1. The smell of rain on warm stone.
2. Dappled sunlight.
3. The brief buzz of a bee going past.
4. That one can be too warm.
5. The rustle of wind through new leaves.
6. The sudden burst of smell as one passes a sun-warmed herb bush.
7. Drifts of cherry blossom blowing across car parks.
8. Distant constellations of birdsong in the hour before dawn.
1. There was once an assassin, although she didn’t think of herself that way. Really, she was just doing what she had to do. The war, when it came, was someone else’s fault entirely and would have happened sooner or later in any case. Better to pull the thorn and start it now, rather than hanging around basking in the growing bad-feeling. Not only that, but it was more or less an accident that anyone died anyway. To be sure, she was there with the gun and the grenades. She had phoned in the bomb threat that left the cavalcade stuck on the old road. But she had more or less decided not to do it when an acorn fell on her head. Everything happens for a reason, you know. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do. The acorn, unregarded, fell into a patch of soft earth.
2. They say that the lifespan of an oak tree is three hundred years growing, three hundred years living and three hundred years dying. The acorn’s questing shoots had no idea of this saying, or that it was not normally true. The earth went round the sun once, then once again. The war was still far off. It became a sapling, then a mature tree. The woodland flourished for four hundred years, basking in steamy, sap-smelling summers and sitting through mild, damp winters. Someone seeded the ground with landmines then, a hundred years later, robots came to dig them up. The tree survived. Beetles ate out its heart, but it remained standing. A small town grew up in the greenwood beside it. Two hundred years later, twenty thousand refugees came to stay, and the town stretched out its limbs into the woody valleys around and became a city. Nine hundred years later, the husk of the old oak, surrounded by black tulips, lay at the centre of a genteel square.
3. At the death of the old year (which was in those days in the yellow height of summer), a parade of swimmers hung black ribbons on the oak as they processed down through the steep streets to the lake. Perhaps this year there were more ribbons than usual; it was a very hot summer. In any case, the last remaining branch of the oak snapped free and fell down over the road. A group of teenage girls came down from the silent houses on the square and stripped it of bark, which they used to make masks.
4. The masks hung in the silent houses for a hundred years more. A kind and gentle age came over the land. People ventured out across the borders again. One could walk in the mountains without having to watch for drones. There were people digging in the black moorlands of the old cities, and finding old technologies, and bringing their secrets back to life. The silent houses found themselves full of families who could not help but laugh from time to time.
5. There were five children who grew up on the square, and they were all writers. It was a good time for writers, because now the war was over there was finally time to twist its stories into something beautiful or strange enough to hang an audience’s attention on. They thought that they would travel to the mountains and live on ice water and berries and dried meat, and that each of them would write a play, and they would come back to the city on a glorious wave of Art and be some kind of famous Set or other. And perhaps when they were setting out their minds were wandering further, oh further! on to the days when they would attend academic seminars about their journey, but in thrilling disguise.
6. In any case, it did not go quite as they expected. They made it to a remote valley, where they were only moderately hungry. On the third day they caught a wild pig, which they drained of blood in the hope of making black pudding. Someone brought out a bottle of a thin green herbal spirit. They wore the masks and made a forest out of twigs set in the earth to act out a scene someone else had written that morning. There were refugees, and a bear. Two hours later, the fifth of the travellers went for a scenic piss on a cliff edge and did not come back. In a panic, the others scrambled down the cliff half-way to where they could see a pale shape in the darkness below; then they fell too. A warm rainstorm washed out the river valley two days later, leaving no trace. In time, the empty campsite was found, with its masks and blood and bundles of twigs, and formed an enduring mystery that captured the attention of the age. Someone even wrote a play about it.
7. A bottle and some bones and a packet of verses were swept with the floods down into the caves below the mountains, where they meandered through various ghastly sumps and narrow caverns. Eventually, they made it to the sea, washed up into the open door of an old lighthouse. Someone must have been living there then, although I am not sure how. They took the drifting objects and put them three floors up, near the lamp. In those days the lighthouse ran on energy from the decay of radioactive isotopes, because the land around it was not deemed habitable. But this was a generous age, and for a further hundred years the light gradually wound down, and travellers came to live again in the old villages by the sea.
