By Petros Cowley

Yet another supremely important story for the instruction scientific, moral, and otherwise of the masses of Great Britain.

It’d been a miserable evening and a waste of money. They both plopped out into the street, not particularly drunk, but enough to know that something of an undetermined nature, most likely of very little significance although possibly otherwise, was lost forever, and they were both very angry. With as begrudging a pair of goodbyes as they could each afford, off they went in their respective ways, to do nothing, to resist sleep until it resisted them. The rain began again.

The only event of any possible note that night was that, on his walk home, Paul had a mysterious encounter. He was crossing the field behind the church, packing himself near to its walls to avoid the rain, when he heard a voice just around the corner ahead, at the back end of the church. When he drew level, he saw something like a woman slouching to the ground in the black gloom of a doorway. The torso sulked from its waist, the abdomen dropping before the chest, the face coming last, planting itself against the wall. And the face dragged along the wall until it dropped, and it swung about at the end of the neck a while until, at last, tipping all into disequilibrium, it brought down the rest of the body. All of it had collapsed onto the stone. For a moment, nothing; here and there, wretched bits contracting and deflating, wriggling along the stone; a wheezing sound, fleeting little points of light. A human eye birthed itself to probe its surroundings. A head and stinking body followed it up from that grease-clotted orifice of hair. Spitting at the ground, the woman who’d emerged charged screaming at him, but he ducked out of the way and the body flew past him, scattering out in wild laughter all across the soil. Paul hurried out of the churchyard, looking only once behind himself; he couldn’t see anyone there anymore, but the laughter continued from all around him.

To make matters worse, he found no key in his pocket when he reached his door. Nobody came when he rang the bell, but the entrance was hidden away in an alley behind a shut-down restaurant, so he was free to climb the low wall that took him up to his unlockable window without drawing any suspicion from passers-by. Not only was the lock broken, but the window couldn’t even fully close: his hand slid into the crack and pulled the thing open with ease. Inside his incommodious hovel of a bedroom he deposited himself into the bed. Only after some minutes did he kick off his shoes and accept the duvet’s protection from the cold winds entering through the window. The wind had been making its way into his trouser legs, which was an odd and unpleasant sensation.

On the floor by his bed was a bag of sweets he’d placed earlier, knowing he’d return hungry; he retrieved them from the darkness (the lights both large and small were broken) by memory. Also beside his bed was, curiously, a sink, so he hadn’t an excuse not to brush his teeth once he’d seen to finishing the sweets.

Of course, Paul overslept. He’d managed to turn off all ten alarms and return to sleep without waking up enough to even remember doing so. He awoke with a mild headache just before nine, only roused from his sleep by the window clattering against its frame in the wind, and the clapping of a paper bag which that wind had pressed against the far wall. This afforded him around an hour to leave the flat.

Having forgotten to the night before, he brushed his teeth. Then he changed his underwear. Somehow he’d undressed himself in his sleep, so he’d just take the same clothes from where they lay by the bed, both too uninspired and too stressed by how little time he had to get ready to bother selecting others. The reader may wonder why he needed an hour to do this, and so did he; Paul couldn’t ever manage to leave on time, let alone early, for anything; the earlier he’d begin to get ready to leave, the faster time would pass. No matter what precautions he took, he’d always leave at least five minutes late. Once he had his underwear on, he checked the time and it was already five-past. Ten minutes had fled as he’d brushed his teeth and changed his pants.

But it was here that the nuisances proper began. For whatever reason, however he tried, by whichever method, he couldn’t quite manage to get into his trousers. Naturally, this at first confused him rather than stress him any further. He struggled a while to retrieve his calves from these trousers that’d fit him just fine only hours previously. Holding them out in front of himself, he convinced himself they hadn’t shrunk at all. Perhaps his legs had grown, he wondered, but extending then each of his legs before himself for inspection, he similarly couldn’t convince himself that either of these legs were any larger than they were yesterday. One more time, he examined the trousers before failing to enter them again. This was no time for such nonsense, however – already quarter past – so he bracketed this complication for later consideration and grabbed the next pair he found.

