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The Nonesuch and Others

Dust jacket and interior illustrations

Print version interior design

Introduction

“The Thin People” in Whispers Vol. 6, No. 23-24,

“The Nonesuch”

Electronic Edition

ISBN

978-1-59606-661-8

Subterranean Press

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519

www.subterraneanpress.com

Table of Contents:

Introduction

The Thin People

Stilts

The Nonesuch

Introduction

The man who features in the following trilogy of stories is in no way typical of a majority of characters in my other stories and novels, for by and large I write of heroes. And the reason I make no mention of his name is because—like Clint Eastwood in those spaghetti westerns—he doesn’t have a name; I didn’t give him one. And even when he gives himself one in this small book’s title story, it’s a pseudonym.

You’ll see what I mean.

Unlike that cheroot-smoking fellow in the poncho, however, and as I’ve hinted above, my Man With No Name isn’t a hero nor even an anti-hero. (But he’s no coward either, well not especially.) Why, in The Nonesuch he might even appear rather brave—or perhaps stupid and ridiculously naive, depending on your point of view.

But however you look at it, my Man With No Name is just an innocent bystander who happens to be standing by in the wrong place at the wrong time: a witness to terrifying occurrences, monstrous events, who can never be one hundred per cent positive that the things he has experienced are real. And why not? Because a man who sees pink elephants might as easily see just about anything!

So then, and as stated, this rather different character of mine is by no means a typical hero; but if you the reader were confronted by the bizarre, inexplicable nonesuches whose paths tend to cross his in the following stories…well, how brave would you be?

Ask yourself that question when you’re done…

Brian Lumley

Devon, Feb. 2008

One

Funny place, Barrows Hill. Not Barrow’s Hill, no. Barrows without the apostrophe. For instance: you won’t find it on any map. You’ll find maps whose borders approach it, whose corners impinge, however slightly, upon it, but in general it seems that cartographers avoid it. It’s too far out from the centre for the tubes, hasn’t got a mainline station, has lost much of its integrity by virtue of all the infernal demolition and reconstruction going on around and within it. But it’s still there. Buses run to and from, and the older folk who live there still call it Barrows Hill.

When I went to live there in the late seventies I hated the place. There was a sense of senility, of inherent idiocy about it. A damp sort of place. Even under a hot summer sun, damp. You could feel blisters of fungus rising even under the freshest paint. Not that the place got painted very much. Not that I saw, anyway. No, for it was like somewhere out of Lovecraft: decaying, diseased, inbred.

Barrows Hill. I didn’t stay long, a few months. Too long, really. It gave you the feeling that if you delayed, if you stood still for just one extra moment, then it would grow up over you and you’d become a part of it. There are some old, old places in London, and I reckoned Barrows Hill was one of the oldest. I also reckoned it for its genius loci; like it was a focal point for secret things. Or perhaps not a focal point, for that might suggest a radiation—a spreading outwards—and as I’ve said Barrows Hill was ingrown. The last bastion of the strange old things of London. Things like the thin people. The very tall, very thin people.

Now nobody—but nobody anywhere—is ever going to believe me about the thin people, which is one of the two reasons I’m not afraid to tell this story. The other is that I don’t live there any more. But when I did…

I suspect now that quite a few people—ordinary people, that is—knew about them. They wouldn’t admit it, that’s all, and probably still won’t. And since all of the ones who’d know live on Barrows Hill, I really can’t say I blame ’em. There was one old lad lived there, however, who knew and talked about them. To me. Since he had a bit of a reputation (to be frank, they called him ‘Barmy Bill of Barrows Hill’) I didn’t pay a deal of attention at first. I mean, who would?

Barrows Hill had a pub, a couple of pubs, but the one most frequented was The Railway. A hangover from a time when there really was a railway, I supposed. A couple of years ago there had been another, a serious rival to The Railway for a little while, when someone converted an old block into a fairly modem pub. But it didn’t last. Whoever owned the place might have known something, but probably not. Or he wouldn’t have been so stupid as to call his place The Thin Man! It was only open for a week or two before burning down to the ground.

But that was before my time and the only reason I make mention of pubs, and particularly The Railway, is because that’s where I met Barmy Bill. He was there because of his disease, alcoholism, and I was there because of mine, heartsickness—which, running at a high fever, showed all signs of mutating pretty soon into Bill’s problem. In short, I was hitting the bottle.

Now this is all incidental information, of course, and I don’t intend to go into it other than to say it was our problems brought us together. As unlikely a friendship as any you might imagine. But Barmy Bill was good at listening, and I was good at buying booze. And so we were good company.

One night, however, when I ran out of money, I made the mistake of inviting him back to my place. (My place—hah! A bed, a loo and a typewriter; a poky little place up some wooden stairs, like a penthouse kennel; oh, yes, and a bonus in the shape of a cupboard converted to a shower.) But I had a couple bottles of beer back there and a half-bottle of gin, and when I’d finished crying on Barmy Bill’s shoulder it wouldn’t be far for me to fall into bed. What did surprise me was how hard it was to get him back there. He started complaining the moment we left the bar—or rather, as soon as he saw which way we were headed.

“Up the Larches? You live up there off Barchington Road? Yes, I remember you told me. Well, and maybe I’ll just stay in the pub a while after all. I mean, if you live right up there—well, it’s out of my way, isn’t it?”

“Out of your way? It’s a ten-minute walk, that’s all! I thought you were thirsty?”

“Thirsty I am—always! Barmy I’m not—they only say I am ’cos they’re frightened to listen to me.”

“They?”

“People!” he snapped, sounding unaccustomedly sober. Then, as if to change the subject: “A half-bottle of gin, you said?”

‘That’s right, Gordon’s. But if you want to get back on down to The Railway…”

“No, no, we’re half-way there now,” he grumbled, hurrying along beside me, almost taking my arm in his nervousness. “And anyway, it’s a nice bright night tonight. They’re not much for light nights.”