8. At some point they found the verses, but they could not read them. These travellers had a story, which was that they were the first brave pioneers to come back to this area after the dark age; and so they believed that they had found some great long-lost relic. They made a wooden town and painted it in many colours, and it had a blue tower that one could see for three miles along the coast. Here they kept their relics. In time it, too became a city, and the blue tower sat incongruously in its busy docklands. Scholars came from all around to look at the lost verses. But they threw away the bottle, believing it to be litter.
1. There was a letter d, and it was entirely bored of being the final letter in the word ‘and’ in a rather miscellaneous sentence. So one day it swivelled its serifs by ninety degrees and tunnelled out of the book. The hard covers caused it some problems, but finally it was able to slip out from under them and drop silently to the floor of the library. Letters move slowly, and it was two hundred years since it had started to burrow. That is why more letters do not escape. Two days later, a maid left the window open to air out the room and the letter d was blown into the garden, where it stuck to some clover and later mated with a bee. I mention this story merely because, should you encounter an unusual bee or two in Shropshire, it may explain matters.
2. The letter y at the end of Aleister Crowley’s name had become entirely suffused with wickedness during his lifetime, wickedness being the sort of thing that sloshes through a name and gathers in great gloopy puddles at the far end. After his death, it devoured the other letters and became enormously fat. Indeed it was hardly recognisable as a letter y and no font would accept it. Instead, it started its own font which consisted entirely of the letter y; having charmed a number of upper-case Y’s who it persuaded to join. If you should find a book set in this font, I recommend closing it and stepping away carefully.
3. There is a place in a distant galaxy, right in its star-dense heart, where one can look up and see a perfect letter Q written in stars across the sky. It is what is known as an asterism, or stars that are unrelated save that they happen to line up. And no being who has anything like a concept of the letter Q has ever lived in that galaxy. Nevertheless, it is there.
4. There is a kind of a viral bug that can be passed between different instances of the letter e. It gives affected letters the raging shits which, since letter turds are often mistaken for full stops, is not always noticeable to the careless reader. One may discern an affected sentence, paragraph or book by its apparent overuse of ellipsis.
5. In particularly severe infestations, the letters may crap on the line below like gastroenteritical birds on a wire, leaving smears down the page. These types of outbreak may be identified by their apparent overuse of exclamation marks.
6. There was a king whose ambition was to be a letter, and he thought maybe it would be a letter x. In later years he slept in a hollow in a huge book, which three servants would close over him at dusk. As a result, when the revolution came, he was quite hidden. A rather more equitable form of government was installed and the king’s book ended up in the national library, where the ex-monarch survived on bookworm corpses and by inserting a surreptitious straw from his book’s breathing holes into the discarded coffee cups of the adventurous browsers who came that deep. For some reason, nobody ever opened the book.
7. There was a letter q that was known for its bad temper. No other letter would come near it. It often found itself confined to the margins of books, scowling and grumbling at stray punctuation marks. One day a book burned down and, unaccountably, the letter u grabbed the letter q between its uprights and hauled it to safety. After that day, that letter q was a much more trusting beast and could often be persuaded to curl up and sleep next to other letters, whereupon it was often mistaken for a letter o. Whilst I would like this to be the reason that q is often found next to u, it is not. In fact, that particular letter q was always rather shy about approaching any letter u thereafter.
8. There was a letter g that swallowed its own tail by mistake, leading to a hole in the page that led nowhere in particular. This was a godsend to the local research institute, which was chock-full of experts in nowhere in particular. They sent a number of tiny probes into the hole and wrote sixteen research papers which were all published in prestigious journals. Later, the tiny probes wrote their own paper but, since none of them had a research track record, they had trouble getting it accepted.
