Dead Funny

by Robin Ince

  ‘Hello James,’ he said upon picking it up.

  ‘Oh, hi Dad, how are you feeling?’

  ‘I’m well, son, how are you?’

  ‘I’m good – so, look, I’ve cancelled the holiday, so I can come to you for Christmas, but is it OK if I bring Polly?’

  Roger nodded to himself – yes, this was how it should go.

  ‘Of course. I could certainly use the company.’ He permitted himself a wry smile.

  ‘OK great – take care and we’ll see you on the 24th, OK? Can you manage ’til then?’

  ‘No problem.’

  Roger rang off and stood. He gathered his things together for the walk he would now go on, just to get out of the house.

  The day was high and bright, the sky blue and fresh, cold but not unbearable. It brought a touch of rose to Roger’s cheeks. He waved to a neighbour and petted his dog. He let his mind wander back over the past few months, feeling every bit as strange and out of bodied as he had when he first found the book. The mysterious author of those messages felt close to him now; somehow, strangely, as if he could sense him inside. Again he asked silently: why no clue? Why no clue about the thrombosis in the calf? It would have been so easy to add it later, to the post-death months, as a warning, why no clue? It could have been averted. She could be here, now. And then it came to him, so suddenly that it stopped him dead in his tracks. And he turned and hobbled with his stick back home as fast as he could.

  He went upstairs without even bothering to remove his coat, only pausing in the study to collect his fountain pen. He picked up the pole with the brass hook and pulled down the wooden door in the ceiling. He unfolded the ladder and let the safety catch click into place. He climbed up as best he could – slower this time, but still able. He flicked the switch to illuminate the bulb and crawled over to the chimney breast. He knelt back and lifted the board, giddy with this plan, this plan that would protect all future Rogers from the horrible fate that had befallen him and the however many that had gone before. He would make the change. He would leave the clue. He would be the Roger that took care of all the Rogers and Rosemarys to come, into eternity. He rolled back the fibre glass insulation, not caring about his hands this time, and pulled at the board beneath. He didn’t have the patience to fish about underneath it, and so he yanked at it instead, leaning back on his heels as he did so. The board was nailed in further back and so he had to pull hard. One good tug should do it, he thought. And that was the last thing he thought, as the whole board suddenly came up in his hands and he flew backwards, hitting his head with a sickening crack on a slanting wooden rafter.

  Ten days later, James and Polly let themselves into the house. Despite the cold, the smell greeted them on the doorstep.

  ‘Dad?’ James called, wishing he had checked in on his father mid-week, as he clearly hadn’t been washing himself or anything else for the past few days. The house was quiet. ‘Stay here,’ James told Polly and she nodded, quite happy to remain in the fresh air. James followed the stench up the stairs. He put his head round the bedroom door, and then the bathroom door and then the spare room-cum-study door, where the smell was most powerful. The ladder was an unwelcome but irresistible invitation and with his sleeve over his face, James climbed it.

  The police said the cold had probably preserved Roger’s body for a little while, but thought he had been dead at least a week. They said the cause of death was an acute trauma to the head and would have been almost immediate. They were baffled as to what he was doing in the loft, although it appeared that he had been looking for something under the floorboards next to the chimney breast, as he had ripped up the floor there. What he was looking for was a mystery, as the space under the boards was quite empty, but on closer inspection they had found a nest of mice which may have been making noises in the bedroom wall and annoying him. There were a lot of mice, the police had said, thousands of them, all exactly the same, blindly scrabbling around in the walls.

  Woolboy

  richard herring

  The following is a true story . . .

  Tired of London, but still very much enjoying being alive (screw you, Doctor Samuel Johnson, you dead idiot) I had caught a train to Hertfordshire. I was going to walk in the woods, breathe fresh air, listen to birdsong and be alone with my thoughts.

  It’s strange the way that we assume that the countryside holds none of the dangers of the city and that being alone makes you more secure than being surrounded by millions of people. In Hertfordshire, just like in space, no one can hear you scream.

