Judderman

by D. A. Northwood

  The

  Eden Book Society

  100 Years of Unseen Horror

  The Eden Book Society

  Copyright © D. A. Northwood 1972, 2018

  All rights reserved.

  The right of D. A. Northwood to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by The Eden Book Society, an imprint of Cinder House Publishing Limited.

  ISBN 9781911585466

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd,

  St Ives plc.

  www.edenbooksociety.com

  www.deadinkbooks.com

  About the Society

  Established in 1919, The Eden Book Society was a private publisher of horror for nearly 100 years. Presided over by the Eden family, the press passed through the generations publishing short horror novellas to a private list of subscribers. Eden books were always published under pseudonyms and, until now, have never been available to the public.

  Dead Ink Books is pleased to announce that it has secured the rights to the entire Eden Book Society backlist and archives. For the first time, these books, nearly a century of unseen British horror, will be available to the public. The original authors are lost to time, but their work remains and we will be faithfully reproducing the publications by reprinting them one year at a time.

  We hope that you will join us as we explore the evolving fears of British society as it moved through the 20th century and eventually entered the 21st. We begin our reproduction with 1972, a year of exciting and original horror for the Society.

  D.A. Northwood

  D.A. Northwood was a writer of weird urban and landscape horror fiction in the tradition of C.A. Nolan. He was the author of numerous collections including What We Know So Far, The Commare and Other Nightmares, and What Never Was. He disappeared from his flat in Tottenham in 1981 at the age of 38.

  From Daniel Eider’s journal

  Earlier this evening, while Mum washed up in the kitchen and Dad sat in his chair nodding off in front of the latest news of bombs and missing children, I wrote the following phrase in my journal: ‘This city is built on pain.’

  That’s far too simple. I know there is more to the city than just pain, suffering and trauma; but sometimes my vision is obscured and I can’t see clear.

  I am no anarchist, and I am not a communist, and I do not like limiting myself to the political categories people are so fond of in this time I find myself living in. The boxes we cram ourselves into trap us, and the lid locks, where we wait to explode like Jacks driven mad from our confinement. That should be obvious to anyone with eyes to see.

  So I would not say I was political. But I do care about people.

  And I try to care about all people. It is the people that I love in this city. What is a city without its people? A city is people, and people are its corpus and its blood; its plasma and bone; its sinew and teeth. The people are its long, complex story and its fractured memory.

  (Teratomas grow in the city. The teeth and hair and eyeballs all merged in a monstrous outgrowth. There is a teratoma swelling, here in London, in the year 1972.)

  * * *

  And this city, London, is the place of my birth. It is the place where my family’s stories sprouted and grew strong and spread like vines colonising old red brickwork. One of these tendrils ended up bearing my name. One of those tendrils bears Gary’s name also. My brother and I, we see the city in ways we know others do not. We try and see it for what it really is, and slowly, so slowly, but inexorably, we are succeeding. The hippies in their squats and on their communes out in the countryside talk about a third-eye opening, but I think this is something deeper, older and more hard-earned than that. Learning to see more than what the eye records.

  Imagine an image swimming into focus through the eye of a telescope trained on a distant nineteen-sixties tower-block; or the shock of third-world villager, her life spent with fuzzy and blurred vision, given lenses for the first time.

  The important things to see are there and were always there, but you need the tools to see them. Whilst looking for the Great God Pan, I may have found something else looking back at me. Something that is able to coax overblown statements like, ‘This city is built on pain’ from my pen. Ha! I make myself laugh, even at times like this when all feels too serious.

  And anyway, how could words, just scribbled symbols on a page, convey the true nausea and ecstasy of the physical world? Words fail me often, but what I am writing here, this is my attempt to get across the city that my brother and I can see. The place we know as London Incognita: our home.

  It is true that London is built on blood. The blood of a bloody Empire and the countless thousands that Empire enslaved and exploited. I was schooled to be proud of that Empire, and a map distorted with pinky-red tones, even as it was in its death throes.

