Dreamcatchers A Dreamcatcher is a device designed to take away your dreams. In this sense it is much like a spouse, or permanent employment. Dreamcatchers tend to be assembled from willow hoops within which are woven webs akin to those of a spider, often made from sinew or nettle fibre. They are designed in this fashion so that they might catch any harm that might be in the air, in just the same way real spiders’ webs don’t. The hoop of the catcher is further adorned with dangling feathers and beads. The whole structure is then intended to be hung over a child’s bed. The basic theory is that the bad dreams will be caught in the webbing prior to getting to the sleeping infant, whereas good dreams, which everyone knows consist of smaller particles than bad dreams, slip through and successfully descend via the feathers into the youthful brain. So far, so simple. Another theory about what happens is that the child lives in such horror of the Blair Witch mobile hanging over them, that they welcome unconsciousness as a blessed release, and never complain about bad dreams again. When dreamcatchers were first appropriated from native American culture into naïve American culture in the 70s, it was discovered that they were exactly as effective for adults as they were for children. Much as a spider’s web might gradually fill up with the dried husks and twitching half-dead remains of flying insects, your dreamcatcher will, with extended use, become entirely covered in angry, trapped nightmares. This is all perfectly normal. Just try not to look at it. Dreamcatchers are deliberately and lovingly assembled from natural materials that will dry out and collapse in time. Try not to use words like “shoddy” when returning them to the store, after they have fallen onto your terrified face in the middle of the night.

Husk If you find a dried humanoid husk in your wardrobe or loft, check the face. If it matches yours, you have nothing to worry about.

Ham Apparently, ham is worth more to a collector if you haven't taken it out of its plastic container and played with it.

Dental Records The three men stood around the filing cabinet and stared at the contents of the narrow drawer Matheson had just pulled out; he with pride, the other two in quiet admiration. ‘That’s the lot. One year’s worth,’ Matheson beamed, ‘almost.’ Jones looked to Phillips and mouthed a silent ‘wow’ before turning back to Matheson. ‘So how many exactly?’ Matheson sucked in through clenched jaws before responding. ‘Eight-Forty.’ All three men knew what this figure meant. ‘Fourteen more,’ whispered Jones. ‘So close, and yet so far,’ added Phillips, shaking his head, ‘damn shame.’ They returned their attention to the drawer, and the many molars, premolars, third molars, canines and incisors nestling within. Matheson returned to the dining table to fetch his drink. ‘One more working day. I’m not on call over Christmas, so I can’t rely on emergencies, but one more day. I can still do it,’ he wandered over to the window, and the dark snowy vista that greeted his gaze, ‘as long as the bastards don’t all cancel.’ By the following afternoon, Matheson had only had one cancellation. He had removed old Mr Pinter’s last incisor, an occasion Mr Pinter had elected to mark with a joke and a smile, rather than a tearful goodbye to his enamel-owning years. Thirteen. He had extracted 45, 44 and 43 from Jeremy Smith. Some might say that there was a link between Jeremy’s abscess and the root canal work Matheson had carried out months earlier with equipment he’d elected not to sterilise, but Matheson couldn’t possibly comment. All that mattered was that the young student walked away feeling vaguely grateful at the thought of an end to weeks of pain, and that Matheson was closer to his goal. Ten. Then the cancellation had come. Mrs Parker, his main banker. This was a disaster. She was supposed to be having three upper rights and four upper lefts out today. Radiotherapy had left Mrs Parker unable to produce much in the way of saliva, and her gums had receded. It would have been so easy. These teeth would have practically fallen out in the chair and Matheson would have been nearly there. He might even have been able to wobble out a couple of the remaining lower ones too. But oh no, Mrs Parker had felt ‘too ill’ to struggle through the snow to the surgery. ‘Bitch!’ Matheson had hissed at the news of this betrayal, adding ‘not you,’ to his startled receptionist. Most days, he would also have had to apologise to his assistant Kerry, but she was already on Christmas leave, and he was working on his own in the surgery. This was a fact he was growing increasingly relieved about, as he contemplated the possible ways in which he was going to have to make up for the Mrs Parker deficit. Having to hide from Kerry some of the more dubious work he’d done to get this far had made things very difficult at times. Ten. The final appointment of the morning had also yielded nothing, a simple check-up. Ten. So there Matheson sat, waiting for his two-thirty to arrive, nervously patting a scraper against the palm of his disposable glove, and pondering what was at stake. No emergency calls. No-one had had the decency to crack a few molars falling off a swing, or suddenly feel the urge to come in with a particularly savage case of periodontitis. This being the case, and with the surgery closing seasonably early, he only had two shots at this left. In walked shot number one. ‘Hi,’ ventured the nervous Ms Ahmed. She flashed a quick smile that made Matheson’s heart sink; gleaming white enamel, and straight, to boot. Every bit as perfect as the x-rays he was holding from the previous year. Matheson had hoped against hope that things had gone horribly wrong with Ms Ahmed’s oral hygiene plan in the intervening time, having skipped an appointment, but this didn’t look good. ‘Hi Sam,’ he responded, hiding his disappointment, ‘how are things?’ ‘Oh, not bad, not bad.’ ‘No pain? Nothing been troubling you?’ ‘Well, I’ve had a slight niggle with this one,’ she confided, sticking her finger into the back of her mouth. Matheson’s face lit up. ‘Let’s have a little look at that then, shall we?’ Eight. One of the molars in question had indeed shown signs of decay that in truth a small filling would have dealt with. It was perhaps a trifle earnest to perform the extraction, and even more so to remove the neighbouring tooth, which was entirely an innocent bystander. Ms Ahmed had clearly left in a state of shock, but nothing that a nice hot sweet cup of tea wouldn’t solve, in a few hours, when she would be able to drink hot liquids again. In came shot number two, Miss Jenny Michaels. The last patient of the day, and eight teeth required. Jenny meekly climbed into the chair. Jenny was seven. Matheson smiled briefly at Jenny and asked her to open wide, hoping against hope that somehow nothing had changed from the records he’d studied at lunch; that they were still there, waiting to be taken. ‘You’ve already exfoliated…’ his face fell. ‘Hargog?’ said Jenny, her mouth occupied by a suction tube and Matheson’s tiny mirror. ‘You’ve no milk teeth left. You had ten left last time, Jenny. They were all bravely hanging on.’ Jenny giggled. ‘Aw gog.’ ‘Yes. All gone…’ Matheson withdrew his mirror and tapped it against his palm, deep in thought. This would have been a cakewalk. If the primaries had still been there, he could have simply made an excuse to take impressions and pulled the lot out in the alginate with one sharp tug. Now what? He stared down at Jenny, waiting patiently in the chair and attempting a smile despite the tube. ‘Let’s do a proper check-up then, shall we?’ Zero. Speeches over, Jones, Phillips and Matheson sat at the end of the long dining table, many of the other diners already having headed for the bar. Jones and Phillips sat witness to the remnants of a fine meal, Matheson with a largely untouched platter. Jones raised his glass. ‘To you, Matheson. I don’t know how you did it, but you’ve certainly shown some balls, old man.’ Matheson nodded and lifted his still-full glass in return. The painkillers were wearing off a little, but he still couldn’t muster a smile, or risk taking a swig of claret without it pouring down his front. ‘To the eight-hundred-fifty-four,’ Phillips chimed in. ‘So, the title’s yours for the foreseeable. Obviously the money’s a nice bonus…’ Jones mused, ‘where will you keep that monstrosity?’ He was motioning toward the enormous golden molar that sat proudly on a plinth between the three diners, forming an extraordinary centrepiece for the evening. ‘Bank vault in the morning,’ mumbled Matheson somewhat joylessly, as he tongued in turn the eight sockets he had created for himself the previous week. ‘Jaw still bothering you?’ inquired Phillips. ‘Still fractured, and still missing all the same teeth, thank you,’ said Matheson. ‘Funny, really,’ said Phillips. ‘Funny?’ Matheson queried his friend, somewhat in disbelief. ‘Well, if you’d known her mother was going to run in and swing that stool at you, you wouldn’t have had to take out the little screamer’s teeth in the first place.’ ‘Mine wouldn’t have counted,’ said Matheson, ‘you know the rules.’

