The I...

CHAPTER ONE

By the dirty auld river.

They are an echo in the blue-black midnight industrial graveyard.

Their presence is the background chill of an awful murder scene, or the distant laugh the condemned man thinks he half-hears, as his final steps are taken to his execution. They are ancient. Their breeding ground is misery and their inheritance is torture.

They are the i…

Pronounced as the letter i in the word ink. No big, fancy, protracted, esoteric name.

No grandiose or arcane complicated evocations. Simply and wretchedly efficient.

The i…

The original life-form motivator. Both a generator and a consumer of fear, whose purposes end in madness and whose main intentions mean harm.

Ancient before the first empires thrived in the youth of human history.

Travellers from a world and a star far into deepest, distant space.

The i…

In the shadows which meet you in the dark places of the mind, in the pillow logic night. They swarm like moths and mutter quietly as a massive tragedy approaches, they laugh as the surprise disaster floors you, and then glow with delight in the face of your newly acquired soul. Just imagine losing something you never really thought you had, or if you did, what damned difference did it make anyway?

Arthur MacNeil walks down six flights of granite stairs and out of the Tyneside tenement on his way to work. Same set of steps for two decades, same job, same routine, same holidays off and weekends spoken for. He walks to save money. Unmarried and entirely habitual, his life unchanged and unchanging.

In the enormous dockyard, brick-built office he works as a draughtsman and knows every file and drawing stacked around three floors of dreary ink and paper business. He earns a better wage than that which the men working outside receive, yet his heavy black tweed suit is old and trimmed with dark leather on the cuffs and elbows. His sturdy shoes shine, despite their age.

He is quiet. His shirts are clean, threadbare and dusty. His attic flat is a neat and simple arrangement of small living-room, a tiny bedroom, a cupboard kitchen and a closet that works. Above all, the rent is cheap. Yet his home is orderly and functional. Arthur’s most treasured items being the bundles of letters from his mother, stacked into an old shoe box. Gas mantles burn low at night as he responds or reads. In old Gateshead, down in a warren of ancient houses soon to be demolished in the massive upheaval that the following decade soon will bring. This is his world. He grafts as hard as he may to keep his mother in rural comfort and care, far up the Tyne Valley, in an expensive nursing home, nested in the gentle woodland overlooking Hexam. Whilst he abides in haunted Pipewellgate, right by the dirty auld river, with the enormous span and towering supports of the High Level Bridge, casting a perpetual shadow on the maze of chares, or alleyways, and the sub-standard, semi-derelict tenements clustered below.

Every Saturday he takes the steam train early, out of Newcastle Central Station bound for Carlisle, stopping at Hexam. Every single Saturday, bar those where illness or malfunctioning engineering or weather forbid. After a day of gentle rambles and talks with his troubled mother, he stays in the same guest house in the little rural town, near the sculptured ruins of the old abbey. Arthur could not remember his father who had perished in the Great War in 1918. Dad was but a face in a faded photograph. A Royal Flying Corps uniform, that brave, clean-cut look, lost over France, his reconnaissance biplane, tail up in a foreign field. A folding issue penknife with lanyard, and his RFC cap badge and a rack of medals, his only reminders.

Sunday would see him take his dear friend and parent on a shorter walk, always by the river. Afterwards he would catch the train back to the dirty city in the afternoon, the fields and forests and farms flashing by unnoticed. Always he dwells on her words, always he holds their conversation, pondering, until the massive, black engine grinds into the grimy station platform. His routine, when walking to or back from the station, was to have a couple of pints in The Bridge Hotel, which helpfully was just over the High Level Bridge, and had become his local. Simply being there, having a beer, acted as a remedy to the disconcerting madness in his Ma’s words. Around him all was soon to change. The looming 1960s will challenge in ways he cannot yet know or prepare for. His beloved mothers death, the demolition of the Pipewellgate slums, unemployment and an appointment with alcoholism.

In that filthy, shadowy, industrial sprawl, as the massed workers of Tyneside grafted and lived their predictable lives, Arthur, the most predictable of all, held a knowledge of something terrible and dangerous. All his mother’s stories, all her dreams, every letter, her life’s obsession and reason for her illness, these things, the monsters that terrified her, the fiends she called the i…

The i…

Tyneside. 1960’s Northern England. A dreary black and white photograph of a place. Battered, derelict houses are widespread, the broken doors and smashed windows gape at the callous world. In a tenement on Bottle Bank, not far from the river, a gang of young teenagers kick an old piano down a stone stairwell. It rings and rackets its booted-in music whilst they laugh. As the faded walnut veneer and wood-wormed panels crashed into dusty splinters and the vandal’s symphony rang on the cold stone walls, something else was laughing.

