Tenzin, the young Buddhist monk, had just spent his second Christmas on the island of Hopeless. Was it really only fourteen months since he had been brought here, whisked away from Tibet tucked beneath the arm of a very large Yeti?

This Guardian of the Glaciers, who was otherwise known as Willy (or possibly Billy), was a creature who considered his distant relative, Mr Squash the sasquatch, to be particularly small and puny. That had not, however, prevented him from using Mr Squash’s mysterious portal to smuggle Tenzin to safety.

The journey, undertaken to escape the evil lama Dawasandup, was short and brutal, but not that Tenzin remembered much about it. Humans travelling through Mr Squash’s portals were always rendered comatose, which was just as well, for ensconced beneath a Yeti’s armpit is not the most salubrious place to find oneself.

In any case, living at The Squid and Teapot had proved a splendid education. Tenzin’s almost-perfect English was spoken with an accent all his own, drawn mainly from Philomena’s gentle Irish lilt and Reggie Upton’s clipped, upper-class militiariese. There were, however, still a few linguistic mysteries waiting to unfold.

On the last day of December, Tenzin was pleased to greet his friends in the bar with a cheery:

“Merry New Year.”

“Ah! Actually, we don’t say that, old chap,” said Reggie. “We say Happy New Year.”

Tenzin frowned slightly.

“Not merry?”

“Never merry,” said Reggie. “Always happy.”

Tenzin considered this.

“Why?”

Reggie opened his mouth, then stopped. His brow furrowed.

Why indeed?

“I’ll get back to you on that, old chap,” he said at last. “For the life of me, I’m dashed if I know.”

Throughout much of that afternoon, any casual observer might have concluded that Reggie was no longer in full possession of his metaphorical marbles. He wandered back and forth before The Squid, muttering, nodding, and occasionally laughing to himself.

In fact, the truth was that Reggie was in full battle preparation, employing thought processes that had served him well in many a campaign.

It was early evening when he next encountered Tenzin. Caitlin and little Oswald were safely tucked up in bed, and the residents of The Squid gathered in the snuggery, as the inn enjoyed its brief hush before the New Year’s onslaught.

“Well,” said Reggie, “you’ve certainly given me something to think about. But I believe I’ve cracked it.”

As several hours had passed since their original exchange, Tenzin – like everyone else – had absolutely no idea what he meant.

“Oh no,” said Philomena, aghast. “Not the flushing privy. I don’t know how we’ll replace that.”

“No, no –  not the old thunder-box,” laughed Reggie. “I meant, why we don’t say Merry New Year.”

Relieved, Philomena settled with Rhys and Tenzin, to hear the inevitable lecture.

“According to a very fine little book I found gathering dust in the main attic,” said Reggie, “merry didn’t originally mean jolly at all. Its older meanings were lively, spirited, unrestrained and, most importantly, slightly dangerous. A merry person was not necessarily nice, and certainly not the sort of chap one would lend a fiver to. He would be high-spirited, possibly reckless, and probably over-lubricated.”

“I’ve heard people described as being a bit merry after a drink or two,” said Rhys. “I thought that just meant cheerful.”

“Oh, I expect they were,” said Reggie. “But a merry person steps outside the rule book,  though usually not far enough to cause alarm.”

“But surely,” said Tenzin, “when you wish someone a Merry Christmas, you are encouraging them to break the rules?”

Reggie smiled.

“You still have much to learn of our customs, dear boy. That’s exactly what Christmas is for. It is the last socially acceptable space for misrule. That’s why those blasted Puritans banned it.”

He took a long swig of Old Colonel, dried his moustache, and continued.

“Christmas was never cosy. It was noisy, rowdy, topsy-turvy and faintly alarming. Lords served servants. Work stopped and boundaries blurred. The Lord of Misrule was no metaphor, and the whole shenanigans went on for twelve days.”

“So Merry Christmas doesn’t mean ‘Have a nice time’?” asked Philomena.

“Good heavens, no,” laughed Reggie. “It means: allow the usual rules to loosen their grip. A little pleasure, a little noise, a little risk and, quite often, a far from little hangover.”

“So that definition explains Robin Hood’s Merry Men,” said Philomena. “They were never particularly jolly. More of a gang of thugs, I’m my opinion.”

“Precisely!” said Reggie, thumping the table, and making everyone jump. “They lived beyond the law. That’s what made them merry.”

Tenzin, who had been silent, said thoughtfully,

“So Hopeless, with its odd and chaotic ways, could be called a merry place.”

“Indeed it can,” said Reggie.

“So when I say ‘Merry New Year’ I am not wrong.”

“No,” said Reggie, carefully. “I suppose you are not.”

Tenzin stood, raised his cup of sarsaparilla, and declared:

“Then a Merry New Year to one and all.”

The fire in the public bar of The Squid and Teapot had settled into that most companionable of moods. It was no longer roaring, no longer demanding attention, but glowing steadily, as though it knew it would be needed for stories. Outside, the fog pressed up against the windows like an uninvited listener, and inside, tankards were refilled, chairs drawn a little closer, and voices lowered without anyone quite noticing why.

Mr Squash sat on the floor with his back to the hearth, vast, shaggy, and contentedly immovable. Drury lay sprawled beside him, his bony tail ticking gently against the flagstones.

“You seemed to know that Christmas was coming,” said Tenzin, watching the firelight ripple across the Sasquatch’s dark fur. “Even before the decorations went up.”

Mr Squash considered this for a moment.

“Well,” he said at last, “I’ve had a fair bit of practice. And I spent one winter far north of here, where the nights are so long that even the stories grow beards.”

This, as everyone present knew, meant that a tale was inevitable.

“It was northern Sweden,” he went on. “And a long way from home. But that was six centuries ago, give or take. I was younger and a good deal sprightlier in those days, and less inclined to sit down for long periods. Anyway, there was an inn up there, very much like this one, only built of timber, and standing where the forest thinned just enough to allow travellers through.”

The fire gave a small, obliging crack.

“That inn was watched over by a house guardian, a Tomte,” said Mr Squash. “Not a showy fellow, performing tricks for their own sake. He kept the place warm, the food plentiful, the doors hanging true on their hinges. He did all this quietly, and for a very long time.”

