regular feeding patterns. Rex would err on the side of caution and up the dosage of the last meal, but not by too much as it would be a chore getting the crocodiles through the tunnel and to the slaughterhouse.

"Okay, my man — I'll take some precautions and if the worst comes to the worst, I'll shoot the fucking crocodiles in the head as soon as they come through. Might mean that the skull collectors will have to do without this year. Shouldn't be a biggie. Okay, that everything? Thanks for letting me know Ramesh. See you later."

With that, Rex pocketed the phone and pondered for a second. Maybe he would just have to hire a few more people just in case. Rex grinned and jumped into the jeep and sped off, back to the farm.

Julia looked at the panel in front of her. The layout was easy enough to understand, there were a few buttons relating to each gate in the pool and the one gate that led into the slaughter room. She sat on the chair and rolled up a cigarette, unmindful of any after smell that might have been left. She thought about her brother and the fact that he was probably in the stomachs of several of the crocodiles.

She pressed the buttons that opened up all gates to the pools and as she lit the cigarette, she heard the crunching of tyres pull up at the gate. She smiled, took a last drag of the smoke, and flicked it onto a stack of newspapers that lay in the corner of the room. She went out into the courtyard to meet Rex Powers.

Rex opened the gate and was about to get back into the Jeep and drive it into the courtyard when he saw the filthy looking girl with long hair step into his field of vision.

"Who the fuck are you?" he shouted angrily, stomping towards her. He stopped dead when she held up a mobile phone, appearing to be filming him.

"I am Steve's sister!" she near screamed, her voice taking a slight hysterical edge. Rex's mind turned into a calm pool and he knew that the crazy bitch would fuck up, and he would drag her through to the first pool by the hair and throw her in.

"Steve who?" he grinned, taking a slow, deliberate step towards her.

"He hid this mobile from you. He filmed the crocodiles on it. You're finished!" She put the phone back in her pocket, and Rex went for her, only knowing that it needed five steps to reach her and cave her head in, there was no way she could stop him...

Julia stomped the heel of her army boot on the ground and a three-inch blade shot out the front of her boot. As Rex was two steps away, she spun and kicked him to the belly, opening up layers of clothing and flesh, enough to rid him of his intestines. He screamed, trying to push the slimy coils back into his stomach. Steel certainly did rend skin!

Julia walked away from Rex as he fell onto his knees, screaming like a baby or perhaps like a ghost or some sort of psycho, then he collapsed onto his side, waves of seeping blackness washing over him.

She ran to Rex's Jeep, and knelt down, taking out a screwdriver and proceeding to take off the driver's plates. She then left the farm, and walked round the perimeter until she came to her rucksack. Going back to the jeep, she pulled out a fake set of number plates that came from a stolen car up in Aberdeen. She attached them and then jumped in and started it, relieved that she wouldn't have to go to his body and fish for keys.

She pulled out onto the lane and before long she was joining the road and the traffic that took her back to London. Squirming in the seat, she pulled out the mobile phone from her tight trousers.

She turned the mobile on, keeping one eye on the road and the other on the screen that was slowly coming to life. She saw herself looking at a photo of herself and Steve at a pub in Shipton, which was taken by some punter a couple of years before.

Trying not to let the emotions of the day overwhelm her, she accessed the video gallery and brought up the first short film. Steve's face filled the screen and he said something, but there was no sound on the clip. Then the mobile was focused on the larger of the two pools and on those deadly killing machines. She stopped the recording, and set up a message to send it to her friend that worked for The Daily Telegraph.

She was about to hit send, then noticed with a huff that there was no signal and probably wouldn't be until she left the valley. She put the phone on the passenger seat next to her and put her foot down on the accelerator.

She went to overtake a lorry, and as she did so, the lorry also pulled out, driven by a Portuguese fellow by the name of Olaf Minnies who was also overtaking an old man who was doing fifty miles an hour in a Metro City X. The lorry slammed into the side of the Jeep, flipping the machine over.

Julia didn't even have time to scream. As soon as the roof of the jeep hit the hard tarmac, it crumpled, killing the girl instantly. The jeep went over again, over the safety barrier that separated both sides of the dual carriageway, where it was hit head on by a family of three that was coming back from a two-week holiday in the Norfolk Broads.

All aboard were killed apart from the family dog.

The phone, containing those images of Steve with the crocodiles, which were by now leaving the farm pools and going deep into the countryside, had been flung out of the open window on the first bounce and was damaged beyond repair, meeting its fate under the wheels of the dual carriageway's incessant traffic.

CHAPTER 6

Samantha Blacklock was pissed off. She should be on holiday with her now ex-boyfriend, by a pool and doing nothing but drinking sangria and having lots of sex, and now here she was driving a minibus full of handicapped children for a day out in the countryside.

She looked in the rear-view mirror at the dribbling, screaming, idiotic fucking children. Her three colleagues were all ignoring the kids; ipods plugged into their ears and turned up to the max.

She was sure that Ivor had been the one. After having experienced heartache so many times, Samantha thought she had found the man who could rebuild her shattered love life and make her happy and give her the marriage and children she so desperately yearned for. They had met through friends and when she first saw him, all five foot eleven of him, black hair and blue eyes that made you want to dive in and look for pearls, she was instantly smitten.

Ivor came from Transylvania and had his own business renovating and developing nightclubs. Samantha had given Ivor the goods that very night, something that she had sworn she would never do again, but the thought of him taking her was just too good to pass up. And when it came, and when he finally came, she was glad that the champagne and his horniness gave her the best orgasm of her life.

Samantha looked up ahead, as the traffic started to slow down. An accident by the looks of it, a really bad one. She indicated to the left and pulled into the slowest lane. The traffic crawled along. She could see the twisted carnage of a couple of vehicles on the other side of the road and a jack-knifed lorry on her side. The police were swarming everywhere, directing the traffic around the lorry. Pulled up next to the lorry was a small, metallic blue Mini Metro. An elderly gentleman with a bemused look on his face was giving a statement to a rather stern looking policeman.

He looked like he'd seen a ghost. Or a psycho.