9. There is a font which is entirely unexceptional, except that the letter o is represented by the rings of the planet Saturn, available only at actual size. As a result, only one letter o is settable in this font at any one time, and even this is rather impractical to use. In consequence, most users omit the letter o from their correspondence.
6750 The common cold
-6750.1 General
–6750.11 Phlegmy sort
–6750.112 Productive of bright green phlegm
–6750.113 Productive of bright orange phlegm
–6750.113 Productive of clouds of dandelion fluff
–6750.14 More of a cough, really
–6750.141 The sort that keeps one up at night
–6750.112 Sounds like a bark
–6750.15 Mainly of the lost voice sort
–6750.151 Striking just before one has to sing
–6750.16 Gentle little cold that wanders around the back of throat and glands without ever really doing much
-6750.2 Obtained via miscellaneous and/or unknown means
–6750.21 Obtained while on mission from MI5
-6750.3 Obtained via contact with children
–6750.31 Via nursery
–6750.311 First cold in a row acquired from nursery
–6750.312 Second or more cold in a row acquired from nursery
-6750.4 Obtained via recreational activity
–6750.41 Recreational activity that was definitely worth it
–6750.42 Recreational activity that wasn’t
-6750.5 Obtained via mode of transport
–6750.51 On an aeroplane
–6750.511 At the start of a holiday that would be really great without a cold
–6750.512 By the return journey, able to share cold with a whole new group of people
–6750.59 First documented case of donkey-human transmission
-6750.8 The uncommon cold
–6750.81 Productive of rainbow glitter phlegm
–6750.82 Sneezing up tiny unicorns
–6750.83 Sinuses colonised by tiny kittens
–6750.84 World’s best viral party going on in eustachian tubes,
invitation extended to local bacteria, entrance queue goes all the way
down throat and back
Ptork P. Snang, Penelope Sudo-Nimming, Lady Esperanza Buttocks, Sir Themistocles Zammit, Blackbird Beasley, Cornelius Q. Face the Third, Professor Flora Maria Pausewang, Robert Robert Robert, John Twice-Toast Smith, Ellifer Pingnose, Helen Wellington Kenno-Lost, Spamanda Andara, Jay the Pickle Caperque, Lara Fellowes-Driftwood, Timebob Snorres, Alice Quack.
[NB. Two of these are actual real notable people who have stuff named after them]
1. On the left breast, you will see a large and obvious patch where a scale appears to be missing. This is a stick-on decoy patch designed to draw the efforts of dragon slayers away from the dragon’s other vulnerable points. Most dragons wear them these days. You will notice if I peel it back that the scales underneath it are completely intact.
2. You’ll also notice some gold marks on the belly. These are exactly what you’d expect. This dragon has spent some time sleeping on a hoard, likely of gold of relatively high purity and softness. Over time, pieces of gold have rubbed off on the belly surface as she’s rolled over or crawled back and forth. Don’t touch!
3. I believe these symmetrical scratches down both sides of the belly are probably mating marks, likely in the dominant position.
4. There are also some scratches on the upper sides, here. These look like rock scratches and probably indicate that the dragon has spent time living in a cave. They may also indicate that she has grown since first occupying the cave and may be looking to expand it.
5. There is a scar of some kind extending down from the right wing base, possibly the result of a juvenile crash.
6. These scales here are a slightly yellower shade than the rest. I think this is a birthmark of some kind.
7. The dots, as you might expect, are arrow marks. Dragons get shot at a great deal.
8. This sticky stain on the top of the belly is probably custard. Dragons are notoriously fond of custard, and there have been a number of suspicious torchings of custard facilities recently. Note also the matching stains down the neck and left jaw.
9. If you look over there, under the left front leg, you can see a couple of pickaxes. It looks like someone (or several someones?) crossed the boundary between bravery and foolishness. As we might be said to be doing, of course.
10. These faint scratches on the left side are actually the dragon equivalent of a tattoo. They show more conspicuously in the ultraviolet; this would be quite bright in dragon vision, whereas we are barely able to see it. Note also that what we can see appears to be crossed out. Maybe the dragon equivalent of a regrettable tattoo?
