So, about ten people. Not bad. Errol Meeks was offering a domestic anecdote concerning his new boiler that made everybody laugh and feel obscurely guilty that there weren’t more black guys in the group. Carl with the foreign last name, something-vich, sat closest to the door, looking unhappy. For some reason, there was a rolled length of carpet propped against the empty chair beside him, and Merelda thought he might have said that he was moving house soon. It was probably to do with that. His glum expression, on the other hand, was probably to do with Alison Macready, who was looking daggers at him from the table’s Dave and Marcus end, where she was sitting in a huddle with her friends and upstairs neighbours, Steve and Sheila Denton. Carl and Alison had been an item for the previous eighteen months or so, which meant their break-up at the last meeting had been accompanied by a bit of an atmosphere. Uncomfortable, but these things happened.

  With her coat draped on her forearm like a toreador, Merelda made a halting circumnavigation of the table, pausing to exchange a word or two with everyone before she got to the unoccupied chair next to Emma. Actually, tonight might prove quite lively, with the big debate Marcus had scheduled, over a proposed change of direction, both for CSICON as a whole and for their quarterly small-press mag, Interesting Times. Sitting beside her friend, she asked what the young teacher thought of Marcus’s ‘uncharted waters’ scheme, but Emma said she wasn’t sure she really understood it and, changing the subject, showed Merelda a blurred shot of a purported chupacabra on her phone. The mumble of surrounding discourse fell away on a steep gradient, like in a cinema when the lights dip for the main feature, and Merelda guessed the meeting proper was about to start. She couldn’t wait.

  I left it as long as I could and then made my excuses. As I stepped into the wind and drizzle, I heard somebody behind me shout, ‘Hey, hang on. You forgot your … thing.’ From what I’d been told back two weeks hence, this would have been right around the point at which the jilky had dilated both its lateral spills. Of course, nobody understood exactly what it was, but they’d have had some time – a second or two, at the most – to individually understand exactly what it wasn’t. You might think that I’d be taking quite a risk with such a drastic clean-up exercise, but not in my experience.

  He nodded and made intermittent grunts at everything that Marcus said because he liked the chap, known him for years, but to be honest, David had misgivings about this whole ‘new direction’ thing. Surely the group was all right how it was, although he didn’t feel that he could just come out and say that. David was uncomfortably aware that he was CSICON’s oldest member and he didn’t want the others to think that he was opposed to new ideas, set in his ways or ‘square’ in any sense. Did people still say square? He didn’t know, and mournfully accepted that this made him even squarer.

  Marcus bobbed his number-one cut excitedly now as he warmed to his subject. ‘I mean, people who report phenomena, they generally report things in existing categories. What about, though, what about if somebody encountered something where we didn’t have a category; where we didn’t even have a word? How would you go about reporting that? You wouldn’t, would you? There must be a thousand cases where …’ David let his attention wander to the rest of the Surrealist Investigators, mumbling clumps of rhubarb spread incongruously around a polished table more accustomed to Chalcombe & Bentine’s orderly appraisals of the housing market. There was a commotion over by the door as voluble Merelda Jacobs blustered in, complaining about leaving something in her car and having to walk back down Fetter Street ‘through all the rain’ to fetch it. Well, whose fault was that? Across the room, directly opposite Carl Wasowiec and his teetering stack of old newspapers, Brian Appleby was obviously trying to chat up the new girl, Adriana, with his outsized Adam’s apple going up and down grotesquely like a yo-yo. David sighed, albeit inwardly.

  Perhaps Marcus was right. Perhaps CSICON was overdue for some sort of a shake-up. He thought back to when the pair of them had got the whole thing going, what, three years ago now, in 2016? That was back during David’s rough patch after Anne had left him – she was Leave, he was Remain – when he’d realised just how few friends he had and jumped at any opportunity for conversation. He’d known Marcus since the noughties, when the younger man had been a client and they’d discovered that they were both long-time readers of Fortean Times. Following Anne’s departure, Marcus dropped by maybe twice a week to have a beer or several and keep David company. It had been on one such occasion that Marcus had floated the idea of a paranormal studies group ‘but with a sense of humour’, whereupon David had drunkenly suggested they could gather in the spacious conference room at work – and three years later, here they were. David supposed, if he was honest, that he’d privately been hoping he might meet some eligible women, but that hadn’t been the case. He’d had his hopes up about leggy Sheila Hall until, apparently from out of nowhere, she’d got married to Steve Denton. Was he any better than poor Brian Appleby when it came down to it, disguising loneliness behind a jabbering tirade about the Enfield poltergeist?

