Sample Chapter from Green Wizard 4: Ultra Violence

Forty. Receding pate. Loose teeth. Failing marriage. Delinquent, uncaring son. Ball breaking psycho boss parachuted in to cut the big earners. A few lost marbles…

It wasn’t always like this. He used to be a face. A player. A terrace celebrity. Now he’s just another faceless nobody on the brink of despair in a world he no longer recognises. Yet, one freezing winter’s day, a chance meeting with a face from the old days at Meadow Lane changes everything. Especially when there’s an intriguing proposition on the table. One he may find difficult to refuse.

Ultra Violence is the thrilling, and sometimes moving story, told partially in flashback, of one man’s journey from idealistic young fan to major football hooligan set against the shadow of a grim and soulless middle age in the bustling city of Nottingham.

_________________________________________

In this sample chapter, the gang enjoy its traditional (and never ending) Saturday night out in Fun City.

Chapter 8: The Fountain

Saturday evening.

You start in the Bench and Bar at the top of the Broad Marsh escalators. When you walk in, the PA is playing Step On by the Happy Mondays and you know that you are in for a good night.

You’ve managed to get the last Football Post from that old boy who has been delivering the paper since the fifties. One day you ought to ask his name.

*

Preece, Clarkson and Breaker are looking at the League tables and discussing the prospects for promotion this year. Neil Warnock is doing the business for Notts and the team are third in the table looking good. The Magpies are hot and getting attention for once. 

Usually, Forest are the media darlings in Fun City, but nowadays they have to share the limelight. Not since Sirrel has there been such a buzz. Notts have some decent players for once and Warnock has them playing like a dream. Draper in midfield. Short and Yates, an iron back line. Bartlett up forward scoring for fun. McParland flying down the wing and lobbing them in. It’s worthwhile taking your eyes off the firms in the away pen for once. You couldn’t often say that about following Notts.

The four of you drink pints of Becks.

You could go home to get changed but you’ve been out the night before and can’t be bothered. You prepared in advance so you look alright anyway, certainly on a par with the present company - a ribbed chocolate-coloured Armani roll neck, faded Levi jeans and jet-black loafers. 

You had only been playing a team of muppets today and sure enough, the muppets didn’t bring more than two hundred, all cloth caps, mongs, shirters and women in big coats.

There were four or five casual wannabes giving it the big one in the Norfolk, but you let some of the Notts drinkers from Bilborough slap them as they walked down the Canal while you and the rest went to the Navigation for a last pint before kick off.

Battering them would have been below you and you could have potentially ripped your Armani for no good reason.

*

It’s warm out, for the time of year, and dry. You drain half your pint glass more or less in one gulp and then you feel it, the bulge, as the liquid settles.

You’ve put weight on.

You look a bit like the rest of them now. Not all the way, but you’re getting there. You’ve had to buy new jeans twice in the past two seasons because you’ve expanded from a thirty to a thirty four. On occasion, you can still get into a worn thirty two, but nothing top designer. That lot design for anorexics. 

You looked in the mirror the other day and you noticed the beginnings of a double chin. Your mum has made a comment or two lately, when you go round for your Sunday lunch. Your dad hasn’t noticed you in six months, such are the hours in his new job at the heating plant. Generally, you don't eat like an Ethiopian let loose in McDonalds. The odd curry, the odd pea mix when you can’t be arsed to cook. 

It’s the booze, just the booze. Becks. Red Stripe. Stella. Southern Comfort and lemonade in Zaks or the Arriba.

*

You take another gulp of the cold Becks. You estimate this is your seventh pint of the day. Haxford and Crazy Jack wouldn’t even consider seven pints a dinner time session in the week. They’d go back to work after seven pints and put a shift in. You rub your belly hanging over your crocodile skin Lacoste belt. You think of going to the gym three times a week but with Notts and your travelling job, you’re bolloxed when you get back to your flat and can’t be arsed. 

You don’t look too bad yet. It’s not as if you’re going to need to be fitted with one of those new gastric bands.

Not like some of the lads.

Your quartet sinks the pints and head for the Dog and Bear.

You walk up Bridlesmith Gate, which is empty. Earlier today, it would have been rammed, one of the world’s busiest shopping streets.

You walk past Wardrobe. A squat meathead in a long black coat stands in front of the shop. Bacchus and his gang of brigands must have been at it again. Meathead’s been there all day, a throwback to a time when most human beings grunted at each other in strange code and avoided sabre-toothed tigers by climbing trees. 

You recognise him. He’s Forest, like all the bouncers round town. When they’re not shagging sixteen-year-old girls from Basford, you can usually find them at the City Ground.

It’s packed inside the Dog and Bear. Forest mostly, some Notts. No women – they generally don’t come out until eight. You stand about while Breaker gets the ale in. The Landlord’s invested in a new Fly’s Eye rack of televisions. At the minute, it’s showing a video of Poison by seventies relic Alice Cooper. That’s been playing a lot lately, along with Simply the Best by sixties suspended animate, Tina Turner. 

You realise that the nightmare which is eighties pop music has some way to go before it fades away. The jolly rock beat livens you up and you are shocked to realise that you are tapping a loafer.

Four pints of Stella appear. The pub is solid with lads and it’s just six thirty. You stand in the doorway and look outside. It’s quiet, but by seven, the place will be full and by eight, heaving, difficult to get served.

