Contents

1. Copyright

2. Introduction

3. Author's Note

4. Illustration

5. Throttle and Bribes

6. Notes

Guide

1. Contents

2. Start of Content

GARTH MARENGHI'S THROTTLE AND BRIBES

Copyright © Matthew Holness 2024.

The right of Matthew Holness to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: © Joe Avery

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This story was first published as part of Garth Marenghi's TerrorTome Collector's Edition in 2023 by Hodder Studio

An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Introduction

'Throttle and Bribes' is perhaps - nay is - the definitive artistic statement - in any genre - on society, bread, lack of bread and 'The Man'. By which I mean ape. A cogent, radical and wholly Marenghian take on the theme of social oppression, perpetrated by monkeys.

I'm lucky. I have money. A lot of money. Most folk don't. In fact, I take that back. I'm not remotely lucky. I've earned what I've got through hard graft and woe betide anyone or anything that tries to take it from me. I have access to a famer's shotgun and I will aim it at another human torso.

But for many, the acquisition of wonga is a mystical art. All too oft, what the workshy manage to grasp fleetingly in their hands after blowing the bulk of it on vapes and 'acrylic nails', is soon snatched back by the paws of The Man. By which I, again, mean ape.

What follows then, is a cautionary tale intended to guide yon non-thrifters on a truer path. One that I pray will inspire in you, my readers, a spirit of self-sufficiency, financial prudence and a fresh Puritan work ethic, without which you deserve diddly squat. Not even bread and water.

Garth Marenghi

Author's Note

Warning - this story contains scenes of women and children being peeled apart like human bananas. It also dramatises the theft of children's breakfasts at gunpoint. If this offends you, tough.

Heh heh heh.

- Garth Marenghi

THROTTLE AND BRIBES

'I'VE SEEN THIS picture somewhere before, Nick. I know I have.'

Nick Steen, horror author and current battler of his own internal*1 demons, ignored his former editor Roz Bloom and concentrated instead on the road ahead, trying not to hit any dallying schoolchildren as his ’93 silver Ford Sierra Sapphire swerved fast past the main school gates at 60 mph in what was officially a 20 mph zone.

‘There’s something eerie about it,’ Roz said, examining the picture in her hands, which was technically a drawing, while Nick continued to ignore her. ‘I mean, these two sinister-looking figures . . .Why, their eyes seem to bore right into me, Nick. Into my very soul. Intimidating it.Threatening it. Throttling it . . .’

‘Thanks for the reminder, Roz,’ said Nick, slamming the car from full throttle into even fuller throttle, before cranking it up to much more throttle than before.

Roz looked up, staring through the passenger window at disparate groups of fleeing schoolchildren.

‘I’ve a suspicion you’re breaking the law, Nick.’

‘And this lot aren’t? Look at them, Roz, dawdling in groups, half in and out of the road. None of them looking where they’re going. If I hit a batch of them at top speed, I’m the one who’ll get my knuckles rapped. This lot will walk free.’

‘They’ll be lucky to crawl,’ laughed Roz. ‘But in all seriousness, Nick, if I were you, I’d slow down just a little.’

But you’re not me, Roz, thought Nick, rolling his eyes, even though he had to concede she was partly right. Arguably, trying to save the lives of some schoolchildren while taking the lives of other schoolchildren was counterproductive. Especially when the particular schoolchildren Nick was tearing past weren’t the specific schoolchildren he was looking for. Not even close.

He applied minimum pressure to the brake pedal as his car sped towards a waiting bus queue. A red double-decker that had stalled halfway across the pavement’s edge belched a thick cloud of black fumes at the crowding pupils, its driver already preparing to lurch the coughing vehicle back onto the main road. Then the long-awaited replacement ‘625’ service would finally begin ferrying its latest batch of Stalkford Comprehensive’s poorest pupils home to their assorted shoddy shacks and council tenement squats.

Roaring past the uniformed throng at a slow fifty, Nick increased pressure on the accelerator again as he emerged from the blinding fumes, his concentration returning once more to the road ahead.

‘Perhaps the kids you’re looking for are among those ones back there,’ Roz suggested.

‘Hardly, Roz. If what I suspect is happening is in fact happening, the particular schoolchildren I’m after won’t even be able to afford a penny chew from the local tuck shop, let alone a bus ride home.’

The car passed by the flat grey buildings of an impoverished comprehensive. Numerous broken windows stood out starkly against the drab stained blue of the school’s flaking outer panelling.

‘I was a pupil here myself, years ago,’ Nick whispered, shaking his head forlornly. ‘It was, and remains, a shit-hole.’

‘Well, you did okay for yourself, mister writer,’ Roz teased, smiling and squeezing Nick’s thigh playfully. Calmly, he removed her hand.

‘Cool it, Roz. We’re not technically sleeping together, remember? That’s just the effect of my imagination leaking out of my own head and warping reality around us. It’s true that in my books you became all too oft a love interest of sorts, owing to my own primal lusts imbuing various fictional lady characters with aspects of your own physical attributes. And while I kept your mind and personality well out of it at all times, aware the book had to be believable, it’s true that your physical form has been diluted through various novels of mine over the years in the form of masked outpourings and thinly veiled character portrayals of sultry female sizzlers I prayed you’d never notice.

‘I’ll freely admit, too, that my own heroic qualities frequently found a permanent home in the traits of my chief protagonists, meaning you and I were indeed technically “lovers” on the page, and sensual ones at that. But now that those repressed fictional lusts are rearing their hot unholy heads around us, I urge you to trust my authorial judgement in all instances of spontaneous slap-and-tickle. Believe me,’ he concluded, patting Roz’s hand with his, ‘you’ll be thankful for it in the morning.’

‘Gosh, Nick, I’m sorry,’ Roz said, returning her chastened hand to her lap. ‘I forget I’m not actually attracted to you, and it’s only because your fiction is leaking into reality as a result of what happened during those previous terrifying events we experienced*2 that our own minds are being warped as much as the physical world around us, meaning I frequently find you sexy as hell and presume we must be all too often all over each other at any old time of the day and night, when in reality we’re nothing more than staid professional colleagues.’

‘It’s okay, Roz. I forgive you.’

‘Thanks for not taking advantage of me.’

‘I’m a gentleman, Roz, as you’re well aware.’

‘And a damned virile one,’ she murmured throatily, reaching out once more for Nick’s thigh.

‘You’re at it again, Roz.’

‘I’m sorry, Nick,’ sighed Roz, blushing. ‘I guess I’ll just have to tie a knot around my finger to remind myself that I don’t really find you smoking hot with that sweeping brown mane, rock-stock physique and grizzled stubbled chins.’

‘Down, Roz, down. That’s an order. I have to keep a look out for these damned kids.’

Nick peered past the passenger window at the dismal school grounds passing by on their left. He’d driven way past the main teaching blocks now and was currently heading outwards, past a lonely row of damp and moulding mobiles towards a vast spread of crumbled-concrete playing field.

‘How do you know it’s more than one child you’re after?’ asked Roz, examining the picture again. ‘This drawing looks like the work of a lone artist.’

Nick glanced down at the illustration.

‘That’s not the only one I’ve found, Roz. I tugged that one free from my car windscreen wiper this morning. As you can see, it’s penned almost entirely in blue. Yet the picture slipped inside my newspaper this morning was shaded pink. That means it’s two kids we’re after, Roz. Two cries for help.’

‘Blue . . . for a boy . . .’ muttered Roz, deep in thought, ‘. . . and pink . . . for a girl?’ She looked up at Nick questioningly.

He nodded down at her, even though their car seats were equal height. Roz was a sharp tack after all, he conceded, despite her profession.

‘Has to be,’ he confirmed. ‘There’s literally no other option.’

‘But why you, Nick?’ Roz queried. ‘Why were both these drawings left for you specifically?’

‘Like I said, Roz, they’re cries for help. Directed at me alone, I presume, because the workings of my escaping fictional mind have selected me as chief hero. As I’ll explain imminently, Roz, once events start to unfold around us and we find ourselves embroiled in some deeply terrifying chain of events brought about by these escaping visions of mine, the kids who drew those two pictures are terrified of something. Which is why, I presume, they’ve written “Help us, Nick Steen, we're terrified of something” at the bottom of both pictures. What that something is, though, is currently a total mystery.’

‘Yet I’ll bet there’s a clue here somewhere, Nick,’ muttered Roz, staring deeply at the illustration in her hands. She’d missed the written appeal to Nick scrawled at the bottom, sure, but perhaps there was another clue here they’d both missed? Maybe it had something to do with those two creepy figures depicted boldly and prominently in coloured ink . . . Though she suspected it might, Roz hesitated to mention her theory to Nick just yet. As he’d explained to her several times, Roz was a paranoiac. For this reason alone, she had to find some firm shred of evidence besides this existing firm shred of evidence to back up any suspicions she might have.

But there was certainly something uncanny about those two figures. If Roz didn’t know better, she’d swear they resembled a pair of malevolent traffic cops from some distant turn-of-the- century era.

The creature (or was it a man?)*3 on the right bore a terrible, knowing expression which seemed to pierce Roz’s mind with its cold, hard stare. The dreaded face seemed to be willing Roz somewhere deep inside herself to hand over to it all she held dear. Her money, perhaps, or possibly her more valuable personal belongings (like lipstick, etc.). Maybe even her self-respect, or what was left of that, having pursued a career in editing. Yes, this particular figure, she felt sure now, was somehow lusting after Roz’s own very sense of self.

And then there was the other . . . That second, hideous figure on the left of the drawing . . . the more primal of the two creatures, as Roz now perceived them to be . . . This4 cruel, leering monster wanted something different from her. Something more immediate. More primitive. An urge, Roz felt certain now, to throttle her.

