(16/02/95)

The world has ended, well it has as far as mankind is concerned. It was written in the Bible that a day of judgement would come, a day when mankind would die. That day has just arrived. In this transsmission I have enclosed a copy of the message which has been sent out to warm warn other people of the danger of going near earth. “This is a message to anyone who who may wish to come to earth to anyone who may venture onto the dreaded planets surface. Dont the planet is dead the only life is a race of deadly robots. They are indestructible they go can blow up spaceships or trucks and can even destroy whole planets. We the earthlings have created them and nobody, nobody can destroy them. They look like silver dogs but with faces more like hedgehogs. If they ever get to your planet you must escape get away it took GOD 7 days to create the earth and it shall take The Bugs 25 seconds to destroy it. MESSAGE END. This shall be my last message. GOODBYE P.S The 3rd world war begins in 2057.

Returning after a considerable hiatus thanks to the intervention of one Tom Crowley and his Story Etc podcast...

The BUGS saga dies with a whimper, rather than a bang in this wholly unnecessary third instalment that’s all tone and no substance. Clearly enamoured of the ‘last message by a doomed civilisation’ trope, this adds nothing to the story of the BUGS except an underwhelming description of their appearance that, once again, I definitely robbed off an old VHS box.

My Gran and Grandad’s house in Ayton, on the Scottish border, was a bit of a nowhere town. Just north enough of Berwick to count as basically proper Scotland, it had a few pubs, a few B&B’s, that spooky farm and not much else. The highlight for me was the local newsagent, where every morning that I stayed there, my Gran would walk with me and her small poodle Fifi to buy a ‘bag of rubbish’, her term for the childhood favourite, the 20p mix-up.

Standing, waiting for the sweets to be counted into the tiny paper bag or trying to bargain my Gran up to a bag of Winter Warmers (rarely permitted because they could damage your teeth, always a pyrrhic victory if not because they were basically horrible cough sweets), I would goggle at the selection of rental videos on display, which we only on the very rarest of occasions would be allowed to select. One video which we definitely wouldn’t have been allowed, at least not at that age, was Critters, the slightly grimy farm-set cousin to the higher budget Gremlins.

I eventually watched Critters a few years later, and liked it enough to pick up the sequel a year after that. But it’s the box-art we’re interested in here - in case you don’t remember it...

It was almost certainly a glimpse of this that convinced me there was a little bit more to be eked out of this BUGS nonsense, because I distinctly remember crafting their unlikely appearance as ‘silver dogs but with faces more like hedgehogs’ (you know, as you’d expect) from the silvery, hedgehog-y Critters...

SP

(15/02/95)

“I’m to old for this” mumbled Sam as he slowly pulled his wheelbarrow into the graveyard. He was a gravedigger and tonight he had to dig a very, very deep grave. He set to work digging, digging, digging. There was a squeak behing him he turned round but there was nobody there. Then his shovel hit wood.  Within 2 minutes he had dug up a wooden box around 2 foot long. He tried to open it but it held fast. He went home and returned with a crowbar. It broke open quickly. Inside was a human skeleton. Bloomin coffin he shouted. B ut then there was a movement in the bones and a rather plump rat ran to the surface. Then there was a very loud noise behind him. He turned round and there behind him were around around 100,000 rats there were all looking at him with there evil grin and red glowing eyes. Then they all jumped on him eating and scratche scrathing. Within 3 minutes there wasnt much left of poor own old sam. TO BE CONTINUED...

I think it’s fair to surmise that, as originally completed, there wasn’t supposed to be a sequel to this particular story. It seems to have been ret-conned with a ‘:1′, subtitle and a ‘TO BE CONTINUED...’ at some later date, which would also explain why there’s no cliffhanger to speak of, with poor Sam meeting his grisly end at a swarm of unexplained rats.

I say unexplained, they’re actually all too explicable, these ones coming straight from the poster/VHS art of the dubious 1990 Stephen King adaptation of the same name.

Like so many of these stories, I hadn’t actually seen the film in question at the time (I think I have since but it can’t have been very memorable) but managed to get the gist of the plot either from the video box or from the Daily Mail’s ‘Weekend’ magazine, which my Grandma used to save for me to read every Monday, and which had film listings for the coming weeks, with a short description and a symbol indicating the level of Adult Content present. There was (from memory) a ● for General Viewing, a ■ for Some Caution Advised, a ◆ for Moderate Content and a ▲ for Adults Only. I could generally always get away with a ◆, but only a ▲ if my parents had either seen it before, or if my Dad pre-vetted it before handing my recording over to me. Graveyard Shift failed at the first hurdle when my Mum stayed up to watch it, and declared that there was too much swearing in the first 5 minutes, which scotched the film entirely.

