Short Hoggers

If you haven’t read the previous events-- “The Specter at the Feast” or “Summer Break 2017” then please do so first so you’ll understand my chaotic situation.

The following events occurred two years before I came to Western France. Having survived several encounters with the local Australian wildlife--the most unpredictable animal being the one that walked on two legs, I thought I had seen most of everything I would see. I thought I gained enough knowledge to face the crisis of sudden change and displacement. Although I wasn’t the typical 14 year old doing stupid and outrageous things, I certainly wasn’t a genius when it came to expecting the unexpected.

I was among the Saffrasia Island population suddenly displaced due to the nearby volcano. Since Saffrasia was a British Overseas Territory, we were all granted full residency rights in the United Kingdom.

Well, I pretty much hated the weather in England, if it was not raining, it was windy and icy-cold, and it was hardly even sunny! I also hated the capital—London along with the urban population. So unfriendly, superficial, and self-absorbed; just all stiff-upper-lip presentation, no one bothering to listen to one another because they were all much too busy trying to present themselves in a certain narrow minded manner, at the same time looking at their iPhones.

Well, the place I eventually got settled in East London Borough certainly wasn’t the Ritz, but it wasn’t a total nightmare. Although we did find mushrooms growing atop the kitchen countertop... plus it had roaches as well as rats. Not small ones--the big scary kind that tended to scurry over your face in the middle of the night.

Still, most of my housemates (many of them fellow Saffrasian refugees) were great; the place was laid back and fun... I just didn’t want to live there forever.

There’s something you got to remember about London—something very important to know before you wander off the beaten track. There’s more than one version of it. Underneath the buzzing, brightly polished metropolis lays strange, secret worlds, all hidden from view of the millions of inattentive people. I’m not talking about the London Underground (also known as the Underground or the Tube) or Subterranean London with its catacombs, air raid shelters, and top secret bunkers. I’m talking about the Hidden Places not featured on any tourist brochures, signpost or advertisements. Bizarre Worlds filled with marvels and surprises. ... also potentially dangerous to your sanity and well-being --alternate realities, each containing a version of London existing simultaneously, even closely entangled with your own world in a massive Gordian knot.

I think I might have stumbled into one of these worlds; I think I might have also accidentally “leaped” into another version of myself, although now that I think about it, I’m not entirely so sure if this was the actual me or some equally confused alternate version of me. Anyway, I was standing in the checkout queue at this nearby supermarket, and I happened to spy this tabloid paper. If I remember the name correctly, it was called The Toad Huddle. Some wise guy (possible tipsy too) obviously thought this one up with a flip of a coin.

SCANDAL IN LIMOUX COUNTY, FRANCE

Proclaimed a banner in bold capital letters:

YOUNGEST HEIRESS OF PROMINENT VAN DEVEREUX FAMILY ACCUSED OF SERIOUS CRIMES--HARASSMENT AND EXTORTION OF INNOCENT PRIMARY SCHOOL STUDENTS, MAKING AND DISTRIBUTING OF DEBILITATING AND DEADLY TONICS, AS WELL AS A HORRIBLE HALLOWEEN PRANK LEADING TO MASS PANIC AND INJURY.

Then another banner:

UNLESS GRANTED CLEMENCY--SENTENCE WILL BE A DOG’S LIFE.

And I’m like ''‘What? Exactly what do they mean by ‘a dog’s life?’''

I must have said the question out loud then for an old woman’s voice answered right back. ‘Well, dearie, its local slang meaning exile in a mortal shell.’

Turning around, I see a couple of old women in the elderly matron ensemble topped off by a small, old-fashioned hat--a fat one with jowly face reminiscent of a bull dog and a very thin one that reminded me of a skinny old hen. Their skin was of a mottled and unhealthy grey pallor, giving the appearance of curdled milk or ash. It was the fat one who spoke up next.

’They turn the felon into a mortal first before they sending ‘im off,’ she explained. ‘Don’t know how they do it exactly, except its long and complicated. Isn’t that right, Lottie?’

‘Right you are, Fran,’ the thin biddy nodded. ‘Shortens 'is life down to one mortal span, plus it grounds ‘im hard to the Midgard earth so ‘im wouldn’t be able to hold a magical charge or anything else. Makes ‘im as weak and powerless as a dog.’

‘Hence the saying--’Being mortal is no better than being a dog,’ Lottie replied.

‘Well, that’s awful!’ I exclaimed, shocked. ‘Why not have them do their time as an ordinary animal like a donkey or a cow?’ At the same time, the inner me was like ''What? What the hell is going on here? Why am I taking this bizarre stuff so seriously? This can’t be real! Why am I saying all these things? It’s like I’m in a Monty Python skit with squawky-voiced guys in bad drag!''

‘Oh, they still do that sort of thing in a few primitive parts,’ Fran told me. ‘Used to do it here until the Labor Party came along and abolished it.’

