When humans go to sleep, the Night Animals come out to play.

Dresserwinkles are molluscs the size of coffee pots, with black bodies and shells the colour of fading walnut veneer. They make their homes in wardrobes and chests of drawers. By day they lurk unseen amongst the empty shoe boxes and balled up sweaters that litter such places. At night they press themselves against whatever doors, panels, or drawer–fronts their environment possesses and — by means of their strong, muscular (but singular), feet — push them gently open. The night time creaks and groans of opening cupboards are a certain sign of dresserwinkle infestation.

Night Animals is an occasional series of strange creatures drawn from dreams.

One of the formative novels of my childhood (one of many) was Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake's masterpiece of gothic fantasy (though I believe he didn't really think of it as a fantasy).

Gormenghast cast a shadow over my writing, a shadow made up of twisted towers, ruined halls, dusty carvings, hallucinatory narratives, and redolantly named characters. I read it around the age of fourteen — a similar age to the equally influentual but harder to immitate Dune — and it changed my writing, probably in ways I wasn't even aware of. It certainly wasn't the only source of the strong themes of dilapidation and unexplained mystery that run through my writing, but it was one of them!

Not long after reading Gormenghast I wrote a story as a present for my Grandmother Jessie, I think it was a Birthday present. I called "Tales of the Castle", and it was set in a place that reads a lot like a dream version of Gormenghast. I wrote it longhand, made a booklet out of it, gave it to her, and then forgot all about it.

Twenty-Five years later my Dad found the story in a box of Jessie's belongings that he's had in storage for two decades, and gave it back to me. I had no memory of it, but when I read it through I was amazed at how much it resonated with the writing I've been doing over the last couple of years. It could be part of a series with The Night Alphabet.

I transcribed it, then re-wrote it, and here it is.

One of the pleasures of running InBetween for people is that I get to do character portraits that aren't of humans. I am not good at humans, but better at mice.

Here's some that I've drawn