by Unknown
I have vivid memories of the day my son came home from school, frantic and eager to tell me what had happened to John Carlyle, one of his best friends. John had been in the same position as the poor kid who’d wet himself this summer.
It was a Thursday night it happened on, while John was shopping with his mother after school. It was late, around 7PM, and all of the shops had closed. They were on their way to the bus station when John decided he couldn’t last the 20 minute journey home and told his mother that he really had to go. The only place that he could go was on Wood Street, which was also on their way to the bus stop. There was another public convenience over at the train station, but that was twice the distance, and it was raining.
So they got to Wood Street, and his mother, knowing the legends (but not believing in them) said she would stand by the entrance as he went in, and not move until he came out.
John walked down the stairs like a man to the firing squad. He went through the door and into a long corridor that led further underground again. To his left was the large glass window of the caretaker’s office – Billy Bogroll’s office – and by the time he reached the bottom of the incline the floor was two inches deep in murky liquid - urine or water, he wasn’t sure. The smell – which he described as being like his grandmother’s head after a trip to the hairdresser – suggested it wasn’t water.
He tiptoed over to the cubicles, just one of which was unlocked, and did what he had to do as quickly as he could do it. Without washing his hands or flushing, he made for the exit, oblivious to the liquid splashing up his trouser legs. As he passed the glass window of Bogroll’s office, John looked in and saw him hunched in the shadows. He said that he couldn’t say for sure what Billy Bogroll had been doing there, but whatever it was, he was doing it with a knife in his hand.
John Carlyle, aged 11 and a bit, had secured his reputation at school. He was a legend. No bullies would bother him, and even the teachers probably had a quiet respect for him. Why? Because he’d been into those toilets, and seen Billy Bogroll, and survived to tell the tale.
Anyway, here we are. It was coming to the end of the heat wave - you remember that storm that broke late on the last Friday of June? Well, as the thunder tore the summer apart, a mother sat at the window of her terrace phoning around friends and neighbours to see if she could locate her six-year-old daughter.
The next day, the rain cleared, the summer made a timid return, and the first missing posters went up. To start with, they were just in the local shops. Within days you could find them all over the city. I’ve even got one of them myself, not that it’s anything to brag about. Oh, I know what you might be thinking, but you’d be wrong. Those killings have nothing to do with me. I may have retired from the newspaper, but old habits die hard. I like to keep up my old connections, and keep writing about local happenings. Maybe it’s pretentious, but I think of myself as the city’s personal diarist. Anyway, like Imogen Rogers and all of the others that had come after her, Amanda Heartly became the poster girl for every parent’s worst nightmare.
The city shuffled its feet for a moment when the police found a severed human toe in the grounds of a church, but no sooner had word got around about it than they released a statement saying that the toe belonged to an adult male.
She hadn’t been missing a day when the whispers began. They always do. Once again, suspicious eyes looked towards Wood Street. Billy Bogroll was taken in for questioning, but soon released without charge. I’ll get to that in a moment… Just over a fortnight after his release, another face appeared next to Amanda Heartly’s in the newspapers: his.
Terry Culshaw, longtime landlord of The King’s Arms, and fellow member of the Ancient Barking Spiders (that’s the name of our quiz team), met with me a couple of weeks ago. Ten years ago this conversation would have taken place during a late night stay-behind, but as it happened it took place over coffee and muffins upstairs in the indoor market.
A group of guys drinking one night in the King’s apparently got talking about the missing kids and about the whole history of Billy Bogroll. One of the men, who also happened to work with Amanda Heartly’s father, said he knew where Bogroll lived, and suggested they go to his house and question him themselves. Do what the police wouldn’t do. „Times like this,” they said, „it’s people like us who’ve got to stand up for what’s right.”
Well, according to Terry, they stopped in the King’s until closing, by which time they’d had enough drink to send an ox to sleep. Not only that, but they were all fairly excited about ‘finding justice for the children’ and, as one of them mentioned, becoming ‘local heroes’.
They left the pub and Terry locked the door behind them, convinced that the next time he saw them it would be on the news.
On one of my biweekly visits to the city centre, I popped into the offices of the newspaper I used to work for. From time to time I would go there and ask if there was any light work for an old man. Vic Engels, my old boss, took me into his office like he always did when he had a spare 15 minutes, and told me all he knew about the whole situation.
Alan Hostick, later to become known as Billy Bogroll, was born the same year the Titanic sank, he told me. His father, who had the same name as him, went to fight in the Great War, and never came home. Margaret Hostick, his mother, was left to raise the three sons alone. Alan was the eldest. The youngest, Albert, died of TB at the age of three. The middle brother, Roy, moved out of the city in the 1950s, and nobody is sure what happened to him or where he ended up.
Alan Hostick stayed with his mother, supporting her when her arthritis made her unable to leave the house. He fought in, and returned from, the Second World War. On coming home, he took a job in a tobacco factory and worked there through the latter part of the 1940s and most of the 1950s, until he lost three out of the four fingers on his right hand in an industrial accident, and was forced to take early retirement. (This is where the rumour that he had one hand and one talon originated.)
