Minds here are corrupted not by incomprehensible visions of infinity and malevolence but by a bizarre religious devotion to Margaret Thatcher’s doctrine of self sufficiency. The gibbering madnesses that result are, however, largely the same.

Hospitals, a frightening reminder of the coddled horrors of living in a socialist state, are largely shunned, and their functions are slowly being replaced by a variety of macabre houses of medical horror that cater to the twisted whims of these strange and deranged people. Shopping centres no longer contain just shops. Here you can have your teeth vibrated clean, strapped down into a chair just outside Wilkinsons, your lips pulled back, a crowd of onlookers marvelling at the lack of enamel left in your maw. There, next to that stall where they print pictures onto canvas for no readily apparent reason, you can have your eyeballs sliced open, businessmen allowed a quick glimpse of the ultraviolet dimensions before the cornea is replaced and their lunchhour is over. And everywhere you can sit with your feet in a trough and let piranhas feast on your everdying flesh.

Those that cannot pay are left to rot in their shoes.

Jeff Randall is Essex Terror’s senior.

I had grown up here, and fled as soon as nature allowed, but my forebears remained. Parents, grandparents, aunts, they spread out across the marshes like a malarial plague, easy to forget for years before finally the fever remanifests itself and debilitates you all over again.

It had been fifteen years since last I was brought so low. On that occasion, on a quick visit to wish my father a happy birthday, I had been forced into helping him with his endless DIY. I had no suitable clothing, having come in my professional suit and tie, and the only thing that my father had that fit over my exaggerated frame was an old Comic Relief t-shirt, the kind made out of that magical 1990s material that allowed colours to change when the temperature rose. It was an evening I had tried to forget, and had almost done so. But nothing is ever truly gone.

In the present day I walked up the drive, the gravel crunching under my shoes as I strode briskly to the door. Moments later I was in, Mother popping out of the door like a ghastly jack-in-the-box as my finger hovered over the button that would ring the doorbell. Kisses followed. I was seven again, and full of resentment.

Ushered into the kitchen, I blankly handed out my gifts, my parents placing them on the table with barely even a glance. I’d spent an entire lunchhour deliberating over which chocolates to buy in Thorntons, and here they were, already dismissed. I dreamt of smashing them up with my fist. I dreamt of eating them all in the car.

I dreamt of many things.

But I was dragged away from reverie. “It’s been so long since we’ve seen you, Jeff,” Mother said. “I can’t remember the last time you were here.”

“It was when dad was doing the kitchen. I helped him put those panels up on the ceiling.”

My father nodded. “You remember, surely. Jeff here, in that Comic Relief Tshirt, holding up our ceiling like Atlas.”

My father started to laugh. “And the nose on the shirt started changing colour, going redder and redder and redder!”

Now mother: “Hahaha, yes! I came in, and you were laughing, and then I saw the t-shirt, and I started laughing.” She started laughing. “It just kept getting redder and redder.”

Father: “Like his face!”

Their laughter was continuous now, like it had been back in 1995. I tried to speak but shame and embarrassment and a sheer unspeakable terror stilled my tongue. I became unstuck in time, flipping seamlessly between now and then, their laughter echoing in stereo through time, rising, always rising. Every time I thought it must subside it redoubled in strength, every time I thought they might speak it was just instead a thunderous splutter of mirth that had gained almost complete solidity. I cycled through emotions so quickly I could not even begin to name them all. All I know is that as I walked back to my car in the gloaming dusk I no longer wished to be alive. The horror of existence was laid bare, and it was complete.

I have experienced similar horrors before. In London there is the underground, and even, so I’m lead to believe, another form of train that roams above ground and chases across the scorched countryside beyond the M25. I have travelled by plane, a civilised form of transport if ever there was one, but I have heard tales of a cheapened version, fat women crushed into cramped interiors by the thousand, black bin bags full of duty free and sick clasped in their clammy fists. I even went on a ferry once, when researching the cyclopses of Wight. I was still unprepared for the trauma of the bus.

The day begins at the bus stop. Located on the edge of town, marked only by a sign hidden behind a tree, a queue begins to form. The queue is shapeless and bloated, barely even a queue at all. Am I supposed to remember the order in which we arrived? Is it just a free for all? Am I expected to fight my way into the coach when it arrives? I look around me, hoping to ask advice from my fellow travellers, but all of them are of such a sullen and disgusting disposition I hesitate. My hesitation develops into a full silence, and becomes too large to be broached. Instead I wait.

And wait. Despite the timetable saying the bus will arrive at 8:47 am, that moment comes and goes unmarked. I look at the people around me. Am I to be trapped for eternity with these? I can feel a fear tugging at my intestines and I want to turn and run, but professionalism keeps me from abandoning my post. I will catch this bus, even if it kills me.