Philomena smiled to herself but said nothing.

“Now, people often think a Tomte looks after a house,” Mr Squash continued. “That’s not quite right. A Tomte looks after the agreement between a house and the people who live in it. So long as both sides hold up their end, all is well.”

“And if they don’t?” asked Rhys.

Mr Squash’s broad shoulders lifted slightly.

“Then the Tomte notices.”

In the old inn, he explained, the first owners had been good people. Not saints, mind you; it’s well known that saints make terrible innkeepers. No, these people weren’t saintly but they were fair. They fed their guests properly, didn’t cheat their measures, and remembered that a house is something you live with, not in.

“But time passes,” said Mr Squash, “and hands change.”

After a while a new owner arrived. Then another. Corners were cut. Food was wasted. Guests were mocked once their backs were turned. It was nothing dreadful, just a slow and noticeable thinning of care.

“The Tomte didn’t rage,” Mr Squash said. “That’s a human habit. Instead, he took out his measuring stick.”

Reggie frowned. “Measuring stick?”

“Oh yes. He measured the hearth, to see if it still welcomed people. He measured the doorways, to see if they still invited strangers in. He measured the beams, to see if they remembered why they’d been raised in the first place.”

The fire popped again, rather sharply this time.

“Tomtar,” Mr Squash added, using the correct plural, “never measure in order to repair. Only to decide whether it’s time to leave.”

As the Tomte measured, small things began to go wrong. Bread went stale too quickly. Laughter didn’t linger. Guests left earlier than they meant to, unable to say why. The house grew colder, though the fire burned just as brightly.

“And still,” Mr Squash said, “no one noticed, except for a child. This was a boy, no more than six, who liked to sleep near the kitchen hearth. He awoke one night to see the little grey-bearded figure measuring the stones.”

“What are you doing?” the boy asked.

The Tomte looked at him for a long while before answering.

“I am seeing whether this inn still knows itself, as it should do.”

The boy thought about this, as children do, very carefully.

The next evening, he set aside a bowl of porridge.

 It was  properly made, with good oats and, because it was Christmas Eve, a generous knob of butter from the best they had. He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t ask for anything; he simply left it out. 

The Tomte ate. Then he put away his measuring stick.

“In the morning,” said Mr Squash, “the house felt like its old self again. Not perfect, but just right. And the Tomte stayed.”

There was a silence in the bar, warm and thoughtful.

Outside, snow had begun to fall.

Mr Squash shifted slightly and glanced toward the kitchen.

“That’s why,” he said mildly, “it matters what you feed a house. And why it’s best not to forget who’s helping, even if you can’t see them.”

At that very moment, unseen by most, a small figure padded along the beams above the bar, pausing to straighten a sprig of holly and adjust a pine cone that had slipped out of place. Satisfied, he moved on, his work done for the night.

Philomena rose quietly.

“If you’ll excuse me,” she said, “there’s some porridge that needs attending to.”

No one laughed, or commented.

And if, later that night, the inn felt warmer than it strictly ought to have done, and the beer tasted better than anyone remembered, well – it was Christmas Eve, after all.

Mr Squash shifted on the settle that he single-handedly filled, and the aged black oak complained with an ominous creak. 

“Go on then,” said Philomena. “You promised to tell us why you fell out with Pyralia Skant.”

“I promised someday,” said Mr Squash.

“It’s someday now,” she replied, in the tone that makes even a sasquatch rethink his boundaries.

He sighed, adjusted his great, shaggy elbows, and fixed his eyes on the fire. The flames made citrine glints in his fur.

“Well,” he said. “If you’re to understand why I don’t get on with Pyralia Skant, you need to know what happened when the green children came to Hopeless. That was a long time ago – a hundred years, or more. Sebastian Lypiatt ran The Squid and Teapot in those days. Before his time the place had fallen into disrepair, but Sebastian turned it into the fine inn that it is today.”

He smiled at the memory.

“His best barmaid was Betty Butterow,” he went on, “Betty was one of those legendary characters that the island throws up occasionally. She and her husband Joseph Dreaming-By-The-River-Where-The-Shining-Salmon-Springs were the first islanders to meet the children.”

Philomena leaned in. 

“I’ve heard of Betty and Joseph,” she said. “Wasn’t he from the Passamaquoddy people? And you’re right – those two seem almost mythical.”

Suddenly interested, Tenzin, Reggie and Rhys abandoned their card game, and settled down to listen to the sasquatch.

Mr Squash nodded, and began his tale. 

“It was early winter,” he said. “Cold enough that even a sasquatch thinks twice about stepping outside. The fog lay in the hollows like it was hiding something.”

“That’s normal,” said Reggie.

“Not like this fog,” said Mr Squash. “This fog had intentions.”

He paused, lowering his voice.

“Pyralia was on the island. She’d arrived a month before, quiet as frost, asking strange questions about a legendary chest of bog oak and brass. You know how she can stir up trouble without even noticing. I felt her workings long before I saw her. The island felt somehow rearranged.”

Philomena shivered. This sounded all too familiar.

“One night,” Mr Squash continued, “I felt something shifting on the island, like a door swinging open. It wasn’t opened by me, and not one of my portals. I was pretty sure it wasn’t opened by any Hopeless hand, either. It was a slip, a weakening, as though someone was tugging at the weave of the island.”

“Pyralia,” murmured Philomena.

He nodded.

“She wasn’t trying to do harm. She never tries to. But she was unravelling something, unmaking a knot she thought ‘untidy.’ To her, it was housekeeping. To the rest of us, it was like a rip in the fabric.”

“And through that rip,” he said, “fell the children.”

“It was Joseph who heard them first. He’d been out doing something or other up on the Gydynaps.  At first he thought he heard Drury whining, as though he’d injured himself, but Drury  doesn’t speak, and he  certainly doesn’t glow.”

The pile of bones pretending to be asleep beneath the table grunted with indignation.

“Glow?” asked Rhys.

“Oh, only very faintly,” said Mr Squash. “Like soft green starlight.”

“They were tiny.  No more than six and eight years old, and green as new nettles. They were shivering in the cold, holding one another’s hands like they were the last things in the world they trusted.”

“And perhaps they were,” whispered Philomena.

