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I quite liked it, but for something that seems to be a chiller/horror - modern M. R. James, I'm thinking? - the pace seems a tad leisurely and I agree with the concerns about the voice - it veers a bit between modern and cod-19th century idiom, no doubt because of the fact that most of these tales (Poe, Doyle, James etc.) are of that era.
The character of the Landlord comes through strongly though, and I don't think you want to lose his bumptious prickery - it's always fun to see that type of protagonist rent limb from limb (presumably we're not going to be denied that?)
Greet Obble is a fab monster name. Could we have a bit more description of the myth and the monster's appearance, taste in prey, favourite times/places to stalk abroad though? That's exactly the sort of detail that local legends always give, and I want to be a lot more scared or apprehensive and intrigued by the monster than I currently am.
General textual issues: please don't be offended - I've gone through the text and made the amendments (bolded) and comments (italicised) I would make if this were given to me as hardcopy in class. See below for the "edited" version, hope it's useful.
The scene was repulsive. You will know all the official details from the report, but I think you should read this text, which we found at one of the men's houses. By chance, it is recent and pertinent. It gives a human touch to the tragedy, however one might feel about the man's character. Let us hope that it allows us to learn something about, and from, these events.
***
Very few people, I think, should be allowed to write memoirs. The form demands a life more interesting and worthy than most, and unfortunately, those predisposed to writing and “the arts” often live a boring life. Not so I: the life of an English publican is nothing if not exciting. His customers present an array of diverse challenges, just as the charges of the kindergarten teacher do - except hers are rarely possessed of such brute strength and will. For this reason, I have decided to make a start on my autobiography, and so I pad out my usual diary-keeping tonight. Recent business has made me stop considering keeping a record of my life, and pushed me into the action of writing one.
Let me start by telling you about Willis. One Wednesday we found Willis hunched in the corner of my Inn, the Feathers, in the village of Abbingdale. His eyes were open, but he wasn't seeing anything, you could tell - the pupils were massive, taking up the whole eye, like a mouse’s. It was a severe overdose - the silly old bastard had raided the bathroom cabinet and now, bowtied, white-haired, he was no man, just a shaking mound of white meat (not sure about this image – it’s a bit strained and hard to visualise). He must have chucked down his selection before he came out - Cheryl served him a drink - and then he went and sat in the corner on his own, like he always did, and waited for it all to take effect.
Now, Willis had plenty of reasons to try it: the wife had disappeared at some indeterminate time before we all knew him, and like any rustly (do you mean rusty?) academic he didn't like talk (What do you mean by this? “Talk” as in gossip, or talk as in conversation? Academics aren’t notorious for not liking to converse). He kept a private address book of friends as distant as the non-identities one flicks through in the Yellow Pages. He was almost the perfect candidate - except that Willis wasn't the type to even consider such romantic notions as topping himself(less pretentious)(to use the phrase of the youth, though they notice none of the implied meaning). ( Which implied meaning? Do you mean that “topping oneself” could also mean “exceeding oneself”?)
They'd tried to teach him Blake at school, but he had resisted. He had a passing fondness for the Histories but couldn't be bothered, so he would fluster (flounder?) in rare bursts of conversation, with all that bloody Ant'ny and Cleopatra business. He knew about seventeenth century pistols, and had a few books about swords, but he would never have fallen on his own. Nice Roman reference, but I think this para should be part of the one above as it’s still about his possible suicide)
All this was running through my mind when I went to visit him in hospital on Saturday. He was sitting upright in bed, looking very small in all that white cloth (sheeting? ). They hadn't put any tubes in him, but even so he looked worse for wear, as if he'd managed to get rid of a chunk of himself even if he'd failed at death. (I would rephrase this, it’s a bit clunky. “As if, despite failing at death, he’d nonetheless managed to diminish himself”? Or summat.)
“Oh Christ”, he said when he saw me.
“Pilate”, I said. “I put people up for the night.”
“Was that a joke?” (Was it?)
He glared at me as I sat down on the chair beside him. His pupils had reverted to their normal, beady state.
“Cheryl sends you this”, I said, opening the knapsack. “She says she's sorry she couldn't come and see you.”
“Marmalade?”
“Yes.”
“But I don't have any bread!”
He was petulant, and then his glare melted into a sigh of anguish. (Visual to aural – combination of confusing and amusing! Rephrase?)
“Why didn't you finish me off, Toby? Eh?”
“Oh, for Pete's sake, Willis!”
“I mean it! Why didn't you just give me a quick whack with the shovel?”
His nasty hands (nice) were clamped on mine. Not for the first time, I regretted the parental status that comes with running an Inn.
“I hope”, I said, “that you don't judge your friends on how ready they are to whack you with a shovel. What would you do if you found me knocked out?”
“You - if you knew...”, he started, and then stopped, and looked forlorn.
I got up and pulled the curtain around the bed. There were only one or two others on the ward, but they were staring.
“If I knew what, man?”, I asked. “Is it this wife business? It is, isn't it?”
