Teletubbies horror: The Fleece Cage

Time for Tubby terror! Time for Tubby terror!

Jul 05, 2025

green and brown mountain under blue sky during daytime — Photo by Jeremy Liem on Unsplash

Eh-oh everyone! It’s time for Tubby terror! Time for Tubby terror! I’m Mata and welcome to my weekly horror newsletter.

After last week’s dread-filled tale, this time we’ve got a more primal source of fear: British 1990s children’s television. Grab your tubby-toast, and strap in for:

The Fleece Cage

We all knew him as ‘Brian the Warlock’. We never took him seriously. He looked like a combination of a LSDed-out hippie and roadie for a 70s metal band. On the back of one hand he had a blurred tattoo of a child’s windmill, and the other had four geometric sigils. He’d be in the pub everyday, always at the end of the bar, his nicotine-stained beard dragging through the foam of his ale as his crystal-blue eyes stared through the pub’s optics, his gaze set on some distant land. It seemed like he’d never aged in all the years I’d been drinking there: I met my wife there, we'd got married and had a fantastic kid, and yet Brian the Warlock still looked the same. Under his breath, he muttered in a weird language that none of us knew, and, when he stood to use the toilet, amulets and polished stones jangled on leather straps around his neck.

I didn’t mean to get in his way. I didn’t mean to trip him up.

“Ah’ve heard youse whispering ’bout me,” he said, as he caught himself from falling. “Ah’ve had enough. Enough is enough!”

I’d always laughed at the nickname, but in that moment I regretted it. There was a mad glint in his gaze, something curled in there that sparked in weird colours, flashing purple, green, yellow, and red. I stumbled through my apology, but he ranted at my back as I returned to my friends. His words dribbled into an incoherent ramble, but some made it through: “Time for tubby bye byes.” I had no idea what it meant, but I knew it was a threat.

That night, it took hours to fall asleep. I fought the duvet and dreamed of being swaddled in sweltering padding, barely able to breathe, vision narrowed to tiny holes in a mask.

And I awoke to find it was real.

Holding up my hands, my arms were covered in apple-green felt-like fleece. I rolled from the single bed and found myself in a bizarre communal dorm with three others, each in bulbous costumes in different colours, each with a furry antenna sticking from their head.

An inhuman screech, like a creaking door trying to laugh, cracked the sky. In the clear blue beyond the round window, a childlike god’s face cast a searing light.

With no control, before I could speak, I was sucked aloft, and tossed out through the roof of the building. The fur suit only had tiny legs, I waggled them helplessly in the air and yet managed to land on my padded feet. From that new height, there was no sign of the city in which I’d gone to sleep, no sign of where my family would be waking without me. I was lost in a landscape of tiny hills, stretching out to the horizon in every direction.

Pipes sprung from the ground, bearing speakers with dents, like countless others before me had tried to destroy them. “Time for Teletubbies! Time for Teletubbies!” demanded a voice with an accent like the ghost of a 1920s boarding school drama teacher.

The others fled, and I ran with them. Weaving between the speakers, we waddled across the strange hills as fast as we could manage. Terrifying music echoed around us, like a cat stamping across a xylophone.

Under the child-god sun and within the suit, my flesh baked. Sweat pooled inside the padding, making it moist and grating on my skin, rubbing me raw. I fought against it, trying to rip it from my body. Perhaps it looked like I was dancing, because the sun looked down and laughed at my suffering, its eyes the blue of an infinite and uncaring universe.

I couldn’t get free.

Beyond the domed house where the day had begun, the only feature on the landscape was an enormous windmill — a windmill I recognised from Brian’s tattoo. “Arsehole!” I tried to shout, but the windmill spun, casting pink dust into the air, and my curse only came out as '“Uh oh!”

The dust seeped through the mask, and a shiver like electricity ran through my body. The other three figures, who I assumed then were more victims of Brian’s wrath, gathered around me. Their antenna shapes were familiar: the sigils from Brian’s other tattoo. I tried to speak, but no coherent words came out, only muffled cries that could have been mistaken for excitement, but I sensed their misery beneath.

Then the worst thing happened.

On the stomach of the yellow one, I saw a vision. Maybe it was the windmill’s dust warping my mind, or maybe it was Brian’s final torment for his captives, but a picture appeared: my child, my son Ned, living his life. He was fixing a bicycle with a man that wasn’t me, a man that wasn’t his father, but Ned couldn’t tell I was watching. Ned didn't seem to care I was missing. I tried to call out, I wept, but only cooing sounds escaped my suit.

Finally, the vision faded. The others patted my back. Were they shown visions of their loved ones too? Would this happen every day? Would we forever see ourselves being forgotten?

I had to escape.

I ran, back to the place I’d awoken, hoping there would be a clue to escaping this madness and returning to blissful normality.

As I ran, up and down those small hills, their size and shape struck me. Why so many? Why so small? Then I saw, emerging from the soil, between blades of too-green grass, buried halfway up the slope was a wisp of decaying fabric. I knew then what they were. They weren’t hills: they were burial mounds.

I will never leave. I will never be free. I’ll be here every day, condemned to perform insane tasks in this sweaty green cage, fighting for an impossible release until the day I die and am buried alongside countless others. Every day we're watched by those blue eyes of the sun—Brian's blue eyes—and he giggles at our captivity, awaiting our final bye bye, when we will make space for his next victim among those infinite hills.

The end

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