We’re always interested when we find something new and a bit different, especially if it comes from small and independent creators rather than the mega-industries – we try to be a signpost site for stuff you might otherwise miss. So today we’ll mention a bit of head-on action – Ngolo Diaspora, an African Martial arts comic book series based on the award-winning Ngolo screenplay…

“Ngolo Diaspora takes place in the near future in a world similar to ours, yet different. In this world assassinations are legal, as long as they are carried about by government sanctioned guild. Guilds are used to settle disputes between the powerful and the ordinary, with each side given a grace period to settle their differences before the assassination contract activates. Of the six sanctioned guilds, the Bloodmen are the most skilled and the most feared because of their deadly fighting style, Ngolo. Just the mention of their involvement can bring parties to the table. But some think the guilds have become too powerful and are bent on destroying them. Their target? The Bloodmen. The Bloodmen are forced to go into hiding, code name ‘Ngolo Diaspora’.”

More details about the campaign for this project near the bottom, but first we expand on the issues behind Ngolo with a piece from author and Black martial artist Balogun Ojetade, who wrote the very enjoyable A Haunting in the SWATS horror/weird novel, and Afrikan Martial Arts: Discovering the Warrior Within, as well working regularly on a wide range of other stories and comic books.

Balogun also joined us a while back with an article about writing black female characters: http://greydogtales.com/blog/women-speculative-fiction-men-write/

PLEASE NOTE: We often agree with our guest writers, but what they say is their own personal opinion. and they choose their own words (you should see the discussions we have when our regular guest, Paul St John Mackintosh, lays into a subject). It’s supposed to be this way, otherwise all you’ll hear is us droning on and on…

OPINION PIECE:

The Importance of Heroic Black Imagery in These Trying Times

by Balogun Ojetade

Black heroes have become more popular since the release of the Black Panther movie. So much so, a phenomenon called “the Black Panther Effect”—the clamoring by the entertainment industry for heroes and villains of African descent—has arisen.

Heroes fill a psychological need today more than ever before in this time of Covid-19, the uprising of the oppressed, the continuous stamping out of Black lives and the cry for agency.

Heroic Black images speak to our collective desire for defiance and our need for the world to acknowledge and respect that we, too, are courageous; we, too, are powerful; we, too, are brilliant, loving, moral and willing to fight for freedom and justice.

The role of fantastic stories of battle, defiance and over-the-top heroics is to make our dopeness visible—to others, yes, but more importantly, to US. Our dopeness, immortalized in comic books, reminds us that the impossible is only impossible to those who cannot do it and we can do much.

The images of Black heroes and superheroes in comic books, movies and TV shows reminds us of the everyday Black heroes—everyday heroes on the front lines of an uprising right NOW; heroes that rise because of our suffering and heroes that rise because they suffer. George Floyd may have never been a hero otherwise, but his murder elevated him to a heroic status. His death has become bigger than him and served as the fuel for an uprising that has been long coming.

Ngolo: Diaspora—a comic book series written by Balogun Ojetade and Milton Davis and illustrated by Peter Chizoba Daniel and PEDAent—brings heroic images to the forefront, explores what heroism is and gives us agency—usually, in film, television and comic books, the African martial arts are made mockery of, defeated easily by Asian martial arts, or non-existent. Not so in Ngolo, where the African martial arts and African warriors are front and center, powerful and yes, deadly, if necessary.

Support the Kickstarter for Ngolo: Diaspora, the first book in the series. There are also card games and role playing games in the Ngolo universe and much more dopeness to come!

So do check the link highlighted above, and have a look. Next time on greydogtales, books about Frankenstein, for some peculiar reason. We really can’t remember half the time…

Our big, in-depth writer interview of the month, and it’s a darned good one. As you should know, I, greydog, am an unashamed enthusiast of the work of American weird fiction writer Matthew M Bartlett, and it came to me the other day, lying back on my bed of bracken and stolen chicken bones, that it was time we interviewed him properly.

So we sent a number of photographs and only slightly redacted documents to him in the States, and suddenly he was very keen to go ahead. It was all jolly enjoyable, so do read on…

Matthew M Bartlett in the Wild

Interviews are curious animals. Often respectful, sometimes a touch fawning, and occasionally much like a series of press releases. Promotion-o-rama. But what prompted this one, as mentioned above, was a simple fascination with Matthew’s work – and yes, there’s a degree of envy in such thoughts. Envy is one of the five staple food groups for a writer, after all, along with economy own-brand noodles. Decent folk smile and say: “Well done you!” Avaricious jobbing writers like me hiss: “That bastard – he did it first. Back to the bloody ideas bin again.”

However, I remain absorbed by his work; a single paragraph of his, which I think I read in early 2016, told me that we would probably click:

I find Dither weeping disconsolately at the microphone. Ronstadt’s limp body hangs by the neck from a thick branch that has plunged through our modest roof, his neck impossibly folded, his tongue a black bug peeking from a pink letter slot, a coffee mug that says “I Don’t Like Mondays” gripped in his curved rigor mortis finger.

