THE HOLE IN THE WALL

 

‘I know people in the association who are big fans of the American filmmaker David Lynch. And if I told them that the Year and a Day Tavern resembled something from a David Lynch film, they’d probably rush to it immediately. But they should hold back.

‘They should remember that the elements of a typical David Lynch film—grotesque characters, claustrophobic settings, sinister lighting and sound effects, images of ugliness and decay—are enjoyable when you’re on your sofa or in a cinema seat, watching them on a screen. You’re not on the screen amongst them. You’re not living the nightmare yourself.

‘Whereas when you set foot in the Year and a Day Tavern, you truly enter that Lynchian nightmare.’

He stopped writing and surveyed the room. Its reddish light almost hid the torn and stained wallpaper, almost hid the bald-spots in the carpet, and almost hid the different-sized pieces of wood and hardboard nailed onto the counter-front, over holes customers had kicked in it. The light almost hid them, but didn’t.
Meanwhile, what he’d first thought was a mannequin wearing a sailor’s hat, placed for decoration beside the entrance door, was actually a little old man wearing a sailor’s hat. Music had started playing at a thunderous volume from some wall-speakers and now the little old man was dancing a hornpipe. If the music had sounded nautical and jaunty, this would have made sense, but instead it was a Hi-NRG version of the song The Final Countdown by the rock band Europe. The little old man jigged to this like he was hearing an entirely different tune. Then a drinker at a nearby table noticed him and whooped, ‘Fucking brilliant!’ and threw a handful of coins at him. The little old man immediately stopped jigging, squatted, and scooped the coins off the decrepit carpet.

Foxton’s pint arrived, courtesy of a barmaid who had a blond-dyed bouffant perched above a face that was as wrinkled as bark. He swigged from it and grimaced at its chemical taste. This was to be expected, though. Along the counter stood six beer-pumps, all chrome, all powered by CO₂, all bearing the logos of big breweries.

An enormous man sat on a stool next to him at the counter. Suddenly the man raised a hand to his mouth and started tugging at something. Foxton wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d torn out his tongue, or ripped away his jaw, or peeled off his face. What he did, however, was wrench out his row of top teeth and dunk them in his beer. Leaving the dentures floating in the glass, he oozed off his stool and shambled towards a door marked ‘Toilet’.

‘Don’t worry,’ Foxton called after him. ‘I won’t steal your drink.’ But his words were drowned by a caterwauling voice: ‘The fiiiii-nal countdown!’

Well, he told himself, it can’t get any worse than this.

At that moment, a black dog that looked the size of a calf came prowling around the counter-corner. It stalked up to Foxton and shoved its wet snout into his crotch.

 

Once the dog finished inspecting his genitalia and wandered elsewhere, Foxton felt a need to pee. He waited until the enormous man slouched back to his stool and retrieved his dentures. Then he braved the toilets.

He lurked outside the toilet-door for a moment, steeling himself for the potential horrors that lay beyond it. Come on, he thought. It’s crap here, but at least I’m not in…

He shuddered as he thought of that soulless, corporate chain of identikit pubs that blighted every town and city-centre in Britain and symbolised everything he hated about the modern drinking experience.

…Wetherspoon.

Past the door, as he’d expected, the room was dungeon-like in its dimness, dankness and smelliness. A big, muscular man with a shaven head and red flames tattooed on the back of his neck stood pissing into a urinal. Foxton felt reluctant to go to the urinal beside him and decided to enter the single toilet-cubicle. On the floor below, he thought he glimpsed a small, hairy thing scurry from under the cubicle-door, past his feet.

He lurched back. A rat? Well, no surprise.

Bladder bursting now, he forced himself into the cubicle. It was even darker than the room outside. Indeed, he’d extracted his member from his trousers and pointed it towards the toilet bowl before he realised someone was sitting there. A sprawling blob of a person, not much smaller than the guy at the counter.

Foxton stammered an apology and stuffed his penis back behind his trouser-zip. The person’s round, pale face rose before him. A voice—a woman’s voice—said, ‘Behagged! Behagged I am!’

He lurched back again, out of the cubicle. He hadn’t quite zipped himself up and he felt warm drops of pee squirt over his hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry…’

‘Birling in wickedness,’ said the woman. ‘Birling, birling, widdershins!’ She tried to get to her feet. Her broadness meant the folds of her skirt rustled against the cubicle-walls on either side.