Other inspiration would have come from James Herbert’s Rats books, which I had only read scraps of in copies my Dad had left at my Grandma’s house from his teenage years. My parents were a little unsure of the suitability of them, so I was never allowed to take a copy home.

I did, though, manage to get into the Rats books by the back-door when, probably a few years after this story was written, I picked up Herbert’s graphic novel sequel, The City, a gruesome post-apocalyptic story in rotted reds, browns and bone grey that I read over and over again.

SP

(14/02/95)

Natturally the police investigation ended with haste. The murders continued on a nearly monthly bases, until one friday when I went to the pub to meet harry. He came to me and told me that I must come to his house tonight at midnight. Then he left. I felt nervous as I approached his house I could not think why. But when I got to the door it was locked, but the cellar door was wide open. I went in to try and find him. As I went in the door slammed behind me I was left in the dark. There was a scuffle and I heard a CLUMP. I took out my tourch and switched it on. All around the room people were standing. But they were horrible they had empty eye sockets and holes made by maggots all over there faces. In the middle of them was harry. Meet my family. At that time I fainted. I was found 100 miles away at the side of the f road. I got out of hospital 5 weeks later harry was gone his house was empty. He definetly had the Family of the Damed.

I have an enduring love of stories and plays that prominently contain their own titles, which I’m glad to see was already present aged 10. I’m also glad to see that Harry did it after all, having been rather worried that there might be a Harry-shaped plot hole at the centre of this three-parter. 

It’s actually a reasonably satisfying conclusion, and though I’d initially worried that Laura Kedling appeared and vanished again for no reason, I’m actually pretty sure that the idea is that Harry was pillaging graveyards to build himself a surrogate zombie family. It’s another plot that owes its inspiration to the VHS sleeve of Braindead, of course, but it’s actually quite solidly setup, with the early mention of Harry’s lack of a family when he buggers off early from the pub.

I’m not quite sure why our narrator gets packed off 100 miles away from Oaklea at the end. Maybe Harry put him in the back of his car and dropped him off as he fled town with his new family in tow. Presumably, also, Harry is in fact some kind of necromancer or mad scientist as well as being an inveterate pub-leaver. It’s heart-warming that he kept up his weekly pints with the narrator, despite his presumably quite strenuous regime of grave robbing and corpse re-animation.

Pubs held a strange fascination for me, probably because my family so rarely went to them. My Gran and Grandad ran a hotel when I was very young, the Wheatsheaf in Fife, so I had warm recollections of afternoons spent swinging on my stool by the jukebox and buying small bottles of pineapple juice, but apart from rare bar meals and the like, the only time I actually went to the pub was during our annual holidays to Gorse Hill caravan park in North Wales.

They had a sort of family restaurant/pun that we’d go to of an evening, where I’d have a ginger beer and a packet of Bombay Mix. But other than that, they were pretty mysterious places. I have, I’m glad to say, thoroughly made up for lost time in that particular department.

Cheers.

SP

(13/02/95)

By that afternoon to the whole town of oaklea was in a uproar. This was the first case of Graverobbing for 60 6 years weeks. The next night there was another 3 graves were robbed. I began to suspect my friend harry of it and so the next friday I confronted him about it. He said nothing just stomped off looking grim. Many thought that the graves were being robbed by the local hel hospital but it was proved not guilty of the crime. Then the murders began. They were vicious and brutal and in every case it seemed that the corpse had been eaten alive. But on one door of a victim there was a fingerprint in blood. There was an enquiry and for weeks nobody was found. But then the prints were found to match a woman called Laura Kedling. They searched all of the towns records to see where she lived they found a photo of her but then found that she had been dead for 60 years.

The town of Oaklea has stayed remarkably calm for somewhere which apparently reacts in surprise at no grave robbings for the past month and a half. The ‘Re-Animator’ vibes continue here, with an impossible bloody fingerprint and the suggestion that the local hospital might have been responsible for the corpse-snatching. Thank God they were cleared in the ‘enquiry’, which presumably went something like ‘Are we in the 1830′s? No? Then it probably wasn’t the local hospital then.’ I’m not sure when the last body was Burked in the UK, but I reckon it was a good few years before 1995.

Elsewhere, Laura Kedling provides some more fodder for fans of dreadful character names, and our pub-leaving friend Harry seems to be off the hook? OR IS HE? Tune in next time for the thrilling climax!

