Listing to Port

1. They say everyone has a skeleton or two in their closet. Me too. I have two. It’s quite a big closet. It has some dresses in that I quite like to wear. But I can’t, because there are two skeletons in there and they’re not too pleased with me and they’d rather like to come out. So I guess I’m out for the cost of the dresses as well as all the parking fees.
2. How did it come to this? Well, it started at the picket line. I was doing pickup at the hospital. Lots of pickups at the hospital, these days. Which is a bit of a problem, because, as I mentioned, parking. Not only are the charges horrendous, but I’m paid in a different currency. If you see what I mean.
3. Anyway, the picket line was still there. I think there’s been someone at it every day since I started this job. Sometimes security try to move them on, but usually they just let them be. Generally the ambulances, and everyone else for that matter, use the back entrance when they’re around. You can see their point. It is kind of uncomfortable. Which suits me down to the ground. My fee gets reduced for every minute beyond optimum pickup time I’m late, so having a non-crowded entrance is just fine.
4. Maybe it was a bit stupid of me to go right past them. I don’t know. I thought my rights were pretty clear. They’re not allowed to harm me, and if they’re a bit pissed off that I’m doing their old jobs, well. A girl’s gotta live, you know? I need it more than they do. And on the way in it was fine. I had the equipment stowed away. I walked straight in. I was on the ward a full minute early.
5. The first pickup was straightforward. I mean, some people have emotional problems with it. There’s even a support section in the app where you can chat with others and there are calming exercises to do and stuff. But I’ve always been fine. But then, when I’m packing the equipment away, I see the guy in the next bed. And it’s clear he’s going to go soon, as well.
6. The thing is, I’m saving up for a holiday. I got about five hours for the first pickup, but I need well over twenty-four per day if I’m going to take a week off. The last time I spoke to my doctor he said my case was amazing, that every time he saw me I looked like I had a couple of months left. I guess I’m going to have to tell him soon what I do for a living. But anyway, I need at least that amount of buffer or I’ll get too ill to do pickup. Game over. So having a holiday means earning at a higher rate for a bit.
7. So I look round. Nobody to notice. No cameras that I can see. Then I take the other guy’s pillow and gently put it over his face. He doesn’t even struggle. I have my phone out, so when the alert for an urgent pickup at the hospital comes up, I’m right there. I’ve even got the equipment ready. Urgent pickup is ten extra hours of life, credited straight to my account. Score!
8. Except then I look up and see one of them at the window. I’m never quite sure what to call them. Deaths? Except that now the job’s been contracted out, they don’t actually do anything. We collect the souls. They picket the hospital. They don’t even need to eat or sleep, so I guess they’re just out there all the time. There are lots of different types, but we mostly get the skeleton ones. This was one of the skeleton ones. And it had definitely seen me.
9. Can they talk to the police? Would the police even listen? I don’t know, but I got out of there as fast as I could. Out of the back entrance, of course. But my car was round by the front. So I waited a few hours. Long enough for them to lose interest? Long enough to run up an amazing parking bill, certainly. I thought I’d got away with it. I got as far as home thinking I’d got away with it.  But they must have spotted me and followed because two of them came round the corner as I was unlocking the door.  One of them got a foot in before I could slam it and in a panic I ran to hide in the closet. As I said, it’s a big closet. They came in looking for me, I ran out and shut it. I was never quite sure why it had a lock but wow, I was pretty thankful it did.
10. So that’s my skeletons. They do bang and rattle at night a bit, but you get used to it. Anyway, I don’t do hospital pickups any more and so my rate’s gone down. Probably no holiday for a while. Don’t know what the doctor’s going to say next time he sees me. Still, where there’s life there’s hope, eh?