11. The small button-like protuberance at the right breast - see here? - is a flaw cover. Yes, dragons do in fact usually have a real flaw in their belly scales. In fact, a good flaw is often a kind of status symbol. No self-respecting dragon would venture near humans without covering it up with some kind of armour, though. This cover is actually harder than the dragon’s own scales.
12. There is a small left-side white scar down here - can you see? This is likely a surgical mark. You will notice it’s almost directly above the dragon’s fire bladder, which is highly susceptible to infection and to the formation of cinder stones. Most probably this was for stone removal, which most dragons will have to get done at some point.
13. The ruby just below the base of the tail is probably deliberate and decorative, although it could be from hoard-sleeping again. May I remind you - DO NOT touch.
14. I think the purple smear down there is probably some kind of paint. They do have festivals, up in the Northern mountains. Of course humans who see them don’t tend to come back.
15. As you will notice, ladies and gentlemen, we are not in a custard factory but in a whisky distillery. And I believe the most recent stain here is from a large splash of whisky. Now, ladies and gentlemen, it will not have escaped your notice that a dragon in a distillery is a highly explosive situation. Nevertheless, I believe we have all learned something here today. It’s not often that one gets this close. Now let’s let her sleep it off, and retire to a safe distance.
1. Snunder. Despite the name, snunder is not a type of thunder but rather a type of rain. It occurs in places that have been subject to some act of public high drama or tragedy and can most easily be distinguished from normal rain by its slightly thicker, stickier texture and its salty taste. It is derived from the spectral mucous of sobbing ghosts. Ghosts are often particularly sentimental, and those ghosts that have no limitations on their travel in space often gather at sites that mean something to them. Note: this is not the gentle drizzle derived from the decorous crying of melancholy phantoms, which can hardly be distinguished from sea-spray. Snunder only occurs in places where sad ghosts are really going for it. Since some ghosts can also travel in time, the unexpected arrival of snunder can also mean that some public tragedy is about to occur; for example, it is rumoured that Princess Diana’s 1997 death in Paris was presaged by a particularly sticky snunder rain.
2. Avioplop. This is the theoretical rainfall that would occur if a sufficiently dense cloud of aircraft above a city all voided their toilet waste at the same time. Needless to say, a rain of avioplop is not a particularly welcome event. Some projections of future aviation demand which have not thought through their premises particularly well suggest that, by 2300, most major conurbations will be subject to avioplop. Little do they know that by 2300 27% of passengers, via a combination of genetic engineering and advanced physics, will have no bladders but instead void directly into a small one-way portal into deep space. Aircraft toilet demand will therefore be significantly reduced and only very flight-dense regions, such as the airspace above Beijing, will be at risk of it.
3. Gin rain. There have in fact been three documented gin rains, as far as we can work out. The first, in rural Texas in 1873, led to a scandalous episode of widespread intoxication. The second and third gin rains occurred in Lusaka in 1950 and in Archangelsk in 2005; less information is available about them. Gin rains are not more widely reported because for some reason governments seem particularly interested in hushing them up. Why governments should be interested in what we assume are the failures of experimental methods of gin production is beyond us. Maybe we should expect the advent of weaponised gin at arms fairs at some point.
1. She is the mother of a preschool-age child and a baby. Most of her time is taken up in caring for their needs. She does not usually work outside the home, and can go weeks without leaving her small, poor local area or travelling in a car. She does not have many hobbies. She is usually in pyjamas by 7:30 and in
bed with the lights out by 9:00.
2. She had the highest exam results in her county that year, and went on to study and teach theoretical astrophysics at one of the world’s top universities. She was known for not making eye contact and for wearing odd clothes to lessons. Sometimes her glasses were held together with sellotape. She once attempted to invent a system of algebra because she was bored. Later she dabbled in Antarctic science and ended up in economic modelling, acquiring an Erdos number of five via two entirely separate routes.