Creeping Waves

What’s not to like about that lovely little scene? Basically, Matthew M Bartlett has a unique, skewed talent which makes him stand out even amongst the many talented writers of new weird fiction today.  So now I paint a smile on palsied lips, and try to play nice…

greydog: OK, Matthew – I think it was that talented young colonial Brian O’Connell who first really alerted me to your work, four or five years ago. The key, of course, was mention of Leeds – because I’ve lived in or near there, in the UK, since the mid-seventies, and had no idea until I read your work that there was another one in the States. I even assumed it was yet another Innsmouth or Castle Rock at first. But Leeds, Massachusetts, is a real place. Were you aware that there was an urban Mothership in Yorkshire when you started?

matthew: I was aware of the Leeds in Yorkshire largely because a band I like called The Mekons started there. The Leeds in Massachusetts is actually named after your Leeds. Ours is a small, sleepy village in the city of Northampton, a village that used to be a hub for textile manufacturing, making farm implements, things like that. There’s a pretty little river spanned by quaint old bridges, a short tunnel on a winding road, an old mill building converted into apartments, a bucolic country club, a couple convenience stores, quiet neighborhoods, and a lot of wooded areas.

The Leeds in my fiction, on the other hand, is a twisted version of the whole of Northampton—a city settled in the 1600s and established as a city in the 1800s, a cultural hub and a college town, the home of some factions of early Spiritualist movements. In my stuff, it’s a place propitious for occult practices and various kinds of devilish deviance. So it is basically a Castle Rock or an Innsmouth, in that it’s a fictional city loosely based on a real city. When I say loosely, I mean that I throw in geographical features and places from all over New England, or anyplace I’ve been, really, if they seem to work for a given story. I’d love to make a map one day.

greydog: It seems more than coincidence that you should mention The Mekons, as it happens that in the same recent issue of Occult Detective Magazine where we publish an excellent story by you and Jonathan Raab, we also publish a parody by David Langford, an old friend who is also… the brother of one of The Mekons. That your own brother, I understand, interviewed Jon Langford at a Boston concert, makes this a conspiracy of massive proportions. Unfortunately, I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, so I can take that thought no further.

Anyway, thinking about the aforementioned Castle Rock from Stephen King, your own Leeds, Lovecraft’s Arkham, S P Miskowski’s Skillute and others, what is the attraction of fictional locations like these? Do you feel that such discrete, frequently revisited psychogeographies are basically comfort zones for the writer? Or do they represent something else, such as authors’ own experiences of, and issues with, small town life?

matthew: Leeds grounds me in a locale with established geographical features and institutions. In that sense it can be a comfort zone, I guess, although the term “comfort zone” seems to suggest that there’s no room for growth and experimentation there, and I don’t believe that—the borders both physical and metaphysical are not exactly constricting. They’re very malleable. For some authors, these fictional locales definitely serve as commentaries on small towns; for me, if there’s any of that, it’s not deliberate, or at least not overtly so. Northampton/Leeds works for me because it’s so old, the new is just a very thin skin placed over the ancient. Also, a relative recently traced my family to the area, in Colonial times, which I didn’t know when I moved here.

greydog: Cool. Now, the substantial block of Gateways to Abomination, Creeping Waves and If It Bleeds (or Iib Leeds as I prefer to call it) is augmented by both subtle and direct references in a number of other stories, as in the collections Of Doomful Portent and The Stay-Awake Men. Is there a whole garment there in the making, a final hideous pullover being knitted to a pre-existing pattern? Or do you add to it on fairly random, when-the-mood-takes-me sort of way?

matthew: The latter. Or both. I don’t know. Which probably means the latter. I do know I have a basic idea of an overarching plot like a giant jigsaw puzzle, and each story is a patch of pieces, and it’s so big that there are more than enough places to fill in more.

greydog: You rarely tell a ‘straight’ story. Characters, events and symbols intertwine, disappear and then are back – the Government Man in If It Bleeds, for example – sometimes as focal points, sometimes as throwaway references. Or maybe they don’t come back at all, and we’re left to wonder where they went. It’s a striking – and very effective – approach which raises the content of your stories to almost psychopathic dreams. Deliberate stylistic choice, or something which flows from how you think about the world?

matthew: I’m not particularly good at analysing myself and my fiction. I can say that I like writers and songwriters who revisit locales and characters, and who use call-backs. As a reader I find it thrilling to say, Oh, that’s the person from that other book, as if it’s my own private discovery. It’s fun to write that way, too. I may be working on a current piece and think of something or someone barely referenced in Gateways, and work them into the new story. I gave myself plenty of elliptical stuff in the early work that I can come back to and mine for more material.

In the flickering lights, Greyson had a terrible hallucination: for a moment it seemed as though Spettrini’s head was sending tendrils of flesh back to the chair. Where the tendrils hit the surface, the leather took on the magician’s pallor, splotches of flesh spreading like spilled water, and then hair, white and wild, began sprouting from the flesh of the chair. Spettrini reddened, as did the chair, then, as the spinning tables slowed and the stroboscopic effect faded, so did the hallucination.

‘Spettrini’, The Stay-Awake Men and Other Unstable Entities

greydog: Your world is full of facades. Ice-cream vans burn and break open to reveal warped children; skulls split and twisted horns erupt, bodies burst to release the new and terrible things within. Skin is something which is worn like an old suit, not integral to whatever lives inside it. Camouflage and deception; transformation and the incubation of horrors. Should we distrust what we see?

matthew: Again, I’m bad at analysing myself, but it sounds like you’re onto something there! I’m a fairly naïve person, so I’m surprised again and again when I take something or someone at face value, and then the ice cream truck shrugs off its suit and becomes a mobile slaughterhouse. Say I start a new job, and I gamely think everyone gets along, likes one another, despite small disagreements…then I find out there are massive battles going on, people who loathe one another almost homicidally. This reveals itself only after many months, and I’m left to wonder if it was obvious all along. Maybe I’m dealing with something like that when I write. But I worry that if I can pick out particular metaphors or overarching themes in my stuff, I’ll start overthinking it.