At 9:03 am the bus finally arrives. I hang back, letting the more experienced travellers fight it out for position. I am still no wiser as to the organisational principles by which position is decided, but it all appears peaceful enough. Perhaps the delay in the arrival of the bus is designed not to infuriate but to pacify. Anger can only last so long before it turns to ash.

Finally I step onto the bus. A thrill as I cross the threshold. Now I am no longer outside, I am Inside. I am on the bus. It is a dream come true. And like all good dreams, soon it will turn to nightmare. “A return to Chelmsford, please mate,” I say, handing him a  pristine twenty pound note fresh from the cash machine. “Haven’t you got anything smaller?” I haven’t. “I haven’t,” I tell him. He sighs, eventually snatching it from my hand. £13.40 in five pence pieces is returned to me as change. I stare at them as they clatter endlessly out of the machine. I stare at him but he’s not looking back. If he wasn’t protected by perspex I’d throttle him until he was dead. I have to content myself with labouriously opening my wallet and putting the change into the correct hole as slowly and as awkwardly as possible.

This has no effect. The driver just pulls off without even waiting for me to finish. Flustered I try to pick up the money as quickly as possible but most of it slips through my fingers and spills all over the floor. I bend over to pick some of it up but this leads to the coins in my wallet falling out to join their comrades on the floor. I stand up, breathe deeply, attempting to steady myself and calm down, but the bus lurches its way round a corner and I am flung haplessly into the back of an unamused man. I decide then to abandon the change and make my way to the safety of a seat.

I stumble my way down the length of the bus and collapse into one of the seats near the back. There isn’t much leg room, but at least I don’t have to sit next to anyone. I sit as close to the window as possible, and rest my forehead on the glass. The condensation cools my brow and obscures my view of the outside world, making everything an indistinct blur. Whenever the bus stops, its chassis begins to rattle, and the vibrations are amplified by my skull, causing my teeth to shake and the inside of my ears to itch. I fall into a torpor, the snorted conversations of teenage boys around me receding from my awareness. Greyness begins to envelope me, and I fall into a reverie, fantasizing about gunning down everyone inside, one shot at a time, remorsely, their apathy aiding me in my pursuit of their destruction. I walk slowly up the aisle, each footstep falling on another of my scattered 5 pence pieces, and when I reach the front of the bus I shoot the driver in the face. The bus veers into a layby just outside Danbury, hitting the kebab van that sleeps there. Everything bursts into flames.

The bus pulls into central Chelmsford at 9:53 am. We all file emotionlessly off the bus, each of us robotically thanking the driver for doing his job. I realise that it isn’t fear I am feeling, it is disgust. My journey is at an end.

Jeff Randall is Essex Terror’s senior correspondent. He has moved away.

Colchester has long been a town associated with fear and horror. Many of these were introduced by the Romans, like the pigbeasts that live in the historic sewage system underneath the town, where they devour whatever rotting filth that seeps down to their lair. And it was here, with the tyranny of Boudicca, that that most universal of fears – woman – achieved its apotheosis.

One of the most recent horrors in the town is the university. Built in the 1960s, it is an endless series of concrete squares and brick towers thrust into the side of a desolate hill. Utilising what were at the time state-of-the-art techniques of psychological depredation, this holocaust of architecture has been breaking the spirit of revolution and free-thought in potentional student insurrectionists for generations. It is here that the greatest terror of the present-day lurks.

Amidst the brutalist facade and the modern student class, their mobile phones and foreign voices ringing out across the void as I walk amongst them, are the rabbits. An infestation that neither guns nor myxomatosis have ever managed to tame, the rabbits leak across the campus from the surrounding fields. Like with the crabs of Christmas Island, absurd sights abound. Football matches are played around them, rabbits crowding the six yard box. People sit and eat their lunch, feeding not pigeons with their crumbs but the Leporidaean hordes. And their corpses line the carpark, the spaces outlined in blood instead of paint.

“Everything about them is just wearying,” says one anonymous student. “Whenever my mother comes down to see me she points at each and every one and says ‘Look, David, a rabbit!” But once you’ve seen a million rabbits every day for three years you’ve probably seen them all.” There is something about his body language which suggests complete defeat.

There is the theory of the Mobius, too. It has been suggested that each pair of rabbits give birth to their own grandparents, creating an infinitely repeating closed loop of continuity, safe from the tarnishing aspects of evolution and the theorised decay of entropy. Professor Theobald Vaaak shows me the workings of his theory, but they are far too technical for me to understand. He helps explain it using the analogy of the surface of a balloon, trickles of paint flowing down from the top like blood, forming clotted stalactites that hang delicately from its underside. This explanation proved too oblique for me to follow, and the professor’s shouted denunciations followed me back to my car.