More Notts arrive in the pub and you drink up, the echoes of Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus in the ether, and you head up Bottle Lane to the QEII, a dank fleapit frequented by prehistoric pissheads and Forest. The pub is decorated with bottle green and whipped cream ceramic tiles, which makes the place look like an oversized toilet. It reeks too, but it is tradition to visit the QE, a link with Nottingham’s past.

Too many pubs have shut lately, particularly the Flying Horse, with its ever present smell of steak and its Minos labyrinth of rooms, each framed with ornately carved oak beams and hardwood furniture which was antique fifty years ago.

Gone now.

And the Exchange, a Shipstones pub, minute, almost quaint, until you went inside, the back wall lined with fragrant and alluring tarts, sitting quietly, sipping Babychams, halves of lager and black, squired by ear-ringed pimps with Stanley blade decorated cheekbones.

Visiting there was heady stuff for a kid. The Council turned a blind eye while developers turned those historic pubs into a yuppie-shopping arcade for the Park set. Galleries, couturiers, jewellery shops.

You can see the way the world is going.

It won’t be long before the QEII - with its toilet-influenced décor and permanent reek of piss, fags and bitter-slops - goes the same way.

And the Arriba above it.

*

There are plenty of you now, Notts coming in all the time. Haxford is in there along with Kent and Wykeham and the Skull, who is a Forest fan, a big mate of the Bully’s and now temporarily adopted by Notts. There is no chance of a table, everyone standing, pints in hand. You’re talking about football, the upcoming fixture down at Pompey; the fighting news from around the country; who’s hot, who’s not, who’s rioted, and who’s shat it.

Always football. Always football violence.

You hear that five thousand Birmingham destroyed the resort at Blackpool ensuring that countless civilian holidaymakers from Coventry to Tipton won’t be welcome on the Golden Sands this summer.

You hear that Millwall battered Leeds at Watford Gap services. You hear that a coachload of Wolves held a copper hostage after a three cornered battle between them, Hull, and Leicester on the M6. Hostage negotiators and armed Police were called. Carlisle’s Border City Firm set light to the away stand at Preston causing an evacuation. Thirty-seven arrests in the ensuing fighting. Burnley and Reading fought a pitched battle in a Westfield Centre…

After a while, it all became wallpaper and yet the wonder never stopped, it was infinitely entertaining talking about fighting, you never tired of it, never became tired of it, you were experts in it, cultural commentators every inch as skilled and knowledgeable as the people on Panorama and World In Action. You knew every firm in the country and you followed every snippet – whether urban myth, radio newsflash, tiny newspaper cutting or rare TV footage – the news disseminated, as if by magic.

You finish your beer and the fifteen or so of you walk out of the pub in a line, walking past fifteen or so Bulwell lads, the fifteen or so Carlton lads, or a fifteen strong stag party from Stamford, all waiting to take your places.

You go up the road to the Lord Nelson, but you don’t stay there long, because it’s a bit shit and Haxford, who generally leads these endless crawls, is talking about crossing it off the list.

It’s always crowded and the DJ still plays New Romantic stuff like the Human League and Tubeway Army and Soft Cell even though it’s a decade too late and you may as well be listening to George Formby and his banjo.

The beer’s rank too, kept in dirty pipes too long. You visit the Nelson out of habit, the round, the round.

*

It’s not even eight thirty and you’re in the Fountain. You walk in, a long line, one after the other, past the bored bouncers who know you, but don’t acknowledge you because they’re too cool for that. Ship of Fools by World Party is on the PA system. The bar isn’t too busy and in any case, the Fountain put plenty on, up to ten bar staff on a Saturday night.

The barmaid you’ve been chatting up for ages is working tonight. She sees you and edges to the Notts side of the bar. Rita her name is and she seems to like you. It’s been nine months since you got any and you’re getting ready to ask her out. Something always stops you though. Not just with Rita. You don’t know what it is.

 You put a big smile on your face, a type of manufactured grin you believe makes you look cool and attractive.

Tonight, Rita is wearing hoop earrings and a cream lambswool v-neck top, which balances a tiny gold crucifix on a golden chain. She’s wearing a denim skirt down to the middle of her thighs and Scholl wooden sandals. There isn’t an ounce of fat on her, with the exception of the beginnings of a lady tyre. That’s quite fetching, you think. But you wouldn’t want the tyre to get any more obvious. That would put you right off. She’s got flawless legs, with no divots and scars, no scabs or veiny trails. Legs are your big thing and she’s got sexy feet too, tonight varnished violet with a gold toe ring bringing out her natural colour.

It’s your round and you order four Becks.

She asks you what town’s like.

You tell her it’s busy. Plenty out.

She asks what you’re up to tonight.

You tell her the usual round. As if she didn’t know.

She asks whether you’ll be back in for last orders.

You nod. Always in the Fountain for last orders.

See you later, she says.

You suppress excitement. It might mean something, it might not. You can’t read women. If you consider something like that an invitation when it isn’t, when you strike, she’ll pull away, asking who you think you are. The whole rejection makes you look a bit of an idiot, especially in front of that lot.

Yet if you don’t strike, she might think you’re not interested: Next thing you know, she has her tongue down the throat of one of the top Forest lads.

The place is buzzing and a queue develops outside, civilians in suits and loads and loads and loads of women looking splendid and up for it. There must be three hundred people in the pub by eight forty five and it soon becomes difficult to get to the bar. Rita is flat to the boards. Haxford is telling you and Tom about a ticket deal he has for Primal Scream at Rock City. You’re only half-interested in Scream. Haxford is the type of entrepreneur who would buy and sell anything. Any ticket you want, for any event, Haxford can usually find you what you need. You know that if Notts ever got to Wembley and it was a sell out, Haxford would have tickets. Not that he would sell them to anyone. He was good like that. He’d always sell to Notts first.

