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 Cross-&-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 Cross-&-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!”