“Joseph brought them straight to Betty,” Mr Squash continued. “He burst into The Squid and Teapot yelling for hot water and blankets. Sebastian Lypiatt nearly had apoplexy.  Not about the children, mind you, but that Joseph had tracked mud across his polished floorboards.”

Reggie snorted.

“But Betty took charge, of course she did. She wrapped them up, cooed to them, tucked them behind the kitchen stove. They warmed up quickly enough, but they never stopped looking terrified.”

He hesitated.

“They were afraid of the dark.”

“Children often are,” said Philomena.

“These weren’t,” said Mr Squash. “Not in their own world. But whatever it was that they’d fallen through frightened them worse than anything Hopeless could throw.”

Tenzin, who knew a thing or two about being dragged from his own world, swallowed audibly at that.

“Randall Middlestreet was the Night Soil Man at the time. He was the next to get involved. He’d found marks in the marsh. Not prints exactly; more like impressions. Shapes that didn’t belong. And a trail that stopped abruptly, and ended in thin air.”

Mr Squash tapped his knee.

“That’s when I knew where the children had come from. You know the Underland well enough, Philomena, and how it attracts other times and places to press against this island. The children must have wandered too far in their world, and Pyralia’s little ‘adjustment’ made the membrane too thin.”

“Like the babes in the wood,” Philomena mused.

“Maybe Pyralia didn’t notice,” said Mr Squash, darkly. “But my guess is that she noticed, and called it an ‘unfortunate side-effect.’”

His fur bristled.

“Children shouldn’t be side-effects. Not of anyone’s cleverness, at any rate.

“What became of the children?”

Philomena held her breath, not really wanting an answer. 

Mr Squash sighed.

“They lived,” he said gently. “For a while, anyway. Betty and Joseph cared for them as their own. Betty even taught them hopscotch. Joseph told them old Passamaquoddy stories so they wouldn’t be frightened at night.”

“And then?” Rhys asked.

“They grew weaker,” said Mr Squash, voice low.

“They belonged to a world that wasn’t this one. Their greenness faded. Their shadows grew thin.”

There was silence in the snuggery.

“When the mist rose one midsummer morning,” he said, “they walked into it. Together. Hand in hand.”

“They never came back,” whispered Philomena.

“Not to us,” said Mr Squash.

“But I think –  I hope –  they found the gap Pyralia made, and went home.”

Philomena blinked away the ache behind her eyes.

“And you’ve avoided Pyralia ever since?” she asked softly.

Mr Squash huffed.

“Yes,” he said. “She’s dangerous when she’s tidying. She straightens things that were never meant to be straight.”

“And that’s why you left when she returned to the island?”

“Oh yes,” said Mr Squash. “When I felt her energy again, all crisp and chilly like a librarian rearranging the universe, I thought it best to return to the Pacific North-West for a while.”

He scratched his chin.

“And then,” he admitted, “I missed this place. I missed you all. Even the ghosts in the privy. So here I am.”

Philomena reached out and patted his enormous paw.

“Thank you,” she said. “For trusting us with the truth.”

The fire crackled. Snow tapped at the window. And for a moment, the entire inn felt warm as a heartbeat.

–

Authors note: Readers should feel free to trawl the Vendetta archives for the many tales of Sebastian Lypiatt, Betty Butterow and her husband, Joseph, and also the mysterious chest of bog-oak and brass.

It is my belief that, for most people, the best part of Christmas lies in its anticipation. The islanders of Hopeless, Maine, are no exception to this, despite their privations. Indeed, it is probably because they have so little that the prospect of a celebration never fails to please. As December unfolds, the air of excitement becomes almost tangible, and the centre of all this simmering cheer is, of course, The Squid and Teapot.

Philomena Bucket could scarcely believe it had been only two years since she and Rhys had married at Christmas and been handed the keys to The Squid by Bartholomew and Ariadne Middlestreet, who had finally decided to retire. 

Not having any truck with organised religion, the couple had refused to ask Reverend Davies or the ghostly Father Stamage to marry them. Instead Reggie Upton had been persuaded to perform the secular ceremony, giving in to Philomena’s reasoning that if a captain could marry a couple at sea, then surely a brigadier could do the same on land. And so Christmas had taken on an extra shine for the Bucket-Cranhams, a yearly reminder of joy, new beginnings, and improbable good fortune.

With this in mind, she set out early one fog-blurred December morning to gather some greenery. Decking the halls (well, the bar and snuggery) with boughs of holly seemed an excellent place to start.

Even on Hopeless, the vivid green of the leaves and the scarlet clusters of berries refused to be subdued. The holly trees practically glowed, luminous even in the hesitant dawn light. The sight made Philomena’s heart lift – and then, mid-lift, it abruptly faltered as a vast, dark shadow spread itself over her and the branches like an eclipse.

She froze. After what felt like a lifetime compressed into a heartbeat, she slowly turned toward whatever had cast that monstrous silhouette.

The creature was enormous; eight feet tall and easily seven hundred pounds.

“Mr Squash!” Philomena cried, delighted. “Where have you been? We’ve missed you!”

“I’ve been keeping out of the way,” he replied, a little too guardedly.

“Out of whose way?” Philomena frowned. She couldn’t imagine anyone on the island forcing a sasquatch to hide.

“Pyralia Skant,” Mr Squash muttered, almost sheepish.

Philomena raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, it was a long time ago,” he said quickly. “Nothing to trouble you with. Honestly, Philomena.”

“Really?”

“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you sometime.”

“Yes, you will, Mr Squash,” she said with a sly smile. “I’ll make sure of that. Now come along, help me with these holly branches…”

As you might imagine, the sudden reappearance of Mr Squash caused no small stir on the island. The sasquatch had been a popular figure for generations, turning up unpredictably but always making people feel safer simply by existing.

Reggie, Rhys, and Tenzin were delighted to have him back at The Squid and Teapot, but the children – Caitlin and little Oswald – were positively ecstatic. Once they recovered from their initial shyness, the discovery that a gigantic furry creature was, essentially, a living huggable toy felt like Christmas had come early. Mr Squash, for his part, was equally thrilled to see them.

That evening, the bar was bursting. Admittedly, that was partly due to Mr Squash occupying the space of four customers, but it seemed that everyone wanted to claim him as their best and oldest friend. Ironically, his actual friends had retreated to the snuggery, which was quieter and considerably less congested.

