The Hypnotherapist

Jefferson Marlowe leant back on the hypnotherapist's couch, tucked his thumbs beneath his braces and prepared to regress.

"Ok, Jefferson," said Dr Mandrake, "are you ready to go under?"

Jefferson sighed.

"Yes. Yes, I am," he mumbled as the dubious doctor produced his pendulum.

This was Jefferson's fourteenth appointment with Dr Mandrake and almost certainly his last. So far he had uncovered a gamut of traumatic experiences: as an infantryman at the Battle of Fondu Dyke, as a bankrupt blacksmith in the remote mountain village of Ashling Potsville and as an exceptionally comely courtesan in the ancient kingdom of Mavlavia.

Jefferson did not believe in reincarnation, but he did believe in con men, and he was beginning to come to the conclusion that Marcel Mandrake "M.D." was making most of this stuff up. He was certainly no closer to triggering his memories of the blank patch between his altercation with Alfonso Barsquador on the road to Batahausen and his sudden arrival at the Quinto Rock Mining Collective seven months ago. What on earth had happened? Who the hell was "Marukash"? If he was ever going to find out, he needed a new and, if necessary, drastic approach.

He reached out and grabbed the swinging stone.

"Jefferson!" cried the quack.

"I'm sorry, Dr Mandrake. I don't think I'm getting anywhere here."

"But we've unearthed so much already. Please just give it one more try."

"No, Dr Mandrake. I need to tackle this head on. I'm going to go and see the Carletian Oracle."

"But she charges three hundred groats an hour! That's seven whole sessions with me!"

"I've spent six hundred on you already," Jefferson replied, as he donned his poncho. "Anyway, you'll thank me for this when I'm saving you from Marukash."

"Who's Marukash?"

"No flipping idea, mate. No flipping idea."

Jagalath, Marukash, Jefferson and Clive

Rarely can a pair of demons have been much more demonic than the fearsome twins, Jagalath and Marukash, two ancient terrors birthed by a belligerent black hole, which spat them spiralling away to wreak havoc across the embryonic stars in the very earliest days of the universe.

And what havoc they wrought, toppling gods and gobbling up galaxies: the Kray twins of Cassiopeia.

But then one day the chaos which they had caused was suddenly brought to an end, as the brothers were trapped by a canny old wraith named Clive under the surface of a planet called Earth in a patch marked out by a field of silver dandelions in the mighty shadow of the Aquamarron Mountains.

Jagalath and Marukash spent several millennia buried away in their underground jail, stewing bitterly and plotting their revenge on the race of wraiths who had devised their downfall.

Yet the two terrors were not without hope, for, when he had imprisoned the demons, Clive had cunningly left a method by which their dungeon might be opened, should any future warrior come up with an ingenious plan by which the dastardly twins might finally be banished from the universe for good.

The key to the prison door (blowing every seed off the head of a dandelion flower picked from the field) was passed down through the generations lest the demons be inadvertently set free before a plan to destroy them had been devised. Thus the dungeon remained closed for thousands and thousands of years...until one day a hapless young buffoon by the name of Jefferson Marlowe blundered in and sprung open the prison door.

With the red carpet rolled out by Jefferson, the twins might both have emerged there and then, but they opted instead to hedge their bets; Jagalath came out first, whilst Marukash lay in wait to see what would befall his brother.

Once Jefferson had atoned for his idiocy by slaying the first demon himself (an experience so traumatic that he immediately forgot all about it), Marukash chose to lurk still beneath the surface in his freshly re-bolted cell, waiting for some fresh imbecile to blow on another dandelion and let him loose to avenge his brother's miserable demise.

A Breath Through the Window

Jefferson Marlowe was settling down to some cross stitch when an unseasonably chilly breeze blew in through his kitchen window. He bristled, wearily rose and flipped the porthole shut.

He dropped back down into his armchair, took a couple of puffs from his pipe and returned to the nascent tapestry. But, just as he had rethreaded the needle, the cool draught wafted through once more, chilling his hands and tickling his patience.

He looked across. The little window was firmly closed and he could not see how the breeze was still getting in. He stood up to inspect the wall, but, as he did so, the flame of his stubby little candle was blown clean out and the bungalow was suddenly as black as can be.

The breeze came again, but now he could hear that it was not simply a breeze but a breath, ushering out a fragile but gently coercing voice.

He listened intently.

"Jefferson...", it drawled sweetly. "Jefferson..."

"Yes."

"Jefferson..."

"Yes, yes, it's me," he answered impatiently. "Who the hell is this?"

"An old friend..."

"An old friend?"

"We need you, Jefferson...We need you...Soon...We will come back for you soon...Marukash is awaking...It is not safe for you just yet but you must be ready...Soon, Jefferson, soon..."

The breeze stopped and the lights flashed back on. Jefferson felt a dull shiver of recognition. He knew not whose voice it had been, but he knew he had heard it before, a faintly familiar murmur from his past, a past which he had almost totally forgotten, but which now he knew was destined to come again.