‘I have seen this drawing before,’ she announced suddenly, a buried subconscious memory finally surfacing from somewhere deep within. She looked up sharply at Nick. ‘Why, Nick, there’s one just like it in your bedroom.’

‘You’ve never slept in my bedroom, Roz.’

‘Alas, I’m aware of that, Nick, but I go in there occasionally when you’re not looking to imagine what life would be like spending time in there, by your side, through the endless night. Silly, I know, but I have to dream, Nick. I have to yearn. I have to lean down and sniff your pillow and inhale that deep and musky oiled scent of your ageing metabolism . . .’

‘Roz . . .’

‘Sorry, Nick,’ she said, blushing once more. That damned attraction again, she reflected, wincing inwardly. Right when she’d been about to remonstrate with Nick, too. Damn it, these unsolicited amorous urges of hers were really starting to stick in her female craw.

‘Well, whatever the reason for it being in there, Nick, I know I’ve seen it. In your room. In your top bedside drawer, to be more precise. Under your gun magazines. An identical drawing. Exactly like this one.’

‘There!’ Nick yelled, so suddenly that Roz wondered whether he was deliberately attempting to change the subject. Until she glimpsed the two children Nick was pointing at, wandering along the pathway ahead of them.

The pair moved slowly, heads bowed, trudging along a beaten path leading towards a puckered fence bordering a distant stretch of industrial waste ground.

‘A distant stretch of industrial waste ground,’ Roz whispered in horror. ‘Nick, no child should have to walk home through a distant stretch of industrial waste ground.’

‘I did,’ Nick said stiffly. ‘And technically it’s not a distant stretch of industrial waste ground at all, Roz,’ he added, smiling proudly at the rocking needle on the vehicle’s speedometer. ‘It’s a rapidly closing stretch of industrial waste ground.’

‘But they’ll be set upon, Nick, as you know full well. The moment they pass through those gates, wild dogs or a pack of dirty old men will leap out and grab them.’

‘Nonsense,’ scoffed Nick, before recalling again that he and Roz were now living in a terrifying Stalkford of Nick’s own fictional imagining, with both of those extreme dangers Roz had just mentioned now distinct and actual possibilities. After all, hadn’t Nick featured identical terrors in several horror novels over the years? Not least Dog Wasters and his controversial banned classic, The Old Pokers?

‘Perhaps this pair are those two children you’re after?’ Roz said, interrupting Nick’s thoughts.

‘Must be,’ Nick replied, drawing his own separate conclusions. ‘They evidently can’t afford the bus and, as you rightly pointed out, Roz, with my prompting, are now risking being set upon by a pack of incontinent demonic canines and swarms of bucket-hatted perverts. Lean out and grab their attention, Roz, because if I do it, they’ll just assume I’m the proverbial man with puppies.’

Roz wound down the window.

‘Hello?’ she called out. ‘Hello, children?’

The boy and girl turned their heads to face the car closing in on them at speed, then sprinted for dear life.

‘Damn it, Nick, they’re running from us!’

‘Typical!’ Nick hissed.

‘Quickly! They’re almost at the fence!’

‘Hold tight, Roz,’ Nick yelled, slamming his foot down hard on the accelerator again. As the vehicle roared past seventy, he caught sight of the wire fence rushing towards them and executed a swift, sudden but not strictly essential handbrake turn, spinning the car around in a violent spray of flung grit and showering pebbles.

‘Well executed, Nick,’ Roz said, as they skidded to a halt across the broken pavement. ‘Now let’s rescue those kids from that thing you haven’t yet told me about.’

She flung open the passenger door, then reeled back violently from a sudden volley of hurled stones. As the barrage of rocks struck the car’s windows, cracking glass, Roz ducked below the lower edge of the frame for cover.

‘They’re pelting us!’ Nick yelled as the two children grabbed another handful of stones from the ground. ‘Like monkeys at a safari park!’

‘They’re scared, Nick,’ Roz yelled, ducking suddenly as a fresh shower of grit slammed against the passenger window, shattering it inwards and showering her and Nick with clumps of dirt and glass shards. ‘They think it’s you after them.’

Nick watched helplessly as the children continued to fling stones at his vehicle.

‘I am after them, Roz. Only I’m trying to save them, not kill them. It’s a crying shame these kids don’t realise that, because my vehicle has already sustained damage not remotely covered under the terms of my insurance.’

‘But what shall we do, Nick? We can’t just sit inside the car, like sitting ducks inside a car being pelted by stones.’

Thinking fast, Nick reached across Roz’s cowering back and flipped open the dashboard compartment, pulling out his revolver.

‘You’re not going to use that, are you, Nick?’ whimpered Roz, clocking Nick’s piece. He ignored her, aiming the weapon just past her head before opening fire. Both shots passed through the already peppered passenger window, close enough to raise a clump of hair, he calculated. If that didn’t quieten things down, he’d lower the barrel a couple of inches and live with the consequences.

But the rain of pebbles had already ceased. As the gun smoke cleared, all Nick could hear was a soft whimper from Roz as she squirmed helplessly in a pool of her own tear-flooded make-up. Then the distant pitter-patter of retreating sandals.

‘They’re off again!’ Nick yelled, kicking open the driver’s door and springing out after the two children. He dashed round to the front of the car. Far too fast, he realised, to let loose a killing shot.

Roz raised her head above the seat cushion and yelled.

‘Nick, they’re only children!’

Nick froze. What the hell was he thinking? Cursing, he tossed the weapon aside and hurled himself at the fleeing pair, rugby-tackling both boy and girl – evidently brother and sister if their matching blazer labels were anything to go by – hard into the gravelly mud. Amid a dusty cloud of grazed skin and scuffed uniforms, Nick yanked each child upwards by the scruff of their necks and immobilised them both with a strangling chokehold. A minute or so later, having applied lipstick, Roz sauntered up.

‘You can let them go now, Nick. I don’t think these two are going anywhere.’

Slowly, Nick released his hold on the children and stood, realising Roz was right and it would take several minutes for renewed oxygen levels to return both children to full consciousness.

‘That might have looked harsh, Roz,’ Nick said, picking up his aban- doned gun before reloading it, ‘but kids these days need discipline.’

As the children slowly came back to life, Roz dug around in her handbag and drew out two ice creams.

‘Here,’ she said softly, handing the young girl a strawberry- flavoured cone, before passing on a mint choc chip cornet to the boy (which is how it should be). Roz judged both siblings to be around ten years old, the brother perhaps a year or two older.

When both were finally able to breathe normally again, the girl licked nervously at her ice cream and spoke. ‘You’re not . . . them?’

‘Them?’ Roz repeated, before glancing over at Nick. ‘Who are these them she’s referring to, Nick?’

‘Ask them,’ he replied.‘About those them.’

Roz turned back to the girl.

‘Who are these them you’re referring to?’

‘Ask him,’ said the girl, pointing to her brother.

‘Who are these them she’s referring to?’ asked Roz, transferring her attention instead to the boy.

‘Those them,’ Nick interrupted, correcting her. ‘The them in question aren’t physically present, meaning that this question, plus your previous two, ideally require further clarification.’

‘Who are those them she’s referring to?’ repeated Roz.

‘Ask him,’ replied the boy, pointing back at Nick.

‘Who are those them they’re referring to, Nick?’ said Roz, turning to Nick again.

‘Second thoughts, I’d drop both “those” and “these”, Roz. They’re equally vague, if not inelegant. Use “who are them?” instead.’

‘Sure,’ said Roz. ‘Who are them he’s referring to?’

‘They’re referring to,’ Nick added. ‘Both children, i.e. them, or those two, have previously commented on the matter.’

‘I prefer “who is them . . .”’ muttered Roz.

‘Which makes no grammatical sense whatsoever, Roz. You, of all people, should know that.’

‘Who are them, who those two are referring to?’ she asked.

‘Whom,’ Nick replied, ‘plus they.’ He forced both children into the back seat at gunpoint. ‘Look, I’ll explain everything in the car.’

At Roz’s insistence, Nick gave the pair a few additional minutes for minds and emotions to recalibrate as he turned the vehicle round, then drove back fast along the main road. As he accelerated along the slip lane towards the adjacent motorway, Nick turned round to face them.

‘Listen, I’m here to help,’ he said, angling his head further towards the rear seat in an effort to reassure them. ‘I’m not taking you to see any puppies, which aren’t technically puppies. I’m driving you both home to your parents.’

‘NO!’ yelled the boy, his face a mask of abject terror.

‘NO!’ cried his sister, her face also a mask of abject terror.

‘Strange,’ said Roz, turning to face the children herself. ‘They were both calm as cucumbers following those ice creams I gave them, but now that you’ve mentioned their parents, Nick, they’ve become agitated again. As if somehow you’d touched some sort of terrifying nerve. What the heck is going on here? What exactly are these kids terrified of? What is this thing you’re rescuing them from that you haven’t yet told me anything about?’

Nick ignored the screeching of brakes and beeped horns as he swerved right across multiple motorway lanes.

‘I guess it’s time I told you the truth, Roz,’ he announced sombrely, before swerving left across the lanes again towards the upcoming services. ‘The truth about those drawings I found . . .’

*

‘Throttle and Bribes,’ said Nick, stuffing down a second cheese- burger. ‘Those are their names. One throttles you, while the other steals your soul. Plus any cash you’ve got hanging around. I believe card payments are also acceptable.’

‘That’s horrible, Nick,’ gasped Roz, nibbling weakly at her poor excuse for a veggie burger. ‘What manner of beasts would do such a thing?’

