My short story The Final Cut - a Lovecraftian parody exploring the true meaning behind Jersey's branchage tradition (in which fines are issued for unruly roadside foliage) - is included below. Hopefully it's an enjoyable tale, though - with hindsight - one I'd advise against reading aloud with a hangover.
The Final Cut
The Branchage Festival must be stopped! Forgive me for dispensing with
the usual email pleasantries dear Charles, but my state is animated – bordering
on hysteria, if I’m honest – and I fear my time is short. Is it just fancy or
can I detect the dread scent of clipped primrose in the air? Is that the faint
snipping of gathering sheers I hear beyond my bedroom window? Oh god! But I
must share my discoveries with you before it is too late. The island needs to
know!
A façade, Charles, the lot of it! A festival of film, indeed! That the
organisers of this damnable event should so stridently adopt that title for
their masquerade, leering from behind the syllables of that bi-annual farce
…they’re laughing at us, Charles! Waving it in our damned faces! Hiding in
plain daylight!
You know, of course of my research into the true and hidden history of our island’s Branchage tradition,
(roadside hedge trimming - pah!) of the practice’s links to the 17th
century fertility cult of Les Rasoirs de Dieu, They Of The Shorn Pubis, that secretive
pagan sect who viewed all forms of overgrown shrubbery as a metaphor for Nature’s…
Oh I know you’ve laughed at my claims in the past, Charles – I can
picture you laughing into your computer screen right now - but will you be
laughing when they come for you? When
you wake in the morning to discover your kitchen floor covered in mulberry
clippings, having been forced through the letterbox by unseen midnight hands?
When you return to your car to find the mud flaps neatly shorn to the metal by
some silently spying blade?
No Charles, I am not laughing and no longer should you be, for they are
among us, they are manifold and I tell you, I implore you, this festival must be stopped!
You’ll remember the tales I told you of the cult’s persecution towards
the latter end of the nineteenth century, that the then Bailiff of Jersey W.H.Vernon
swore publicly to put an end to ‘these troublesome bacchanals, with their
midnight pagan witchery, their cliff top rituals and their sacrifices.’ Oh yes
Charles, there were sacrifices – to
Pan, Demeter, Tlalteutil…for they were indiscriminate in their prayer, and
fearless too, raising burning pyres of shorn leaves and bushes gathered from
local hedges in hellish homage to wild, bubbling Azathoth and his son
Nyarlathotep – dear lord how my hands are trembling just to type their names!
It’s all there in the Jersey Archives, should one care to search, as I
have been searching these past few years. The full history; how the lower
orders of the sect were infiltrated, hunted down and banished into exile, with
our sister island of Guernsey bearing grim host to the worst and the maddest;
how in 1908 Bailiff Vernon carefully coded news of the sect’s eradication into
his Christmas address to the House…it’s all there, in file and folder.
But Vernon lied, Charles! Knowingly or otherwise, the old man told an
untruth! They had no more eradicated Les Rasoirs than they had travelled to the
moon. The sect’s activities continued, albeit quietly, secretly, in cellars,
caves and - once the Germans had left - bunkers. Numerous in their number were
fine, upstanding members of the community, wealthy and respected islanders with
the means and connections to shield their depravities from the eyes of the
common man. The rural parishes were awash with Rasoir cultists, and it was only
a matter of time before they began to infiltrate the island’s legislature.
Unsurprisingly our volunteer police force, or ‘Honoraries’ as they are colloquially
termed, were particularly susceptible to Rasoir infiltration. More frightening
still, I have found documents suggesting that by the start of the twentieth
century the sect had already extended their influence to the very highest
levels of our island’s governance, leading one to the spine-chilling notion
that perhaps the ineffectuality of Vernon’s purge was due neither to simple
lack of thoroughness and insight but that perhaps the Bailiff himself was…but
no, this is not the time for conjecture and idle hypothesis – I must be brief,
for the smell of freshly shorn foliage is growing stronger by the minute. Though
I have just drawn the curtains against the moonlit fields outside and checked
that my windows are shut still I swear I can hear the growing chitter of
approaching secateurs – snip snip snip
– oh God, I can hear them Charles! I can hear them! Time is short. But I must
conclude this email and get it sent in the hope that you can convince someone
in London to take action, that these past years’ work may yet come to something
other than hopeless paranoia and fingernails chewed to the quick!
Of course the Branchage festival organisers will deny it all, they and
their sect (for they are Rasoirs, Charles, all of them!); they’ve been denying
it all for close to a century now, whilst all the while their fiendish cogs
have been turning, turning…
As if the Loi Sur la Voirre of 1914 was anything other than an attempt
to force their dark rituals into the public arena, meshing them into the very
fabric of our daily existence! What a dance these satyric pipers have lead us
on! Whereas in centuries past the act of trimming would have been performed by
the Rasoirs’ shamen or branquers, at
night, and at specially pre-arranged snipping sites (usually within proximity
of the island’s dolmen rings), now they have us performing their sacred rites for them in the name of ‘roadside
maintenance’! And if we should refuse we are fined, and forced to wield our strimmers or clippers or sheers in the name of
their dark gods!
Yes, the mind can only marvel at the sheer audacity of these fiends, and
at the level of infiltration that they have achieved (though I draw the line at
the late Herve le Gaston’s outlandish claims that the origins of Les Rasoirs
can be traced back to the Norman conquest, and that the very flag of Jersey
itself contains a set of red shears across a white background, a notion I find
too terrifying to even contemplate.)
Oh but they are nearly upon me! Behind the hellish snipping of those approaching
secateurs – clearly audible now, (from below,
as well as from outside!) - I hear a low chanting, and the rustle of what I can
only assume are the garlands of clipped shrubbery that Les Rasoirs are reported
to wear when engaged in some dread and sacred summoning...
I have had it coming, Charles! Ever since I took up took up my studies
at the Jersey Archives – hanging over each slowly yielding text like some ancient
listing oak, growing heavier in my horror – I have been spied upon and tracked.
I’ve had my warnings, of course, numerous coded threats, two of which I believe
I touched on earlier, and more.
Leaf clippings through the post. The burglary that so upset me last
month, when I returned home to find my front door open and every set of
scissors in the house laid out upon my pillow. The gardening magazines to which
I have suddenly found myself subscribed. Untraceable phone calls in the dead of
night, with nothing but a leisured metallic ‘snipping’ at the end of the line.
Relentless, Charles! They are relentless!
And then yesterday, the final straw. Having popped into a popular
American fast food outlet in town – to find a sprig of freshly shorn hazel in
my cheeseburger – in my pre-wrapped
cheeseburger! – dear Charles, I realised then that my time was up, that I
had peered too far into this particular hedgerow, and that something infinitely
dark and baleful was rushing out at me from the leaves, that my doom was all
but assured.
Charles! The Branchage Festival
must be stopped. It is exactly one hundred years since the Loi Sur de Voirre
was passed, since Les Rasoirs de Dieu made slaves of us all, and I harbour
grave fears that this latest festival – purportedly a celebration of film,
music and ‘arts’ – is little more than a cover for some dark and demonic
celebration, the culmination of which will result in god knows…but wait…what…
They’re here! That snipping! As though the very air around me were being
assailed by titan blades! That sweet and cloying smell of clipped foliage – it
is grown hard to breath in here and I type with one hand over my nose – the
chanting is growing – stop them
Charles, stop them by whatever means – you will know them by their beards – their
beards! - oh but the very floor is giving way, the very reality around me is
being shorn and sliced by invisible – I must – send
- - -
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