  Beside him, Marcus called the group to order, and went into his arm-waving pitch for ‘studying the negative space in phenomenology’, whatever that might mean. The evening had begun.

  As I said earlier, a Whispering Pete’s emotional life takes some getting used to: although I’d not met her prior to that night – and obviously she hated me – for my part, I was mostly thinking about all the sex that we were going to have, and how pretty her eyes were. And, yes, I was feeling guilty about her; about the lot of them. I know it makes no rational sense when this was the first time that I’d laid eyes on them, but it was the last time that they’d lay eyes on me. The last time that they’d do a lot of things. Though I accept it’s pretty much impossible for me, I tried to see things from their point of view, and that’s why I felt sorry for them. I knew when I met them two weeks’ time ago, it wouldn’t seem so bad, but I still wanted to give them a while together on what was, from their perspective, their last night. I didn’t get up and leave straight away, is what I’m saying here. I’m not a monster.

  This was definitely the last meeting she was coming to. She’d made her mind up at the point where, halfway through twatsplaining all about the restless dead, that stringy Brian guy had asked her if she’d ever seen the movie that Timothy Spall had been so good in. He’d a copy up at his place and if Adriana ever fancied popping round to watch it …

  Now she thought about it, this whole CSICON set-up hadn’t really been what she was looking for, which was, essentially, material for her master’s thesis, ‘Paranormal Subculture and the New Right’. The problem, she conceded, was with her: she’d not been honest with them when she joined. She’d let them think that she was studying psychic phenomena, when in fact she was studying the people who were studying that stuff: people like them.

  Up at the top end of the table, the bald English teacher who was obviously gay continued with his energetic monologue. The main thrust of the argument, if Adriana had it right, was that instead of seeking vampires, flying saucers, yetis, Loch Ness monsters and a lot of other things that probably weren’t real, the group should look for evidence of things that nobody had ever said existed in the first place. ‘I mean, everybody understands what ghosts are.’ Well, no, actually, they didn’t. ‘What we should be looking for are things that have been previously invisible to us.’ Which, if you thought about it even for a moment, obviously included ghosts. Basically, not an academic.

  Adriana, carefully avoiding eye contact with the unduly lanky table-tilter to her left, allowed her artificial lashes to brush briefly over the remainder of the group. Next to the gushing and gesticulating teacher sat the estate agent who was old enough to be her dad, but even more depressed and angry-looking. Further down, across from her, the Polish guy was making sure that everybody saw the gleaming high-tech speaker system he’d apparently just bought, while at the table’s other end, the fifty-something redhead who’d arrived late made a big deal about flipping through her ring binder and tutting loudly. Next to her sat the short blonde girl who was always wearing jumpers borrowed from a boxset Scandi noir – the one that Adriana thought was possibly another teacher – and then there was Errol, a few empty seats away on Adriana’s right. Errol was CSICON’s sole stab at racial diversity and, by coincidence, about the only one whose name she could remember.

  None of them were much use for her purposes, in that none of them were particularly right wing. She’d do better coming at the problem from the other end and infiltrating the English Defence League, keeping her ears open for a mention of Atlantis or the Hollow Earth. Transferring her laconic chewing gum from one cheek to the other, Adriana doubled her resolve, and knew without a shadow of a doubt that when the group assembled in a fortnight’s time, she wasn’t going to be there.