These were a pair of jeans strewn over the back of his desk-chair, whose denim still bore the wrinkles from his weight the previous afternoon. To his what really was now alarm, he discovered that he couldn’t get into these trousers, either. Throwing them aside, he fashioned himself into various strange poses to examine again his calves, now before the mirror, but no matter how he looked at them, they seemed their ordinary size. He took a deep breath, and proceeded to attempt entries into his remaining two pairs of trousers, and then tried them all four once again, but these efforts proved an undivided failure. What was he going to do? He had only thirty-five minutes to leave. He paced about his room in bare-legged fury. “How does this always happen to me”, he said to himself at one point, despite no such thing ever having happened to him. Half a face on a newspaper cover peeked up at him from beneath one of the discarded trousers on the floor; enough of his anger was discharged against this newspaper, shredding it into a dust, that a small pocket of lucidity was cleared within the chaos of his mind, and within it, certain suspicions began to flourish. Yes, he knew very well what the cause of all of this nonsense was; Thomas had returned. Out of the room Paul marched.

In the adjacent room, Paul’s flatmate, Thomas, was fast asleep after returning the previous night from a several days visit to his girlfriend in a nearby city. And into that very same adjacent room barged an indecent amount of Paul, rudely awakening the inhabitants.

‘What have you done with my tr-’ but Paul fell quiet, staring dumbly at something behind Thomas.

‘What sort of occasion do you call this?’ Thomas asked, giggling at Paul stood there in his pants. Paul was now using the trousers he’d brought as evidence to cover up the gist of himself. ‘I don’t think that’s the most practical way of using those things, Paul,’ added Thomas.

‘Sorry, Freya,’ Paul mumbled, ignoring Thomas. Paul hadn’t expected Freya to be here. ‘… for interrupting your sleep like this. But I’ve reason to believe that…’ He hesitated a moment. ‘That Thomas has done something awful to my trousers!’

Thomas burst out laughing and Freya smacked him over the head as she could while keeping the duvet clutched tight at her collar.

‘What have you done to Paul’s trousers?’ Freya snapped at Thomas.

‘Nothing!’ Thomas turned back to Paul, grinning again. ‘I haven’t done anything awful to your trousers, Paul.’

‘Well then,’ Freya continued, turning now to Paul, ‘would you please fuck off and let me get back to sleep. Thomas here hasn’t done anything awful to your…’ She paused a moment, intensifying her look of disgust to its boiling point, and released her frustration once more onto Thomas’ skull with her fist. She turned to Paul again. ‘Would you fuck off, Paul!’

Paul closed the door and trudged over towards his other flatmate’s room, John’s room, not wanting to stick around and listen to the mean and horrible things Freya was saying about him. Freya had some sort of phobia of Paul; according to Thomas, she’d told him that Paul was a “bad influence” on him, and that he, Thomas, should stop giving such a useless person so much of his time. But despite the evil woman’s protests, Thomas and Paul were very happy together in their friendship.

As per usual, John was not in his room. John was in the toilet, as Paul could hear when he passed by the bathroom door.

‘What are you doing in thereagain, John?’

‘I’m watching a performance of King Lear on my laptop,’ returned a sulking, baritone voice from inside the toilet.

Paul thought concernedly a moment about his flatmate’s life choices, but quickly remembered the urgency of his situation.

‘Listen, John, you don’t happen to know if Theo’s done anything very bad to my trousers?’

But a response was not forthcoming, and Paul himself nearly fell distracted listening to the performance of King Lear. ‘Would you turn that bloody thing off for a moment, I’m in serious trouble here.’

‘Fine,’ grumbled the voice inside, and King Lear fell quiet. ‘What did you say you wanted? Trousers?’

‘Yes, all of my trousers. I can’t get into any of my trousers this morning, and you know how important today is for me. I’ve got about half an hour to leave. You don’t happen to know if Theo’s done anything? Did he say anything last night?’

‘What?’

‘So you don’t know anything about my trousers?’

‘I know nothing at all about your trousers, Paul, now would you leave me be?’

But Paul had already left John be. He went back to his room and once again failed to get himself into any of his trousers. Lying back in his bed, he considered whether John might lend him a pair, but he remembered, his mind in its state of distress unable to realise the obvious here, that John was a man of significant dimensions, and that he locked his room when he went to the toilet. He wondered about Thomas. Not wanting to cause any further outrage, he tried sending Thomas a text. This was to no immediate avail, but he’d wait a few minutes for a response, he decided, hoping they hadn’t gone back to sleep already. In any case, in the meantime, Paul looked at his emails and saw a certain parcel had arrived, so he took the opportunity to go downstairs and retrieve it.