He’s tall, six foot, taller than you. He doesn’t bother dressing up for matches and he rips the piss out of you and Breaker for wasting money. He once referred to you as Gaylord and you weren’t happy, but that’s Haxford, he rips the piss out of everyone. Once, one of the lads in the firm was going out with a much older woman. Her name was Ginny. The gap was fifteen years at least. Coming back from one of the annual Blackpool weekends, Haxford’s coach passes a cemetery. Look. He taps the lad with the older girlfriend on his shoulder. That’s where Ginny lives. The target of his affectionate humour was visibly shaken. There are some vile nicknames going around and most of them emanate from Haxford or Tom who are pitiless in the face of weakness. Still, he’s the type of alpha-male who can get away with this kind of stuff. He even rips the piss out of Older Bully. But not Younger Bully. He’s quite mild around him.

It starts to get uncomfortable now in the Fountain with pockets of civilians barging into you and sticking fags in your arm and standing where you usually stand and Haxford decides its time to go up to the Malthouse. You’d much rather go to the Bodega behind it but that’s the price of running with the pack. There are at least twenty of you now and you walk down Bridlesmith Gate mob handed. You’re pleasantly pissed and talking to Clarkson about something and nothing, and he’s talking back to you about something or nothing and you hear snippets of modern sounds from each pub you pass. Gangs of girls ten strong in red high heels and long coats and fresh make up and thirty quid hairdos and twenty quid clasp bags all the colours of the rainbow, smoking, laughing. It all seems to happen in slow motion as they walk past under the streetlights and some of the lads know some of the girls and waves are exchanged and implicit in the waves is an unwritten message of I’ll-See-You-Later-In-The-Fountain.

The Malthouse DJ plays a Madchester song you don’t recognise – Carpets? Scream? – and Breaker passes you a bottle of Newcastle Brown for some reason. You look round to see if it’s for someone else but there’s no-one, the drink is for you and this is the point of the night where you start hiding pints, giving the lads the impression you can stand your round and hold your drink when in actual fact you’ll be hiding pints behind statues and on the plinth near the toilets, no more than a quarter drunk, because its only just past nine and you’ve got five hours to go at least and you’re not Haxford or Tom who, by a conservative estimate, have already downed fifteen pints since lunch in the Bentinck and you know, like a pair of Terminators, they are never, ever, going to stop.

You leave the Malthouse behind and head to the Bodega and then, after that, you decide to go back to the Fountain for the last hour. By the time you get back, the place is half-full. You’re well experienced in the rhythms of Nottingham’s night life and you know that the ebb and flow of drinkers usually leaves the Fountain free between nine thirty and ten thirty, so you strike, all twenty of you and this time, the bouncers um and ah about letting you in, because you’re all hammered, staggering, loud and boisterous, but Haxford has a word and in you go, your corner free except for five civilians in moustaches, jackets, shirts, ties and trousers who are probably off to Madisons to try and pull. The gang encircles them and the intimidated quintet move further down the pub.

*

Rita comes straight over to serve you and you order two pints and two halves, the latter puff’s duo for you and Preece, victims of far too much ale. She’s definitely smiling now and you know you’re in with a chance. She tells you not to go away and that afterwards, she’ll come out and have a chat and you nod, buy her a drink too, the money for which she puts in the communal tips tray.

You check your wallet. You’ve well overdone it today and you hope Rita doesn’t want a late night curry because you’ll have to borrow money and you hate that. You aren’t paid until Friday and you spent most of last month’s salary on a black leather blouson from Ralph Lauren

You’re in a situation.

You have enough money for a taxi and a couple more rounds in the Arriba Club. There’s no way you’re taking Rita to the Arriba. Not on the first date. She’s far too classy for the Arriba. The lads come over, get their beer, and admonish you for your tardiness. You tell them to fuck off, even though you hardly ever swear. They give it you right back.

*

After last orders, Rita comes over with half a lager and lime and she stands next to you. Before you can even say hello, Tom, Clarkson and Swifty are all over her like fleas on a greyhound. They swamp her and she’s not averse to all the attention, even if it is drunken attention. Clarkson can scarcely breathe, never mind have a conversation.

The air is thick with cigarette smoke and you are tired and irritable. You’ve had far too much to drink and even if Rita wants to take the night further, you’re going to be struggling.

The boys entertain her with pissed flirting communicated in an alien language. Then they spot three women they know by the cigarette machine. Ample breasted blondes in black two-piece suits who look as if they’ve been drinking since last Christmas. They seem to be struggling to remember the sequence involved in lighting cigarettes. One of them, with thighs like a footballer, puts the wrong end of her cigarette in her mouth.

They all laugh.

Like vultures, your friends spot the dead meat lying on the parched Serengeti and soon they’re dive-bombing out of the azure skies.

*

You’re alone with Rita. She’s been to the toilets and dabbed perfume on. You don’t recognise the brand. She asks whether you have a light. You say you don’t smoke and for a moment, everything looks less like the perfect jigsaw you want it to be. Nevertheless, you’ve been out with smokers before and you are sure Rita will have encountered the odd non-smoker in her life so you let the jagged moment pass. She asks a nerdy looking bloke in a blue striped shirt for a light, lights her cigarette, and taps you lightly on the forearm.

What are you doing after this?

I don’t know, you say. I’m a bit pissed. You?

I can see that. Your mates are completely hammered.