  I fancied that I was returning to nature, somehow communing with the past, recapturing the simple and idyllic life of the noble ancient Britons. In truth, I suspect our ancestors didn’t have much time for a nature ramble, being concerned mainly with fighting off invaders, disease and wild animals. They would probably have given their right arms to be able to escape nature completely. If you gave them the choice between living in a wood and my grotty flat in Shepherd’s Bush I don’t think they’d have to think twice about it. But I didn’t let these facts shatter my illusions of the mythical notions of our Celtic past, even if I was just allowing myself to become a member of what was essentially a medieval version of UKIP.

  I allowed myself the fantasy, because I deserved the break from reality. I had been working much too hard. Days and weeks and months of my life had disappeared without me noticing them, like pages of a day-by-day calendar being ripped off by an invisible hand in a shonkily filmed 1950s movie about time travel. Now unencumbered by deadlines and bulging inboxes I could stop and smell the roses, or in this case the musty combination of dead leaves and animal shit of the forest.

  My senses sharp and vivid, I had the time to observe and enjoy the world around me: the way my shoe sunk into the damp earth, insects scurrying around the surprisingly life-like corpse of a fallen crow, the grotesque, yet alluring sight of a tree felled by lightning, its blackened, splintered trunk hopefully reaching upwards, as if it was unaware that its branches and leaves were gone. Something scampered through the leaves behind me and shot into a hole in the ground, as if fleeing from some unseen predator, its fear hanging palpably in the air.

  For months I had barely noticed the sky above my head, but now my eyes had become an electron microscope and could zoom in on a single petal or a dew drop on a leaf; my hearing had taken on superhero proportions and I could pick out the helium buzz of an individual midge. I felt relaxed for the first time in months, yet primed for any attack by a sabre-toothed tiger or mammoth that might be lurking in this ancient part of Albion. My imagination has not been checked for historical accuracy.

  The ground in front of me dipped and I stumbled, but stopped myself falling. Even though there was no one to see me, I carried out the whole self-conscious, dignity-restoring pantomime of pretending that the incident had never occurred, then looked down imagining some outside force had been responsible for the whole thing. Then I progressed gingerly down the slope.

  The house was so well hidden amongst the trees that I didn’t see it until I was only a few feet away. I wasn’t expecting to see a habitation so deep into the woods and perhaps my eyes had been focused on tiny details so weren’t ready to take in a large two-storey farmhouse. And the moment I had unscrambled the situation in my brain I was sent into a paroxysm of shock that saw me slipping backwards and falling on to my arse. A shadowy figure was seemingly staring out at me from the front window, its arms raised above its head.

  I performed an ungracious bum shuffle as half my brain told me to flee and the other half was instructing me to get to my feet and consequently there was frenetic movement, but I stayed more or less where I was.

  But fear turned to laughter as I glanced back at the window and properly saw what had spooked me. I lay down, relieved and shook my head. It wasn’t a person. It was a doll. Not just an ordinary doll, a hand-knitted, life-size representation of a boy of about ten years old. H
is skin was bright pink, his hair made from brown flaxen strands and he had a massive comedic, yet demonic, smile stitched from ear to ear. He had both arms raised above his head as if he was banging on the window.

  My laughter caught in my throat a bit. It wasn’t a furious madman, but this was still a strange thing to behold. It was hard to process why this woolly monstrosity had been made at all, yet alone placed in this position.

  The doll was wearing a real boy’s clothes – they hadn’t been knitted, but maybe bought from a shop or stolen from a dead child. Or a living child. I don’t know why my mind went straight to that morbid possibility. They might have been stolen from a sleeping child . . . Actually that’s rather more sinister. It conjures up the image of some stranger creeping into a child’s bedroom at night, spiriting their clothes away and the confused infant waking in the morning, unable to get dressed, wondering where his pants are.