  Anyway, when finally I got to the October night in question, I did what the mormoleen had sleepily and snugly reminisced about, which, from the mormoleen’s perspective, had of course already happened: I arrived at the smart premises comparatively early, where I found the jilky waiting for me in the alley just off Purser’s Row. There was a covered manhole in the shadows from which I presumed the jilky had emerged, and which it would use to make its departure when the matter was concluded. I’d not visited the area before, but there had been a street map in that clipping from the local paper I’d cut out, the day after tomorrow. I’d be coming here a lot over the last three years, apparently. The intermittent rain meant hardly anybody was about, though with the evolutionary psychology thing that I mentioned, it would have made little difference if they had been. I mean, when I walked the jilky to the offices, we bumped into someone with a receding hairline who appeared to know me. One of my acquaintances-to-be, no doubt. Glancing towards the jilky, he smiled sympathetically and said, ‘Laundrette night, eh? Yeah, I know that one.’ It was literally that easy.

  It transpired that other than the balding fellow and another man who seemed to work there at the place, we were the first arrivals. We went in and found ourselves a pair of seats, so I could nod to all the unfamiliar faces as, in ones and twos, they turned up for the meeting. The one sticky moment was when an attractive brunette wearing tight jeans and a fake fur jacket – beads of rain were hung from the acrylic hairs like diamonds – practically spat at me when she walked in with two friends and I offered a non-committal smile of greeting. Turning pointedly away without a word, she and the couple she’d arrived with went and sat up in the big room’s furthest corner. This, I reasoned, must be Alison, who I’d been looking forward to meeting since learning of her in the diary that I fill in every night, so that it’s there for me to have already read the day before. The way she saw things, two weeks earlier, for no apparent reason, I’d ended a passionate relationship that had been going on more than a year, so she had every reason to despise me. In two weeks’ time, I was going to behave appallingly.

  Errol was well distracted, to be honest, and his full attention wasn’t on the pep talk Marcus was delivering, but even so, he wasn’t sure he liked the sound of this whole ‘new direction’ thing. The only reason Errol was in CSICON – OK, not the only reason, nearly all the people there were really nice, but the main reason – was that it gave him an outlet for his illustration and cartoon work in the little magazine they put out, Interesting Times. All right, there’d only been four issues in three years, but Errol had done all the covers and interior spot illos. He was getting better all the time; might even soon be good enough to have a stab at turning pro and jacking in the shift work at the care home. The thing was, all Errol’s work for Interesting Times was based upon familiar stereotypes – vampires and ghouls and black-eyed aliens – particularly the cartoons. If CSICON was now dumping the spontaneous human combustion and the anal probes in favour of something that nobody had ever previously imagined, what was he supposed to draw?

  Amongst his various distractions, number one was obviously the plastic washing-up bowl in his boiler cupboard. It was there to catch the slow but steadily accumulating drips from the new boiler until his mate Paul the Pipe could come and have a look at it on Friday. But the bowl was only so big, and would fill up in around four hours to the point where it was slopping over. Errol had been training himself to wake in the middle of the night and empty it into the bath, so that it wasn’t pissing through the kitchen ceiling when he came down in the morning. He’d performed this ritual before he’d left for Chalcombe & Bentine’s around an hour before, and thought that it should last until he got home later, but you never knew. Returning to a flooded downstairs loo would be the worst imaginable way that Errol could wrap up this Thursday evening, so the possibility was weighing heavy on his mind.

  The other things distracting him were relatively minor, and were, in the main, related to his fellow CSICON members. That new woman, Adriana, sitting to the left of him, she had some kind of scent on that he didn’t like at all – a heavy, choking lavender that made him want to sneeze and go to sleep at the same time. Then, right across the table was the gold-framed painting Carl had brought in, which was frankly horrible and might have been a picture of a badly deformed horse. Or something. Worse than both of these in the distraction stakes, however, was Merelda Jacobs at the table’s bottom end, continually fussing with her bloody binder, muttering under her breath at every minor inconvenience and making the whole evening about her, as usual. Errol didn’t even like her name.

  He tried to focus on Marcus’s monologue, which at that moment was concerned with ‘entities that our taxonomies have made us blind to’. Errol wasn’t all that confident about his understanding of ‘taxonomies’, and couldn’t see how things that we were blind to made for decent gag cartoons.

