Published 'Heart Attack' 1992
The village of Emoss Crack could be discovered down a country lane, now forgotten, near Hoax Hill, way into the Southern Mysteries of this our green and pleasant land called England. Those who lived there had grown accustomed to isolation ... and only one still continued to commute northwards in the mornings, for work in the City. Most lived off the soil as best they could, whilst some village idiots were given special tasks such as closing up holes after others entrusted with spades and shovels had dug them.
It had one long main street, where the pubs and bank-fronts huddled close to the gossip shop and the pork butcher's. But, unlike other country communities, it had back streets and sunless alleys more fitting for a run-down city ... and, at night, if one wandered haphazardly, one may have seen misshapen kids playing dibstones in dark corners, cretin faces on the look-out from badly drawn top-floor windows and lurching red-eyed men in capes heading for somewhere they never seemed to reach.
Richard Wiles came to Emoss Crack the year before the War and, as he drove down Main Road in his clapped out Ford Popular, he could not help shuddering. It was something relating to the grey slate roofs and the people lingering outside the inn. He felt ill at ease, as one loafer, unbidden, offered to take the luggage from the boot.
"Thank you, my good man," said Wiles, but not without preventing a hint of suspicion in his register.
Wiles was deceptively tall, whilst his little pointed face seemed out-weighed by heavily framed glasses, giving the impression of a mime artist on a self-conscious crusade to find a wide-brimmed hat that actually fitted — unlike the one he now wore. He was professorial in his manner, sharp-witted in his after-thoughts, above all, lean and unswaying in his attempt to get from A to B, but via C.
The loafer with the luggage, grunting with the faint click of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, did not seem to want to look at Wiles,
Wiles followed him up the teetering steps of the inn and, forgetting most of what happened in the lobby, he finally reached his allocated room: Q-shaped, to encompass the ensuite toilet, with a square bed covered by a dirty brown eiderdown. A wardrobe that had the outline of the Devil's visage in the grain of the wood stood squatly at the back of the Q. Blocking most of the only window was a rifle chest with one fully cocked piece behind the grimy glass door. The wallpaper was frayed and drooping, ripe for the picking.
"This will do fine," Wiles said to the man who was even now placing the luggage on the only other piece of furniture: a green comfy chair with open arms and a fresh antimacassar. The loafer again grunted inconsequentially as he left the room.
The bed was hard and too short for Wiles' gangling body, but this drawback did not prevent him from falling into a deep sleep. He had come to Emoss Crack on behalf of a national newspaper, for there had been rumours that tombs were being mysteriously rifled. The Crack community had tried to keep this quiet, but information had seeped out into the surrounding area and, later, to pre-tabloid Fleet Street itself. Wiles was here to write an article on the desecration of tombs and, as he slept, he dreamt of keeping vigil in the Crack churchyard. He had a job to do and he would do it.
The next day, after having stretched his body to its normal length, he asked the way to the local police station, over breakfast served to him in a desultory manner by the village schoolteacher, who evidently helped out at the inn when it happened to have a guest. As Wiles knifed into a humourless fried egg, he heard the teacher state that the police station had been closed down and its uniformed staff moved to nearby Jester's Cross.
"Perhaps you can tell me," ventured Wiles, turning over his fried bread to see what was crusted underneath it, "I'm visiting Emoss Crack to write an article on ... its church history. Can you tell me the best sources..."
The teacher was no doubt one of the few people in the village who could maintain conversation at more than half-pace: "You could go and see Mrs Picklow at Grain End — she's been our local historian since anyone can remember. She comes on Thursdays to teach all about the past ... but she can't use the blackboard for fear of the scratching and the dust ... and of Uncle Hairlip who the kids have told her lives inside it."
The teacher explained the whereabouts of Mrs Picklow at that hour of the morning and, giving up the rest of his breakfast as a lost cause, Wiles strode down Main Road, dodging between some lame children scratching chalk-marks on the pavement for a hopscotch game. He did not go straight to Mrs Picklow, for he sat down on a bench to rest and gain his bearings. He would need to retrace a little and then sheer off towards...
...imperceptibly, a woman, about 50 or so, with a prune-like head, had sat down beside him: she gave Wiles a boss-eyed look from below a scalp that twitched noticeably every few seconds, her loosely curled hair moving up and down like an inland sea.
"Are you new here, deary?" she asked with a curious lilt in her voice.
"Well ... yes ... I am," he answered, half mesmerised by the hair.