You’re listening to WXXT. You are not sure how long you have been listening. Your stomach drowns out the sounds of your radio. A wind howls. The batteries die. Infants mewl at your feet. Up next, the swinging sounds of Dino Paul Crocetti. You know him as Dean Martin.

Gateways to Abomination

greydog: I’m with you on the overthinking bit, which makes some of these questions a bit ironic, but we must screw our courage to the sticking post, as Lady Macbeth said when her soufflé collapsed yet again. Beyond visual cues, there’s a huge aural component to your fiction, from background static to explicit WXXT broadcasts; Fat Andy and the Peepers, fragments heard in the background, old records and spoken words which make no obvious sense. There’s Music of the Moldering, of course, and you’ve worked with Cadabra Records. All these suggest that aural stimuli play a large part in your own life, yes?

matthew: Yes. I like listening to music, which isn’t exactly unique, but as a teenager the mix of music—mostly what we now call Classic Rock and then punk and new wave and goth stuff—and the hour-long spoken word/comedy shows our local stations played really opened up pathways in my head, and made me think about what we hear vs. what we see. Which brings us back around to the last question.

I remember there was a deejay on WCCC, our local rock station. He had one of those cool-guy rock voices, a little raspy but well-modulated, professional but gritty. I pictured him as a tall, sandy-haired guy with a sharp nose and arched eyebrows and a motorcycle jacket, face like a younger version of the character actor Jere Burns from Breaking Bad and Justified. One night I went to a show where that deejay introduced the band, and he was just a tiny, sort of hunched guy, balding, with a scraggly beard. On the radio he was The Lich; in real life, he was just Hal Lichtenbaum. It may be somewhat significant that I got heavily into music, and at the height of that interest, MTV came out and I began to see the people who made the music. Or it may not. Who knows?

greydog: I always find the problem with music videos is that I can never quite disengage the song from the images (including what the singer looks like) afterwards. And for years I thought that Frankie Laine really looked like his photo on the cover of Hell Bent for Leather, one of my favourite teenage albums. He didn’t.

And still on the aural stuff, you frequently reference a real organisation, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – but as I read more of your stories I’m no longer sure of their role. At first I saw them as the Radio Police, maybe even the ‘good’ guys, but now… are they the investigators of deviant transmissions, the instigators of them, or both?

matthew: I use a fictionalized version of the FCC, which I plan to flesh out and use as antagonists in the third ‘canon’ WXXT book. Listen to this: Calvin Coolidge was once the mayor of Northampton. He also signed into law The Radio Act of 1927, which spawned the Federal Radio Commission, which was later replaced by the FCC. The connection to Leeds is irresistible. My FCC will be composed of mystics, former occultists, and religious fanatics and cops who decide to wage war on my little radio concern. They’re technically “good guys,” I guess, but not for me. They’re on the side of law and order; they’re corrupt, twisted Christians who want “decency” on the airwaves—like, nothing but wholesome content, while they themselves roil in the muck of corruption and vice. So they’re the bad guys, and my band of demons oppose them. There are no real “good guys.”

greydog: Leeds, Massachusetts is modern in one sense, the ‘skin’ you mentioned above, but your fiction in general does draw on history, from the witch-elders, New England historical disquiet, through to wireless and number station references which seem to belong more to the post-war era than today. How do you feel about weird fiction which is explicitly set in the deeper past – ‘period’ fiction? Can it achieve the impact of contemporary-set work, or it safer because of its chronological distance?

matthew: I like weird fiction set in the past, though I frequently start to wonder whether this or that is historically accurate. It’s certainly a worry when writing any kind of historical fiction. I do think it can achieve the impact of fiction set in contemporary times, because people as a whole don’t change much, and the past is always bubbling up. Look at the brilliant work of Daniel Mills and Scott Tomas for terrific fiction set in New England’s past.

greydog: I’m getting into Mills’s  The Lord Came at Twilight at the moment. Historical accuracy research for this sort of thing is a strange fish, because you know that most readers won’t care, yet there will always be someone who knows when the left-handed sprocket wrench was really invented – and call you out on it. I live in fear of those people.

Staying historical, as a Britlander I often say that my own nonsense draws more on writers such as Saki, William Hope Hodgson, Blackwood and Dunsany than it does on the 1920s to 1940s ‘Weird Tales’ tradition. And I love subverting classic British approaches. But when I started writing weird fiction, there was always an elephant from Providence in the room – and sometimes the beast annoys me. Do you ever get tired of people trying to talk about ‘Lovecraftian’ elements in the contemporary field?

matthew: I don’t think I would have tried writing weird fiction if not for having read Lovecraft, so I do have a bias. However, I’m not overly fond of pastiche, or of explicitly using Lovecraft’s various genius creations, unless I’m working satirically or in parody, which I do from time to time. Eventually I want to self-publish a smallish collection of my Lovecraft parodies, but one of them is in an anthology that hasn’t been published yet, and it’ll be quite some time before I get the rights to it back.

greydog: I look forward to that. So, at the end of it all, when your work is out there – it’s great to get good reviews, which you do (a lot) and yet also fascinating to get bad ones. I’ve had books I was in marked as 5 Star Must-Reads, only to have one Amazon reader say rate it as One Star – ‘Total garbage’. And I rather liked a One Star given to your Gateways (as opposed to the one hundred plus 4 and 5 Star reviews), where the reader missed the entire point, said they could write that sort of thing easily, and then totally proved that they couldn’t, by trying it. Do reviews influence you in general? Do they ever steer what you do next?

matthew: I’m not one of those writers who boasts about never reading reviews; I read every review I can get my hands on. I can’t really say that they influence me. The negative ones rarely have much to teach me; the work either didn’t resonate with them, which is fine, or they just think it was outright bad-which is also fine! It’s certainly not for everyone, not even every horror fiction reader. It’s true that here and there someone misses the point entirely, like one reviewer who complained that I wasn’t honest when I used the phrase “Collected Short Fiction” on the cover of Gateways, not realizing that that was a calculated ruse meant to trick the reader into thinking that he or she wasn’t reading a short novel I have to admit that some bad reviews sting.