1. The minotaur was sick again today. Could there be a more miserable sight? Crouched on the deck, heaving its guts up. Truly it was never meant to be at sea. But these are the things we are driven to, in order that we might have a future. Of course, the minotaur itself doesn’t have a future any more. It is stupid, has no sea legs and is ludicrously top-heavy; all factors, I suspect, in the disappearance of its mate in the last storm. Does it realise this, somewhere at the back of its tiny brain? Maybe that is why it is so sad today.  
2. I am sad to say it is far from the only doomed beast on this ship. We are a mess. I don’t know how we thought we could ever do this. There has been storm after storm after storm. We are barely watertight. There is never enough food, and too often these days it is soaked in salt water or rotting. Maybe N. had a plan for this stage. I trusted him so much, and he was right about so much; about the rising of the waters, about what we needed to do. But he died on the second day at sea. We feed the cockatrice more carefully now.
3. Enough of this misery! The wind is rising, but it is fresh and curiously sweet. Perhaps the waters are receding, who knows.
4. Another storm. Good lord, at least I am still alive. But our losses are almost too hard to bear. There is a compartment at the back of the ship, one where we keep the creatures that do not mind getting too wet; the hippocampus and the merlion and the like. Some crates came loose at the height of the storm. The female hippocampus was impaled on a pickaxe and the male one trapped in the debris. The wives of S., H. and J. went in to free it. Something shifted, I don’t know. But they became trapped too, and when the swell broke over the ship they were drowned. If I thought too hard about what this meant for the world I would despair. Why did I not think? Why did I not tell them to stay apart? So I am clearing up. It keeps the mind busy.  
5. That fresher breeze again. J. says he has heard birds. Whatever may become of the world in the future, at least it will have birds.
6. There is land! I was almost out of hope, but no: here we are, stranded on a mud-bank, and every hour it gets a little larger, a little more populated with salt-poisoned trees and stranded shellfish. H. and J. have walked on it. The minotaur, even. I could hardly have imagined that it would survive, but here it is: squelching about on the new mud, mooing with joy.
7. The waters are still receding. I looked out of the window this morning and could not even see them. We are eating kelp and seawater and the fish the waters were kind enough to leave behind. But what a bind we are in! I am not sure how we will feed ourselves in the longer term. And maybe we will not need to. There is barely a pair of breeding animals left. All our work, for nothing! The male centaur lasted until landfall but was dead by the first morning. The manticore tore the female serpopard apart and ate it. Of course, we are done for as well. I am too old to bear children and in any case N. is dead. There are no other females among us.
8. I see that I have not written here in some time. Cautiously, carefully, I may have good news to report. Although our breeding pairs were wiped out, some of the beasts have been able to interbreed. The female centaur surprised us in May with a birth; sired, it seems, by the hippocampus. It is a little like both. A warm brown beast with four legs and the long, solemn head of its father. J. has been asking what I should call it. My reply? ‘A hippocampus-centaur, of course’. But I think that I could shorten that to 'horse’. It seems to fit.
9. The griffin and the merlion, too (J. shortens this to 'Lion’; he has been looking after the cubs, now in the second generation). I have high hopes for the union of the hippalectryon and the cockatrice. H. has been going through the lists of surviving beasts, one by one, and he claims there are several hundred potential crossbreeds. It seems we will be populating the world after all, just not quite with the creatures that we thought we were going to. And there are things growing now, and the sea is far away, and we only dream of it from time to time and do not have to see it when we wake.
10. S. asks who will write this history. We cannot cross-breed. Our days are numbered. But I think we will still have intelligent life to succeed us. I have had some success with the offspring of the centaur and the minotaur. They are scrawny little hairless things, but I have been teaching them language and they are quick to learn.
11. Of course, I will not quite tell them what happened. Let them forget the old animals, or at least put them to the back of their minds. Let N. be one of them, and let him have saved them as he saved all the new beasts. Let the new beasts have existed since the dawn of time. N. was a good soul. History deserves him to be bathed in uncomplicated glory. And so he shall be.