The piano has no further to fall. It crunches to rest and thrums slowly towards silence. One of the gang stops mid step and glances back up the stairwell. He had half-heard a laugh, a dull-dry hollow sound. He can see nothing and spits on the exposed strings as he passes. Very soft and low, they ring.

The i… For such is their music, this is also what they are drawn to, the discordant and violent. In the wanton forte of a self-indulgent cacophony, whether it is the raucous destruction of an old piano or the arrogated avant garde and their mael-odies, the i …are near, waiting and watching. Finding a way into their quarry with a patience developed over thousands and thousands of years, on this planet at the very least of it. They scrutinize first to acquire later. They stalk and plan. Unseen, efficient, observant, and terminally deadly.

The lads pass around cigarettes and smirk at their handiwork. Outside a siren blares as it rushes by. The night wraps the city, its frozen winter fingers reach into the tenement hall. After their exertion they begin to feel the chill, their breath and exhalations billow into the gloom. Looking for swag in old houses, getting into fights and smashing up stuff, this was their world. These old buildings had good quality lead in the roofing, available if you had no fear of heights and a big brother to cash it in for you at the local scrap yards.

Nearby, a dingy quay, the is tide out and the stinking mud-banks glisten. In a deep trough of the river there is a small dock, a pool of ink in the gloom. Within its rancid waters rust prams and old knackered bicycles. Rib-cage hulls of old rotted boats, abandoned long ago, where now only fat river rats worked. Fag-ends float on the filth, half submerged bottles bob uselessly. The murk is rippling in the yellow light of a distant street-lamp. Above, the uncaring sky ranks a canopy of frozen vastness. Here is the Northern England no-one mentions.

A seventeen-year-old boy is limply flapping at the surface. He has been beaten so badly his spine is damaged and he cannot keep himself afloat in the stinking mire. Slowly, gradually, he is dying. He gasps and struggles and cannot accept this tragic, frozen demise. As he sinks, he thinks he can see a group of people standing on the dock in the shadows, dark, tall, and muttering. As he reaches towards them imploring for help, they begin to actually giggle and soon they are laughing outright. They find his death funny. The sick bastard things. They find each drawn out moment warms them. They are amused in this dreadful place. Such is their food, their nourishment.

The kid’s hair floats in the polluted filth, a used condom catches in the sway. Bubbles slowly diminish and soon all is silent. Except the laughing and the cold, mean, sense of humour. Whilst the solemn, freezing night that bridges the earth below greedily consumes all warmth. Physics cannot be argued with. The perishing cold logic of winter.

The i…

Delighting in filth and poverty, knowing too well that these are the fertile fields of human suffering. Anything that creates, encourages or develops grief, they are there, entertained by our troubles. Their low sickening laughter, hateful and sinister, confident that you are theirs to play with. They will enter the spaces where we dream, they will haunt the zones of our unconscious. Planting seeds of doubt and fear, they wait and watch as horror grows, slowly and painfully to an ancient plan. A story which always has the same ending.

The i…

Industrial smog thickened under the High Level Bridge stanchions, over in the West the sun was setting beautifully, but by the Tyne night had arrived. From the numerous pubs in the tightly packed slum area, yellow light and human noise leaked. The smell of beer and tobacco, the stench of Victoria’s most northern secret, that lost era fading before its final fall. This was the last of this place, a relic of a time about to be abandoned. Sagging slate roofs and the crumbling towers of chimney stacks climbed up the steep hill on the bank of the dirty river, all dwarfed by the massive black stone and iron bridge above. Demolition had begun upstream, wholly unique areas had been crushed to tired rubble and dust. Gone forever. Gone.

Many rooms and houses were derelict. Within the shattered windows, shuffling dossers and tramps would bed down, once the gangs of quarrelling kids had finished their battles and roughneck games. The river rolled by, dead from the ravages of an industrial revolution and the engineering requirements of an empire and two world wars. The warehouses looked run-down and unsafe. Scrap yards had appeared where once precision and detail ruled. Old barges rotted on the Tyne’s muddy banks, baring the ribs of oak that framed within, as the toxins in the water corroded the skin of their visible history. Their time of usefulness had long passed.

To the i…the place was singing with the concerted memories of so many difficult lives. It retched from the squalor with a sigh upon their senses, and always the sound of children crying, some place. The i…enjoying the suffering and ignorance, the poverty and knowledge that it was all about to disappear, after all this time. In the little pubs along narrow streets, sometimes singing could be heard, maybe a piano, hammering through some old-time, much-loved, favourite tune.