“Did he tell you why he disappeared so suddenly, m’dear?” Reggie asked Philomena.

“He said it had something to do with Pyralia arriving on the island,” she replied. “He made no secret of the fact that he doesn’t like her.”

“Hmmm… that’s odd,” mused Reggie, a faraway look in his eye. “Dashed fine-looking woman, if you ask me.”

“Perhaps not to a sasquatch,” Rhys suggested.

“Well, there’s more to it than we know,” said Philomena. “And I intend to find out.”

“And I’ve no doubt that you will, m’dear,” Reggie chuckled. “But in the meantime, I’d better help Tenzin in the bar; the poor chap is hardly coping out there on his own.”

It was much later, when the last customers had finally drifted away and the inn was quiet, that they had Mr Squash entirely to themselves. The fire still burned cheerfully in the grate, and no one was eager to let the cosy mood disperse like smoke up the chimney.

“Don’t leave us guessing…” Philomena said.

“Guessing?” Mr Squash feigned innocence. He knew perfectly well that Philomena had no intention of letting the Pyralia Skant mystery lie.

“Why did you fall out with her?”

Mr Squash sighed. It was a deep, forest-floor sort of sigh.

“I suppose I’ll get no peace until you know, will I?”

Philomena shook her head.

“Very well. It was like this…”

—

To be continued…

You will recall that Philomena Bucket had discovered Durosimi O’Stoat using sorcery in order to intimidate the liminal fissure, known as Not-Hopeless, into supplying him with copious amounts of single malt whisky.

Although she felt it her duty to set things right, Philomena had never thought of herself as being anyone’s idea of a heroine. Such people tended to be loud, and she preferred her magic like her porridge: not too sweet, quietly effective and entirely unremarkable. Yet there she was, slipping through the predawn murk toward the fissure, with Pyralia Skant’s amulet in one hand and a battered hip-flask in the other, and feeling every inch like a woman about to complain to the management about something that was totally beyond its control. 

The woods were still. Even the drizzle seemed unwilling to make a sound.

The fissure throbbed faintly, like a pulse beneath the earth, awake, restless, and in no mood for nonsense. Philomena felt the tension rising from it. Not-Hopeless had become a place stretched too far, and pulled like wet dough under Durosimi’s greedy thumbs.

She took a breath, squared her shoulders, and stepped through.

Dawn in Not-Hopeless was always peculiar. The light came from nowhere in particular, like an afterthought, illuminating things that had not existed yesterday and might not exist by teatime. Today that light was weak, strained by the world’s recent indignities, courtesy of Durosimi O’Stoat.

Philomena walked slowly, respectfully, the way one approaches a wounded animal. The air shivered under her touch. She felt it recognise her, not as its master, but as someone who understood rules and the reasons why they mattered.

“Good morning,” she said, softly. “I’m here to fix what the sorcerer broke.”

A ripple moved underfoot; it was, at least, an acknowledgement.

She placed her offering, a small loaf of coarse bread and a pinch of salt,  upon a stone that was only a stone if you didn’t look at it too directly. Then she uncorked the hip flask.

“Real whisky from the Gannicox Distillery,” she murmured. “An honest libation.”

The scent drifted upward, warm and familiar.

Philomena caught her breath as she felt  something undefinable in the landscape gently ease. Then the impressions came, not as words, but as a rush of feeling, a tightening of the air, a cold prickle up the spine. Philomena understood it as clearly as if Pyralia Skant herself had spoken:

“Return what was stolen. All of it.”

Philomena knew instinctively that Not-Hopeless was patient, but this patience was not limitless, and certainly not forgiving of the insults it had suffered. She looked toward the shelves of impossible whisky Durosimi had pulled into being. They stood gleaming in the rising light, neat rows of fantasy dressed as liquor. Every bottle radiated something she could only define as wrongness. They had no provenance, nor origin. They had no lineage, nor place in memory. They had to go.

She touched Pyralia’s amulet. It pulsed once, warm against her skin, reminding her of the mysterious friend who had entrusted her with this task, and also with her final secret.

Philomena raised her hand, found the thread of unreality running through the shelves, and spoke the word Pyralia had warned her never to use lightly.

“Unspool.”

The bottles didn’t shatter; that would have been far too mundane. Instead they simply decided to give up the whole business of being. They loosened from existence like stitches pulled from a badly mended hem, dissolving into motes of light, sighing away into the air, and leaving only the faintest smell of spring water and peat.

A deep tremor rolled across the ground like an unmistakable sigh of relief; the balance had been restored. Not-Hopeless was not quite done, however.

A new impression pressed against Philomena’s thoughts: it spoke to her about consequences and their rightful owner. It spoke about Durosimi O’Stoat.

“Oh, I see,” she whispered. “You want him to feel it, don’t you?”

The fissure hummed.

Philomena sighed. “Well, I won’t argue. Actions have outcomes.”

She gave the landscape a small, respectful nod.

“Thank you. This has been an honour,” she said.

And with that, Philomena stepped back through the fissure, leaving bread, salt, a small splash of Gannicox whisky, and the faint promise of equilibrium behind her.

Durosimi discovered the consequences two days later, when he attempted to pour himself a triumphant dram in front of Doc Willoughby.

The whisky in his glass turned into a watery gruel that smelled vaguely of wet porridge.

He tried again. And again. Every bottle he touched mutated into the same dull swill.

By the fourth attempt he was roaring like a man who had been personally insulted by the universe. 

It was early evening when Doc Willoughby ambled into The Squid and Teapot. Philomena listened to his puzzled lamentations with a perfectly straight face, as she polished a row of tankards, exhibiting the serenity of a woman who had absolutely no idea how such a thing could have come about. Doc muttered something about “mysterious transmutations of the alcoholic spectrum,” and scribbled an illegible note into his book.

Later, she  quietly served him a bowl of stew that actually contained recognisable vegetables.

Drury sat by her feet, tail thumping, giving the definite impression of a conspiratorial wink through his eyeless sockets. 

Balance had returned. The island was safe.

Or, being Hopeless, more or less safe for now.