‘Man-monkeys,’ said Nick, helping himself to the girl’s meal, which, like her brother’s, sat largely untouched. ‘Or men-monkeys, if that helps. Or monkey-men. Or man-chimps. Guy-gibbons, even. Though they may well be crossed with baboon as well, given their penchant for irascibility, which is borderline murderous.’

‘I was actually asking them, Nick,’ said Roz reproachfully. ‘You’ve barely let either of these children say a word.’

‘Perhaps because they’re terrified, Roz. Petrified because every penny earned by their doomed parents has been stolen by those unearthly, stinking creatures. Perhaps I’m speaking out for the afflicted.’

‘That’s noble, of course, Nick, but I do think we should continue this discussion by at least establishing the names of these two children, if we’re to liberate them from their terrifying supernatural antagonists.’

‘What are your names?’ asked Nick, swallowing the girl’s burger pretty much whole. Although thieving the entirety of the child’s meal from directly under her nose might seem ruthless, Nick knew it was another potentially life-saving act. A severely malnourished child might go into severe shock having consumed large quantities of highly salted Nicaraguan beef mixed with heavily sugared condiments. And he’d paid for the damned thing, anyway. Neither Roz nor the two children had contributed one penny.

He glanced briefly over at the boy’s untouched meal. That plate would present more of a challenge, he suspected, but then he always had the revolver.

‘My name’s Terry,’ whimpered the boy. To Roz alone, Nick noted.

‘He’s on drugs,’ declared Nick starkly. ‘Look at his eyes.’

The kid shook his head frantically from side to side. ‘No . . .’

‘Bullshit,’ snapped Nick, shoving Roz aside. Hell, if there was Class A in the boy’s system, there was no time for niceties. ‘No, what?’ he barked at the boy.

‘No, I’m not on drugs.’

Nick breathed a sigh of relief. No junkie would be able to hold a man’s gaze while simultaneously denying their own addiction. The kid was all mouth, sure. But he was no junkie.

‘No, what?’

The kid shrank back from Nick, confused. ‘No . . .’

‘Sir.’

‘No, sir.’

‘That’s more like it.’ Nick leaned closer, closing the gap between him and the boy, then nodded his head sideways. ‘And the girl?’

The boy froze, unsure what Nick’s question actually was.

‘She’s my sister . . . Amanda.’

Nick exploded at him. ‘Is she on drugs?’

Tears welled in the boy’s eyes. ‘No . . .’

Nick placed a hand on his revolver’s butt. ‘No . . . ?’

‘Sir.’

‘Let her speak, dammit,’ Nick barked, before turning his attention just as suddenly to the girl.

‘What’s your name, princess?’

The girl said nothing. It was when Nick began drawing the revolver from his pocket that Roz closed one hand gently over his.

‘Let me handle this, Nick,’ she whispered placatingly. ‘You’re all stressed from the drive and these persistent day-to-day heroics.’

Roz was right, Nick realised. He was stressed. But it wasn’t from the drive. Or the constant burden of answering a hero’s call from dusk till dawn, and beyond, right up to dusk again (and then beyond again, ad infinatum).5 And it wasn’t having just consumed everyone else’s sugar and salt. No, something different was nagging at Nick’s vitals. Something far worse . . .

Something concerning those two men-monkeys.

Something only Nick knew.

He watched as Roz turned her attention back to the children, taking their hands in hers while speaking softly to them. There was a touch of Florence Nightingale to his editor, Nick reflected, calmly saving lives in the ’Nam while all hell broke out in their perimeter, with two Hueys down and Charlie on the wire again, mortars trained mercilessly on medivac and the Freedom Bird. Or Jenny Agutter, maybe, in a nurse role. Roz certainly didn’t resemble Boudicca burning London in the nude, Nick figured.

‘Nick says you’re being hunted by a pair of bloodthirsty man-monkeys in uniform who’ve been demanding money from your mother and father. Is that right?’

They nodded.

‘Their uniforms are old,’ Nick clarified. ‘Turn of the century. Like Irish cops. No, like prison wardens, in fact. And they drive a wagon.’

‘Can monkeys drive?’ Roz asked, addressing Nick this time.

‘Man-monkeys can. They represent humanity at its most base and primeval, Roz. Yet besides the usual fighting and defecating, they also practise extortion. Picking on parents who can’t afford toys for their kids, hammering them for all the money they possess. Then when they can’t break them down any more, these cruel, murdering man- monkeys peel their victims from the head down like massive bananas, stripping their skin away entirely to reveal . . .’

‘To reveal what, Nick?’ gasped Roz, terrified by Nick’s description of these demonic half-humanoid simians.

‘A toy,’ said Nick. ‘A miniature tin toy. Moulded exactly like the victim’s peeled remains. The victim’s broken soul, Roz.’

‘Good God,’ said Roz, shivering. ‘A miniature tin toy of the victim’s broken soul? What in God’s name is a miniature tin toy of the victim’s broken soul?’

‘Like I’ve just said, Roz, it’s a miniature tin toy of the victim’s broken soul. It looks just like the victim, only it’s technically a miniature tin toy symbolising their broken soul.’

‘But what doThrottle and Bribes do with these miniature tin toys symbolising their victim’s broken soul?’

Nick necked the remainder of the girl’s strawberry milkshake, crushing the cardboard carton in his hand before tossing it over one shoulder onto the floor behind.

‘They bung it in the back of their wagon, Roz, and drive off into the night, having first shat on the victim’s floor.’

Nick’s expression darkened as a glint of westering sun crossed his eyeline, casting half his face into sudden shadow.

‘Some do say, though, Roz, that as day draws to a close and the sun commenceth to wane in the western sky, about seven o’clock, generally, though earlier in winter, obviously, two black silhouettes of gargantuan man-monkeys with what look like peaked caps upon their heads can oft be glimpsed scrabbling and rolling o’er a patch of distant industrial waste ground, gibbering at a blood-red moon that doth be rising, all the while smashing and dashing what’s left of their victims’ miniature tin toy broken souls to jagged shards ’pon the stony ground, to be strewn and lost amid the scattered and shattered detriti*6 of soul-damned mankindity for all eternitum. Though no one’s yet caught any of it on closed-circuit TV. And by the way, those gargantuan man-monkey silhouettes I’ve just referred to, Roz, are Throttle and Bribes. In case that element was unclear.’

‘No, Nick,’ said Roz fearfully. ‘It was clear, alright. Though I already had some nasty suspicions.’

‘Then disregard that last bit.’

‘I will. But Nick . . .’

Nick sensed it then. The one question he’d been dreading.

‘. . . How do you know so much about Throttle and Bribes?’

There was an accusatory look in Roz’s eye and her tone was cold. ‘You seem to be uncommonly familiar with these two murdering ape-men.’

A sharp tack indeed, Roz Bloom, thought Nick. The sharpest tack in an admittedly blunt toolbox.

‘Because I created them, Roz,’ Nick said, coming clean. ‘You don’t think two murdering monkeys in early-twentieth-century prisoner warden costumes gallivanting around Stalkford extorting money from hard-up parents are normal occurrences, do you?’

‘Of course not, Nick. Again, I suspected as much. For I knew when I recalled that picture of them concealed in your bedroom drawer that you must have had some hand in all this, albeit unwillingly.’

‘Unwillingly, Roz?’ said Nick, his voice betraying a hint of buried shame. ‘Or willingly?’

‘Willingly, Nick?’ Roz gasped. ‘What the heck do you mean by willingly?’

Stalling for time, Nick reached over and grabbed the boy’s burger at last, wolfing it down while defensively aiming his revolver at them all. Then, having swallowed the last morsel, he re-holstered. They might not understand, Nick reflected, but he needed all the strength he could muster.

‘I’m to blame, ultimately,’ said Nick at long last. ‘Because although Throttle and Bribes never featured in a published book of mine, they were the two terrifying antagonists in an unpublished tome.’

‘An unpublished tome?’ repeated Roz unnecessarily.

‘Once,’Nick continued, ignoring her, ‘many years ago, when I was around eight years old, I conducted the latest of many embittered arguments with my useless parents. To cut a long story short, on this occasion they’d failed to buy me the complete stories of Edgar Allan Poe for my birthday as instructed, and instead had mistakenly gifted me an inferior, and much cheaper, children’s illustrated edition. No doubt they meant well, believing that a simplified, nay sanitised, version was more suitable for a child’s mind, but they were wrong. After raging at them angrily for several hours, during which I insulted both my mother’s looks and my father’s supposed “profession” – he was a window-cleaner – I was sent to bed without any supper, which I immediately pointed out was a trite cliché befitting their conservatively pedestrian outlook on life. They still sent me, of course, but not to my bedroom.’

‘No?’ repeated Roz, again unnecessarily.

‘No, Roz, like I just told you. To reflect the severity of my so-called crime, and so that the floor insulation would hopefully silence my incessant ranting, my wonderful, oh-so-caring parents sent me up to the loft.’

‘The loft?’ Roz repeated, with a look of sudden fright.

‘Yes, the loft,’ Nick replied testily. ‘I was sent upstairs, like I just said, Roz, to the loft.’

‘But Nick, what was so bad about the loft?’

‘I’m coming to that, Roz.’

‘Of course you are. Sorry, Nick. Continue.’

‘I intend to, Roz. What was bad about the loft was that as well as it being soundproof, there was nothing up there at all except an old mattress, multiple cobwebs and those two dreaded monkey toys.’

‘Monkey toys?’ repeated Roz, this time necessarily.

‘Monkey toys, Roz,’ repeated Nick, repeating her repeat likewise necessarily, as if to honour the uncanny and eerie atmosphere building slowly around them. ‘Though how anyone could bring themselves to play with either of those two dreaded monkey toys was beyond me, Roz. No doubt they’d been left there by the previous house-owner. Two mechanical monkeys with wind-up levers on their backs and rictus smiles stretching, it seemed, from the darkest, damnedest corners of the blackest bowels of hell. That last bit’s metaphorical, although, who knows? They were certainly demonic to me, Roz. And in a childish attempt to rationalise my mounting fear, I named them . . .’

‘Throttle and Bribes?’ asked Roz.

‘I was about to say, “Throttle and Bribes,” Roz. Can you please stop interrupting?’

‘Sure, Nick. But wouldn’t naming them Throttle and Bribes have in fact exacerbated your feelings of primal terror? As opposed to rationalising them?’

Nick shook his head painfully, recalling the events of that distant night.

‘I knew my parents were punishing me by locking me up there, Roz, but I decided – I vowed – that they weren’t going to break me. Steeling myself, I turned my back upon those two terrible toys and distracted myself by reading that stupid children’s edition of Edgar Allan Poe they’d bought me, signed inside with their two stupid names, plus hugs and kisses. And all the while I was reading it, I could sense those four metallic simian eyes boring into me from behind.

‘But I held my own, kept both eyes on the pages in front, until daybreak finally dawned. Then, having survived the night, and inspired by the book of Poe I’d just read, which I’d actually really enjoyed, especially the pictures, I elected to wreak my final act of revenge and exact the ultimate punishment on all who’d opposed me . . .

‘With the loft crumbling and in a bad state of repair, I devised a macabre punishment of my own, directly inspired by the beautifully illustrated tales I’d just read. Smiling grimly at their stupid monkey faces, I shoved those two dreaded toys through a small hole I’d spied in the farthest wall, and bricked them up behind it, sealing the gaps with hardening rat turds.

‘Then I left them there, for all time, never to be seen again by human eyes . . .’

‘God, Nick. That was so brave of you,’ said Roz in genuine awe.

‘But that wasn’t all, Roz. My revenge had only just begun. Still furious at my parents, I stayed in that loft for the rest of the week, resolutely refusing to come down except for meals and toilet breaks. And while I was up there, Roz, I wrote my first terrifying tale of horror. A tale of supernatural revenge in which a thinly veiled portrait of my own mother and father are destroyed by two hellish half- simians. A pair of sinister murdering monkeys, named—’

‘Throttle and Bribes?’ whispered Roz, yet again unnecessarily.

‘Well done, Roz. You’ve just single-handedly wrecked the atmospheric conclusion of my intensely creepy anecdote. Yes, Throttle and Bribes. Those two insane chimps in uniform that, in my bloody childhood tale, visited my own parents late one night, extracting cash from my mother so that I could afford to buy the adult edition of Poe that I’d originally requested, before throttling my father for sending me up to that loft without any supper. With the story finished, I finally came down from that loft, Roz, and was all set to publish the tale via photocopier and sell it from the end of my garden path, when ...when ...’

‘Yes, Nick?’ Roz asked, sensing Nick was on the verge of tears (though he absolutely wasn’t). ‘When?’

‘When my parents put me up for adoption.’

‘Oh, Nick,’ said Roz softly. ‘I had no idea . . .’

‘Except they didn’t do it,’ he corrected her. ‘For on their way over to the council offices to finalise the paperwork, both of them were run over by an out-of-control rag-and-bone wagon and crushed to half their original size.’

Roz gasped, covering her mouth with both hands.

‘My God, Nick, that’s awful. Then what happened?’

‘What’s left to tell?’ said Nick forlornly. ‘They were skipped with everything else, until a local scrap-metal merchant realised he’d paid premium rate for two flesh-and-bone human patties and got into a violent argument over a refund, at which point the police were called and my troubles were officially over. But I never forgot the eerie similarity between what happened to my parents and my uncanny tale of supernatural revenge. I knew that tale was cursed, Roz.Whatever dark spirit had been released from those two monkey toys I’d buried in the wall had somehow taken possession of my own story. From that day to this, I haven’t dared publish it. No, I’ve kept that particular tale close to my chest for decades, Roz. Buried somewhere deep where no one will ever find it. Concealed from human eyes. Because if word ever got out about my evil patri-matri-monkeycide pact with Lucifer (I presume it’s Lucifer), I fear my writing career might suffer.’

‘Yet now we’re all suffering, Nick,’ said Roz desperately. ‘With this sudden advent of your escaping imagination,Throttle and Bribes are back, for real. Preying on these two poor children.’

She gazed down at the pair, who were both fast asleep, having nodded off during the earliest section of Nick’s long and occasionally rambling speech.

‘I’d say the most sensible thing you can do at this point in time is to destroy that story completely.’

‘Never,’ snapped Nick instinctively, startling both children awake. ‘That tale’s all I have left of my parents, Roz. Literally. The paper I wrote it on had been stolen from my father’s desk while snooping through his private drawers, and I had the council skip everything else they’d ever owned. It’s a damned good story, Roz. No way will I let Throttle and Bribes make me destroy a single shred of it. That tale is mine, brilliant, and concealed somewhere completely safe. Where no one will ever find it.’

His face puffing red like an irate baboon, or so Roz thought, Nick necked a few stubborn dregs from the girl’s milkshake and stood up abruptly from the table.

‘Let’s go,’ he snapped at them all, before catching sight of something lying by the salt shaker. It was the ketchup-stained receipt he’d checked and re-checked numerous times while querying the price of the meal. Nick couldn’t be certain, but it seemed to have shifted slightly while he rose violently from his chair. Beneath it, a second slip of paper had become visible. A handwritten note, Nick observed, as he drew it out from under the receipt and examined its near-illegible message, scrawled in what looked, to him, like human blood:

WE COME FOR YOU AT MONKEYING HOUR (3AM OR THEREABOUTS).

WE PEEL HEADS AND SMASH SOULS UNLESS WE PAID (CASH, NOT PEANUTS).

THROTTLE ’N’ BRIBES.

‘What is it?’ asked Roz, noting the dark look on Nick’s face. A look she’d never seen before, despite all the horrifying events they’d shared together in recent weeks.

A look of terror.

‘Later, Roz,’ said Nick, screwing the scrap of paper up in his hands. "I'll tell you all about it later. In about an hour or so."

*

The car pulled up outside the children’s home, a three-storey terrace set halfway down a nondescript urban street on the rough side of town, bordering Stalkford’s official outskirts.

It was Roz who’d finally coaxed the address out of the siblings. Nick had tried to speed things up by prising it from them via gun at close range, but his former editor had merely shaken her head softly like Stephanie Beacham in her early roles, before she began playing divas, and continued to draw information from the children slowly, gently and, in Nick’s parlance, pointlessly.

Except it ultimately proved pointful. Somehow, both kids, whose names Nick had by now forgotten, warmed to Roz’s soft cajolery, revealing at long last where their parents’ house lay.

‘But you’ll never find them,’ cried the girl suddenly, bursting into fresh tears. ‘Throttle and Bribes came in the night and took them. The horrible monkeys took our mummy and daddy away!’

As Roz hugged the little girl close, Nick shook his head, sighing loudly.

‘Wrong, missy,’ he said, looking up at the building again, the house lights fully switched on inside.

‘The house lights are fully switched on inside,’ he barked, turning around to hammer home his point with a jabbing finger. ‘So either you’re lying . . .’

‘I’m not! I’m not!’ cried the girl, whose name Nick had already forgotten.7

‘She’s not!’ growled the girl’s brother, whose name Nick had also forgotten.8

'Well, either you're both lying,' Nick persisted, 'or Throttle and Bribes are inside your house as we speak.’

The children burst into paroxysms of violent weeping. As their small panicked hands fought vainly with the vehicle’s child locks, Nick cursed inwardly again. Jeez, why the hell had he deliberately upset them, when all along he’d known full well that Throttle and Bribes weren’t due to appear until the Monkeying Hour?*9 Was there some deep and distant part of his subconscious mind that was taking some sort of perverse pleasure in teasing and provoking the raw emotions of these two frightened children? Was he subconsciously stoking the fear he had inadvertently created in these helpless innocents? Was he somehow, God forbid, acting like his own parents? ‘Hey kiddos, I was joking,’ Nick said, trying to calm the pair down, though he could barely hear his own voice above the incessant bawling of the two terrified siblings.

‘For goodness sake, Nick, try and understand that these children are terrified,’ Roz pleaded.

‘Sure thing,’ Nick said, yanking out his revolver to a barrage of fresh screaming.

‘I’m not going to shoot you this time,’ he yelled, struggling to hear his own voice above the incessant din. ‘I’m about to ambush Throttle and Bribes!’

As Nick’s words rang unheard amid the din, Roz placed a hand on his shoulder. Not his thigh this time, Nick noted.

‘Get out of the car, Nick, and let me handle things.’

‘So it’s all my fault, suddenly,’ he muttered, dutifully yet reluctantly stepping outside as Roz had requested.

Two minutes later, the children had calmed down sufficiently for Roz to learn that the lights in the house were on because their parents, desperate for enough money to meet Throttle and Bribes’ relentless regime of financial extortion, had been forced to take in lodgers.

‘Amanda’s bedroom has been let out to an engineering student, who’s generally quiet except when he’s pumping weights in the shower, and Terry’s room has been given over to a large Taiwanese family, who’ve turned both it and the inner stairwell into a makeshift volleyball court.’

‘Meaning?’ asked Nick.

‘Meaning Terry and Amanda are sleeping elsewhere, and therefore our options for laying a trap for Throttle and Bribes have been severely hampered.’

‘Where are they sleeping?’ asked Nick ominously.

‘Amanda’s temporarily housed in the basement, and Terry sleeps upstairs . . . in the loft.’

At the mention of the word, Nick swallowed deeply. Mustering courage, he raised his head slowly to examine the building’s roof far above.

‘Then we’ll set our trap in the basement,’ Nick said, ‘and ambush them there.’

‘Can’t be done,’ replied Roz. ‘There’s barely room for two people in either room, apparently. We’ll have to split up, with each of us protecting a single child. One of us in the basement, and the other upstairs . . . in the loft.’

‘I’ll take the basement,’ said Nick immediately.

‘Impossible. That’s Amanda’s room. Right now, she needs me with her, Nick. You’ll have to take Terry and set your own ambush upstairs . . . in the loft.’

‘Or we could all just get back in the car and go to a motel?’ replied Nick.

‘We could,’ agreed Roz. ‘But isn’t that running away from the problem, Nick? Surely we’re here because we want to ambush Throttle and Bribes by surprise when they come to extort more money from these poor children? Isn’t running away counterproductive to such a plan? We’d be on the back foot then, Nick. The hunter would become the hunted, as you so often say. Heck, if I didn’t know better, Nick Steen, I’d argue that choosing to run away now to a motel is tantamount to an act of abject cowardice.’

Nick gasped aloud, and was actually unable to speak for several minutes. When he did open his enraged mouth at long last, the voice within rasped like a sand-filled anaconda.

‘How dare you, Roz?’

‘I’m sorry, Nick. But surely you can see . . .’

‘Wait,’ said Nick, speaking normally again. ‘I hadn’t finished.’

‘Go on,’ she replied.

His voice returned to its former cold, stark-sounding rasp. ‘Nick Steen never runs . . .’

As Roz began to reply, Nick cut her short with an upheld finger.

‘. . . away.’

His speech concluded, Nick turned abruptly from her and buzzed the front door. The engineering student let them in and after everyone had gone to the toilet and washed their hands, both raiding parties parted company at the stairs. It would prove to be a very long night.*10

*

‘How does this work?’ Nick asked, hating to ask the boy for advice. ‘I mean, I know how it works, obviously, but you’re the one who ran the cable down to the basement and you probably got it wrong, so this is merely a test to check that you know what you’re doing, so I can fix it if not. Most likely we’ll have to start again from scratch and I’ll have to show you what to do.’

The boy picked up the receiver end of his walkie-talkie set and pressed its orange ‘speak’ button. At first there was a sharp burst of crackling static, then the noise gave way to a clearer, quieter hiss.

‘Now you just speak into it,’ said the boy.

‘I know that,’ said Nick, snatching the receiver from him. ‘Hello?’ he said into it.

‘Hi, Nick.’ Roz’s voice blasted upwards via the far end of the plastic cable, which was currently wound around the banister frame from the basement below, all the way up to Nick’s present position in the loft.

‘And now you say “over”, Roz.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You say “over” when you’ve finished talking, otherwise the other person doesn’t know when to start talking back.’

Nick listened for a while to the hum of mild crackling.

‘Over,’ he added.

‘We’re all set here, Nick. Amanda’s fast asleep already and I’ve done my level best to clear the place of cobwebs. I’ve finally found that Derringer you gave me for my birthday, too, so I’m good to go.’

Nick waited.

‘Now say “over”, Roz. Over.’

‘I’m sorry?’ said Roz.

‘You didn’t say “over”, Roz. Over.’

‘Fine, “over”.’

‘Over then or over now? Technically you owe me two “overs”. Over.’

‘Over now.’

‘Remember, you still owe me an “over” then. Over.’

‘Over then as well. Look, can we just forget the whole “over” thing?’

Nick reflected for a moment, wondering whether he should demand an additional ‘over’ for that sentence as well, then concluded they had indeed no time to waste. Much like the SAS, Nick elected to adapt tactics to reflect the shifting complexities of a fast-developing situation. He’d just have to ensure he made a running list of unspoken ‘overs’ and ensure Roz said them back to him once this whole thing was over.

‘Sure, Roz. Go ahead.’

‘As I say, Nick, I found that Derringer you bought me. It’s right here, under my pillow.’

‘You’re supposed to keep it in your tights, Roz. Or your bra. Somewhere the fella isn’t going to expect it.’

‘That’s where I eventually found it, Nick. But I’m hardly going to be seducing two murdering monkeys in order to whip a Derringer out of my nightie at an opportune moment.’

‘I suppose you could just shoot them outright,’ Nick reflected to himself, again employing SAS tactics. ‘Fine,’ he concluded at last. ‘Just make sure you shoot straight. Because there’s only one shot in a Derringer.’

‘But there are two monkeys, Nick . . .’

He could hear it. Fear in her voice. Reality, then, was starting to bite.

‘Let’s hope they split up like us, Roz,’ he said. ‘If not, and you’re attacked by both men-monkeys, buzz me on the walkie-talkie and the kid and I will come charging down, guns blazing. As long as that Taiwanese family aren’t holding another midnight volleyball tournament on the stairs. It was bloody murder laying the cable.’

‘I laid the cable,’ protested the boy behind him. Nick held the receiver away so Roz couldn’t hear.

‘Goodnight then, Roz. And good luck.’ ‘Good luck, Nick.’

‘And goodnight, I said.’

‘Goodnight as well, Nick.’

Nick released the ‘speak’ button.

‘Nice piece,’ he said, feigning interest in the walkie-talkie in an attempt to placate the boy, who’d turned away from him in a sulk. ‘What batteries does it use?’

‘No idea,’ said the boy into his pillow. ‘I’ve never changed them.’

‘Never changed them?’ Nick spat in alarm. He slid back the plastic compartment lid and examined the power cells arranged inside. Without navigating the regulatory maze of lithium battery safety, Nick couldn’t be certain. But knowing the kid’s parents’ reputation for executing cheap measures, Nick had a strong hunch these particular units weren’t legal.

‘The fools,’ he said, praying the cheap double Ds would hold out long enough to maintain contact with Roz and the girl in the basement below. Nick glanced over at the boy, now slumbering fitfully on his makeshift duvet, Nick having taken the main one.

Then looked down at his watch.

12.02 a.m.

Ideally, Nick ought to grab some z’s before the Monkeying Hour. But that was unlikely, he realised, seeing as the dark corners of the unlit attic space were already recalling unwanted memories of that other distant evening he’d spent in a similar, lonely loft. Stoking yet more visions of those two petrifying mechanical monkey toys, standing behind him throughout the long, dark and lonely night, piercing the back of his head with their insane, terrifying gaze.

No.

No way was Nick Steen catching a wink of sleep tonight.

No way at all.

It just wasn’t happening.

*

Later, when Nick had forced himself to stop peering into the far corners of this toppermost room, prevented himself imagining those two grim watchers standing in the dark, no longer sealed up inside that grim stone wall of distant memory, he once more checked his watch.

Sixty minutes (i.e. one hour) left until the Monkeying Hour (which is why I opted for ‘sixty minutes’ – close repetition of the word ‘hour’ here is inelegant).

He distracted himself from a threatened flood of panic by revisiting a small gap in the eaves he’d found, through which he could look down over the front of the tenement wall directly into the street below, and which would allow him to observe Throttle and Bribes as they arrived outside in their dreaded wagon. Nick hoped, from this position, that he’d be able to take a pot shot or five at them without them having any idea where the attack was coming from.

He checked his watch again.

2.02 a.m.

As Nick examined the glow-in-the-dark timepiece, taken from the boy’s wrist without him knowing, both hands ticked steadily, relent- lessly on. Fifty-seven minutes now. In another minute it would be only fifty-six minutes until the Monkeying Hour. Then following another minute, Nick would be looking at a terrifying fifty-five. And so on and so forth until the clock struck 2.58 a.m., at which point there would be only two minutes left until the Monkeying Hour was upon them.

Nick fought off a fresh wave of rising fear. All this calculating wasn’t helping him, he figured. Thinking about the time that remained had already wasted thirty seconds, and by the time he’d finished reflecting upon that calculation, most likely another thirty seconds, maybe even forty, would have been taken up in addition.

He checked the watch again, sighing with relief. Those thoughts had actually taken up only twenty additional seconds. Meaning Nick now had ten seconds on account. A small gain, sure, but a gain nonetheless. Yet by the time he’d processed the advantage made in gaining an additional ten seconds he initially thought he hadn’t had, another ten seconds had gone by, meaning Nick no longer had the advantage of that additional ten seconds after all, and time was once more continuing to pass by while he continued to calculate and recalculate ad infinatum. Cursing inwardly, Nick checked the watch again.

The batteries were dead.

Now he’d literally lost track of time. ‘Sonofabitch,’ he snapped loudly, smashing the watch to pieces on a nearby brick, which woke the sleeping boy whose name Nick still couldn’t remember.*11

‘Yes, Daddy?’ muttered the lad, emerging fitfully from slumber.

‘It’s me. Nick Steen. Not your dad,’ Nick said gruffly, rocking the child physically so he’d wake up more quickly. ‘Now get up, sunshine, or I’ll have to stuff a cold flannel down your neck.’

‘No!’ yelped the boy, like a spurned whippet, forcing himself awake.

‘It’s your watch,’ said Nick, handing him the broken timepiece. ‘“Watch” as in your turn to keep watch. This is beyond repair.’

The boy took the watch from Nick’s hand, stifling tears.

‘My dad bought me this.’

‘Should have forked out a bit more for a decent model,’ said Nick, then started suddenly as the boy began rocking to and fro. Shaking like a leaf trapped in a wired fence bordering a stretch of industrial waste ground, Nick mused. Like Roz had insisted hours earlier, the boy looked terrified. So, he hadn’t just been putting it on to shirk hard work and offload responsibilities onto his younger sister after all.