Some are hilarious. Maybe I’d find them less funny if I didn’t have so many positive ones to offset them. Sure, occasionally, though, there is insight. One reader said something like “too many worms devalue the currency” – and I get that. Gateways was what I called “distilled” horror. There aren’t sympathetic characters (there are hardly any “characters” at all), and there’s precious little in the way of normalcy to offset the weirdness. It’s a barrage. That wasn’t necessarily calculated. Some people loved it, and others who had different expectations were disappointed.

greydog: I absolutely loved it. And finally, a brutal, incisive question. Why goats?

matthew: They’re very cute, but they have horns and weird eyes and creepy teeth, and when they bleat it sounds eerily like a human yelling. They’re wonderfully devilish. I’m just annoyed I didn’t invent Black Philip before Eggers got there.

greydog: Thank you so much, Matthew for joining us. We imagine we were a pleasure; you certainly were.

IMPORTANT INTERVIEW NOTE

We failed to ask Matthew about which up and coming authors he likes, who stands out in weird fiction at the moment, and who were the great classic writers. This was because we thought it was a bit boring, and we were more interested in him. But he probably has a favourite colour, or something. We don’t know. Oh, and he loves cats.

Have a look at Matthew M Bartlett’s Author Page on Amazon UK or US… and buy a book!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Matthew-M.-Bartlett/e/B00M5HEX5Y

https://www.amazon.com/Matthew-M.-Bartlett/e/B00M5HEX5Y%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Yes, today we conclude our serialisation of  Alan M Clark‘s moving and lavishly illustrated novella Mudlarks and the Silent Highwayman, set by the polluted River Thames of the nineteenth century…

“Monster Soup commonly called Thames Water” Coloured etching by W. Heath, 1828

MUDLARKS AND THE SILENT HIGHWAYMAN

SEGMENT 12

Albert made it to firmer ground, picked up speed, only to stumble on something in his path. Falling, he rolled and lifted himself quickly to his feet.

Albert saw what had tripped him—Papa’s winning smile, half-submerged in the muck. Mud had oozed into the open mouth, slid in a smear across the uneven teeth, but Albert would recognize that grin anywhere.

He reached—he had to help if his father were somehow trapped alive under the mud.

Upon touching his father’s lips, he knew his mother’s feelings for the man, their history together.

She’d become pregnant while unwed. Her family, too poor to feed another hungry child, turned her out in the street. Mum had a meager income working as a cardroomer at a fearnought mill. She could barely afford lodgings of her own. Soon to be a mother needing an income more than ever, she’d fallen under the thumb of the mill’s overlooker, a cruel man named Ganloff.

Papa competed for fares at the Kidney Stairs in Limehouse, very near the fearnought mill. At midday, he’d take a break, purchase food from a street vendor, and have a stroll while eating. On one of those walks, he found Mum in the alley that ran beside the fearnought mill, hiding behind a stack of crates, her hands covering her face.

“Come, share my bread and cheese,” he’d said. “You appear to be eating for two, though you’re very thin.”

He coaxed her out of her hiding place, took care to gain her trust, and asked for her story.

“I’m too ashamed to tell it,” she said, her red-rimmed eyes downcast.

Papa gave her a gentle smile, said, “There’s nothing that unburdens one so much as telling the worst to a willing stranger. Should you trust me, whatever it is, I shan’t think the less of you for it.”

She did not confide in him on that day.

With his smile and good humor, he lifted her heart and she laughed many times during their first meal together. They met in the alley at midday many times over the following month.

One day, she placed her hands on her swollen belly and said, “When the father found out I were knapped, he left me and went to sea. Mr. Ganloff found out, said should I want to keep my position, I’d please him and his three brothers. All are scurfs here at the mill. No one disobeys them. Some of the women they command are pimped on the street. Once the baby comes, that’s where they’ll send me.”

Papa courted Mum briefly. Already friends, true affection drew them even closer. He asked for Mum’s hand. She quit the mill and married him before young Albert was born. Mum had asked Albert Gladwick senior if she could give his name to her boy.

He loved me and raised me as his own.

He saved Mum from the street! No wonder she’d forgive him anything.

Along with the revelations of Mum’s past came the understanding that she had died in the night. Passing on, she’d dropped his father’s smile on the foreshore. Though the flesh felt real, somehow Albert knew the grin to be mere memory.

Distracted by the experience, consumed by his feelings of loss, Albert had forgot briefly about the one approaching in the boat. Sudden realization of the need to flee forced a gulping breath that brought back the panic.

He wiped away his tears, looked out over the water, and saw that the Silent Highwayman had drawn closer, not a hundred yards away.

Albert got up ran again. Deeper mud confounded his steps and sucked away his energy. Still, he plodded on, moving away from the water. Periodically looking back, he saw that the river remained beside him—he could not put distance between himself and the water, nor between himself and the one in the boat.