‘Yep, got rid of that sort of punishment in 1965 along with the death penalty,’ Lottie muttered. ‘Too barbaric, they say plus there was a potential of magical backfire, causing the transformation to go horribly wrong.’

‘That and the felon sometimes tried to get revenge in animal form.’

‘But that Van Devereux girl looks feeble minded!’ I exclaimed, turning back to regard the vague dull-looking brunette on the magazine cover. ‘Surely the court wouldn’t sentence a natural to lifelong exile.’

‘A natural?’ Fran’s bristly eyebrows went up. ‘A natural, you say? Oh no! Definitely not a natural, dearie.’

Lottie chuckled, shaking her fluffy head of hair. ‘You don’t follow that news, do you? Ain’t no innocent halfwit, she is. That Gentry girl’s a cunning lil’ thing, cunning and mean like a lil’ viper. She don’t care nothing about anybody, not even her mamma, papa or any of her brothers and sisters!’

‘Right,’ Fran snatched up the magazine from the rack. ‘A really mean lil’ witch indeed.’ Flipping through the pages, she added. ‘Never seen such a nasty beast in all my born days.’

‘Ere!’ Lottie grabbed the magazine from her stout friend, thrusting it forward. ‘You can see some of that meanness in Clarissa’s eyes!’

‘But...’ I started to say, and then as soon I saw that magazine cover again, my eyes widened in disbelief.

What I say wasn’t a slovenly-dressed girl with an empty, flat face of a large baby. Instead, what I saw was an immaculately-dressed girl with curly blonde hair that was braided and tied back with silk ribbons. Although her oval face was fixed in an expression of charm and delight, the dimpled smile seemed icy while the wide blue eyes seemed cold and calculating as though she could see into my unsettled mind.

‘But I swear I just saw...’ I began.

Lottie narrowed her bloodshot eyes. 'You alright, dearie?’

‘Don’t look alright to me,’ Fran observed. ‘Looks to me like she’ve seen a ghost.’

Yeah, that’s what I think I saw, I wanted to say, but I didn’t because I didn’t want them to think I was losing my mind.

Instead I blurted out something a little more reasonable-sounding:

‘Well, for a minute there... I thought she was a brunette.’

Both biddies screwed up their wrinkly faces in puzzlement before looking down at the magazine once again.

‘Ooh, you might be right on that one, dearie,’ Fran remarked, pursing her bulldog lips. ‘She does seem to have some dark roots.’

‘Hair’s a funny color too,’ Lottie chuckled without mirth. ‘Weird ginger blonde... like she did her own dye job, but botched it though.’

‘Well, they probably don’t have any professional hairdressers where she’s at now,’ Fran replied brightly.

Meanwhile, I walked forward with my groceries, leaving the cackling biddies behind to their gossip. I wasn’t going to get involved in gloating over someone else’s troubles, even though, like the majority of foreigners and working-class, I wasn’t too fond of the Gentry class.

By the time I got home, I pretty much dismissed the strange occurrence as due to stress, travel fatigue along with shock of moving to a strange new place.

Eighteen months later, I had nearly forgotten the supermarket incident. I had a new job waiting tables at this tea and coffee tavern. It was tough and I was always tired and had sore feet, had to push myself to meet new people and be a little more outgoing. It seemed things were starting to look up. The landlord finally got around to repairing the apartment house and evicting the animal freeloaders. A few of my roomies even started up a backyard community garden. I eventually learned to adjust to waitressing and the socializing part, even though I still got a bit flustered and tongue tied trying to talk to costumers and sometimes got their orders all wrong.

It was starting to be a pretty good place to live, although I still didn’t like London. Then autumn rolled around with its lengthening chilly nights and thick fog, along with the cosplayers and all around Halloween convention nerds you tended to expect with the closing season—furry anthros and werewolves, Final Fantasy and Harry Potter characters, ghost pirates and zombies, all sorts from popular video games and science fiction movies, various ‘bogeymen’ of all nationalities coming over and borrowing the lawn furniture and party lanterns.

As strange as this might sound, I actually welcomed their company, their noisy house parties as they stood in the nearby yard and street, drinking and carousing.

But on miserable wet nights when the streets were generally deserted, someone…or something would wander near the apartment complex and sing in this phlegmy burble. Always it would be the same song, this bit of nonsense ditty about nobody liking this person, and this person saying--guess I’ll go eat some worms then... or something to that effect.

I didn’t know what this thing looked like exactly. Just that this thing was invisible and that I wasn’t the only person who heard it and it only came around on dark lonely nights of heavy rain or fog, and never tried to come inside.

It seemed a mild-mannered spook and most of the residents along that particular street were used to it, treating it as a trifling nightly inconvenience, even going so far as accepting it as a rather eccentric member of the neighborhood. Some of the more sympathetic ones left it treats and small toys, thinking it was a ghost of a small child.