‘Listen,’ Nick snapped brusquely. ‘What the hell did your parents do to earn such wrath from Throttle and Bribes?’

The boy swallowed deeply as he wiped away fresh tears.

‘They . . . They refused to buy us the computer game we wanted.’

‘I knew it,’ spat Nick with barely concealed contempt. ‘Have you any idea how expensive those things are?’

‘It was reduced in the January sales,’ stammered the kid. ‘Me and Amanda . . .’

‘Amanda and I.’

‘Amanda and I offered to pool our piggy banks . . .We promised we’d pay the rest over the next twelve weeks with our regular pocket money.’

‘Regular pocket money . . .’ Nick said scornfully, shaking his head with a world-weary grin. ‘So you essentially wanted this game on account?’

‘I think so,’ said the boy, confused.

‘And yet you didn’t expect or offer up any interest option on those payments?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the boy, even more confused.

Nick shook his head. ‘No wonder they told you to shove it.’

The boy lowered his face, away from Nick’s own, to caress the broken watch in his hands.

‘And I guess you expect fresh batteries to “magically” appear inside that watch, too?’

Ashamed, the boy attempted in vain to get it working again.

‘Except it needs more than batteries now, buddy boy. Because I broke it against a brick.’ Nick jabbed his finger down hard into the boy’s shoulder. ‘And repairs, son, like batteries, cost money.’

The boy nodded emphatically, burying fresh rivulets of tears in his hands.

‘Look at me when I’m talking to you,’ commanded Nick.

Rubbing both hands forcefully against his reddened cheeks, the boy looked up.

‘When your parents refused to buy you this game,’ Nick continued, staring sternly at the boy, ‘what did you do? What did you wish for?’

‘We wished . . . we wished for a curse on them . . .’ the boy cried out in despair, fresh tears running down both cheeks. ‘We cursed our mummy and daddy . . .’

‘And there’s your problem, Sonny Jim,’ growled Nick. ‘It’s your fault Throttle and Bribes came and took your parents away. No one else’s. You cursed them. Ergo you killed them.’

As the boy began to wail, Nick slammed one hand across his own mouth. What the hell was he doing? Hadn’t he done that self-same thing, all those years before? Hadn’t he conjured up Throttle and Bribes to teach his own parents a bloody lesson or two? Wasn’t he ultimately to blame for the crazed shenanigans of these two murdering monkey-men? So why the hell was he continuing to let rip at this poor, unsuspecting kid? Why was he offloading his own guilt onto him?

Then, like a bolt out of the blue, Nick had it. That was the reason, wasn’t it? Nick Steen was offloading his own guilt onto others.

‘Hey,’ Nick whispered, reaching out with one hand in an attempt to reassure the lad.

‘Leave me alone!’ yelled the kid, rolling aside from Nick’s grasp towards the nearby eaves.

‘You ungrateful shit,’ snarled Nick. ‘I was about to shake your hand reassuringly.’

Somehow, that didn’t help. At an increasing loss as to what he could do to placate the boy, Nick breathed a sigh of relief as the walkie-talkie crackled into life again and Roz’s voice sounded loudly across the cobwebbed gloom.

‘Nick?’

He rolled sideways towards the waiting receiver and grabbed it.

‘Charlie Company. Over.’

‘Is that you, Nick?’

‘Affirmative. Steen, Nick P. What’s your position?’

‘We’re still here. Look, what’s all that crying we can hear through the walls? Are you both okay?’

‘I’m fine, Roz,’ Nick muttered,‘though I’m buggered if I’m having more kids.’

‘Listen, Nick.We’ve found something down here.’

‘Their parents’ bodies?’

‘No, Nick,’ said Roz, her voice growing fainter as she turned from the receiver to comfort the girl now shrieking beside her. Nick rolled his eyes, waiting for the latest storm to pass, until Roz finally came back on the line.

‘It’s a note,’ she said at last. ‘It must have slipped through the floorboards from the porch above us. I’d say it’s been dropped accidentally, perhaps from the postman’s grasp, though that wouldn’t explain the message I’ve just read.’

‘Go on,’ said Nick.

‘Go on, what?’

‘Go on, read me the message.’

‘Of course, Nick. Bear with me for a second.’

Nick waited as Roz whispered more reassuring words to the young girl and, he presumed, gave her some sort of soft toy or sugared sweet to shut her up.

‘I’m back with you,’ Roz said, her voice once again loud in the walkie-talkie speaker.

‘Don’t mind me, Roz,’ said Nick, eyes rolling again. ‘You take your sweet time. They come first, after all.’

Ignoring him, Roz continued.

‘It’s a handwritten note.’

‘Paw-written, you mean,’ Nick corrected.

‘Of course, Nick. Paw-written, as you so rightly say. It reads,

“Remember we coming for you. At Monkeying Hour we peel and squash you. We running late, so probably five past. Throttle ’N’ Bribes.”’

‘Damn those terrifying men-monkeys,’ said Nick.

‘But Nick, surely that gives us an extra five minutes, during which we can take a small nap for strength, or go for last-minute wees?’

‘You can ignore that bit about them being five minutes late,’ said Nick. ‘That’s an outright fib on their part. They’ll be on time, trust me.’

‘I don’t know about that, Nick. No serial-killing murderers would knowingly weaken their threat by reducing suspense in such a way, unless they really were running late, surely? Perhaps they’ve happened upon a tyre hanging from a local tree, or someone’s thrown them some bananas? Maybe they’re busy grooming each other?’

‘These monkeys don’t groom, Roz. They push, shove, slap, bite and pinch each other because they’ve got nothing better to do. Then, once they’ve finished scrapping with each other, they’ll simply pee up a window or moon at passers-by. They’re apes, Roz.’

‘Sure, Nick. But perhaps they’ve discovered jumping in a funny way. Or found a mirror to play with. Maybe a passing circus or zoo representative is discussing career options with them as we speak?’

‘Sure, Roz. If that’s how you want it. But what happens when they burst in on you precisely at the Monkeying Hour, when all along you’ve been expecting them to make an appearance at five minutes past? Imagine how much more shock value that will ultimately generate for you, exacerbated tenfold by the perceived weakening of suspense as a direct result of their advanced warning about apparent lateness.’

‘I hadn’t thought of it like that, Nick,’ whispered Roz, shamefaced, which Nick’s keen mind could sense, despite not being able to physically see her.

‘Just remember who we’re dealing with here, Roz. Throttle and Bribes are two of the most lethal, heartless, cold-blooded giant man- monkeys ever created by God. And by God I don’t mean mankind’s God, Roz. I mean the cruel God of my own imaginata, which is an especially cruel and unsympathetic God. Part salamander, in fact.’

‘And part you, Nick, surely?’

He hadn’t thought of it like that. Maybe he was turning into his own parents after all. Maybe this was their ultimate revenge on him for causing their rag-and-bone-crushed demise. Maybe Nick’s ultimate fate was to turn into a carbon copy of his own worst nightmare.

‘I’ll tell you something, Roz, and this will really put a firework up your skirt. Throttle and Bribes might even come early.’

Nick hated saying it, but he had to think like his parents now. Had to imagine humanity at its worst.

‘You mean they could come five minutes earlier than the Monkeying Hour, as opposed to five minutes after?’

‘Precisely, Roz.’

‘But that’s horrible, Nick! Imagine the shock of that happening, when we’ve been primed to expect their aforementioned late running?’

‘We have to imagine it, Roz, if we’re to play Throttle and Bribes at their own game. We have to ambush them, instead of the other way round.’

Suddenly an almighty crash sounded from the basement below. As well as what he was hearing from the walkie-talkie’s receiver, Nick felt a physical tremor resonating from the very foundations of the building.

Then Roz began to scream.

‘Roz!’ Nick yelled into the mouthpiece. ‘Over! Roz! Over!’

But Roz’s line went suddenly dead as her fingers evidently slipped free of the receiver. Nick fought in vain with the walkie-talkie set, tugging desperately at its plastic cable, hoping to somehow drag Roz and the girl physically upwards to safety until, almost five minutes later, he pulled up, via the loft’s opening, the cable’s frayed and severed end.

‘Chewed through,’ he gasped aloud. Suddenly the boy, whose name Nick remembered was Terry,12 leaped from his makeshift mattress and ran over to join Nick at the opened hatch.

‘My sister Amanda’s*13 down there!’

As Terry made his initial effort to descend the ladder, Nick slammed the hatch shut. ‘We can’t leave the loft,’ he cried loudly into Terry’s face. ‘That would be playing into their hands.We’ll have to hope Roz can fend off both monkeys and prevent your sister, whose name is indeed Amanda, being peeled like a banana and crushed into nothing more solid than a smashed toy, like both your parents.’

The boy lunged forcefully at Nick, his features a ghastly rictus of unbridled fury.

Damn it, the kid was crazed now, Nick realised, attempting to fend off a flurry of pummelling fists. Though the boy evidently possessed a strength of will even Nick had failed to suspect him capable of, something – most likely the terror induced by Throttle and Bribes – had enraged this youth to the point of lunacy.

‘Ease off, buster. They’ll hear us!’

But Terry wouldn’t listen. Instead, he continued to fight blindly with Nick, rolling around the loft space with the author’s head in his grasp, bashing Nick’s skull repeatedly with a flurry of admittedly weak blows. Allowing Terry sufficient time to prevent potential bruising of the kid’s ego, Nick finally stretched his own arms outwards, lifting the boy upwards so that the child’s flailing fists could no longer connect with anything but air.

Then Nick heard it. The sound of something clambering up the walls outside . . .

