15/3 ARCHIVE & ANALYSIS: 3 AGAINST MYSTERY AND THE BUSINESS OF THE BLACK KNOT

PIC: KM 2026

(This is the first chapter of the novella Archive & Analysis: 3 Against Mystery and the Business of the Black Knot, which will be serialised here over the next seven weeks. The first chapter is available to all, subsequent episodes will only be available to our paid subscribers…)

Prologue:

Another postcard was waiting when I got back from the bank to an otherwise empty house.

Aside from my name and this current address in characterless block capitals, along with a neatly printed number #2 in the lower left corner, the reverse was blank, but the face showed The Cat with the Broken Heart, from Blue Cat Blues, the only Tom & Jerry cartoon with a voiceover by Jerry the mouse. The only Tom & Jerry that comes with a suicide prevention warning.

I put the card with the first in my desk drawer in the basement where I write. Now there were two almost identical postcards. Blue Cat Blues on both. Aside from scuffs and tears, the only way to tell them apart was to read the stamps – Los Angeles 3 weeks ago, just before I started work on the story of What Happened Then, and now New York. And those numbers – first #1, this latest #2.

Not much to go on. Nothing unusual or unexpected about that numerical sequence except that, for me, it was matted with meaning, sodden with significance.

I couldn’t sleep again and found myself thinking about those two cards in the drawer, fanned like moth wings, identically patterned, with a camouflage mimicking cartoon images of a cat without hope. Being me, I imagined them slowly flapping out book dust and mortuary soil, huge as tennis courts attached to the hunched shoulder blades of a human-scale Angel of Death, beating out supersize sailboat gusts as the Reaper took to the skies above time and made another selection.

There was dad first, then Rosie not long after. Implacable Azrael swooping in, quiet as an owl on the hunt, striking so close the slipstream of the bastard’s dive knocked me off my feet, so it took months to recover. Months while the Embodiment of Mortality executed a perfect blue sky turn en route to its next target.

Coming closer again, eastward, the cardboard wingbeats of the Angel of Death, or of Redemption. Angels were surely implicated. Fallen or otherwise.

If my suspicions were correct, there would be a third card soon enough, but only the sender, that Tempter & Deceiver, and I knew what the #3 would stand for.

I had to go back a bit to make sense of all this.

It’s a good thing the night is long.

*****

1.

Everything about it was stupid.

It wasn’t what you’d call an original idea. Dominoes’ ‘inspiration’ was a popular book series starring a trio of insufferable boy detectives.

Stay with me, think pint-sized private eyes specializing in faux supernatural capers and you’re there. An added audience participation gimmick invited young smartasses to spot glaringly obvious clues paced through the text like a set of luminous footprints leading directly to the culprit’s lair. By following the evidential trail that resulted in a successful unmasking of some disgruntled villain before the boys reached the same painstakingly inevitable conclusion in the concluding chapter, bookworms (9 to 13) were encouraged to feel superior to the three precocious leads.

There at the beginning, Dominoes threatened to call us the Young Investigators. He styled it out as a direct ‘homage’ to his teenage sleuthing heroes, a word he pronounced ‘hommidge’. I gagged on principle and argued we could surely come up with a better name of our own. No surprises, Dominoes agreed but rejected my proposal, The Cluehunters. Big Mikey, who’d never had a clue and wouldn’t know what to look for, was indifferent at best, so we ended up shackled to the atrocious ‘3 Against Mystery’, like drowning men to an anchor.

According to Dominoes, who was wrong, this bestowed upon our undertaking a spooky gravitas missing from all other efforts, i.e., mine. As far as I was concerned, he’d arrived on this Earth more thoroughly stuffed with shite than the lower intestines of an All The Shite You Can Eat champion.

Next, he had those pompous, little business cards run off at that copy place they used to have in the Arcade before people had home printers and business cards were obsolete anyway; a big 3 with AGAINST MYSTERY underneath. On the back, he’d asked them to do a ? behind a red backslash ‘forbidden’ bar and provided contact details for all three of us. My dad never forgave Dominoes for the crank callers! Oh, the embarrassment!

Membership brought with it an additional unique privilege in the form of our exclusive team badge. Naturally, Dominoes had chosen huge, embarrassing lapel pins whose diameters exceeded those of jar lids. They looked like the chest plates worn by Thing 1 and 2 in The Cat in the Hat and they even had numbers! Why not, I often thought, write, I’m a loser – feel free to humiliate me on our foreheads and be done with it? It wasn’t long before the number 3 itself came to encode my feelings, a glyph of dismay, triggering PTSD every time it caught my attention anywhere.