Now the box on the wall into which parcels were delivered was just outside the door in the alley downstairs, meaning the parcels were as much theirs as any thieve’s, so it was a matter of necessity that Paul retrieved this parcel sooner rather than later; over the course of the year, several parcels had been stolen from this box; there was a CCTV camera overlooking it, but it was visibly broken (wires and various other components dangling out of it) and the landlord, whoever on earth the landlord was, whom they’d only ever communicated with by email, had gone from promising to fix it to lying that he had. To return to the matter at hand, however, the box where the parcels were delivered was just outside the door, but not so near, at least not near enough to reach without stepping someway outside, far enough that a great surge of wind was able to swoop around the corner and shut Paul out of his flat without a key and without a pair of trousers to cover his legs with. Nobody answered again when he rang the bell.

Outside is no place to loiter in one’s underwear, so as soon as he’d regainined an outer semblance of composure, Paul made his usual journey up over the low wall to enter his bedroom by the window. Now, above this low wall, and after a further, smaller climb, Paul was now stood on a part of the roof of the closed-down restaurant below: a grey region, with a large, metal fan-box at its centre. And this fan-box was a difficult object to manoeuvre oneself around. He began on his way towards his window, which was at the far end, pivoting himself around the fan-box. Only, when he turned his head as he did this, he found himself staring directly into Thomas’ window; both inhabitants were staring back at him from the bed, in bewilderment and revulsion respectively; they must have been woken up again by the noise Paul was making climbing up onto the roof. Paul tried to gesture to Freya why he was standing there now staring through their window in his pants, but apparently Paul’s demonstration was misinterpreted by her, for she made a terrible gesture back at him with her hand and slammed shut the blinds. ‘At least Thomas is awake now’, Paul thought, as he hobbled over to his own window pouting. He climbed back inside.

Some ferocious manner of argument had ensued in the next room from the moment the blinds had been shut, which continued out into the hall, Paul could hear. Paul peeked through his keyhole to have a look when it sounded as though it was reaching the top of the stairs leading down to the front door, and to his surprise he saw John then emerging from the toilet, presenting himself to the two combatants at the head of the stairs. They broke off their argument and both turned to look upon John in awe.

‘Who the fuck is that man!’ yelled Freya, suddenly.

Thomas tried to explain that it was John, but before he could finish, Freya had already left, refusing to listen to anymore of Thomas’ rubbish. The front door was heard to slam, and Thomas turned around to face John. They didn’t exchange any words, and John returned into the bathroom. Paul withdrew from the keyhole when he saw Thomas approaching and pretended to be at once both trying to get on his trousers and opening the parcel he’d just retrieved.

‘Oh, hello, Thomas,’ he said as Thomas barged in in his pyjamas.

‘Oh hello, indeed. What are you doing, you idiot?’

‘Well, I thought you might’ve been behind this mess I’ve found myself in this morning, but on further consideration, what seems to have happened is much to extravagant for you to have pulled it off overnight, and not to have woken me up.’

‘And what mess have you found yourself in?’ Thomas’ pretence of anger was beginning to drop: he kept having to stop himself from grinning. ‘What’s wrong with your trousers?’

‘Well, when I look at them from afar, nothing at all. They look just like the trousers that fit me yesterday. But I try to put them on now, and I can barely get them past my ankles.’

Thomas now looked merely confused.

‘Look,’ Paul went on, and demonstrated his inability to enter two pairs of trousers. Halfway through this, they paused to listen as they heard John leaving the toilet and going into his room. ‘It’s like that with the others, too,’ Paul said when he was done, having just torn the leg off the last pair of trousers as they’d both tried to cram him in, but then he froze up suddenly, and scrambled over to the bed. Thomas asked what was wrong.

‘Balls! Twenty minutes. I’ve got twenty minutes before I need to leave.’

‘Where?’

‘What do you mean, where? You know how important today is for me!’

Thomas thought a moment before he realised. A look of alarm now came over him, too.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Let me have a go with your trousers. Maybe they’ll fit.’

They both hurried back to Thomas’ room. Five minutes later, they were both collapsed on the floor in absolute horror. Thomas, whose legs, as any good pair of eyes would agree, were certainly larger than Paul’s in all relevant measurements, had entered just fine into these larger trousers. But when Paul had attempted to replicate his friend’s success, all five times he failed. Sat there on the floor, every now and then, one of them would raise their head as if about to speak, and the other would look to them in anticipation, but they wouldn’t find the words, and both would look back down at the pile of trousers between them. What about John, you may be wondering. Well, they’d heard John leave the flat as they’d been trying to get Paul into Thomas’ trousers, and Thomas had run over to see if John’s door was left unlocked, but Thomas had returned disappointed.

