Unfortunately, I have never been able to get beyond the first room before the blood drowns me, so I am unable to tell if it is a notable addition to Ted’s canon.

"We can dance if so we wish & leave thy freinds behind, For thy freinds dance not & if they dance not they be no freinds of mine."

If you were to dig beneath the stone, however—an act which is forbidden by a special order from the office of the Witchfinder General—you would find something out of the ordinary. You would have to dig through three feet of earth, then three feet of slightly different earth, then scrape through a thin layer of gravel, scoop out a hundredweight of treacle, extract several cubic metres of compacted white dog shit, go through a scale model of the Great Pyramid with a pickaxe, then break open a metal enclosure that reaches ten feet into the ground, and then dynamite your way through a solid marble sarcophagus before you got to the metal casket, which is lined with lead sheeting. If you finally managed to get the casket open, you would find what appeared to be a mummy or possibly a frankenstein, wrapped in successive layers of lead, corduroy, tweed, silk, sackcloth and ashes. After unwinding these wrappings, you would finally see the mortal remains of Barry Johnson himself. You would notice that his belly and chest have been roughly sliced open and his internal organs removed, along with his feet and most of his teeth. While pondering this macabre scene, you would be absorbing enough evil to put your immortal soul in peril. For Barry Johnson is better known to the world as Jack Pudding, the notorious Dancing Man of Walthamstow.

The best method for hearing the echoes of this huge celestial heart is to sit in your garden and night and push a cat as close to your ear as possible, holding it there despite its protestations, listening, listening, listening. The cat, unhearted and inert, acts as the perfect conduit for absorbing and amplifying sound, its whiskers perfect antennas that can pierce the walls between the worlds.

A dog will not suffice

This short and possibly unfinished article was found in the papers of Toby Vok that were bequeathed to the county of Essex upon his disappearance in 1990. As far as can be ascertained, it has never been previously published.

While even by itself this would usually have been the best moment of my day – Squirm is a true masterpiece of comic terror – this edition has been filled with copious notes by the mysterious “Toby”, all made for the benefit of his equally mysterious friend “Ted”. I can only surmise that these two figures are Toby Vok and Ted Vaaaak. Any other explanation is inconceivable.

I’ve added some of the highlights below, or you can download the entire annotated book here: The Complete Squirm.

“During a recent job interview I was briefly left unattended in the Chepstow Records Office Document Room. Unable to resist the charms of the filing cabinet marked “Forbidden” I opened it up and quickly flicked through the folders within. Most of the folders had incomprehensible names like “T.V. Relocate Requisition Order” and “Necro/Micro/Animate Res. – URGENT”, but one of the folders was called “Ladybird/Lovecraft – t/anom”.

“Inside was a single book and a handwritten note. The book was a pristine copy of a ladybird book from the 1950s. It was book number 15H in the Ladybird Key Words Reading Scheme Series, entitled Trouble At The Market. The author was credited as H.P. Lovecraft N.F.U and the artist as Terry Oakes. (I remember this as I have a photographic memory). The story inside, however, was so nauseating and disorientating I have involuntarily stricken it from my mind (except for the excerpt below, which is my sole proof that this chain of events ever happened). The full-colour illustrations were so vivid and inexplicable I was afriad I might begin to scream. Fortunately the photocopier in the corner of the room could only replicate them in blakc and white.

“I only had time to photocopy this single page before I could hear my interviewer scrabbling his way along the corridor. I hastily put the book back in the folder, and the folder back in the filing cabinet, and myself back on my seat. I don’t think the single bead of sweat on my cheek gave me away. In fact, I suspect he mistook it for a tear.

“Anyway, I know Wales is not in Essex, and although that is a shame I cannot expect you to excuse lightly, I thought you should be informed of this find as quickly as possible.

“Regards, Daniel.”

What kind of pipe has Edward chosen to accessorise with his creepy gothic outfit?

A) Lead Pipe

B) Indian Peace Pipe

C) A Pipe-Schontenheim

D) Smoking Pipe

Answers on the back of an email to: EssexTerror (at) gmail (dot) com

And good luck!

We’re delighted to report that despite only being on the web for a few months, letters recounting people’s fond remembrences of Essex Terror have been trickling in.  And inevitably, amidst genuine well-wishing from former subscribers, that grand bugbear of correspondence has finally chosen to rear its malformed forelimbs and twitch them at at us: The Chain Letter.  I am not going to reproduce it here — not because I refuse to take its warnings of supernatural calamity seriously, but because it has reminded me of a greater threat; and one I learned through none other than the hallowed  pages of the original Essex Terror…

The Tale of Gin Susan

In the late 1700s, under cover of darkness, a publican’s daughter by the name of Susan Tines is said to have snuck out of the Swan and Bender Inn, Colchester, clutching tightly to her person a letter she had written only that evening.  Her intent was to deliver it (the recipient unknown) before the nearby churchbells sounded in the new day; for if she did not, she would be condemned to die young and in agony. Where had she learned of this terrible fate? In another letter received that very day, demanding that if she was to live she must pass on its curse. It is quite possibly the earliest recorded example of the chain letter phenomenon, and an 1848 copy is on display at the Chelmsford Museum of Antiquities (attributed to Thomas Chatterton, given its pseudo-medieval stylings).