  And the city is built on the blood of London’s own people too. The blood and sweat and struggle of everyone who came here, worked here, fell in love here, or was beaten up and died here.

  At night, I walk by the River Lea near my family home and I imagine the darkness hides the truth of the river, and it is in fact a flow of warm crimson liquid, pumping towards the Limehouse Cut and into the Thames itself, then out into the estuary and beyond into the North Sea.

  When not walking in the shadow hours, I struggle to sleep. I dose myself with alcohol on too many nights, but I make myself sound a victim or a figure worthy of pity there and that isn’t true. I like the drink, and it likes me. On the nights without alcohol, when sleep finally claims me I dream of scarred harlequins, idiot mastodons and leopard seals breaching the oily waters of the Thames. These are dreams I do not want.

  So, I drink with my brother and my crippled cousin in The Sovereign because there’s a price to pay for seeing too clearly. Why do you think the hippy dream is turning sour?

  My days are spent plagued with images of Wat Tyler on Blackheath, of the Gin Alley riots, of Spring-Heeled Jacked and the judderman, of hulking atlas bears on the Hackney Marshes and the men who wear their skins. I have seen London burrymen wearing outfits of nettle and buddleia along railway sidings. I know of bad things that happen in the homes of wealthy men, to the defenceless and the voiceless. Each day I see the war in Ireland and its blowback here.

  I have recurring visions of a blind creator god jerking its arms out towards me by a deserted stretch of the New River Path in the cold days of February; by the reservoirs of Woodberry Down estate; near the Adath Yisroel cemetery in Enfield. The location seems to change each time, but the creator is the same. Mantis arms, blindfold over its ruined eyes, receding gums and an idiot smile.

  There is too much of London for me to see now, a place constantly as busy as a work of Hogarth’s, as terrifying as the violent and lonely nights the inmates of Bedlam endured.

  I collect stories of the city, and have done for many years now. I feed on them. I am addicted, hungry all the time, unable to be sated. Drive and dissatisfaction are essentially the same, I realise. I need to learn all that I can, while I still can. I have disturbed something in my searching; it has noticed me.

  So, I am writing down as much as I can about the Huguenots, the Jews, the Romans, the Irish, the Italians, the Indians, the West Indians, the gypsies. My own people too. Spivs and skinheads and mods and teds. Hippies and occultists. I have scribbled books containing the stories of coolies and lascars down on the docks. Native Americans in the Victorian Wild West shows, buried aboriginal cricketers in Hackney, accounts of Maori who somehow made their way to London’s docks from Aotearoa. Chinese Limehouse, opium smoke, ripper myths, the self-exiles hiding in Epping Forest.

  I need to know their stories a
nd so somehow understand my own.

  I often wonder how long the true book of London would be? The thought terrifies me. I hope, in some way, these words I write in this cheap journal purchased from the local newsagent, as Mum clears the kitchen and Dad dozes, are part of the true book of London. The book of London Incognita.

  I think about my own mongrel origins and the endless mix of people that make the city. It gives me strength. I am nothing pure, and happy with that.

  There is London Cognita, and London Incognita, and I know where I belong. It won’t be long now.

  Gary

  Danny was gone. Folded into the creases of the city. Vanished.

  ‘Charlie, where the fuck is he?? I’m getting worried now.’ Gary clicked his tongue in thought before sipping his beer. He wiped foam from his top lip and looked vacantly around the pub.

  ‘Gary, he’s probably just gone on a bender,’ said Charlie, annoyed. ‘You know what your brother’s like. Out smashing it for a few days.’ His cousin sucked roughly on a cigarette and massaged his damaged leg as he took a gulp of Guinness. Gary imagined the metal buried in Charlie’s white flesh as sleeping grubs ready to awaken at a moment’s notice and devour him. The damaged leg was a constant reminder of other realities. The limp forever grounding Charlie in the nineteen-seventies.

