I wouldn't say anything about Big Martin if I were you. He might be listening.

I'm not prod of this but here we go:

Once when my younger brother was getting ready for bed, I hid under his bed. He got into his room and started to undress. When he got close to the bed, I stuck out a hand and gripped his ankle...

Hmmm, was I really that evil when I grew up?

My cousin Philip did something similar to his baby sister Lindsay May - there's about a 20 year difference between them.

Philip had hidden under Lindsay May's bed. Lindsay May got in, turned off her bedside light and snuggled down to sleep - she was about 7 at the time.

The conversation went something like this

Night Lindsay May

Night Philip.

Are you comfy?

Yes thank you.

Want a drink of water?

No, I'm alright thank you.

What did you do at school today?

etc etc - Lindsay May chattered away to Philip, obviously not thinking at all that it was strange to be talking to her brother when she was 'alone' in her room.

Suddenly in the middle of a sentance she screamed - Philip had reached up the side of the bed and touched her arm.

Lindsay May had to sleep with the light on for the next couple of years!

"Sinister chuckle... :-)"

I'm glad I'm not the only person who got hung up on the Big Martin reference. The weird thing is, I KNOW I have read the story of Big Martin. It was a kid's short story -- maybe a fairy tale or one of those "Scary Stories to Tell After Dark" books -- something in a collection of tales, anyway. The main character of the story meets a cat that wants to eat him, but decides to wait for Big Martin to come along. A bigger cat arrives, same. A bigger cat. I just can't for the life of me remember how the story ends, but I remember the successively larger cats, the eerie description of their big, green eyes, and the whole "wait for Big Martin" part. Argh!

I knew I should have waited before posting the previous message. But evidently writing it got the old brain cells bubbling. After a futile Google search, I finally went to Amazon on a hunch and checked the contents of "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark", and sure enough, the story is called "Wait till Martin Comes". Now I just have to get a copy of the silly book and re-read the story :)

I don't think it's Big Martin. After all, Thursday can't remember a cat she's never seen.

Sometime back in the 1960s I heard (by oral tradition) what must have been the same story about the ever-larger cats, and I remember its punch line.

In the version I heard, the name is Marvin, and each cat tells the next arrival, "We can't start yet, we have to wait until Marvin gets here."

After a succession of kitten, cat, bobcat, jaguar, puma, leopard, tiger, etc., we finally get to a lion, who asks, "Shall we begin now?" and gets the usual answer. The lion then roars: "MARVIN ISN'T COMING!" End of story.

Isn't there a story called "The Tinder Box" with succesively larger cats (or is it dogs?) by HC Anderson?

I seem to remember something about eyes the size of plates?



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'Pompadour,' spat my mother. 'Living in sin with his pompadour.'

Those were dogs.

And also did the jump onto the bed thing as a child. Wouldn;t want to gove the monster a chance to grab me.

I did that! Especially after I read a book called "The Ankle-Grabber" played hell with my confidence!!

When I was a child I was terrified of monsters, I had nightmares all the time. Freudian interpretation anyone?



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'Pompadour,' spat my mother. 'Living in sin with his pompadour.'

Greetings disciples! After much divine contemplation I have the following to offer.

I'm thinking along the lines of auntysassy. Remember Thursday tells us that Aornis was lazy, like all Hades are and that she missed something from TN's psyche.

Miss Havisham told Thursday that she only feared Big Martin and The Questing Beast. I dont think that Thursday is ever really scared of that much, at least not people or 'things'. So I dont buy the Big Martin theory.

Despite her rugged exterior our heroine is warm, sensitive and loving. Her greatest fear would be losing someone close to her....Landen's permanent eradication? The loss somehow of Parke-Laine junior?

What came up the lighthouse steps was not necessairly some kind of beast, but instead some manifestation of pure unbridled fear - and that's what finished Aornis off.

I think the gouge marks in the timbers indicated that the third cat was LARGE, however, I agree that we are still waiting for REALLY BIG MARTiN!!

Bruce Chatwin, in The Songlines, talks about the prince of darkness, which he links to the primal fear, inherited from our australopithicine ancestors, for the sabre toothed tiger/ leopard who lived at the back of their cave and preyed on them, much the way leopards predate baboons in Africa.

Perhaps Big Martin is both a cat (a giant lion?) and also represents the kind of primal unseen fear of fear itself.

Greetings.

Perhaps Big Martin is Thursday's fear, since she was waiting nervously for him and never sees him?

Personally, I get the sense that Big Martin works for Jurisfiction and is her protector, not her nemesis.

>Once when my younger brother was getting ready for bed, I hid under
>his bed. He got into his room and started to undress. When he got
>close to the bed, I stuck out a hand and gripped his ankle...

Yeeess. I remember my five years younger brother pleading with my mother that he didn't want to go to his bedroom alone to sleep as he was afraid of the dark. As he was losing this argument, I slipped out and hid behind his bedroom door...

Probably explains why he never speaks to me now.

I'm of the opinion it was Death that saw to Aornis in the lighthouse. Thursday made a point of not looking at the mysterious figure, and just left the room. Aornis turned to face them and turned instantly white. I don't know if Death is supposed to do something like that, but it sounds possible. Medusa would have turned her to stone.

And Big Martin. I think he's a big softy, and works for the CofG. He's trailing Thursday (or was, at least) to protect her. Hence when the pro-caths attempt to kill Heathcliffe, Big Martin comes along and saves Thursday from being shot to pieces. But he didn't then go for Thursday, which suggests that was never his intention.

Maybe Jasper just forgot about that? He tends to leave so many open plot ends to pick up later, there must be several he's missed...

I like that idea of Death, except that one thing Thursday never seems to be afraid of is Death. I was wondering if it was something more abstract, like the idea of losing herself (one my own greatest fears), except that isn't that exactly what Aornis is doing to her?

In a different thread, Chebrew suggested that her greatest fear was the Glatisant ("I thought Aornis was killed by the Glatisant, "the hell beast" Kaine conjured and it killed 3 SO agents in Lost in a Good Book. But then I read that Thursday can't conjure up a fictional beast, so it must be Big Martin that got her. But then again, this was Thursday's DREAM so she could have conjured a fictional beast that was her worst fear, a Glatisant. She certainly made it clear in LIGB that she feared it most. My money's on the the Glatisant, not Big Martin.")

I need to go back and reread that portion of LIAGB to see if Chebrew is right, but I can't shake the feeling that there's something really, really obvious (i.e. Thursday says "this is my greatest fear") in one of the books, that we're missing. I do like the idea of her own boogeyman, except that I feel that Jasper would have mentioned this before in some aggravatingly subtle way if this was indeed the answer.

The story as I know it is in a juvenile book called _Ghosts, Ghosts, Ghosts_
edited (written?) by Phyllis R. Fenner, pub. 1952. The story is called
"Not Quite Martin". A boy is in the woods after dark and wanders into
a deserted cabin. In comes a possum, followed by successively larger
creatures: cat, fox, wolf, finally a large brown bear. As each one comes
in he is told by the previous one: "Can't do nothin' 'till Martin comes."
Finally he tears out the door and runs all the way home, and never
does find out who Martin was.
I suspect this is a retelling of an older oral or written story - wonder
where Jasper heard or read it?

It's named after me. I was nowhere near the lighthouse though....



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'We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad." [said the Cat.]
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "Or you wouldn't have come here."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland