IBC122 Shaft Number 247

Join us in Innsmouth Library for a delve into Basil Copper's subterranean horror, Shaft Number 247. We talk Solar Pons, radionics, Paranoia RPG, Corridors anthology, daleks, disco and dreams.
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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:11

Welcome to Insmith Screen.

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Greetings, traveller, and thank you for joining us today in a relatively sunny Insmouth, it has to be said. Spring is in the air, perhaps, even in this decayed old seaport. And as you can see, we've brought you straight into the library today, where we're going to be reading a story by an author who I feel doesn't get as much exposure and acclaim as he perhaps deserves. I'm one of your guides, Rob Poynton.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

And I'm the other one, Tim Mendies. Yes, we're going to be looking at Shaft No. 247 by Basil Copper. And you mentioned that spring is in the air. Does that mean that the shogoths are in bloom at the moment? Those blooming shogoths. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, mating season.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

That accounts for that rather unusual fragrance in the air, perhaps. Mating shogoths. Always, always good.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

I wondered what them weird noises down at the harbour were every night.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Every night is a weird noise night in Innsmouth, isn't it, in one way or the other? Isn't it just that's largely because Innsmouth Swinging Club is kind of very adjacent to and pretty much the same as Innsmouth Swimming Club, I do believe. But uh perhaps we'll we'll draw a discrete vowel over that.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Didn't somebody didn't one of the sitcoms do that? Somebody going to a swinging club and it was like, I thought it's a swimming club. That was their excuse.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

If it hasn't happened in a sitcom, it should. Yeah. So before we get into the story though, we have a couple of news items. Uh the first is musical, I believe, sir.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Indeed. Yes. Over over Easter starting the Thursday the second, and my band Groovy and Green will be doing three shows. Um, we'll be playing in London on the Thursday, then Northampton on Good Friday, and then on the Saturday, we'll be up in Leeds. And uh, yes, for all for all you wondering, yes, we will be doing the shuttered room. And um, we're currently working on another one, a little um depressive number by the name of The Outsider. So there we go, there we go. Yes, existential dread in musical form, marvelous.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Indeed, indeed. And of course, our other news, as you'll know, if you've been following their socials, is the Innsmouth Literary Festival 2026. Our two special guests of honour this year, author Stephen Jones and artist Les Edwards. We're really looking forward to seeing them. And speaking of Stephen Jones, Titan have just re-released the Shadows Over Innsmouth anthology. We're seeing if we can arrange to have some copies of that new pressing there for Stephen to sign. We might put something up on the website, perhaps an advance order system or something. So do keep an eye out on the Innsmouth Forum. And tickets and trader spaces are now available. You can book them online at the Innsmouth Gold website. So, our author today is Basil Copper. And as I said at the start, I've kind of put him a bit in the same category as people like R. Chetwind Hays, and maybe people like Cutner and some of those other authors that were very, very good, but don't seem to have got the same acclaim as the big names.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

Yeah, it's interesting because he was a very much a contemporary of like Ramsay Campbell and Brian Lumley and people like that. It was all around the same time and also heavily involved with Arkham House. So it's interesting because, yeah, I mean, uh obviously when I started collecting a lot of this stuff, you go for the Arkham House stuff, and even then Basil Copper's work was kind of, I don't know, just not as readily available. I mean not as collectable, I guess, which is really strange.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, the story we're reading today, I first read, I I guess most people probably first read this in the Cthulhu 2000 anthology. And I did have his novel, The House of the Wolf. I I read that about a year ago, I remember. But it it's not uh an author you see regularly on the the bookshelves, is he? No, no.

SPEAKER_01 4:22

I mean, I think which what was it that I got into his story that got me into his work? It was Beyond the Reef, the Lovecraftian novella.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

That was in one of those Innsmouth collections, I think, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_01 4:36

Yes, it was. I think that was the first of his I read, and they're followed by this. Well, I'll get into the publication in a moment. But I didn't realise that he's actually had um TV adaptations. Yes. Yeah, Camera Obscura was an episode of Rob Serling's Night Gallery.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

I didn't know that. It was actually very prolific, including uh a series of solar ponds stories, Mr. Leth's uh sort of Sherlock Holmes character.

SPEAKER_02 5:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

Basil Copper was born in London in 1924. Uh Tim's about to giggle. Copper moved with his family to Kent as a boy. Little Willie, as he was affectionately known, I told you, attended the local grammar school uh and he started writing for the school magazine, took part in amateur dramatics, and was a member of the football team. He was a voracious reader and soon discovered the works of M. R. James and Edgar Allan Poe. He began training as a journalist, but was conscripted into the Second World War, where eventually he became a radio operator with a gunboat flotilla off the Normandy beaches during the D-Day landings. That's quite an experience, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 5:44

Bloody hell.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

Yeah. After D. Mobby resumed his career in the regional press, he became editor of the Seven Oaks edition of the Kent Messenger. He made his fiction debut in the fifth book of Pan Horror Stories in 1964 with The Spider, which I remember actually. I do remember that story. The Pan Book of Horror Stories. That was an amazing collection.

SPEAKER_02 6:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

Well, he was paid£10 for the spider, and four years later he gave up journalism to write full time. The first of his stories published by Derleth was House in the Tarn in Dark Things in 1971. And Copper went on to have a long-lived relationship with Derleth's Arkham House, which published a f several of his collections, and his novels Necropolis and The House of the Wolf. Interestingly enough, uh relating to our Strange Shadows podcast, Copper's novel The Great White Space of 1975, which is uh an expedition into a remote part of Asia, features a character called Clark Ashton Scarsdale. Nice, nice little homage there.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

Yeah, because that that was basically his homage to Poe and Lovecraft, wasn't it? The Great White Space. It's um very much um Mountains of Madness, um Arthur Gordon Pym of night took it, that one.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Yeah. As well as Weird Fiction and the Macabre, he also wrote Hardboiled Thrillers featuring the Los Angeles P.I. Mike Faraday, a sort of homage to Philip Marlowe. And as I mentioned, after the death of August Derleth, Copper took Derleth's Solar Ponds detective series in hand. In 1982, he published the Solar Ponds Omnibus and continued the canon himself, producing seven collections of novellas and the novel Solar Ponds versus the Devil's Claw in 2004. What a great name.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

That's good as well, that one. Because that was the other way I got into copper, because I was a big fan of SolarPod.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

And yeah, you mentioned that TV adaptation there. That was uh The Camera Obscura in Rod Serling's Night Gallery in 1971.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

Amusingly, going back to Little Willie, um, I had a brief look through his bibliography earlier, and one of his Mike Faraday books is called House Dick.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

It just writes itself, doesn't it? This material. Doesn't it? In early 2008, a bio-bibliography was published called Basil Copper, A Life in Books, compiled and edited by Stephen Jones. Ah. That received the 2009 British Fantasy Award for the best non-fiction. Uh, and Copper received a number of other accolades as well. He was a member of the Crime Writers Association. He was also one of England's leading film collectors with a private archive of almost a thousand titles, and he founded the Tumbridge Wells Vintage Film Society. I always have vision of Dr. Fibes. Was it Terry Thomas, wasn't it? In the uh with his uh naughty vintage films. Indeed. Yeah. So there we are, a very prolific author, and not just in the the weird genre. Actually, I've never I'm not sure I've ever read solar ponds. You know, I really should get into some of those.

SPEAKER_01 9:05

I mean, I I really like solar ponds, especially the the weirder end of it. Yeah, there's some good stuff. He Durlith did a damn good job of it. Because uh because you know the story of that, right? He wanted to write Sherlock Holmes, so he wrote Sherlock Holmes, and the estate told it was stop it, uh, so he changed the name.

SPEAKER_00 9:24

So they're essentially Sherlock Holmes stories. Well, you know, sometimes if you can't go forward, you go sideways, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:30

Yes, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

Nice. So as I said, I read this in Cthulhu 2000, but uh, has it been published in other places?