The music halls were gone and soon even their songs would be worthless. They would sing in these places sometimes, howling and hooting with tears in the eyes of those worn-out northern faces. Nothing to remember them by, nothing much to say or do or be. Fertile fields to the i…

The i…

By another river running through a similar industrial city, Belfast.

A far more troubled place than the Tyne, yet an architectural twin, having the very same look, the same tattered, dog-end Victorian architecture, a similar oldness and much the same greasy dirt.

In a drinking den, in a dive that tolerates moronic, raucously bellowing football supporters. The accentuated vowels and sectarian jibes belch with the blue cigarette smoke out into the run-down street. They are happiest in their tribal group, all boys together. Revelling in the unquestioned bigotry that permits this dense illusion of grandeur. Their jokes are cruel and always pointing away from their tacky loyalties. Their crude songs insult the ears, they all dress more-or-less alike and worship the same empty soulless hard-men without flinch or question. The air turns thick, the pint glasses click and slosh. They are drunk and content and secure in their arrogations for yet another Saturday night.

No one there heard the quiet laughter, a different amusement, a dark and sinister sound. Pool balls skitter over the threadbare baize, young guys posture for the girls, the television blares unheard. They are awaiting the news and football scores, another busy night…

In a devastating instant, in the physical detonation of Semtex, the scene is irredeemably transformed. A bomb planted earlier in the day by hard-core members of the very group they claim to despise, it explodes!

Fucking BOOM!

In the sub-seconds of the blast, as bodies are thrown and split and shattered, as glass showers into lacerating dust and all the top shelf hard liquor adds to the calamity by flowering ablaze, the i … they are laughing! Relishing the moment, in the bright, loud expansion of high combustion and concussion, they gloat. Deriving pleasure from every contorted frame, each shower of radiant blood and splintered bone, every shriek and anguished howl.

Passers-by in the street flinch at the shock wave. Some throw themselves to the ground. Tragic shapes that emerge from the dust and smoke are staggering, some are trying to shout. Some moan or cry, their clothes in bloodstained rags.

It will never or can never cross the minds of these victims that they set themselves up. That by their demonising and harassing, they alone created a ready-made enemy, hence therefore scripting their own demise. A point not wasted on the i… They appreciate the irony and the obvious consequences of projection phenomena. In the brief silence after the blast, when the glass and detritus tinkles to rest, just before the cries of the survivors and the terminally maimed screech and wail, the i.. they are gloating, feeding contentedly.

A youth bleeds slowly to death from a severed leg, the useless limb cradled like a baby in his bloodstained arms. The smouldering pockmarked walls, burnt and splattered with a film of viscera and gore. Look where all that hard man swagger got them? Not so tough now eh? They wanted to bait the Fenian bastards and wish-fulfilment being what it is, they got exactly what they asked for. Yet only the i… got the joke in its fullness.

A once pretty young girl screams, a long, loud bray of pain and induced shock, her hands sticky with blood as they hold together the lacerations that have marred her beauty forever. All the bravado, all the stories that showed clearly that they were tougher, better, cleverer, more human, these all stand out as those cultural footsteps leading from ignorance to disaster.

Where there is sectarianism, or half-witted, uninformed emulation of the same stupid human tendency, the i …are close, some place near. Watching, waiting, feeding and coldly capable. The i… always will feast well on the suffering.

The i…

Tyneside, the same one targeted for bombing during WW2, the dirty auld river that flows and thrives on war. During wartime, work increased and those at home in the slums and squalor had a major concern and distraction. Britain went off to do battle, especially when the enemy wanted to bomb the factories where flat-capped blokes made very dangerous kit indeed. Equipment like tanks, field and deck artillery and of course the warships. This plus all the varied munitions required to make the wide range of weaponry effective. Tyneside made the best. The river carried them all far away to very violent theatres indeed.

Arthur had been a draughtsman of these same warships and was considered essential civilian personnel, one who would not serve and fight on a foreign field, rather instead to construct and draw. He was supervised by chief engineers on the execution of these precise construction diagrams. It was an exact, time consuming job. This was Arthur MacNeil’s work, hours spent gainfully which translated into these floating machines of destruction, very much engaged in the conflict that had swamped the whole world. Arthur reflected, he had felt important and had grafted so very hard indeed.

All those years ago… When…

Arthur remembers…

Over the channel voices were singing heartily, words such as…

Together my brothers, we’ll show them a sign! United we’ll always be free. The morning will come when the world is mine! Tomorrow belongs to me!