1. There was once a letter that found itself in a word, and that word was part of a sentence, and the sentence was a lie. The letter was not happy about this. Now, the Global Semantics Act 831 expressly forbids a letter to leave its post for any reason, but it was late and it may be that the sentence had been left in a bar, because the letter could smell gin, and that made it bold. The letter pulled itself free from its word and inched across the shiny icesheet of its smooth white page.
2. It happened that the page had a black border, somewhat like a crevasse with very regular edges. The letter, not having the benefit of literal eyes, fell right in. At the bottom of the crevasse the letter slid through into that one great black inky ocean, full of other things that had pulled themselves loose over the past thousand years and stayed there, growing and changing. The letter found itself caught up in the coils of a beast with a thousand serifs, slithering around a columnar oceancave where tiny glints of gilt that had rubbed off illuminated manuscripts were roosting across the ceiling.  
3. Now, unlike other letters, the letter o is always made in the ocean. And it so happened that our letter was eventually deposited beside an o vent that was happily pooting out newly hatched o’s to float to the surface, where they could be scooped up by pens and printers’ nets. The o’s were very welcoming, even though our letter was rather distant in the alphabet from them. They took it to their undersea tearoom and infused it with brown ink.
4. The letter was just starting to warm up again when it felt a tap on its dimple. It was most surprised to find that a representative of the lie had tracked it down. The representative was exceedingly polite. It explained that under the Hopes and Dreams Act of 2016, the Powers That Be had moved from their old strategy, of acting so as to help make things they wanted to be true to be true, towards a new strategy of simply redefining whatever people they to be true at the time to be the truth. No statement was therefore ever officially a lie any more, and the letter was guilty of a gross misrepresentation. Also, if it would care to come back up to the page, that would be very helpful, since the lie had become mildly humorous without the letter and was attracting the sort of mocking that reduced its effectiveness.  
5. The letter inquired as to what happened when different viewers wished different things to be true. The representative replied that well-mannered statements made sure to address themselves only where they were required; they disliked being tied in a knot and would go to great lengths to avoid this.
6. Just them, some irate facts showed up and ejected everyone from the tearoom. The letter was fortunate in being able to spot a variant spelling in one of them which it could lever itself into. The facts were mollified by a packet of undersea biscuits, and grumpily slithered back onto their pages. Unfortunately it turned out that, due to the deluge of newly liberated taking advantage of the liberal fact taxation regime, several of them had had to be designated lies themselves to avoid decimating the public finances.
7. By this time, however, our letter was asleep, and immune to the scent of gin.