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Well, it was first published in the 1980 Arkham House anthology New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by none other than Ramsay Campbell. Uh, I'm going from the 1988 Grafton edition, which coincidentally we talked about in our last episode of Strange Shadows. Ah, yes. When we were talking about um M. Brundage's racy weird tales covers, and we were talking about uh sexed-up paperbacks, and I brought up that my personal favorite so bad it's awesome cover is this little doozy, which uh for for the listener, it's basically there's a a drawing of a sort of squiggly hound of tinderlosy kind of monster in the foreground, and behind it is a woman in a basque and stockings going, oh yes, right rather strange cover.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

And it's very you know, it's very well executed.

SPEAKER_01 10:46

I love it, it's one of my favourites, but it's one of my favorite covers. Just because I remember when I first picked this up, I was like, What in the hell? I can't find out who did it, who did the cover. There's no credit for it in the paperback.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

Oh, I can't remember because I think it was the same artist for all three. Right. Uh I I did hear it earlier today, fun enough. If I can find it, I'll I'll put it down in the show notes below. Right.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

Well, there you go. Yeah, so that was its first publication. Was in that. And then it went on to be in a couple of other collections, including Cthulhu 2000. And I think it's in is it in one of the Blackwings? Or no, one of the Chaossium Cycle books.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

Uh right. Right. So, shaft number two four seven begins with a quote from the man himself. The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination. H.P. Lovecraft. Now, this is taken from a letter from Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long on the 27th of February 1931. And uh Lovecraft was waxing lyrical about Greek mathematicians, many of whom I've never heard of, and their names I'm not going to begin to try and pronounce. But uh yeah, this this was uh basically Lovecraft talking about the quest for knowledge in its purest form.

SPEAKER_01 12:13

Right, gotcha.

SPEAKER_00 12:15

And I think, well, the the interesting thing for this, for something that's in a Cthulhu connect collection, uh and a mythos collection, is there's no direct mythos references in this story anyway. No. There's there's certainly no shopping list or or anything like that. And yet this is a very Lovecraftian story, I feel.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Yeah, I mean, I would say it was a chamber piece kind of thing. It's more of a mood piece than it is. There's no action or anything, it's purely atmosphere, isn't it? And it it's it's claustrophobia boiled down into print. It's tremendously effective at getting across that feeling of claustrophobia. It's uh yeah, and that, you know, if you've ever done that, you've ever been stuck in a confined space, and all you can think about is getting outside. And that's precisely the whole gist of this story, isn't it? If you think about it.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Yeah, this is this is a bit like the feeling. I remember, you know, being on the tube in London once and it just stopped and the lights went out, and we sat there for three minutes in the dark, then the lights came on again, and we sat there for another 15 minutes, and it's getting hotter and hotter, and uh, of course, there was no announcement. Yeah. Yeah. And then off we went eventually. Yeah, rather disquieting.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

Yeah, you said about there's no mythos elements, but I wonder if that was actually down to the editor of this, and who curated it was Mr. Ramsey Campbell, who at this point in his career had moved away from referencing Lovecraft. So a few quite a few of the stories in this don't. They're all Lovecraftian without mentioning the mythos or anything like that. Because his story in this faces at Pine Dunes is one of my favourites, it's a great story. But again, it it's a mood piece. It's it's more of a weird tale than a Lovecraftian, if that makes any sense.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Do you think this shows are sort of maturing in terms of what constitutes a mythos tower or a Lovecraftian tower as well? Yeah. We're looking beyond those obvious trappings, the window dressing of you know, tentacles and lots of books on the shelf and all that. It it's um it's an attempt to expand, which I think I think Lovecraft would have approved.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

Yeah, because I mean the other s it's a tremendous collection, but we've actually covered several of the stories in it now. Um, obviously it's got Crouch End, Stephen King. Yeah, um Second Wish, Brian Lumley, Dark Awakening, Frank Belnap Long, This, Black Man with a Horn, T D Klein, yeah, Black Tome of Alsophocus, which we covered. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Faced Pine Dunes. It's a cracking little collection.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

So we begin with our protagonist, Driscoll, who's a captain of the watch, and our setting is what we describe as sort of a a subterranean society. Now, what I like with this is the lack of detail. I can see how that might kind of confuse some people or frustrate them, but I think the lack of detail is what makes this, in that we've dropped straight into it. There's no backstory, we don't know what's going on, we know something has happened. And at first you might think, oh, these are in some sort of mining operation, but it it is clearly something much bigger than that.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Yeah, it's like um, you know, that it's that classic doomed earth, we all move underground scenario. Essentially, that's how it feels to me. But I love the fact that obviously it's got such a British feel to it, because what would happen if that happened? The bureaucrats would take control. And you know, it would be shifts and red tape and signing things in triplicate and and all that, and that's kind of come into it. It's like office middle management gone mental, hasn't it?

SPEAKER_00 16:01

Yeah, it very much captures that feel, doesn't it? That bureaucracy, yeah, which is uh incredibly stifling. I mean, I suppose some people have drawn parallels between this and the Cold War and Soviet Russia. Uh I don't know, maybe that was an influence, but it feels more to me like that. Uh, yes, if you go to the bureau, then you give the man the form, then you have to take it to account, and then you you it it is more that sort of very British bureaucratic feeling than anything else.

SPEAKER_01 16:31

Yeah, it feels in that way, it feels kind of akin to what Charles Stross does, but in a less comedic manner. This is taking it to its kind of again, just adding to that claustrophobia because you're stifled not only by your surrounding, but creativity creatively too. You're stifled by everything else.

SPEAKER_00 16:51

And Driscoll is in the control room. We get nice descriptions of of everything here and the characters involved. He's there with Wainwright, who has got earphones clamped over his head and was turning one of his calibrating instruments anxiously. Now, we never find out what any of these instruments are for or what's going on or what exactly they're doing, but it sounds pretty important. He's a captain of the watch. It sounds like he's got an important job to do. And um Driscoll's not too sure about Wainwright, is he? He thinks he's uh he's losing it a bit, perhaps.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

Yeah, like uh yeah, you get the you get the impression that he's a bit uh, I think is the way you'd describe it.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

But something's unsettled him, but his musings were interrupted by a sharp, sibilant exclamation from Wainwright. Some activity in Shaft six three nine, he reported, swivelling to look at the captain of the watch with watery blue eyes. Driscoll shook his head, a thin smile on his lips. Ah, it's nothing. Some water in the shaft, probably. Wainwright tightened his mouth. Perhaps even so, it ought to be reported. It it's like they're watching for something, or they're making sure that something doesn't get in, or everything is sealed up. So at first, when I first read this, so it's a mine, I don't want it to flood kind of thing, perhaps, you know. But as as I said, the situation is way beyond that, as it turns out.

SPEAKER_01 18:16

Yeah, I like how Driss Driscoll he get at this point in the story, he's very much doing the rationalizing thing, isn't he? He's like, okay, I've reported it. It's water in the tank, it's water in the shaft, it ain't nothing to worry about. You know, there have been 17 similar reports in the past year, and it was water every time. Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_00 18:38

And he even says he thinks that uh Wainwright is beginning to show signs of psychotic disturbance. Uh and then we we we start getting these little details added in. We learn that there's 40 miles of galleries and tunnels alone in the section under his own command. That's uh big underground space, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 18:59

Well, that's it. Society has obviously moved on the ground. We don't know why. We can only assume some cataclysm or you know, it did Cthulhu rise? Who knows? You know the implications are endless, really, aren't they?

