Company - a short story.

Company

A short story by Steve Conoboy

It ate the cat last night, but I forgive It. I did like that cat, but I guess I can get another. Not right away, of course. Wouldn’t be much fun for the cat if I did, although the Greyling would probably be happy. Quite an appetite it’s got. Gobbled down all of my cat, fur and everything. Happened pretty quick. The cat was lolling about on the rug, the Greyling was listening to me rattle on, all calm and normal. Then the Greyling’s eyes bugged out of its head. A split-second was all it took. It was on the cat in the blink of an eye. Would have been me next if I hadn’t got over the shock and started talking again.

  Poor cat. Judging by the way the It looks at me, it’s got a similar fate lined up for my furless hide. Hasn’t tried to eat me yet, and I think I know why.

  I’ve had to learn a lot about the Greyling pretty quick. It loves the sunlight, thrives on it I think, which you wouldn’t expect to look at it. Sleeps from dusk till dawn. Precisely too, so I have to be on my toes there.

  Can’t sleep in, or I reckon that’ll be all for me. I’ll go the same way as the cat. Excuse me talking with my mouth full but it’s unavoidable. It’s become habit. No, more like a survival technique. While we’re awake, me and the Greyling, I talk. Constantly. Only thing that keeps the It at bay. It presses itself against a wall and listens, like it’s doing now. Follows me around the house to keep me in earshot and drinks in every word. It’s like some odd kind of hypnosis, not really like talking, filling the air with inane rubbish. It’s a spell, a really long spell I’ve got the Greyling under, and it’s easily broken. That’s why I don’t turn the television on any more. You can get distracted and forget. I’ve had a couple of close calls like that.

  I’m forced to sing to it while I’m in the shower. Quite loud so it can hear. I’m not a singer, I wasn’t built for music. At least it doesn’t come in the shower with me, just lurks in the room. It could do with a wash, though. Smells like an old attic. Not sure how to approach the washing of the Greyling. Or how it would react if I did. That’s why I haven’t done it yet. Neither would you if you’d been anywhere near those teeth.

  It’s not a looker. Man shaped, if that shape had been stretched and buckled. All its joints seem like they’ve been screwed inwards. Makes you think it must be slow and weak, looking at it. It’s not, though. Definitely not.

  I don’t know where it came from. I was putting the bin out one night, only takes a few moments so I left the door open. By the time I got back in the house it had snuck in. I leave the front or the back door open whenever I can now, but it doesn’t seem interested in leaving. Knowing my luck I’ll end up with another one creeping in at some point.

  I hate this time of the year when the days start getting longer. The winter wasn’t so bad, when the Greyling was getting itself off to sleep around four, five o’clock. Meant I had the evenings to myself. Could stop talking for a few hours too, although I’ve got to admit I still end up nattering on to myself. Force of habit. I think the whole experience has made me a bit eccentric. It would do the same to anyone, I suppose. These later evenings mean I have to keep my mouth going for longer. It’s a hell of a lot of time to fill up with talking. Sometimes I end up babbling nonsense just for the sake of stringing words together. The way an old person might coo and chitter to a beloved pet.

  The first couple of weeks were… fractious. I couldn’t work out what to do about the Greyling. Still haven’t really. I thought about reporting it to the police, but something tells me that wouldn’t work out very well. I’m not sure what I’d tell them to be honest. All it has done so far is menace me and eat the cat. There’s no doubt that it’s got more murderous intentions in mind… but if the police came round I suspect the Greyling would simply hide, and do a good job of it. That wouldn’t make me look very good. And it might be angry after.

  A while back I got tired of it following me around, always being in the corner of my eye. It’s just creepy. So I locked it in the bedroom. That’s why I don’t have a bedroom door any longer. It went completely berserk. For the sake of my doors I haven’t tried doing that again. I’ve never seen anything that furious. It could quite easily pluck my arms and legs out of the sockets. When it comes to the Greyling, I just don’t know what to do.

  Cleaning and talking to yourself seem to go together, don’t they? You know, it went mad when I locked it in the bedroom, but it’s fairly calm when it comes to me leaving the house. It has to be done at some time, going to shops and whatnot. Mowing the lawn. Posting a letter. Essential things you can’t get away from. Work, when I used to. I was invited to a meeting, and invited to leave. A result of my recently-developed eccentricities, I think.