‘Listen!’ he snapped, flinging the small boy aside onto the mattress. ‘They’re coming.’

Nick scrambled back over to the hole he’d discovered in the eaves, the one that looked down onto the front of the building and the porch below.

As the boy joined him, Nick drew his revolver from a jacket pocket and aimed its barrel through the small gap, preparing to blast the first furry head he glimpsed ascending the brick wall below.

Then the wall behind them exploded.

Rubble rained over them, crashing into their arse-cheeks and the roof sloping above their heads. Before Nick could turn around he heard the dreaded scream of an enraged simian, and knew in his heart that the Monkeying Hour had arrived ahead of time, exactly as he’d predicted. But what Nick hadn’t predicted was that as well as the loft, and the basement far below, this particular house evidently possessed a further crawl space behind the walls, allowing those giant man-monkeys to gain access to any room in the house they elected to visit, unheard and undetected, including the very one he and the boy were currently hiding in.

Damn it, Nick should have known. Of course Throttle and Bribes would be waiting behind the wall. After all, that’s where he’d buried them all those years before, wasn’t it?

Steeling himself, Nick turned to confront the gibbering horror that had burst through solid brick behind them.

‘Don’t look at it!’ Nick yelled, hoping to save the boy further trauma. Because what loomed over them both now was a thing of nightmare. The head was fuzzy with wild, flecked tufts of white hair protruding from crazed angles beneath the peaked brim of an ancient warden’s cap.

The thing’s uniform was grubby, streaked with banana stains and splashes of misdirected urine. Shoots of straw and dried faeces clung to numerous creases on its trousers as both paws scrabbled instinctively at its groin area, itching for a public display of dominance.

The facial features resembled more those of a baboon than a chimp or rhesus monkey. Its cheeks were red with rage, its mouth drawn tightly together at the jawline as though it were about to blow something foul in their direction.

Which it then did.

Nick ducked hard under the spraying jet of banana-mush spittle, which shot violently against the roof behind, sizzling on contact with the eaves like a vat of hurled acid.

But he had no time to celebrate his miraculous escape as the murdering gibbon in uniform leapt forwards on all fours, baring its teeth at Nick and hissing loudly into his face.

‘Run, Terry!’ Nick yelled, as the monkey’s hands thrust outwards, grabbing the author forcefully by the throat. Nick barely had time to grip its wrists before he felt the appalling vice-like pressure of a simian chokehold.

‘Now you know what it feels like,’ yelled the boy, making his way over to the closed floor hatch to escape.

Nick attempted to yell out a pithy rejoinder, but the monkey- man’s grip on his neck prevented a single word departing his lips.

This, then, reflected Nick as he fought in vain to prise the monkey’s long, stool-caked fingers from his throat, was evidently Throttle. Then where the hell was Bribes?

Downstairs! thought Nick in sudden panic. The men-monkeys had split up after all. Throttle had made his way up here to deal with him and the boy, while Bribes had evidently remained in the basement below, extorting what little cash Roz claimed she had left (which Nick suspected was more than she’d made out while ordering their earlier Wimpys).

But if that was so, then who*14 had Nick heard climbing up the wall outside? Perhaps Bribes had already finished with the girls below and was himself*15 ascending the front wall as Nick had initially presumed, poised to burst inwards through the gap in the eaves at any moment, to assist his*16 gibbering partner in crime. Hell, maybe they’d both been waiting there in the walls all along, precisely where Nick had buried them all those years before*.17 Maybe they’d both been watching Nick and Roz in secret the entire time . . .

The creature’s grip on Nick’s neck tightened. Despairing, Nick realised that in the chaos of the monkey-man’s attack, he’d dropped his revolver. Wrenching his head to the left, he spied it lying on the floorboards by his feet. He attempted in vain to call out to Terry, but succeeded only in producing a string of glutinous drizzle between his incisors.

Then Nick’s problems suddenly got a whole lot worse. Though the monkey’s natural scent was bad enough, Nick’s nose now detected a vague hint of digested waste. Christ, that’s all he needed. He’d seen them do it at safari parks and zoos across the country, of course. Knew all too well that if all else failed for a monkey – if it were caged without adequate supervision and its bananas were late, or its food had been deliberately solidified in ice on a cold day as punishment for a frenzied bout of public self-pleasuring the previous morning – then it was but a simple matter of time before the hassled ape began throwing its own poo around. And at this distance, Nick’s chances of ducking in time were, frankly, negligible.

But . . . Nick thought, desperately scouring the fog of his strangled mind for a solution . . . If Bribes didn’t suddenly appear through that gap in the eaves . . . if Throttle’s partner-in-grime was still downstairs, extorting hard cash from Roz’s purse, and if Throttle elected to remove one of its paws from Nick’s throat in order to retrieve a steaming hot log from its uniform’s buttoned-down trouser patch . . . then Nick might just have a chance. Might just be able to muster enough strength to free himself from the man-monkey’s weakened grip . . .

He glanced over at Terry again. The boy was halfway down the hatch. No way could he draw the kid’s attention at this range. He tried again to alert the boy to the gun lying uselessly by his feet, but Nick now barely had enough vocal cord left for a basic whisper.

Then a burst of flatulence shot loudly from the ape’s rectum. As the sound vibrated loudly across the attic, the fleeing boy looked up suddenly, smirking instinctively at the sound of someone’s juddering flaps. And in that moment Nick caught the boy’s eye. Frantically, he mustered what strength remained in an effort to alert Terry to the presence of his dropped revolver, but sensed his mind clouding suddenly as the raw, fetid stink of the simian’s faecal odour met both nostrils, and he momentarily blacked out.

When Nick came to again seconds later, the boy was no longer staring in his direction, but was looking instead at Throttle, quaking in terror as the uniformed monkey-man hissed and spat and jumped up and down before him, oo, oo, oo-ing with malign intent.

With a howl of sudden fury, the human baboon finally released its partial grip on Nick’s throat, then scrabbled frantically at its rear trouser patch with one paw in an effort to locate the part-protruding log.

Nick seized the moment and grabbed the monkey’s remaining mitt in his, wrenched the creature sideways with a howl of human rage and hurled the beast against the adjacent wall.

The furred monster gibbered angrily as Nick rolled backwards, reaching for his dropped revolver. As he fought to regain breath, Nick glanced over in horror as Throttle leaped up and down repeatedly in the same spot, then reached behind its rear trouser patch again with both hands.

Nick realised he had no time left to aim a shot. Instead, he grabbed the gun in his hands and ran.

‘Down!’ he yelled, hurling himself towards the opened hatch.

The boy was taking his time climbing down, unable to coordinate brain and body with quite the same dexterity of his older saviour, so Nick stood deliberately on the kid’s fingers and watched him drop the final eight rungs.

Cruel but necessary, Nick realised, if they were to maintain any chance of rescuing Roz and the boy’s sister, whose name had once more escaped him.*18

Pulling the hatch down hard against the shrieking creature above them, Nick heard and felt the tell-tale thud of striking turdage as Throttle catapulted last night’s take-out against the sealed hatch.

That wouldn’t hold it for long, though, Nick realised. A mere matter of minutes remained before this simian hellbeast discovered a way of releasing the catch from within. Or simply made its way back downstairs through the crawl space it had previously entered by . . .

‘Quick!’ Nick shouted, grabbing the boy’s hand in his and dashing down the spiral stairway, dragging the youth behind him.

As Nick hurled them both at speed from floor to floor, yelling periodically at the boy to keep up with a real man, a door opened halfway down and the engineering student currently renting out Amanda’s*19 bedroom leaned out of his doorway and told Nick to ‘Ssh!’.

Nick cracked him fully in the face with the butt of his revolver, knocking the youth backwards into his abode, painfully aware that any setback now could result in the imminent deaths of Roz and Amanda.

As they descended the next floor at speed, Nick found their route completely blocked again by a nocturnal makeshift volleyball tournament.

‘Move aside!’ he yelled, raising the revolver again, threateningly. But the crowd of Taiwanese relatives, many of them children, refused to give way or acknowledge Nick at all, so intent were they on the current state of play.

Desperate, Nick ran forwards onto the pitch among the competing teams, grabbing the ball in one hand and bouncing himself and the boy across the stairwell, hurling the rubber sphere upwards over the adjacent net as he reached the far side. To tumultuous applause, which he simply had no time to acknowledge, Nick and the boy turned the far corner and raced ever further down the stairwell, passing through the main hall before entering the cupboard below the stairs, which led downwards into the basement area beneath.

As Nick kicked the door marked ‘Basement’ inwards, he realised he wouldn’t have to wait for his eyes to adjust to any gloom, because the overhead bulb was already fully on, revealing another terrifying uniformed man-monkey swinging below it from a trailing cord of rope as Roz and Amanda tossed note after note of money into a large pile beneath the creature’s hairy, elevated feet.

‘Dammit, Roz, you told me you had no money at all,’ yelled Nick, calculating that Roz could easily have chipped in for the Wimpy meal if she’d wanted to, if not pay for the entire thing herself.

‘Please, Nick,’ Roz shouted, tears streaming down her face. ‘If I don’t give him all my money, he says he’s going to peel Amanda’s head like a banana and squash her tiny soul into a broken toy.’

‘Says? How the hell can that thing talk?’

‘Well, he sort of screams it and my mind interprets what he’s saying inwardly. It’s all very vague and somewhat ill-defined from a logical point of view, Nick. A bit like your books, I guess.’

This was true, Nick concurred. He’d never really tackled those sorts of editing notes in his fiction (if indeed any), hoping that the reader would simply gloss over any apparent logical flaw or plot hole amid the sheer exhilaration of a climactic denouement, assuming instead that Nick had already explained how it all worked at an earlier stage in the story, when the reader hadn’t been paying the tale their full attention.