SP

(12/02/95)

The town of oaklee is we weird in two ways. one over 12 bodys have gone missing from graves in the last year. That is pretty strange but not considering the second thing that second thing is the story I am about to relate. A story that nobody will ever v forget. It took place 2 months ago in a small house just outside the town. It all began in a pub one night. I was sitting at the bar with my friend. We were chatting about work my friend was called harry and as far as I knew lived on his own in a the house I refferd to at the beguining. He had often said that he wanted a family. The next week harry said he wanted to go home early. I agreed and he went quickly in the direction of the cemertery. The next week I asked him what he had been doing he wouldnot answer me. That day he went away soon and once again headed for the cemertery. The next morning the paper reported that 2 bodys had been stolen from the cemertery.

First thought about this is how eerily prophetic it is of my future annoyance at people going home from the pub early, to be honest. Harry doesn’t even have a family to be getting back to, and here he is, shooting off after a couple of pints to go hang out in the cemetery. Outrageous.

Otherwise, we’re back to the standard model of multiple part stories, this one having a hint of the structure of one of my favourite episodic stories, which I suppose it’s possible I’d encountered by age 10: H P Lovecraft’s ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’. It was the first Lovecraft story I read, or perhaps the second after ‘Pickman’s Model’, and I found it both enthralling and, occasionally, terrifying. A copy of it came in Peter Haining’s peculiar Frankenstein Omnibus, which had a bunch of stories loosely inspired by Mary Shelley’s novel, of which I was an avid fan.

The story surrounds a medical student who befriends the wildly unethical experiments of the titular Herbert, and it’s a collection of absurdly ghoulish vignettes in which Herbert’s spirit of scientific inquiry wreaks havoc on the surrounding countryside. There are headless corpses dashing about with waxwork faces, dismembered fighter pilots bursting into terrible life in bubbling vats of re-animating chemicals, and some weird bits with a dog or something that I can’t quite remember.

Lovecraft apparently hated the story, which he knocked off for the cash as a magazine serial, and it certainly bears the marks of his own issues with the episodic story, namely that he feels the need to re-cap everything that has happened at the start of each section, so that by the end three-quarters of the running time is just going over everything that’s taken place in parts 1-5. Anyway, I loved it, probably still do, and you should definitely put aside half an hour to read THAT before you come back for anymore of this absolute toot. There’s also a pretty good film of it, that gets name-checked in American Beauty, which is probably as close as any of the inspirations for this collection got to an Academy Award.

SP

(11/02/95)

July 6 1997

We set off on our car journey as if it was any other. We were driving to a airport and it was around 10-o-clock. 2 of the children were asleep but one of them (the oldest one) had stayed awake. It was a long journey and we had only travelled for 2 or so hours (it was around midnight) when the child who had stayed awake (sam) started saying he could smell petrol. The tank was leaking. So we stopped at a laybye to fix it. It was a small laybey with only enough room for one car at the edge there was a small black and white sign, with the words M213 written on it. We heard a scream coming from sam at the back of the car. We asked him what was wrong he replyed theres something behind the sign. I went out to check and there was nothing there. When I got back to the car there were no children in the back just a group of green skeletons grinning away with blood dribbling down there chins they jumped at me. I ran.

Strangely enough, I have an extremely precise memory for this story’s origin, one of my most vivid from this period of my childhood. As mentioned on a Tumblr passim, every second weekend between the ages of 4 and 16 I would be taken by my parents to stay in my Gran and Grandad’s lovely house (long since sold, sadly) in Ayton on the Scottish border.

Ayton is roughly 100 miles from my house, so it was a two-hour drive, which would usually take a little over two hours. My Dad would finish work as early as he could, we’d have our tea, and then usually make a start for Ayton soon after 8pm. We’d drive from Allendale through Hexham to Newcastle along the A69, and then switch to the A1 for the long road north.

Me and my sister Heather would take up the back seats, until September 1995, when we were joined by our youngest sister Iona (the three children featured here providing more evidence in the favour of these stories being written in 1996, fact-checkers) who would be stowed in her car seat between us.

At that age, I was never really content unless either watching an old horror film or reading a book, preferably a horror book, and so my Dad had small reading lights installed on the door by my side, which switched on with the turning of a small brass pin. Angled downwards, they allowed me to read to my heart’s content without creating a glare to reduce the driver’s visibility.

Anyway, one such journey, our car experienced a routine problem, possibly the one described here if I wrote this story soon after and in response, and we pulled into a lay-by. It was dark, and Dad was out looking under the bonnet and generally fossicking about.

I was looking out of the window, playfully nervously, in that I was half-hoping to see some ghost, ghoul or revenant scarecrow flitting through the Northumbrian motorway night. And I didn’t. I’m absolutely certain I didn’t. But I did look at a large motorway sign, one of those blue ones probably, and imagine that I saw a horrible face peeping over it, red eyes, slimy jaw - just for a moment. And I scared myself, was scared, so badly that I had to turn off my reading light, close my eyes, and spend the rest of the journey thinking happy, un-monstrous thoughts until the car pulled into my Grandparents drive an hour later.