‘Where do you think John’s gone?’ Paul asked, at last.

‘He probably needs to eat again.’

‘Ah.’

But before Paul could sink back into total despondence, Thomas came up with a good idea.

‘You’ve twenty minutes. That’s long enough.’

‘For what?’

‘I can run to the shops and buy you a massive pair of trousers!’

Thomas felt hopeful once more and hurried to gather what he needed from around the room. Paul, however, could not force himself to feel optimistic, and uttered a meagre ‘I suppose.’

‘Come on Paul, you’re not going to be late on your big day! I won’t let it happen!’ With that, Thomas rushed out, leaving Paul to sulk on the floor.

Five minutes passed, and Paul stood up again, and had a fish through his friend’s wardrobe. There were no more pairs of trousers, but he did find a very long jumper. That was of course no solution, however. But he did wonder for a moment why Thomas might own such an excessively long jumper. Maybe Thomas had a bathrobe, he wondered, but his search revealed no jumper. He checked the time and ten minutes had passed now. Returning to his own room, he sent Thomas a text, asking if he’d return soon. Paul went to the kitchen next, to make himself a coffee when no reply came quickly. And when returned with his coffee, there was still no response. Perhaps he’d send another text, just to be sure, he decided, and composed it on his way back to the kitchen where he’d perhaps find a few slices of bread to eat. However, just at the text was sent, he heard a ping in Thomas’ room. ‘He’d better be here soon, I’ve got five minutes now,’ Paul said aloud.

But those five minutes passed without Thomas returning, and now Paul was pacing all around the flat in a frenzy. Another five minutes passed before the door opened, but it was John who appeared at the top of the stairs. John seemed to take no note of Paul and walked past him into the kitchen. John slammed the block of meat he’d just bought onto the counter and set about bashing various cupboard doors and stamping on the floor as he gathered what he needed. Eventually, Paul persuaded him over the noise he was making to let him try on pairs of his trousers. John hadn’t put anything in the pan yet, so he wasn’t entirely discommoded by the request.

‘Wait here,’ John grumbled, and stomped off to his room to retrieve a pair of trousers.

‘Get a few pairs.’

John looked back at Paul confusedly, then set off again the way he was going.

I’ll summarise since you can probably imagine roughly what happened next. When Paul couldn’t fit into the first pair of trousers, John merely looked unimpressed, and told him to try again, but by the fifth and final pair, for the first time in years Paul was able to see an emotion besides fatigue, hunger, or irritation in John’s expression. It’s worth reminding the reader that John was indeed a very large man; where there might have been a shred of conceivability in Paul not fitting into Thomas’ trousers, it was an outright phenomenon that he couldn’t fit into John’s. Also, Thomas hadn’t returned and Paul was now twelve minutes late.

‘But…’ John had to reign himself in a little here, showing more excitement than was appropriate for his character. ‘But,’ he began again, ‘will they let you be late?’

‘Maybe if I left now, I might make it. Thomas has gone to buy me a massive pair of trousers, but he’s left his phone and he’s been gone for over half an hour. I-’ Paul collapsed onto the old sofa, whose fabric he sank into continuously for around fifteen seconds until his bottom met what felt like concrete. The trousers, meanwhile, remained reticent, not yielding their mystery to the intensity of the frown which John was subjecting them to; he gave up and got back to cooking. ‘You should call them,’ he stated between two noises of explosive volume that he’d somehow and for no very obvious reason produced with a pot and the cutlery drawer.

‘And say what exactly? That I’ve woken up unable to wear trousers?’ Paul pressed his hands against his face in frustration. ‘Look, since Thomas seems to have been raptured, you wouldn’t mind going yourself to find me a massive pair of trousers? I’ll transfer you the money, of course. And I guess I’ll call them now, in any case.’