The next exit was hers anyway, so Samantha stayed on the crawler lane as the traffic opened up once more.

Samantha never thought that trouble would have come in the form of her sister Tabitha, whose return from a gap year in Africa helping the local church's missionary work was celebrated by a large party. Everyone was invited and Tabitha didn't seem that taken with Ivan whatsoever when they first met.

The night got more and more drunken, with more and more people turning up. Ivor said he was going to go for a drink and while Samantha was chatting to her second cousin Nora, she realised that he hadn't returned and had probably been caught by one of the elderly aunts. She was also bursting for a pee, so she went to the toilet, opened the door and saw Ivor taking Tabitha, bent over the toilet, both hands gripped to the side of the bowl, up the jeer, like the dirty trampish whore that she was.

The party finished pretty quickly after that and both girls ended up in hospital after having a very public display of kicking the absolute shit out of each other. Three days after that, Tabitha went back abroad, cast out from the family and Samantha texted Ivan telling him that it was over and then busied herself in her work as head carer at the Shepton Care Home for the Disabled at Inglebury.

Of Ivan, the last that was heard of him was that he finished his last job, a nightclub six miles away from Inglebury, and fled with his tail between his legs back to the land of the undead.

Samantha indicated left, and pulled off the road and followed the slip road up to the crossing. There, she turned left and headed towards the signs that said CLEYBURN RIVER WALKS, an award winning site that was known for its excellent disabled facilities and the reason why they had come out on this field trip in the first place. It was just another distraction from the absolute balls up that was her life.

Five miles further and the mini-bus arrived at its destination. The Cleyburn Outdoor centre was a massive sprawling outdoors educational facility that was originally opened up in the early 80's to cater to the Blue Peter generation of children who were interested in the creepy crawlies that festooned and wriggled at the bottom of gardens. It garnered minimal attention until the owner, a jobsworth to the core called Kevin Bailes, hit upon the idea of getting as many grants as humanly possible to turn it into a place that could cater for the disabled. With the burgeoning Lottery Fund eager to be seen as a viable and socially aware organisation, the Cleyburn Outdoor Centre was one of the first to benefit, being given a grant of £2.5 million to radically redevelop the place and turn it into something that would give everyone who visited it the best customer experience of wildlife in the UK.

Awards were handed out left right and centre and before long Kevin and others on the board were sentenced to jail for skimming cash off the top and keeping it for themselves. The Government stepped in and seized control of the centre before selling it off to the National Trust for an undisclosed sum.

After grinding to a halt on the smooth driveway, Samantha got out, as did her other colleagues, who were packing away their ipods and mobiles into the deep recesses of their bags.

She walked towards the reception area of the centre and was met by Nelly, a kindly lady from Jamaica who was going to be their tour guide for the day. She came out to meet all of the kids, ten in total, and she told the carers what they would be doing for the first part of the day before lunch. Food was catered for by the centre and was totalled for in the final bill.

After they had managed to get all the kids ready, they slowly made their way down into the luscious countryside. All of the paths were smooth tarmac and zigzagged comfortably down the steep hills; so on the way back up normally it wasn't too much of a struggle for people pushing the wheelchairs. Soon the path met the river, and Nelly told the group about the wildlife that could be found there and about all of the fish that swam in the water.

They followed the river for about a mile until they came to a small clearing that hadn't been tarmacked but it was still pretty accessible. The group stopped there and would spend half an hour by the river, just taking the place in and letting Mother Nature do her work.

It wasn't having a calming effect on Samantha, who was seriously thinking about jacking her job in and spending the next ten years of her life sitting on the couch and watching the Jeremy Kyle Chav Show. As she was wiping the face of Angela, one of the three who were in wheelchairs, a single tear escaped from her eye and slid down her cheek.

She tried to wipe it away, but Nelly smiled and came towards her, whispering, conspirator-like so the other carers who were at the other end of the clearing couldn't see or hear.

"What's wrong child?" Nelly asked, putting a comforting hand on the other woman's arm. Samantha sniffed deeply, and then gave a rueful grin. With those green eyes, it was almost as if Nelly could see into her soul.

"Men, what else?" she said looking over at Toby Douglas, the Downs Syndrome child who had broken away from the group and was splashing his hand into the water. "Toby, you be careful now, okay?"

Toby glanced up and smiled sloppily.

The crocodile came out of the water and crunched down on the young lad's arm. A look of utter incomprehension flashed across his face. Samantha screamed as the reptile dragged Toby into the water. Everyone stopped and started at the scene, it was unfolding out like some 80's B-horror carnage film. Toby burst free of the water, a deep gash running down his throat where a sharp tooth had shredded the skin like paper.

He tried to make some noise but he was rendered silent as he was pulled with almost unnatural force back into the water that was rapidly turning red. Samantha ran to where Toby last was and waded into the water, unmindful of the danger she was in. The other carers were frantically trying to get the other children together to get them into the minibus.

The crocodiles slithered from their hiding places within the short bushes and trees and with a speed that took everyone by surprise, they attacked. Samantha heard terrible screams to her right and she turned her head and saw that there were about twenty crocodiles snapping and tearing into the group, the hysterical children unable to defend themselves from the prehistoric hunters.

A few of the carers, mainly Carol and Sheena were bravely trying to fight them off but were soon brought down, with Sheena's face being caved in with one bite of a crocodile's jaws. Samantha turned to wade back out of the water, when she heard Nelly scream to her to get out, to get the fuck out...

A solitary tooth tore through her calf muscle as easy as a knife through butter. She fell to her knees, trying to punch the immovable force that had attached itself to her. Then another crocodile slammed into her side at speed and the air was torn from her.

Samantha's death was by no means quick and there were no survivors. All of the children were uncomprehendingly ripped to pieces. Toby's half eaten body slowly drifted down the river. Nelly lay on her back by the minibus, her face unrecognisable, her hands fastened together as if in prayer.

As silent as ghosts, the crocodiles disappeared back into the undergrowth like psychos, joining the masses that were slowly making their way into the depths of the valley.