Nowadays, those badges would end up as collectors’ items on eBay. They were evil, demoralising works of art in their own way.

We were each assigned specialist roles within the team. Dominoes, no-one will be shocked to learn, was Mystery #1 – Coordinator - the brains, or so he hoped. Mikey AKA Big Mikey on account of his towering five inches above Dominoes’ imposing 5 feet four – was Mystery #2, or Fieldwork, the muscle of the trio.

Never mind that I could jump higher, run faster, and hold my breath for longer than either boy, my place was reserved for me on the lowest step of the podium, plucky bronze medalist Mystery #3. As the scuffed and foxed calling card I kept as a bookmark indicated very clearly, I was Archive & Analysis, and unto me fell the tedious job of recording our cases. Secretary, PA, treasurer, hagiographer in chief to the Brains & Brawn dream ticket!

I would say I only had myself to blame but why? Not when two associated clowns existed to relieve me of exclusive responsibility for the following unusual, mysterious and, some might say, tragic events.

As I said, stupid. Cluehunter #1 would have sounded much better. Mystery #1 made no sense at all. There was nothing mysterious about Dominoes. He was an open book with empty pages. The days of his life gave off the same papery whiff of unstated excuses as a 5-year diary optimistically begun then abandoned due to chronic lack of incident.

‘Dominoes’, AKA Dominick Cambeltown.

According to his backstory, he’d been named for the patron saint of astronomers and founder of the Dominican order itself. The ‘k’ on the end explained by his mother’s attempt to do for the boy what Aleister Crowley did for ‘Magick’.

Our English teacher, Mr. Willis, half blind from wanking and unable to decipher the new boy’s handwriting, announced him to the rest of the class as incoming pupil ‘Domino C’. Surely, a rapper or MC? Mr. Willis eventually recanted his error, assuring the class that the new boy in question had in fact been baptized Dominick, but the damage was done. Dominick was Dominoes for the remainder of his time at Bellavista Academy. As will be demonstrated at least once more in this account, no one gets to choose a nickname, and there was nothing Dominick Cambeltown could do about his.

He was lucky. But for Mr. Willis’ mistake, Dominick Cambeltown would have endured the next three years living up to ‘Dombo’ or ‘Cambo’ such was the imaginative reach of classroom consensus in those days.

My guess is he liked the name Dominoes because it made him sound like someone who might eventually receive an invitation to join the X-Men.

Back then, he was an awkward new insertion into Class 2A’s social Jenga tower. 14 years old with skin so clear and a general aspect so pleasantly cherubic it seems in hindsight a shared false memory. Six months later, wave after wave of determined hormones would blitz his complexion to resemble Guernica but there at the beginning, convolved beneath smooth cheek and unshaven chin like unexploded bombs or daffodil bulbs, Dominoes’ spectacular fusillade of zits had yet to erupt in triumph through the peach fuzz, purging volcanic pus.

Let’s not forget the literal shock of hair; a scrub of dead and dirty blond keratin that belonged on the crown of a root vegetable. Relative to his malnourished or bulimic classmates, Dominoes was from a now discontinued brand of out-of-shape nerd once described as ‘stocky’ or ‘stout’.

He wore bulky National Health specs, the left leg secured with Elastoplast as an affectation. His T-shirt collection was legendary, coolly recondite. He carried an inhaler he’d long outgrown, but Dominoes felt the vaporiser added to his idiosyncratic mystique, comparing it to Sherlock Holmes’ trademark pipe. It could tip the scales in a confrontation, he reasoned. Who wants to be first to hit a wheezing asthmatic? In truth, I could think of coachloads of assholes who’d happily throw an asphyxiating kid’s inhaler in the pond for a laugh. A fake asthma seizure would be enough to justify a lynching, but I left Dominoes to his flights and his fancies.

Comic books, games, and cult TV provided us with a common language, our secret dialect of pop culture arcana. I was a lanky tomboy who wore trademark long-sleeved T-shirts and specialized in geek boys and misfits. I gravitated towards, then cultivated, lost souls who inevitably looked up to me. Girls never talked to boys like the ones I befriended, so the boys were generally overjoyed to be hanging out on my team, even if most of the time I felt more masculine than they were! Rake thin, the way I was then, when I thought ‘athletic’ meant ‘chunky’. When I imagined myself ‘boyish’.

