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Hosstory - Mine All Mine

Chapter One

It all began one summers evening as doctor Valentine sat in his consulting room checking through the usual large number of patients files place in front of him for that evenings consultations. He did not know it but this evening and the following evenings were to be the most stressful of his entire career.

‘Next patient.’ He called into the microphone before him.

There was the usual knock and a very sheepish looking woman poked her head round the door. She looked around the room as if expecting to see someone or something else there. On seeing only the doctor she seemed to assure herself and entered.

Dr Valentine with a puzzled look on his face beckoned her forward and asked her to sit. Immediately he noticed that the woman seemed distressed and bothered about something as there she sat nervously fidgeting and toying with her fingers below the table. Constantly her left eye twitched and every so often she looked round the room as if expecting someone or something else to be there.

‘What seems to be the problem?’ the doctor asked.

‘It’s the tapping, doctor.’ The woman replied timidly. ‘The constant tapping, it won’t go away.’ She whimpered as a sweat broke from the brow as if she were afraid.

‘And where is this tapping?’ Valentine asked, not hearing a sound.

‘It’s there all the time. I hear it. We all hear it.’ She answered. ‘It won’t go away. It’s there, day and night. You’ve got to help me.’ She pleaded.

‘Do you hear it now?’

‘No. Not now. It’s only when I’m at work.’

‘Oh, at work.’ He repeated thinking that there might be some machine or other, or a maybe a dripping tap where the woman was employed. ‘Where do you work?’ he asked.

‘I work at the Three Tuns pub. As a barmaid.’ She replied.

He quizzed her further but could not ascertain what the tapping might be. Finally, after looking in her eyes, and her ears, and inspecting the palms of her hands for hair. Putting it down to stress, he prescribed for her the standard dose of painkillers and told her to take a few days off work and to get some rest.

She left the room still as nervous as she had entered only this time checking the corridor outside before she left.

Valentine watched her go and as the door closed he took from his pocket his miniature highest of high technology dictation machine bought for a very reasonable price from Dixons Discount Warehouse. His previous machine having been condemned by the very same firm that very day. As usual he gave a quick report to be added to the woman’s folder later, and called for his next patient.

There was a knock and this time a young girl of about seventeen entered the room. Unusually she seemed as distressed if not more than the woman who had just left and as the other, she too constantly surveyed the room. When the doctor asked her what was wrong she also said she was hearing tapping.
Valentine, now puzzled asked her where she worked and what she did? She told him that she was a waitress at Ingrams Fish Restaurant, and that there was a constant taping all day, every day including he dinner and tea breaks as well.
He gave her an inspection as well and for her he prescribed Valium along with a two-week sick leave and the instruction to rest.

This is how things went on all that evening and every evening for the next two weeks. Both men and women, irritable in nature all complaining of hearing tapping while they worked. Many of them had to be turned away from the surgery as the surgeries consultation books rapidly began to fill. Soon all were being turned away and told to try the next day to be seen.

On checking with other doctors at his own and surrounding surgeries Valentine found the same. For months now their patient influx had spiraled out of control and all had been dishing out valium and other sedatives like sweets to calm the nerves of people who were suffering from the delusion that they were hearing tapping. In fact he came to the conclusion that Filey seemed to be suffering from some form of mass hysteria, all centered on strange sounds that the locals thought they were hearing. Valentine didn’t realise it but he was almost right. The noise was at the center of the problem both geographically as well as psychologically, and if he had had a map of the streets of Filey he would have seen the common factor.

He didn’t have a map but what he did have was the knowledge that he was becoming quite positively unhinged. He himself now on several sedatives a day was beginning to prominently twitch above both his left and right eyes. The past two weeks had been unnerving for him and he had slowly but surely drifted into a state of acute and subjective paranoia that’s hub was without doubt the patients he had seen and their symptoms of tapping.

Filey itself within weeks had become a Mecca for drug pushers and dealers of all kinds, who through the usual channels had heard of the shortage of sedative drugs and descended to make an easy killing from the unfortunate workers.

Drug deals became and everyday thing and were taking place quite openly on nearly every street corner, and often when all the corners of the streets were taken, behind the gravestones of St Oswalds Church.