CHAPTER 7

Jack Pembroke was sitting in the kitchen, drinking whisky from a filthy pint glass and smoking one Blue Orange after another. His wife was upstairs in the bedroom, like she had been for the past four years. She wasn't expected to come back down again. Her self-imposed prison sentence wasn't one that she was going to break for man nor beast.

At forty-three, Jack was slowly killing himself. He could easily take a gun to his head and pull the trigger; he had a small arsenal of arms in the cellar which was only accessible by lifting the rug up in his office, removing the floorboards and unlocking the catch, but he chose the drinking-himself-to-death way, so he could bear witness to the journey.

He was always one for the journey. The journey was the only thing that mattered any more, he had to bear witness to his complete and utter disintegration, and at the last moment when he realised what a truly worthless piece of cretinous shite he had become would he accept that the journey had been worth it and that he was now at its end and he could give up and die in a puddle of his own piss and shit, alone in a cockroach-infested hellhole, hopefully not being found for a week, and in that time his skin would have taken on the consistency of wet wallpaper sliding off the wall.

Until that time, it was time for another drink. He downed the last of the whisky and got up, the chair falling back onto the stone floor with a dry clatter and he weaved his way to the dresser and grabbed the bottle and lifted it only for it to slide from his hands and shatter on the flagstones. He stared dumbly at the mess as the biting liquid pooled on the filling between the stones. He thought that he really should go down on his knees and start licking but the thought of ripping his tongue to shreds on all of that broken glass put him off. Just.

Grabbing his jacket from the back of the chair that had fallen, he stomped out of the kitchen, slamming the back door behind him, and set off up the hill to the local supermarket to get himself two bottles of whisky.

Mavis Pembroke heard the door slam and tutted to herself, then looked back at the camera that was set up at the far end of the room. She smiled at it, the smile not reaching her deep brown eyes, and waved to whoever was watching her on their computer screens. She felt around on the bed beside her, and pulled up a twelve inch black dildo, and started sucking on it.

As a way to make money, it was a pretty easy and very lucrative one. It's not as if she could leave the house anyway. When Jack and Mavis had first met, Mavis had been a sliver of a girl and very pretty to boot. To anyone who would have passed them on the street, the thought that Jack had gotten extremely lucky would have been on the forefront of their minds.

Jack was extremely pock-faced, with deep pits and craters most prominent on his cheeks; and they slowly got deeper the older he became. But when they first met they were seventeen and the facial blight that was to turn his face into a map of the Sea of Tranquillity was many years off.

Jack had been fighting, some lads from the neighbouring town had cruised through and had parked up by the back of the Co-op, smoking doobies and listening to Led Zeppelin. They had been warned time and time again not to bother coming into town to listen to that kind of music, especially the underrated Houses of the Holy, and that one day they would most certainly get theirs. But these threats were empty ones, with everyone in Jack's gang (seven in all) either not being around when they came in town or just not having the mettle to take them on once and for all.

But this time they were all sitting under the shade of the bus shelter when they saw the car, a Triumph, go past and pull into the car park. Jack glanced at his mates in amazement and the reciprocal eye contact said it all — they were gonna fuck some young bucks up from Bucksdale.

Jack planned a pronged attack with each of the kids wielding heavy stones. The smallest of the group, Smithy, was to go up behind the car and shove a wad of newspapers up the exhaust pipe, which he did admirably, sneaking his way there, listening to the giggles of the pot heads and their horrendous rendition of 'Dancing Days.'

The first stone was thrown by Jack, punching through the window and catching the nineteen year old Jim Hurt on the shoulder, making his surname count for something! Then the other stones came in quick succession, the shattering of glass ringing in the still air.

The car started and tore out of the car park, but then it began to stutter, spurt and finally stop. The lads got out of the car. There were four of them. The biggest one of the group, John Perlman, had a deep gash that ran across his forehead where he had been struck by a virulent slice of glass. He did not look happy. Then another stone sailed out of the black night and smacked him squarely between the eyes, knocking him out and giving him a sore head for the next eighteen weeks or so.

As quickly as it had started, it was over with — the group of lads dispersed into the welcoming shadows of alleyways and concrete flats. Jack walked along the river before cutting up the bank and came out by the Portman's Call, one of the most notorious pubs in the area, rife for its under aged drinking and occasional stabbing...

(The manuscript ends at this point; if you feel you want to continue writing the story yourself, Lamblake Heinz says he doesn't mind.)

THE NEFARIOUS MATTER OF SMELLING DARKLY

(One Day in the Life of an Award-Winning Horror Author)

Tom was a man who knew that not all things were what they seemed. Ever since early childhood Tom had been cursed with the Second Sight of Simile and Metaphor. This terrible mental affliction allowed him to embellish where other writers feared to tread. Where some of the more competent wordsmiths in the genre might gently wring out small amounts of imagery from their everyday environment, Tom would artfully render even the most innocuous of objects overpoweringly evil.

It was this curse that Tom regarded as his muse and later he would reuse its revelations as fuel for the inner monologues of his most depressingly, fatalistic characters. He'd even thought of writing a story about this called: One Day in the Life of an Award-Winning Horror Author. But as yet, he had not decided upon the required amount of wordplay or metaphor.

It was any wonder Tom could get to sleep at night, lest his pillowcase smother him with its soft, undulating but ever so insidious fabric-softened breath. The world was a minefield of metaphor and simile, alive with threats and dark possibilities. But being an award-winning horror writer, he could ill afford not to cast his deeply sensitive eyes upon the wealth of material lying all around him. It was his duty. But also a curse, he reminded himself, as he would often keep reminding his readers, like you just now.

Today, for instance, as he proudly stood in his large manicured garden, desperately trying to admire the sheer beauty of the topiary (his award-winning books had paid for this recently landscaped sculpted greenery), but over which he was unfortunately drawn to the amorphous heap of matter stinking and broiling in the midday sun. Mrs. Torrance's compost heap.

His elderly next-door neighbour saw nothing at all demonic or supernatural about the evil-smelling rotting mound that had sat at the foot of her back garden for these past three months. But, Tom, who, luckily for all concerned, happened to be an award-winning horror author of impeccable and well-honed perception, knew almost without looking that the compost heap represented something far more ominous.

