The Teeth

Hereabouts begins the period where I started to write more toward an audience like 4chan's /x/ than anyone else. This was written in November of 2008.


In older times, when men would greet each other, they would tip their hats down a bit, the brim covering their eyes for a moment, as a sign of respect. Nowadays, this custom has fallen out of practice, and people just wave or say a few words. Would that they return to this simple practice!

None now remember why this custom started. I will tell you, traveler. It began back in London, when the fog covered the streets at night so thick that you could not see whom you met on your wanderings. I know, I was there, traveler. There in London, whispers in the back alleys spoke of the “street wraiths,” forms without arms who walked at night through the tangle of lines that made up London's downtown. If you met eyes with them, they would smile, it's said, and if you see their smile, by the sunrise you were mad. I've met many a drifter who screamed in his shuddering about the teeth, the teeth.

It became a sort of recognition idea to, upon seeing someone on the streets at night, tip your hat with your hand. If the figure up ahead did not tip their hat back, then it was assumed they were a street wraith, and you had best avert your eyes and make your way to where you are going on a different street.

Slowly, the fogs began to lift from London's streets, and people started to believe less and less that those crying madmen were victims of a ghost or spirit or whatever-it-was, and more that they were simply mad from poverty and hunger. Still, on a cold night when the fog rolled in, a few more would turn up on their doorsteps gibbering like the plague had hit them, about the teeth. Some of them even clutched pieces of their own hair, torn from their heads in their madness, and their hats always missing. “How peculiar,” some would say, “that their hats would be the only things missing. Would that I knew where they all were; I could make a penny off all those hats!”

No matter what medicine did, however, none could determine why those who lost their minds never recovered, and always amounted to being locked up and left to rot in their white cells, where often before killing themselves, they would paint the face of some monster with giant, jagged, sharp teeth on the floor in their own blood.

Alas, it is sad indeed that the simple manner by which one might distinguish a simple traveler from demise in a tight jacket has been lost. Oh, myself? No, traveler. I will not tip my hat to you. You see, sir, I haven't any arms.