‘Don’t pay him a penny more, Roz,’ said Nick, aiming his gun at the monkey’s heart. ‘This ends here.’

‘Thank God,’ Roz replied, getting down on all fours to scrape the pile of money frenziedly back into her lady’s handbag.

As the cash below Bribes quickly vanished back inside Roz’s purse, the man-monkey stared forlornly at the ground, then glanced up angrily at Nick before dropping loudly from the rope to bound at speed towards him. The creature hissed and spat violently like Throttle before it, and when Nick saw it reach behind its own rear with both paws, he raised the revolver and fired.

Nothing happened.

‘Who’s been monkeying around with this thing?’ Nick yelled, breaking open the gun to find that the bullets had all been replaced with bits of banana instead.

‘As if I didn’t know,’ he tutted ruefully, realising Throttle must have got to the weapon when Nick had briefly blacked out under the stench of that expelled wind. But before he could think up an alternative method of defending himself, Nick’s face flashed with sudden terror as the giant ape-thing grabbed Roz in both paws.

‘No!’ yelled Nick.‘Don’t do it!’

But it was too late. With well-heeled precision, Bribes reached upwards with both mitts and peeled Roz’s head apart, pulling strands of her own body downwards on either side, so that strips of his former editor fell to the ground, one by one, around what remained of her body.

‘He’s peeling them!’ shouted Terry suddenly, rushing forwards to protect his younger sister, whose name was definitely Amanda.

‘Keep back!’ yelled Nick, impressed nevertheless by the boy’s reck- less heroism. Reckless, because Nick knew, with the advanced wisdom of age, that the kid didn’t stand a chance in hell of rescuing his sibling.

Horrified, he watched as Bribes grabbed the boy effortlessly in one paw and, like Roz before them, peeled both him and his sister apart.

As strips of both siblings fell to the ground, Nick turned away in horror. When he at last found the strength to turn back, he could see only three battered objects lying broken on the ground where the monkey’s victims had once stood. Three broken tin toys, Nick realised. One of them resembled Roz, Nick saw, while the other two retained the shapes of the deceased boy and girl.

How had he let it happen? They’d all been peeled apart before his very eyes and Nick Steen had stood completely still, then looked away.

He was a coward. Worse than that, he was an arsehole. The miserable wretch known as Nick Steen contained, he realised, the worst instincts of his own parents’ cold, ruthless cruelty.

Hell, this whole damned thing was his fault.

‘You bloody monkeys,’ he howled aloud, realising he had no way at all of defeating Throttle and Bribes now. As the latter advanced towards him on all fours, the wall beside it burst inwards and Throttle leaped into the room to join its devilish companion, having made its way down from the loft via the hidden crawl space (as Nick had cleverly predicted).

Together they moved towards Nick . . .

So, they’d finally got him, after all these years. Despite Nick think- ing he’d silenced these two terrors permanently, sealing them up inside the wall of his parents’ house, he now realised they were back with a vengeance. Only they were real monsters now. Here to crush him into a mechanical toy.

Plus Roz and the two children.

And their parents, Nick remembered, quickly doing some more math.

Would he go down fighting? How could he? There was nothing to fight with. Most likely he would be pelted first, too. Brained violently by monkey turds, then crushed, strangled and peeled like a human banana by Throttle, while Bribes counted up all the earnings from Nick’s paperback horror novels over the years. Books Nick alone had written so tirelessly, effortlessly and brilliantly.

His life’s work.

‘No way, buddy,’ Nick growled to himself, reaching inside his shirt for a place very close to his chest . . .

‘You’ll want this story, too, I presume,’ he announced, drawing out a wad of faded, folded paper.

‘A rare tale, this one . . .’ he said, offering it to them.‘ An old story, I’ll admit . . . but a damned good one.’

The human apes released their grip on two steaming links they’d just plucked from their respective behinds, and shuffled towards Nick’s extended hand, staring in awe at the proffered manuscript.

Nick held out his childhood tale of ‘Throttle and Bribes’ toward them, smiled grimly at the two glaring monkey-demons, then tore the thing to pieces.

At once, the two guy-gibbons shrieked and yowled, teeth chattering insanely as smoke and steam rose suddenly from their tousled heads, bursting forth from their ears and nostrils. Meanwhile, their limbs lashed blindly outwards as if their inner bodies were suddenly consumed with fire.

Sensing inner strength he’d never known he possessed, a feeling of authorial power over these monsters at last, Nick continued to tear savagely at his tale, knowing the only way to relieve this curse once and for all was to destroy the narrative at its source, as Roz had previously suggested (not that he’d tell her that). Nobody but him, not least Throttle and Bribes, had known he’d carried this weight around with him for years, literally close to his chest, terrified in case anything should ever happen to his impassioned expression of childhood rage.

But that time had now come.

Grinning coldly at the flaming monkeys, Nick popped pieces of the destroyed tale into his mouth, shred by severed shred, and swallowed them whole.

By the time the cursed story had struck his own internal stomach acid, all that remained of Nick’s childhood demons were two blackened piles of fur and bone, smoking and sizzling on the basement floor.

‘Thanks, Nick,’ said a voice he knew well. Nick looked up. Before him, the real Roz, Terry and Amanda stood where he’d last seen them peeled to pieces by a giant, uniformed man-monkey.

‘I don’t know exactly what you did, Nick,’ said Roz, smiling. ‘But thanks.’

‘Something that needed to be done, Roz,’ Nick replied cryptically, although mainly because he wasn’t quite sure himself.

Turning to ascend the basement steps, he gave the conundrum further thought. Whatever it was that he had done had certainly been the right thing to do, just as long as nobody dissected his plot mechanics too closely, he figured. For, as Roz so often pointed out, his tales sometimes struggled to make any literal sense. Story sense, though, Nick conceded, wrenching open the basement door to let the daylight flood in. That was another matter entirely.

That ole devil named story sense...

‘What are these?’ asked Amanda, following him out. Nick turned and saw what she was holding in her small hands.

‘Put them down, pickle,’ he told her gently. ‘You’ll cut your precious little fingers on all that nasty junk.’

Hearing him, the girl dropped the two beaten-up toys in her hands and followed her brother, Terry, and Roz out through the front door of the house.

When they were gone, Nick reached down and picked up the two objects. No point burying them behind a wall this time, he figured. What was left of them now was only fit for the local scrapyard.

On his way back to the car, Nick tossed the two metallic toy monkeys into a rag-and-bone wagon parked halfway along the road, then turned again to wave goodbye to the two children, whose parents now stood beside them on the doorstep, home at last and already ushering their impoverished tenants back into the street.

‘Fancy a Wimpy?’ Nick said as he and Roz approached his parked car.

‘Sure,’ Roz replied, smiling. ‘But how about you take a much needed break, Action Man? I’ll drive.’

Nick let her, despite perennial misgivings, and even attempted to squeeze her own thigh this time as they pulled out into the road, but was immediately rebuffed. ‘Your fictional world is taking a temporary hiatus, Nick Steen,’ she smiled admonishingly.

‘Fair enough, Roz,’ said Nick, concentrating his efforts instead on securing some much-needed sleep.

As he gazed up tiredly into the passenger wing mirror, he glimpsed the old rag-and-bone wagon already on its way, turning the far corner of the road behind.

For one brief moment, Nick thought he glimpsed two shapes scampering on all fours among the vehicle’s heaped detritus. Then a low cloud of thick, black smoke lingering in the wagon’s wake obscured his view of the street behind.

My imaginata, Nick pondered dreamily.

Only my imaginata...

THE END

Notes

1. See Garth Marenghi's TerrorTome, Tome 1:Type-Face (Dark Lord of the Prolix), the first story in this epical fictive. If you haven’t read it yet, stop reading this tale immediately and read that one first. Then, and only then, return here. Do it. You’re interrupting my flow. GM

2. See above and stop wasting my time. GM

3. No. It’s half-man, half-monkey. Technically man-monkey. GM

4. Again, man-monkey (singular). Or men-monkeys (plural), if it’s important to you that I honour the plurality of the sentence in question. In fact, I’m in charge. It’s man-monkey. Deal with it. GM

5. No way, pedant. This is the correct spelling. It’s how I’ve always spelt ‘infina- tum’. It’s how I will always spell ‘infinatum’. GM

6. Plural of ‘detritus’. GM.Yes it is.

7. As have I temporarily, but I’m deep in ‘the flow’ and don’t have time to go back earlier into the story and check what it is. If this bothers you, why not go back yourself and look up the name, then keep it in mind yourself because I have far more pressing things to do, i.e. finish this story. If you still wish to know her name but can’t be bothered to go check yourself, then I’d put the book down now, amigo, and do one. GM

8. See previous note, and again, do one if this bothers you. GM

9. Approximately 3 a.m. or thereabouts. As I say, you should be remembering these details – not coming here each time you’re stuck, expecting me to bail you out. Because I won’t. Except in this instance. GM

10. I.e. because of the horrors about to occur. GM

11. Again, neither can I. GM

12. The boy’s name is indeed Terry as I’ve just paused for a coffee break and checked. GM

13. Ditto the girl (Amanda). GM

14. Technically ‘what’, but dependent on whether you regard the human or simian strain of Nick’s aggressor to be the more dominant. GM

15. Or ‘itself ’. See above. GM

16. Or ‘its’. Again, see above. GM

17. Not technically this house, or indeed his actual childhood home, but rather an identical loft-based dream-space powered by Nick’s overly fertile imagination. GM

18. Flow again. I have a coffee break in two minutes. GM

19. I’ve now written down both names on a Post-It note for easy access. GM