I liked to tell myself they probably fantasized about me naked, the fools, and this justified my contempt and pity. I imagined I was the only bridge to normality these outcasts would ever dare cross. I was helping them. I was being kind at great cost to my own credibility. It is to be understood that my missionary self-sacrifice spared me the effort of competing with the popular girls, who’d already made a point of rejecting my company.

Dominoes’ saving grace was a twisted sense of humour that chimed with my own unpalatable wit. His was a very serious deadpan delivery that allowed him to serve up the most outrageous statements with wide-eyed sincerity. We got on like a maternity ward on fire.

Perhaps, in hindsight, there was nothing about Dominoes that wasn’t mysterious. We talked for as many hours as we needed about superheroes and TV shows, movies, ghosts, flying saucers and pop music but we never once raised the subject of our lives at home. Or only in the most offhand derisory way. There was a shared understanding that the world of parents came set-dressed in shades of dispiriting grey. It wasn’t worth talking about, so we never did.

Big Mikey Macaroni (real name McCrory) came as an accessory, part of a twin set, like Tom and Jerry, Barbie and Ken, or Bondage and Domination. He’d commenced his progress to devoted right hand man with a sustained attempt to bully Dominoes that verged on the passionate. For more than a month after Dominoes’ admission to our year, Mikey made Dominoes life hell with an unrelenting program of harassment that included one actual pummelling, half-hearted and uncommitted though it was.

During this primary aggressive phase of his mating ritual, Mikey failed to account for Dominoes’ guileless gift for coercion. Deploying his advanced edge detection and pattern-making skills, together with a grab-bag of haphazard cues and observations, (Mikey’s black and white Warren comics habit. His Misfits T-shirt), Dominoes deduced the conflicted young jock’s love of campy horror movies, ghost stories, science fiction, and monster comics. Idling in an athletic peer group that lacked like minds with whom to share these profoundly geeky forbidden passions, Mikey made easy prey for Dominoes whose compendious arsenal of pop culture trivia, rare videos and infectious enthusiasm proved an irresistible social inducement.

The turning point arrived one spruce April morning in the boisterous Spring term corridors between classes with Dominoes facing the usual rat run of abuse from outliers of Mikey’s crowd. One toe-brained Rugby squad thug, who’d traditionally relied on the Big Em’s support to back-up his provocations, got his first taste of the new world order that day when, chortling, the brute stuck out a foot to trip Dominoes, laying him flat like a rug.

Enter Mikey stage left, playing the new sheriff in town, stepping up to draw some moral lines in the sand after a seeming religious conversion. Mikey seized a generous handful of the bully’s greasy hair and dragged the lump backwards off his victim.

“Fuck off,” Mikey snarled. Then, so that every kid who saw it would remember, he sneered in disgust and flicked his fingers. “Nits. Fried in oil.” The cowed troll kid scuttled away, broken, cringing. His pre-existing nickname, ‘Tombo’, now erased from the roll call, he would spend the next three years until graduation, as ‘Nits’.

Mikey, with a politician’s nose for the grand gesture, extended his clean hand. Employing a firm young manly grip, he hoisted Dominoes off the Marmoleum floor onto his feet. Face to face Mikey nodded approvingly in recognition of Dominoes’ prominent Danzig T-shirt. Applause and cheers bubbled up, as if a scene in a play had come to an obvious end and the audience was moved to heartfelt appreciation for this surprisingly upbeat plot turn.

By the end of term, Mikey and Dominoes were inseparable. Like bacon and eggs, no-one could imagine a time they hadn’t been served together. Mikey had discovered a rewarding new purpose as Dominoes best mate and personal bodyguard. Ennobled, Mikey made it his duty to protect Dominoes from people like Mikey. He felt responsible at last, like the policeman his dad, the policeman, wanted him to be. I saw a kind of Courtly Love emerging, that was pure and protective. A Knight’s chaste devotion to the Beloved.

I gave the boys’ friendship a couple of weeks to develop and cohere. I’d already swapped a few jokes and some Marvel comics with Dominoes, so we were on good speaking terms, but I opted for a back seat to give the budding bromance some oxygen. While I was waiting for the boys to mate for life like swans, I dedicated myself to learning their habits. My coloured felt-tipped pens were ranked in a scrambled rainbow, I ruled neat vertical lines in my jotter to make columns and set about recording and memorizing in-jokes and routines like a hunter stalks prey, tracks spoor, gathering intel before I made my move.

