Smoke And Mirrors

The Daughter of Owls

John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century collector and historian, is one of my favourite writers. His writings contain a potent mixture of credulity and erudition, of anecdote, reminiscence and conjecture. Reading Aubrey's work, one gets an immediate sense of a real person talking from the past in a way that transcends the centuries: an enormously likable, interesting person. Also, I like his spelling. I tried writing this story in a couple of different ways, and I was never satisfied with it. Then it occurred to me to write it as by Aubrey.

The overnight train to Glasgow from London is a sleeper that gets in at about five in the morning. When I got off the train, I walked to the station hotel and went inside. I intended to walk down the hall to the reception desk and get a room, then get some more sleep, and then, once everyone was up and about, I planned to spend the next couple of days at the science fiction convention that was being held in the hotel. Officially, I was covering it for a national newspaper. The year was 1985.

On the way down the hall to the reception desk, I passed the bar, empty but for a bemused barman and an English fan named John Jarrold, who, as the Fan Guest of Honour at the convention, had been given an open bar tab, which he was using while others slept.

So I stopped to talk to John and never actually made it to the reception desk. We spent the next forty-eight hours chatting, telling jokes and stories, and enthusiastically massacring all we could remember of Guys and Dolls in the small hours of the next morning, when the bar had started to empty out again. At one point in that bar, I had a conversation with the late Richard Evans, an English SF editor, that, six years later, would start to turn into Neverwhere.

I no longer remember quite why John and I began talking about Cthulhu in the voices of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, nor why I decided to start lecturing John on H. P. Lovecraft's prose style. I suspect it had something to do with lack of sleep.

These days John Jarrold is a respectable editor and a bastion of the British publishing industry. Some of the middle bits of this story began life in that bar, with John and I doing Pete and Dud as creatures out of H. P. Lovecraft. Mike Ashley was the editor who cajoled me into making them a story.

As of October 1999, the story is nominated for a World Fantasy Award as best short story.