In all of its long history, the Squid and Teapot had never smelled so good. It was almost unnerving.

Instead of the usual perfume – a heady blend of skunk cabbage, spilled ale, and poached squid legs – the inn now carried hints of rosemary and citrus and honest-to-goodness fresh vegetables.

It took no time for the word to get around the island that something special was happening down at The Squid. It had even attracted Doc Willoughby, whose gastronomic curiosity had overcome his deep antipathy toward Philomena Bucket.

He arrived three nights running, sniffing the air like a suspicious badger in tweed, poking at the menu and asking, far too loudly, whether someone had finally discovered a way to render spoonwalkers edible. Philomena accepted the remark with a frozen smile, and every muscle she owned clenched in unison. Being in an especially mellow mood that evening, however, she allowed the slight to go over her head and fly out to sea. Nothing was going to disturb her equilibrium; after all, Pyralia Skant’s parting gift had given her the means to provide the inn with a better menu than it had ever known.  And that would have been the end of the matter if Doc Willoughby had kept his mouth shut.

Then came the remark. The one that halted Philomena in her progress to the kitchen.

“It’s a mystery where this place suddenly gets its food from” he’d said, to no one in particular. “Almost as mysterious as Durosimi O’Stoat’s single-malt supply. The man drinks like he’s got a distillery at his beck and call.”

Philomena felt the bottom drop out of her stomach.

Pyralia’s voice echoed in her memory: Take only what is needed. Disturb nothing else.

If Durosimi had learned of not-Hopeless, that wild liminal space of near-realities, then the pompous, rules-optional sorcerer would not be limiting himself to a handful of carrots, repaid with a grateful sigh.

This is how, some nights later, Philomena found herself crouched behind a blasted hawthorn stump at the edge of the fissure. She had picked her time deliberately, knowing that this would be when Durosimi would be most likely to replenish his store of whisky.

Under the dark of the moon, those few days between its waning and waxing, was traditionally the best time for dark magic. And everything about this particular midnight felt dark. Philomena’s pale blue eyes narrowed, straining to penetrate the foggy gloom.

Durosimi arrived with all the subtlety of a peacock entering a funeral. Rings flashing and a self- satisfied grin so smug it could curdle lamp oil.

He muttered a few opulent words, traced sigils in the air, and the fissure yawned open. It was obedient, malleable, too easily bent. It reminded Philomena of a dog her father had owned, beaten into cowed submission. The hair on the back of her neck prickled as she sensed Not-Hopeless shiver. It did not like to be steered.

Durosimi marched straight in. Philomena followed, tentative, silent and filled with a sense of trepidation. The air within the fissure glowed with an unearthly luminescence.

What she saw made her breath catch: shelves of bottled whisky that had never existed, turning themselves obediently toward Durosimi. Trees releasing ripe fruit at a snap of his fingers; it was a docile landscape bowing like a bullied servant.

Not-Hopeless writhed under it. The very ground seemed to ripple. Shadows lengthened in odd directions. A tone, deep and vibrating, thrummed through the bones of the place, like a warning growl from something enormous but not yet visible.

Philomena clutched an amulet Pyralia had left her.

“He’s pushing it too hard. He’s bending it too far,” she was terrified that she had spoken the words aloud, but if she had, Durosimi had not heard her.  For how long had he been doing this? And knowing the sorcerer, enough would never be enough. No wonder the island felt so bruised.

Cracks skittered across the sky like fractures in porcelain.

Durosimi, to his credit, paused mid-plunder and frowned at a nearby boulder that had started quietly bleeding sand.

“Hmm,” he said, as if mildly inconvenienced by the prelude to a cosmic rupture. “Perhaps I’ve over-steeped the infusion…”

Philomena knew then that if she didn’t intervene, the people of Hopeless would pay the price.

Not dramatically; there would be no big blousy apocalypse. That would require too much enthusiasm from the island. But it would retaliate  in those small, unpleasant, irreversible ways it specialised in.

This was only the beginning.

And Philomena Bucket, purveyor of soups, ale and occasional witchcraft squared her shoulders.

There would be a reckoning.

It was Philomena who first noticed that Screaming Point had moved. Not dramatically, of course. It hadn’t marched inland waving a flag or anything so vulgar, but it was certainly elsewhere. Where there should have been plunging cliffs and the eternal roar of the tide, there was now only a gentle slope of gravel leading to a new, smaller headland that hadn’t existed the day before.

Reggie Upton, in the best military tradition of the Ordnance Survey, had been trying to map the island for the past year. He could be forgiven that this latest development had left him muttering that it was “bloody inconvenient.” It was bad enough that Screaming Point had moved once, but to do it twice in a matter of months was dashed inconsiderate. Drury simply growled in the general direction of the horizon, as if telling the landscape to behave.

Only Pyralia seemed unsurprised. Within a few days of Philomena’s discovery she had moved back to the old lighthouse. Some thought that she might be rebuilding the light, while others opined that she was dismantling it from within. By day, a thin plume of smoke rose from the tower, though whether it was chimney smoke or something less natural was anyone’s guess.

Philomena visited her once, taking a basket of scones and a question she couldn’t quite phrase. Pyralia was polite but unusually distant, her hair threaded with seaweed as though the ocean had been combing it. Her recent foray into island fashions had been abandoned; she was once more in her white lab coat and stiletto-heeled shoes 

“I’m sorry that you’ve moved out of the inn,” Philomena said. There was no mistaking the sincerity in her voice.

“Yes,” said Pyralia, staring out to sea. “So am I. But don’t you see? Everything is moving now. Even the things that shouldn’t.”

Drury, faithful hound that he was, kept his bone-white snout turned toward the tower whenever the thickest sea-fogs rolled in, as though listening for something beyond the usual creaks and moans. And in the dark water off the newly located Screaming Point, the gulls had begun to circle a patch of sea that glowed faintly green at dusk, a sort of eel-skin green, the precise shade of an old book’s cover.

The days became weeks, and the lighthouse door was rarely open anymore. Philomena sometimes found it ajar by an inch or two, the way a house leaves a window on the apse for a returning cat, but Pyralia herself was seldom visible.

When Philomena did catch a glimpse, it was only ever in profile: a silhouette framed in the lantern room, or,  more unsettlingly, a reflection in a tide pool far below, even when the woman herself was nowhere near the cliffs.

