THE WORLD OF ROCKY HILLS

Can a whole life and even insanity by created by the naming of an infant?

When Mr and Mrs Hills had a son they called him Rocky. They were both high on something or other at the time and thought it a grand joke " a boy being called Rocky Hills.

The boy didn't find it so amusing, especially when he started school and the other children found it laughable, to have a boy called Rocky Hills when they lived in a small town nestling amongst the skirts of some genuinely rocky hills. And when children find something amusing with one of their number it usually ends up with bullying, and Rocky found himself being bullied.

At first it was just name calling, but when he didn't respond to the almost boring taunts launched at him on a daily basis the bullying became physical. And physical bullying can cause pain and humiliation.

As he grew older he became identifiable as one of the world's bullied. He must have given off an aura " it's often the case that a boy who has been bullied all his life seems to smell of the bullying, seems to generate a subconscious invitation to his schoolmates to come and thump him or de-bag him or humiliate him as often as they like and in any one of a thousand different ways.

So, almost inevitably, Rocky Hills became an introvert.

He preferred his own company to that of anyone else, even the parents who had wittily been responsible for his taunting by naming him inappropriately, and as the years passed he descended ever further into a world that was entirely his own and into which others never trod. Even his natural instincts at adolescence were suppressed by his need for isolation.

Then, in his teens, he met his god at the time most of his peers met their girls.

It was bound to happen sooner or later. No human being can be so totally alone and remain sane.

He went, when his schooling came to and end, to University where he learned everything he could about his chosen subject, theology. He poked in as many academic corners as he could and what he couldn't discover amongst the theories of others he made up for himself, and eventually, after a great deal of disgracefully hard study, he became the Reverend Rocky Hills.

And it was then that his name became, for the first time ever, a virtue. People trusted him for it, and when they discovered that it was his real name, given to him at his birth, by his parents, it was widely decided that those parents must have been guided by the good Lord himself. They, still being generally high on this or that substance, laughed inanely and agreed.

For several years Rocky was a curate in other parsons' churches, and he fulfilled those tasks given him with humility and wisdom, going about his duties with a quiet reverence which earned him high regard in the broadest ecclesiastical circles, and he was soon in charge of a church of his own.

It was in a village, a place with a rural population, and it was in that village that things started happening. Weird things. Mysterious things.

Underwear vanished off washing lines, female underwear, the skimpy kind that the young and daring lasses liked to wear. One minute it was there and the next it was gone, down to the last thread.

Then, on dark lanes at the dead of night, creatures moved where there should be stillness and silence. Women, young women usually, returning to their isolated homesteads after a night at the pub with their friends found themselves being chased by shadows and at fear for their lives, shivering and shaking and crying of promised rape and such evil matters. Then, when those shadows actually molested some of them the police were brought in. But nobody was caught and certainly nobody was suspected.

Then matters got worse.

Houses were entered and personal items were moved around, intimate personal items, some of them " like the prim schoolmistress's vibrator " were taken and left in quite the least appropriate places, like in the hands of a graven Virgin Mary in the churchyard. And the site of the stone Virgin Mary wafting a penis-shaped vibrator just out of reach of passing schoolboys filled everyone with two things. The first was mirth and that was swiftly followed by the second, which was horror.

Things were out of hand and the new vicar, the Reverend Rocky Hills, pontificated from his pulpit on the subject.

He said there were restless souls in the air. He declared that as all the odd happenings had to do with the personal and often secret lives of his parishioners there may well be a haunted spirit in the fabric of the place, one that couldn't find peace because it was still tied to its past earthly life by carnal and evil desires.

All carnal desires, he said, were evil.

He was called in to deal with the matter. He had to exorcise the ghosts of the dead, help them to the peace beloved of those who have passed over.

He had bottles of water, blessed, he assured the people, by the Bishop himself, and he had books of spells and chants and a staff he declared was carved from timbers of the One True Cross by the disciples themselves.

And he splashed his holy water about. He waved his staff in the air as though he was intent on winning an Oscar and he recited dark spells urging wanton spirits to depart.

And for a while they did.

For a while there was peace in the village.

For a while young women could walk the streets at night, unmolested and brightly coloured penis-shaped vibrators remained in bedside drawers, where they should be.

And the name of the Reverend Rocky Hills became even more respected. His fame spread across the land, and with spooky haste he was made into a Bishop himself.

And in Cathedral Close, adjacent to his new and pompous mansion home, underwear started disappearing off clothes lines once again, skimpy underwear, exciting stuff, and women started fearing for their lives as first one then several were frightened after dark, and somehow, from somewhere, the Virgin Mary got her alabaster hands on a gigantic plastic penis complete with rechargeable battery.

Once again it was time to call on a man of faith, for exorcism.

But this time he didn't come. This time he merely sat on some nearby rocky hills, and dribbled.