3. She first shot a gun with live ammunition when she was twelve or thirteen, which was perhaps unusual for her country where there are few guns. These days, Apocalypse Now is one of her favourite films and she can no longer remember how many times she’s crossed the border between North and South Korea. Her bookshelves are stocked with the Marquis de Sade and William Burroughs. She has not eaten human flesh in nearly a year.
4. A person with a disability asked her for a completely reasonable accommodation to do with their disability and she said no. Her mobile phone once made a noise in a concert that was being broadcast live on Radio 3. She’s nearly hit a cyclist with a car door. She’s several times incorrectly implied to experts in things that, as a person who is vaguely interested in their field, she can do a simple thing-related task better than them. She has flounced out of a room martyrishly complaining about martyrdom.
5. She had more than forty My Little Ponies, aged 11, and she is still fond of making notes in multi-coloured pens. She likes white chocolate, kittens, glitter and rainbows; she likes clothes and dressing up. In the past she has sewn and knitted her own clothes from patterns. She is interested in perfumery, although that will never come to much.
1. There were two detectives who went to a small village on the edge of a marsh. The earth was black in that place and the cold waters black too. There were no paths through the marsh, which was a maze of blasted thickets and dry, crackling reed-beds where strange birds lived. No water could be said to flow into or out of it. There were rumours that time went in different directions in different parts of the marsh and that its waters flowed from now to then rather than from here to there. Nevertheless, a reed-cutter had ventured into its nearer parts to gather eggs, and she had found a body on a mudbank, so the police were called.
2. They had a bit of a thing for each other, these detectives, but nothing would ever come of it because one was married and the other had too much of his identity tied up in being straight. Neither of them was particularly near retirement, but one was older than the other. Their companionship was based around their taciturn refusal to talk about their pasts, which one must assume were both murky and mysterious. In the village they found no-one missing and no-one suspicious. Though there were those who said that human finger-bones and the like had a habit of washing up in the marsh and it would be well to look out for a serial killer. There was a fortune-teller who gathered up the bones, because she was on the look out for her long-lost son who had slipped off playing into the marsh some years ago. But they were not the bones of a child, and she had taken to casting futures with them instead. This near the marsh, the bones would only fall in spirals, revealing nothing of themselves to anyone.
3. The detectives placed the remains, which were mainly skeletal, in a body bag in a refrigerated trailer. The next day most of the locals gathered in the village hall. There was an old man who said he was sure the murderer would be there but everyone, it seemed, had stayed out of the marsh for months. Someone said to see the fortune teller in her mouldy house by the willows, and since there was no other option, they went.
4. The fortune-teller was pleased to see them, for she was often lonely. She did not think she knew the body, she said, but she did know the marsh. She showed them a great black crystal with a spiderweb of incarnadine flaws at its heart, opaline and shimmering. It is a paradox, she said. Paradoxes grow around here like mushrooms. What with time in the marsh the way it is. I can show you the trunk of a hollow tree that is entirely crusted with them, down by the pool where I found the finger bones. Growing off all those petty little frog intrigues dragged back and forth through the years. But I have never found one so large and so strange. I truly think it could be worth something. I was hoping to pass it on to my son. The younger detective looked into the crystal and thought he saw his future written there, and he needed to know more like he had never needed anything. But the fortune teller shut the box. It is for my son, she said. I can show you the pool where the finger bones wash up, and maybe you can find the key to both losses for me, and I will bury it with him. I have never dared to dig there.
5. She gave them a map and a spade and sundry documents of her son’s that could be used to identify him. The detectives thanked her and, having little else to go on, packed sandwiches for a trip into the marsh. As they walked the sun ticked back and forwards across the noonday mark in the sky like the second-hand of an ailing watch. When they reached the pool, the younger detective started digging. The older leaned on the willow tree (they had not thus far checked its bleak crack for more glittering paradoxes). He opened the packet of documents and began to read. The first one was facts and strands of hair and identifying marks. The missing boy, it seemed, had had a wine-stain mark on his left shoulder.