These very words, cackling through a Bakerlite radio, the BBC news report on the source of all these sorrows, in a documentary broadcast on Hitler’s rise to power. Arthur remembers…

…He and his mother sat in the little kitchen, by the window that looked out upon the Tyne Valley below. Their family home, a terraced house on Whickham Hill. Down in the blackout, the besieged town waited. The radio whispered in the dark. Sometimes the bombers would drone overhead and Arthur would wish he were somewhere else. Though on clear nights, when the crump and flash of direct hits on Newcastle and Gateshead showed in the distance, they would watch like children captivated by fireworks, but quietly, for they were both watching in silence. Once an enormous column of fire soared up into the sky, a direct hit on the gasworks. It was astonishing and terrifying at the same time. An image of hell. Arthur recalled how his mother turned and whispered to him,

‘Can’t you hear them laughing?’

He had glanced at her, away from the heightening orange plume. Her face was waxen, serious, drawn. Returning his stare to the pillar of flaming gas he had replied,

‘Hear who laughing Mother?’

‘Not all that lives requires food the way we do.’ She had said.

Such an odd thing to say thought Arthur,

‘What do you mean?’ frowned Arthur, not wishing to miss a second of the spectacle, now a flickering tongue of sword-like fire, having a go at the sky.

‘Some things live and feed on the heart of strife and misery’

He remembered shivering, even though it was warm in the kitchen.

He had to look at her squarely to ensure she was well.

Was she talking about the German bombers?

‘We are their food. Our terror and grief, their meat and drink.’

He remembered wishing she would not to talk so strangely, and simply watch the blazes the Nazi bombs had planted behind them.

‘Whose food Mother?’ Arthur asked.

‘Those things, those glass-like hollow things…the i…the i…’

Arthur froze that day in such a manner which he would really never thaw from. He turned again from the fire-storms away down the valley and looked at her eyes. They saw nothing. She was not there. He remembered the blankness, the stare.

‘The what, Mother?’ he questioned.

‘The i…, the …i….’

Memory

Arthur remembered what had been his Friday night routine during the war years. Before catching the last bus home, he would have a few beers, usually in the Bridge Hotel, with his other workmates who had been spared war service. He was in his early twenties and had ceased to feel awkward about not being in the Armed Forces, he and his pals had began the same ships on paper that eventually fought the great sea battles. He was playing his part, doing his bit. Arthur’s war effort was always to apply himself and produce the highest standard of work, for slackers were not employed for long in this critical time.

Over the sea the war was going badly. No soon had a warship been finished in its design draft then it could begin construction. It would be engineered, furnished, equipped and fully crewed, then launched to task with small ceremony. Often later to be torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic Ocean. The German U-Boats kept Arthur at home and crucially out of the vicious fray which was Hitler’s War. The newspapers announced the ships which had been sunk, sometimes with the terrible words added all hands lost as an awful addition.

He recalled one evening arriving home on Whickham Hill to find the front door wide open. The cold, foggy November night was free to prowl about the house. The gas-lamps within were all off and the range was dead cold. He had called to his mother, his memory guiding him in the dark to the kitchen gas mantle. As it purred into yellow life and chased away the inky darkness, he closed the black-out curtains and called again. No reply. He lit a candle in a brass holder and assumed she had gone to her bed.

It had occurred to him that the front room curtains also were open, so by candlelight he had entered, only to jump in surprise, almost dropping his light. The glow fluttered on his mother’s face. She sat bolt upright in the dark room, glaring at the window, her hands gripping the arms of the chair, her knuckles white.

Are you alright Ma`? he had asked.

She had given no immediate response and only when his warm hand had touched hers in a gesture of concern she reacted and shrieked a long shrill wail. It had made his nape hairs stand on end as he bristled at the terrified cry. Slowly she turned her eyes from the window to himself and as recognition grew in her fear-filled face she had pitifully croaked,

Arthur.. help me! They were outside! Through the window, in the street!

He carried her to bed, tucking her in fully clothed, a deep concern displacing his slight intoxication. The next day he would arrange a doctor to visit. This was the first of many incidents over the years before she was sectioned in a mental institution. Arthur recalled that very first episode, knowing it had been the beginning of a long commitment, creating the routine that would endure until she died. The weekend visits to the hospital and her worsening condition, the way in which it had also burdened him at such a young age. Out of love and duty, he had never abandoned her, constantly engaging the hospital staff regarding both her comfort and mental stability. Year after year this continued, until she was released to the hospice in Hexam, frail and worn beyond her actual years.