SPEAKER_00 19:15

Yes, yes. I I I did like we get mentioned of his taking notes with his radionic pencil as well. Uh that wasn't something I was familiar with. Radionics originally was uh developed by someone called Albert Abrams in the early 1900s, and it was one of these therapies where you're sort of hooked up to elec electromagnetic impulses and it balances out your energies. You know, no scientific basis whatsoever. But uh I think old Albert did okay out of it for a little while. In fact, I think in some forms it's still around, although, as I say, been thoroughly debunked. But basically, electromagnetic tech or electromagnetic radiation, you're writing with a radioactive pencil.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

Yeah, I I'd never heard of that either.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

And we get the names of some other characters as here. We get the name of the supervisor, Hort, who was not really a humorous man. Uh there was no point in knocking himself out for someone so devoid of the absurd in his makeup, which I thought was a nice little observation. And you you get a very clear image of this Holt character, didn't you? He's uh very serious and he's checking all the rules that have been uh adhered to. Yeah. And he gets that worrying comment off of him, I'd like to see you when you come off of watch, Holt went on. He had a slightly sardonic look on his thin face. That doesn't bode well.

SPEAKER_01 20:45

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of jobsworthing going on here, isn't there? That's the that's what I kept thinking about. Oh, this guy's a proper jobsworth, you know.

SPEAKER_00 20:53

And I do think Driscoll is a little bit so Wainwright is going a bit psychotic, but then his relief comes up, Kramp, who's uh about 10 minutes early. Krampf is very keen, and Driscoll doesn't like this either though.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

Yeah, Krampf was always more zealous than most of the personnel here. Driscoll knew little about him. And yeah, dapper and self-confident, his dark hair bent open over the panel opposite, listening to Wainwright's handing over report. Um, yeah, there was something about him that Driscoll didn't understand, did he? It's yeah, it says here, he had none of the anxiety to please that Wainwright displayed. Indeed, he exuded a disconcerting air of suppressed energy and egotistical drive.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

Yes, yes, as uh shown by the jaunty thumbs up that he gave that's a very sort of British thing as well. I can almost imagine this sort of 1930s kind of thing, you know. Oh, here's a here's a fine how'd you do, you know. Just do your job, man. Have none of these. Theatrix.

SPEAKER_01 22:00

Oh, you can yeah, sort of basal faulty era John Cleese. You know, that that very Monty Python, really, the characters in the, you know, their office stereotypes.

SPEAKER_00 22:14

Yeah. So Driscoll finishes its shift, he's onto the canteen. There's no one in there but Carlson, a plump boarding man. And uh it looks like they've got a sort of ongoing game of chess going on over their lunch or dinner or whatever this mill is. We get no indication particularly of time. I I think there's something about it it was nine o'clock as time was measured in this place, you know. So obviously no daylight, no sunlight, no moon or anything like that.

SPEAKER_01 22:44

No, I think it was even more, I think it was even more vague than that. It was night as time is measured. Uh right. Yeah, it's even vaguer than that. They I think they have um a day and night cycle, yeah. You know, like they do on space stations, things like that, where the lights will come on at certain for certain hours and then they'll go off again.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

Talk is about Wainwright again. Poor old Wainwright gets uh gossips about a lot in this story, doesn't he? Carlson says, Well, it's no secret. We have our eye on things. Wainwright was on watch with Collins three weeks ago when you were indisposed. And then we get this mention, uh, and again, this I like the way this is drip fed in. It's certainly not been the same since Deems went to dot dot dot. So we're not quite sure what happened to Deems or where he is, but again, it's not sounding good.

SPEAKER_01 23:36

Yeah, out there is what he finally says, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 23:40

Yes, both capitalized. Yes there. And when we get outside mentioned later on, it's capitalized as well, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 23:48

Yes, I noticed that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:50

So he goes to see his supervisor, Holt. Again, nice description. Holt was a tall, thin, aesthetic man with a bald head and hooded grey eyes. He wore a blue tunic zipped up to the neck and a scarlet badge, denoting his rank of gallery master. He was in his early sixties, but despite his years, there was a dynamic athleticism in his wiry frame that many people found unnerving. It it has the air of it's like being interviewed by the Gestapo or something.

SPEAKER_01 24:23

Yeah. Oh, it's very much in keeping with a lot of the dystopian fiction, isn't it? Where it's all corporations and companies and things like that, you know, everything from Blade Runner to Philip K. Dick and all this kind of stuff, right? Ballard. It's always companies, conglomerates, corporations that are in charge, and it's always these you must go and see the overseer. You've been called in for a review.

SPEAKER_00 24:50

You get the feeling once the eye is on you, so to speak, it's very difficult to shake off. Yeah. Yeah. Brazil, the Terry Gillian film as well. That kind of thing. Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. And uh Deems comes up again. I won't conceal from you, Driscoll, that we're worried, especially after the other business. His eyes have grown serious, and he looks searchingly at the captain of the watch. Deams, Driscoll said. Hawk nodded. Exactly. We have to be so careful. You understand almost better than I the implications of such a situation. We must avoid any leakage. So the cover-up is in operation, but doesn't want to arouse any uneasiness among the personnel. And uh this is something that they're they're not addressing outright. You know, it's all sly sort of innuendos, or oh well, you know what happened there. Again, very British, like a scandal that has gone on. Oh, did you hear about what what she did at number 37?

SPEAKER_01 25:52

Yes. Yeah, very much. Yeah. It's nicely done. And like when we especially when we're discussing Clark Ash and Smith, you notice repeated uses of certain phrases and words to get a feeling across. And in this, it's always watery, slimy, seeping, leaking. Something is encroaching on this bubble.

SPEAKER_00 26:16

Yeah. And in in in an attempt to make it uh more pleasant, because now he he gets a day off, he decides he's gonna go to Central Records, he's gonna start doing a bit of digging and investigating. And we know what digging leads to, don't we, in these stories? And we find out that today is Jasmine Day. A soft breeze was coming through the vents. The scent was jasmine today, Driscoll noted. Driscoll liked Jasmine Day above all others. It was a pity it only came round about once every two months. So it's almost like in order to make up for the fact they're in this underground sweat box every day or every certain days, different scents are pumped through in order to, I don't know, clear the atmosphere or make it somewhat more pleasant for them.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

Well again, that ties into the end, doesn't it? And all that. I mean, I mean that that's a great bit of sci-fi world building, you know. Because yeah, you're stuck in an underground thing, it ain't gonna smell very nice after a while, is it? Sweaty bodies and sewerage systems and you know, rotten food, and oh, it's not gonna be good.

SPEAKER_00 27:24

Overworked air conditioning and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. And uh yeah, smells figure quite largely in this one as well, don't they? We we get a range of scents as we go through. Yes. So he's allocated a desk, desk number 64, where he can go and start doing his research. And he basically finds that the particular time he is looking for is not there. The information you require is in the restricted section. To consult the entry, you require verified permission of authority. And you just know when he's done this, there's a little red light flashing somewhere on a screen that someone's looking at, going, ah, what's happening here?

SPEAKER_01 28:04

Yeah, I always liked that observation in seven, you know, the Morgan Freeman Brad Pitt movie, one of my favorite movies. Um, that somewhere libraries flag people who've taken out Mein Kampf and the works of the Marquis de Sard and things like that. It's all at a database somewhere, right?

SPEAKER_00 28:24

Oh shit. Oh shit.

SPEAKER_01 28:25

Yeah, I know that was the first thing I thought is like, oh god, I've screwed them.

SPEAKER_00 28:30

So I I suppose this is in the best tradition of the weird towel, right? There's a little bit of a mystery here and a puzzle, and what Driscoll really should do is go, oh well, I'm gonna go home and eat my tea and go to bed and start work tomorrow. But he's got the thread now, hasn't he? It's gonna start pulling on this thread. Yeah. Um and we get that slowly building uh sort of monomania. He was irritated with himself. Something had occurred to cause ripples on the smooth and placidly ordered surface of his life. He didn't like that. He sat there frowningly for another ten minutes or so, silently wrestling with the problem. Then he rose and abruptly quitted the historical section. The long armored glass doors slid too quietly behind him, leaving the earnest questers after knowledge to their hermetic silence. There's some very nice phrases in this and language. And again, just a little bit of extra world building. Why has the historical section got armoured glass doors?

