‘You remember now?’ asked Fange.

‘It’s all coming back,’ I said. ‘But how, I don’t understand.’

‘You’ll figure it out, I’m sure. By the by, now that you’re returning to normal, did you get me those tickets you promised me?’

‘Tickets?’ I said. ‘That I promised?’

‘For The Sumerian Kynges Thirtieth Anniversary Tour. It’s thirty years since they played their first professional gig on Ealing Common with The Flange Collective.’

The Flange Collective? That felt like a lifetime ago. ‘That feels like a lifetime ago,’ I said. ‘They’re all still alive, I suppose.’

‘Depends on what you mean by “alive”,’ said Fangio. And there was a certain something in his voice as he said it. A certain gravitas, perhaps.

‘I know exactly what I mean by “alive”,’ I said. ‘I mean, as opposed to dead.’

‘Ah,’ said Fangio. ‘You certainly haven’t recalled everything yet, then. I know a lot of people think it’s just a lot of talk and conspiracy theory nonsense. And I know that for the last twenty years you have been telling me that it’s all nonsense and that you don’t believe in it and nor should I. But I do believe in it.’

‘Believe in what?’ I asked.

‘The Undead thing,’ said Fangio. ‘The Dead-Walk-Amongst-Us thing.’

‘That,’ I said, in the tone known as leaden. ‘I believe in that.’

‘Sudden change of mind,’ said Fangio. ‘You’ve been making public statements for the last twenty years that the whole thing is a communist hoax.’

‘I have what?’ And more terrible memories returned. I had done that. I really had. I had literally become the spokesman for the There-Are-No-Undead-Amongst-Us lobby.

‘Oh my God,’ I said, and I hung my head once more. ‘Oh my God. I was manipulated. Hypnotised. Drugged. I don’t know what. But somehow I have been controlled for twenty long years. And before that, on the day that Elvis died, I was in some kind of trance. That has to be it – some mind-controlled drug-induced brainwashed trance. Or something.’

‘Or something,’ the barlord agreed. And I am reasonably sure that at this point he would probably have gone off to serve another customer. If there had been another customer. But there were no other customers in Fangio’s Bar. There was just him and me in that bar.

So he stayed.

‘Business not too good?’ I asked.

And Fangio sighed. ‘Not since you closed the bar to everyone except yourself,’ he said.

‘Oh dear,’ said I. ‘And when did I do that?’

‘At the time of your divorce. Which came after just the three weeks of marriage. But let’s not return to that topic of conversation, eh?’

‘Let’s not,’ I said. ‘But I am now awake from that terrible twenty-year walking nightmare of a life. That’s half of my life nearly, all wasted away. I can’t believe it, it’s too terrible. But I do believe in the undead. And I want you to tell me all about what you know of them. And I want you to take the “CLOSED” sign off this door and reopen this bar for business.’

‘Praise the Lord,’ cried Fangio, throwing up his not-quite-so-podgy fingers. ‘Praise the Lord, Lordy Lordy.’

‘And never say “Lordy Lordy” again,’ I told him.

And Fange promised that he never would.

And Fange left the shelter of his bar counter, crossed the floor (rather smart trousers he wore, and the wooden leg was only memory), reached the door, turned the ‘CLOSED’ sign to the ‘OPEN’ side and returned to from whence he had come.

‘A job well done,’ said Fangio. ‘And welcome back, Laz. It has been a very long time.’

‘It has,’ I agreed. ‘And I am very angry about this state of affairs.

Someone has been playing awful games with my life, and I’m damn sure I know who. And I will do something about it and about them. You see if I don’t. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ said Fangio. ‘But you did of course say that the reason for your last twenty years of mostly inactivity was because you were perfecting the Tyler Technique. Does this new-found positivity mean that you have now perfected it? Or is it a by-product of the nineties Zeitgeist? The post-yuppie work ethic?’

‘Tell me about the undead,’ I said to Fangio. ‘And get me a proper drink. And get one for yourself. And we’ll both have doubles. Okay?’

And Fangio did as I bade him to do.

And then he settled himself down upon his side of the bar and he told me things. And these things were terrible things.

But I had to be told them and so I listened.

Quietly, like this.

I listened.

‘There’s a lot of different versions of this story regarding the undead,’ said Fangio. ‘Some say the whole thing started here and others say it started there. No one is exactly sure where and when it all began, but there are a growing number of informed and intelligent folk who do believe it. And folk have been piecing things together. And folk talk in bars. And I listened to these folk. And I have been listening to folk during the last ten years, in this bar, having meetings, while you have been out at your meetings propagandising to the contrary on this matter.’

I made certain groaning sounds. ‘Please continue,’ I told him.

And so Fangio continued.

‘Legends say that it started in Vietnam, but researchers have found anomalies that date back as far as the First World War. There was the case of a man named Billy Balloon, a Punch and Judy man in Edinburgh. He went off to fight for his King and his country, and returned to join the family business and perform as a Punch and Judy man. And he is remembered in the annals of Punch and Judy men as being one of the greatest that ever there was. But the mystery of it is this: he had his arms and his tongue blown off during that dreadful war, so how could he work the puppets and do all the voices as well?’

‘My father told me this story,’ I said to Fangio. ‘He told me that as a child he’d been taken to see Billy Balloon’s Punch and Judy show. And later, when Billy died, my granddaddy told him the story. But he didn’t know the truth. Do you?’

‘He was dead,’ said Fangio. ‘He died at the Somme. But his comrades didn’t know that he had died. They thought he had been terribly wounded, but had survived his injuries.’

‘But he was dead? Was it a dead man that my father saw perform the Punch and Judy show?’

‘A dead man,’ said Fangio. ‘By force of will, by utter determination, he refused to let go of his physical body. He clung on to it. He urged it back into animation. But he had no arms. And he could not speak.’

‘So how did he work the puppets? And do the voices?’

‘He didn’t. Not physically, anyway. He didn’t touch the puppets. Those puppets climbed up onto the little stage of the Punch and Judy show tent booth and performed and spoke by themselves.’

‘He brought the puppets to life?’

‘He was undead. His soul had left his body back in the Somme. What remained was the force of his will. Witches have their familiars, animals with the souls of demons that do the witches’ bidding. In the same way, he had his puppets. He conjured into those puppets the souls of departed comrades. How many millions died in the First World War? How many lost souls wandered those battlefields?’

I felt little shivers run through me. This was sinister stuff.

‘Oh,’ said Fangio. ‘A customer. And my first, other than yourself, in twenty years. Please pardon me while I serve him.’

And off he went to do that very thing.

And I did some thinking on what he had said. It was that thing about souls again. That thing upon which the creation of the Homunculus was based. The Punch and Judy man had somehow cheated Death, in that although he had died and his soul had left his body, the being that was him had somehow remained there, by sheer force of will. And this will-being had reanimated his own body. A dead body. But what about those Punch and Judy puppets? The souls of fellow soldiers animating the bodies of puppets? That sounded rather horrid. But then perhaps it was better than being in your own rotting corpse lying unrecovered on some foreign battlefield, awaiting your call to salvation or otherwise. As an option, perhaps it wasn’t too bad a one. Although how had Billy Balloon managed to achieve it?