The city had been a lure for visitors since the Vikings.

Now a new kind of tourist began to appear. Silent in large groups. Congregating. Accumulating.

United beneath a common banner.

Written on walls. Printed on shirts. Posted on sites. Attached to messages.

Inked on skin.

#TheFive

Cities normally return to nature after desertion.

Sand can cover office blocks. Shopping centres fall in on themselves.

Civic buildings lose all semblance of significance. Sewers clog and silt.

Vehicles return their elements to the earth. Or house new tenants.

Fountains fall silent.

Slowly, troublingly, desperately, inexorably the weeds of Priory Hall exerted their cosmic influence on the city.

As he walked across Front Square Mac felt now that the world was only different.

He knew the First of the TheFive was here. The disturbance was now unignorable. The weight of this fact caused the world to spin ever so slightly out of kilter.

‘I knew this was always going to happen,’ Mac said to himself. And he steeled himself for the worst.

It started with the weeds.

Loss hits hard and holds firm and deep and long.

After a lifetime of solitude Mac now found himself unable to deal with a brand-new loneliness.

There simply is no substitute for presence.

‘I’m a selfish cowardly fool,’ he told himself.

‘That a man should send a child to stop the darkness.’

The natural world now meets a new source of energy and the hated hectares of Priory Hall groan beneath the renewed weight of Fallopia japonica, Japanese Knotweed, the curse of the Irish landscape.

In tune with the new signal broadcast. Roots and shoots and rhizomes now assemble with new vigour as never before.

Ready to swallow an island.

According to Wikipedia Stooky Bill was the name given to the head of a ventriloquist dummy that British television pioneer John Logie Baird used in his 1924 experiments to transmit a televised image between rooms in his laboratory at 22 Frith Street, London.

The First of TheFive takes this name.

Priory Hall.

A simple testament to greed.

At night the wind laps the ghost estate like a poisoned tongue probing a mouth of broken teeth.

In a flat stripped and rotting. A broken television perched on a chair comes to life.

A new signal is available.

The First of TheFive.

‘Listen to me,’ said the Rock Star and the crowd fell silent. The Rock Star spread his arms out wide.

‘The5 are here,’ he cried. ‘The5 are really here.’

Even though they didn’t know why, the crowd began to clap and cheer. The Rock Star punched the air and whooped.

‘Yeah!’ he yelled. ‘They’re really here.’

The Rock Star played the crowd now.

‘Listen,’ he whispered. ‘Who wants to join The5?’

‘We do,’ someone yelled from the front of the stage. ‘We all do.’

The Rock Star pulled the Horn from his belt.

‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ he roared. ‘This next song is for all of you.’

The Rock Star put the Horn to his lips.

Mac reached over and picked up his spectacles. He swung his tired legs out of bed.

‘And so the day I always knew is right here now.’

Mac looked out into the darkness.

‘If you are reading this then you will know that we tried. We really did.’

Mac paused and a small tear began to form in his tired eye.

‘I suppose it was always the case that an old man and a young child would be no match for all the evil that the world has never seen.’

Mac smiled.

‘When the inevitable darkness comes for you be assured that it wasn’t the whole world that surrendered.’

At this point it is fair to say that the world has reached a dreadful juncture.

With the terrible truth now slowly pouring from beyond the NotBeSpeak are beginning.

No-one was able to see but a form began to materialise on the stage.

A form that coalesced in the light that the video cast upon the dark.

Indeterminate but concrete. Fleeting but arrived.

The first of the NotBeSpeak.