Foxton backed into something big and solid, and realised he’d bumped against the tattooed man, who’d finished using the urinal and was walking past.

The woman continued: ‘Four-score strides east, a hundred strides north, three-score more east, two-hundred more north. Oh, ye’ll come to me, won’t ye? Say ye’ll come!’ And with a violence that made the cubicle shudder, she toppled onto the floor.

Behind Foxton, the tattooed man barked, ‘Christ’s sake, Sheila, you daft drunk cow!’ He stepped inside the cubicle, bent over, grabbed her under the armpits and lifted her. ‘You shouldn’t be here. You know what this place is? The gents! And you’re a lady! Well, theoretically.’ He positioned her so that she was back sitting on the toilet-bowl.

The woman slurred, ‘Oh… Oh shit… I’m sorry… I don’t know what got into me…’ It disturbed Foxton that only now did she speak like a clueless drunkard. A few seconds earlier, even if the words had been gibberish, her voice had sounded clear and purposeful.

‘I’ll tell you what got into you,’ growled the man. ‘About eight pints and enough gin to poison an elephant. Now get yourself gathered up and out of here before old Kath finds out. How many times has she warned you to use the right fucking bog?’

Then he swung round from the cubicle, towards Foxton. ‘You a writer?’ he demanded.

‘What?’

‘I saw you at the counter. Writing.’

‘Oh yes,’ Foxton stumbled. ‘Yes, I was. I’m doing reconnaissance for ABRA, you see.’

‘Abra? As in ‘abracadabra’?’

‘No, ABRA the association. The association for Action on Bars and Real Ale. I’m doing a write-up of this neighbourhood’s pubs for our monthly magazine. I hadn’t been in the Year and a Day before, so I thought I should give it a try.’

The man lumbered towards the door. ‘I trust,’ he said, slightly menacingly, ‘you’ll write nice things about us?’

‘I’ll certainly convey the unique nature of this, er, saloon.’ Before the man went out, Foxton thought to ask, ‘Could you give me some directions, by the way? There’s another bar in this area I’m keen to visit. I tried to get to it using Google Maps but missed it somehow and ended up in this street instead. Anyway, I’ve heard good things about the place. It’s called the Cache.’

The man froze just short of the door. Despite the dim light, his tattooed flames seemed to glow fiercely. ‘The Cache?’

‘I believe it has another name too, a nickname. The Hole in the Wall.’

The man turned back and his voice rumbled, more menacingly than before: ‘Mate, I wouldn’t go to the Cache. They’re all weird in that place. You know what they got on display there? A horse’s head. Like in Goodfellas!’

‘You mean The Godfather?’

The man glowered at him and Foxton thought it prudent to reconsider.

‘Or was it Scarface? Actually, maybe it was Goodfellas…’

‘Widdershins!’ Sheila declared in the toilet cubicle. Disconcertingly, her voice had gone back to how it’d been before.

 

‘Another pint of Cawdor, squire?’

Foxton looked up from his notebook—which now, an hour later, lay open on the countertop in the Cache. The barman was a large middle-aged man wearing black trousers, a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, a red tie and a black apron that covered his paunch. Foxton approved of the apron. It signified that he wasn’t simply a drone who poured liquids out of taps. Rather, it suggested he was a maker, a doer, an artist who wrestled with the equipment around him to coax the best possible flavours out of it.

The counter was L-shaped and Foxton sat on a stool at the shorter part of the L, a yard from where the counter terminated at the wall. Just behind him, the wall itself terminated at a corner. Foxton leant forward so that he could see the row of wooden hand-pumps on the long part of the counter. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ll try something different. The Wendigo, perhaps.’

The barman put a trickle of Wendigo in a spirit-glass and let Foxton sample it. When Foxton nodded, he started filling a pint-glass. Foxton resumed writing. ‘The apron,’ he wrote, ‘signifies that the barman isn’t simply a drone who pours liquids out of taps. Rather it suggests he’s a maker, a doer, an artist…’

Once he’d finished praising the apron, Foxton reviewed what he’d put in the notebook already. ‘The Cache—or as it’s informally known, the Hole in the Wall—has only one problem. It’s difficult to find. I spent half-an-hour roaming various backstreets before I located it.’