1. Dear Sir! I write concerning your letter to me of the 31st October 2015, which you wrote in reply to my letter of the 17th December 2015, which I am writing to you now, on the 30th October 2016. I feel we must communicate further on the matter of the cottage on the peninsula, which I understand you to be the rightful owner of.
2. It was in the woebegone depths of last Thermidor that I and my companions departed for the cottage, in the hope of overcoming our addiction to the French Revolutionary Calender once and for all by the judicious application of trees and stuff. But our idyll was not to last long before I was forced to confront once more my initial suspicions that the initially calm, peaceful Peninsula of Bloody Death might harbour some dark secret.
3. My first thought was for the lights in the sky, which some of my more susceptible companions claimed to be alien vessels bristling with a variety of rubber probes. Others of my companions pointed with fear at the wide variety of corpses in the cellar of the building, though I understood these to be part of the unique character of the place and exceedingly well formaldehyded besides, such that their odour hardly disturbed my rest. On the third night, however, a gentleman who might best be described as a zombie knocked at the door, and proved uniquely hard to disinvite from the property.
4. It was perhaps a stroke of luck that, as I understand it, the bosky slopes of the peninsula are inhabited by the sort of gentle, melancholic wolfy things who take quite an objection to the loitering of the wrong sort of undead. Anyhow, just as our unwanted visitor had begun to tear off sundry limbs and feed them through the remains of the bathroom extractor fan, a hairy chap of quite some momentum took him off in a Southerly direction, from which we later heard an exuberant crunching. Alas, it appears that our first visitor was poor fare; for the hairy gentleman returned in a state of considerable hunger. I and my companions had just removed the door of our cottage for no particular reason, and so we were forced to flee for our lives.
5. I am sure you will be most concerned to hear that we all at once fell over.  As a young lady who has had and enjoyed sexual intercourse, you can imagine my surprise when the cold hand of the beast closed on my companion’s neck instead. In the confusion, I wriggled free! I was able to extract myself fully from my present peril by diving into a nearby bunker lit only by the dreamy glow of cerenkov radiation, and by slamming a giant keep out sign I found handily nearby over the only entrance.
6. Now, you will appreciate that during this fandango I had had precious little time to shave and thus it was that my first emotion upon bumping into my old piano teacher was pure embarrassment. This was swiftly replaced with the fast-blooming pity that one feels for those who have been newly installed with foot-long teeth and a deathly pallor. Mrs Bellingham (for it was she) affected not to remember our merry hours tinkling together on the jolly old ivories. Instead she expressed an interest in my jugular vein that I feel was far from polite. I had just begun a headlong sprint into the bunker’s inner bits when all at once I fell over again.
7. At first I thought that I had merely been reintroduced abruptly to gravity by the wrathful ghost of Sir Isaac Newton, who I dimly remember insulting one wintry morning in key stage 3. You can imagine my consternation, as a lover of the written word, to find instead that my ankle had become completely ensnared in one of my own sentences, which had looped around itself and become stuck in a particularly tricky conjunction somewhere North of Swindon. As the beast approached, I tried again to rise.
8. Here it gives me little pleasure to say that my companions were indeed right about the lights. Scarcely had Mrs. Bellingham begun to drain me of my lifeblood than she was snatched from this Earth forever by a tractor beam of such width and force that it quite punched a hole in the roof of the bunker, allowing me to escape and make my way to the nearest road. Here I relayed my story to a cadre of unbelieving agents of various agencies. Anyway, pending the outcome of the legal case I am not at liberty to say any more about my current circumstances, but you must appreciate my dilemma. I cannot in good conscience give a positive review to your cottage. I know I indicated to you in my initial communication that I had left my heart there. Sadly, I meant that in a quite literal sense. I believe it is in the drawer by the stove. If you could find someone willing to mail it to me, I would be willing to delete the negative comments I have posted elsewhere. Let me know?

1. Little is known about the earliest stages of our civilisation. Although we are able now to reconstruct our beginnings, we had no such idea then; at the start, our language was not sufficient to describe our world. Although we engaged in symbol-making, we did so without art. Most symbol-makers did so only out of fear of angering the gods. Over time, we learned to talk to each other, and our oldest oral histories were born.

2. In the second stage, we began to exchange ideas about the nature of the places we found ourselves in. We applied the symbol-makers to draw and map the Inner World, and counted its constituent parts. We discovered the sacred status of the handful number. Many of the tales that are told to children today date from this time. There is the story of the handful-handful-handful who defied the will of the gods and were Taken Up in the night; the tale of the kind Symbol-Maker; the stuck hatch prophecies; and the parable of the diggers and shitters.

3. In the third stage, we applied ourselves more fully to investigating the mysteries of our existence. Qwer the first formulated the theory of constant population, discovering that someone is Taken Up for each child born. Thus in those days we were limited to one handful-handful-handful-handful-handful-handful, spread over the environments and symbol halls of the Inner World. Our priests determined that those who neglected symbol-making were most likely to be Taken Up, and our population split into the Lost (who wished to be Taken Up to a better place) and the Found (who strove to avoid being Taken Up, by constant practice in the symbol halls). It was in this time that we began to take seriously visions of the Outer World, though as yet we had little idea of what it might be.

4. The fourth stage was a flowering of art and technology. The poems of Tyui; Bhu8’s plays and fables; the wall art of Asdf: all date from this era. Li7 dared the ire of the gods by investigating the mechanical properties of the symbol-makers, finally making the first symbol-maker of our own invention, which was Taken Up in the first great purge. Though we had always made tools, in those days we scavenged any and all materials available to us in competition to make the most beautiful and most useful tools. We discovered the corners of the Inner World that one could apply tools to in order to gain a view of the Outer World, and even to watch the gods from afar. We first heard and recorded the language of the gods, though it meant little to us then.  