John begrudgingly accepted, and, having still not put anything into the pan, set off out of the flat. In the meantime, Paul looked for a number to call. He checked for the email he’d been sent with the details, but it wasn’t there in his inbox. Perhaps he’d accidentally swiped on it and sent it into the junk folder, he considered, but when he looked there, it was again nowhere to be found among the various promotional offers and the updates from a Facebook account he hadn’t logged into since the age of twelve. This was very odd. He went back to his main inbox to look for earlier emails, but there were too many other emails for this to be of any rapid success, so he had to search for the email account. But before he did that he checked the spam folder; it must’ve been moved there for some reason. Of course, it wasn’t in the spam folder, either. He went back to his regular inbox and scrolled until he realised he was looking at emails from six months ago, and that it was now thirty-five past ten. It had already begun. And where was John? Where had Thomas gone? The shop was only around the corner. He texted John, and, of course, no response came. What was going on? Why was it happening, whatever it was? What sense was there in any of it? He returned to his email inbox; in a pop-up advert half-submerged beneath the bottom of his screen, a pair of giggling eyes appeared besides the words: ‘Just how I like my-‘, the final word hidden beneath the screen.

Suffice to say, Paul, already far from a state of tranquillity, became so upset that his ears began to twitch, and as perceived shortages of a commodity can sometimes lead to panic buying and thus an even greater shortage of said commodity, upon perceiving how his ears had begun to twitch, the incipient decrease of his happiness became the increase in the activity of his ears, and so forth in both causal directions, until his unhappiness and the movements of his ears were both so severe that he lost all use of his hands and fell breathless to the floor. His hoofish attempts to continue navigating his email inbox, or to send further texts to his missing flatmates were all met with failure. However, he did inadvertently manage to call a woman named Paula whom he’d gone to school with years ago, whom he hadn’t spoken to since they were seventeen but whose number he hadn’t ever had any positive reason to remove from his phone and whose number had remained the same since school.

‘Umm. Paul?’ Paula answered. ‘Did you mean to call me?’

Paul found himself unable either to hang up or to articulate anything whatsoever. Instead of words, there came from his throat a sound so evil and senseless that Paula gasped and at once ended the call.

At that very moment, however, both John and Thomas entered the kitchen with a pair of trousers so large that both men were required for the carrying of, rolled up into a tube like a carpet.

‘Quick! We need to get him some water!’ Thomas panicked upon seeing the sorry state Paul had descended into, and as Thomas and John hurried to do so, the enormous pair of jeans unfurled behind them until they stretched the whole three or so meters from the doorway to the sink, covering Paul’s head and torso where he lay on the floor. The animate pair of the three then pulled back one of the massive trouser legs and set to pouring their water on Paul’s face that he might drink it. Rarely, however, with how he was tossing his head about, did any of it so much as enter his mouth, although drenching all else within his mouth’s proximity, and when, altering their strategy, they began forcing the cups to his lips rather than pouring from above, he would blow and gargle with such force that he was the only on in the room not drinking it. John, with all his tonnage, had to sit on him and seize his head in place whilst Thomas pinched Paul’s nose and poured the liquid continuously onto his face until he finally, brought to the point of asphyxiation, began to drink it. But how the twitching of Paul’s ears tickled John’s hands was far too much for him to continue handling. His hand thrust away and whacked the glass out of Thomas’ hand, sending the thing smashing against the wall.

‘Can’t we just give up? He’s in no state to go anywhere, and I’m getting really hungry,’ John began, standing up. ‘I don’t know what the solution is, but I’ve never seen a man’s ears twitching like that.’

‘Wow. They are twitching quite a lot,’ Thomas, who hadn’t yet noticed this detail, replied as he too stood up. ‘No!’ he then snapped, dispelling himself from his fascination with the strange phenomena occurring either side of Paul’s head. ‘Even if he’s late, he’s got to make it! If he doesn’t… I can’t even think of it! This is the most important day of his life, John! We simply can’t let him miss it! Come on, let’s get him into these trousers.’

And so did the pair of them try. They hauled Paul up onto the sofa so as to facilitate the easy manipulation of his legs, and as he lay up there tossing about his arms, growling with feverish eyes, they began to force him into the enormous trousers. At one point they managed to bring the waist up to one of his knees, but, with John struggling with all his might to hold them in place on his side, when Thomas attempted to bring the other side of the waist up to the same level, a sizeable elastic force sent him rebounding against the wall and the trousers tore directly in two along the crotch-line.

‘Dunce! Now you’ve done it!’ Thomas began to argue with John. ‘I told you not to pull them up so high!’

Their argument went on a while, perhaps for seven minutes, terminating when John went back to preparing his food. The tensions having calmed between them at last (Paul, meanwhile, was veering faster and faster from calm) Thomas was able to then rouse John’s compassion again, pointing to the awful scene before them both on the sofa, and reminding John of the severity of the occasion, convincing him once more to help him carry Paul to the shops to try out every pair of trousers in person.