  I was clearly spooked, but considering Woolboy more carefully did not assuage my fears. What the fuck was going on here?

  The windows of the house were barred. Was that to keep burglars out or the lanate child within? Were the owners of this house afraid that some international soft toy thief might want to break into their abode to spirit away this wonky abomination? Or were the bars there for our protection? Without them would this junior Guy Fawkes smash through the window with his mitten hands and run amok, strangling the populace with his loose threads?

  My imagination was running wild, but unless Woolboy comes alive when everyone is asleep (and for the moment I wasn’t discounting that as a possibility) then someone had deliberately knitted him and then placed him in their own window, seemingly pleading to escape, which was actually slightly more unsettling than lifeless material self-animating.

  I decided to get out of this weird place as quickly as I could, jumped to my feet and scurried through the leaves and twigs. At the back of the house was a narrow muddy track with tyre marks cut into it, that I presumed led to the main road. The house had an unpaved and empty driveway with a sign next to it saying ‘Don’t even think of parking here!’

  I thought that was unnecessarily aggressive. We were in the middle of nowhere. I don’t think anyone would think of parking there. Unless there was a sign expressly forbidding them from parking there, in which case they would have to think about parking there. It’s a sign you have to disobey the minute you’ve read it. You can’t read it and not on some level think about parking there. Whoever put that up must know that. They know you have broken their rule if you are aware of its existence. Presumably if you nonchalantly drove in without seeing the sign it wouldn’t be a problem. ‘Did you think about parking there?’

  ‘No, I just drove in without thinking.’

  ‘Right, well that’s OK then . . . are you thinking about parking there now?’

  ‘Well I am now.’

  This whole place gave up the unsmellable stink of craziness. Instinct told me to get away from there as soon as possible. I didn’t really even think about where I was going. Perhaps common sense should have sent me back the way I came, or at least along the muddy road that led to civilization. But I blundered forwards deeper into the wood.

  And I was now thinking of something that hadn’t crossed my mind for three decades. I had felt this fear before in almost identical circumstances. When I was fourteen I’d been on a school trip to Devon and been walking in the woods with a few of my classmates. We’d come across an isolated farmhouse hidden in the trees, with a similar air of sorrow and loneliness. There were dolls in the window of that house too. Is that a thing? If you decide you’re going to live alone in the middle of a forest is there something that clicks inside you and says, ‘Right, well, better sort some dolls out for the windows, then.’ These ones weren’t knitted, but bought from a shop, yet still in their boxes, still in their cellophane. These three dolls stared out from the three upstairs windows. Because if you’ve bought some dolls to decorate your house you don’t think, ‘I’ll put those looking into my bedroom so I can enjoy them,’ you think, ‘I’ll place those staring out into the woods like they’re evil sentinels ready to launch themselves at any overly curious teenagers.’ There was a Christmas tree in the lounge even though it was June. And that house had a weird warning sign too. On the door it said, ‘Beware of the very viscous Alsatian’.

  We were over-confident and clever-clever swots, so we laughed heartily at this mistake. But one of us suggested, ‘Maybe there’s really a very watery dog in there.’

  ‘Yes, if you break in it will come running at you, jump up and explode into a pool of Alsatian gloop – how will I get this out of my clothes?’

  ‘You don’t even have to break in. A viscous dog can sense you’re outside and then slide out under the front door like a canine Terminator.’

  ‘He might even be a friendly dog. It’s just a warning not to pet him. Please don’t stroke our viscous dog, you’ll disturb the surface tension.’

  We had walked away laughing, but I had been chilled by this house and later wrote a bad teenage poem trying to guess who lived in this place, which I described tellingly as ‘lonely as a mind’.

  Back in the present day and the house and Woolboy were five minutes behind me and I was already starting to find the situation and my own petrified reaction slightly amusing. Clearly some eccentric granny had knitted the child and then maybe placed it in that position as a joke, or as a greeting to their own grandchild (though what kind of grandmother would live in such an inaccessible location?). But even though wool is not the best medium for creating human expression I couldn’t shake the feeling that the face had been forlorn and pitiful. Pleading maybe. For a second I thought I should return to the house and free this imprisoned cuddly toy. I was being ridiculous of course and I ploughed blindly onwards.