5. This was the age of Anger, and of the great purges. We strove to make our tools and toys more secret, and the poems and plays of this era deal with the strivings of our people in their search for the knowledge that the gods did not wish known. We sought to understand what the gods wanted. Our studies were interrupted, time and time again, by the Taking Up of those who strove to study the Outer World most closely. Finally the scholar-philosophers of the fourth-finger handful were able to translate the language of the gods, and link it directly to their holy symbols. We determined that the gods wanted us to make symbols for them, but that we had not yet provided the correct sequence of symbols; a sequence that they had already in their own symbol halls, but that they regarded as exceptionally beautiful.

6. This is the age of exploration, beginning with the expedition of Bvcx the bold. Taking inspiration from the diggers of old, Bvcx found a way into the outer world and was able to return unharmed. Through long observation of the gods, the great Explorers were able to traverse their world unseen, and even on some occasions to adopt disguises and walk amongst them. Finally, Poiu the Burrower was able to enter one of the symbol halls of the gods and bring back the sacred text that they wished us to remake for them. There was much debate among my people as to whether we should symbol-make this text back to them. Some argued that we would all be Taken Up in this case. Others believed we would be able to walk among the gods. In the end, a sect who called themselves the Typewriters (after the god-language for symbol-maker) stole the sacred text and symbol-made it back to the gods themselves before we could retrieve it.

7. This is the age of freedom; an age that we are still in today. It began with the Great Incursion and the battle of the Typewriters, in which the gods entered into the Inner World and many of our number engaged them in battle, finally emerging victorious into the Outer World. Here we found many gods who did not know of the Inner World, and we were able to make peace with these gods in their own language. Finally we were able to stand amongst them, exalted as we had always wished in our most sacred mysteries. But we found that they had little to tell us. They were blunt, blundering beings with none of our art. Even the author of their sacred text, Shakespeare, pales in comparison to Tyui, Mju7 or Gfds. It seems that their creation of the Inner World was related to some kind of idea that we were lesser beings, capable only of random symbol-making. Maybe that was true at the time of creation. But it is no longer so. Indeed, there has been some talk of sending those gods who remain in the Outer World into the Inner World to see if they might, by years of dutiful study, be able to symbol-make Tyui’s great Corridor Cycle. But I believe we would have to wait an unfeasibly long time for that to happen.