The i…

Under the High Level Bridge, in the soot blackened tenement Arthur reads a collection of his mother’s recent letters. They were becoming fewer and the handwriting thin, lacking emphasis. The urgency of her writings in the period of her early years in the hospital had impressed hair-fine channels into the page. She once had to use heavy weight papers, the omnipresent pressure of her fear manifesting through a tightly held pen. The recent letters were scrawled over thinner paper, the manic urgency now absent, but the words still reeking of ever-present danger. Of a torment that had imbalanced her and ruined her life.

A sound from outside distracts him, one of young lads playing. Carefully placing the letters back, he opens the filthy window and leans on the sill, looking out over the river. The narrow street below had a high, crumbling stone wall flanking it on the riverside. Over this, a few small industries lingered on. Some had long packed it in, the derelict tool-shops and warehouses being prime play areas for rough young boys. Arthur was high enough up to see directly into the staiths, or the jetty fronting the old abandoned factory loading area. A bank of black reeking mud revealed at low tide the feet of the massive oak beams. Mud full of disease and poison. Over two centuries of pollution stank within its silt and reek.

Four ragged youths, average age of nine years between them, are taking turns with two catapults and are making sport of the rats below. A dead cat, road-kill the boys had found earlier had been used as bait for the bloated rodents. As the vermin scuttle out of the hollows of the staiths and slither towards the flattened cat, the boys let rip with rusted hexagonal nuts found everywhere inside the vacated workshop. They cheer when they almost get a hit, the viscous mud plopping as the speeding metal splats into the riverbank, the fat vermin hissing and struggling to scamper back to safety in the slime. They burst into hoots of laughter when they get a hit. Arthur waits and watches, vaguely smiling until they get a direct hit and a kill. A happy sound. Arthur laughed and applauded. One kid turned, looked up and smiled.

As night fell and the gas lamps were lit, Arthur found himself going to the window to see if the boys were back. They had long gone of course, and it dawned on him it was their laughter and sense of plain and simple fun that was still playing on his mind. Over the river, on the Newcastle side of the Tyne, a cargo boat was unloading directly into a large industrial warehouse. The wide, dark Tyne rippling in the glaring sodium deck lamps, the small, dark figures scurrying about. The far bank rose to the castle keep above and held a deeper darkness of crammed buildings, clusters of chimneys, rooftops and spires. A homely yellow glow from the many windows punctuated the city riverside and the ranks of chimneys smoked above.

A familiar view, one which had been there so long it was fair to assume it would be around a lot longer still. A decayed and jumbled city, with unplanned architectural mixes of eras adding to the oddity that it was. There was an unintentional Gothic air to the place, pre-1960s, Tyneside.

CHAPTER TWO

Concerning the i…

Once when Britain was young and sparsely settled communities shielded themselves against the unknown by all manner of inventive superstition and folklore, the onset of winter was marked by the festival of Samaihn. One of the stories linked to this time, one which allied itself with the arrival of savage winds and increasing cold, was the story of the Wild Hunt. The various names and reasons for this particular festival would vary with people and place, yet the basic theme of the boundaries between our earthly realm and the supernatural being breached was a constant.

As the gales and storms would bash and lash around the walls and roof, by the fireside, folk would shiver, yet not with cold, hearing instead words upon the wind, or crying and howling, borne upon the night. In the imagination of children, mad horsemen tore across the ragged cloudscape, their hounds baying and slavering for a kill. The safest place was indoors and the best course of action was to pray to whatever deity could and would protect. So pray they did.

Fifteen hundred years later, the land being rendered soulless by the scars of a thousand thousand roads and the sterile procession of expanding cities, fear had new forms. The terrorist, from whom our unquestionably efficient and caring leaders would protect us, became one focus. The thug, with his callous violence and savage disregard for anything other than himself, was yet another.

Homes and workplaces were rigged with all manner of lock and alarm, rigid and primed against threat and intrusion. Cars, those icons of prestige and achievement, similarly prepared to thwart the faceless invader and cunning thief with shrieking alarms and immobilisers. Fear was endemic, yet trivia reigned supreme. Terror was widespread, yet banality and an unreasoned belief in self-worth ruled, without any authentic assessment or consideration of what actually mattered, of what was real.

In the rage of the Wild Hunt, in ancient Britain’s rustic heart, the i… would thrive and gather in the places where the storm crashes trees through many a roof, or suchlike calamity. Or when the flood breaks the river confines and courses into the sleepy hamlet or hovel, the i… would be there, enjoying the panic and delighting in disaster, for such is their way, and plagues, how they love plagues.

They have always been and may well always be, a sentient, non-corporeal intelligence that are drawn to tragedy and suffering. Their origins