  ‘This feels different. He’s never disappeared for this long before.’ There was the thump of a dart connecting with a triple-twenty, and a beer-bellied man roared hoarsely in triumph. His team mate patted him hard on the back. ‘It doesn’t feel right.’

  They were sat at the bar in The Sovereign, their local boozer and usual haunt. And today that felt apt; Gary felt lately as if he were a ghostly observer of his own life, a spectre among many in the backstreets and estates of north east London. He was frightened of becoming a shade, a ghost with a hunger that couldn’t be satisfied regardless of the number of pints he downed. It was a Wednesday night and the pub was half full. A fruit machine glowed and burbled in a corner. Old men, veterans like perennial regular Old Fen, sat at the bar not doing very much. Gary wondered if Fen and his mates had done anything other than sit and drink at that bar. Blue smoke from their endless cheap cigarettes coiled in the air. Fen coughed wetly with a sound like something was coming loose inside him, jerking him briefly into animation before resuming his static position. If you picked him up and shook him he’d rattle with all the loose bits inside. His geriatric black Labrador, a surly hound named the Barghest, dozed on the sticky floor by Fen’s barstool. Fen and his comrades were comprised of damp coats, unwashed jumpers and stale cigarette smoke, fixtures as permanent as the beer pumps and the cold ceramic toilets. To Gary, they resembled fungal growths growing up from the pub’s floor, fusing with and colonising the space of the bar. They reminded him of psychedelically patterned mushrooms he and Lisa had found last autumn kicking up leaves and holding hands in Epping Forest. The old men were a form of ancient life springing stubbornly from the rot of the city, clinging on and surviving. The smoke from their cigarettes briefly assumed the loose shape of a wraith that grinned at Gary before it dispersed.

  ‘He’s been gone for five days and a night without a word and you think that’s fine?’ he continued. He rubbed his two-day stubble, the light brown fading to almost blonde in places. His hair was cropped short.

  ‘He’s probably met a bird, and good on him! Heaven knows he could use it, all the freaky shit he’s into has got to get a guy a bit pent up. It’s not healthy, all those books and long walks.’ Charlie grinned under his long greasy hair. His face was lopsided and heavily freckled, but there was a sort of idiot toughness to it. Gary was still surprised his cousin had ever been in the army. Strangely, the limp suited him; not that Charlie wore it well, as such, but he looked the type. Or so Gary thought in uncharitable moments.

  ‘I should be so lucky,’ Charlie added, his smile fading. And it was true, Charlie wasn’t much of a hit with the women. He’d never had a proper girlfriend, and it was easy to see why the girls considered him a weirdo, a creep, a pervert. Gary thought his cousin may at least have been able to milk his injury, but so far, he’d had no luck, and it made Gary think that people never really change. Whatever happens to us, he thought, we stay fundamentally ourselves, only becoming more like who we really are as we age. Charlie had always seemed an odd kid to Gary, obsessed with guns and American cowboy stuff, John Wayne and the Vietnam War, and always wanted to be uniformed and booted fighting in a spurious war for a country that didn’t give a shit about him. He got his wish, and was punished for it. But he survived, and Gary supposed he must be thankful for that.

  Gary had different interests, like his brother. Guns and America, nor the Union Jack for that matter, ever really cut it for him. Now he was plagued with the suspicion that Danny had pursued those interests with too much vigour, straying out of the light and far into the bowels and subterranean levels of the city, stranding himself down in the darkness. They both knew dark things lurked down in the lost reaches of the underground; forgotten troglodytic peoples who’d taken shelter from the bombs who never came back up, whose tools and ephemera Jenny Duro and the other river larks claimed to find in London soil from time to time. Blind grey rats the size of terriers. A segmented and writhing carnivorous thing as thick as a man’s arm, seen in the tunnels by workmen near Finsbury Park and dubbed the emperor worm.

  Before Danny’s disappearance, the brothers had been listening to and recording the tales of London’s many street drinkers. They told stories of a figure that folded itself out of the shadows, flickering and juddering, before leading the susceptible, or the willing, away far into the darkness. It was a story whose meaning was not too hard to interpret, and Danny had started become increasingly obsessed with this thing. A figure seen in the thin places of the city. A seductive danger.