Whether writing it down in this book, which I do vaguely remember doing, cemented the event in my memory, or whether I really just was that scared of whatever ghoul I’d imagined spying on us in an M1 lay-by I’ll never know.

SP

(10/02/95)

Christien looked at his mothers body. He had stuck a knife in her heart just a few seconds ago. He had always hated her. He had been planning it for months and already had a deep hole dug under the cellar. He began to drag her body down the stairs to the cellar. When he got to the bottom of the stairs he dropped the body down the hole. He started to fill it in with his trowel. A noise came from behind him and he jumped dropping the trowel down the hole. He filled the rest in by hand. That night he was woken by the sound of scratching coming from the cellar. He told himself it was rats. The next night it got louder. Until one night he heard it stop and he heard something coming up the stairs. It opened the door he felt a pain in his heart then died. When the police came they found 2 dead bodys a mans and a womans the woman had a trowel in her hand.

More Poe! More bloody Poe! The ingredients of this story are a dollop of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (again), a snifter of ‘The Black Cat’ (again) and a pinch of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. What you can take away from that is, though I was an avid Poe fan, I had clearly only really read or at least taken in, about three of his stories. Expect more scratchings from floorboards, inexplicable parricide and vengeful revenants as the collection continues.

It’s my Mum I feel sorry for, as she certainly has never done anything to deserve the amount of parental slayings visited in these stories.

The trowel here seems an odd murder weapon, and it may be that I’d picked it up from George Romero’s original, brilliant Night of the Living Dead, where a spiked trowel is wielded by a zombie child on its mother to gruesome effect.

Or it could have been as innocent as the fact that my Grandma did a lot of gardening and, therefore, there were usually a lot of trowels around. Incidentally, my own copy of Night of the Living Dead was, almost sacrilegiously, a VHS of the abominably colourised Hal Roach Studios print from 1986, where the titular ghouls all have ridiculous green skin. ‘They scream louder in colour!’, apparently.

The title of this story, ‘Dead and Buried’, is ripped from an altogether different VHS, one which I never actually owned but which called to me from the shelves of Woolworths and HMV. It’s a sci-fi horror film which had an undeserved place on the Video Nasties list, one well worth checking out, and that’s a lot more classy than that vintage would suggest.

SP

(09/02/95)

Sam Smith lived in a small house in the scotish highlands. He loved walking and just down from where he lived was a long path which went right through a wood. That day it had rained and rained so he hadnt got out for a walk. It was pitch black dark now and the rain had just stopped. He decided that he would go out for a walk. The path was wet and slippery and even with his expensive walking boots he still had to walk slowly to avoid slipping over. As he walked along the muddy woodland path he heard footsteps behind him. He started to walk faster the footsteps became faster. Then a hand dropped onto his shoulder. He could feel warm wet foul smelling breath on the back of his neck. A voice behind him said “Hello” He felt a knife in the back of his neck warm blood tricled down his back. The voice began to laugh. “Hes dead I am dead too I am really.”

All right, I give up. I have absolutely no idea what has happened in this story. It all starts straight-forwardly enough, with a sort of ‘Fear of the Dark’ lite in which Sam Smith (not named for the brewery, at this point) goes for a walk in the highlands and is stalked by an unseen menace. But then just when it seems like it’s a pretty standard zombie encounter, it all goes fully peculiar when the stalker announces ‘Hes dead I am dead too I am really.” which means more or less nothing, as far as I can tell.

Answers on a postcard to the usual address.

I am intrigued by the mention of ‘expensive walking boots’, partly because I’ve just come back from a trip to Scotland, where a pair of presumably decent walking boots gifted to me by my Dad turned out to be an absolute godsend. But more because, prior to these current walking boots, I only ever had one other pair, expensive or otherwise, so I can only presume I’d been given them soon before this story was written.

Really reaching now, but it’s possible that this was a cramped attempt at managing a re-write of the Tales from the Crypt story ‘Reflection of Death’ anti-immortalised in a weak-ish segment of the 1972 Amicus movie, but an all time classic in the original comic book. In it, a driver who’s doing something broadly nefarious like having an affair or murdering his business partner, crashes his car and, having apparently escaped the crash, finds him self in a Groundhog Day style nightmare in which he repeats the same disaster again and again, each time coming face to face with his own corpse-like image in a mirror. One panel in particular is a gruesome masterpiece.

But who knows?

Anyway, my new walking boots are bloody fantastic. If, like me, you’ve always thought walking boots were for Squares, I suggest you educate yourself and Get Comfy..

SP