That made him pause and glance at an antiquated map of the neighbourhood, framed and hanging above the counter’s end. In fact, he realised, it was only a short distance from the Year and a Day Tavern. He’d have found the Cache much sooner if he’d gone along four streets from the previous pub, zigzagging east and north of it.

Uneasily, he remembered something: ‘Four-score strides east, a hundred strides north, three-score more east, two-hundred more north…’

He dismissed the memory and continued reading: ‘It’s a venerable building. The thickness of its walls suggest it began life as a storehouse or mill. The interior has many admirable features. The fire burning in the fireplace gives you an immediate sense of welcome. The lighting, so hard to get right in a pub, is perfect. Pendant lights create halos of brightness around the bar and pool-table. But in the seating areas, equipped with occasional wall-sconces, the light is softer and more intimate. This bar has plenty of cosy nooks and crannies where you can hide away.

‘There’s a fabulous wooden gantry, in an Art Nouveau style, that contains eight different mirrors. And suspended from the ceiling around the gantry are things I can only describe as “artefacts”. Clearly, they’re very old. I must ask about those.’

Foxton realised he hadn’t asked about the artefacts yet. Above his section of counter, a black leathery thing hung on the end of a cord. He pointed upwards and demanded, ‘What’s that?’

‘That, sir,’ said the barman, ‘is a shoe.’

In its current condition, it looked like a piece of black membrane that’d been crumpled around someone’s foot and given the vague shape of a shoe. ‘How old is it?’

‘They reckon 18th century.’

‘Where was it found?’

‘The wall next the fireplace. Workmen did some maintenance there and discovered it in a secret cavity. Not surprising, really. They say the fireplace and chimney-shaft are the most vulnerable parts of a house. You need to give them special protection.’

‘Protection against…?’

‘Misfortune. Bad luck. Evil spirits. Old Nick.’

Foxton understood. ‘Ah. The shoe is a charm.’

‘I don’t know why, but our forefathers were fond of using shoes as protective charms. Things in vessels too. We’ve got a collection of those.’ He indicated the main length of the counter. Hanging above it at regular intervals were five small flasks and jars made from stone or clay. ‘One time a leaky pipe made a damp patch appear in an outer wall. They gouged out some of the masonry and found another secret space with this lot inside. Again, back in historical times, someone had bricked them in there.’

‘What did they contain?’

‘Strange little bits and pieces. Locks of hair, feathers, shells, dried-up scraps of plant.’

Foxton felt foolish not to have realised it before. ‘So that’s why this pub’s nickname is the Hole in the Wall.’

‘Not only that. Its official name is the Cache. Which, as I’m sure you know, means a group of things hidden away.’

‘Have they found anything else?’

The barman lowered his voice. ‘In one of the storerooms, there’s a box containing a mummified horse’s head. It used to be on show but we received complaints about its gruesomeness. Plus, with the growing palaver about health and safety, we didn’t want to get into trouble with the environmental health people.’

‘And that’d been inside a wall too?’

‘For centuries.’

‘Wow,’ said Foxton. ‘I never knew. The weird things people did to keep out evil.’

Four men were playing doubles at the pool-table at the room’s other end, so that the conversation between Foxton and the barman had been punctuated by the cracks of colliding pool-balls. Now one of the players approached the counter and the barman went to serve him. As he took his leave of Foxton, he mused, ‘Well, we presume they did it to keep evil out. As opposed to keeping it in.’

Foxton scribbled this new information into his notebook and took a satisfied swig from the pint of Wendigo. Then he felt inspired to add a final paragraph: ‘All in all, The Cache is an utterly English pub. It evokes thoughts of Shakespearean inns where Falstaff held court, of the Prancing Pony in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, of gentle hostelries in black-and-white films directed by David Lean in which characters moistened their stiff upper lips with G and Ts. Yes, this charming venue offers a thousand pleasures that you’d never find in a bland, modern-day pub-chain like…’

He experienced a tremor of hatred as he wrote the final word: ‘…Wetherspoon.’

Then he re-read the sentence and saw that instead of writing ‘Wetherspoon’, he’d written the word ‘widdershins’.