He knew instinctively what his horror writer's mind's eye was showing him, that the compost heap was not manageable with the prerequisite chemicals and that without the proper analysis from the point of view of an award-winning horror writer, it might mutate into something vaguely supernatural, but somehow psychologically confusing (as often happened to many of the characters in his award-winning short stories).

Tom walked back into his stately property and through the eldritch landscape of furniture threatening his mental collapse (it was a daily hassle and therefore one he was quite used to), the curtains in the lounge windows hanging like great flaps of human skin. He walked down the oppressively shadowed corridor (he wasn't entirely sure one could describe a corridor as 'oppressively shadowed', but being an award-winning horror author he was exempt the usual restrictions of prose writing and quite free to experiment... and he liked using the word 'oppressive' and planned on using it at least seventy-three times more during the writing of his next short story) to the front door.

Here he felt annoyed at his lack of metaphor or simile for opening the front door, for if ever one was needed to convey the vast awfulness of such a calamitous act, then now was that moment!

Within seconds he was knocking on Mrs. Torrance's door, the sound echoing through the vast cavernous interior (in fact this was a slight exaggeration on his behalf since she lived in a two-bedroom bungalow and there was only so much he was prepared to do in the name of artistic license).

Mrs. Torrance answered, her red bulbous nose pulsating like the pregnant sac of some sightless creature uncovered living deep within the earth, and smiled. But, and thankfully, as Tom was an award-winning horror author with a huge fan base of adoring horror authors, each of whom he personally patronised in his quest to rid horror fiction of opposing authors with a penchant for monster crabs and explicit Fangoria style gore, the smile was not pleasant or welcoming, but odiously inclined into fooling him.

The musty graveyard smell of her cluttered bungalow wafted out on a tide of sickly perfume (again he briefly questioned whether 'sickly' was an adequate adverb in conjunction with a noun like 'perfume'), and like any number of the characters in any number of the award-winning short stories he had written (he also had written many award-winning novels just in case you didn't know), he knowingly stepped into a house he was silently equating to that of a enormous gaping mouth.

But it was okay, he was an award-winning horror writer and his curse of Second Sight of Simile and Metaphor meant he would see any imminent threat much more quickly than any ordinary non-writing, non-award winning horror writer.

In books or stories hoping to achieve a sense of realism, despite the absurdity of the genre, a conversation might ensue now with both Tom and Mrs. Torrance. It would seem the right thing to do. But Tom was an award-winning horror author, and he merely (and ever so slowly, too slowly if we're being honest, in fact so slowly did he pass through the house that any normal person would have suspected he was sizing them up for future burglary) walked through the house seeing the paltry pretence of Mrs. Torrance's possessions.

They were not objects, no, not the way you or I might recognise them. They were ambiguous, casting ambiguous shadows, whose ambiguous transformations might range from outright terrifying to deeply, but unfathomably unsettling, even sinister.

Cleverly, Tom danced out into the garden (Tom was conscious that he had overdone it on the adverb front and though he often referred to Stephen Kong's On Writing to make him into a better writer, though he would never mention this on public message forums or in interviews with obscure publications, he could no longer think of appropriate words for walking, and decided that both dancing and cleverly were apt collocations), forcing Mrs. Torrance to follow him out into the blistering sunlight, which he was sure would unmask her true eldritch countenance beneath.

Amazingly, she did not melt or shrink or react, but Tom was wise to her game and firmly stood his unshakeable ground. (Is ground unshakeable? he questioned. Ah, he was an award-winning horror author, his constructions were magical combinations, the equivalent of those written by mad Russian writers only admired outside of their own country).

"Mrs. Torrance, we shall now engage in mystifying dialogue that will cause the reader to keep going back over my expertly, but densely-packed serpentine sentences in order to identify who is currently speaking."

Mrs. Torrance resembled a toad in human form, her eyes bulging like sacs (he stopped himself from repeating his earlier use of metaphor, or was it simile, he was always confusing the two), her lips scabrous and flaking like a thing that was scabrous and flaking... some creature masquerading as a nice elderly lady.

"And I shall use a variety of idiomatic language structures, old-fashioned colloquial expressions and other seldom-heard entreaties to a language long since buried in dusty black magic books... eh, eh... hmmm."

Tom circled Mrs. Torrance without attracting her suspicion and leapt towards the compost heap like a ghost... or psycho!

"This Shoggoth Ub Dub, rub a dub!" He thrust one hand into the dark windy recesses of his Levi jeans, his hands sinking past the soft mounds of lint which felt like a pocketful of butterfly wings, and grasped the ancient almanac of Ye Runic Black Arts Magic Handbook For Award-Winning Horror Authors, and thrust it into Mrs. Torrance's non-award-winning face.

Mrs. Torrance snarled her snarl and with one claw like appendage (she had cosmic arthritis) she pushed him into the compost heap.

Tom went flailing (people often flailed in horror literature and even though he was an award-winning horror writer, he also thought it best to keep his hand in with his less literate readers and use bog standard verb phrases), tumbling into the compost heap, its shapeless, formless, nebulous, all-encompassing mass submerging him in its sickening and rotting odour.

"What's with you, been out in the sun too long, as ye?" asked Mrs. Torrance, her deeply unconvincing attempts at strong regional identity through incorrect grammar use and poor pronunciation, sending shock waves of audio pain through the ringing prison of his skull. "It's just compost, ye daft bugger."

But Tom was sinking, drowning in the realisation that the compost heap was alive, burgeoning with alien intelligence, that it had lived eons or even aeons, that it had swallowed whole worlds, that it was becoming... him!

When he finished flailing, he excused himself and left by the back gate.

NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, a leading criminologist began superimposing photographs of condemned criminals. The idea was to synthesise the features of the archetypal murderer. Unfortunately, the face that emerged was rather sad and wholly unremarkable. The experiment was not deemed a success. And yet...

I admit it, the face was mine.