MUDLARKS AND THE SILENT HIGHWAYMAN

SEGMENT 13

So concerned with what lay behind him, not watching his step, Albert tripped on another object in the mud. His foot had hooked onto something that he now dragged behind him. Turning, he saw he’d pulled what looked like a toy steamship out of the mud. The wet, clay-like soil flowed away from the thing, revealing a motionless burst of fire from a cannon, and equally still black coal smoke above the ship’s funnel. About the size of the bucket in which he’d carried water the day before, the small vessel, with its intricate rigging and perfectly formed, unmoving crew on deck, appeared as vividly complex as any ship he’d ever seen. Its tiny signal flags, though motionless, lifted on an unfelt breeze. Even the smell of it, the coal smoke and a familiar fermentation of aging in the sea, mixed with what he believed to be the odor of spent smokeless powder, confirmed that it was no toy.

Albert reached to touch an explosive shell, suspended just ahead of the still and silent flash at a cannon muzzle.

Instantly, he knew his father’s horror at finding the dead and dying in Alexandria following the British fleet’s three-day-long bombardment of the city. Papa had been among the sailors sent from the fleet to fight alongside the British Expeditionary Force in the battle of Kafr El Dawwar. He’d been wounded and suffered the amputation of his leg, then was left in the heat of a dust and fly ridden field hospital to recover with little to help relieve his pain. Albert knew the sights of mutilation, the sounds of agony, the stench of blood that had become lodged in Papa’s mind from his time in the Anglo-Egyptian War.

Having refused to fire upon young boys conscripted by the Egyptian forces to fight against the British, Papa had been the subject of a court-martial. With consideration for the loss of his limb, his sentence was merely the loss of his pension. Much worse, he’d lost his pride.

Compassion for Albert Gladwick senior welled up in young Albert’s heart. Regretting his harsh judgement of the man, he knew again his love for his father.

The ship was a memory of the one Papa had served aboard during the war. He had dropped the small vessel on the muddy foreshore when he’d passed on.

Yes, both his parents had passed away. But away where—where had Papa and Mum gone?

The girl’s voice, very close, startled Albert, and he swung around to face her. She had followed, come up from behind, and crouched down beside him in the mud.

“You found a memory,” she said, a small delight in her voice, a shade of it in her eyes. “If you want to keep it, you’ll have to carry it with you. Looks like a weighty one. May I touch it?”

Albert nodded uncertainly. She reached for one of the tiny ship’s flags, and closed her eyes. Her features moved subtly with emotion. Moisture appeared among her dry lashes.

“Alice,” she said, as if remembering. “That was my name. Born 1832. I shan’t have thought of that without touching the soldier’s memory.” Her voice had gained more life.

Was her name? Questions arose that Albert found too frightening to ask. No, she’s daft or touched.

“Who are they?” he asked uneasily, gesturing toward the waifs wandering the foreshore in the distance.

“We are orphans and paupers’ children, mostly. Paupers who arrive grown have little hope if they are here for very long. With time, the heaviness of their hearts weighs them down. They sink deep into the mud and are lost until their time of remembrance is done.

Albert looked down at the mud. As he’d done when finding his father’s smile, he pictured the horror of an adult buried beneath him. “How many?” he asked.

“Some arrive each day. Those of us unable to pay to cross over must wait one hundred years.”

With his gasp of astonishment, Alice placed her remaining hand, a reassuring one, upon Albert’s arm. “You’ll not suffer as we do,” she said with a touch of envy. Wiping away her gathering tears, she turned toward the water and gestured. “He’s here for you.”

The cloaked figure in the boat had landed a few yards away.

Albert recoiled, leaning into the small ship’s rigging.

The figure made no move toward him, simply held out a hand in greeting, or perhaps to help Albert board the small boat. Silent, yes, but not a highwayman. Albert saw no menace in the pale face beneath the heavy hood.

“There’s nothing to fear,” Alice said.

She’s trapped here, yet she has it in her heart to comfort me?

“You have someone waiting on the other side,” she said, not quite asking. “He wouldn’t have come if you couldn’t pay the fare.”

The ferryman, as Papa said! Albert laughed at himself, and the fear Thomas Conway had given him of the Silent Highwayman. He is not here to rob health, but to carry people across.

Did he take Papa and Mum? If so, they must have somehow paid the fare.

He saw that the landscape across the river had taken on more color. The sky above reflected something like flowing cloth made of light, so much like the glimpse of the northern lights he and Papa had got from the church tower.

MUDLARKS AND THE SILENT HIGHWAYMAN

SEGMENT 14

Albert got to his feet. “Perhaps I do have someone waiting, but I haven’t any chink.”

“A coin of any sort will do,” Alice said, “even a farthing.”

Albert searched. His hip pockets held nothing but gullyfluff.

Frustrated, he looked past Alice, saw George Hardly about twenty yards away. He’d come up quietly, possibly listening.

“Perhaps the ferryman is here for him,” Albert said. His heart sank at the thought.

Alice turned to look at Hardly. “Oh, yes, I’d forgot,” she said. “He awaits payment. Do you have coin, boy?”

Hardly approached cautiously. “No,” he said. “To cross the river?”

“Yes,” Albert said.

“They put pennies on my grandfather’s eyes, someone said to pay…” the older boy began, fear growing in his eyes. “Are we…? Did I…?”

No, Albert thought, don’t say the words. I cannot face it if I hear the words.

Thankfully, Hardly didn’t finish. He shook as if he might shed his troubling thoughts.

“There must be something,” Alice said. “He would not have come. I were with a girl when she found a memory of a coin. She let me touch it. The coin was the first earned by a man who became rich, a memory of how he’d built his fortune from humble beginnings. I believe he dropped it on the foreshore as he boarded the ferry. The ferryman came for the girl after she found it.”