Armed police were often called as rival gangs fought out violent gun battles to the death over the best and largest gravestones to do their deals. Daily bodies were taken from the graveyard to makeshift mortuaries in the upper rooms of the Buccaneer Bar. Bodies stayed there until they began to smell and put the drinkers off their beer. Most ignored the smell thinking that’s how the place always smelled. Anyway, it wasn’t their problem. The beer was cheap.

For Haxbys the local undertaker, business was booming, as daily, bodies by the dozen were shipped in to be measured up and have their final fitting.

A godsend for him in this time of plenty and his time of need had been the self assemble cask. Bought at a reasonable price at one of the many Dixons Discount Warehouses along the road. Haxby had found these shops a must and had praised the day when Dixons had changed from a TV rental firm to a retail warehouse chain. To a corpse, a 26’ Teletext TV at £12.95 a month was totally useless, even if it did get channel 5. The shops however. Anything could be found in them. Anything from staples to car parts. In fact Ralph had even got him sets of alloy wheels and chrome exhaust extensions for all his three Hearses, all at a very reasonable price.

The coffins he now had such great demand for he had immediately without a flinch fallen in love with. They had come at just the right time and they had three main selling points. They were easy to assemble, coming with a full set of step-by-step instructions that even Bannister could follow. They were easy to get hold of in large quantities, which was what was needed in times like this. And the thing that was good for his dieing trade, they were cheap. He having done a deal with Ralph himself to arrange the quantity discount price.

Chapter Two

The landlord of the Three Tuns Public house were getting sick and tired of his staff taking time off due to illness. He were also getting very annoyed at the complaints of his customers about the constant tapping that now could be heard above the sound of anything else in the pub. The jukebox had been turned up to full volume and customers constantly shouted and sang to drown the noise of the tapping. Karaoke nights were held all night and every night and the loudest and worst singers were encouraged to enter, and the loudest and worst were given large and lucrative prizes because they always won.

At first to try and repress the situation, any unruly patrons tapping their fingers on the tables or any other surface had been ejected from the premises along with the threat that they would not get back in until they refrained from the action. This didn’t work as the tapping got louder and louder, pushing the more stubborn drinkers into complaining to Keith about the noise, and in turn out of pure frustration on his part, pushing him into kicking them out of the pub altogether.

The large text signs that spurned the bar walls requesting customers to refrain from wearing football colours now were accompanied by even larger text signs requesting customers to refrain from making annoying noises. The football colours wearing had not or ever had been a problem, as anyone with any self-respect would never dare be seen in public wearing the Filey Town colours, except on the pitch during a game, and then it was only because the local league demanded it. On leaving the pitch after the game the traditional swapping of shirts never took place at Filey. No other team wanted their shirts. On rare occasions when Filey had won, rival players had had their shirts torn from their backs and were threatened with violence if they did not take a Filey shirt in return. Fileys manager, David Brannan had been booked several times, not by any referee, or football league official, but by the police for threatening behavior.

The noises that people were asked to refrain from by the signs on the walls. They started off specifically referring to sounds like tapping. As the weeks had passed and peoples nerves and wills had been worn down to a thread it had got to the state, both in the bar and the lounge, where anyone making the slightest of sudden sounds of any kind what so ever were immediately evicted and barred for life. A cough, a belch, or even a fart were given certain condemnation and sentence. Those producing any two or three in quick succession were also given a severe kicking as well.

A butchers just along the street from the pub only a few days ago had been forced to near bankruptcy by the amount of time its’ staff were taking off, and due to this, out of sheer desperation had resorted to calling in the environmental people, hoping to the high heavens that the noise might be rats.

This, a last resort and a thing near unheard of in Filey, and if heard of shunned most unsympathetically by the other members of the towns trading community. To call them in was an admission of some unsavory and unhealthy thing somewhere on the shopkeepers premises.

The environmental people though, thinking that the shopkeeper must be mad to call them, especially a Filey shopkeeper, had found not a thing. Not a rat, not a cockroach, not even an alcoholic hidden away in the mince. The shop had been spotlessly clean. But soon after, the shop had been forced into final financial ruin when word had got round of their call.

Not a customer came near the place, and but a few days later, its doors were closed and the shop finally ceased trading as a butcher.

Immediately the owners last foot had left its doorway, the shop was bought at a very reasonable price by the Dixons Discount Warehouse group, and upon its sale the insidious tapping noise that had driven so many insane, had stopped.

