I must have a story for the end of Octabber. I must. Smokyween or maybe smokydrinkyween has to pass into the stuff of legend, with cheeeldren (vile and unsanitary things) demanding tabs and tipples or tricks.
It must be horrible. It must be scary. It might not scare the readers who visit here, either of them, but it must terrify the drones.
I did a very good job of that many years ago with Telephone Pest and more recently with A Christmas Contract.
This time there has to be a third hand smoke demon. Utterly ridiculous to anyone with half a brain.
Fortunately, few drones have that much brain.
As some here may know, I’m not exactly on the portly side. On a very wet day I might tip the scales at 120ish pounds at 5′ 8″. (Hey, it’s ALL muscle though! Specially ‘tween the ears!)
In any event, a number of years ago I somehow acquired a “death hood” type thing: all black, with a black, translucent, but (from the outside) pretty opaque front veil.
Well, I showed up at my favorite pub that Halloween dressed all in black with the hood on, and with special care paid to accenting the image of thin, bony, gnarled hands reaching out of black loose sleeves. To finish the image, I smoked constantly through a foot long silver cigarette holder and the smoke would sort of drift out of the front of the death hood!
To fool the bartender, at least maybe for a bit at the start, I didn’t want to answer when asked what I’d drink. So I brought a screwdriver along and when he asked I just placed it on the bar and pointed to it.
Happy Halloween Leggy!
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MJM
It’s not so much fun these days. The kids are more scary than the ghosts.
Alright, any such story must absolutely include the paranormal. Ghosts are traditionally depicted as traslucent, misty figures which seem to live on in their own particular lives much as they did before death, slowly fading…
What if tobacco smoke gives new life and solidity to old ghosts? Think how many there must be, with all the people who have lived and died here. Imagine if they got a chance to live afresh, albeit in a dim, smoky half-life? Imagine a country ghost, still toiling in his green and pleasant land in forgotten green fields now lost under concrete and tarmac; imagine too one of the old Gods of forest and mystery, lost in his past of greenery, blood, death and rebirth and the great cycle of things, all poisoned now under the choking man-made edifice of London.
Imagine what such an entity would think if a whiff of tobacco smoke brought it out of its green and pleasant dreams into harsh, unliving reality once more. It’d be a bit peeved, to say the least.
Just thinking out loud like.
I need a new freebie to get the book sales moving again. New stuff scrolls down the list really, really fast.
I’m thinking along the lines of a demon that can only be seen in smoke and which is repelled by tobacco. On Halloween, it comes out to feed. National Smoking Day is born…
LOL! I’ve sometimes speculated on the possibility that smoking might protect people from West Nile Virus and Malaria since the natural reaction of flying insects should be to fly away from fire and smoke.
- MJM
I remember being asked to sit near non-smokers in pub gardens because the smoke keeps the midges away. Now they can suffer, I won’t go anywhere near them even if they beg.
I may have mentioned this before in response to one of your ghostly posts, but in case I didn’t: There’s an aspect to all this that I’ll be bringing up in my next book! Here’s the relevant excerpt:
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Shortly after this chapter was completed an Internet poster provided the perfect capstone to its pyramid of insanity. At first I thought this posting might be satirical despite the dead seriousness of its tone, but then I realized that it had not been posted to a forum dealing with smoking, but actually sent in as a pleading query to a forum dealing with supernatural phenomena. The writer claimed to be having a “problem with smelling cigarette smoke, but no one smokes at home” and then went on to note that no one else could smell it despite the fact that she herself was forced to use an inhaler because the smoke was giving her asthma attacks even after she covered her head with a shirt.
It was at that point that we moved into realms even more surreal than SHS, or THS, or OTS, as the writer outlined her conviction that the offending smoke odor was being sent to her by a smoking “spirit” who kept appearing to her despite the fact that she had prayed and “commanded it to leave in the name of Jesus.” As noted, the context and the tone of the posting left no room for thinking of it as being anything other than a deadly serious and heartfelt plea for help in dealing with the “problem.”
This innocent Internet poster may be the harbinger of a whole new realm of antismoking paranoia: fear of attack by what can only be called ODS: Other Dimensional Smoke!
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MJM
The UK is full of ghosts. It’s where they come to die. Here it’s very common to have pub ghosts who announce their presence with tobacco smoke. Funnily enough, pubs are less keen to mention this since the ban.