“Sir,” Hardly said, turning to the one in the boat. “Would you take me to Limehouse? I’ve suffered grievous harm, and must get home.”

The stoney figure remained stock-still, his hand held out.

Albert turned back to Alice.“Mere remembrance brought forth coin?”

“Yes,” she said. “The rich man’s coin were like the soldier’s ship, a memory.”

The mudlark in Albert still sorted between things that should be taken up because they had worth and those to be ignored as worthless. He had been taught that fancies, hopes, and dreams had less value than what might be found in sooth. Yet, considering all that had happened that day, the boundary between actual experience and what occurred within his mind’s eye had become mirky. He wasn’t at all certain he’d awakened from his dream of the night before.

In that dream he’d found gold sovereigns at the wreck of the wherry. He’d placed the coins in the hidden pocket of his breeches.

“Gold has no worth but what the fancy of men give it,” his father had once said.

Against all reason, Albert ran his hand along the waistband of his breeches, trying to make it look like he merely pulled them up in case he was wrong.

He felt cold metal disks through the fabric.

How? I didn’t wear my breeches to bed! The foolishness of the thought nearly brought on a laugh, but he held it back.

Three coins, more than I need to pay the ferryman.

He might give one to Alice. She was deserving. But Hardly?

Albert considered the lesson he’d learned from dealing with Turvey, the one about hardening his heart.

If Hardly sees the gold, will he try to rob me? I could board the boat, leave them both behind. I might need the chink where I’m going.

Albert withdrew the coins, keeping them palmed and hidden. He looked warily at the older boy.

A scared child, George Hardly stood with a forlorn look, holding the hole in his chest with his right hand. He wasn’t frightening anymore.

No, a hard heart will get me nothing but the same from others.

Albert stepped up to him and held out a gold sovereign.

Hardly’s scarred features twisted grotesquely, but not toward the cruelty they had so often displayed. His brows bunched upward, and his chin quaked. A tear slid from his left eye, as he said, “Thank you.”

Albert offered Alice a coin. looking at the gold in his hand, glinting warmly in the gloom, she stood taller. Color returned to her face. Alice’s delighted features became youthful.

“He did not come for you alone!” she said with a giggle.

Boarding the boat, she dropped a dented oil can Albert had not seen in her possession. She seemed unaware that she’d done so. Similarly, Hardly left behind a blood-stained leather strap.

Stepping into the boat, and paying his fare, Albert wondered briefly what he might have dropped. He didn’t turn to look back.

Mere recollection of dream-stuff from the hope of his greatest find—the clinker-built wherry washed up on the foreshore of the Isle of Dogs—the gold had the worth Albert’s fancy gave it, enough to pay the fare for all three.

End

The full Mudlarks book itself, illustrated throughout by Alan, is available now on Amazon, and directly from the publisher through the links below:

mudlark ebook – ifd publishing

mudlark paperback – ifd publishing

Author/Illustrator’s Note

I have been immersed in the history of Victorian London for nearly a decade while writing the Jack the Ripper Victims Series, novels about the lives of those killed by the Whitechapel Murderer. In the midst of research for the stories, I discovered all sorts of occupations of the period that involved scavenging and recycling. While that sounds good in the world of today that suffers such destruction from our various wastes, the recycling in Victorian times took a terrible toll on the health of those who did the work. During the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, jobs were scarce and many achingly poor Londoners became willing to do the worst things in order to earn a crust. Toshers scavenged in the sewers. Bone grubbers collected bones door to door or by going through the rubbish of taverns or households that could afford to serve joints of beef, pork, or mutton. Purefinders collected feces in the streets. Night soil men emptied the human waste from cesspits and privy vaults. This one actually paid well, but because of that, many allowed their vaults and cesspits to overflow before they were willing to pay the price. Mudlarks, mostly children, scavenged the banks of the River Thames, looking for anything that had been lost in the water and might be found at low tide in the exposed area known as the foreshore. Markets existed for nearly all that was collected, yet the returns were paltry considering the time and energy involved and the risks to health.

A time when the majority of transportation employed horses, the streets were littered with dung and awash in over ten thousand gallons of equine urine each day. That and the leakage from overflowing cesspits and privy vaults found its way into the River Thames when the rains came. As a result, the river reeked.

The people of London recognized that much illness came from the river. The common belief was that illness was born on bad smells—miasma as it was called—and that people became ill when breathing the malodorous air. The city was in fact suffering outbreaks of deadly waterborne illness during a time when much of the science of microbes was still under debate.

I write this during the COVID-19 flu pandemic, and while knowing something of the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic that infected approximately 500 million people. In comparison, the waterborne epidemics of Victorian London were small events, except to those who suffered through them.

In the back of this volume, the reader will find a short article about the dangers of illness from the Thames in Victorian times, and The Great Stink, a nearly two-month-long period in the summer of 1858, during which those who could afford to do so, evacuated London to get away from the smell coming off the river.

In such periods of fouled water and air, the poor, needing the income, or fearing unemployment, continued to work, despite the dangers of disease, real or perceived.

This is a fanciful story about a mudlark and the choices he made within that environment.

—Alan M. Clark

Eugene, Oregon

“The contamination of the water of the Thames by the sewage of London, which here falls into the stream on both sides, by the refuse of gas works and chemical factories, had, probably, much to do with the rapid decomposition of the bodies. In consequence of the danger to the health of the community it was found absolutely necessary to inter many of the bodies before they could be claimed by their friends.”