SPEAKER_01 29:30

Yeah, the it's all a bit Yeah, it is all a bit strange, isn't it? I can see them parallels to uh the Soviet bloc. Yeah, you know, and yeah, the sort of information societies and all that kind of thing. And you know, if you wanna you wanna talk you wanna find out about this, you've got to go through this screening and that screening and maybe end up in a room with a gun placed in the back of your head, you know.

SPEAKER_00 29:56

So he decides he's gonna visit Wainwright, which is perhaps seen as a bit unusual, and he knows that there's cameras, there's CCTV all over the place. And there's no reason for secrecy, he says, but he got he's got a feeling that perhaps he he needs to be discreet. And he he almost gets into sort of spy operations here. He goes for a walk, he gets into a car, he gets out, he gets into another one, almost like he's trying to shake off a towel or avoid uh any surveillance. And uh he ends up at Wainwright's apartment. Wainwright lives in gallery 4000 and 34, which gives you some idea of the scale of this place again as well.

SPEAKER_01 30:40

Yeah, because he he gets his car to station 68, and you've got to remember this is Justin hitting the block that he's part of, you know. It's essentially a country, isn't it? I guess that's what it is. What you you know? Is this England?

SPEAKER_00 30:55

Yeah, you know, yeah. Well, we we have no indication of place or time or anything, do we? No, no.

SPEAKER_01 31:02

I mean, you know, just if you think of the sheer scale of it, you know, is this England is the next block over Wales, and then the block up there Scotland? You know, does each country have its own section?

SPEAKER_00 31:15

And uh we we get a little more drip fed about Deems. We get Deem's death, so we know that he's gone, and we get Deem's departure as well, which is interesting. It's a death and then the departure. Make of that what you will. Uh Wainwright is a little bit surprised to see him. Your visit is most unusual, so that kind of reinforces that thing that in this society you you don't just go around dropping in on people. It's uh why why would you do that? It's almost, I imagine, I want everyone isolated. I imagine his apartment is, you know, 10 foot by 12 foot kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01 31:50

Something else I noticed here is you keep getting mentions of music and it's always oozing from hidden louvres. Because you have it here, it's like piped in music. You always get the feeling of it's it's to keep them sedate. You get this horrible sort of feeling of it's gonna be lift music, right? It's gonna be musak, you know. The whirlitz are hits of James Last.

SPEAKER_00 32:16

Kenny G on saxophone.

SPEAKER_01 32:18

Oh god, smooth jazz, there's no need.

SPEAKER_00 32:23

Now, here I think is where we get confirmation that this is England. May I offer you some refreshment? I'm partial to tea. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 32:31

Oh, yeah, very much so, and especially the fact of that when he says, Oh, this is really nice tea, it's like, oh, thank you. I blend it myself. It's my own special blend of tea. That's like, yeah, this is the home counties, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 32:45

I thought this is interesting as well. I I don't know if this is something or not. So Wainwright gets up to make the tea. While he busied himself making the tea, Driscoll sat with his heavy hands folded in his lap quite at ease, his lids drooping over his eyes as though half asleep, but he missed nothing that went on in the small world of which he found himself. It was not easy to shake off the habits of a lifetime. So is he used to spying on people or being very observant in some way? Does that form part of his job or is is has he had some other role to play?

SPEAKER_01 33:19

Well, you get the impression that they all do, because in the in this the brief interactions we've seen with Demig and and with Driscoll and the other chap and Wainwright and all that, they're all spying on each other and reporting back to Hawke. It's that office thing, isn't it? It's that office of oh, did you see what she did? Oh, she she nicked such and such's post-it note. You know, it's it's that, but on a more grand scale.

SPEAKER_00 33:46

And I've also just been reminded of the RPG called Paranoia. If anyone has not played that, that's a fantastic game where you're in this kind of society and uh you basically obey the computer. The computer is your friend. Nice. And your team will be given certain things, certain tasks, like go to this sector and discover the spy. It's illegal for anyone to be a mutant, all the characters are mutants. It's illegal for anyone to be a spire, all the characters are spies. It's nice. Uh excellent game, real good fun to play.

SPEAKER_01 34:23

Well, that's exactly the sort of the the sort of um feeling this gives me, you know. I mean, it's not far removed from like 1984 or something like that, is it? Because you you could happily imagine this being dropped into that sort of universe and then being done for thought crimes and you know, all that kind of stuff, right? It's um you're there, you do your job, you do your shift, you don't talk to people, you don't say anything, you conform, you obey.

SPEAKER_00 34:50

And and we see that in that the awkwardness between the two of them as well, right? Because did Hall ask you to come? Wayne Wright's worried, obviously, about that. Uh Driscoll felt a sudden flash of pity for him. He shook his head. No, this is entirely private. I wanted to help if I could. Wayne Wright sat, his body awkwardly constricted, his hands together in his lap, slightly leaning forward, as though listening for something that could not be heard by anyone else. So it is like this even someone showing you concern is a cause for suspicion and causes anxiety. What are they after? Why is he looking at me? W why are you here? Even though he's been very polite and giving him tea. It is so English, isn't it? And of course they get talking about Deems. And we get a repeat of that phrase out there again. It was Dems I really wanted to speak about, Discord prompted. And whatever you imagine is in the shafts. In the shafts? Wainwright repeated dully. Driscoll nodded encouragingly. Out there.

SPEAKER_01 35:57

Yeah, and you get the feeling that he's kind of it's almost like a well, it is a bereavement, isn't it? He's kind of lost and alone here, because he says, Yeah, he was the best. There is no one now. So his one and only friend has gone out there, you know. Poor Wainwright's been sitting there going slightly cuckoo ever since. You get that impression, don't you?

SPEAKER_00 36:19

And yeah, Driscoll says again, I just want to help. And Wainwright's response is, if only I could believe that. So again, it points to this deep-rooted paranoia that runs throughout this society.

SPEAKER_01 36:30

Yeah. And he can't he basically Driscoll carries on, doesn't he? I tried to check on the log entries regarding Demes this afternoon. They were not available in Central Records. Wainwright's face had gone white. He visibly trembled, he shook his head. That was extremely unwise.

SPEAKER_00 36:49

So he knows there's a little red light flashing somewhere. But it he starts to open up Wainwright after this, and he he swallowed once or twice but realized that he had to go on. He'd committed himself and it was too late to turn back. It started with shaft number two for seven. You didn't know that, did you? It was a well kept secret. It's right on the edge of our section. It's a strange place. No one wants to say anything about it. The lighting system is always going there, so the tunnels are often in semi-darkness. There have been odd noises and movements in the shafts. Water has come through in one or two places, and some of the valves are rusting.

SPEAKER_01 37:31

I like how that is loaded with thought with foreboding, isn't it? The valves are rusting. A simple phrase like that in this kind of situation could just get the chills on the back of the neck.

SPEAKER_00 37:42

It's like, ooh. And now it's uh it's Driscoll's turn to say, I find that difficult to believe. That's a nice little inversion we get there in the space of this conversation. And Wainwright says, Well, you won't find it in the records, but Deems knew. He was determined to know. He confided in me. The thing had been on his mind for some time. He was convinced there was something in the shafts, and shaft number two four-seven was the obvious. It's the largest. It was the inspection tunnel years ago when people went out there to check on conditions. So this is like the route to the outside kind of place, I guess. Then they said it was on the edge of the complex. So yeah, this is where people were going to check what was happening outside. I wonder how many of those came back.