You could, conceivably, put this down to coincidence. I prefer to think that there is more to it. Fate, I believe, has singled me out. My work is important not only to myself, but also vital to some mysterious principle of the universe. Is this shirking responsibility for my actions? Probably. Do I care? Not at all.

Besides, questions of morality are of little interest here. I have already spent too much time discussing them in the work that passes as a front for my true activities. No doubt, you are more eager to learn the details of my real work. This is perfectly understandable.

Let me tell you.

The nineteenth century is one of my favourites. I spend more time there than in any other. I am attracted, for one thing, by the poverty and disease. I have always been attracted by poverty and disease. The country in which I was born remains one of the poorest in Europe. I have spent much of my life in a country even poorer. Poverty and disease are my friends. They comfort me in times of doubt.

But this is not all. Another attraction the nineteenth century holds for me is its hypocrisy. This is a brand of hypocrisy you can roll on your tongue like honey. It is everywhere, a tangible force, a noxious mist. Nowhere else is the face of humanity trampled by boots that are so shiny. The sexual repression that fits in with this hypocrisy, like a hand into a glove, or syphilitic penis into pre-pubescent vagina, is also to my taste.

Holy sacrilege, lust, the smell of blood...

In such an environment, I can operate with impunity. I can walk the streets of a city, nodding and smiling at all those who happen to catch my eye. And then later, shrouded by the smogs and the night, I can butcher them with my sharp, little knife, dismember their worthless corpses in a thousand different ways. And I am above suspicion. No one ever thinks to point the finger at me. How could they? I am immune.

Yes, I am immune, tortured and torturer, as gracious and lethal as a bolt of lightning, infinitely desirable, an angel of death, a creature of light and darkness. I am all these things and more.

But who, exactly, am I?

In my own way, I am quite a renowned figure. My name is synonymous with suffering, though it is not generally considered that I enjoy agony for its own sake. Indeed, the very opposite is the case. I am praised as a gentle soul.

For a long time, I was troubled by peculiar visions. I felt that these visions were not divine, however, but had deliberately been placed in my mind by a human agency. Tendrils probing the corners of my brain. I saw the future stretching before me, uncoiling away towards the horizon.

These visions were, without exception, horrifying. I saw a world in which a single global government (a rigid Catholic dictatorship, I might add) presided over a mass of howling, bleeding, starving humanity.

I saw crumbling ant-heap tenements stuffed full with people; whole families living in tiny rooms or on the flights of stairs between the packed levels; beggars choking the gutters. A rash of faces that had nowhere to fester. A swaying huddled ocean of sweating, gasping, parasitic lepers. A world without a single empty space.

I saw blind children wailing down the cramped passageways of underground warrens, men and women squirming against each other like snakes; biting each other like mindless vermin; twisting in endless spirals to escape their fate. But there was no escape.

The whole earth was decrepit and rotten, riddled with holes. People lived and died in these holes, far beneath the surface of the planet, like maggots in an apple. And all the while, these pitiful creatures were eating and defecating each other and themselves, seeking the only source of nourishment that was available, whetting their appetites on the warts and streaming sores of their diseased fellows.

Luckily, I realised that these visions were more than just a warning. They were a plea for help. It was obvious to me that they indicated a failure on the part of present world governments to check the growth of their populations. Some might say they were simply nightmares, that my imagination had been adversely affected by the sufferings and deprivations of those with whom I had to share my life. But I did not wish to take that chance.

Yet what could I do? How could I change the course of events? I was a mere individual, more influential than most, it is true, but still not capable of effecting a worldwide change of such magnitude. Many others had voiced their concern over the population problem. I would simply be adding my voice to theirs. Besides, as a committed Catholic myself, how could I begin to condone the implementation of birth-control methods? And this was the only technique that then presented itself as a viable solution to the impending crisis.

I was in a dilemma.

The time machine solved that.

The time machine appeared to me, one evening, when I was kneeling in my room. I was masturbating furiously over my favourite sadistic fantasy when it materialised out of thin air and dropped to the floor. This seemed like the miracle I had been waiting for. An answer to my prayers.

I guessed that the device, when I had finally worked out what it was, had been intended for my sole use. I had no doubt that my visions of the future had been specifically transmitted to me from that future and that the time machine was a tool by which I could alter it.

It had occurred to me that to avert the catastrophe I had foreseen, murder was another option. By reducing the population a little now, a considerable reduction would take place in ages to come. The victim of a murder does not usually have the ability, or inclination, to engender any more descendants.

Yet it would take a lot of killing to make a sizeable impression. And naturally, I would not have the opportunity for such killing. However, with the time machine at my disposal, I could venture into the past, choose my victims there and return to safety in my present.

By returning a split second after I had left, I could continue my normal existence with all innocence. I could disappear and reappear in the wink of an eye, and yet in that wink I would have had the time to commit numberless killings.

And this is what I did. Whether you believe that I acted out of idealism or not is irrelevant. I would have acted thus even without a motive. Perhaps this is why I was chosen. Perhaps my nameless benefactors had somehow looked into the depths of my soul at the latent monster that lurked there.

Children love me. I find this useful.

My first killing was nearly a disaster. I was not very ambitious. I travelled back half an hour to kill a beggar I had chosen at random. I used my little knife with more enthusiasm than skill, and utterly failed to sever an artery. He hobbled away, bleeding profusely from a dozen minor wounds, but with a speed that was astonishing.

I knew fear then. If he managed to escape me, my reputation would be ruined. I would have no secure base from which to operate. I rushed after him, but saw that pursuit was useless: a group of people were approaching and it was obvious that he would reach them before I could finish him off. I began to feel panic.

Fortunately, I remembered the paradoxes of time travel, the endless possibilities. I returned to my machine, slipped back to a point just before the attempted killing and took a more calculated approach. My final thrust caught him in the throat. He fell to the floor and started to gurgle. Now I could take my time with the little cuts. I sought out all his vitals and laid them out beside him. He flopped around in his own blood like a fish. As an afterthought, I removed his skin, his eyes, his remaining teeth.