“No. No, it isn't. She means nothing to me.”
“Well what is it, then? Or are you just trying to join Generation X?”
He blinked, and then he leaned very close to me, and said-
“It's Greet Obble.”
“What?”
He looked at me with seal pup eyes. (Fab!) He was absolutely serious. I shook my head and said:
“You've lost it. Greet Obble? My bloody grandchildren are afraid of - what on earth do you mean?”
“I saw – I -”
His voice trailed off, and then he glared at me again.
“I knew you wouldn't believe me.”
“Believe you? But that's...you might as well say that Peter Pan was after you! What are you saying, you had, you had nightmares about Greet Obble?”
He sighed. There was an awkward pause while he stared at the ceiling, and then he looked at me again.
“I had some visitors.”
“What?”
“Some young men.”
“What, plumbers?”
He kept his eyes on me and waited for me to catch on.
“Oh. Oh, I see, Willis. Well, you know, we all-”
“I paid them good money. They brought some beers for the evening.”
“Yes?”
“And, ah, we drank our beers, and then they also had some, ah, some pills-”
“Oh, Willis...oh, you stupid bastard...”
He shrugged his shoulders in a way that was almost coquettish.
“I'd been thinking about what a jolly sensible chap I've always been, and I thought, you know...why not splash out a bit.”
“So you, bearing in mind your age, you took these pills, did you?”
“Oh, Christ. I took them alright.”
“And what happened?”
“Oh, Christ. Oh -”
His face became pallid ( cut “in a wave”).
“I - oh, I was laughing at first, and I saw that they hadn't taken theirs, so I was stroking their chins telling them to eat up, and giggling, and then - oh Christ -”
He shuddered.
“Then there was such a heavy weight. Bang, down on the floor. It was like being a pressed flower in someone's book. I was crawling along like a weevil - then it was dark - and then -”
“And then what?”
“Then I woke up on the carpet, I'd somehow got to the dining room, and I was looking up through the French windows - into the garden...”
I had seen the garden Willis was talking about. It was impressive, a good long lawn with big rhodedendrons, and it backs on to the old forest, a very respectable forest, which is only kept out by a wooden fence. The words seemed to be stuck in his throat.
“Go on”, I said. “Tell Uncle Toby. I won't be “mad” at you.”
“Oh Christ! It was awful - it was there - just in the tree line - where you see the shadows merge into one another - in all that mess - right there, looking at me - big black mouth...Greet Obble! I wanted to close the doors...it was coming to get me...oh...”
I nodded slowly. His hand was clasped on mine again.
“So”, I began. “So you took some drugs that some...some chaps gave to you (nice phrasing), and you had a bad trip. And you think you saw Greet Obble.”
“I know I saw it!”
I sighed, and put on my best Vicar voice.
“Greet Obble is a made up character we have to keep the village kids from running off into the woods, because kids are silly bastards who trip over logs and eat toadstools. You didn't see Greet Obble. You were out of your silly little head.”
“You don't understand! It's like ripping back a curtain, a veil - I know it'll be there, looking at me -”
“No, it's like a silly old bastard who messes around with things reserved for the young and stupid. Now, look. What about those boys? Where did they go?”
“They took some cutlery and a watch. The front door was hanging open.”
“Well, that's taught you a lesson.”
He shivered again. I made to go.
“Look”, I said. “Enjoy this marmalade. For Cheryl. And I respect you for telling me this. Like most things, you simply have to let it out, so it can shrivel up in the sun. Next time, don't let it get to the point where you're trying to do yourself in.”
He nodded forlornly, and I left.
The next day, Sunday, today, we left the Inn in the hands of our lieutenants and had the grandchildren over. My daughter swept by in a haze of hello's and deposited the two toddlers on our living room carpet, kissed them, kissed Cheryl and me, and then was off, to some sort of horse event in the county. I sat with the children and performed some amusing if taxing monkey impressions, to rapt applause from my audience.
When the hoots became too much, Grandma, (as Cheryl thoroughly enjoyed being called, ) sent me to the loft to fetch down the building bricks. Now, some men make a second home of their sheds, but for me, the loft is the place to be: it's where I store old trunks of things from my youth and young manhood, including various trophies, official and otherwise, from Cambridge, and a stuffed badger whom (I think) Cheryl hates and with whom I have good conversations.
There is also a large skylight, at an angle that lets me look out over the village. This time, I looked at the roof of Willis's house, visible above the trees, cut off by a long finger of forest from the rest of the village, and then across at the old steeple, built by or at least in the name of Richard the Lionheart over a Norman base, and then further on across the tangled, coiling forest of yew and oak and poplar. You can't see it from the window, but in the middle of the forest there is a large pond with ducks. In summer it becomes infested with model boat enthusiasts, but in the autumn, it is largely free of distractions and an all round pleasant place to be. I decided that I would like to take the grandchildren for a walk there, when they had finished with the blocks. As it turned out, the blocks were a massive success, and Cheryl told me that I might as well take a walk myself.