Football. It’s all football.

Fancy a club?

Not really, no. I just want to go home to bed.

Oh, I do. I could do with a dance. All your mates are going to the Arriba. They’ve just told me. One of them asked me to go with him.

Who?

I’m not saying.

She winks at you. You’re not bothered. Fun City is a free for all, and like the aftermath of a kicking, or being arrested, it’s every man for himself. You shrug your shoulders and watch Cher strut around an aircraft carrier surrounded by hunky sailors on the TV above you.

Are you going? She asks, probably aware you aren’t going to say anything.

I usually do.

Are you going to take me?

If you want to go. The place is a dump.

I know the Arriba. I’ve been there a couple of times. Full of oldies, she says. She has that welcoming, playful face a woman sometimes gives a man when the two of them have crossed a Rubicon.

They don’t play very good music in there, you say.

I don’t know so much. I enjoyed it when I went. Me and me mates danced all night.

Round your handbag?

Rita moves closer to you. I didn’t take a handbag, but yeh. We might have danced round someone’s handbag.

You look at her and realise once again that she’s a very good-looking woman, everything in proportion, beautiful big brown eyes and a lovely voice. Not much Nottingham in it. She might even be from out of town, you surmise.

Okay, you say, finally. You can come. That’s if you know what you’re letting yourself in for with this lot.

I’ll be alright, as long as you look after me. She puts her hand on your forearm again and the sexual tension between you is palpable, but it might just be the drink talking so you stay impassive.

I’ll try my best, you hear yourself saying.

I have to go and clear the empties and the ashtrays. Don’t go without me. I’ll meet you in twenty minutes.

 *

Later, Rita comes over, a blackcurrant coloured coat, a woollen cherry scarf and a subtle leather clasp bag that clearly cost a few quid.

She slides her arm into yours and the two of you leave for the Arriba Club.

Town is at its most vibrant in the hour between last orders and the long slow walk to the nightclub.

Illuminated by streetlights and the light escaping from pub windows, the place has finally completed its transformation from bustling shopping capital to a party paradise full of people loving the weekend.

There’s no fighting tonight. The vans and Policemen in hi-visibility jackets stand idly near the Council House chatting amiably to uniform groupies and cheerful pissheads. Everywhere there is a smell of melted cheese, fried chicken, piping hot chips, hamburgers and hot chilli kebabs. Invisible cumin clouds rise above the curry houses. Takeaways doing great business from the all day drinkers too hammered to get in Camelots. On a good night, which this is, revellers whoop it up in the streets. Partygoers joke, old lovers cuddle for warmth, and soon-to-be-lovers dance their enigmatic dance of anticipation. It’s comfortably noisy. Music is everywhere, coming from every club doorway. Club queues snake down pedestrianised walkways like animated dominos.

In the black sky above, the moon hovers, watching over proceedings like Old Father Time.

You and Rita walk up Bottle Lane and join the queue for the Arriba.

They’re playing Ride On Time.

You smile and Rita asks you why.

Get your handbag ready, you reply.

Sample Chapter from Green Wizard 3: The Daughter of Satan

A mother and daughter travel from Ohio to a leafy English town to aid a family member persecuted by locals intent on vengeance.  Only one of them is happy about moving and the other…well, when she’s not happy, there’s Hell to pay.

At the airport, they are spotted by a cleric of an ancient Church, who is convinced one of them is the prophesied reincarnation of the seventeenth century witch who founded their organisation.

Stalked, harassed, monitored, the subject of demonic attack and bizarre phenomena, one of them is chosen and taken. The other faces a fight to the death to stop a terrifying Ritual from destroying her loved one, and the sleepy town of Wheatley Fields itself.

______________________________________________________

In this chapter, the besieged and bewildered residents of Wheatley Fields begin to experience the effects of the Satanic Summoning which precedes the coming Ritual.

*NB: There are 44 chapters in this book and eleven separate sections. 
Choosing this one wasn't easy! :-)

Chapter 32

All manner of bizarre things happened in Wheatley Fields, on Saturday and Sunday, the 28^th and 29^th of April. 

*

The birds had stayed overnight – if anything, there were more of them and no amount of banging and chasing on behalf of the harassed residents would shift them. The crows were unafraid of scarecrow humans and watched authoritatively from their perches.

Slithering worms continued to emerge from the ground and for every feasting Crow, there were a thousand bloodworms across gardens and now pavements and roads, until Wheatley Fields was covered in them.

Black spiders spun their webs in shadowy places and two more Arachnophobes died overnight, one, a spinster named Miss Edith Harvey, died instantly after encountering a spider a foot in circumference in her bed as she pulled back the top sheet. It too, spat at her and raised its legs, as if about to pounce.

The roads in and out of the town were impassable and news crews were unable to get in except on foot, leaving Caroline Peachtree and the New York cable crew as the two most prolific sources of news in the area. They made the most of it.

*

The natural world and the physical world distorted, another realm, the hyperreal, the supernatural, began to impinge on the daily life of the embattled residents.

In a house on Killington Road, Minnie Post turned to Maxwell Post, her husband of twenty eight years, while they sat watching the BBC breakfast news and began to talk to him in a foreign language. 

She spoke the language fluently and did not appear to notice that she was speaking the language. It was glottal tongue with a bizarre syntax and staccato semantic rhythm. 

Minnie, a housewife and mother, had left school without a single qualification and had been abroad just twice, both times to see her émigré sister in New Zealand.

Yet, her fluency in this new language was undoubted. 