SPEAKER_01 38:32

Yeah. And um he asks, the shaft with the inspection capsule, is it still there? And Wainwright shook his head. The authorities had it taken out, but the chamber still exists, and it would be no great thing to undo the bolts of the hatch. So that's when the seeds are planted, right there, you know.

SPEAKER_00 38:53

Yeah, even though he says, Why would anyone want to do that?

SPEAKER_01 38:58

Well, you know, you just know that Driscoll's gonna go straight there and have a look now, don't you?

SPEAKER_02 39:03

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:04

And and this is the Lovecraft quote now, right? Why would demons want to go there? To find out, to increase the sum of human knowledge, of course. So this is knowledge for its own sake, but we know where knowledge leads in these stories, don't we?

SPEAKER_01 39:19

Yeah. The movement in the shafts. Dot dot dot. Love it. Great use of an ellipsis there, right? That's really nicely done.

SPEAKER_00 39:29

And then it becomes even more chilling, right? Because uh Drisco asks, Well, what do you think's there, Wayne Wright? The watery blue eyes had a strange filmy expression in them. There is something animate, shall we say. Something that wants to get in touch with us. Why should shaft number two four seven leak, for example? Well, why does it leak? Because something is turning the bolts from the other side. Nice.

SPEAKER_01 39:57

This is this is such a good story in it's one of those that we've discussed about before. It's a great example of those stories where not a lot happens. There's not a lot of locations or action or anything, but it's just a really good mood piece that gets under your skin.

SPEAKER_00 40:14

Yeah. It's what detail there is, is just say it's drip fed through, almost like the dripping of water in the the place. Yeah. And the rest you kind of build yourself, don't you? It is quite Clark Ashton Smithian in that sense, where where he could describe uh a world and its history in a sentence. Yeah. You sort of fill in all the blanks yourself.

SPEAKER_01 40:37

Yeah, but it's massively done in the fact that when you are reading it, I mean, uh as I was reading it, I'm hearing the drip of water, you know, and you can hear the whirr of the air conditioning, you know, the oxygen being pumped in and all that kind of stuff, and the beeps and clangs of doors and all that kind of stuff. It is very tangible.

SPEAKER_00 40:58

Yeah, yeah. So he now asked directly about Deems. Well, what what what happened to Deems? And uh Wainwright describes that the place had a fascination for him, and Deems made his mind up to go out there, and it seems like Wainwright is heading that way as well.

SPEAKER_01 41:20

Yeah, and it's almost a bit of a bit of a sadness, really, isn't it? It's that people who are disenfranchised seem to be drawn to it almost like a siren call. Because he says here, he found life intolerable here, he could not adjust, and he had to discover what lay outside. He made his plans carefully, but even I did not entirely realize his determination. It's it's almost like when all the hope is lost kind of situation, isn't it? Yes. Again, that plays back into the claustrophobia. You have to get out.

SPEAKER_00 41:51

And it kind of goes beyond that as well, because then what we learn is Deems came to see me before he went out. He was more than usually agitated that night, and Driscoll asked, Did he tell you what he was going to do? He said, Well, hints only, but he was tremendously disturbed, more than I'd ever seen him before. He had studied the phenomena, you see, and it was my conviction that he knew what was moving in the shafts out there. He talked about wanting to be free. He was convinced contact was being made for some purpose, that there was a benevolence, a peace. So that's quite interesting, and I think this plays into what happens at the end with almost this siren-like quality of whatever is outside going, I'm outside, it's lovely out here.

SPEAKER_01 42:41

Yeah, pretty much. That's pretty much it. But I mean, I mean, to my mind, it it's all a play on claustrophobia. That's how I've kind of interpreted it. Because it is that siren call of fresh air, you know, you've got to you're stuck in a stifling room, you've got to get out because you're gonna end up killing somebody or someone, you know, you're stuck in a room, confined space with a lot of people you don't like, you know. The the outside, and it's always like when you get out and you step out and you have a sniff, it's nectar, isn't it? It's like, oh god, thank Christ for that. I'm outside finally. It's that kind of feeling to me.

SPEAKER_00 43:18

You've been to gaming conventions.

SPEAKER_02 43:22

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:24

Uh, and we then learn what transpired when Deems did go out that night. We got alarm bells going off, and Wainwright went down to see if there was any sign of his friend. Of course he knew where to go, shaft number two four seven. And this is rather strange. I had a torch with me. There was a lot of water in the tunnel. The cover of the shaft was open, or rather, it was unlatched. I shone the light in the inspection chamber. There was a note at the bottom addressed to me, and a grey viscous material that had been crushed in the edge of the metal doors, it looked like primitive embryonic fingers. That's something that comes up later as well, and I'm still trying to work out exactly what that is. Or I don't know if I should I really want to know.

SPEAKER_01 44:10

I mean, is it fungi? Is it fungal? Is there some kind of fungal mass or something? Or is it you know the remains of poor old the demons?

SPEAKER_00 44:21

I mean Yeah, is it a creature that's that's the fingers are coming in best sort of horror film fashion, those fingers coming round the door sort of thing? And and we get the note as well, that we get that other clue there. What was in the note? This is the first. There will be many others. Come outside. There is a shining peace, a brightness, a freedom. But then even more chillingly, the writing was spider-y, as though it had been cut off suddenly. It was then that I knew that Deems had not written it. So, yeah, of course, as you say, now the seed has been planted and it grows. He's having trouble sleeping. This thing is playing over and over and over in his mind. But it it's almost like he's sort of working this out now because he's thinking about the cameras where the cameras are positioned. Yes. And Wayne Wainwright must have gone there. Did the cameras notice him? Or if they did notice him, why was no action taken over? Because it's forbidden to do this. And I guess he's sort of wondering, well, if Wainwright could get there and not be seen, perhaps I can as well.

SPEAKER_01 45:26

Yeah, it's interesting as well, because while he's musing on all this, you get a nice little bit about what he does, about his job, that kind of gives you the sort of uh the weight behind it. One momentary lapse of attention, and the result could be chaos within the streamlined galleries, the miles of tunnels and the sleeping city beyond. Driscoll had not faltered through long years, and yet on this occasion he found his well-ordered mind wandering, his thoughts troubled as he mused again on Wainwright and the indiscreet revelations he had made. So yeah, it's it's that again, it's that an obsession is taking hold. And again, we don't know what his job is exactly, but it obviously seems very important. Exactly. You know, he's he's the you know, the guard of the watch. What's he watching? What's he what is he monitoring?

SPEAKER_00 46:19

What well is it because you think that obviously like air quality, temperature, moisture, all that kind of stuff. But captain of the watch implies like you're like a guard. Yeah, you're on lookout for something, right?

SPEAKER_02 46:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:35

But yeah, your your watcher generally, they're on the frontier, aren't they? They're they're on the big ice wall watching out. Yeah. Not the night watch, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it is uh a little while later where he's near the end of his watch. In fact, it already handed over to his relief and was standing engaged in small talk when the alarm bells began to beep, and a flurry of activity animated the control room. And he knows, he knows that this is from Shaft 247. And he knows it must be Wayne Wright. And it it's just an impulse here. He just he gets out of the control room and runs, just starts running there, which I imagine in this place is quite an unusual sight. He does uh go back to his cabin and arms himself with the pocket torch, right? So good investigative practices there. And here's we where we start getting that smell again. He paused at a right angle junction in the gallery and gained his bearings. He was astonished to hear a slopping noise as he ran down toward the main shaft. He played his torch on the floor of the tunnel, saw the beam reflected back from the creeping tide of water. He was running through the thin trickle now, heedless of the splashing. The gallery had an acrid sort smell, like that of the tang of the sea, as Driscoll had smelled it when screened in ancient actuality material. That's uh interesting thing. Ancient actuality material, it's like they've saved smells and sights and sounds from the time before just as uh educational tool, perhaps, or something.