  The bloody thing sets traps for me sometimes. They’re crude, but that makes them no less disturbing. I came home one time and the It had left me a sandwich on the stairs. A sandwich. There was a tube of superglue inside it. You can imagine what it had in mind. On another occasion it stuck a strand of gaffer tape across an open doorway at what the It guessed to be mouth-height, presumably for me to walk into. I got it across the neck. That gave it the idea that I’m garrotable, means I have to check all doorways whenever I get home.

  I tried to find out a bit more about the It, but where do you begin? I’ve never seen anything like it before in my life. It’s like a horrible cross between a human and a shaved lemur. I spent a while at the library on the internet, looking through websites of weird and wonderful creatures and mythical beasts and that sort of thing, sites about yetis and other things that don’t exist but people have photos of. There was nothing that looked or sounded anything like the Greyling. Maybe this Greyling is the only Greyling there is. Which isn’t very helpful for me, because it means I’m stuck without a handbook or instructions of any kind.

  I could take my own pictures, and I’ve tried. They don’t come out very well, though. It would be great if I could get a good clear picture of the Greyling, send it off to… whoever you send such things to. The news, a science magazine, I don’t know. But it doesn’t like to pose. And any pictures I do get come out smudgey. When you look at them it might as well be a gaunt old man diving out of frame. A better camera might produce clearer results, but I can’t exactly afford one of those when I’ve been invited out of my job.

  And what if this Greyling is the only Greyling? Wouldn’t that mean I held some sort of responsibility for it’s safeguarding? That worries me a lot. We’ve all heard what these sciency-types get up to, all their poking and prodding and cutting and after all that the It will be dead. Yes, it ate my cat, but perhaps cats are one of the main things it eats. I like chicken and beef and things like that. Cows eat grass, birds eat insects, that’s just the way things are.

  I’ve got neighbours on either side of me. I figured it might eventually get tired of waiting and slope off for an easier meal. There’s Mrs. Whitby out in her garden, hanging out her washing. She’s seventy-six and getting frail and has about as many visitors as I do and there’s nothing stopping it sneaking into her house when she isn’t looking. Horrible thing to think, that is, isn’t it? I’m not making excuses, but when you’re having to watch where you’re going all the time and you’re talking to yourself all the time and it’s been going on for months, well, sometimes you don’t think right, do you? It doesn’t really matter what dark thoughts I might have had. The It shows no inclination to go anywhere. Pushing it out with the broom seems unwise. The It seems to be easily riled up. And Mrs. Whitby might be going deaf, but not even she could fail to her it shrieking if I tried to shove it out while she was tending to her azaleas.

  I’d miss the Greyling if it went.

  Can’t believe I just said that. With all this nattering on, I come out with the funniest things sometimes. It often strikes me that I’m quite lucky there’s only the It around to hear me droning on. Anybody else would’ve had me locked up by now. Quick call to the funny farm, and off I go.

  I wonder if it would follow me there?

  When it comes down to it, I don’t really mind the Greyling so much. There’s no woman in this life of mine, no children pattering across these floors, just me and these walls that the Greyling clings to. There’s never a question these days whether it will be there, my strange and terrible companion. Always listening. Always attentive. Never boring. It chose to come here, and chooses to stay.

  A lot like a friend.

  I, er.

  Oh.

  I don’t know what to say.

            Er…

The Definitive It.

Let's jump right on that bandwagon!

I feel justified too. Stephen King's been a huge influence on my burgeoning career as a writer, and It had a major effect on me. So damn right I'm going to wade in on this.

Now, it's been a while (yet again) since I've posted. I was just getting some momentum going, then... you know, events happened. I'll talk about some of it in a future post, not quite ready yet.

But there's no better time than now to discuss It.

I'm going to state my conclusion up front: I believe the upcoming movie adaptation will be the definitive version of the story. Novel included. There. I said it. And you know what? I mean it.
There's going to be a lot of 'It's and 'it's going on here. Should be fun to keep up with.

Here's my raggled copy. Probably worth about 20p.

Which is less than a Freddo. Seriously, how do they cost so much?