  On second thoughts, it looked more like a sofa than a horse, but was so badly painted that you couldn’t tell. Merelda Jacobs made what turned out to be the first in a miniseries of exasperated sighs, and in his head, the water in the washing-up bowl crept insidiously towards the plastic brim.

  That’s not to say my life’s without its unexpected treats. For instance, after slogging all the way through 2020, I was honestly taken aback by my giddy euphoria on reaching Christmas 2019, after years of lockdown and disruption. Everybody else looked miserable about December’s general election and resultant Tory landslide, whereas I was wide-eyed, marvelling at everything as if I’d just stepped into fairyland. Just seeing people shaking hands and hugging, or in tight-pressed, surly crowds on public transport was surprisingly emotional, which isn’t me at all.

  To be fair, I was also looking forward very much to having sex again, after that long, dry period in isolation. As I said, we Whispering Petes are mostly in it for the sex, and if my disappearing diary was to be believed, I was about to embark on a fruitful and protracted period of serial satisfaction stretching to the 1980s, by which time I’m an unusually experienced teenager. In order to commence my sexual salad days, though, I was first apparently obliged to go through with this whole depressing business in town centre, as reported by the clipping in my emptying scrapbook. From the diary, it appeared that in the last week of October, I’d be calling in at my friend Trudy’s place, to chat with her about what I’d be doing/had already done upon Thursday the seventeenth. Naturally, Trudy’s one of the concealed people herself. Trudy’s a mormoleen. She does what mormoleens do.

  And, it has to be said, I fall for it every time: I went to bed on Halloween and had a terrible night’s sleep, as if I’d eaten an amphetamine and coffee sandwich just before retiring. Waking on the morning of the thirtieth, I spent the whole day groggy and unrested, sort of jet-lagged, until early evening when I paid my scheduled visit to the mormoleen. Her house was on the Granby estate to the west of Calderford, a dingy and unprepossessing residence, whereas the neighbour’s front porch was a madness of unnecessary DIY, exactly as you might expect from someone living next door to a mormoleen. Wearing her customary smug and dreamy smile, Trudy invited me indoors.

  As per the diary, I already knew a jilky would be there, so I knew what to look for. And besides, I’d already encountered one in 2035 through my not-yet-wife Mila. When I entered Trudy’s living room, I spotted the guitar case and knew straight away what I was looking at: as if a mormoleen would ever have the energy to learn an instrument. I nodded amiably at the guitar case and received a brief flutter of colour in reply. Nobody knows what jilkies are, because nobody’s ever really seen one. They exploit the way human perception has evolved, always selecting for survival value over accuracy, so that most of what we see is a simplistic glyph rather than what is really there. Jilkies cannot be simplified, and so the mind, in desperation, makes up something else to fill the sudden gap in its reality. As far as anyone can tell, they feed upon the energy released when a molecular bond is disrupted. And while I’m no expert, this particular guitar case seemed unusually plump and contented, sprawling there on Trudy’s sofa. I sat in the armchair opposite.

  The mormoleen began at once to languidly assure me that what I’d done had been necessary; almost heroic. She said that I’d told her in September how the study group I was monitoring had decided to consider strange phenomena outside existing categories, and would have to be shut down. The whole concealed community, she purred, were grateful for the action that I’d taken with the jilky, and had I seen the piece in the Thropshire Herald? I reminded her that I’d been looking at it in my scrapbook for the next few decades, though I guessed it would be vanishing sometime during the last two weeks. She gave a lazy laugh and said I was a wonder. Just as always, I drank in the flattery and soon felt all charged up about myself and my forthcoming already accomplished mission. That’s a mormoleen. That’s how they operate. Everyone likes their company because they leave you energised and bursting with enthusiasm, when what’s really going on is that they’re drinking your ability to calm down and relax. It’s like they siphon other people’s serotonin and then wallow in it, always with that drowsy grin. That’s why I hadn’t slept the night before, but that didn’t occur to me till I was striding home from Trudy’s, full of vigour and exhausting self-importance. Fucking mormoleens.