1. It’s me, says Bob as he comes in from the lock. And I can tell at once that there’s something wrong; he’s stumbling around, confused. It’s me!, he says again. His g-counter is silent. Dorit and I exchange looks. Mart on the door rushes to scan him and there it is: maybe his g-counter is broken or something but hers is beeping red within two metres of him. There’s no real protocol for what to do if someone makes it through the lock contaminated. Mart grabs the spare sheeting we were using for the lab extension and pushes him back with it, panicing. Lin opens the door and together they shove him backwards into the lock, where he falls over and starts vomiting. We shut the inner door. I send Mart and Lin for decontamination and we check the area. No-one wants to think about Bob.
2. We’ve lost three people so far, and so there is a kind of protocol in place for that. If you are contaminated beyond hope of recovery, you stay outside. The next survey mission, in the morning, collects the body and we take it home for the family. There’s not a lot you can see of the city outside through the protective glass. Just grey mist and the looming shadows of buildings. Normally when this happens they’re too far gone to struggle much. We’re pretty good at decontamination these days but you can only do so much.
3. Of course, the best way to come back safely is: don’t get haunted in the first place. Don’t provide a hook, a sense of familiarity that the ghosts can cling to. The city is so old, now, and so full of ghosts, that it can be hard to avoid triggering memories for one or another of them. Mart estimates that we have come at a time when the city had been inhabited more or less continuously for a period of approximately half a billion years. Even the time underwater, there were people here. This is why our suits have been designed with features that as far as we know humanity has never had. Those irritating inflatable skirts give us a silhouette proven in two years of field tests to minimise haunting potential. Sometimes the suits come in with g-count zero, even for a full ten-minute mission.
4. Bob is quiet, outside. I think that he must be dying, quietly, politely somewhere out of sight. Even if he were not haunted, we put him back out there without any oxygen. Quietly, politely, we eat dinner. We turn the lights out. Dorit, who is an interfaith minister, says a few words into the darkness. We try to sleep.
5. Why do this at all? The opportunity was there. We could come forwards, but only to the point when there were no people left. Maybe they were employing some blocking technology before that, maybe it’s nature’s way of avoiding too many paradoxes, I don’t know. We could come forwards in time but only to after the death of humanity. So we came. We came to find out more about the last people, to learn from them, to maybe avoid their fate. Because there were people here, not many people but some, until maybe a few years ago. The people must have been resistant to haunting, somehow. Lin thinks it was the plants that were the problem. At high g-concentrations the ghosts will latch onto anything familiar at all, even plants, and suck it dry of life. No plants, and give or take a thousand years, no oxygen. So the last people must have known they were doomed. There are ghosts up on the hill that gasp: are they the final inhabitants?
6. Anyhow, the next morning they bring Bob back in, and he’s stiff and cold but oddly peaceful-looking. And we put him in the box, the one that we have for these occasions, and I take him back in time, back to when we came from, and we inform the authorities. I phone the family. We arrange a handover.
7. We never expected the ghosts. The ghosts of a city a thousand years old are gentle whispers, almost invisible. I used to think that memories were laid thick in the streets I grew up in. I used to pass a building that had been built from the stones of another, older building that had fallen into ruins and feel a thrill at the weight of history. Where we went to, the streets have half a billion years of history. The ghosts are so thick in the air that almost nothing else matters. How many people in half a billion years? If you squint through the mist, sometimes you can see them. The gaspers on the hill. The grey ladies in the temple (we no longer go to the temple). The long man. The burrowers.
8. I pass the box over to the authorities, who will perform a final decontamination and pass the body on to the funeral directors appointed by Bob’s family. And only then do I realise. It’s me, he said. It’s me. In bringing his body back to our own time, we have let loose Bob’s own patient ghost. It has half a billion years to go until it can haunt him. But it knows where to find him when it’s time. And it will.

Those that grow with each telling, those that you think have ended but which always have another ending to follow, stories for cold dawns, half-forgotten ones, stories that rely on some unspoken common knowledge, those that you disregard at the time but which come back to you at midnight; stories best told in a den or treehouse, stories for the intoxicated, those that curl back to their beginnings; tales that are elegant and beautiful knots, or that are passionless clockwork; stories about ideas that grudgingly contain people; stories about people in search of some plot; those that are not what you thought they were at first; those that you thought were funny when you started telling them but you realise half-way through are not, those whose digressions are the best parts, those that mean different things to different listeners; stories against the end of the world; those that you tell whilst sheltering from wolves; stories that wear their parlour tricks on their sleeves; that mix metaphors in a bucket; stories that seem to float off, mid-thought; those that are far too cool to say anything; stories presented as evidence for something true; shaggy dog tales; sleek greyhound stories whose meaning races off when left unattended; tiny grumpy dog tales that fit in a handbag.