Back in the present, I sat and mulled over this consummation. I had learned a lot from the experience. I would have to be careful not to stain my clothes. I would have to check my fevered desires in favour of a cold, dispassionate savagery. More importantly, I would have to travel further back, perhaps hundreds of years, to preserve my anonymity.

I would also have to operate in different countries. The machine was not capable of spatial travel, and this was a nuisance, but as I said earlier, I had eternity to play with. I could travel the whole globe on foot if I really wanted to and still return to my original starting point in time. I would not even age in the past as normal. But that is another story. My features have always been too weathered to betray any lines that might come with maturity; a desiccated mummy pickled in vinegar. There is both a joke and a clue in that.

I killed a great many in my own country first, however, as an experiment. I desperately wanted to return to the present and see a face I had known for years, one of those wretches who was constantly around me, disappear because the idiot had never been born in the first place. I finally achieved this when I killed the great-grandmother of one of my lepers. Pure chance, I guess, but it was what I had needed to set me totally free.

I was unleashed.

My debaucheries soon knew no limit. I sliced and hacked my way across Asia and into Europe. High in the Caucasus, I forced a peasant girl with my knife; when her private opening had been gouged large enough, I reached in and pulled out her intestines like a magician extracting surprises from a bottomless hat. In Romania, I adopted a disguise and usurped the throne of the ruler. In his name, I slaughtered Turks by the thousands. I became known as Vlad the Impaler.

Further west, in Hungary, a century later, I bathed in the blood of young girls, bit chunks of flesh from their necks and breasts and had Gypsies sewn into the stomachs of horses. Thus was the legend of the Blood Countess, Erzsebet Bathori, thrust upon an unsuspecting world. And the fools thought that it was the blood that kept me young...

Yet the oddest of my impersonations took place in England. This was during my beloved Victorian Age. I was skulking through the East End of London when I chanced upon a tall, pale man, a physician by his general appearance. I slashed his throat easily enough and cut off his nose. But as the pool of his blood spread outwards on the ground, rivulets trickling between the cobbles, I realised that I had made my first mistake.

Usually, gazing into the crimson depths of such pools, I was greeted by an encouraging sight. Reflected in the blood, as if in a mirror, my earlier visions would return to me. I would glimpse the future again, the myriad faces, as innumerable and lonely as the stars, staring back at me. After each murder, there seemed to be less of them, and the expressions of those who remained were always full of gratitude.

This time, however, the faces were angry. I was being rebuked for a failure. It was obvious that I had just killed a man who was a murderer himself and thus deprived him of future victims. My casual method of selecting my prey had not produced the desired results on this occasion.

To redeem myself, I committed a series of murders with a pattern. I chose only prostitutes as my victims and wrote a cryptic letter to the police. I like to think that this is what the pale physician would have done had I let him live. It was my way of paying tribute to him, a kindred spirit.

And so, earning the forgiveness of my unborn mentors, I continued onwards, carving my way to all corners of society. I began to seek a more magnificent spectacle. I began to seek subtlety.

These subtleties manifested themselves in a careful study of cause and effect. I returned to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for a while. I encouraged an obscure little cleric called Martin Luther to stir up trouble. This eventually led to the breaking of the Catholic hold on Europe and reduced the chances of a Catholic world government ever coming into power.

In 1914, I persuaded a young Serbian nationalist to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. The war that followed was the magnificent spectacle I had been yearning for. The flower of an entire generation was crushed in the mud of the Western Front.

Not content with this, I helped to start another war twenty-five years later. The memory of Dresden is still with me: the scent of charred flesh fills my flaring nostrils. And this was but one incident among many. I decided to go even further.

Accordingly, I took a trip to 1962 and provoked a crisis in Cuba. With two belligerent superpowers poised on the brink of nuclear conflict, I felt that my career had finally reached its zenith. The carnage would be unimaginable even to one as depraved as myself. I was in a permanent state of sexual arousal as I manipulated the strings that would drag the crisis over the edge.

You cannot comprehend the intricacies of all these strings. Everything in the Cosmos has an effect, however slight, on everything else. We all know about the butterfly in China beating its wings and causing a hurricane in America (am I not a butterfly myself, stealing the pollen of life from souls?) The straws that break the camel's back were the straws that I was gathering. I needed but a handful more.

But now my future mentors began to grow uneasy. They guessed that I was becoming uncontrollable. They saw I would not stop until I had destroyed every last trace of human life in existence.

To frustrate my latest plans, they filled my mind with doubts. They gave me images of my own death in the war that was to come. And with my death, they pointed out, I would never have been able to receive their time machine and embark on my orgy.

I tried to shake off these doubts, but they were too forceful. A war on a nuclear scale could finish me off and undo all my decades of work. This thought was unbearable. I had no choice but to abandon my scheme.

Scowling, shaking my fist at the future, I returned to my present. I was determined to be avenged on these nameless mentors who had used me and then denied me my pleasure. In a fit of rage, I destroyed the time machine. I instantly regretted this. I knew I would not receive another.

For weeks I sulked in my room, impotent and miserable, plotting revenge. The answer came to me as suddenly as a revelation. It was the strangest of answers, but the twist of logic that made it viable quickened my pulse to an orgasm of shattering intensity. I writhed on the floor, biting my wrist until the blood flowed...

The best vengeance on my former comrades would be to work actively against them. And to do this, murder was not necessary. On the contrary, the preservation of life was the key.

In short, I became genuinely good, helping people to the best of my ability, curing the sick, encouraging the spread of life. A population increase was what I wanted now, and I set about it with the same fervour as I had set about reducing it.

I might never return the population of the future to the level of my first visions, but I could try. With hard work and dedication, there was a hope that, once again, blind children would wail down the cramped passageways of underground warrens and that men and women would squirm against each other like snakes, twisting in endless spirals, whetting their appetites on the warts and streaming sores of their fellows. The sufferings of life are greater than those of death. I have found my true vocation.

And so now I toil ceaselessly for the benefit of the poor. I have managed to repair the time machine and I often use it for my own purposes. I still kill in the past, whenever I feel the heat spreading along my thighs, but now I content myself with the old, the infirm, the ugly. For these are the people who can safely be relied upon not to produce children. Their lives to me, therefore, are worthless.

