After a minute of my now formless existence, I had concluded that the town was at least consistent in that it was shit from all angles. My focus was blurry, possibly because I didn’t have eyes, but I caught glimpses of street upon street of terraces, dotted with the usual North-East mix of scraggly parks, Herons and spiky spires of death-cults, before my attention was finally drawn to a faint glow in the distance. It might have been a tip, but Raughnen, like my home town, was surrounded by glorious, colourful countryside, where you might find fields of beautiful flowers if you were into that sort of thing or bits of old wall with signs if you were a real man like me.
I guessed the glowing bit of hillside through, upon which I could see a nice normal-looking stone chapel with hawk-like clarity, wasn’t going to be the sort with the grave of the local shoe factory’s supervisor’s aunt’s priest’s grandfather built into the tea-cubby’s counter. It was going to have a seal in it, probably in the middle of a big chalk pentagram lined with a circle of mumbling, robed old men with pet abominations on leads snoozing by their feet dreaming of nice fat Boro arses to chomp on, and I was going to float on and on right into their bloody maws any second now.
And I did start going in that direction, but then I noticed a bit of a commotion in a little square up ahead, a square next to the big hand-church-thing where several streets met, and from which dark figures with silly hats were sprinting and milling about in the middle of the cobblestones, and then they raised their hands gormlessly like they were at a Nickleback gig and a big green light flashed out and rushed up to me and then I was falling straight into the middle of them all and rubbing my again-substantial buttocks where they’d scraped an inconvenient curb.
Perhaps I should have just swallowed the lot like a good little demon-servant.
It was a bit late now, because the wizards or priests or whatever the fuck they wanted to call themselves were swishing up to meet me. I caught sight of some quite awful varicose veins beneath a robe or two before I was hauled to my feet and twisted about in the crowd. It was like one of those nights where its one o’clock and most of the crew are too sozzled to know any better and one of the young kids drags you all off to those scummy clubs where they serve great big pitchers of bright blue drinks that aren’t even made of beer and you start seeing the real squirming, pressing, throbbing underbelly of the place you thought you knew and loved so well. Varicose veins and all.
There must have been fifty of them all crammed into that little square. The winos and beggars had scarpered at the first sign of them all, so there was just us with no-one to scream to. I wouldn’t have been heard anyway, because they were all screaming at each other, and the air was thick with spittle and ejected dentures as I was passed from hand to wrinkled hand.
Eventually, the not-quite-skeletal digits started to fall away, and I shrugged myself clear. I was still surrounded, and there were more flashes of light at their fingertips that I suspected might not be Asda glow sticks. Then one of the figures, a slightly more sprightly forty year old man with some rare brown streaks to his hair, promptly turned into a nice copper statue of himself and I realised I might not be the only target. I focused on dividing the hoarse voices, and realised this wasn’t exactly a unified scene.
“Hands off him!” commanded a smartly-dressed professor-type in a tea cosy. It was a bit late ‘cos they already had. “We have first rights to any downed teawalkers in this square.” He produced a yellowed, crumpled scroll from his jacket pocket and held it aloft.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
But the others weren’t exactly interested. “This is no mere sightseer!” said an approaching old fart in what looked worryingly akin to a striped blouse.
“But I am!” I protested, to quite literally deaf ears.
“This is an agent of the Dreaded Dread! I spotted him rising out of that museum!” There were several croaks of affirmation and not just from the frogs on his cronies’ shoulders. “And we’ve got a special contract to take all such agents to the carnival! See! See!” And said contract made a startlingly quick appearance, this time as a much crisper printout.
Somehow I expected that I wasn’t going to the carnival for a ride on the teacups. (I’d already just been doing that, metaphorically speaking). I had to get out of there.
Slowly, slowly, I started to edge out of the way as the two men squared up to each other. But I’m afraid the extra hundred pounds or so that I have - the kind on the belly and not in the account, sadly- didn’t make for a great getaway. I was decently easy to spot.
“Oi!” said a voice in my ear, and “Not so fast!” said something fleshy and squeaky as it pressed awfully into my third neck-tyre. “Let’s all stop for a moment and actually secure ‘im before we pick over him... or his remains at least.”
At last, they were all unified on summat. The whole bloody mob drew in, arms and, well, appendages outstretched to ‘secure’ me in any way they saw fit. I pushed free and backed myself against a boarded-up window, looking for some way out. I’d been in tighter spots than this before, I knew, and most of the time I’d gotten out. Most.
Usually, it was the gift of the gab that worked. As I said, this wasn’t one squad. So I could try.
“Ey!” I bellowed, and I singled out one wiry little acolyte at random as he closed in. “You there.... what a glory boy... in that yellow towel! Pah! You ain’t got no chance this year!”
They all stopped then. Then, as one, they doubled over, stricken by hearty chokes of wheezing laughter. I managed to take out a couple with some long-overdue cardiac infarctions, but that was it. “You bloody what?” the youth snapped. “Glory boy? I was conceived for this! Conceived! Two bloody centuries ago!”
I retract the youth bit.
Then they were regaining composure and stepping over their fallen oldies, and I can’t repeat most of the chatter about what they were going to do to me because as soon as I heard the words “savoury slivers” I put my fingers in my ears and started to cry.
But I was still watching, and then I saw something I understood.
The laughter, it seems, really had done me some good. Because as soon as the violent threats of murder turn to laughter, the amateur boozers come back out the woodwork. And the tourists. At the edges of the square, some of the visitors, and I knew they were visitors because they actually looked like human beings, were starting to peek in at whatever spectacle was occurring, or maybe just looking for an elusive signpost that could point them in the direction of the sane quarter. And because I really am an alright human being myself, I was immediately drawn to what I saw in the middle of one of those little knots. He looked like a decent family man, judging by the wife and the kids with lollipops stuck to their gobs, but the white that I saw lingering about his collar and waist showed his true and filthy nature beneath the exterior of his trendy coat.
He saw the hungry look in my eyes, but it was too late to run.
“Look!” I screeched, channelling a girthy sausage of a finger at his heart. “That man’s from Leeds!”
Utter silence fell for a second. Then the mob turned with a singular, mighty swishing of capes. I was completely, irreversibly, forgotten. All of a sudden, there was real work to be done here, and I happened to be on the right side of things.
I slipped away down the hill as the inevitable chant of “We all hate Leeds scum! We all hate Leeds scum!” kicked in, so I didn’t see any of what unfolded. But I didn’t have to. If you look up any vaguely local paper from 27th August 2029 ( a bank holiday, of course, an official day of ‘just going out and getting some fresh air’ which explained why any of us had ventured into that attractionless riding in the first place) you’ll find a couple of lines about the riot, the utter destruction of several already utterly destroyed properties, the sad loss of two partially consumed lollies and, of course, the brutal dismemberment and obliteration of one ‘innocent’ thirty-two year old male in the ‘apparent dwelling’ of Raughnen at approximately half one in the rather sunny afternoon. But it really is only a couple of lines.
And I, like the papers, feel no sorrow, and certainly no shame or guilt in calling him out. Bloke really was from Leeds.