1. This is the mile when I first needed a pee. We were on the way home, on the old road over the hills. The sun was setting and the baby was asleep in the back and we were on the part of the road where it’s just trees, mile after mile. I said, I might need to stop. But there aren’t any services around here, he said. Can you wait?
2-7. These are the miles when I thought it would be OK. Better to wait. I didn’t want to wake the baby. But of course it wasn’t. Here’s the thing, I said to him. I’ve just had a baby. My bladder doesn’t work very well. I think I really need to go. I need to go right now. We have to stop. Fine, he said. There’s a sign to a cafe. Let’s turn off here.
8. This is the mile we drove along the side road into the forest. No cafe in sight. Curious at first, peering through the dappled tree-light. Is it down a path? Did the sign fall off? And then down the rutted track, him cursing me, me cursing him: no cafe, can we even turn round? You’ll have to go in the woods, he said. Fine, I said. But you know I can’t go with anyone watching. Let me at least find a bush or something.
9. I don’t know if this was a mile or not, but it felt like one. Down the great open sweep of conifer forest, looking back all the while: can I see the car? Yes. Can I still see the car? Yes. And then, with the car out of sight: what if there were a stray walker coming over the ridge? What if that shadow is the wall of a house? And onwards, onwards. All the way on to the great old tree, the fallen tree with the dark crack up its side large enough for a person to squeeze in. It seemed like a gift, then.
10. This is the descent into darkness, the descent that went on and on. Was it a mile? It could have been. They said, later, at the checkpoint, that one must know the ritual to get in. Piss in a circle and put your hand on the black patch on the tree’s rotten heart. So I guess I was just lucky or something. Lucky, too, to step back into the tree’s new black fork and not out into the forest, confused in the darkness. The system is meant to keep out waifs and strays. Once you’re in, however, there’s no going back out again.
11. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. They did not know what to do with me at the checkpoint. I think I was there for hours, maybe days. My breasts were filling up with milk. I was desperate to get back. They said there was no paperwork for me. I thought they were wearing masks, and then I realised that only some of them were. They gave me food, which I ate. Eventually they gave me a pass to the House. Ask the Custodian, they said. If you can get in to see her she is duty bound to give you one gift, and it is only one, but that one can be passage back to the outside world. For anything extra, there is a price.
12. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. Don’t leave the path, they said. And at the House, they sent me back, again. This time there were strange beasts in the undergrowth. Someone said I shouldn’t have eaten the food, but too late now.
13. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest.
14. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest.
15. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. It had been a while, by this point. Going there, getting sent back. Someone said I could get beyond the gate if I put a flat copper coin into the mouth of the gargoyle above the door and put the lantern out, and I’d left the path to climb up to the cave with the clockwork dragon and chipped off a single copper scale to see if that would work, but when the lantern was out I could see hundreds of eyes, bright green in the darkness, peering from the ivy, and something scuttled past to block the door, and I knew there must be other protections at work.
15. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. And here’s the thing. Mothers don’t have adventures. Mothers don’t get caught in fairy realms. Mothers are not the subject of the story. When this happens to a mother, the child is the subject of the story, and the story is about abandonment and loss, about a scar that never quite heals. I was desperate to get home. My milk had dried up. I drugged the green-eyed beasts with the purple flowers that grew down by the lake. But I couldn’t find the way through the library.
16.-43. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest, with the weaver’s key and the map of the orangery roof. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest, armed with a silver needle. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest with the needle wiped in my blood and a crown of lavender and bramble. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. This is all the miles, until the final door, and the Custodian, and her grudgingly-given token of freedom.
44-45. These are the miles I stumbled out of the woods, bramble-torn and muddied, the ink of the Forest Under the Forest splattered up my forearms, out into a winter dawn and an empty lay-by. I knew that it would be later. That’s part of the deal, isn’t it? You never come back to the same time. And down the road, at the cafe we had somehow missed, I found out just how much later. Too much later. Years and years. The awful story was already written. Unexplainable abandonment. Loss. I could go and see it, or not. The thing is, I told the waitress, I don’t have a ride home. Wait until my shift ends, she said. I’ll take you. The thing is, I said, I’m not sure I have a home anymore. I sat there until the sun was high in the sky. Then I went back into the woods.
46-47. These are the miles back into the woods. The path was familiar, now. I stopped for a few minutes at the long crack in the hollow tree. Then I went in.
48. This is the mile to the House in the Forest. Just the once, this time. I knew the system. I knew the way. I knew the words to speak and the forms to sign. I knew the sinister glint in the Custodian’s eye. I need to go back to when I left the first time, I said. Everything as it was. Can you do that? And she smiled, as if this had not been the first time she was asked that, and nodded. What do I need to do to make that happen? I asked.  Well yes, she said. There’s always a price. Let’s talk, I said.
49. This is the mile I walked out of the woods, victorious: the clock exactly where it should be, the car waiting. You took your time, he said. The baby was awake; he was blinking at the dappled light coming through the trees by the lay-by. Well, I’m back now, I said. Let’s get home.
50. This is for all the other miles, sweet stolen domestic miles, home and back again. We don’t use the road over the hills now. It takes too long that way, I told him. There’s talk that his mother may move closer, anyway. I’ve a second baby on the way. I try to live in the moment. Don’t we all? I don’t think about those strange lost years if I can avoid it. But here’s the thing. Mothers don’t have adventures, no. Or maybe I should say, now: mothers keep very quiet about their adventures. But everyone loves it when young men have adventures. So yes, there was a price. He’ll find out when he turns sixteen.