He had problems finding work for a while, until somebody who knew somebody fixed him up with a cleaning position in the public toilets on Wood Street. For a man of vague social skills and only one fully functional hand, this was more or less ideal.
At the start of the 1960s, his mother took ill with influenza, which developed into pneumonia, and ended in her death. He remained in the family home, and kept up his position in the public toilets, but socialised less and less. He never married, nor had a partner, to the best of anybody’s knowledge.
The rumours about him he’d certainly heard, but he was indifferent to them. Kids – the brave kids – would shout stuff at him in the street, but it meant nothing. Alan Hostick closed himself to the world around him. If you were ever to need a real-life example of somebody who was just going through the motions, Alan Hostick would have been it.
His house, on Fareham Street, had no downstairs windows. He must have got tired of children breaking them on dares, so he had them boarded up.
He was one of this city council’s longest-serving employees, and (amazingly to some) he never had a day off sick. There was only one time when he didn’t turn in for work, and that was after the incident in the King’s Arms that Terry Culshaw had told me about. Alan’s employers didn’t notice his absence for two days, and almost a fortnight had passed before the police got involved and broke down his front door.
There was nothing unusual about his house. Far from the torture chamber that one would expect in a Billy Bogroll tale, it was a typical pensioner’s house with old family pictures on the walls, and decor that had gone out of fashion back when even I still understood what fashion was. I say there was nothing unusual, but there was the smell. One of the investigating officers described it as ‘the rotten melon smell of death’.
They followed the scent up the stairs and to the bathroom. One officer was foolish enough to attempt to lift the corpse, which had been soaking for two weeks, out of the bath water. Alan Hostick’s skin and flesh slid off his bones, and his
bones fell apart at the joints.
The cause of death was listed in the news as ‘natural causes’, but Vic told me, off the record, that the old man had choked to death on his own dismembered penis.
Well, there wasn’t much of an investigation into his death. Alan was buried to some mild press attention, before a small crowd of people who most likely felt a streak of guilt for the bad things they’d said about him over the years before they knew who he really was. After that, the case was closed. Even if the police knew he hadn’t just died of old age, they didn’t have the time to waste or the inclination to look into the death of a man the vast majority had - still have - down as a child murderer anyway. Nobody was going to ask questions, so why provide answers?
The toilets on Wood Street have been closed for about a month now, and I hear that they are going to renovate them – maybe get rid of them all together. I’m not the only one interested to hear if they find anything curious down in the drainage system.
And if they don’t find anything down there, well, I guess whoever took those children is still out there.
HOW SATAN DIED AND THE IMPRISONMENT OF GOD
BY SUMMER HANFORD
How Satan Died
One unremarkable, breezy September morning, a graduate student was cleaning rat cages. Now, most of her rats were housed individually in fine 9 x 12 x 9 inch highly durable plastic bins, but four of them lived together in a colony cage. These four rats were naive Long Evans males, recognizable as 19, 20, 21 and 22 by their earmarks, and were currently on water deprivation in preparation for a study.
It happened that as this student was moving her rats from a dirty bin to a clean one, she glanced up and saw a fifth rat poised on the stainless steel shelf of the cage rack. It was also a Long Evans male and appeared to be observing her with great interest.
“I’ve come to inform you that your cruel exploitation of these creatures has landed you a spot in Hell,” squeaked the rat. “However, if you will consent to do my work on earth for the rest of your mortal life, I shall see that Hell isn’t so bad for you.”
“Nonsense,” replied the graduate student, unperturbed at finding an extra rat on her shelf. “This is science.” And she tossed him in the bin with the others.
Don’t be misled into thinking that Satan didn’t try to jump right back out, but the graduate student was accustomed to recalcitrant rats and caught him firmly by the tail. Grabbing up the stainless steel cage top, she plunked the stunned Satan once more into the bin and snapped it closed.
“Don’t you realize who I am?” squeaked the rat as loudly as it could, but she had already headed down the hallway to dispose of the trash bag full of dirty shavings.
Several weeks passed and Satan tried at every opportunity to escape his confinement, but a quick hand on his tail always yanked him back. He spent his spare time cowing his cage mates into submission, which involved a fair amount of eye gouging and genital nipping, since they too failed to recognize his inherent right to dominate them. Of course, he had an advantage over them since his claws and teeth were eternally razor sharp and he did not succumb to fatigue.
Once they had been properly subjugated, Satan proceeded to lead his subordinates in several escape attempts, which involved the clever plan of eating as much food as possible off the cage cover and then trying to push it open. Unfortunately, it is rather difficult to eat a lot of dry food pellets when you have no water, and the other rats didn’t really put their hearts into the effort.
They would ask him, “Why would we want to escape? We have food, and fifteen milliliters of water a day, and humans to provide it and keep our home clean.” Then they would return to digging about in the shavings.