Drury picked up on things before anyone else, rattling anxiously on evenings when the fog glowed faintly, as though lit from within. When Philomena scolded him gently for disturbing the sleeping inn, Drury simply pressed his skull against her hand, trying to explain in the only language he had left: She’s going.

The island shifted in increments so small that no one noticed at first.

A path curved slightly more west than usual.

A signpost pointed to a destination that had never existed but somehow always had.

A rock long used as a seat outside the Squid developed a hairline crack, shaped unmistakably like a balancing scale.

Philomena alone knew what these changes meant: the unmaking had nearly run its course. Pyralia wasn’t withdrawing out of melancholy, she was being pulled out of the world like a stitch from a tapestry, her work complete enough that reality no longer needed to hold her.

Still, practicality prevailed, as it always did with Philomena. If one must be haunted, she reasoned, better to be haunted productively. With that thought in mind she resolved to visit the lighthouse one final time, and not be burdened with unanswerable questions. Instead, she climbed the lighthouse steps with a slate full of menu notions that she fully expected Pyralia to mock gently. She was prepared for a lecture about equilibrium, or unmaking, or the inadvisability of trying to make anything edible from barnacles.

What she wasn’t prepared for was the smell.

Not the usual lighthouse scents of brine, brass polish and old oil.

This was something warmer, familiar, comforting: rosemary, potatoes, a hint of yeast, and something sweet she couldn’t quite name.

It reminded her painfully of meals she’d never actually eaten.

Pyralia’s presence shimmered in the lantern glass again, though more faintly than before.

“You want the menu to improve?” Pyralia murmured, her voice like a hand brushing the back of Philomena’s neck. “Then listen.”

Philomena, practical as ever, listened.

“There is a place,” Pyralia said, “between Hopeless and not-Hopeless. A fissure the fog forgets to close. Stand by the old washing stones at low tide. Turn your back to the sea. Wait for the third wave to hesitate; it will, if it wants to.”

Philomena swallowed. “And then?”

“Open your basket.”

The shimmer brightened, just for a heartbeat.

“Whatever you need will be there. Not what you want, mind. You, more than most, know that those two things are rarely the same.”

Philomena tried to make sense of this. “You’re saying the sea is somehow supplying produce?”

“Not the sea.” Pyralia sounded amused. “The in-between.”

“But is it safe?”

“Oh no,” Pyralia said. “Absolutely not. But it is generous.”

Philomena stood for a long moment, clutching her slate. “Why tell me this?”

A ripple passed through the glass. It was a gesture that was almost fond.

“Because the island needs someone who feeds rather than takes. Someone who nourishes. Someone who is not me.”

Philomena bowed her head. “Thank you. I’ll use it wisely.”

“You already do,” Pyralia whispered. “And I will always be here for you. The lighthouse remembers me well enough. Talk if you need to. Drury will hear first.”

The lantern room dimmed, as though acknowledging a presence withdrawing, little by little, into a place where light and shadow are negotiable. 

Philomena left, stepping carefully over an old off-white lab coat and a discarded shoe, badly scuffed and with a broken stiletto heel. They looked as though they had been there for years. 

She didn’t look back. She had a basket to prepare. 

The night was thick enough to be tasted. Fog seeped through every chink in the Squid and Teapot’s old timbers, softening edges and dulling sound, as though the world was wearing carpet slippers. Pyralia Skant sat alone in her room, her fingers resting lightly on the green eel-skin cover of ‘The Shivering Chronicle’, the private journal of Father Ambrose Honeywell.

Strangely, the book felt old; far older than Honeywell’s scribblings. It was as though an unfathomably ancient mind, lurking in the shadows of time, had shaped the pages and rendered them older than language itself. And now, in Pyralia’s hands, the book quickened, alive and shimmering with an unmistakable aura of sentience. She instinctively knew that it did not like to be touched. That much she had learned that on the first night, when Reggie Upton had placed it into her keeping, and she felt it shudder beneath her palm. Only now did it yield to her touch, tamed and broken, like one resigned to its fate.

Pyralia listened as the inn murmured in its sleep. Floorboards shifted, bottles clinked softly in their racks, and the wind prowled the chimney like a lost soul, unsure of its welcome. Pyralia read by lamplight, though it seemed that the words themselves produced a faint phosphorescence, the muted glow of deep-sea creatures that have no apperception of the sun.

Skakka is not a god, the book insisted, but a balance. A fulcrum. That brief instant of perfection between falling and rising.

She mouthed the words as if testing their flavour. “Balance,” she murmured, “not peace. Stillness, not death, but fashioning a return to symmetry.”

Her mind wandered, as it often did, to the island itself; to its tides of madness and mischief, its casual relationship with time. Hopeless was not balanced. It was an open wound in the world. That was why it needed her.

The reduction began on the second night. She stripped the text like bark from a tree. Folklore, ritual, supplication was removed. She excoriated  all that was sentimental and unnecessary, casting the ink into a shallow bowl of saltwater, and turning it the colour of old pewter.

By the fourth night, the eel-skin binding had paled to ivory, and the writing rearranged itself when she looked away. Whole pages went blank, their meaning absorbed by whatever occupied the space behind her eyes.

Sometimes she caught her reflection in the window. Her hair was loose, her face lit by the lamp’s glow. She looked almost translucent, as if she, too, were being refined. Reduced.

“Equilibrium,” she said aloud, to the silence. “To balance the island, something must yield.”

The air thickened. The lamp guttered. For an instant she felt every heartbeat on Hopeless, every sleeping mind, every anxious spirit, every ghostly whisper. She felt them sway as one, like a pendulum hesitating at the top of its arc.

Then it passed.

At dawn, she placed the eel-skin book aside. It was no longer heavy, nor eager to speak. She had wrung its meaning dry, distilled it into a single phrase written on a sliver of vellum:

‘When the world forgets which way is forward, I shall remind it to rest’.

Outside, the fog had gone entirely still. Even the gulls had fallen silent, as though something sacred and unspeakable had paused to take breath.

Pyralia smiled – faintly, almost tenderly – and whispered to no one in particular,

“It is done.”

After that, there was nothing. The kind of nothing that makes you doubt you’ve done anything at all.