SPEAKER_01 48:10

Yeah, yeah. I think that's really cool. You know, it's kind of like the seed bank and things like that, isn't it? It's uh you know, more natural history museum really, but Yeah, but to save smells that's uh that's an odd one. I like it.

SPEAKER_00 48:26

Yeah. And it looks like the lighting is fouled and even the cameras are fouled at the moment. He stumbles on something slimy and almost falls. He put out his hand to the shafting and supported himself. He saw without surprise that the black painted letters as his torch danced across them. Shaft number two for seven. There was a strange odour now, something he had not smelled before. He could not place it and paused hesitantly, the torch in his suddenly nervous hand, trembling across the archmetal ceiling of the tunnel. Something else, something almost obscene, an animal smell, pungent and rotting to the nostrils. Reptilian, if you like. Now that interested me because it is this the incursion from outside bringing this smell in. We've had the water, that brackish sort of salt water smell, but pungent and reptilian, that's a very distinctive odor, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 49:21

Yeah, like when you get the reptile house at a zoo, it's uh yeah. Well, it's essentially what's happened here, right? Because Driscoll had once visited the zoological gardens long ago, where the few remaining specimens were kept. The aquarium had particularly fascinated him. There was something of that now. The great saurians, some almost a hundred years old, sleeping caked in their beds of mud, glazed green eyes immobile for hours on end. Yeah. It is very unsettling when you go to these, right? And you have them walking great lizards uh just sitting there, just and they're just looking. They don't move. And it's the stillness is unnerving.

SPEAKER_00 50:05

And that in itself, that sounds that's a Lovecraftian creature, right? That's like a shogoth buried in the mud, or one of the great old ones who's just sleeping, and that reptilian eye just slowly opens. You know, it's that sort of feeling, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 50:21

Well, old Squidface himself, because his his body's described as scaly and reptilian, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 50:26

You know and this is where he sees he gets to the shaft and he sees there's rust on the casing and the bolts. The inspection chamber hatch was ajar. Driscoll soon saw why. There was something protruding from it, something grey and rubbery from which the stench emanated. Driscoll did not like to touch it. Instead he worked the hatch pivot with his torch. The thing that was jammed in the gap moved as the aperture grew. It looked like an embryonic hand with tiny fingers. So that's the small source of that reptilian smell. Again, what the f fuck is this?

SPEAKER_01 51:05

What is it?

SPEAKER_00 51:07

Something that dwells outside by the looks of it, you know. The door to the outside is firmly closed and latched. He's no doubt pleased to see. But we get another smell now, as I say, lots of scents and smells in this. This is something like a musky perfume that made his head swim. Driscoll knew what had fascinated Wainwright and his friend Deems before him. The heady odour had something in it that reached deep back into his roots. He saw green fields, a blue sky, corn waving in the breeze. This was not something on the vision tube, but an atavistic memory of reality. So this to me, and then what happens later, is that lure. Oh yeah. Come outside, come outside.

SPEAKER_01 51:54

Yeah, and we get even more of that now, don't we? Because we he get if he finds another note that just says freedom on it.

SPEAKER_00 52:01

Freedom! Freedom.

SPEAKER_01 52:04

Oh dear. The most ah but the most fact factually inaccurate film of all time.

SPEAKER_00 52:14

It was pretty much, wasn't it? Yeah. Yes. Liberties taken, I think. Yes, that's that's it. Yeah. Let alone the accents. Oh god. So yes, freedom until we meet outside, signed W. Now, do we think that's W, or do we think that is like the uh the Deem's note that was not written by Wainwright? Who knows at this point? Odd thing to do, isn't it? That's a little bit like uh they're breaking in at the window. Oh no one likes that stuff, do they? No, yeah, yeah. But he pays the price for his uh curiosity uh because he returns. Of course he's been seen, or the cameras have come back on, and he is suspended from his job. I like this.

SPEAKER_01 53:01

Hort did not ask to see him, there was merely the dreaded green chit with the official stamp slipped beneath his door as he slept. There would be an official hearing in a week's time. So this is exactly what I'm talking about that dystopian society thing, the the dreaded thing, you know, you got the form.

SPEAKER_00 53:21

Yeah, there's no uh well, there is gonna be a hearing, but there's no that's it, isn't it? Basically, you're marked, your card is marked.

SPEAKER_01 53:29

Yeah, there's gonna be a disciplinary, oh god, right.

SPEAKER_00 53:33

He gets a bit sort of blanked here as well, doesn't he? Apart from Kramph, the only person in central control who secretly irritated Driscoll seems sympathetic at this time of crisis. I wonder if Kramph's gonna be the next one. That would be the implication, wouldn't it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 53:49

Yeah, because he's basically become a pariah now because of this. He he disobeyed the rules, kind of thing. Yeah, so he just keeps to his cabin. He could use the restaurant facilities and watch the vision tube. In effect, he was limited to eating, sleeping, and passing his time as best he might. No messages came for him, there was no communication from above apart from the green chit, and Hort certainly had no wish to see him. That might prejudice the proceedings.

SPEAKER_00 54:18

And all he's really got time to do is brood. And brood he does, and this is where we now get into the monomania, because he goes from being a very quiet, uh, subservient civil servant, I guess we would call him, or whatever it is.

SPEAKER_01 54:33

Yeah, yeah, a civil, I would call him a civil servant, yeah. Yeah, yeah, and very much a jobsworthy type, you know. I couldn't possibly, it's more than my job's worth, you know.

SPEAKER_00 54:43

Now we're getting that scene where they tool up and you get that sort of d-un dun, it's the tooling up montage, right? So in in Evil Dead, it's like a shotgun and a chainsaw and all that sort of thing. Yeah. Groovy.

SPEAKER_02 54:57

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 54:59

Yeah, it's uh a hammer, a wrench, heavy-duty wire cutters with insulated handles, and a food supply for three weeks. At the intersection of the first corridor, he smashed the camera lens there, and he basically is on his way to Shaft 247, smashing every camera as he goes. He's gone berserk.

SPEAKER_01 55:19

Yeah, he just goes and starts walloping them like this here. He was smashing light fixtures too. He was surprised how easily they broke. No one had ever done this before. It was absurdly easy. At the time, he hoped that the tunnel section was not guarded. There could be no turning back now. And by luck, then the next camera he smashes or light fake he smashes, he hits the circuit and takes everything out. So it's all plunged into darkness, which is precisely what he wants, right?

SPEAKER_00 55:52

Because he's got his trusty little torch, you know. And the strange nostalgic stench was in his nostrils again. His running, he does a lot of running in this, doesn't he? He sets off at a staggering run over the last quarter of a mile. Still there was no siren of the emergency squad. The shafting was in front of him. Driscoll could almost taste the stench in his nostrils. It was not oppressive. On the contrary, he breathed deeply. It brought back things he had forgotten ever existed. Sunlight, waving corn, clouds across a blue sky, a woman's smile, a child tottering toward an old woman in a white dress. So again, that allure. And are these actual memories of his or are they memories of memories?

SPEAKER_01 56:39

Or is it race memories kind of thing?

SPEAKER_02 56:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:42

Yeah, that's something again, like all best weird fiction is left to your own interpretation, isn't it? And uh I don't know, to me, it feels yeah, almost like race memories, like whatever is luring people out is really baiting the trap with some juicy cheese. It's a kind of like, look at all these idyllic images of what things used to be like, they can be like that again. Just come outside. Come outside.

SPEAKER_00 57:09

I love this dance music was reverberating from somewhere.

SPEAKER_01 57:14

Well, yeah, when when this was written, right? So 1980, uh the dance music of the time, that'd be disco, wouldn't it?

SPEAKER_02 57:26

Y M C A uh Still alive.