Close to the end of term in early May, when the buds were bursting, and the birdsong was bright and clear and blue at 6am, I insinuated myself steadily into the mix. These were the slow last days in school’s relaxing grip. Teachers let loose their belts a notch or two, anticipating lazy yellow summer’s easing of rules. Ties worn slack and collar buttons undone. Going into class felt like trespass. The vacant rooms that echoed to floor polish smells, admitting particular slants of sunlight, impossible in winter, onto the wallcharts and maps. Even the teachers were preoccupied with travel brochures, researching barge proprieties, caravan etiquette, hillwalking kit. Too busy with their dreams of liberty to bother with our education. We educated ourselves.

In that liminal haze, anything could happen. When I turned the Dynamic Duo into a Terrific Trio, it was hardly remarked upon. It seemed natural for me to be part of the equation. So much so that no one would ever remember when it had been different.

Summer break was a hoot. As I said, Dominoes and I shared a sense of humour that was harmonized like two waveforms on an oscilloscope, locking into synchrony. Mikey played along, skewing blue in his locker room way, but eager to adapt to our surreal and cruel improvisations.

That summer we’d lie on the carpet reading comics, or novels by James Herbert and Clive Barker, passing them round when we’d finished. A shared hum of concentration was all the fellowship we needed, bound, even in silence, to a common reality, a mutual immersion in imaginary worlds.

After an hour or two of this, a telepathic impulse would rouse each of us as one, at the same time. We’d take off into the wilderness of Maxwell Estate for intense, extended and passionate discussions of our reading, arguing over storylines and artwork, shock scenes, our shared taste. Climbing trees, fording rivers, cataloguing clouds. Laughing ourselves legless.

Every Saturday morning we’d commence a 5-mile-wide ceremonial circuit of Gasglow’s south side, pausing at a sequence of Mingus Bros and Liberty’s newsagents, blissfully rifling through the spinner racks for newly released issues of favourite titles to add to our collections. Or we’d scrounge for paperbacks and used videos, weird movies and old vinyl at the Stalls Market and walk home together, in lockstep, with our loot and our opinions. Extending our range, just to spend more time together.

In the evenings, we’d devour bootleg VHS tapes, horror, sci-fi, surreal comedies, at Mikey’s until it was time to call it a day when Mikey’s dad, the policeman, insisted on driving us home.

Some weeks into these bonding sessions, my own dad, (in his pre-mortem period), indulged an urge to lecture me, What was I doing hanging around with a couple of ‘dodgy oddballs’, as he described my new friends? Dad continued to imagine the worst kind of sex criminals and drug dealers until he laid eyes on the pair, loitering on our path like refugee children off a poster, survivors of war and famine, outside the house on Ashpark Avenue. They looked so pitiful; mum was stricken by a humanitarian need to feed and water the waifs before they perished on the footpath.

As far as I was concerned, I’d made the grade my way. I had my own gang. I could ignore my sister and brother, both reduced to sniffing for clues. Me and the boys would vanish into the scramble of the Estate or walk as far as Rocking Mill in August heat and high humidity, on one shared can of Mettle Broo, arguing and agreeing about comic characters, TV plots, new records. Laughing at dehydration and heat exhaustion. Rosie and Jet knew nothing about my secret world.

I gave my boys pride and the legitimacy they lacked among their alienated peers. A geek, a jock, and a guh-girl? We were a recipe for a sitcom or a quirky superhero team. They were protective of me and for my part, I’d found, at last, not just one person, but two fools to whom I could feel superior!

Somewhere in the dazzle of our fusion, shared memories of the Young Investigators books were generated as a conversational by-product. I’d only read one of the books in the series, but Dominoes’ eyes lit up when I mentioned how much I’d loved The Young Investigators and the Mystery of Midas Mountain, especially the disturbing hallucinatory chapter 5: Ghosts of the Goldrush. Everything followed from that moment. That recalled title. Those annihilating words. Why not? Instead of reading about them, why not be young investigators?

Me, Dominoes and Mikey. Together we were – the Cluehunters!

Were we F.U.C.K. We were 3 Against Mystery.