  ‘You worry too much,’ said Lisa, leaning over the bar and poking Gary in the shoulder. His girlfriend, and resident barmaid at The Sovereign, who’d been listening in to the conversation in between serving Fen and his group. She gave Gary a wink and that cheered him up a bit, as he dredged up an image of her naked pale body, ash-black hair spread around her, stretching blearily and waking to another London day, half-covered in the duvet they were sharing with increasing frequency. He didn’t really know what they were doing, but whatever it was, he liked it. Lisa claimed to be one of the black Irish, her skin like alabaster, like she was already half among the dead. Maybe that was true, but Gary wasn’t sure how much any of that mattered. Too many men, long hairs and cropped skulls like himself, were talking of belonging and not-belonging right now. Pubs were turning the West Indians and the Irish alike away from their doors, signs splitting the city into further division.

  ‘There’s a lot to worry about,’ Gary replied, slipping back into his mood. ‘And mind your own Lisa, would you?’ But he grinned as he said it, and Lisa smiled back. He ordered more pints, and they made plans to meet up the next day.

  On leaving the pub, Charlie’s shuffle disturbed the Barghest which barked the same way Fen coughed, mucoid and unpleasant. Its left eye was milky with blindness; it watched Gary as he exited the pub.

  As the two young men walked slowly back to Gary’s mum’s in the hot summer evening, past the graffiti insulting their neighbours and telling them to go back home, a group of young children sat on a chipped wall singing a song.

  Judder Judder Judder

  All over now

  Judder Judder Judder

  You’re all over now

  Gary listened to the children’s voices, repeating the verse over and over as they laughed and giggled and pointed at his limping cousin.

  ‘Fucking spastic!’ one of them shouted, shrill and impossibly young.

  Charlie walked like that because of the shrapnel buried in his leg. A car bomb had gone off during his second tour of duty, taking out one of his mates and throwing him to the floor with blood leaking from his ruined leg, mixing with oil that shimmered like a metallic rainbow. Now every s
tep he took, the bomb went off again. Gary could see it in his face.

  The singing children tittered and laughed and pointed as he walked, cruel in an everyday and almost perfunctory way, like it was their duty and expected of them. They’d been taught that this is how people act. Difference was funny to them, there to be pointed out, a useful thing to demarcate the lines of belonging. Charlie was still a young man but had passed into some other realm in the eyes and minds of children. To them, only the old and the monstrous and the outcast walked like that. The city wasn’t kind to people like Charlie. Charlie, for his part, did a good job of ignoring these things.

  As the children’s voices faded and distorted in the hot air of the city, mingling with the sounds of passing traffic, Gary thought he heard a little girl, her voice clear, piercing, and much more beautiful than the others, sing:

  Your brother’s with the Judder.

  He’s all over now.

  But he was tired and drunk. He was angry, worried. His clothes smelled of sweat and were uncomfortable in this recent bout of hot weather. He was overdressed and underprepared, like all the English. It was one of the hottest summers on record. That’s what they said on the telly and in the papers. Heat itself was news, rather than any of its effects. Ice cream vans were doing a roaring trade on street corners and people basked like prehistoric lizards in the city’s parks, soaking up the rays they half-believed would never come again. As a people not used to warmth and light, Londoners went funny in the head when the temperature rose. They thawed out, only to realise they had suffered a form of freezer-burn and had been kept too long in storage. Now they were not fit for purpose. Their minds had turned to mush.

  Bombs had been going off in this sweating city too frequently, all the time it seemed, in pubs, at football grounds, and in places where important men did their business. Blown out windows had an awful beauty to them, Gary thought, and the glass made fascinating patterns over the hard surfaces on which Londoners walked. There was something to read in the scattered fragments, an extreme and violent form of rune-casting. He didn’t yet know the language but there was something crucial there to be deciphered. Danny could have helped him with that, and now Danny was gone.