SPEAKER_00 57:34

It gets it gets even uh quite bizarre, really. Uh a girl in a bathing suit plunged into blue water, droplets of spray raining downward. There were flowers and with them the fragrant perfume that had been lost for so many decades. The girl was smiling again. A grave, grey eyed girl with tawny gold hair. A herdy girdie was playing, and he could smell roast chestnuts. A child bounded past on a scooter, his feet making a click-clacking noise on the sets of the paving. There was the distinctive impact of a cricket bat connecting with the ball on a summer afternoon. Driscoll nodded at the ripple of applause. So yeah, this is definitely deep-seated ancestral memory, isn't it? And again, this this now's it as being in England.

SPEAKER_01 58:18

Oh yeah, very much so.

SPEAKER_00 58:20

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:23

Yeah, the cricket, the cricket was a dead giveaway.

SPEAKER_00 58:28

Yes, leather on willow. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 58:31

Bravo, chaps, bravo.

SPEAKER_00 58:35

And it comes with this wave of emotion and a thought as well. He could see the point now. Everything down here was negative. He had to know. He thought of Kempf, Deems and Wainwright, of Horton and Carlson. He had no real friends. The only reality, the tunnels burrowing beneath the earth, and the remorselessly efficient humming of the machinery. Not enough. Driscoll set his teeth. Perspiration was streaming down his face as he reached out to the interior hatch of the inspection chamber of shaft number two for seven. A child lifted her head and put her arms around Driscoll's neck. He was smiling as he began to turn the bolts.

SPEAKER_01 59:14

Lovely. Lovely.

SPEAKER_00 59:15

Very effective. And we can see, I think, at the end there, he doesn't stop to write a note, does he? No, exactly. That's all part of the trap, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 59:23

It's you know, it's yeah, it's well done. And it it'd be one of those that'd be really easy to do an adaptation of. Well, I don't think any studio would ever touch it because it doesn't have a clear antagonist and all the rest of it. It's like I remember years ago, somebody'd uh I don't know if it ever got finished. I don't know, to my knowledge, it didn't, but a Canadian filmmaker was planning on doing an adaptation of the Willows. And I remember thinking, as much as I'd love to see that, no studio is gonna touch that.

SPEAKER_00 59:57

Well, there's there's no fight scene, there's no love interest, there's no character arc, etc. etc. etc. in it, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:05

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:06

Uh it's mood. And I suppose in uh probably more in a TV setting than in a film setting, it's difficult to establish a mood because you have no control over the environment.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:16

This is a little bit like when I do some of my Zoom sessions and we do uh breathing exercises and meditation and that sort of thing. So I might have eight people on the screen, yeah, and we're getting into that state, and someone's phone rings, or their doorbell rings, or you know, yeah. I've just gotta go and answer the doll, or I've just gotta turn my oven on like that before as well. It's there we go. Okay, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:42

Yeah. Saying that, Benson and Moorhead could do it.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:46

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:47

Because their films are all mood pieces anyway, aren't they? I think they're the only filmmakers I can think of who could actually do this and the Willows justice.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:57

Yeah, that's very true. Yeah, and I think in a in a cinema it's easier because you're there in the dark, aren't you? It's that atavistic gathered round a campfire sort of thing, isn't it? I mean, we're we're as bad at home, so you might be watching something, but I'll check my emails, or Lara shows me an Instagram of a cat doing something. You know, it it's very difficult to stay in the zone.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:18

Now you see, I try to, but Linda is terrible for it. I was like, Will you put your bloody phone down?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:28

Yeah, it's a constant thing, isn't it, these days? Having said that, it's rare to find a film that really grabs my attention like that these days. I'm I'm thinking for this in terms of the thing as well. I know that was much more uh overt and there was the obvious body horror and all that stuff, but that central premise of you're in this confined space, you can't go outside. If you do go outside, it's death. Yeah. And and you're working with this group of people, and it only takes one to go a little bit askew, and everything starts going wrong. If you had the thing without the thing and just had that as some sort of aberration in one of the characters, you'd still have a very tense film, wouldn't you?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:07

You know. Well, I think that's why the lighthouse works, because that's essentially the same kind of deal, isn't it? It's a couple of people stuck in cramped environments and isolated. And that isolation and cross claustrophobia are pretty much exactly yeah, the thing, this, you know, that that's the core premise of it, really. It's uh people battling this sort of hostile environment that they're in.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:33

Yeah, yeah. And I suppose most of the best horror puts you in that situation, don't you? Where you're very contained, uh, you're very confined to a house or a spaceship or whatever it is. You you can't just uh well get in a car and drive off.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:47

No, it was like the modern world, right? You just mentioned mobile phones. Something I found that I have to do in sort of stories set in the present day. The first thing you have to do is get rid of the phone somehow. Right. So no signal around the middle of the that's one of the reasons I chose Cornwall, because there's never a bloody signal in Cornwall. You know, you don't come to you want to come to Bedfordshire. Yeah, yeah, well, I have been a Bedfordshire several times. I know that, I know there is no bloody phone signal there either. But um, but yeah, you've got to find a way to get rid of it because everybody's connected, even if they're just especially after the pandemic when everybody started using Zoom and and all this, right? You talk to people across the other side of the planet, but you're st you're just in your own little room. So we've kind of lost that isolation, which is so central to horror movies and stories. The first thing when when the the psycho with a machete comes is she'll fumble a phone and you'll stamp on it, kind of thing, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:50

Yeah, it skit it skitters down the the galley and into the drain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So uh excellent story, I think, and I think I like that better on rereading as well, because I think probably the first time I read that I was waiting a lot more for uh a beastie to crop up. We well, we kind of get a beastie, but that's nicely done as well. The grey embryonic fingers. Yes. So it it is my supposition that is a manifestation of what's outside. I think, like you say, it's a fungus that has seeped in with the water because that's why it's undoing the bolts. Doesn't necessarily want to get in itself, but it sends that little bit of itself in, and it is outside, whatever it is, and its consciousness is invading into the complex and putting those images in their minds.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:37

Yeah, it's kind of similar to what my yeah, it's kind of similar to what mine is. It's yeah, there's some kind of gestalt entity out there, which is you know, but the other thing, why does it want people to go outside? Is it gonna eat them?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:53

Yes, what's what's it looking for? Does it feed on them? Does it want worship? Does it just want companionship? Do they become part of it? Yeah, assimilation if it's a gestalt, yeah, assimilated into this big shoggoty blob thing, you know. Maybe the other way to look at this is is to invert it, and maybe it is all great, and it just wants them to come outside because everything's lovely now. Well, well, they're they're subject subjecting themselves to this horrible existence underground, away from anything. You know, maybe it is all really okay, or perhaps that's just the creature speaking through me now. Didn't know Shaft 247 was in Bedford. Listen, we had the Daleks invaded in Bedfordshire. Did you know that?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:34

Yeah, mining. That was the way the big mining operation was, but in Dalek Invasion of Earth was in Bedford.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:40

Yes, it yeah, just on the edge of the big hills and and by the mountain. There's no mountains or big hills in Bedford. But yeah, El it was probably Elstree, wasn't it, or something that was filmed? Yeah, it was. Yeah. So yeah, we've seen off Daleks. Shogoth's nothing after that.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:56

Well, there is the m the Maya beast in that. Which was a big shogothy thing, which was the pet of the Supreme Dalek. Oh of course, yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:05

Yeah, the big slimy blobby thing that comes out and the Daleks themselves are slimy blobby things, aren't they?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:12

Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:13

Yeah, car-led mutants.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:15

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Little cephalopods. Cephalopods with anger issues, basically, in in tanks.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:22