For most of the morning, she spoke in the language, and it appeared to Maxwell Post that morning, as he reached for the telephone to call the Church, that it wasn’t Minnie talking, but someone using her physical form to talk through her. 

Six other similar incidents occurred in Wheatley Fields that day and those who encountered it had no idea what to do about it.

In the chocolate shop on the high street, William Benson was choosing between treats for his wife Marjorie, when suddenly, he felt an itch in one of his hands. He turned it over, absently, thinking that something had bit him, or that he was experiencing an allergy to the wheatgerm he ate for breakfast that morning.

He showed what he had found to the owner of the chocolate shop.

The palm of his hand had started to bleed. 

A wound the size of a fifty pence piece. 

He took a look at his other hand; that too, had started to weep with blood. 

He raced home without buying any chocolate because he felt similar itching pain in his feet and sure enough, at home, removing his socks, he discovered similar wounds.  He took off his shirt as his side had begun to hurt. A freshly laundered Marks and Spencer classic he’d had since the days when everything they sold was made in Great Britain, had been covered in blood, as if he’d been shot in the side. He reached for a mirror. 

His entire side was cut, wounded and bleeding.

Stigmata. 

The wounds of Jesus Christ on the cross.

He called 999 immediately. The woman at the contact centre told him to be patient, because there wasn’t a single spare ambulance within fifty miles of Wheatley Fields.

A further fourteen residents suffered similar afflictions that weekend, including an eighteen month old boy, who caused his mother a fright it would take an age to recover from.

In Dorothy’s, still reeling from the freakiness of yesterday, the birds, the worms, the unearthly music, the crashed cars everywhere and worse, the subsequent lack of custom, Dorothy – this time in black high heels, simple black leggings and a belted red rollneck Angora sweater - watched incredulous as one of her most expensive evening dresses (with a raffia train) extricated itself from its hanger and floated over the racks from one side of the shop to another.

Dumbstruck, she reached for her mobile to call whoever, as she was wont to do in these circumstances, but realised it was dead, like all the other mobile phones in the town.

Several other items  decided to move of their own accord throughout the morning. Picking up her keys, she put on her coat and locked up.  Like everyone else of similar age, she spent the afternoon in the pub getting obliterated on scrumpy and ended up sleeping with the landlord of the Sea of Tranquility who had fancied her for years. 

In the midst of all this madness, she couldn’t think of a single reason why she shouldn’t sleep with him when he asked.

Similar other incidents of levitation occurred in eighteen other houses, including in Clement St Anger’s house, where a magnifying glass began to read Hard Times by Charles Dickens on its own, the pages turning of their own volition. 

Clement – whose newly grown sulphur tree was now on its way to being a monster adult – watched the magnifying glass with a detachment that told him he was seriously losing his marbles.

*

A volume on its own would not adequately recount what happened on that Saturday, as the impact of The Summoning began to absorb the minds of the people of Wheatley Fields.

Beyond any doubt, the hapless residents knew that they were in the presence of madness. Some realised earlier than others and escaped into Charlestown and the City, though many more tried to escape and arrived back in the shade of the Three Steeples no matter how what method they tried (car, bus, on foot), what route they tried, and no matter how many times they tried. They always found themselves back home.

Many escaped on foot across the fields between the town and the city, an eighteen-mile journey. Some found themselves beaten back by freak storms. Others became lost and spent the entire weekend wandering half-familiar fields and woods, shifting scenery, haywire points on the compass, making their meagre packed lunches last and praying for the first time in many years.

Everyone who stayed had a story to tell.

Fund raiser and community spokesman Derek Priestly found himself buying a week’s groceries in the Community Supermarket and sorting out his MOT in Brinsley’s Garage a mile and a quarter away at exactly the same time.

A girl watched her glass of diet cola turn into ink as she drank from it and the spreading black stain wouldn’t come off her lips and lower nose no matter how hard she tried to remove it and no matter how many chemicals the private hospital used either. The despair she felt at the possibly permanent destruction of her unequalled looks would have heartened many, many young people in the town, unpleasant as that may be.

Christopher Cook, a debt trader and keen jogger, to his horror, met a Doppelganger of himself on a long run past the racecourse. The Doppelganger was travelling in the other direction. Identical to the last freckle; the same tracksuit, the same running shoes. The two stopped and stared at each other. The Doppelganger approached. Said something to him in an insect voice mixed with crushed glass and Chris passed out into a ditch where earthworms quickly wriggled into his running vest for warmth. 

Sprinting back to Chris’s house, the Doppelganger proceeded to seduce Chris’s buxom Venezuelan wife who was both surprised and delighted at his new found technique, seemingly relentless stamina, and diabolical inventiveness.

Johnny Haddock, a wag and a clown, impressed everyone in the Haywain with his newly discovered ability to bend cutlery just by looking at it. People found it funny, particularly after a few pints of Devil’s Cockerel, temporarily forgetting their woes. 

Something of a ladies man, he unzipped the back of a dress with his eyes, causing the owner of the dress to laugh uproariously at first, before it fell off, causing great embarrassment to her and her partner, because she wasn’t wearing any underwear.

Glasses melted, beer boiled and he even snapped a leg off a stool just by looking at it, though that tired him and he had to take a break. 

The Landlord of the Haywain half-heartedly extracted a promise for him to pay for the damages, but like everyone else, money and their usual preoccupations didn’t seem to matter much anymore.

In his back garden, on Eastham Terrace, ten-year-old Bentley Adams shocked his best friend into silence by showing him a neat new trick.

