The Thing in the Road.

Seeking a solution to the aforementioned supernatural/paranormal tomfoolery/high-jinx that is afoot in my town and spreading throughout the country at large, I have found myself consulting the work of Lady Gregory. In her attempt to assemble an archive of Irish folk beliefs, Lady Gregory spent a large part of the early 20th century travelling the hills of Sligo collecting tales of Fortean phenomena said to have been experienced by the various bog men she found there. It was amongst the folk wisdoms of these first hand accounts that I hoped to find some remedy to our current economic/occult predicament.

Gregory records an odd event that took place late one February night on a muddy road that ran raggedly from the foot of Ben Bulben. The tale of The Thing in the Road became one of the most celebrated paranormal incidents of its time and is even said to have once been referred to by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself, during a drunken tirade launched at his wife.

Anyway, without further ado, I will reproduce the accounts, as recorded by Lady Gregory, of the people who were actually there on the night. If you catch sight of anything that may be of assistance amongst the insanity of the garbled rustic parlance below please let me know.

The Thing in the Road: testimonies by boggers of a fiend that they happened upon whilst drunkenly travelling a pitch dark path at four o'clock in the morning (possibly after taking mushies).

Husband: 'There was something in the road that night. You could tell it was there because it wasn't somewhere else. It had a shape but it wasn't like a shape and it rolled forward like a duck doesn't or a goose either for that matter. It was as big as it was small and twice that size again. It wasn't comely, you wouldn't go toward it.'

Wife of Husband: 'I saw it also. At first I thought it was a cow but it wasn't. It was nothing like a cow and there was no reason to think it was a cow at all. It wasn't a cow or anything like that. It wasn't a horse either. I thought it was a cow and it could've been I suppose but for the fact that it wasn't.'

Brother of Wife of Husband: 'It was fierce. It looked fierce and it smelled it also. There was a stench of fierceness in the road and that is all I will say on the matter.'

Wife of Brother of Wife of Husband: 'My heart was above me at the sight of it. My heart was above me and to either side of me and behind and below me and there before me at the sight of it on the road.'

Father of Wife of Brother of Wife of Husband: 'I'll neither confirm nor deny that I saw it but see it I did and it wasn't there at all.'

Brother of Father of Wife of Brother of Wife of Husband: 'I thought it was something the faery ride upon. It had no hooves. It let a tremendous belch. It called me a gee-bag.'

Random Bogger: It was faery but not good faery, not comely, you would be reluctant to make its acquaintance. There was badness to it. You should never cross a faery's path. Never close a gate upon a faery or speak badly of one's footwear. It called us gee-bags. I didn't like it at all. It might have been a protestant. You know, the grass is so thick there you could grease your boots with it.'

The End.

I'm not sure if reading endless streams of this Lady Gregory stuff is helping. Beyond my window I can hear the pitiful wails of a nation being poisoned, paralysed and slowly eaten alive by the hideous scuttling mega-spider that is Nyx. There must be something that can be done, something, . . .going forward.

'Giant Spider Collapsed Housing Market' Claims Councillor

Telekinetic spider Goddess Nyx's continuing rampage has spread into the Irish Midlands causing councillor Gutty (Gut-Bag) O'Gorman (Fianna Fine-a Gael Fail) to claim that the paranormal assault is now the single largest contributor to the collapse of property prices in the area. O'Gorman, a long time advocate of the Jackson Pollock school of land rezoning, said on local radio that 'some minor misjudgements by certain parties in the past may have played a part in the decline of property values but really it's the spider that's to blame. Who'd want to be living in a place overrun by supernatural entities and malignant arachnid demons looming down on you from the heavens? Let's get real on this issue'.

Naturally, Nyx's effect on the locality is also of great concern to people living there. Taking their first step on the property ladder, James and Sorcha Healy moved out to the commuter belt. Now they find themselves deep in negative equity and unable to leave the house for fear of an Old Hag that lays in wait in their front garden. 'Property around here is worth next to nothing what with the goblins coming down everyone's chimneys and the human skeletons hanging from creepy grey webbing in the sky' says James. 'It's so true,' agrees Sorcha, 'the amount of money we've invested in this place, . . .I mean, we may as well have burned all our cash and gone to live on the North Pole in a house made of shit'. Neighbour, Shane Curley, concurs, 'as a private sector employee I find myself thinking of the sacrifices I have made already, I doubt Missus Colossal Spider Goddess out there even cares. Why doesn't she go attack the knackers on some corpo estate or eat one of those over-funded libraries no one goes to?'

Tourism has also been badly effected by the recent transformation of the Midlands into a web strewn supernatural jungle of death. Just listen to this disgruntled visitor from Germany: LINK. I doubt he'll be back.

'The spider will be the ruination of the country, don't we have sprays for this sort of thing?' asked an emotional O'Gorman before his radio interview concluded with the arrival of a Hat Man in the studio and the ensuing sounds of petrified screams, cardiac arrest and soul consumption.

Mummy . . .is . . .HERE!

Tonight, more so than every other night, a great cloak will be thrown over the heavens and darkness will fall. It will be the time of Nyx, the Goddess of night, and she will slide up from the depths of our sleeping minds and crawl like a colossal spider across the land, casting a shadow blacker than a starless night.

Animal headed children will twirl and shriek in the air amongst spinning dead leaves and the psychic transmissions of disturbed rests. 'Mummy is here! Mummy is here!' the children will scream with malign delight and then unmask to reveal themselves to be the offspring of Nyx. The goat faced girl is Lyssa, the Goddess of Madness, the ravager of reason and comprehension. She takes the mind, every individual's only true haven from her expanding realm of unreason. She will slip into your head and stomp and whirl until nothing is where it should be. She will ensure you never again escape the grip of Phobetor, the pig faced boy, her nephew and the God of Nightmares, who bangs remorselessly and senselessly upon the shrill keyboard of rational cognitive processes.

Some of us will perish this night when the rabbit faced Thanatos unmasks, a monstrously deformed child, the God of death, who will drag us forever into a great unknown where science and empirical determination mean less than nothing. Where you are but a frequency in a hissing static discord of paranormal incomprehensibility.

And this night will howl and rage forever and we will all be its victims for the Sun is dead (kicked to death in a shop doorway as it slept a drunken vagrant's sleep). Screaming cats and birds will join every car alarm in the land, singing a panicked song of despair, an eternal cacophonous nocturne, a permanent soundtrack to this Hell on Earth. The agencies of the state will weep. Holy men will plead to a God long since murdered and then, worst of all, Nyx will crack open the Universe like a rotten egg and her summoned army will come oozing out.

Maybe you've seen the foot soldiers of Nyx, creeping from the dark recesses of your room and looming over your frozen bed bound body. The Old Hag, the Shadow People or maybe the Hat Man. Now they are here to stay, released forever from the nocturnal parole of sleep paralysis, defying the left hemisphere of the brain. These Archetypes of Twilight, these members of the Jungian Collective Unconsciousness, will become the new cops, the new teachers, the new doctors, nurses and priests. Un-Civil servants in a new state of infinite chaos.

It is happening in my town and will happen in yours. I warned you all. I wrote letters to both the Irish Times and The Herald, but it did no good. People scoffed, some mocked, Madame editor saw fit not to publish my missive . . . and now it has happened. The Twilight that ruled our pagan past has re-emerged. The shadow of the spider is spreading and soon it will swallow reality whole. We are all to be dead deranged dreamers and Nyx will rule this dominion for eternity.

. . . Eddie Hobbs can't save you now!

You were warned.