Accident? I didn’t think so. Thin People? Well, the trouble is I thought I’d seen one of them…maybe. So they were either real or it was a bad case of the dt’s. Whichever, it had scared me enough I packed my bags (plastic bags, that is) and portable typewriter, and got out.
And as for Lois or Lori or Lorraine (shit, I can’t even be sure of her name now) I’ve done almost as good a job of forgetting her as I thought I had done of forgetting the Thin People. So may your poor buried ashes rest in peace, Diary.
But as for the Thin People—
—I hate to admit this, but there have been reminders…
Diaries go year by year, usually. And so do you, Diary. Or you should but you’re three years out of date, just a notebook now. Still, what the hell, I can talk to you because you’re not a shrink and you can’t talk back. Or maybe you can.
Let’s turn one or two of your pages back to find that time I took a holiday in Cyprus. The sun, the sea, and the sand. And no booze. I was over it. I had a good job up in the north-east, Newcastle, and I was in control. All those bars, those alfresco tavernas—all that cheap Keo beer in big brown bottles—that Metaxa, clear Ouzo, dusty resinata? Hell, no! No way! Make mine a diet Coke. Water, even. How clean can you get?
And I would look at the holidaymakers in the Cypriot night—all tipsy, some stoned, others flat out—and think, “God, what clowns we make of ourselves!” But now, when I think about clowns, I think of something else.
Clowns: they used to scare me as a kid and still do, even more now. But I’ll get to that.
Out there in Cyprus, however, well it was a great holiday. Only one thing spoiled it; one little nothing kind of thing, a dream I had that turned into something else. And here it is as I wrote it down in your pages, Diary:
…I think I was dreaming about those Thin People that Barmy Bill told me about—I think I probably dream of them quite frequently, but can’t remember too much about it when I’m awake. Just as well, I suppose. Old Bill told me they looked a lot like men in the daylight—not that they were out very much in the daylight—but that at night they were more themselves. At night they unfolded themselves, like a joiner’s wooden ruler but fifteen feet long and incredibly thin. He said it was their science, totally different from ours, which let them manipulate matter differently. That was how they could do things with their bodies; even with…well, other bodies. Bill said their joints must be similar to the joints of certain insects…
So that’s what I was thinking, or dreaming, as I came awake in my hammock under the grapevines, in the garden of the hotel where I was staying, near the British military base in Dhekelia. Or was it?
Perhaps what I saw as I slowly woke up reminded me of that time in Barrows Hill. So that I wasn’t so much dreaming as reflecting—constructing or maybe reconstructing one event from the other—until both events merged, flowing into each other in the surreal interval between true dreaming and full consciousness.
But as for what I actually saw as I awakened…well, that was more dreamlike than a dream! In fact, and if I didn’t know it now to be a natural phenomenon, I would have to say it was nightmarish.
Who am I kidding, it was nightmarish!
Close by. In the cropped grass, I noticed that a small area of the ground was moving…
Now consider: the place where I was staying was rather rare on a Mediterranean island, insofar as the garden had real grass. And the owner was very proud of it. He watered it daily and cut it twice a week—despite that it didn’t need it. I saw him watering and cutting away at it that morning. Maybe that’s what caused it, made the earth damp and brought about a disturbance.
Anyway, a small patch of ground nearby was moving. And lying there on my side in the netting—surfacing from what was probably a deep sleep—I saw a run of cropped grass blades parting as the soil beneath them bulged upward, forming a hummock three or four inches long and two across.
Then the earth broke open, and this thing nosed its way out. Emerging slowly at first—shaking the soil off its furry little body—it came out, and I knew at once what it was. It was a mole! Or at least the first part of it was, the first couple of inches.
But a mole with antennae?
And I think I can be forgiven for believing that I was still asleep and dreaming…because then the rest of it pushed its way out.
Okay, those first couple of inches: I saw these legs—mole legs, covered with bristling fur—then the dark hairy snout, and a furry mole body. So far so good. But not really. Because sticking out from the snout were these antennae, and halfway down the mole body was an oddly jointed pair of insect legs! And if I hadn’t been awake before, well I certainly was by then.
The rest of the body emerged—the thorax, as I now know it to have been. No fur, just three inches of unpleasantness, of long, folded-back spiky-tipped wings, and another pair of those thorny insect legs. Until finally it was out in the open.
I looked at it wide-eyed, and this thing looked back at me, through eyes like tiny red faceted beads. Then it shook itself one last time, opened its wings and flew. I heard the whirring—ducked as it seemed to come right at me—almost fell out of my hammock as it buzzed close overhead…
Later I spoke to Costas, the owner of the hotel. He laughed when I told him how I’d nearly fallen…and he told me what I’d seen: a mole cricket. There weren’t too many of them, but neither were they very rare. My opinion: those nightmarish little bastards should be rare! And extinct would be even better…!
…Back home, I checked it out in a book at the library. A mole cricket, sure enough—genus Gryllotalpa—an “injurious insect.” Well, the damn thing very nearly injured me, for sure!
So there you go, Diary: a flash-back of sorts, reminding me of those Thin People in Barrows Hill who might or might not have been a result of my drinking. Except now I’m pretty sure they weren’t. I mean, there are so many things in the earth—and on this Earth—that we don’t know about. Okay, so people know about mole crickets. Some people do, even if I didn’t. But what if there are other things, species that are unknown, that no one has ever seen? Or if they have seen them, did they know what they were seeing? And I’m not just talking about the Thin People…
So what am I talking about, eh, Diary? Well, it’s this new thing. Except (God help me) I’d been drinking again, and can’t really be sure. But I’m pretty sure…
A fair was in town. Now usually, these days, a fair is no big deal. In England they’ve sort of dried up, lost a lot of their appeal; not to kids—no, of course not—but among parents. I mean, who can afford them any more? The rides and sideshows are too expensive, and you need a cast-iron stomach to handle the greasy rubbish they sell from the fast-food stalls. What’s more, it’s a very rare fair that doesn’t attract rain. It can be bright and summery in the morning—“autumnal” in the case in question—but from the moment those big artics and painted wagons start rolling in, look out! Here come the thunderheads.