To get to the pond, one takes the tarmac road down through the village, past the church and the monument, and then on to the rough track that turns off and under the line of the trees. Once under the canopy, the road seems to shrink and lose volume until the buzz of cars is only as loud as the humming of insects, and a loud bird-call can overpower it, and shortly after that the noise of human occupation disappears entirely.
It gives one time to reminisce. It won't be too much of a construction (A what now? Are you sure this is the word you want?) for me to tell you that this time, I considered something at the root of my philosophy. I remember a street in Cambridge, buildings on either side, and in front of me, a young woman with a fabulous arse. A dirty, scrubby tramp came walking down the street in the opposite direction, and every person he met was roughly asked “Got any change?”, and then stared at as if it was some kind of moral duty of theirs to give up cash to this horrible little blue-bottle.
He asked the girl, who said no, and me, and I said no, and as I did so I caught the girl's eye. I made some sort of passing comment, something along the lines of “No luck, Jack”, she giggled, and that night we rolled together in an expensive hotel bedroom. Sorry, Jack. From that industrious night onwards I have been strongly aware that life really only comes to those who realise that giving out (Generosity? Charity?) can only be achieved in such a pitifully small amount (degree? ) that any attempt at selflessness will only end in tasteless parody.
I reached the pond ringed with trees, and looked around for ducks. I couldn't see any. They must have been hiding or nesting or something. The pond was silent and dark, the only movement being a slight ripple or wind flicker of grass atop the banks.
Poor Willis. As far as my wife knew, he had tried to do himself in because of a torturing phone call from his ex. Of course, I couldn't tell her the whole story. I had always privately imagined him to be the sort of chap who would indulge in leather and whips and whatnot, and it was not too much of a stretch to see him partaking in the renting of boys. A dirty faggot, to be sure, but I admired the way he subordinated his perversions to his work. I for one rather think a course in seventeenth century pistols (History of? Use of? Business end of? Maybe be more specific to make the joke work) would serve those hideous “campaigners” that one reads about very well, if not as nicely as a subtle hanging. (Nice paradox but not sure it works here.)
And what of Greet Obble? It was a fixture of local bollocks-talking,(nice) part of a venerable tradition. The rector often pointed out a worn carving on the church, battered by wind and rain to a smooth outline of some interminable (indeterminate, presumably?)figure, and said that was thought to be a representation of Greet Obble. Various workings on the misericords and the very oldest gravestones were sometimes attributed to it as well, although I doubted these. I once had a half-interesting (nice) conversation with some kind of trendy folklorist-linguist crossbreed at The Feathers. He was keen to tell me his theories:
“Greet, you see, like Girt or Gurt, can be seen as analogous with the modern Great. Obble is more interesting- perhaps linked to our Horrible or Horror, but of course reminiscent of the Northern Ob or Od for God.” He stroked his frankly ridiculous goatee beard. “Great Horrible. Great Horrible God. Who knows?”
I suppose someone must have talked to Willis, and told him the stories. They must have lodged in what the pretentious might call the subconscious, but which I prefer to think of as “Under the table”. Presumably the rent-boy's concoction had whisked away the table cloth, so to speak. It was certainly interesting to watch an old poofter go to pieces.
I spent a few more minutes idly wondering where the ducks had got to and then turned back. The trip, I decided, had not been the most interesting, but I had had a jolly good think. Then, just as I was about to set off, I was greeted by the figure of one Eddy Dascombe, a smashing fellow who I have a lot of time for, and his dog, faithful old Robert.
“You got the family around too eh, Toby?”
I laughed and we started to chat. Eddy manages a factory in the nearest big town, and so talks on a scale I don't have to shrink myself to. We talked about the trouble he'd been having, what with people demanding to be paid unreasonable wages and so on. Robert was straining at the leash, as dogs do, and so I told Eddy he might as well let him off for a while.
Unfortunately, this proved to be a mistake. On getting free, the animal, a Jack Russell, bounded straight to the water's edge and started yapping furiously. “There's no ducks for you, I'm afraid”, I said, laughing. Robert wasn't interested in the chidings of me or his master, however, and was barking away like some sort of dreadful reformer on a soap box. (nice)
We decided to let him do what he would and went back to talking, but then we were suddenly aware that Robert had bolted, darting up and over the bank and disappearing into the brambles, trailing the lead after him. We could hear him yapping away and gave chase.
In the event, we couldn't find him. The forest rather stretches on and on. (”Does go on rather”? ambiguity intended, I’m guessing) Dascombe became very down at heel (Do you really mean this? Not down in the mouth or downcast?), and so I agreed that tomorrow we would go and look for Robert. The day was rapidly becoming one of those where everything seems to collapse into a sort of tunnel of pessimism.
And so I end today's entry. We've got quite a posse together, what with Eddy, George from next door and myself. When we go to the wood tomorrow, I imagine we shall find what we are looking for. |
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