  Then I stopped. In front of me on the path was a big black dog. I don’t know the breed, but the kind that you sometimes see scary men dragging along on a piece of string. It was much wider than it was tall, and had huge haunches, like it spent three hours a day in the doggy gym. It was standing there, looking at me, panting and displaying its teeth, which looked vicious, though the drool emanating from its jowls did give them the appearance of viscosity as well.

  The dog had a collar on, so I expected to see its owner rounding the corner at any moment and calling it to heel. But no one appeared. The dog looked at me as if daring me to move. I stayed still and looked back, ready to flee if it tried to run-waddle at me.

  After what felt like minutes a tall, thin middle-aged man in a flat cap slunk out of the shadows. He didn’t acknowledge me, no friendly greeting, not even a nod. He just walked by me, a little too close, with the dog following.

  Just as he got behind me the man stopped stock-still and started fishing in his pocket for something. Now I was properly terrified. Was this the man who owned the house? Had he knitted the boy? Was he looking at me and thinking, ‘He’s thinking about parking in my parking space. I warned him not to. Why is he doing that? He has to die.’

  In this moment I was convinced he was a serial killer. Perhaps his gimmick was to knit his victims in their last seconds. The ten-year-old boy had made it to the window but no further, the bars blocking his escape. Maybe the whole house was a woolly mausoleum, with yarn-based effigies of the terrified dead in every corner. I wondered if the mummified remains of the unfortunate dead lay inside these handmade sarcophagi. Was this man, faceless due to the shadows cast by the peak of his cap, reaching for his needles and a ball of wool? Was his dog about to jump on me and envelop me in a watery sphere that I could not escape from, which would roll me back to the house where my remains would rest, encased in sheep fur, until the authorities finally stumbled across this museum of death and knitting?

  I’d have given anything to be back in Shepherd’s Bush at this moment. We’ve got knife crime, we’ve got feral children swearing at you for going about your business, we’ve go
t tramps openly shitting on the pavement in broad daylight. But there are not Woolboys battering on windows and there are plenty of people around to hear you if you scream.

  For whatever reason the man in the woods let me live that day. I think he might just have sized me up, realised he hadn’t brought quite enough wool to craft my somewhat stocky frame.

  I broke into a jog and then a run and emerged from the woods and headed straight for the train station and my home. If you go down to the woods today, you might not be so lucky.

  Halloween

  tim key

  Richard decided to give his missus a fright on Halloween night.

  He chopped his head off and hid it in the freezer.1

  But by the time she opened the freezer he was so weak he could barely say ‘Boo!’

  And there was that much blood on the ready meals her main emotion was one of fury.

  1I’m thinking here about a freezer like the one we used to have in our garage or like the one the thugs put a man into in the film Shallow Grave. A chest freezer, I think is its technical name. The one in our garage had things like frozen casseroles and pizzas in it. Sometimes I’d put on shoes if I had to go to the garage and get something from the freezer and other times I’d go in just my socks. You had to walk sideways to get past the car.

  Fixed

  rufus hound

  Nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  Then, very suddenly, not nothing.

  Waking up has prerequisites – chief amongst them that, initially, something is asleep. This wasn’t that. Nothing had been asleep, and yet, here, now, something was awake. It was confusing. From absence to presence, from zero to one, from death to life – how? Why? Where? Whatwhatwhatwhat? Who?

  Mere moments ago there was nothing capable of asking a question – of even understanding the concept of questions and yet, now, too many of them; complete incomprehension, bombarded by a screaming desperation for answers, for any speck of information that would make some – any – part of this make sense. Like waking up whilst drowning, but with death as its genesis, rather than its feared conclusion.