I can’t say Dominoes ever gave much serious thought to what it might mean to be against Mystery. Our self-appointed leader’s plagiarized blueprint for the venture suggested we would most likely investigate local area phenomena; grey ghost sightings, urban poltergeists, cackling skulls from the curio cabinets of aristocratic families, wandering suits of armour, otherwise empty etcetera etcetera. We’d stake out haunted stately homes and case creepy castles. We’d target touring circuses, graveyards, and museums.

Dominoes’ reading had taught him that these locations could be relied upon for adventure, intrigue, and above all the kind of mystery he seemed unable to locate anywhere in the real world.

In this way, we’d build brand awareness and gain a reputation for no-nonsense ghostbusting that would invariably pave the way to further adventures. So far, so good.

In search of mysteries to demystify, I felt Dominoes had overlooked a few obvious possibilities - 3 Against the Mystery of How to Talk to People. 3 Against the Mystery of Appearing Normal in Public - except it wasn’t even 3 Against the Mystery. He’d left out the article that might have added some sense!

The name, and I’m sorry to go on about this, implied a coalition for mystery rather than against it. If it wasn’t for mystery, we wouldn’t have much to do, I maintained. Mystery was our bread and butter. Why set our table against it? Unless he meant ‘up against’ mystery, I ventured, triggering a sort of vocal fart, and side-eye from Mikey. Like rubbing up against it!

Dominoes hated it when Mikey was coarse.

Frottage! I mugged. My dad said these cards could easily be misunderstood…

I relished my contributions to Dominoes’ ongoing embarrassment, but my efforts to change his mind were in vain. The name would not be budged. We were 3 Against Mystery.

We each had branded rucksacks with our logo drawn on. These were essential for carrying our cheap cameras, and cassette dictating machines, along with old-fashioned pens and paper and old-fashioned corned beef sandwiches courtesy of old-fashioned mums. Swiss Army knives, of course. Our ghost hunting proficiency badges, like you’d get in the Scouts or Guides, rounded out the tackle.

In this manner came the kit, came the name, came the will. We were locked and loaded, missing only one critical ingredient: ghosts.

A shortage of available phantoms in any real world outside of fiction was to be expected but worse news was on its way. We were perhaps the first to identify an unexpected scarcity of ordinary people pretending to be ghosts; whether it was to claim a disputed inheritance or scare away prospective theme park buyers, they were nowhere found.

This seemed ironic. What a time to discover that ghost-impersonators were rarer than genuine hauntings!

The titles of our ‘cases’ bore cruel witness to our team’s fundamental limitations. They were doomed to disappoint when stacked against The Young Investigators and the Secret of Skeleton Swamp or The Young Investigators and the Mystery of Moonlight Mansion to name but two of the fictional team’s dependably thrill-fuelled and (simulated) spectre-thronged exploits.

Sensing yawns, let’s start the engine, pump the gas, and crash headlong out of our team’s ‘origin’ story. We’ll call it 3 Against Mystery Meet in School on the way to the exit. It’s easy to think of as one of those literary experiments - summative or Spoiler or something like that - where the title tells the complete story.

Next in the canon came 3 Against Mystery in Nightmare Castle, the chilling tale of a mostly uneventful day trip to a local ruin, barren of wraiths, where the titular nightmare was a savage admission price that tore the living guts out of our combined weekly pocket money allowance.

On page after blue ruled page, I had the minutes of our weekly field trips dutifully written down, along with my own more whimsical 3 Against Mystery Wait for a Bus (38a).

When Dominoes demanded to see the only copy of our so-far staggeringly dull casebook, he complained I wasn’t taking ‘TAM’ seriously enough.

I made him promise never to use the acronym TAM again, a promise he kept, although he ignored my snappy alternative ‘3AM’. When I next presented Doubting Dominick with every meticulously logged twitch and tremor of our weekend excursions, along with bus tickets, entrance fees, and the more general lack of excitement that clung to the journal pages like a damp haar, there was nothing he could say. I’d recorded every grinding banal moment and as he grimly scanned page after ruled page of drab non-incident as scrupulously documented by yours truly, I remember thinking - chew on that, Mystery number 1!

We were, I dared to venture, so stubbornly opposed to Mystery our denial had rendered us Mystery Proof!

Despite Dominoes’ upbeat insistence that our various humdrum excursions counted as legitimate ‘field research’, there was only ever one case that could reasonably qualify as ‘real’.

There was one last entry in the ring-bound journal.

None of us ever forgot that one.

to be continued