The Wrong Kind of Toilet The train slid through the dark evening air as George sat cursing his phone battery. Another hour to go, and no electronic distractions from the boredom. In the darkness the window provided no more entertainment than a reflection of George’s own annoyed face. Looking around the carriage, he became aware of his solitary travelling companion; an extremely pale gentleman in an immaculately tailored three-piece suit sat across the aisle. ‘They should have charger sockets.’ ventured George. He seldom spoke to strangers unless directly challenged, and was proud of this opening gambit. However, it elicited no response. The pale man stared straight ahead. Perhaps he hadn’t heard. ‘In this day and age…’ George continued, eager not to repeat himself and seem odd. The pale man slowly turned his head toward George. Momentarily fixing him with a dispassionate gaze, he silently rose and walked toward him. The five or six slow, deliberate steps it took the pale man to reach his seat, never breaking eye contact, unnerved George greatly. Then he simply switched focus down the aisle ahead of him, strode straight past George and disappeared through the carriage door and into the toilet. ‘Bugger’ said George to himself. This was partly in exasperation at his own timidity, and partly at the sudden realisation that he also needed to go. Twenty leg-crossed minutes passed, and the pale man had still not returned to his seat. Having dwelt on his previous unwarranted fear response for most of the intervening time, and having apportioned an increasing fraction of the blame on the pale man for having deliberately stared like that, George decided that it was time to show some intestinal fortitude. Also, he really needed a wee. He knew as soon as he’d done it that he’d knocked far too hard on the toilet door. Overcompensation for feeling so cowed earlier. George was only compounding his embarrassment by now waiting far too long without actually saying anything that might justify the urgency of this attention-seeking door-banging. Surely ‘I have to piss’ wouldn’t cut it. He considered tiptoeing off again. No. This had now become a rite of passage. Right of pissage. Buoyed by this internal wordplay, and the fact that no complaints had thus far come from the other side of the door, George knocked again, in a more tempered fashion. With a click, the door swung open. The feeling of revulsion that arose within George as he stared into the toilet was powerful. ‘What kind of monster…’ He flushed the toilet, and felt somewhat mollified. As he relieved himself, George pondered the disappearance of the pale man. Had he simply gone from the toilet to the other carriage to avoid responding to further interrogation regarding charger points? It was possible. People had walked away from George in mid-sentence before, and he occasionally wished he could walk away from himself. He washed his hands in the tiny sink and returned to his carriage, where the pale man was once again sitting. ‘I thought you’d fallen down the loo.’ said George to his former toilet nemesis, bolstered greatly by the feeling of relief his trip had just brought him. This was surely too forward though, he thought as he took his seat, and hoped that the pale man would once again ignore him. Instead, the impassive countenance was dropped, and the pale man addressed him directly. ‘You know of the portal?’ ‘Um…’ He sized George up through narrowed eyes. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’ ‘I have a return ticket…’ ‘Shut up.’ George was sure indignation would well up within him shortly, just as soon as his terror and confusion subsided. The pale man continued, seemingly talking to himself. ‘I told them this would happen. I told them it was possible that the portal would be activated by accident.’ He returned his full attention to George. ‘You flushed twice, didn’t you?’ George nodded. ‘And you washed your hands.’ ‘Is this really any of your…’ ‘Be quiet.’ George obeyed, as the pale man rose and paced the aisle, deep in thought, and it was at this point he noticed that his lavatorial interrogator was wearing an entirely different suit, a herring-bone lounge affair. ‘I told them some of them washed their hands. Do you even know what’s happened here?’ George remained silent, uncertain whether the speaking ban was still in effect. ‘This is not your train.’ George considered this for a moment and went to retrieve his ticket from his wallet. His tormentor shook his head. ‘Look. We have chargers here.’ offered the pale man as if by way of explanation. George looked to where he was pointing and sure enough there were power points set into the wall of the carriage at table level. ‘I’m in a different carriage.’ suggested George, ‘first class.’ ‘You’re certainly in a different carriage, yes.’ He looked at the dark windows. ‘Thank goodness this happened at night. You’ve not seen too much.’ He loomed over George. ‘Listen to me. You need to go to the toilet again.’ ‘No, I think I’m alright…’ ‘You need to go to the toilet and wash your hands. When you’ve done that, flush twice. I’ll change the protocol when you’ve gone. I’ll clean up their mess.’ George quietly followed these instructions. Clearly he shouldn’t be in first class, and this freak may have been dangerous. Emerging from the toilet and staring through both carriage door windows, he could see that the pale man was not present in either carriage. He proceeded to wander through both carriages to make sure, and also to try and figure out how he’d gotten turned around in the first place. He couldn’t seem to locate the charger sockets in either carriage now. Relaxing somewhat, now that he was no longer in the presence of stranger danger, he decided to find this more annoying than confusing. Eventually, the train came to a halt at George’s destination. As he passed the toilet door on his way to the platform, he noticed that it now sported an ‘out of order’ sign. Opening the door, he peered in to see that the toilet bowl was completely stuffed with paper. It was a mystery as to how this had occurred. But no more than usual, he supposed, and disembarked.