The Wreck of the Princess Alice (Edwin Guest, 1878)

In 1966, Ewan MacColl wrote ‘Sweet Thames Flow Softly’, a haunting and romantic folk song which we first encountered in a recording by Planxty (Planxty, 1973).

“Swift the Thames runs to the sea, flow sweet river flow.”

Yet a century earlier, the Thames was not considered so sweet, as we have mentioned in earlier posts. Try this cartoon, for example:

“Father Thames Introducing His Offspring to the Fair City of London. (A Design for a Fresco in the New Houses of Parliament.)” engraving by John Leech. Punch magazine, July, 1858

Twenty years after the above cartoon was drawn, on 3 September 1878, the Princess Alice pleasure steamer was in a catastrophic collision with the colliery boat Bywell Castle, a collision which resulted in the loss of up to 700 lives.

Edwin Guest’s contemporary account, quoted at the start of this piece, listed the names of those whose death was confirmed, but others were lost, some unnamed, to the sludgy waters. In the period which followed, attempts were made to ship effluent from the area, and to purify at least some of the sewage discharge. But the Thames remained more polluted than sweet for many years…

It is in such a grim spirit, that we return to our serialisation of  Alan M Clark‘s illustrated novella Mudlarks and the Silent Highwayman…

MUDLARKS AND THE SILENT HIGHWAYMAN

SEGMENT 9

Surprised that he had not hurt himself, Albert rose awkwardly. His feet, still in his shoes, sank deep into mud. That didn’t seem right. But then he remembered that Hardly had been in pursuit. Albert tried to look back that way he’d come, and found he couldn’t change the angle of his vision.

His muddied head wouldn’t move! His right cheek and ear rested on his shoulder. Everything appeared sideways.

Albert turned his body—the only way to realign his vision—glancing around quickly.

The pier—gone!

Something happened…I don’t remember…

Had he fallen in the water and been carried downstream?

He kept trying to move his head, looking out for danger.

Nothing there, or, at least, very little. Everything, including the sky, had taken on a similar shade of gray. A near featureless foreshore extended into the dreary distance to either side and behind him.

Why can’t I move my head? Have I broken my neck?

He reached up to feel with his hands.

Yes—he felt bones pushing the muscle and skin of his neck outward. Yet he felt no pain.

That fall should have killed me!

He felt fortunate to have survived, and thought of another incident in his life in which luck had safeguarded him. A draft horse had kicked him in the head while Albert reached for a farthing that had got away from him and rolled off the kerb to lie beneath a wagon. The force of the blow had tossed him at least ten feet onto the flagstone footway, but he had walked away with only a gash on his forehead.

Albert would have to be careful not to make his neck worse before he could mend up. He might need a surgeon’s help.

An odd quiet suggested his hearing had somehow suffered from the fall. Snapping his fingers, told him that wasn’t so. What had happened to the rumbling hubbub of the city surrounding the river, the sounds of countless feet, hooves, and wheels upon the stones of the roads, the innumerable voices of the inhabitants, the ringing grind and clank of industry, and commerce on land and in the river?

The disorienting sideways view became tolerable in short order. He saw clearly the chill, gray river, its slow current lapping at the colorless mud along the edge. The bank had a different shape from what he’d expect to see near the West India Docks Pier, it’s curve more gentle. With the morning sun low in the eastern sky behind the embankment at his back, he should see its light shining upon the buildings across the moving water to the west. Instead, he saw merely dim silhouettes of the landscape; a couple of rocky prominences, a couple of dead trees, and no more. He saw no river traffic.

Yes, taken downstream. Just don’t remember.

Albert turned to his right and began walking upstream.

In the distance, he saw a figure, a scavenger perhaps. Abandoning his natural caution, Albert ran toward the figure, but his vision, bouncing with his head on his shoulder, became too disorienting. Slowing, he got a good look. A boy, it seemed, crouched on the foreshore, poking at the mud with a stick. He wore several layers of mud-caked clothing, mostly rags, and some sort of large, cumbersome hat upon his head. No—not a hat, but a mass of filth-clotted, tangled hair, also caked, as if he, too, had fallen head-first in the mud. The figure seemed a growth on the gray landscape. Displaying no curiosity, let alone wariness—something unusual in a scavenger—the child didn’t look up as Albert approached.

“Tell me, please,” Albert said, “where are we on the river?”

Like an old man, bent and broken with age, the boy rose slowly. For all his filth, he had a gold watch chain fixed to one of his numerous waistcoats, the end disappearing into pocket, where, presumably, a watch rested. So, indeed a scavenger, and a successful one too.

Finally, he lifted his head.

Albert gasped to see the features beneath the rat’s nest of hair. Yes, a child—the rounded shape of the face told that—though wrinkled with untold years of wear on what otherwise had a boyish shape. The lips and nostrils suffered cracks at the edges. The eyes, dull and somehow vacant, held the smallest hint of a great yearning deep inside. Indeed, Albert could see in the silent pleading gaze a curious and inquisitive boy, a poor waif trapped within an ancient, slow-moving body.

Revulsion drove Albert back a few stumbling steps. He felt the tingling of his skin tightening into gooseflesh.

The ancient boy dropped the stick, raised his hands toward Albert. The fingernails were several inches long, curled in upon themselves, some raggedly broken.

Albert turned and ran despite the disorienting effect of his bouncing vision.

MUDLARKS AND THE SILENT HIGHWAYMAN

SEGMENT 10

The grayness seemed to absorb Albert. His mind having nothing visual to grab onto, he lost all sense of direction and feared that he might make a circle, running into the boy again. Albert stopped and turned, saw the boy not too far away. He’d picked up his stick, gone back to poking at the mud, and didn’t appear to be a threat.