One day, the world will know me for what I really am. But what am I? And who am I? This is a question I still have not answered. Pay attention then. I will delay no longer. Your patience will finally be rewarded.

In the morning, when I walk among my friends, they reach out to touch my arm as if I am a saint. They are lepers for the most part, beggars, cretins. My mission, they tell me, is of fundamental importance. My name will go down in History. They are useless fools, they have no perception. I love them all dearly and nurture them. Their suffering gives me joy.

Sometimes they call me Teresa.

More often, they call me Mother.

CUT ME UP, MY DARLING!

(a psycho folksong; best performed by a barberghost quartet)

Cut me up, my darling!

gouge out my eyes and spleen,

stamp on my ears and mash my nose,

grate my kidneys and pulp my toes!

You know I love it when you hack me up

and I also love it when you kill poisonous ducks.

So wring my little neck, pretty,

bite off my thumbs and tongue.

and let's have calluses for breakfast!

La de da, ho de ho, hum de hum,

Bum titty bum, nonny nunny no!

Slice my chin, my love!

castrate me with a blunt spoon,

whip out my mind and wrap it tight,

post it to a Dutch anthropophagite!

What use are lips and digestive tracts,

except as saurian pillows for your lovely head?

So chop out my lungs, lovely,

knock out my teeth with a broom.

and let's strangle my dog with a snake!

LAMBLAKE RECALLS HOW HE HELPED TO ESTABLISH THE BRITISH SOCIETY OF WEIRD FANTASY

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I noticed I wasn't getting half the attention I deserved; and so I thought carefully about why this should be. During a long weekend spent in the country in the spooky cottage of one of my biggest admirers, James Sherbert, with several bottles of his Malt whisky, I mulled the problem in my mind.

It was clear to me that I needed to start winning some awards in order to raise my profile. But for some bizarre and eldritch reason, the awards that already existed, such as the Hugo and Nebula, never seemed to come my way. Clearly I had enemies in the business that deliberately arranged matters to my disadvantage. The bastards!

But, I asked myself, what was to stop me starting up my own society with the power to award its own awards; furthermore with the power to award its own awards to someone more deserving than the normal writer who was winning awards back then. In other words to award awards to me and to turn me into an award-winner...?

With a bunch of my friends, because friends came in bunches in those days, I founded the British Society of Weird Fantasy. And now my shelf groans with awards. In fact I've been forced to extend that shelf so many times that it now encircles my house on the inside no less than fifty-seven times, an award positioned every few inches.

But before you go away thinking that I'm arrogant and egotistical and pompous, allow me to point out that I'm not the only author to have won BSWF awards. Many other writers who have praised me and who are in my clique, such as James Sherbert, Peter Strawberry, Dennis Etchings, Gary McMadman, Stephen Vulk, etc, have won.

And that's a good thing, because it keeps variety alive. And variety is the spice of life, like paprika and turmeric, but on second thoughts, they are just spices, not spices of life, so it isn't like that, not much at any rate, but it doesn't matter. That's the thing about being a writer, especially of award-winning horror. I can use imagination!

If you are reading this right now and you happen to be a horror writer, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that you might win an award one day too, or even many awards just like what I've done. It does rather help quite a lot if you worship me and kiss my bumhole, of course. I wouldn't and couldn't want it any other way. Good luck!

INTERVIEW WITH LAMBLAKE HEINZ CONDUCTED BY M. JOHN HORRORSON

Q: You started out writing conventional horror but then you reinvented yourself as a master of the 'attritional banalities' school. How influenced were you by my own work in this regard?

A: Well, I consider you to be one of the best living horror writers of the present contemporary age, perhaps almost as good as half as what I am, and I won't deny that the particular school of modern horror fiction you refer to, namely the 'attritional banalities' type, is more closely associated with you than me, but with respect, and also without it, I must state very strongly that I was actually doing stuff along those lines in the 1960s and James Sherbert will undoubtedly back me up on that, so let's be generous and say that neither of us was an influence on the other but rather that we both generated that style independently.

Q: Some years ago, one of my novels, Hill Walkers, won the Rum Doodle Prize for mountain literature, the first fictional book to win the prize even though it wasn't non-fiction. What prizes have your own books won?

A: The British Society of Weird Fantasy, which is a society I helped to establish to increase the chances of me winning awards, keeps a careful list of all the awards and prizes I have won. There are too many of them for me to remember. All I can say for certain is that I have won more of them than you have. Indeed, at the last convention of the British Society of Weird Fantasy in Brighton I was awarded the Lamblake Heinz Award for Being The Best Brilliant Writer of All.

Q: One of my specialties in my stories and books is the device of leaving out the 'humanity' in order to highlight it strongly by making it absent. Even though this is complete bunkum, I'm good at it. Can you pull off the same trick? If not, what are you good at?

A: I'm very good at it and in fact my novel The Grope in the Dark leaves out all the 'humanity' not once but twice and therefore it is highlighted to twice the strength of any of the absent humanity of your books. But I am good at many other things and the British Society of Weird Fantasy has a list of them too. For instance, as an example, I can give you a hint of one of those other things I'm so good at. The horror writer Gary McMadman said that one of my tales was 'heartbreaking' and he's a man, but I made him cry anyway; not only that, even though he's a man, but he admitted to the fact he had cried because my work was heartbreaking. This is proof of my incredible skill and talent and ability.

Q: I am more than feasibly grumpy. What are you?

A: I am not only more than feasibly grumpy, I am also more grumpy than what isn't feasible. Put that in your pipe and puff it.

Q: I don't smoke pipes because my physique is good and I'm a climber. I have never trusted anyone who can't be bothered to look after their own health. Do you share this mistrust of mine?

A: One of my many best novels is probably The Duke of Twelve. It's so hard to choose. Ask me another question!

Q: My fantasy cycle collected as an omnibus volume and given an overall title, namely Elppaenip, consists of four brilliant books and is a journey out of fantasy into bleakness. The first volume, The Fruit Pastille City is set in an imaginary world; the second volume, A Storm of Teacups, goes slightly 'avant-garde'; and the third and fourth books, In Elppaenip and Elppaenip Nights, completes the journey. Are any of your books voyages into bleakness from somewhere else?