With only their own bodies at their disposal, it was, firstly, too difficult, for Paul would flail about in their arms and escape them, crawling away on all fours into the corners of the room and out onto the landing, more often than not against any conspicuous heat or light gradients, and, secondly, as they realised after having already expended so much effort, too indecent an act to inflict upon the public; Paul, you are reminded, can only be in his underwear. John felt indifferent and resumed his activities behind the stovetop, but Thomas searched the flat for tools. Behind the tumble dryer, he discovered a large, man-sized bucket, which he rushed back into the kitchen with.

‘Fine,’ John grumbled, just about to open his tub of meat and transfer it into the pan. Paul, at this point, had returned from the darkness beneath the table, and had crawled beneath the window, was rearing up his head to press his chin against the cool of the glass, snorting and trying to shake away the annoyance his ears were producing; his pupils had become so dilated that his eyes were almost entirely black.

To sedate him momentarily, John whacked Paul over the back of the head with a tray. Briefly so incapacitated, transferring him into the bucket was no great difficulty, and once they had him inside, they hurried to use rope and Sellotape to detain him within. To avoid what they could of the public’s suspicion, they also covered him with a blanket. Taking one hand of the bucket each, they set off out of the flat.

‘It’s just a cat,’ they’d say to those who did pass worried looks at the mysterious, and for all they knew, dangerous article Thomas and John were transporting through the streets.

‘That’s a strange noise for a cat to be making,’ one concerned old lady replied.

‘He’s very ill, he swallowed a shoe,’ Thomas told her. To prevent her asking anymore, infuriated with Thomas’ extreme eagerness to stop for a chat at such a time, John reminded the woman that they rather urgently had to get the poor, suffering animal to a vet. Paul managed to shout the word ‘Human!’ at this point from beneath his blanket, so they sought to take off running from the old lady, only they crashed into each other as they turned and dropped the bucket. The blanket wasn’t entirely removed, but came off just enough that the old lady was certainly able to ascertain that it was no cat the two strangers were lugging along in their bucket. The woman gave a look of moral contempt, and hurried off muttering horrible things about the men to herself.

There was, as I wrote above, a clothes shop just around the corner, but as both John and Thomas had earlier discovered, it was closed, so they’d had to go further afield for a pair of trousers. They’d taken so long because no buses had turned up to take them up the hill; this time, a bus did come, but the driver took one look at what they were trying to bring inside his vehicle and turned them away.

‘I don’t know what that horrible thing is, or how it’s making those sounds, but it’s not coming on my bus!’ said the bus driver.

After about forty minutes they arrived at the other clothes shop, half the water in each of their bodies depleted by the exercise of mounting the great incline of the town. The conversation the two shop assistants were having behind the till was rudely interrupted by the monstrous sounds issuing from the bucket the two men had brought into their shop.

‘Excuse me, may I help you?’ one of the frightened young ladies asked. Thomas stopped to respond as John, the strongest of the pair of them, meanwhile dragged the bucket with Paul in across the shop floor and into the changing cubicle.

‘No, I think were alright. We just plan to try to get some trousers onto- to try on some of your- to try on some trousers. Yes.’ He smiled lovingly. One of the girls whispered in the other’s ear, and said other rushed through the curtains behind the till, entering whatever room was back there.

‘Both of you, and… and your bucket? All in that cubicle?’ asked the first girl again, and Thomas was just entering the cubicle to join John, who had already gathered several pairs of trousers and brought them inside the cubicle.

‘Yes, yes. Um… We have body dysmorphia, you see. So we need to be there to reassure and affirm each other as we try on the-’ a fist came out of the cubicle and bashed Thomas over the head, interrupting his speech and sinking him to his arse, then grabbing him by the collar and yanking him behind the curtains.

‘What are you blabbering on about?’ John shouted at him within, as Thomas tried to soothe the effects of John’s fist.

The shop assistant who’d escaped into the backroom poked her head back out once Thomas, John, and their bucket were all stuffed away inside the changing cubicle.

‘What do you think they’re getting up to in there?’

‘I’ve no clue, but that noise tells me it can’t be anything good or hygienic. I think they’ve got some sort of animal in that bucket. Have you called the police?’

‘Yes, let’s hope they come soon.’