"Oh, we don't see many new faces round these parts, ducks, we really don't. Such a pity, I always think, new faces brighten up a place, don't you think so, pet? Course you do. Everybody does. Stands to reason. You've come here to visit someone, I dare say?"
"Not really ... I am a student of history ... of church history, really. I'm here to study why this village has more churches than shops..."
"You're a writer, then ... give me a break, I can't even read meself."
"What do you spend your time at, madam?" he asked, beginning to be interested in perhaps extracting some local gossip from her, probably less unreliable, if more outlandish, than that to be gained in the shops.
"I'm a ... well, let's call it a seam-stress, a tail-oress..."
"And your name, if I can be so forward?"
"Mary ... Mary Fluck ... I live in the Fish Station..."
"The Fish Station?"
"Better than me saying, would you like a look round the Station?"
"That indeed sounds like a jolly good idea," answered Wiles, pleased that he was becoming friendly with one of the villagers.
The so-called Fish Station, unexpectedly, was not a half-way depot for Billingsgate Market in the City, but an old pub converted into a homestead. It was down a blind alley called Oats Farm. The pub sign still hung above the door, depicting some baying hounds, and Wiles recalled, unaccountably, the old nursery rhyme:
Beneath the Sign of the Dogs that Whine
Their tongues and scissors flicker;
Within the inn there grows a skin,
And the stew is crusting thicker.
In two minds, he followed Mary Fluck into the old pub, while enquiring about the derivation of "Fish Station". Her answer was vague: "It's where those that can't breathe in air end up for a while."
Inside, it was too dark to see much at all, but a large grey kettle was already simmering over an ambitious fire and a cat curled gently round his calves.
"I'm afraid it's not much, not what Mrs Picklow..." she began.
"Ah, don't worry, Mrs Fluck..." Wiles began to smile.
It took several seconds for Wiles actually to take in that the Fluck woman was beginning to divest herself. And before he could say Knife, she stood stark naked, her breasts drooping like bulbous onions with thick, blackening nipples. All her body hair coiled and crinkled. She began to attack his shirt with dress-making scissors snicker-snackering...
"Christ!" he shouted and rushed out of the door, the woman's curses following him into the street. Mrs Picklow was a much nicer woman to meet, but what she had to say did not permeate the state of shock the Fluck woman had instilled.
Wiles felt he was losing the ability to maintain a demarcation line between dream and reality, since arriving; but as he crouched in the Crack Church graveyard, absently watching the clouds and sportive moon, he recalled the night before in the Q shaped room, when there was scratching at the window... However, tonight, he was safer out here in the open, he thought, but couldn't quite rationalise why.
The tombstones, tilted sentries set against the moonlit sky, marked time. He had ensconced himself behind one such...
He caught the sound of scrunching footsteps as they approached up the church path, slow and arrhythmic. He tried to pierve the gloom with his eyes ... but, still, the footsteps shambled, louder, perhaps faster. Then he discerned the shape of a man, welling into view, clad in the shadowy wings of a large cape and with an arm that grew into a shovelhead. He came to a halt at a particular tomb and squatted to read the evident etching upon it. He then shovelled away at the soft soil, planting the earth in a heap behind him. Wiles watched, with shortening breath, as the dark outline of the ghoul clawed at the ground in stricken glee. He dragged the corpse from the fresh hole, and Wiles could no longer credit his faculties as he witnessed the ghoul hug and kiss it, delving his hands into rotting flesh. Then came the horror beyond all horrors heretofore: Richard Wiles finally sensed what freakish thing was clad in that cape: not a man at all, but the foul-grinning visage of one Mary Fluck, French-kissing the cold clayey lips of a corpse — the recognisable corpse of Wiles himself.
Wiles felt himself losing purchase upon his other body which had been crouching behind the tombstone. He floated in the air...
Staring up into the red beast eyes of Mary Fluck, he discovered himself fighting for her precious breath ... as the wagging fishtail tongue probed the corpse's throat, only to find the almost undigested remains of its earlier breakfast. Still crusted to its throat and even deeper.
This was the working through of one of Mary Fluck's curses — the terror of the tomb — whilst the village dogs whined distantly in pitiful mimic of hounds deeply baying.
“Mary Fluck was not exactly just another village idiot, nor someone who could simply play a flute louder than a fish-horn. (For God’s sake, how many pukka village idiots could one village have, anyway, without its whole culture as a village being corrupted?) But she was someone who could double-tongue a flute, not side by side, but end to end.”
Rachel Mildeyes (THE ART OF TELLING A STORY WITHOUT ACTUALLY TELLING A STORY vol ix Grooves and Guppies)