A: All my books are journeys and voyages. Sometimes when you start reading one of my books, you might be sitting at home on the sofa; but when you finish it, you might find to your surprise that you are on some other sofa in some other place, a bleak place!

Q: I am a little man and that's why I'm so angry and waspish. What are your reasons for being angry and waspish?

A: I am bloated.

Q: I have always felt that humour was morally wrong because it promotes the erroneous belief that escapism is possible and escapism is the biggest self-indulgent crime I can think of, and that's saying something because I have a massive brain and one of the most critically acclaimed prose styles in modern café society opinion. I know you share my distaste for humour and that you feel it a betrayal of the values we have in common. But what do you think of humour as a literary device?

A: Despite what people say, I do have a sense of humour and I can prove it. What do you call a dog without a nose? A jar! Ha ha ha ha ha! This is incontrovertible evidence that I understand the mechanics of comedy. But yes, I agree with you that humour is morally wrong and that escapism is morally wrong and that writers from Continental Europe don't know what they are talking about just because they are so advanced and sophisticated and I was doing brilliant stuff and amazing work and tremendous writing long before they did, even if they were dead before I was born, and clever so-called 'writers' like absurdists better watch out because I have a loyal and devoted following in the horror world and if anyone dares to criticise me or mock me in any way, I can rely on these followers to savage those so-called clever 'writers' like horror hounds!

Q: Thank you for your time, Mr Lamblake Heinz.

A MESSAGE FROM THE EDITOR

I am Welsh and so is Lamblake Heinz. Therefore I was deeply honoured almost to the point of my internal organs exploding when I was selected to edit a representative selection of his best short work. As we all know, unless we don't know it, Lamblake is most famous for his novels, those bleak and scary and weird oblongs that are almost guaranteed to make a reader feel weird and scared and bleak.

And yet he has been an incredibly important short-story maestro over the years. Referring specifically to his short tales, the luminaries Stephen Kong, James Sherbert and M. John Horrorson issued a joint statement to the effect that, "At the shorter length... Lamblake Heinz writes of things and other things beyond the ken of mortal man even more effectively than ken himself does... This is a scary truth!"

And it is. Incidentally, I quickly managed to secure the services of Mr James Sherbert himself when I was looking around for someone to write a competent Foreword to this collection, but for some reason he is under the delusion that he is this book's editor. No, he's not. I am. Unless my mind has been so bleaked, scared and weirded that I no longer know who I am. With Heinz's work that is possible!

It remains only for me to hope you had a safe journey through the tales you have just read. In the language of the 'street', they are bleak as fuck, scary as fucker and weird as fuckiest. In the language of the salon, on the other perfumed hand, they are little masterpieces of the finest gemmary! There is something for everyone here, even norms. Have a safe trip out of the dark labyrinth of the Lamblake mind!

RHYS HUGHES, THE HOVEL, 2012

ANOTHER MESSAGE FROM THE EDITOR

While searching for the lost works of Lamblake Heinz, I discovered an odd truth that has never been mentioned by anyone before, namely that when looking for files on computers one frequently has to type strange sequences of words onto the screen in order to access those files; words that when put together make the actual story they are supposed to be finding! How curious is that? Very, is the answer! For example, while searching for Heinz's story 'Knees' on my own computer, I couldn't find it anywhere until I started typing the words 'It was so foggy that Boris Martins could only see his own knees ahead of him on the road...'

And then it slowly revealed itself. This style of 'searching' closely resembles the act of 'creation'. Weird, isn't it? And this was true not only for myself but also for the lovely people who looked on their own computers. Some of these lovely people have elected to remain forever anonymous; others want to be known. It seems a good idea to encrypt the relevant names and provide the 'key' to the cipher sometime later, so that these lovely people can receive the credit due to them. All of the works in this ebook were found by me except for the following:

'I'm Lovecraft, Woe is Me' and 'Genetic Crocodiles on the Rampage' — found by JWXWHVXDB

'Matryoshka', 'The Terrors that Creep in the Night' and 'The Most Utterly Romantic Monstrous Horror Story Ever' — found by FHRCUVYYVCF

'Chainsaw for Sale, Lightly Used' — found by VXCDQQHUREE

'And Now a Word from Lamblake Heinz Himself' — found by CPCMPDL

'The Nefarious Matter of Smelly Darkly' — found by ZLUHEXOZZS

'A Greek Haircut' — found by FGMFXJT

'Excerpt from Shadow of the Tory' — found by IFSNJQHTWWNHP

Whether or not you enjoyed reading this ebook, you now have the opportunity to get another ebook for free! The free ebook in question is Tucked Away in Aragon by me; and to get it for free from Smashwords, simply go to the page where it is featured and use the following coupon to get a 100% discount.

This coupon expires on the 24th of September 2012, which happens to be my birthday. I'll be 46 years old. I never thought I'd get that far, and in fact I haven't managed it yet, because I'm writing this on June 5th, but fingers crossed! Other things crossed too! Here's the link and code for the book:

Tucked Away in Aragon

RR88J

Please consider buying one of my other ebooks here on Smashwords. The one I recommend is The Tellmenow Isitsöornot, because it's the best value for money. You get exactly 100 stories (150,000 words of fiction) and at the end of that ebook is another coupon for another free ebook, namely Fables of Rhysop; and at the end of that ebook is another coupon, so that you can get Flash in the Pantheon, a collection of 100 flash fictions, for $1 instead of $2.99. Both these coupons expire on the last day of the year 2012, so you have just over six months to take advantage of this offer.

THANKS FOR EVERYTHING!

WITHOUT READERS, WRITERS WOULDN'T EXIST!

BYE BYE!

Oh yes, and don't forget that the brilliant cover was done by an amazing artist by the name of Gonzalo Canedo, who really is massively talented and ought to be doing book covers for major publishing companies. So if you represent a major publishing company why not get in contact with him?

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