But Hopeless had its own way of answering.

In the foggy darkness, the tide receded too far, dragging the seaweed flat and leaving behind fish who blinked in mild confusion at finding themselves still alive on the dry sand. A crab scuttled in a slow circle, as if uncertain which way the world now turned.

In the marshes, the will-o’-the-wisps flickered uneasily, their usual mischief dulled. For one moment, no longer than a sigh, every light on the island, natural or otherwise, pulsed in quiet unison, as though the whole place had drawn a single deep breath and was deciding whether to release it.

In the churchyard, the weathered angel atop the oldest grave tilted her head half an inch, the first movement in two centuries. The fog, too, behaved strangely; it didn’t move so much as listen.

No one saw it. Not Pyralia, not Philomena, not even Winston Oldspot, the Night-Soil Man, who prided himself on noticing everything while others slept. But deep beneath the island, far below the wet bones and tunnels to the Underland, something ancient flexed, like a sleeper turning over, reminded briefly of its dreams.

And high above, the gulls rose screaming into a sky that had gone the colour of a bruise.

There are few sounds as unsettling as silence on the island of Hopeless, yet, on the night of our tale, it felt as if the sea had forgotten how to breathe. Pyralia Skant stood on the strand, her fingers tracing invisible sigils in the air. Each movement was a neat little erasure, like rubbing out old ink on parchment. A palimpsest in reverse, I suppose. Pyralia was, as ever, unmaking.

When the fog thickened for no discernible reason, everything about it screamed that this was not the ordinary kind of fog that shrouded Hopeless on a daily basis. This was more sinister; it had a sentience that Pyralia instinctively knew to be observing her. Seconds later, out of that fog emerged the tall, lean figure of a man who walked with a slow and deliberate grace that suggested he was in no hurry to arrive.

“Pyralia. Pyralia Skant?”

Pyralia slowly turned; her eyes narrowed. 

“You’ve undone enough, Pyralia. It’s time to call a halt,” he said. His voice was quiet but oddly resonant, and reminded her of a bell being struck underwater.

“And you, I imagine, presume to stop me?”

“No. You need to stop yourself.” 

He tilted his head slightly, studying her with something that might have been pity. 

“Don’t you remember me?”

“Skakka” she whispered to herself, tasting the syllables on her tongue as something both alien and familiar. It was an old word, reaching out from the days when the Men of the North shared secrets with the sea.

“This island aches for equilibrium,” he said. “It is my duty to answer.”

His coat brushed the shingle and his eyes caught what little light there was. For an instant Pyralia thought she saw her own reflection there. And then he was gone, leaving nothing but the faint smell of salt and the lingering feeling of judgement.

For some minutes Pyralia stood stock still, as motionless as the rocks surrounding her.

“Ah, Skakka, I remember you now. There will be battles to come, no doubt,” she muttered into the breeze. “And I, for one, have no intention of giving in without a fight.”

 Conventional wisdom tells us that it is only death and taxes that are inevitable. Hopeless, of course, turns this on its head. On the island taxes are non-existent, and death can sometimes be negotiable. What is inevitable, however, is that trusted friends will confide in each other. This is why Pyralia, for whom the concept of friendship was a novelty, told Philomena about Skakka, and Philomena later related the story to Rhys, Reggie and Tenzin. In The Squid and Teapot, news of a stranger arriving on Hopeless was unremarkable; when that stranger’s presence disturbed the usually implacable Pyralia Skant, however, something was decidedly amiss. 

Reggie Upton had rummaged in the attics of The Squid countless times, fascinated by the bric-a-brac and dusty old books that others had found superfluous to their needs. It was during a recent spate of particularly inclement weather, rendering him house-bound, that it occurred to Reggie he could be usefully employed tidying things up and conferring some degree of order to the hundreds of books scattered around. And so he set out, with military precision, to organise the various volumes into separate piles for easy reference – history, fiction, geography, alchemy etc. On the face of it, this was not a complicated, or particularly interesting task, until, a few days following news of Pyralia’s visitor, he found a handwritten tome, bound in a greenish shade of eel skin. It was a book so begrimed with dust that it seemed to be upholstered in the stuff.

Gingerly he peered inside the cover. The title page, once coaxed into view with a careful puff, read:

‘The Shivering Chronicle, Being a Record of Certain Occurrences Unsuited to the Pulpit.

Compiled by Father Ambrose Honeywell.’

Reggie turned over the page. 

‘I, Ambrose Honeywell, have undertaken what no prudent servant of Christ should: to sanctify the fog.

By candle and crucifix I gathered it, drop by ghostly drop, from the air itself, and it condensed upon the brass cross of St. Ursula, which wept steadily all through the night. I named the result Aqua Nebularis Sancta, the Sacred Cloud Water, and blessed it with trembling hands.

My intent was simple: to cast this holy distillation upon the sea, and thereby quiet whatever stirreth beneath.

I approached the tide, and into it I flung the holy water, God forgive me! The fog shuddered. Not parted, not fled, but recoiled like a living thing. The drops struck the waves and hissed. Then a shape arose, vast and thin, its face divided cleanly down the middle. One side was weeping, the other smiling.

“Balance,” it said, though no sound was made. “Balance and unbalance. I am both these things, priest. I am Skakka.”

I remember little after that, save the taste of salt and dust in equal measure, and a sense that something within me now is forever drawn toward the sea, as a needle is to the lodestone.’

Reggie, who had long since lost any sensible sense of caution, carried the book downstairs. As he descended, the lamps in the stairwell flared briefly, casting twin shadows of him, one to each side, as though the house couldn’t quite decide where he belonged.

In the snuggery Pyralia Skant had been deep in thought. This had been rudely interrupted by an angry bluebottle, which Pyralia quietly proceeded to unmake.

Reggie, barely able to conceal his excitement, burst into the room and placed the book on the table before her.   

“I found this upstairs,” he said. “It crossed my mind that you might appreciate a spot of bedtime blasphemy.”

Pyralia brushed the cover clean with a fingertip; the air quivered. “Ah,” she said softly. “Honeywell. He was one of the few who nearly understood.”

Reggie raised an eyebrow. “Understood what?”

