Big Night Out and Other Strange Stories

By Michael E. Lloyd

Acclaimed novelist Michael E. Lloyd presents four very strange short stories and a complimentary poem:

• Big Night Out watches the mysterious and Machiavellian "N.G." working single-handedly to protect his adopted homeland from great and present danger.
• Drop to Drink is a brief Kafkaesque study in Denial.
• The Three Bears and the Intruder propels an old fairy tale writhing into the realities of the twenty-first century.
• For the Conference imagines just what might have motivated Charles Darwin to flee Oxford at his defining moment ...
• and Never Alone is a short Betjamenesque verse on the perils of modern technology!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael E. Lloyd
• Release date: Feb 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393869443

Book preview

Big Night Out

N.G.’s real name bore no relation to the initials he used. It was known to only a handful of living souls, and most certainly to none of the many government ministers he had protected in his long career.

Each new minister insisted on being told what it was, of course, immediately upon taking up office. The private staffs of that department would, as usual, truthfully swear total ignorance. So it was always necessary, at their first private meeting, for N.G. to sigh deeply and personally remind the latest appointee, in short order, that it was he who controlled the country’s Intelligence Services. That he had been doing so long before that minister’s sudden rise to glory, and would be doing so long after his or her inevitable fall, and was not going to allow a mere politician’s claimed need-to-know to prejudice the security of the entire nation.

So for all official purposes (he would then conclude, closing the subject once and for all), he was simply N.G. And he would take any other name he chose for particular, less public situations.

This masterly opening gambit had never failed. It had brought each minister easily into his immaculate closed loop; ever more easily, in recent years, with the war-temperature rising steadily again.

And for months now he had been assiduous in supplying, through the mouthpieces of his own grey chiefs, immediate news and evidence of dastardly sleeper-guerrilla plots reportedly being uncovered and thwarted almost daily; plots apparently designed to attack the country’s cities and large towns with increasingly severe consequences. This expertly-managed portrayal of his Service’s continuing, near-perfect success rate in deep and secret intelligence stood unchallengeable by a nervous and grateful populace, politicians included. The Defender of Liberty was steadily mutating, within the most heavily carpeted corridors of air-conditioned power, into a revered demigod ...

* * *

For the small number of people who were even permitted to know of his existence, N.G.’s early