Bill Hussey

Hello, your friendly neighbourhood Caretaker here…

My plan last week was to begin a short blog about the final stages of writing Book 2 (currently titled ‘The Absence’). This was to run alongside a blog which would record the weeks leading up to publication of ‘Through A Glass, Darkly’ on 10th July. The idea was to scribble a few lines, here and there, describing a smooth and uneventful final edit… Okay, ‘smooth and uneventful’ is always an optimistic ambition when nearing the end of a book. Inevitably, you’ll find bit of gristle in the veins of the story that must be cleaned out, fat that must be trimmed. Sometimes you’ll discover a great big chunk of wayward plot clogging up an otherwise healthy artery (don’t worry, these cardiac allusions are going somewhere). On Monday 5th May, at about 11.30pm, I put down my red pen. Friday’s deadline for handing the MS into my agent still glowered on the horizon in blood-red tones, but I was ahead of schedule. Yup, I could see nothing in the road ahead that might trip me up.

Then, at a little after midnight, my heart decided to burst clean out of my chest…

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Fictional horror story first –

The idea for ‘The Absence’ came to me one hot summer afternoon as I was standing in a long Post Office queue. There were two old fellas in front of me, chattering away about yesteryear. Except that this yesteryear wasn’t filled with Junker bombers, ration books, Betty Grable and Bakelite radios; these tales were far older, plucked from an ancient collective memory. My queue buddies were of a dwindling breed: true, honest-to-God Fenmen – descendants of that vanished race of Breedlings that made its living from the East Anglian marshes. Their forebears had been reed cutters and fen fishermen who, once upon a time, had used stilts to traverse the great swamps of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. After the drainage schemes of the Seventeenth Century much of the world of which they spoke had simply vanished.

I listened to their vignettes (too brief, too delightfully jumbled to be called ‘stories’). Couched in a gruff, Yellow Belly accent, I overheard references to tales I would later discover in dog-eared and dusty library books. Stories of the Green Children who entered the Fens from another world; of the demonic Dane-hound, Black Shuck; of Yallery Brown, the trickster, trapped beneath the Stranger’s Table; of… Ah, but you’ll have to wait awhile before you meet the strangest of these fenland characters. He is, after all, the bogeyman of my tale.

I had already done a fair amount of research into Fen history. The mythology of this area has some bearing on the events in ‘Through A Glass, Darkly’. Now I ploughed a deeper furrow. I ordered up every book I could find on the folklore of the Fens and, although the materials were thin on the ground, I kept coming across the same strange little creature. Like much of Fen mythology, his story seemed to have largely vanished, along with the watery landscape over which he had once presided. The tales left behind about old ‘No-Name’ were very scant indeed. He seemed to me like a forgotten god, existing only in a thin tradition of oral storytelling…

And then it struck me: here was a story. A tale of neglected beliefs, of Absence…

‘The Absence’ is a story in which the Fens and their folklore play a large part. As far as I am aware the true mythology of this place has hardly been touched upon in dark fiction. Sure, MR James set many of his excellent ghost stories amid this bleak landscape and beneath this brooding three-quarter sky. Susan Hill employed the frets and forlorn atmosphere of the Fens for her haunting chiller, ‘The Woman in Black’. But most of these are hermetic tales, sealed off from the folklore all around them. I do not believe that the stories which sprang from ‘behind the rustling reed’ have ever directly informed a modern horror novel. In ‘The Absence’, Fen folklore and a sense of Fen history (what was and what was lost) are central to the story.

Once I had been gripped by this idea, the writing of ‘The Absence’ was fairly straightforward. It would revolve around a modern family, buckling under the weight of a terrible loss. They would inherit a house set in the midst of the Fens. A place in which the memory of something ancient and forgotten still moved behind the reed…

I plan to post further blogs about the writing and development of this book, but for now I hope this serves as a basic introduction…

And so, after many months, I had reached the end of my final draft before submission. I had the story more or less as I wanted it and was preparing for the inevitable and healthy critique of my agent. This was Monday 5th May – 11.30pm…

The first flutters began as I was brushing my teeth. I could feel the tremors through my shirt, but I’d had brief attacks of palpitations before, and they always wore off after thirty seconds or so. By the time I laid my head on the pillow it felt as if my heart had turned into a gigantic moth and was battering itself senseless against my ribcage. By 1.30 am the ol’ ticker would stop dead for what felt like minutes; then it would gasp back into life, launching itself into my throat then dropping back into position and pummelling at my chest.

By 2am I found myself at Skegness cottage hospital, hooked up to a rather impressive piece of machinery. This nifty device told me two things: that my heart rate, which should be around 72 beats per minute, was averaging 198, and that it was fluctuating wildly. Suffice to say that all thoughts of mythological fen creatures had left me.

My story of the Nightingale family and their encounter with No-Name of the marshes would have to wait…

To be continued…

The Caretaker is currently:

Reading: ‘The Hanging Garden’ by Ian Rankin and re-reading ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’ by GK Chesterton

Listening to: ‘Konk’ by the Kooks

Watching: Paul Merton in China (very amusing)