I was one of the few people who never grew accustomed to the spirit, and often times slept with ear plugs whenever it came around. Even complained about it at work once, and the people there just nodded while I pitched a fit, then my boss told me I should consider myself lucky that the ghost/boggart/whatever only came around once a year. Then he mentioned the Skrim apartments where the residents were pestered by a full-time phantom in a veiled widow outfit banging on a gong.

‘You’ll get used to Short Hoggers,’ he told me. ‘Everyone eventually does.’

Now ‘Short Hoggers’ happened to be an affectionate local phrase used to address really small children. I think it meant 'Little Boots,’ although at the time I felt like calling it something a little less sweet and chucking some heavy duty boots at it.

But as the weeks went by, I eventually got used to it. Even stopped griping about how it kept on singing the same old song.

Unfortunately, one roomie in particular who was clever about occult things, but not so in common sense, decided to do a little dabbling, innocently thinking that what she was contacting was a lonely little ghost.

Poor Joan. She was always boasting constantly about her great magical abilities. She claimed to have even vanquished a nest of shadow demons at the dog cemetery in Hyde Park. She actually thought she was on par with the greatest human spell casters in history (mostly fictitious ones), instead of just being a trust fund hippie/wiccan wannabe. So when everyone was out at a movie one Halloween night, she called that something in... Something that she thought was a lost child.

She thought that something would also be her friend and would help her become the spell caster she always dreamed about. Poor stupid Joan.

The neighbors heard her shrieks and came running, but it was already too late.

They later told me that it looked like she had been attacked by lions. She was horribly mangled, claw marks all over her. Yet there wasn’t a trace of blood anywhere, just this black, stinky slime drenching the inside of the room.

Me and everyone else who lived in that house had to go to an inquest, even though we weren’t around when the murder occurred and there weren’t any suspects, although we had a pretty good idea who it was, cause while we were at the movies, we kept hearing Joan’s voice going around the aisles--singing that wretched worm song... just like the Short Hoggers.

The court ordered us not to talk since Joan happened to come from this ulta-rich family who didn’t want the negative publicity. But a person just can’t keep quiet about that sort of thing. I’ve got to tell somebody--even though that somebody’s an unseen viewer reading this blog posting.

But that wasn’t why I left England. Not wanting to stick around for a repeat performance of Joan’s messy demise, I fled East London Borough. Much to my relief, the thing didn’t follow; it stayed on in the neighborhood, moving from one house to the next, although it didn’t take anyone this time. Instead it would sit outside either on the porch or on any lawn furniture left out. It would always leave in the morning, and all the wicker wood or couches would all be soaked in black oily slime--unfit for anything but the bonfire.

I ended up moving to a house in East Dulwich with five others in it. I was to share a room with a chatty Aussie exchange student and the privilege would cost me about £550 per month. But I felt it was all worth it after my harrowing experience in East London Borough. Then, a few months later, I came home late from working as a kitchen assistant and found the house filled with police and freaked out fellow tenants. Meanwhile, my roommate was having hysterics on the couch, and I thinking to myself--Oh great, someone just got caught with a bag of Sparkle Freeeza or Brain Boosters. But it wasn’t about an illegal substance; it was about my roommate seeing the Short Hoggers. And when she finally told us the story, a shiver of cold horror ran through me. For it wasn't a ghost she saw sitting in the lawn chair when she went to take the trash to the curb. This was something much darker than any vengeful earthly shade, and far worse than any merely infernal spirit.

‘It was squirming and twisting around in a chair,’ she stammered. ‘I thought... I thought it was an animal at first... like a seal or a giant eel even. Just lying there, wriggling and squirming horribly around... like it was dying or turning itself inside out. Then it saw me and stood up. But I ran back inside and locked the door. Then I saw it looking in through the window.’

Then my roommate pointed to the window overlooking the drive.

‘Right over there... it was pressed up against the glass. Its face... it was like that Wiccan girl that got killed a year back in East London Borough, and yet it wasn’t. Like a death mask without any eyes, with the nose and lips all shriveled and rotting away. And I knew there was something hiding behind it--something even more terrible!’

I moved out the very next morning and emigrated shortly afterwards. So that, everyone, is my story, and I know nothing more than what I just experienced... and I don’t want to know anymore.

Lying in bed, I watch through the skylight as tattered clouds scudded past the closest moon and imagine gray banks of fog rolled in from the Channel. In my mind’s eye, I see beneath all that mist, wandering wildlife turning tail and fleeing, and dogs huddling, trembling and whimpering in their yards and kennels. My nightly dream wandering will bring me down the old rutted coach road and weaving through the nearby Swanwick Forest, and then I suddenly, I hear in the distance someone singing a strange song.