Bentley had discovered, quite by accident and just this morning that he was able, just by closing his eyes and thinking of the place he wanted to go, to translocate.

Gary, his best friend from next door, when told, quite naturally, didn’t believe him and he asked him to prove it.

I’ll bet your Call of Duty game that I can go into your bedroom without walking to it and wave to you from the window.

Gary laughed and shook his hand. Okay. It’s a bet. If you can’t, he said, I want your FIFA Twelve.

Bentley smiled. Okay, he said.

Closed his eyes. 

Gary heard a tap behind him. Seemingly, it came from his house, his bedroom window.

There was Bentley, smiling, Gary’s copy of Call of Duty in his hand.

*

Throughout the town, schoolgirls went into concentrated trance states.

The houses of the transcendental mediums were filled with the atmosphere of the grave, a deathly cold, breath hanging in the air like wraiths.

Some young mediums could move vases just by looking at them. Another could open windows from the other side of the room. 

One started a fire just by looking at a waste bin, before fainting dead away.

Dead souls spoke to stunned parents.

Long dead relatives. Aunts and Uncles, Dads and Grandads, Mums and Grandmas. Little brothers, little sisters, they queued to talk.

Hard bitten, materialistic cynics, who no longer attended Church (if they ever did at all), with Degrees in this and Masters Degrees in that, with two hundred and fifty thousand pound mortgages and seventy thousand pounds a year jobs, broke down and wept as their dead relatives told them about life beyond the grave through the medium of their innocent daughters.

For the unbereaved, ghosts from another time came to tell their tale.

One recounted the tale of William Spring, a gambling Coachman, decapitated during a fixed game of Hearts in the back room of the Saladin. 

Another purported to be Elizabeth Harley, the Grey Lady, who was strangled, also in the Saladin, by her Cavalier lover, just back from Naseby, surprising her in a most indelicate and disloyal situation with the muscular son of a Blacksmith. 

 *

Ectoplasm - a grey, wobbly, mass, a fog, like a huge surreal rugby ball, floated down the High Street and they came out of the Haywain to watch.

A drunken bravo from the public bar, with a reversed baseball cap, baggy jeans - one of the Wheatley Fields Massive, the local gangster posse - touched the ectoplasm to impress his gangster friends and was projected thirty feet across the market place by a blast of electric energy that flashed and sparkled. 

Dazed, he survived with a broken elbow, a sprained knee and severe electrical burns on his right hand that had to be treated by the ladies in the Launderette as there wasn’t a single doctor, nurse or ambulance available to take him to the City or to Charlestown.

This was just the Saturday.

On the Sabbath, the day before Walpurgis Night, the last day of the Summoning, things got even weirder in Wheatley Fields.

Sample Chapter from Green Wizard 2: Hollywood Shakedown

Sometime writer and full time bum Buddy Chinn is in trouble. The ponies are slow, his liver is bitching, the bugs are munching his wallet away and his free spirit squeeze Monique is catting around town with who knows who.  Worse, a big-time manuscript collector believes he’s got the lowdown on some serious buried literary treasure.  Buddy hasn’t a clue what he’s talking about.

Collector guy offers him a deal he cannot refuse. Find said treasure and make a hundred large. Fail and lose body parts. Lots of body parts.  Worse, he’s got two weeks and some bad, bad people on his tail. Some days, it just ain’t worth getting out of bed.

Based on the life of the fictional son of the alter-ego of a brilliant beat poet, Hollywood Shakedown is a surreal, dangerous, funny, knowing, shaggy dog story ideal for the pool this summer.

____________________________________________

 The boys after Buddy are ordered to bring in his girlfriend Monique as an insurance policy against a rip off on the manuscript. She's shopping in an upmarket LA mall and having a great time. The boys have a guest with them, a tracker who is paid to bring in runaways and they don't like it at all.

Chapter Nineteen:

A hectic, almost frenetic lot. 

Three men forced to watch her enter the mall from the road outside. Stuck in a queue for parking places. As soon as they pulled into line, a Lexus tailgated them and that was that. They could have forced their way out if it came to it (or even shot their way out, as they were packing enough hardware to start an LA revolution), but they were under orders from Saxon to stay nice and quiet.

Under the radar. 

Inconspicuous.

Ahead of them, the line snaked thirty strong and though the delay was irksome, the men showed no discernible emotion. 

After all, there was nothing they could do so why worry.

Bishop wasn't concerned. The woman clearly had no idea the men were following her and she wasn't likely to be leaving the mall anytime soon. She was there for the duration. There was shopping to do. They could take their time.

Pick their spot.

The man in the back seat stared out of the window, bored and restless.

Accustomed as he was to the open prairies, he disliked being cooped up in a metal casket like this one but it wouldn't pay to show too much weakness to someone like Bishop. He’d use that against him when it came down to it. 

You give nothing away to a man like Bishop.

 Scanning the lot like a hawk, he spotted a woman in blue jeans and espadrilles, with cherry blonde hair walking to her mini-van. Tall, long legged. He ogled her top, which would have been ample even if her blouse had been the right size. Several large bags of shopping weighed her down. Clearly, she’d been inside the mall since opening time and she prowled the lot with a confident swagger.

It didn't take the woman long to realise that someone was staring at her, but she had no idea who and it unnerved her, her sixth sense, her radar, attuned to the world around her going wild.

If she could see him, she would have seen a thirty two year old man, lantern jawed, bloodless lips the width of pencil points, sandy coloured hair to his shoulders, inlaid with flecks of grey and a days’ worth of rough stubble. 