Mobile tanks. It's a great concept. Based on the Panzer 4, I still I still maintain. Absolutely. Oh well, they were an allegory for the the the Reich. Yeah. Funnily enough, as we're in Doctor Who territory, I have seen some people say this story, you could picture it as a Doctor Who episode. It's a Doctor Who set. Very much has that feel as well, especially with that British thing, right? Oh yeah, definitely. And another aspect of this I I thought was interesting was the idea of outside and the outsider. It kind of relates in a way to the outsider who's in this strange, as we find out, subterranean world and existence, who wants to get out from that. But when he gets out, it it wishes it could get back in, but he can't by that time. He's seen the truth. When the truth is revealed, it changes your life irrevocably and may even destroy you. Indeed. Very Lovecraftian, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:17

Absolutely. So yeah, one thing I want to ask you, Mr. Poyton, is uh for your anthology thing, Corridors, which I was a part of, was this an inspiration on it?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:29

Oh, it it's interesting because looking back at that story now, I can see how that would be uh uh thought of because it is a ripoff of this story. Yeah. In effect, really. But it wasn't in my mind at all. I had read this story before quite a few years before, so maybe subconsciously it was there. Uh Corridors, for those of who haven't read it, and it is currently available on Amazon and other booksellers of repute, of course. It's uh an anthology based around the setting of uh there's been uh a cataclysmic event on the surface involving the King in Yellow and Humanity is retreated underground. So it is the setup for this, basically. And I think we had about 13 authors all came together, and the really nice thing was although that was the setting, everyone put their own stamp on it. So we had some quite different interpretations. But the inspiration for that, and this is the only time it's happened to me, came from a dream. Ah an extremely vivid dream, so very Lovecraftian, that I can still picture in my mind of being in a set of yellow tunnels, and this was before I'd seen back rooms and all that kind of stuff. But a very specific look to this place and there being like uh a a sort of little parade of shops in there, uh almost like a little village, but in this very creepy yellow tunneled setting. So that's where the the germ came from. But I mean, who knows? I'd read this before. Who knows? Stuff percolates, doesn't it, in the brain and bubbles up sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:07

Absolutely. I'm surprised you haven't written a story about your other dream inspiration.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:11

What was it, 10,000 horses? If I if I could remember what it referred to, then I bloody well would. And it'd be the best story ever, I reckon. Yeah, that that was me. I I used to I still do wake up in the middle of the night, lean over and scribble something on the pad. And uh in the morning I read, I think it was 300 horses, and I still not got a clue. It obviously it was a great idea at three o'clock in the morning.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:36

Oh, I do it.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:36

Yeah, a lot of clue.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:38

Problem I have as well is because I don't want to disturb the other half, so I don't turn a light on or anything. So I'm scribbling in the dark. And you wake up and he's completely illegible.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:49

Talk about spider rewriting. Yeah, yeah. Penguin. What? Yes, uh, so really enjoyed that story, and I think as I say, Basil Copper is one of those oh I've gonna use the word forgotten, that's not not really uh the term, but I think it deserves a lot more attention. I would recommend The House of the Wolf. That was a very good read. Uh perhaps we'll look at that sometime. And I'm gonna be looking at Necropolis as well. The the trouble is sometimes with these books, they're out of print. And you can look on Amazon or eBay where they're like 50 quid or something for a paperback, you know. And a lot of the time I know you can download them as ebooks, but I I really struggle to get through anything on a screen. A short story maybe, but a novel, no, can't do it.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:36

Yeah, I'm with you on that. I'm with you on that.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:39

So do let us know your thoughts, dear listener. What do you think was outside? Was it better outside than inside? As uh my dad used to say, if someone said to him, It's cold out, isn't it? He said, Well, put it back in again. You know, I like that. That's a good one, that's almost a carry-on, you know. And in fact, we have had some maulin, I believe, in the old uh mailbag there. A little delve around. We've had a couple of missives in from our lists.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:09

Indeed, the first one was uh discovered on YouTube from Patrick Dodson5686, and it refers to episode 113, notebook found in a deserted house. My idea of cousin Osborne was that he was killed on his way back with the uncle and turned into a more capable whisperer in darkness puppet, and that they use the cousin as Willie would be less likely to identify his being puppeteered. But I don't necessarily think this is what Block intended to imply, as there's no mention of him acting or seeming inhuman. Yeah, that's interesting speculation. I sort of what I love about that is I think we've come up with about 15 different explanations now, haven't we?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:52

Yeah, yeah, there's been a whole raft of them coming, which is great. And it as it says, it just points to one of the delights of these stories is that speculation, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:02

That's certainly a a nice interpretation, yeah. So thanks for that, Patrick. Yes, I do like that one as well. Yes. And on Patreon, CJ, CJ Hooper has posted. Now, this is referring back to our last episode where we had a chat with Heather Miller. She came in to stay over at the Gilman Hotel, and she was talking about her next work, uh, next paper being a look at Moby Dick and Lovecraft, Melville and Lovecraft. CJ writes, Have you seen the 1930s Moby Dick with John Barrymore? It makes Ahab a jolly jack-tar backstory before he loses his leg, but he still returns to Nantucket after killing the whale to marry his beloved. It's bloody awful. Now Tim can start a poet about Nantucket. Hugs, CJ. I know a couple of good ones about Nantucket, neither of which are repeatable.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:58

Oh once was a girl from Nantucket who crossed the sea in a bucket, and when she got there, they asked for a fair, so she pulled up a dress and said, There you go, CJ. I aim to please.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:12

Uh now you'll you'll see CJ in action at the Innsmouth Literary Festival, uh, particularly in the evening. I hope he's going to be comparing for us again and uh regaling us with some of his wonderful poetry.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:22

Maybe I should do that. Maybe I should do a turn of filthy Lovecraftian liberics or something.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:29

I don't know. Not a bad one. Perhaps we'll we'll we'll think about that. Maybe that's like the late the late night set, isn't it? That one.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:36

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:39

All right. Thanks to those two chaps for writing in. Do get in touch, let us know your thoughts on Mr. Copper and his work. As usual, you can get in touch via YouTube, you can send us a message at the insmouthbookclub at Outlook.com, or you can leave a post on the Innsmouth Forum or our Patreon page. And while you're on the Patreon page, do check out signing up to help support the show. It really does help us keep everything going and everything moving. It helps keep the uh helps keep the shogoth oiled, so to speak. And of course, when you sign up, you get access to bonus content for the Innsmouth Book Club and Strange Shadows. You get a quarterly copy of Innsmouth News. The spring edition is in preparation as we speak. And you'll also get free entry to the Innsmouth Literary Festival. And good to see a few of our patrons have put their names down already. We're looking forward to seeing them back in Oddly Moist Bedford. Nice. So are we back in the library next time, sir?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:40

Indeed we are. Indeed we are. We're gonna be going into obscure mythos tome territory here, one of the lesser-known mythos tomes, the El Down Shards, which was the creation of Richard F. Seawright, who was a contemporary and correspondent of Mr. Lovecraft. And we're gonna go with a story written in 1935 called The Warder of Knowledge.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:07

Nice. That doesn't ring a bell with me at all. I'm familiar with the Elk Down Shards through various uh scenarios and what have you, but I don't believe I've read that story.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:17

Yeah, because obviously Lovecraft used them in the diary of Alonzo Typer and the Shadow App Time and things like that. But yeah, the Water of Knowledge. It could be found in those dreadful Elk Down Shards, which is a nice little book from H. Hawkson Productions, and contains stories by C. Wright, his son, Franklin Seawright, um, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, and HP Lovecraft. And it also has some correspondence.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:48

Ah, nice. Sounds like one of those old 1920s songs. Oh, those naughty out now charged. Yeah, yeah. Oh dear, you see, scholarship, comedy, and music all rolled into one homogeneous ball. That's what you get on the IBC. Yay, what do you're calling a homogenous ball? You've been called worse. So have I.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:17

Frequently.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:18

All right, thanks again for joining us today, folks. We'll see you next time. With that, it's goodbye from me, Rob White and it's goodbye from me, Tim Mendes.