A muffled cry of, “My eye!” seemed to come from the mud beneath his stick.

“My apologies,” the boy said in a thin, cracked voice.

Did I awaken or is this still dream?

Albert looked closely at the back of his right hand, saw a smear of soil caught in the tiny hairs, the grit trapped beneath his nails, and a bit of dried grass caught in a sharp split of his thumbnail. He pressed that nail hard into his index finger until he felt pain.

No, not dreaming.

A tap on his left shoulder, and he spun around.

George Hardly!

Albert stumbled back and fell on his arse, scramble backwards on all fours to get away. Hardly followed.

Albert could see only the boys torn breeches and feet, the shoe missing from the left foot. He turned onto his left side to see more of him.

Hardly held his hands out to his sides. His scarred face, wide eyes, and trembling lips had a pleading look.

Even so, Albert covered his head with his arms for protection, drew his knees to his chest.

“I mean no harm,” Hardly said, his voice tremulous.

Albert peeked up a him from between fingers. The older boy appeared on the verge of tears. Hardly reached out a hand. Though reluctant, Albert finally took it and stood with assistance. The two boys looked at one another.

Hardly’s shirt was bloodied and had a hole in it on the left side of his chest. “He had a bigger knife,” he said with a grimace. “I fell down the bank, got lost. I recognize you, but nothing else.” He grimaced again. “What happened to your head?”

“I fell on it.” Albert backed away. “Leave me be.”

“I know… I-I harmed you,” Hardly said. “I don’t expect you’ll forgive, but I need to find my brothers. This wants help.” He gestured toward the hole in his chest, looking fearful. “Your head wants help too.”

Albert continued shuffling backwards. Hardly kept up, walking slowly.

“Stay away,” Albert said, and the other boy slowed, following from a distance.

MUDLARKS AND THE SILENT HIGHWAYMAN

SEGMENT 11

Albert saw the figure of a young girl ahead, another filthy waif in rags, not quite so bent with age as the ancient boy he’d seen earlier. She’d lost most of her right arm. A withered nub, hung out of her gray, rotting shift. Moving toward the girl, Albert watched her poke at something in the mud with a stick held in her remaining hand. “Just a rock,” she said, presumably to herself. She spoke slowly, as if the effort was practiced, not natural. “No life, no memories.”

He stopped to speak to her. Hardly became still about fifty feet away.

“Can you tell me where I am?” Albert asked.

She looked him in the eye. Although appearing sad and withdrawn, her gaze didn’t frighten. She had crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, creases around her mouth, much like those of Albert’s mother. Her skin had the liver spots of someone much older still.

“Sticks,” she said, simply.

He looked at the stick in her hand.

“What did she say?” Hardly asked.

Albert waved the older boy’s words away. “Do you live hereabouts?” he asked the girl.

Her eyes widened briefly at the word, “live.” The crow’s feet disappeared. For a moment, she looked like any little girl. She seemed to search his face for meaning.

Albert became uncomfortable, trapped within her gaze.

Then a look of fright fixed her features. The crow’s feet returned. “The woolen mill, that’s where I…” Her voice trailed off for a moment. “The machine was so thirsty, never got enough of the oil, never satisfied. Had a hunger too…” She left the stick upright in the mud and rubbed the nub of her right arm. “…and a mean bite.”

Finally the girl frowned and her gaze shifted. She shrugged, and took up her stick. “You’ve only just come, you and your friend,” she said, turning away and poking the mud. “You know nothing.”

Hardly had approached. “Do you live here?” he asked the girl.

“No live,” she said, “no die. No coins. One hundred years before I can go without paying the fare. Maybe tomorrow—don’t know how long I’ve been here. Not as long as he has been.” She gestured toward the boy Albert had first approached, now a mere thirty yards away.

The air having cleared slightly, Albert saw several other children wandering the river’s edge in the hazy distance. Their movements slow and unnatural for children, he assumed they all suffered the same condition, whatever that was.

“Which way to Limehouse?” Hardly said. He grabbed the girl by the shoulders. The nub of her right arm broke off in his grip. He threw it to the ground as if it had stung him, and looked at the girl, his mouth gaping in horror. She made no complaint, nor any expression of pain or surprise.

Hardly’s astonishment emerged as a great whooping sound. Then he was in a rapid stumble to get away. He disappeared into the grayness.

Albert, transfixed by the drama, stood dumbly wondering how he might help the girl. “Are you…?” he began.

The girl looked briefly at the nub of her arm on the foreshore before turning away toward the river.

Is she so ill she cannot feel? Has he made them all sick?

Albert hadn’t wanted to believe Thomas’s tale of the Silent Highwayman, but now he easily accepted that the skeletal phantom existed.

He’s done this, and now…

“Luck is with you,” the girl said, pointing out over the water. “He comes for you.”

Albert saw a small boat, much like his wherry. From its stem, a green lantern swung, sending out a sickly light that infected nearby mists. A gaunt cloaked figure stood at the tiller. The water appeared unusually troubled beneath the boat.

A panic in Albert’s chest shifted to his throat, raising his head upright, and he ran, the muddy foreshore sucking on his every step.

to be continued…

You can also see the full story of mudlarks on the Thames unfolding daily here:

https://ifdpublishing.com/blog/f/mudlarks-and-the-silent-highwayman

The Mudlarks book itself, illustrated throughout by Alan, is available now on Amazon, and directly from the publisher through the links below:

mudlark ebook – ifd publishing

mudlark paperback – ifd publishing