Trying a new strategy, Satan regaled them with tales of the horrors their human was likely to perpetrate upon them. The other rats shook their heads.
Number 21 disagreed. “We’re for some odor detection task. She won’t do any of that to us.”
“Why don’t you give up all this escape stuff?” asked number 19.
“Here she comes!” squeaked 22, running to the front of the cage and waving his paws through the bars in the top.
“Come have some water!” suggested 20 as he tried to squeeze his nose through the hole for the waterspout. Satan sighed, stepping forward to jostle with the others for access to a drinking tube.
Constrained by the laws of the universe to keep his rat form until he either escaped or accomplished his mission on earth, Satan was obliged to form a new plan. He would ask for a single cage. This, he hoped, would have a lighter top. The next time the graduate student came to clean, Satan moved to the back of the cage, waiting until her attention fell on him.
“Come here, little Satan rat,” she soothed, reaching toward him.
“I want my own cage,” he proclaimed. “One of those individual ones.”
“Your own cage?” she repeated, frowning. “Why?”
“This cage is too full, and the Vet won’t like it.” Satan had considered his arguments and presented this one first, deeming it the most effective.
“True,” she drawled, obviously unconvinced that the rat didn’t have other, more selfish motives. “And?”
“And I don’t see why I have to be on water deprivation!” Satan put a lot of feeling into this, trying to be convincing. Of course, he was Satan and didn’t actually need water, but he hoped she would take pity on him.
“Hmm, well, I guess you’re right.” She paused, considering. “I’ll get a cage, and hold it right next to this one. I want you to jump in, and none of your escape attempts!”
She departed, presumably to get a scoop of shavings for his new cage. Satan was elated. Now he would have his chance!
When the new cage was presented, Satan jumped in and immediately tried to jump back out the other side, mostly for show. Escape that way wasn’t his plan. As he expected, she slammed the lid in place, admonishing him.
SLAP. A bright green tag was affixed to the outside of the container. It read #13, as his earmarks denoted him, and Class: Practice HRP. BAM! A scoop full of food came down on the lid, and a bottle of water slid into place. To keep up the act, Satan rushed over and pretended to drink feverishly. He felt the cage being lifted and slid onto a shelf. He could hear his former cage mates talking in happy relief about his departure, but he was so elated at the prospect of his now certain freedom that he didn’t care. Wait until he secured his release and could resume his true form. That girl was going to be the main course at his next banquet in Hell!
Satan peered about the small chamber, trying to discern if she was still present. He regretted not specifying that he wanted a clear cage, but that may have seemed suspicious. To be safe, he waited for the loud click of the timer that preceded the sudden darkness of a laboratory night. He was stronger at night.
In the darkness, Satan moistened his mouth and began gnawing away at the food that weighed down the cage lid. Even though he worked with fervor, it took until nearly dawn for him to clear it. Bracing his back legs, he pressed his nose against the top.
It didn’t budge. He frowned, turning to place the flat of his head against the bars, and pressed harder. The lid didn’t even shift. Frantically, he cocked his head to one side, peering upward. There was no food left!
The water bottle, he realized. It was too full, adding weight. He reached for it, placing one paw against the tube and allowing the lukewarm liquid to run down his arm, dampening the cage floor. It was intolerably slow. Satan dug his claws into the rubber stopper, yanking it free. Water rushed out, soaking him and flooding the cage. He shook his head, flipping water from his eyes and off his whiskers. Once again, he pushed at the top with all his might.
It was fastened tight. Satan sank into the shavings-water slop that now coated the floor of his prison. He had miscalculated. The tops on the individual cages fit much more tightly than those of the colony cages. He was trapped.
A dripping and sullen Satan didn’t even try to escape the next morning as he was
gently placed in a dry cage.
“I know you were thirsty,” reprimanded the graduate student, “but you could have shown more restraint.” She placed a new scoop of food on the top, and provided a full, tightly-stoppered water bottle.
Satan didn’t answer. He lay limply at the bottom of his prison. The graduate student shrugged and left. Later, she checked on him again, providing a spoonful of peanut butter to cheer him up. Satan sat, eyeing the peanut butter malevolently and sulking. So caught up was he in this new emotion, depression, that Satan did not bother to maintain his rat body and, over the next few weeks, he became thinner.
By this time September had ended. October had come and gone. Now, as November came around, it happened that the graduate student needed an extra rat to practice her newly acquired HRP skills on. The HRP, or horseradish peroxidase, was injected into various locations so neural connections could be tracked. It wasn’t the most fun for the rats, because the only way to find out where the HRP got to was to put thin slices of their brains under a microscope, but the graduate student was sure the skills she was acquiring were very important to the future of mankind. Looking over her rats, she spied the Satan rat, pining away.
“Here, cheer up,” she told him, removing his cage from the shelf and looking down into it. “It will all be better soon.”
Satan peered up at her through the bars. “You are going to free me?” He felt a painful twinge of hope.
“Well.” She shrugged. “Let’s just say that I’m sending you on to a better place. You’ll be free of this life.”