Before I go any further, and hopefully before the hatchets come out, let me jot down a couple of provisos. I love Stephen King, right? I've gobbled up his books since I was just starting my teens, and there's no doubt that he's a big influence on me becoming a writer. Also, most (note that word most) of the novel It is great - just be aware that I'm going to argue how King started out very, very good, and got a hell of a lot better as his career went on.

Also, I don't have a lot of room to judge, really. My first novel probably sold 6 copies (3 to me), and my second isn't due out until April 2018 (subtle plug for A Graveyard Visible there), so I'm not exactly at the top of my game yet. Still, I retain the right to be as critical as everyone believes they have the God-given right to be on the internet - and I shall do so constructively.

The main thing, and let's get this out of the way now, is the ending. We can all agree that the ending of the original 1990 mini-series didn't work. It's not just the special effects either (can't expect much; It was made for 90's American tv, and there was no budget for effects, and no room at all for any of the gore in the book). Dramatically, it's flat.

The novel has the same problem. The climactic confrontation doesn't work, not when the characters are kids, and certainly not when they're adults (both battles run in parallel, switching from one to another in an attempt to give a double-rush of excitement). You see, we've spent near enough a thousand pages following their various clashes with It in it's multiple unpleasant forms... and then at the end, apparently the best our human minds can do with It's 'true' form is to conjure it as a big spider. Oh well. This form simply doesn't compete, terror-wise, with a psychotic clown called Pennywise. Nor is it as scary as the leper, or the werewolf, or any other of It's visceral, beastly, life-threatening variants. In truth, this last form is a real disappointment, and we would have been better off with the clown. There are other issues, such as the Turtle, which is about as 'out there' (readers of the novel might get that one) as King has managed to go, and I suspect that his editor let him get away with a little bit too much.

I mean, really. Even back at the time I thought we 

would have been better off with no ending than this.

The point of all this? From what I've read, the makers of the new It 2 part movie are dropping the ending entirely. No spider. Hooray! Common sense prevails! The weakest part of the novel is being removed. What are they replacing it with? Who knows, but I'm actually looking forward to finding out. At least now there's a chance that, come the final reel of film two, I might not be disappointed this time.
The only part of the prolonged end sequence that works is the devastation that descends upon the town of Derry, and how the place falls apart. I do hope that some element of this is retained somewhere along the line.

Is that all I've got? Nope. There are other issues, things that absolutely would not translate to screen, some for legal reasons I suspect. The whole 'Beverly' scene towards the end (if you've read It, you know the one, if you haven't, then you really need to be prepared for a no-holds-barred experience) has also been left out, which is only right, really. In fact, something I'm hoping has changed significantly is the portrayal of Beverly throughout the story, particularly as an adult. She's pretty much a vessel for men to do what they want. You can argue that's caused by the treatment she receives from her father, but it's all a bit flat and one-dimensional. And don't get me started on the sappy performance of her in the 1990 mini-series. Let's leave that in the past where it belongs.
From the sounds of things, the amount of (mostly) verbal abuse that the Losers Club receive is going to be toned down, and I think that's a shame. We have to be honest about bullying. Kids can be really unpleasant shitheads. There's no point kidding ourselves; if you can think a vile thought, then you can bet that some kid somewhere on this planet is gleefully shouting it at someone at the top of her/his lungs.

Cannot wait. Absolutely cannot wait.

They're making other changes too - the forms It takes throughout the novel are being altered for the screen. We're going to get the Leper and the dead kids, and that might be all from the original. I'm all for seeing something new. Plus it will be good to get the Leper this time - that part of the novel is freaky. And the Leper isn't going to be CGI. Look it up if you don't believe me...

Does it sound like I'm not a fan of the novel? Because that's not strictly true. It is the best two thirds of any horror novel I've ever read. The sense of place and time it conveys is phenomenal. So rich. You can almost smell the heat of the Barrens, and hear the running of the water (in both canals and sewers). I just think there's always a problem with having a main baddie/creature who's true form we cannot comprehend. If our mind can't see it, then how's something supposed to write it (it? It? it It? Aaaaargh)? Anyway, I'd place good money on this being the best horror film of the year, and if it's not... well, I'll eat my hat. Or your hat. Or your dinner. Whatever looks better.

Let's all report back after the movie's come out, what do you say?

Laters.

(Click here to see if I can write any better.)