“That balance is not necessarily peace,” she murmured, eyes unfocused. “It is tension held politely.”

The room grew still. Even Drury, snoozing by the hearth, ceased rattling his vertebrae.

Pyralia turned a page and stopped. The illustration showed a tall, spectral figure bestriding the surf. One half of him was dark, the other luminous, and a set of scales dangled where a heart ought to be.

“Skakka,” she whispered, her voice reverent and wary at once. “So many years have passed. I had almost forgotten him.”

Reggie looked puzzled.

“You’ve encountered this Skakka chap before?”

Pyralia smiled, almost wistfully.

“Oh yes… aeons ago, when Atlantis disappeared beneath the waves. He interferes when the world lists too far.”

Reggie peered at the page. 

“Well, if this is the blighter, he looks more like an accusation of guilt, if you ask me.”

Pyralia smiled thinly. “That’s precisely what he is.”

Then, as if to punctuate the moment, a bell sounded outside. It was not from the church, but from somewhere deep within the fog. Three notes only, uncertain in their harmony, as if testing which world they belonged to.

Pyralia closed the book. “And he’s back,” she said. 

To be continued…

---

Authors note:  According to the Cleasby & Vigfusson Old Norse to English dictionary, skakka means “to balance” and is used in phrases like skakka með e-m or skakka milli þeirra, which translate to “to interfere between fighters” or “to interfere between two combatants so as to decide the matter.” This suggests a sense of mediating or bringing equilibrium between opposing forces.

It was a morning of suspicious tranquillity.

The sky hung pale and featureless over the island of Hopeless. It was a sky so bland that it looked almost embarrassed to exist. The wind didn’t moan. The sea didn’t belch up relics. The fog was abnormally thin, as most of it had elected to stay politely offshore, like a guest who knew better than to arrive early.

Philomena Bucket stared through the kitchen window of The Squid and Teapot, teacup in hand.

“Something’s not right,” she murmured.

Reggie Upton stroked his moustache and regarded the day with suspicion.

“This is dashed rum,” he muttered.

“It’s actually nettle tea,” replied Philomena in slightly hurt tones.

“No, m’dear,” explained Reggie. “I meant the day… there’s something dashed rum about the way it is not doing anything. It brings to mind a particularly sticky incident in Poona, back in ninety-three…

Unfortunately, before Reggie had the chance to regale Philomena with some possibly risqué reminiscence of the Raj, Granny Bucket appeared. She seemed slightly more transparent than usual.

“Child,” she said gravely, “I sense a disturbance in the island’s… um… lack of disturbance.”

“My thoughts exactly,” agreed Reggie, who had long since become used to Granny’s unannounced manifestations. 

Before anyone could theorise further, Pyralia Skant wandered into the inn, looking unaccountably smug, which, in fairness, was not particularly unusual, though today she wore the look of someone who had just put a recalcitrant universe in order and was rather pleased about it.

“Ah,” she said, stretching as if emerging from a long nap. “You noticed.”

“Noticed what, exactly?” asked Granny, with spectral hands on hips. “That the island appears to have taken leave of its senses?”

“Oh no,” said Pyralia. “Quite the opposite. I’ve simply paused things. A little housecleaning, you might say.”

Philomena blinked. “You’ve done what?”

“I have temporarily unmade the chaos.” Pyralia smiled serenely. “I thought you could use a day off. No hauntings – present company excepted of course.” She gave Granny a withering look.

“There will be no unexpected horrors, no peculiar seafood incidents. Just one spotless, uneventful day.”

Reggie looked alarmed. “But… won’t the island notice?”

“It’s trying not to,” said Pyralia. “I told it to take deep breaths and count to infinity.”

Outside, Septimus Washwell caught a fish with the proper number of eyes. Mrs Beaten posted a ‘Polite Notice’ on her front door that remained obediently affixed. Even Drury, usually incapable of restraint, was playing fetch with an honest-to-goodness stick instead of a misplaced femur.

The islanders, however, were not at ease. Reverend Davies distributed pamphlets entitled ‘Is Calm the New Sin?’ Neville Moore was seen outside his mausoleum-like cottage at Ghastly Green, shaking his head in wonder at the unnaturally placid behaviour of his pet raven, Lenore, and Doc Willoughby briefly considered patenting boredom as a curative tonic.

By late afternoon, Hopeless had grown fretful. The fog arrived on time but declined to whisper. The spoons stayed unmolested in the cutlery drawer. Somewhere, a whistling kettle boiled without shattering the windows. 

Philomena turned to Pyralia. “This feels unnatural.”

“My dear,” said Pyralia, “natural is a matter of habit. You’ve simply become accustomed to calamity.”

“Perhaps,” said Philomena, “but we like a certain amount of calamity. It gives the place character.”

“Character,” said Pyralia with a sigh, “is no more than a euphemism for mess.” She snapped her fingers, and time itself gave a small, weary hiccup. “Very well. Tomorrow, you may have your bedlam back.”

Granny Bucket gave a cynical cackle.

“Of course they can have the usual chaos back tomorrow,” she said. “The truth is that you can’t control it for any more than a day, can you? You’re arm-wrestling with an island, girl, and you’re not going to win.”

For the briefest of moments Pyralia looked sheepish, then, composing herself said,

“Of course I can control it. I’m just not choosing to. These things have to be done a little at a time.”

And so the island of Hopeless passed the remainder of the evening in oppressive serenity. In The Squid and Teapot the fire crackled politely. The ghosts haunting the flushing privy were silent. Nothing screamed, hatched, or cursed anyone by name.

When morning came, of course, Hopeless had returned to normal. The fog returned with a vengeance, spoonwalkers scuttled along on pilfered cutlery and Mirielle D’Illay made rude remarks about Reggie Upton in particular and the English in general. 

Pyralia, standing in the gathering fog, smiled to herself.

“Yes, Granny Bucket was absolutely right,” she said to Drury, confident that he could keep a confidence, and that Philomena’s ghostly ancestor was nowhere within earshot. “I can’t control the island… not yet at any rate. But I’m getting there.”

With that, she looked down at her latest choice of workwear. The stiletto heels and white lab coat had now been discarded in favour of garments more in keeping with the environment.

“But getting there in wellington boots was never part of the plan,” she said, miserably.