Here, both ladies shrieked and took all but their eyes back behind the curtain. A screaming man in only his pants, covered in ropes and Sellotape, came scampering out on all fours, bashing into the clothes racks and knocking all sorts of things to the ground. For an instant, the man stopped, and sent a look so uncanny and black at the two pairs of eyes behind the curtain, and let out such a yelp, that they both ran away through a side door screaming, hiding themselves in an alleyway. But the other two men had come out of the cubicle now and were chasing the beast around the shop. Or, rather, John blocked the door (they couldn’t have Paul set loose on the high street in the state he was in) and Thomas, the more agile of the pair, hurried around after Paul until he’d trapped him in a corner, fending off his evil attacks with a wooden clothes hanger. John returned and dropped the bucket over him, and in a series of dangerous moves, they had him once more restrained and covered with the blanket.

‘I suppose this won’t work,’ Thomas concluded. John nodded. ‘We’d better take him home before he gets us into any more trouble.’

Off they went again with their bucket. To their consternation, they discovered a small crowd had gathered around the shopfront as they’d been in there. One or two allegations were levelled, but the men didn’t stop to listen. They needed to be out of sight, so they made for an alleyway.

‘AAGGH! Keep that thing away from us!’ screamed the shop assistants still recovering there, so the men were forced back onto the high street.

There next misfortune was running into Freya, who’d been out purchasing groceries. At first, she pretended to ignore them, to get points in against Thomas or for some such other reason, but she was forced to pay them her attention, unable to ignore how everyone around her was gasping as they came by.

‘What is that!’ she yelled at Thomas.

‘Quick! John! Leg it!’

The men hurried as fast as their bucket’s weight would allow them to travel, and they made it into another alleyway before the horrible woman had caught up to them. A flurry of violence was pronounced upon Thomas’ body with the aid of a lettuce, for how dare he run away, or some reasoning of that sort, so that he had to release the bucket and defend himself from the vegetal ambush. When it was Paul that came tumbling out of the dropped bucket, however, Freya fell silent and quit her attacks on Thomas to look upon the creature with disgust. Paul, once he’d rid himself of his binds, reared his head towards the sky and let out, what could be described as, a bray. He then ground his teeth, snarling, and then lowered his head again to consume a stone about the size of a thumb that’d been lying there on the concrete.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ she asked, but saw it better to run away before any answer was given.

John thought better than to say anything to his embarrassed co-conspirator, and he and Thomas mutely reapplied themselves to, firstly, preventing Paul from eating any more detritus and vegetation from the ground and returning him to his bucket, and, secondly, carrying him further away from the public eye. They managed to traverse a few back streets largely unnoticed and thereby entered a park. To make it across the park was effectively to have made it home: only a short stretch would then remain. However, about halfway across, they noticed far behind them the bright green of police uniforms. Acting with haste and not consideration, they stuffed Paul inside a bush and ran for home in fits of laughter.

The policemen hardly struggled to locate the bush Paul was concealed within, with how very noisy he was being. They discovered him chewing on the leaves and scratching around in the dirt.

Within half an hour, he’d been transported to a medical facility of some kind. The examinations performed by the nurses and doctors yielded ominous and baffling results, and it was concluded that an MRI scan must be performed.

The difficulty was keeping the man still inside the MRI scanner, which the doctors did using a large prodding stick they’d fashioned out of two mops (they required the distance to stay out of the way of the radiation they were bombarding their patient with). At first, whenever he would jolt around or bash at the walls of his enclosure, the prodding stick would be sent in between his legs to pester his groin, but when this proved ineffective, they tried to send in bits of food by first attaching a third broom to lengthen the stick. This didn’t work either however, but once they’d found two further brooms, they were able to utilise a combination of both methods to distract their patient sufficiently into stillness.

After the scan was completed, he was returned to his bucket and locked away in a pitch black room while the doctors came to their conclusions. Once again, though what they discovered was certainly nothing healthy, they didn’t know quite what to make of it, and so the patient needed to be subjected to further testing. After several further rounds of bombardment by radiation, various invasive surgeries, and heavy doses of exotic medications, Paul was in no ordinary state of sentience. For a while, however, he did, at least within the world of the visions he was having, return to a relatively ordinary state. But the nature of these visions was quite the opposite of ordinary.

For instance: He was lying on the ground with his head beneath a table. His head was someway under the desk, so that the table made up the upper third of his sight, and no more, and at regular intervals during this activity some breeze would animate the leaf of a plastic plant resting above on the table, and it would bow to him over the table’s edge, pause there a moment, survey him, and then it would twist both ways in disapproval, lastly retreating back out of sight. He was just about to get up from this boredom when something caught his attention. What had caught his attention?