As I drove across the county to my next destination I tried to reflect upon my experiences of the day, but meaning proved elusive.

Jeff Randall is Essex Terror’s Senior Correspondent. All complaints shall be referred directly to the IPCC.

It’s Autumn half-term week this week, that strangely oppressive moment when the clocks go back and the leaves start to fall and the streets start crawling with the horrible children of a hundred thousand working class mums. It is a time for terror like no other.

I’ve been sent to the small town of Maylandsea, a small working class town set adrift among the marshes of the Dengie. It’s where the farmer’s send their workers to live, so that they don’t have to look at their contracted faces all evening as well as all day. For a man like me, it is one of the most incomprehensible landscapes on this Earth. A world of monstrous urges left out in the open instead of hidden safely away behind the walls of our houses.

There’s a boy on a driveway, maybe ten years old. his bike turned upside down. He’s standing astride the front wheel, his crotch placed gently on the rim, and he idly spins the wheel forward with his hands. He sees me looking at him, my face undoubtedly aghast. “Have you ever tried this, mister?” he shouts. “It feels so good.” Behind him his mother stands, her shirt pulled up, twin babies clamped to her breasts. And what breasts! Flesh flowing out in every direction, wanton and obscene. You don’t see breasts like this in London, at least not outside in the harsh light of day, and not for free. Behind her in the yard her washing line spins lazily in the breeze, sickening dried semen stains on the inside-out pants looking like the trails of slugs and snails. In a way I suppose they are.

I walk on, past the rutting dogs and the kissing teenagers, past the underwear laying forgotten in the gutter. At the edge of town, condoms caught in the branches of the bushes flap in the wind like so many flags caught in the maelstrom of lust that roars through the lives of these lascivious and lubricious
people, their passions forever requited, no matter how base. I step beyond the town’s boundaries, and try to leave my shivers of revulsion behind.

Jeff Randall is Essex Terror’s senior correspondent. His sobs can be heard even in the North.

I was walking the streets of Essex again. It was good to be back. The shouts, the screams, the boarded up shops, the bronzed human skin and the stench from the bloodmarsh, all of it was a perfect bracing antidote of realness from the antiseptic and resolute unreality of the westminster lifestyle I’d been cocooned in during my days working for the BBC. And most of all , that constant pervading sense of gloom and the feeling of fear. I’d forgotten all about that, but it came rushing back to me almost immediately.

I was walking the streets of Mundon, the deformed and hunchbacked younger brother of the more famous Essex Town of Maldon, in search of the so-called Lesser Terror, a state of fear that renders the recipient trembling and silent, and often leaves them unable to explain what or why they feel that way. “I’m not scared, I’m just cold” is the typical response of the afflicted, even though its the middle of summer and they’re wearing a coat.

At first I thought I’d never find it. Two cunts came tumbling out of a pub in front of me, shouted “Watch out, Grandad” at me, stumbling down an alley and out of view. I was shaken, frightened, but this was definitely not the Lesser Terror, this was more like a general case of Bus-Stop Fear or maybe Eating-Chips-In-The-Park-And-Then-Some-Boys-Ask-You-For-Some-Of-Them-So-You-Hand-Them-To-Them-And-Then-They-Run-Off-Laughing-With-Your-Dinner Anxiety. Not an altogether unpleasant sensation, but not the subtle emotion I was look for.

A jumble of fears and horrors accosted my nervous system over the next couple of hours. Afterwards i couldn’t remember them all, everything a strange haze of shattered memories, seen quickly as if in a quickly cut slew of movie scenes. Two girls swinging back and forth on some swings in the park; a dead squid half hanging out of a bin; llamas roaming around a field by a dilapidated church; twisted dead trees in a field of cows; mud; mud; mud; a car travelling down the road quicker than was generally considered safe. But none of these produced the Lesser Terror that I so craved.

I thought maybe the evening was, if not wasted, at least disappointing. I had began to trudge back home, across the fields and along the sea wall. But then it happened. Before me in the hampered gloaming light stood a man, his eyes like holes in time, his hands held out towards me like hooks of flesh. And in his hands he held a tattered kite, some horrible 80s robot drawn on the front. “Is this yours?” he asked, and handed it to me. And as I looked down at it, read the words “Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots” printed across the bottom, I knew that it was. I remembered running around the fields of my youth, flying the kite, flying it always, until one day it had flown to high and left my grasp, and flown out into the river beyond. And now, 20 years later, here it was, in my hands, again.

The strange man began to walk away, and I began to shiver. “I’m just cold,” I told myself, as I stood there holding the useless flaps of material the man had given me, the wind flapping them back and forth around like whips against my skin.

Jeff Randall is Essex Terror’s senior correspondent. His weekly column will appear here sporadically.