A Trip Away - Chapter 12

Sit ye around boys and girls, and hear a tale that will confound your mind and freeze your blood.


For this tale is one few have heard. It is a tale of deceit, of horror and of suspense. It is a tale you perhaps may have heard snippets of before. Terrified gasps in the cool night air carrying the story across generations.

But now, my dear readers, I present the facts laid bare in their pure unadulterated horror. I lay these facts at your quivering feet as you shiver with unease.

Brace yourselves my dear readership, as I bring to you the tale….of Barry Chuckle!

One warm summer’s eve in Didsbury, at a gathering of friends, Chuckle rose from the spirit realm to make his presence known. He possessed the mind of an idiotic man-child from deepest, darkest Reddish, and set upon the remaining people in the flat.

All of the people unfortunate to have been there at the time were permanently scarred by their experience. They were unable to shake the vision of Barry from their quivering minds. A light entertainer turned possessor of the weak minded and fat!

The man possessed from Barry on that night, had no idea of what happened. He woke up following the ordeal, in the centre of Rotherham on a bicycle with no memory of the night before. His friends, scared of what a vengeful Barry would do to them, never brought up the matter with him and he continued on in blissful ignorance.

After a few years passed, his friends started to believe that Barry was gone for good, but alas they were to be unpleasantly proven incorrect one damp night in Inverness!



So yeah, I hope you enjoyed that whimsical melodrama there. As you can see, a career writing horror stories probably isn’t in my future. I was just trying to set the scene for this chapter. As you’ve probably guessed, the poor fool “possessed” by Barry was I, your humble narrator.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous chapter, Pete and I used to share a flat near Parrs Wood. We were essentially on the border between Heaton Mersey and Didsbury. It was a nice flat and I enjoyed living there immensely. Sadly, Pete had to move out due to getting a job in London. With no replacement roommate capable of sharing the burden of bills and rent with me, I ended up having to leave the flat also.

Living with Pete was actually a very pleasant experience. We meshed surprisingly well as roommates and I did my best to not get on Pete’s nerves too much. During university, I’d lived with Luc and he hadn’t really enjoyed it. Quite to the extent of his discontentment didn’t come to my full knowledge until about a year later.

I can’t really blame him that much in some ways. I was a different man in my University days. On my days off I’d sometimes wake up as late as 2PM in the afternoon and then spend most of the day procrastinating about writing an essay. Add to that my general waster tendencies of the period and I can see how that would become tiresome after a while.

By the time I moved in with Pete, I was a more mature and slightly more hygienic man, so we had little difficulty living together. We would share the burden of cleaning and tidying. My bedroom did at one point become a bit of a sty, but I did my best to ensure this didn’t spill over into other areas of the house.

I think you’ll have gathered from these excerpts that Pete is a unique fellow. I once described him, after a few pints with Adam, as a “conundrum wrapped inside an enigma”. This cheesed him off a little bit, but I didn’t mean it as an insult. Pete is a difficult man to comprehend at times and I’ve known many a person who has struggled to adapt to his esoteric ways. But, if adapt you can, you will find him to be one of the most interesting and humorous men you’ll ever meet.

Living with him was a joy and certainly not a chore. He’d always throw in a spin ball when you weren’t expecting it or suggest something almost out of the blue that would make an evening better. I’d come home from work and he’d just randomly throw at me “shall we watch Jaws later?” and we would watch it while riffing and having a chat.

You never knew what would be waiting for you when living with Pete. On one such occasion, I returned home to find that Pete was preparing a “Surrealist Night” and had gone to such lengths as to print off a lot of props and posters for the evening.

The evening was to include “Cheese Criticising”, “Fishing for Compliments” (a set of compliments placed in a bowl with homemade fishing rods to collect them) and, in the main event, a “séance” with Barry Chuckle.

The fact that Barry Chuckle wasn’t actually dead didn’t seem to discourage Pete from the idea. Pete decided that it would be my job to perform the Barry spectacular, and showed me the prop I was to use. Pete presented me with a cardboard box upon which a life size printout of Barry’s head had been crudely stuck to. It took all I could not to explode with laughter.

During the evening, Pete gathered myself and the assorted guests around the dining table of the flat and switched the lights off. After a few moments of humming and shouting, Pete returned the lights, by which time I’d managed to put the box over my head and become “Barry”

“Helloooooooooo” I shrieked.

What followed were a few minutes of desperately poor improvised comedy, which thankfully everyone seemed to find humorous. Pete in particular was in stitches at the whole situation, and it warmed my heart to hear him laugh so.

Following the surrealist night, the cardboard box (now affectionately referred to as “Barry’s Head”) took pride of place on top of fridge until the sorrowful day when we had to leave the flat for good. At that point, I forgot what happened to Barry. When we arrived in Inverness, Pete soon let me know by presenting Barry, pristine as ever, to me and commanding a repeat performance during the holiday.

That performance was to happen on our last night in Inverness. The sun had gone down and we ventured off into the damp night to have a few drinks by the Loch. Pete attempted to light a fire under some nearby cover, but alas it never got to more than a glimmer.

As I stashed Barry’s Head out of sight and prepared to reprise the role, I took in the surroundings. Moonlight was gleaming on the surface of the Loch itself, but everything else was pitch darkness, outside of the few desperate flames emanating from the dampened fire. The silence struck as it had done the day before.

I’ll be honest and say that I found the atmosphere a bit unnerving. I’d enjoyed it in the daylight when climbing the hill the previous day, but hearing it now while surrounded by a seamlessly unending blackness filled me with concern. I just kept picturing a maddened serial killer popping out of nowhere and doing me in with something sharp and unpleasant.

I took a few Tartan Specials with me and sipped them while keeping the lookout for an axe wielding psychopath who may have just happened to pass by. Once Adam and Luc were assembled, I slipped on Barry’s Head and went to work.

I can’t say that it went down as good as it had on the previous occasion, but it was good enough for government work as they say. We had a brief chuckle, some photos were snapped and we took in the night together while sipping our drinks.

The weather moved on from being a slight drizzle to actual light rain, so we decided to step back inside and spend the rest of the night playing games in the living room. I must admit to being happy at being back indoors and in front of the warming glow of the fire.

I can’t really remember what we discussed that night or what games we played. I seem to recall sticking on the iPod and listening to PiL, Blur and some other band I can’t seem to find in my memory banks. I eventually laid on the couch, my mind dancing between the realms of awake and sleep.

We went to bed at some undetermined time, sad to see the end of our trip away. That being said, there was still the matter of a long card drive back. We weren’t home yet