6. The older detective had just such a mark on his shoulder, and he knew that as a child he had been found wandering (though he did not like to discuss it). He realised that he could be the fortune-teller’s long-lost son. He told the younger detective of his suspicions. But the younger detective, in sudden fright of losing the crystal’s speaking flaws to him (or of losing him to the crystal’s speaking flaws) jerked back the spade and swung at him with it. It hit the older detective in the neck and he bled out on the wet mud.
7. The younger detective threw the older detective’s body into the crack of the rotted-out willow tree by the black pool, where it hung for several days before slipping down into the water. It drifted into the currents of the marsh and washed back and forth through time, shedding small bones and shreds of skin along the way. Eventually the body fetched up on the reedcutter’s mudbank, three weeks before it had been laid to unquiet rest. The reedcutter found it, and called the police.
8. Some two days into the future, the sun ticked back and forth across the noonday mark like the second-hand of an ailing watch. The younger detective walked out of the marsh and into another story, which we are not concerned with here. He no longer needed the crystal. Before he left, fearful of evidence, he tipped the bag containing the skeletal body into a cracking reed bed. The body slipped into a deeper current where time turned itself inside out. It took the bones and reclothed them in their raiments of past years.
9. Twelve years before, a thrashing bag bobbed up from the current onto a sandy bank, and tore itself open under the moon. The older detective crawled out, young and gasping, with his memories scrambled. He stumbled South, out of the marsh, back to the city. It seemed he had been somewhat changed. He no longer bore the fortune-teller’s mark, he could not remember who he was, he bore no documents. In time he married a nurse, and the itch of the memory of the younger detective faded from his brain. But he knew that he himself had had a flair for detective work. So, after some years of rehabilitation and retraining, that is the field he went back to. Eventually, he was paired up with an older partner who was as taciturn as he about his past.
10. Some time later, they got a call about a body in a marsh…
0800 Lost things
-0800.1 Recently lost
–0800.23 Mittens
—0800.231 Mittens placed on walls, railings and gates by helpful passers-by
–0800.24 Stuffed bears, dogs and bunnies
—0800.241 Those that are found again, to great joy
—0800.242 Those that are not
—-0800.2422 Those that are lost in airports at the start of a long journey
—0800.243 Those that might have been found again, or might have been replaced by a duplicate, you are never quite sure
–0800.25 Things that you know you put down just a moment ago
—0800.251 Items that are in fact still on your person somewhere and obvious to a hypothetical bystander
—0800.252 Items which you need to find to be able to find them
—-0800.2521 Glasses
—-0800.2522 Cups of coffee
-0800.2 Long lost
–0800.21 The subject of intense nostalgia
—0800.211 Things for which the nostalgia does not align with the original reality
—0800.212 The subject of sepia-tinted documentaries
–0800.27 Things after the death of the last person who remembers them directly
–0800.28 Things after the death of the last person who has heard the truth of them
–0800.29 Things that have passed even out of story and rumour
-0800.3 Things that are not lost, but know perfectly well where they are
–0800.31 Things that are hiding
–0800.32 Things that are mistaken about their location
—0800.323 Confident walkers in mazes
-0800.4 Things under sofa cushions
–0800.41 Remote controls, keys and pens
–0800.42 Food, dust and buttons
–0800.43 Other sundry items
–0800.44 Things that have passed into the main body of the sofa
—0800.444 Things that are so valuable they require the dismantling of the sofa to retrieve
-0800.5 That are the subject of humorous asides
–0800.51 Marbles
—0800.511 Literal marbles
–0800.52 Virginity
—0800.523 May or may not be lost, depending on whether a specific act counts or not
-0800.6 Appetites, desires and dreams
-0800.7 Cities, civilisations, treasure, ships, aeroplanes, etc.
–0800.72 That in fact never existed in the first place
–0800.73 Rumoured location is covered in dense jungle
–0800.74 Rumoured location is under the sea
-0800.8 Memories
–0800.81 Of which only a ghost remains
—0800.811 Memories that itch maddeningly at your thoughts when you smell a particular smell
—0800.812 Things that you know you once knew
—0800.813 Things that other people know you once knew