Something stirred above him. He saw how the old shoe had started turning, slowly, anti-clockwise, on the end of its cord. At the same time, he felt a draught pass by, which was surely moving the shoe. He twisted around on his stool, looking for the draught’s source, and was surprised to see a narrow alcove in the wall between the counter-end and the corner. It was six feet tall and arched at the top like a lancet window.

Foxton hadn’t known this was behind him. He got off his stool, approached the alcove, and got a second surprise. It wasn’t really an alcove, but an opening into another room. The room was in darkness but Foxton could make out a few tabletops on either side. He returned to his stool, wanting to quiz the barman about it. However, the barman was standing along the counter and chatting to the pool-player while four newly-poured pints rested on a tray beside them.

Foxton frowned. Had the nearer lights above the counter dimmed a little? So that the part of it where the barman stood was bright, while the end where he sat had become shadowy? He shook his head. Maybe the booze in his system was affecting him, making him imagine things.

He excitedly made another entry in his notebook: ‘Guess what? It’s got a snug too!’ Then, in the spirit of journalistic thoroughness, he decided to check out the snug-room. He took his pint, went through the opening and seated himself behind the nearest table.

Can hardly see a thing here, he thought.

He reached up the wall by the entrance, searching for a light-switch. Instead of feeling wallpaper, plaster or panelling, his fingers scuffed across uneven slabs of stone held together by coarse strips of mortar. There was no light-switch. Underneath him, meanwhile, he noticed how hard the seat felt—stone-like as well. And when he set down his pint, the glass’s base clanged on the tabletop. Its surface might have been stone too.

Intending to look for the light-switch on the entrance’s far side, he began to stand up again. But then he saw something in front of his table and dropped back onto the seat. Just visible in the sparse light filtering through the doorway from the main pub-room was a small, misshapen animal that seemingly floated in the air.

Foxton needed a moment to understand what he was seeing. Another cached object was suspended from the snug-ceiling, as the old shoe and the flasks and jars were suspended above the counter, though it was too dark here to see this one’s cord. It was probably a cat or small dog but, over the centuries, its flesh had dried and shrunk, its carcass become twisted and knotted, its pelt changed to a black, leathery rind. Now it looked more like a sketch of a cat or dog, made by an infant with clumsy fingers and a smudgy pen.

He remembered the barman telling him about the mummified horse’s head and how it’d been stowed away. So why was this thing still on view? What about health and safety?

He peered deeper into the snug. Other items hung on invisible cords. He spotted more flasks and jars. Then he made out something that looked hirsute with fur and had two curved protuberances—horns?—on top. It tapered down to a snout, where, under a rotted lip, a few chips of teeth gleamed faintly in the light penetrating from the doorway.

He croaked, ‘That definitely violates health and safety!’

Close by, a voice seemed to reply. ‘Widdershins,’ it whispered.

He twisted his head the other way, so sharply he almost hurt his neck. But nobody else was in the snug. He was briefly disturbed by the fact that the animal hanging before his table had changed in appearance. Then he realised it looked different because he was viewing a new side of it. The draught moved in here too and the shrivelled creature had turned on its cord.

Foxton heard the balls colliding on the pool-table in the main room. They didn’t so much crack together now as make small, muffled bumps, as if a barrier had materialised and sealed the main room off from him. He lifted his glass to his lips and, when beer lapped over its rim and down his sweater, he knew his hand was shaking.

Okay, he decided. I’ve had the snug experience, thank you. Time to return to civilisation.

He tried to get up again but his feet wouldn’t move. He concentrated. He felt his feet, but they wouldn’t shift for him. Something dense and unyielding had formed around them.

In front of him, the small animal twitched, detached itself from its cord and dropped to the floor. By now, not only Foxton’s feet were locked solid. His legs were, too. He managed to bend forward at his waist and look over the table. The thing presumably lay on the floor beyond, but it was too dark to see anything. Instead, he heard a scurrying noise, of something propelling itself along on little paws. He jerked back.

