A really scary Halloween story

With the week that’s in it, here’s a true old Irish story, one of the scariest ever told of course. It also involves killer robots, and it’s called “The Face at the Window”…

Picture the scene. It’s coming up to Halloween, and we’re outside a a little old Irish pub at the crossroads in the bog end of nowhere in the Dublin Mountains, on a dark and windswept night.

Now let’s pan the camera over to two lads who are stumbling out of the door of the pub. For argument’s sake let’s call them Pat and Jimmy. They have clearly had what’s called “a session”,  “loads of gargle” or  “a feed of pints”. In other words, a long night of drinking.

But it’s late. It’s closing time, and there’s no more gargle to be had. So our two lads – who don’t have a notion of what horrors lie before them in what will turn out to be a horrific tale – are attempting to waddle out of the pub. They are carefree as they swagger over to the car park and jump into their vehicle and start it up.

A quick aside: astute readers may have noticed that Ireland’s drink driving laws were rather different in them days, before the random breath testing and the mandatory breathalysers and the milligrams per gallon of blood and so on.

Anyway, enough of the asides. The two lads are driving away, and after a couple of minutes there’s a light tap on the passenger window. Pat, the passenger, screams: “Jimmy! Jimmy!”

“What is it Pat?”

“Look at the window, Jimmy! It’s a ghost!”

The face at the window...

And sure enough, by the light of the moon they can make out a haggard old man’s crinkly face at the window. So Jimmy puts his foot on the accelerator, yet this ghostly appearance stays in the window.

So Pat rolls down the passenger window -  just a tiny bit mind you, so the head of the ghostly thing won’t get in – and after much trepidation he tries to regain his composure and he addresses the apparition: “Sorry, er, um, what do you want?”

And the old man replies, quickly and very softly: “Any chance of a fag?” So Pat quickly hands the ghostly figure a cigarette and yells “STEP ON IT JIMMY!!!!”, and he rolls up the window in a panic.

Jimmy puts the pedal to the metal, and a few minutes later the two lads calm down and start laughing to each other, like you do when you’ve just gone through the wars and can can now look back on moment as the funniest thing ever.

Jimmy leans over from the steering wheel and announces: “You know what? I never knew a ghost that smoked!”

And Pat says: “Well not one that smoked Major anyhow.”

More laughter.

And Jimmy says: “I dunno what happened there, but not to worry. We’re flying now. The speedometer says we’re doing 60!”

Another quick aside: pedants will now explain how these were the days of mph (miles per hour), not kph (kilometres).

All of a sudden there’s a light tap-tap-tap on the window again. “It’s him!” Pat yells, scared out of his wits.

“Him?” says Jimmy.

“Yeah, him,” says Pat.

It’s the old man alright. He is emitting a ghostly glow, as before, but now he has a fag (unlit) dangling from his mouth. So Pat rolls down the window and shakily says: “Yes?”

“Do ye have a light?” the old man quietly asks.

Pat chucks his disposable lighter out the window, and shouts: “STEP ON IT JIMMY!”

I know, there are a lot of asides, but in case you ask: in those days a lighter was probably not cheap, plastic and “disposable” in our sense of the word. Nonetheless, such was the terror in this story that it was disposed of in great haste.

By this stage the two lads must be hurtling along the back lanes at  80 miles an hour, and

Time for another aside about…

…no, no time for that now, because they want to speed away into the distance,  they’re trying to forget what they’ve just seen and heard, then all of a sudden there comes some more tap-tap-tapping.

“OH NO!” says  Jimmy.

“WHAT NOW?” Says Pat, rolling down the window.

The old man gently replies: “Howrya lads. Do ye want some help gettin’ out of the mud?”

A final quick aside: this story came to me after a comment on yesterday’s post about the current state of tabacs – French tobacconists. The comment came from Teensandsmoking.com, and the more I think of it, the more I’m convinced the comment and the home page of that website were written by a killer robot that is out of control. Scary, huh?

The robot says “Teens do not know that the dangers of cigarette smoking because they see their parents smoke happy.”

It goes on: “Peer pressure is another culprit that young people smoke.”

And it goes on. And on and on. The website does many other things to murder the English language, and it’s enough to drive you to the drink, or at least to a packet of 20 Major.