Alan first came to my notice when he turned up at our stall at last November's Unconvention. He was clutching a box that had once held a plastic Christmas Tree. He thrust it at me, and said "Here's your mermaid". I vaguely remembered Richard F having said that one of his mates had offered to make us a feegee mermaid, but I had forgotten all about it. Sad to say, so many people offer to do stuff for us, and then fail to deliver, that I had got into the habit of treating all such offers cum grano salis, but the advent of Alan shows that I should not be such a cynical old sod. Now he has become a guest blogger..
Now this little tale is certainly off-topic as far as mysterious zoology goes, but then several other blogs have also veered somewhat from the cryptozoological straight-and-narrow, so to speak, and I’m pretty sure that the events that I’m about to relate do have some Fortean interest at least, so pin your ears back and prepare to hear a rather gruesome, not to mention disturbing story….
About six years ago, I went out one evening to meet some friends at one of my local pubs. They knew that I had been working on a horror movie project, and asked me to bring some props along with me, so I found an old plastic bag from Tesco (it draws less attention) and filled it with a severed, decomposing head--always a sure-fire hit at parties--two rotting human arms and a small withered mummified creature. I’m fairly well-known in my neck of the woods (East London) for turning up at local hostelries with assorted monsters and dead bodies which I will usually sit on a bar stool. The best audience for this, not surprisingly, was the late-lamented Goth pub The Intrepid Fox in Wardour St in Soho in London’s West End, and for a couple of years I had three of my zombies sitting behind the bar, leering out from between the beer pumps. The landlord said that they were his best customers, which is perhaps the reason why the pub closed down…
So there I was, with my Tesco bag full of body parts, which seemed to go down well with the local inmates, most of whom were so drunk that they didn’t know what they were looking at anyway, and I have to admit, that what with it being something of a social occasion, I had myself partaken of what might be euphemistically described as “a few sherbets”, so consequently my powers of cognisance and deliberation may have been somewhat alleviated by the time I called it a night, and repaired to my local Chinese takeaway for the obligatory prawn balls, and a sweet and sour--or whatever.
The next morning, I realised that firstly, I was labouring under the weight of a hangover that felt like my head had been stuffed into a tin drum along with a small thermo-nuclear device, and second, that my Tesco bag had inexplicably gone missing. Despite my delicate physical state I managed to recall enough of the previous night through the mists of alcoholic oblivion to remember placing the bag on the floor of the takeaway. In great relief I pulled myself out of my deathbed, and painfully dragged myself down there. To my even greater relief, the chap behind the counter recognised me, and gave me a cheery wave over a large plate of Peking duck.
“Hello!” I said. “I left a bag here last night. Silly me!”
“Yes, yes,” he said, “you leave it on floor.”
“Yep, that sounds about right. Can I have it please?”
“Oh no,” he said, “we throw it outside by bus stop.”
“WHAT?” I replied. “Why on earth did you do that?”
“We look inside and find murdered dead people. We scared, we no like.. We get rid of it.”
I was momentarily speechless, although if I had been able to find the words, I am certain that the great majority of them would have begun with “F”. I went out to the bus stop, but the ‘murder victim’ was long gone. Initially, I was understandably angry that these idiots had chucked my work away, but even worse, the fact dawned on me that they had found what were ostensibly human remains--at least as far as they were concerned--and rather than phone the police, had disposed of the evidence. I could hardly sue a provincial Chinese takeaway for loss of earnings, and in all conscience I had to accept partial responsibility for being drunk in charge of decomposing corpses--kind of, so I was forced to chalk it up to experience. I’ve often wondered what happened to those props--whether they turned up on Ebay, or have been kept in a cupboard somewhere by some loon who thinks they’re the real thing…
In the years since, I’ve often visualised this nightmare scenario of lunatic serial killers up and down the country, bumping people off right, left and centre, then dumping the remains in this shop, only to have them conveniently disposed of by the nutcases inside.
So if there are any budding Hannibal Lecters out there, who find themselves in possession of some inconvenient heads, torsos, and assorted human body parts, I suggest that you immediately get yourself down to Dagenham, where I could direct you towards a very accommodating Chinese takeaway……..
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