Sadly, so the story goes, fate was not on Susan’s side as barely a few yards from her home she ran into a friend of her father’s and was quickly apprehended, returned, and locked away in her room. The pressure of these events appears to have snapped Susan’s fragile, womanly mind, as on the following day she drank herself into a gin-induced stupor and fell down a drainage ditch; whereupon her still-warm body is supposed to have been devoured by blind, piglike creatures rumoured to live underneath Colchester.

That is not the end of the story, however. For it is said that if any who know this tale choose to propagate any sort of chain letter, Gin Susan’s bloodied, half-eaten specter will appear by their bed and drag them off to the Colchester tunnels.

The tale of the tale does not end there either. In the late 1960s, an Essex medium operating under the name of Madame Cravatsky (real name Enid May Beake) claimed to have contacted the spirit of Gin Susan, and offered to give a public demonstration of her talents to a small audience at the recently opened Civic Theatre. The ensuing spectacle involved much wailing and over-consumption of gin, after which Blavatsky manifested a pool of ectoplasm before passing out completely.

Whatever the truth behind Gin Susan’s tragic tale, this writer at least shall be held in check by it whenever a chain letter should happen to arrive in the post. Perhaps you will now, too.

The Beginning

The initial run of the Essex Terror fanzine ran from July 1989 through to June 1990. It was printed on A4 paper, with a cardstock cover.  The layout was quite sophisticated for its time, realised on a Zandy 5000 running what was probably a port of Professional Page, a popular WYSIWYG DTP client of the day. So much for the technology. Concerning the logistics and funding, things begin to get a little murky.  We do know that Guy received an inheritance in 1987 after the death of his aunt, and what was not immediately taxed away or used to fend off angry creditors must have been used to launch the fanzine.  The initial circulation was tiny, but by the final issue it counted subscribers living as far away as Braintree and Chelmsford.  It’s difficult to put a precise number (since the accounting side of Essex Terror is possibly more Occult than the forbidden lore in which it traded) but subscribers must have numbered in the mid hundreds — an incredible achievement for a one-man outfit whose primary means of transport was a Raleigh Grifter.  Incredible, that is, until one learns that the publication had become the property of the East Grinstead outlet for the Church of Scientology (there are no records of the sale, but it is listed as an asset in a December 1989 copy of Freedom Magazine).  Quite what the Church’s interest in a simple horror fanzine might be has remained a mystery, and more-so, a fact which has dogged those who would remain true to Guy’s original vision.

Today

I was first approached with the idea of relaunching Essex Terror in March of 2007 by a former associate at Fleetway Publications, but unfortunately had commitments to Home and Garden magazine which required I postpone the project.  By late in the year however, I was more in a position to take the matter seriously.  Arrangements were made and writers hired, mostly through a string of informal, Christmas card correspondences (looking back, things very much took on a life of their own in those early days).  Our team was largely made up of former subscribers and word-of-mouth admirers of the original. We were greatly excited, and it’s probably not gilding the lily too much to say that issue one came into being almost overnight.  Then came the letters.  In no uncertain terms, the Church of Scientology (hereafter referred to as CoS) threatened us with legal action should we go ahead with our publication.  We thought we had taken suitable precaution, Essex Terror! being more a spiritual successor to Guy’s Meisterwerke, but in the eyes of the CoS’s lawyers we were in clear danger of gross infringement of intellectual property rights.  Naturally Fleetway required we back off, and when the firm passed into receivership a few months later (due by all accounts to matters unrelated to the CoS dispute), it all appeared to be over.

This brings us to the present, with EssexTerror.com.  As our planned relaunch was begun primarly as a labour of love, we have decided to continue our project via the Internet as a purely non-profit undertaking.  It is to the original voice of Essex Terror that we remain true, and it comes to us in a tone shrill and swollen, as of a birdcall echoing down a chimney.

Disclaimer

We assert that Essex Terror! is in no way directly related to Essex Terror, is not a derivative work, and further believe we are in no way infringing on the intellectual properties of the CoS, in that our publication firmly comes under the notion of fair use regarding Guy’s original vision.  Whilst we may, from time to time, reference content from the original fanzine, our project is purely an historical and elucidatory one.  We are seeking charity status in this endeavor (further updates on request).