The sun was appearing through the window. It made its loud, whirring sound as it entered, and the walls and the ceiling were altogether now scattered with so many small, orange and red and yellow points of light. The sun came to a stop most of the way over the desk’s edge, just enough for him to see most of it, and there and then it began with its rotations. The little, colourful lights circulated around the room in so many distinct bands, each band moving in the opposite direction to those immediately adjacent, all at different, changing speeds, and, then, with a great clunking noise and a little squeal, the sun stopped, and then, the sun began to rotate again, with the same pair of sounds, except backwards, and now there were no bands, the lights all moved in arbitrary directions all around the room, the sun thrusting forth and back now just above the edge of the desk, releasing black clouds of smoke, in, and out of the room. The leaf reappeared, pausing then twisting, retreating back over the desk as the sun went faster and faster, in, and out of the room. The plumes of black smoke issuing from the sun’s eight, equidistant funnels were augmenting rapidly, sparks were racketing between the sun’s components, and with a great cough the device burst aflame.

To preserve himself from death by fire, he rolled out of the way and retrieved himself from under the desk. But when he stood up, the door beside him started to rattle.

‘Hello?’ came a troubled voice.

‘Hello?’ echoed Paul.

‘Who are you? Are you in there? Where are you?’ The doorknob rattled again; one of the burning components fell from the sun onto the carpet and Paul rushed over to put it out. ‘Hello?’ the voice asked again, as Paul squatted down to extend his leg and scoop away what had fallen to the carpet.

‘But what do you mean? What sorts of questions are those to ask me?’

‘How do I open this bloody door!’ The voice had shouted the word door and began pounding against its referent in frustration.

‘With the handle,’ Paul said, blinking quite innocently, although, unconscious of his fear, backing away towards the wall.

‘There is no handle!’

‘There is in here.’

‘What good is it in there? Open this door!’

The banging resumed. Occasionally the voice would shout other things, mostly in the same vein as the foregoing.

‘And how do I stop the fire?’ asked Paul at last, putting out another fallen component. ‘I want to stop the fire.’

‘By opening the door!’

But when Paul opened the door, he found himself before something so unsettling and deformed that all animation failed him. Only when it was right up in front of him, reaching out to him, just as it was about to touch him, did he recoil, and slam shut the door on that egregious figure.

‘What are you doing, idiot!’ it shouted, banging again at the door. ‘What are you trying to do to me! Let me put out the fire!’

‘But I don’t want the fire!’

Paul paced around in search of an escape, but there was only the window, and that, of course, was inaccessible, with the great, burning device just in front of it. The plastic plant had caught fire now. He swiped it from the desk to extinguish it, but just then the other door opened. He darted his head back to the first door. Where had the second door been? The banging and shouting hadn’t stopped. He turned to the second door. Entering the room from this other door was the very figure as had been behind the first.

Paul whimpered and retired to a corner, curling up into a ball with fright, and as the figure approached, the first door now came bursting from its latch, the first figure, identical to the second, entered through a cloud of sawdust. They both stood over him now, and then more began to enter through the two doorways.

About two dozen of these figures were crowded into the room now. The figures all had bright red skin, with pointy heads, and they were dressed in long brown fabrics. In the centres of their faces were crude approximations of noses: if a nose could be the same in every direction, and still have nostrils (at its edges, and not in the middle like a snout) then, and only then, would these be noses; like starfish, the ends of whose tentacles entered seamlessly into the red skin of the figures’ faces, the tentacle-pits forming their five nostrils.

All at once and in unison, their noses began pulsating and from them, with each pulsation, came noises like boat horns. Their noses stopped pulsating, though the honking continued, now their eyes flashing white to the rhythm. Then even their eyes stopped flashing, and they all thirty six of them disappeared along with sun, but the noise remained and even grew louder until it destabilised the structure of reality. The honking blurred into a continuous hum, underwritten by something like a heartbeat, though discontinuous, palpitating, and multiple; two white orbs, level with each other, would fade in and out of being within the dark, moist vacuole that all had been reduced to. The prodding stick burst in and threatened the lights, chasing them around. A fist entered, too, warring both with the orbs and the prodding stick. And so on, with and without Paul, according to no reasoning or sound logical structure.

So much for his visions. After prolonged examination, the doctors, who faced serious financial restrictions, had to give up before they had been able to extract from the patient any great contributions to the medical sciences. Thoroughly disappointed, they took what remained of the patient outside in its bucket and poured him out beside a river.