The Most Important Amnesiac

After six months working for the Quinto Rock Mining Collective, Jefferson Marlowe had become a little restless. Chipping away at a coal face for fifteen hours a day was not wholly unsatisfying, but it was nothing compared to the thrill of rescuing Princess Yolande from the implausibly tall belltower at Stankingham Castle or hunting for diamonds hoarded by the legendary five-eyed giant Lorcando in the Jungle of Chrysling Grub.

But Jefferson knew that such adventures were a thing of the past. Which was fine, for the most part. It was a relief not to be freelance, no longer to have to hunt for work, to have a more straightforward tax return, to be settled in one location with a recently-established regular girlfriend and three flat viewings planned for next weekend.

Jefferson was sure that this current pang of restlessness would pass - it was time, he knew, to resign himself to the fact that he wasn't particularly special, that there wasn't anything extraordinary about him at all. He was just a bloke - an unusually handsome bloke, but a bloke nonetheless - with a straightforward haircut and a modest talent for chiselling.

Yet, at that very moment, less than fifty miles away, just on the other side of the Aquamarron Mountains, a statue of our humble hero was being unveiled by a grateful race of wraiths. It was a monument to the man who had rescued their community, the man whom they desperately needed to come to their aid one final time: Jefferson Marlowe - in truth, a far from ordinary bloke and the most important amnesiac the world had ever known.

A Tolerably Short Bulletin

Eddie Berwick splashed into the middle seat of the sofa and flicked on the TV. It was the news - he was early - a tolerably short bulletin before the start of the cricket.

He brought up his whisky to his mouth and sipped just a bit, then reached out to the little table and left the glass there. He thought about some crisps.

A few seconds passed. No crisps. Whisky was bad enough.

Then Eddie's attention was interrupted.

He looked at the screen. His face had been pointing towards it all along, but now, for the first time, he looked. He really looked.

A woman, a young woman, was standing in the middle of a mass of dried mud, her face exhibiting no easily defined expression. She was trying to recover her bearings, said the reporter, but failing.

The mass of dried mud was her hometown, said the woman, clumsily dubbed. It was where she had grown up, where her family had lived, her mother and her father and her brothers and her sisters, where her family had lived until yesterday. When they all died.

Eddie felt the whisky burn at the back of his throat. He had to swallow to relieve the soreness where the whisky had tickled.

Soon the woman was no longer standing in the hard mud. She had gone, maybe never to be thought of again, replaced by the weather and, in a minute, the cricket.

Eddie was no longer thinking about the woman or the weather or the cricket. There was not a thought in his head, just a futile tear falling from each of his eyes and a tight stiff swelling trapped somewhere in his chest.

Michael's Column

Michael wrapped his arms around Admiral Lord Nelson, using the great man to shield himself from the full force of the wind as it buffeted up the rubbish around Trafalgar Square.

He peered over Horatio's head and across the rooftops of Whitehall towards Big Ben. It was quarter past two in the morning. How had it got so late?

One minute he'd been curled up in front of the snooker after a slightly over-indulgent supper, watching Peter Ebdon compile yet another frame-winning break in meticulous and monotonous fashion, the next he was one hundred and sixty feet above the pavement, eyes pinched half-shut by a gale, shouting frantically and almost blindly at hopelessly inebriated passers-by.

No-one down below could hear him. The storm swirled around the square, scooped up his shouts and whipped them off away from their intended targets.

Michael grimaced, pressed his face up against Nelson's, just as Hardy had done two hundred years before, and cursed his bloody sleepwalking.

Bathtime

Maxwell Dandy peels off the facemask and blinks into the bathroom mirror. Widening his eyes, he feels the remnants of the mud crack in the grooves of his forehead. He wipes them away with a fluffy white hotel hand towel, rolls his shoulders and peels off the dressing gown.

It has been a long day's filming.

The bath is nearly full behind him - he reaches out through the steam and turns the taps to off. The salts fizz in the water below and spread out into the bathroom air, as if it is being hot-boxed with Friar's Balsam.

Maxwell dips a toe fearfully below the surface, then, with growing confidence, a foot and a calf. He reaches across, opens the window a crack and commits his other foot to the tub.

He lowers his bottom below the surface and sighs as the water crackles against his skin.

There is a telephone beside his head. He reaches across and dials nought for reception. Oysters and champagne will be delivered to his suite in twenty-five minutes time. He wonders belatedly whether Janine likes shellfish.

Better Words

There are better words around, somewhere - I know there are - more imaginative vessels which bear meaning below their decks in a manner which is both thrillingly ingenious and pleasingly succinct.

But they are not so easy to find...

There are plenty of new ones, sure, but the majority are quite unexceptional. They are all over the place, eager for exposure and the chance to be assessed.

Sometimes I look, I rummage about in the back of my brain and find a few original words and phrases scattered around, but they are largely of little use and are swiftly redundatised. They are malapplicable and hypervoluted and I cannot envisage a context in which I might come to incorporate them readily into my everyday discourse.

Yet I will continue, I will forage for fresh expressions, for, somewhere in this mess of newly minted words, a little gem will be lying, hiding away in a quiet cramped corner, waiting to be prised out and carried across into the cool light of conversation.