Lennon sunglasses covered up his pupils, but not the whole of his eyes.

Taking advantage of his position in obscurity, he took aim.

Dark things imagined. 

The darkest of things.

A picture painted intricately in his head. Attached to the mental image, all his black emotions, all the fantasies spawned on long nights wandering the prairie. Because it was morning, and because he was merely amusing himself, he neglected to show her some of the more potent images that existed inside his library. The ones he used when he was being paid to. 

Still, the particular picture he painted in his head was, nonetheless, not for the everyday person.

The window of the car opened about three inches, enough to let the breeze in.

The man extended the palm of his hand and placed the picture upon it. 

Blew it toward her, gently.

He felt no pleasure in the act. She wasn't his usual type, not at all. He preferred muscular, athletic women, Native looking, chestnut eyes, skin toasted in the desert sun. The psychic thing he did to the classy looking urban chick was just something he did to pass the time.

The projected image hit her.

He watched her flinch. If a bystander were watching from a certain angle, it would look as if she'd been accidentally bumped into by a shopping cart.

Temporarily unsteady on her feet, she threw her bags of shopping into the back of her mini-van and jumped awkwardly into the driver’s seat. For a good five minutes she stared out of the windscreen. Remained totally still, perhaps to steady herself.

Tonight, he knew, she will experience unusual and unsettling dreams. 

Dreams about things she didn't even know she knew. Things that would make her feel uncomfortable; make her look at people around her differently, with anxiety, for at least a fortnight

Eventually, she got a grip. 

With a shake of her head, she drove off without looking back.

He adjusted his sunglasses.

(Sweet dreams, honey)

He leaned forward between the head rests of the two front seats. “I'll go after the woman,” he said. “It’s time.” A mid-west accent, sleepy and slow.

“Say that again?” Bishop said, not really understanding his rural drawl, the sentence taking twice as long as he was used to.

“The mark. I'll go after her.”

The big man shook his head. Took a sip of his soda. “No dice. We need to wait”

“Let's go now. Stay here and park the car. I'll bring her in.”

Ramirez, who did not like the man in the back seat one little bit, felt uncomfortable around him, a distant alarm bell ringing in his head every time he heard his voice, turned round over the seat and spoke assertively. “We'll do this later. That's the deal. “

He shook his head, knowing full well the Mexican didn’t like him and knowing also, that he didn’t like him much either. “I ain't talking to you, brother. Who asked you anyway?”

Ramirez bristled but didn't let it show. “The boss doesn't want a repeat of Denver. You heard what he said. You were there. You were Denver, man. And I’m not your brother.”

The man stretched his arms on the full length of the back seat rest. Ramirez had hit his weak point full on.

Up till Denver, he would have probably been asked to carry out this job alone. It was an easy payday. Bringing rogues back to base was what he did. 

Now, because of certain unfortunate events in Colorado, a pair of assholes had to come along for the ride and it felt like babysitting. “Denver went bad. It happens. I apologised, what more could I do.”

“Sure, real bad.” said Bishop, wryly. He was no fan of the man in the back seat either but there was a job to do and he was a professional. You couldn’t always choose your partners in a disparate organization like Saxon’s and the man in the back was a specialist. “You're lucky to be allowed back on the team. Let’s sit chilly for a little while. It’s busy in there and the man wants this to be done nice and clean, squeaky clean. Besides, what else have you got to do today? There's no rush....”

He sat back and crossed one leg over another. A pair of expensive rattlesnake skin cowboy boots under a pair of Levi jeans. Whereas Bishop and Ramirez wore business suits, he took a more casual approach to his work. He hated suits and, by and large, the people who wore them.

He hated Bishop and Ramirez too.

One day he was going to sort them right out.

Ace them.

Oh yes. Ace them. 

Besides, he'd been there when Saxon told them all to blend in and stay inconspicuous. Guess what happens. These two assholes turn up at his hotel looking like, er, gangsters while tailing the mark in a black Audi with tinted windows typically driven by, er, gangsters. Maybe they had misunderstood the word inconspicuous. 

Or they didn't know quite what the word meant...

By his side, a black cowboy hat rested on the seat. He didn't really like being stuck in the back of a car, even one as comfortable as this. In the end, there was no choice, so he shut up, picked up his cowboy hat and rested it over his eyes.

“I can think of a hundred places I'd rather be than in this car right now, Mister Bishop, sir. But it’s your party. Wake me when you want the huntin’ to begin.”

Lunchtime was beginning to blend into the middle of the afternoon and Monique was desperate for a drink.

Cravings crept up on her unawares and they bit her hard. The force nearly knocked her down and she began to feel faint. Luckily, before they overwhelmed her, she found a spare seat near the fountain at the centre of the mall. Lucky in itself – the mall was even more crowded now than it was when she'd arrived. Hundreds and hundreds of shoppers wandered the Pineapple Grove. Sitting down, she felt at peace, a momentary sense of relief.

Up until that point, she had been a busy girl.

She'd done herself proud. The professional shoppers of Beverley Hills would have been proud of her. Alone, she'd faced the daunting shopping Everest ahead of her and she'd climbed it with a rare vigour, using the shopping equivalent of ice pick, mountain boots and shiny axes. Raced up the mountainside and there she stood, atop the peak.

Monique sat with her back to the fountain alongside an impressive collection of upmarket shopping bags. In a quite memorable spree of see it and buy it shopping, she'd spent nearly a thousand bucks on clothes, shoes, make-up, accessories and lingerie in around two and a half hours and there was still plenty left in her purse.

Just under a thousand bucks. 

If she spotted a cream maxi dress, a zebra skin printed top, a pair of pink strappy sandals, a mauve purse with gold clasps, a pair of fifties style horned sunglasses, a lemon camisole set, or a pair of pristine, rare, American-made Levi jeans, she'd be all over the item like the sun’s rays.

If she liked the look of it, she brought it without trying it on.

Second thoughts? She cast it aside, not bothering to put it back on the hanger.

Well, she thought: This lil Oklahoma girl would most definitely enjoy being one of the idle rich. 

In the last ten minutes before the cravings hit her, she had been having a pressing internal dialogue with her inner self about purchasing a leopard skin mini-dress that hugged her figure like a Latin lover, but was one of those dresses which caused more problems than it solved, especially when combined with a pair of black shoes with eight inch spikes for heels.

The dress and shoes were some real bad girl combination.

Had her mother seen what she was planning to wear at her age, she would have had a cardiac the size of the 1905 earthquake. She really wanted those clothes- really, really wanted them and the combined spend would be close to five hundred bucks – her mother would have definitely keeled over at that price - but the downside nagged at her.

The downside? The married woman’s downside.

What would her boyfriend say?

What would anyone say? She was just past forty and this kind of outfit gave a gal a real bad name and these were not clothes for a woman with a boyfriend.

 These were prowlin’ clothes.

Well, she'd already gotten herself a bad name! She'd heard the whispers. Seen the impact she had on men who only ever respond like that when in the presence of a girl with a bad name.

She'd never been unfaithful to Buddy, though she'd pushed it farther than she was supposed to at times, pushed those boundaries until they bent, strained and cracked, (smooched with a few guys, sipped bourbon, smoked a little draw in a car with Sylvia and a couple of hot young guys from outta town when the bars had shut, watching the lights flicker down in the Valley; hung out at the occasional impromptu house party with guys Buddy wouldn’t be all that happy to know about, danced a little and such), but she had never actually hid a dick apart from that of her boyfriend since they’d been together. It was hard not to. She got plenty of attention from guys and she was a free spirit.

Yet, since Buddy, she had been playing it straight.

(Ish.)

So, putting it all together, she wanted that dress badly.

She desired it. The dress niggled at her. She'd put it back on the rack and left the shop but that wasn't enough. The desire for the dress ate away at her. The more she thought and prevaricated, the more she felt she'd have to leave the State to avoid buying it. She could just imagine Buddy's face when he saw her wearing that dress. Hell, he'd rip it off there and then (she'd have to watch that, if she decided to buy it), but he wouldn't be too happy at all is she wore it down Jodie's or the Hangman. It would upset him, the sight of her walking out with that dress, those shoes and her new clasp purse. She knew men well enough to know that a whore in the bedroom is a whole different thing to a whore in the local street corner Lounge.

And she loved him. She really did. 

That was the God's honest truth.

Yet, this dress was just too damned special to wear just for Buddy in the bedroom.

It was too cool not to show off.

And those shoes...she had NEVER seen a pair of shoes like that in her life! She spotted them in the shop window of a Luigi Facchino franchise. 

Stared at the window almost hypnotised.

Time slowed to nothing when she saw them.

Instinctively, sensibly, she knew that nothing good could come from buying these shoes.

She'd already brought shoes.  

Nice ones too, real sexy shoes.

These were different though. They seemed to call to her. It was like they had spotted her walking past the window of the boutique, spotted her essence – the woman inside, her soul, her being - and latched on to it like a tractor beam. It was like those shoes had hunted her down, predators: imprisoned her there in front of the shop window.

Mounted on a plinth, framed by two spotlights orbiting the shoes like the twin moons of Saturn, each shoe buffed to a glistening shine, they had an ethereal, otherworldly quality. 

Powerless to resist, she entered the shop. When she'd tried them on they fitted her perfectly too, the caress of the inner shoe like a silken embrace, the insole a bed of a million feathers. The shoes had a transcendental impact upon her that stretched from her temples to the tips of her toes and centred like a hurricane between her legs.

She had to have them - three hundred and forty bucks was a small price to pay for such sheer emotional range and she wasn't going to get this chance again anytime soon.

Then she embraced the downside. Those heels would attract men like flies round shit and send Buddy into a deep depression if she wore them out, say, to go shopping with one of her pals. She needed the attention of men, but she needed Buddy more.

Badass shoes.

Pals would love those shoes. Sylvia. Katy. Christina. The Sunday night gals at the Magpie Bar. Even Gay Nate.

They would ENVY those shoes and by extension, they would envy Monique.

Little Monique of Annardarko, Oklahoma.

Decisions, decisions.

(Shoes.)

To buy or not to buy.

The sensible half of her knew that buying those shoes was attracting heaps of trouble into her life on just about every single dimension she could think of. 

The mad side of her didn't give a crap about that – she wanted them so bad she could taste the need at the back of her throat.

The battle raging inside her went on. Every time she tried to reach a resolution about the clothes, the idea of a cool drink in her hand came to her. First the mind, then the body. The craving began to take hold at the back of her throat. Though the mall was homeostatically controlled by powerful air conditioners, she began to perspire. After five or six minutes of sitting in the rest area, her entire body was covered in a sheen of moisture. 

This was her psyche solving the problem for her.

Can't make up your mind? Decisions too much for you? Too much pain and thinking? Have yourself an ice cool Margherita, Monique. You KNOW it makes sense...

Unable to resist the craving, she got up and went in search of a lunchtime drink.