He discerned one more object suspended on a cord. It hung in the depths of the snug, where the draught seemed to originate. It was bigger than the others, almost human-sized, and resembled a giant pupa. A narrower end pointed towards the ceiling, a bulkier end hovered above the floor. It was something wrapped in a sheet, one so old that despite the darkness Foxton could see how its outline was hairy with moss and lumpen with fungi. While it dangled, it turned slowly, anti-clockwise…

Foxton’s arms had stopped moving too. He gazed down but couldn’t see anything. It wasn’t just the room’s darkness. In the last few moments, something black and solid had risen off the floor and encased his lower body.

‘Behagged,’ a voice told him. ‘Behagged ye are.’

Across the room, the pupa shook and the decayed sheet began to rip open. Through the rents in it emerged two spindly arms. Flitters of material hung from them—Foxton wasn’t sure if the material belonged to old, torn sleeves or was skin and flesh from the arms themselves. Then came a small, round head whose profile was barbed with occasional hairs, so stiff and straight they might have been stalks of straw. Finally came a wasted body that was hunched and ape-like when it stood free of the sheet.

This scrabbled towards him.

He tried to scream, but the blackness had crept up past his neck and hardened around his jaw and mouth, so that he couldn’t produce any sound. The pupa-thing reached him and its grimy face leered into what was still exposed of his. Through a mouth that was a lipless gash, it whispered, ‘I put a glamour on a fusty drab in yonder tavern an’ sent my summons by her. An’ ye came.’ The voice was hoarse and throaty but had a gleeful note in it too—a girlish gleefulness. ‘So, I be loose now, at liberty. While ye be… subrogated!’

Foxton felt cold, stone slabs crush against his face. He drew one more breath and then his mouth filled with mortar.

His last thought was: I wish I’d stayed in the Year and a Day.
 


It took the barman a moment to process the sight. The ragged clothes, the verminous-looking hair, the filthy face… ‘You!’ he roared. ‘Get out of here!’

On the far side of the counter, the young woman turned around and peered at different parts of the room. She blinked several times, as if she’d just emerged from someplace dark and found even the pub’s subdued lighting too bright.

The barman continued to rage. ‘Your sort isn’t welcome here!’

Her appearance, plus the way she seemed not to comprehend what he was saying, convinced him she was one of them. One of that foreign under-class who, too lazy and dishonest to look for work in their own countries, had taken advantage of Britain’s lax immigration laws and sneaked in to claim every benefit going, while at the same time pestering decent citizens on the streets, begging, scrounging, pretending they were destitute. Oh yes, the barman thought, he knew all about them and their tricks. He read about them every day in The Sun.

The girl stopped turning and regarded him with eyes that were disconcertingly big and pale. The barman was troubled to feel a pang of lust for her then. If she was given a good scrubbing, he realised, she’d look pretty.

‘Liberty,’ she crooned.

‘You won’t be at liberty if I call the police. Now get the fuck out of this pub!’

She seemed almost to float towards the door in her long, tattered gown. He looked at the gown’s hem and wondered if she was wearing shoes. No, she was bare-footed, though her feet were black because they were caked in dirt. Then he noticed something else, a little dark thing scooting around the legs of the chairs and tables.

‘We don’t allow dogs either. Take your mutt with you!’

The door opened. The girl looked back at him and, weirdly, gave him a smile of goodbye. Then she was gone. The little dog, if it was a dog, scuttled out at her heels.

‘They’re like cockroaches,’ the barman lamented. ‘Katie Hopkins was right. Make her Prime Minister!’

He noticed that the four men had stopped playing at the pool-table and were staring at him. There was a moment of awkward quiet before, in a more subdued manner, they resumed their game and conversation. The barman took a deep breath and, when he looked in one of the gantry’s mirrors, saw how red his face was. ‘Christ,’ he muttered. ‘Got to manage that temper.’

Then he remembered the stranger who’d come in earlier and been so impressed with the pub. Feeling embarrassed, the barman turned towards the counter-end where the man was sitting. ‘Sorry about that, sir,’ he started, ‘but those foreign beggars are trouble…’

He fell silent. The counter-end was deserted. The man must have finished his drink and slipped out. From the look of things, he’d taken the pint-glass with him as a souvenir. Thieving sod!

He’d left his notebook on the countertop, though. The barman picked it up and read something scribbled on the page it was open at.

‘Guess what? It’s got a snug too!’

Puzzled, the barman lowered the notebook again and stared at the corner past the counter-end. The walls there were smooth and solid.

‘No it hasn’t.’