For several weeks the shop was closed. Its doors to the outside world remaining locked tight shut and its large windows boarded up, preventing anyone from the outside seeing, if they should wish, what was going on within. The tapping that had been driving so many to madness was quiet as if some miracle had taken place that had banished its terrible sound from Fileys streets.

Drug sales diminished and the rival gangs fought now over the supply of their merchandise to only the hardest of addicts.

The undertakers were the ones who now suffered. Now they were left with dozens of pre-paid, flat-pack coffins with nothing to put in them. True, the occasional stiff turned up with a hole or two in it, but these were becoming scarce and Haxby had heard on the news that people were living longer after they retired. Bastard!

The Buccaneer Bar was beginning to smell sweeter. The smell of urine and vomit was clearer in the air throughout the bar, and occasionally the scent of bleach wafted its way through from the toilets to the rooms outside.

Most who drank there couldn’t stand it and left. They preferred the smell of rotting flesh as they sat there and drank their beer. These sweet smells they now smelled were for puffs.

Chapter Three

One fine summers morning as if some magical transformation had taken place, there instead of the butchers shop stood a new branch of Dixons. The windows were now un-boarded and clear for all to see what was inside, and the doors were now open to the world of passing trade; and there inside a brand new fully fitted-out shop along with the smiling face of Ralph Fredrick Dixon himself waited to receive its first customers.

Something was certainly strange about this transformation though because not a thing had entered or left the shop via its securely locked front doors, and nothing had been taken in by the rear. It was as if some miraculous event had taken place that allowed the whole inside to be stripped and rebuilt without access of anyone or anything. Had Ralph imported a machine from the far east that transformed matter from one thing to another?

No one really cared, as the opening deals that were being offered were ones definitely not to be missed. He highest of high technology electronic equipment at the lowest of low financial prices was on offer to those who were first through the door, or second, or even third, forth, or fifth etc.

That day, in the shops all around, the staff remaining noticed something was missing. Their managements ordered full stock checks to be taken in an attempt to find out what. But all checks proved fruitless as everything to be counted was there and where it should be. It was only when the drugs that the employees had taken began to wear off that it became obvious what was missing. The tapping. The silence was now unbearable for some and they immediately swallowed more sedatives to calm their nerves. The more tough ones though began to search their buildings for a source of the silence. Nothing could be found as slowly one by one of them realised that this might be the end of the torture they had suffered for the past months. As it slowly sank in, some began to cheer. Some shouted. Some even broke down and burst into tears; but these emotional outbursts were tears of joy as they hugged and embraced each other to show their interminable happiness.

In the Three Tuns, free drinks were dished out to all the two customers who had remained loyal and had sung over those harrowing times; and the noise banning posters now totally covering the walls were ecstatically torn down and ripped to shreds.

That night the doors of the new shop were closed and the shop was locked up securely for the night as were all the shops along Murray Street, John Street, West Avenue, and Belle Vue Street.

To try and encourage its clientele back, the Three Tuns most nights stayed open late with offers of the happiest of happy hours, cheap drink, and a good kicking for anyone who dare try and pass without calling in.

In the bar the music played at a more rational level and Keith talked, mainly to him self as he had got used to doing over the past few months.

The last record ended and time was called indicating to those still there to drink up quickly and get out while they still could, and as the last of the drinkers finally left, Keith looked around the empty room with its dirty glasses, and its out of place stools, and as he stood there in the peaceful quiet, a tear came to his eye. This was not a tear of joy or of gladness as so many had shed that day. This was a tear of sorrow and utter despair. For in the quietness of the deserted pub he heard the faint sound of tapping coming from below him.

There, from the ground below, the sound of random tapping emanated, and as it got louder and louder, Keith knew but only one thing. The madness had not left. It had not suddenly disappeared as many including himself had thought. It was still there, and with a shaking hand he reached for the small brown bottle of yellow pills he kept beneath the bar, and opening the lid swallowed the lot.

Out of sight several feet below his still body, on their hands and knees, lit by highest of high technology lights, Ralph Fredrick Dixons workers hammered and chiseled at the hard rock face before them. Cutting and carving the pathways that would take them to the shops around the center of Filey above; ready and waiting only for their owners to sell up and move out so that they could move in and expand the glorious Dixon Empire. And surely and finally one day take over the whole of Filey’s shopping area, and maybe someday, the world.

End