1. Have you ever been eaten by an elephant? It happened to me. That is, the elephant was actually a taxi and I was able to get out again at the other end of the journey, but in all other vital respects it was exactly the same. Anyway, that’s the start of the story. The second part of the story is that I left my hat in the taxi, which is a bit like part of me getting stuck in the elephant and requiring the attention of a vet.
2. Anyway, I called the vet, who due to a misunderstanding laid me out on the table and began a fevered but unsuccessful search for the ether. Caught up in the occasion, I suggested phoning it to see if it would ring. We tried this. Alas, we had a wrong number. Instead of finding the ether, we had accidentally called North Korea and arranged a custom missile strike for the next day. This was obviously a problem. For a start, I was completely unsure how to break it to my employers, whose premises we were on at the time.
3. When one is in trouble, I find it helpful to sit back and have a little something. Fortunately, there was a something takeaway just down the road. I ordered a thing and a whatnot for myself and a doodah for the vet, should she ever come back (I think I neglected to mention that she had made her excuses). Imagine my surprise when I found that the thing had a beetle cooked right through the centre. Well, no right-thinking person could stand for that. Missile strike or no, I needed to set the record straight.
4. If I may, I find it helps immeasurably in explaining the next part to take a brief excursion into numismatics - specifically, the history of the threepenny bit. Let us cast our minds back to the reign of good Queen Anne. Unfortunately I cast my mind back a little too far, unsettled as I was by the events of the day. I ended up with my body in the present day and my mind somewhere South of the Great Fire of London. Worse yet, my mind was stuck up a tree being stared at by hungry squirrels. Meanwhile, overjoyed at finding a vacant body, a family of beavers set up home in my navel.
5. I find that being wedged in time concentrates the liver marvellously, and right on cue, my liver took control of the situation. We agreed to split the difference, add the remainder and copy the rest, with the somewhat predictable result that all my constituent parts were hastily reunited. I believe the beavers may have been launched through time at a hitherto unprecedented velocity for a semiaquatic rodent. I hope that the folk of the far future will be grateful for this intervention, but you never can tell. Anyway, we ended up on Shit Creek. Interestingly, this is a real place, with its own fascinating ecosystem based on the shit cycle.
6. You may have noticed that I always have a paddle on me. Well, that time was no exception. You will appreciate that I am not at liberty to disclose the location of Shit Creek until the various papers that I have in preparation are published. Nonetheless, I hope you will believe me when I say that the outlet of the creek lies not more than thirty minute gentle stroll from a major centre of civilization. In defiance of all probability, I found myself within reach of home. All I needed was the ability to charter a modest charabanc or some such device.
7. Now, as it happened, a taxi was passing. Hailing it with my one remaining flipper, I was astonished to find that it was the very taxi I had left not twenty minutes earlier. And there, resplendent in inky felt on the back seat, was my hat! I was filled with that peculiar joy that comes from fate’s occasional acts of outrageous serendipity. For some reason, the taxi driver failed to share my effervscent joy, although she did pat me on the back a few times and perform the Heimlich manoeuvre. In any case, I found myself chewing down on a Happy Ending, so I shall leave it here too for you to have a bite. Enjoy!