Alone Again Or

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The mission patch showed a simple arc: Earth, a thin silver line, and a solitary star beyond it. “Solace-1” read the stitched thread beneath. Commander Eli Rowan had joked before launch that the name sounded like a promise you made to yourself when you knew no one else would be there to keep it.

The objective was equally austere: thirty days alone in low solar orbit, farther than any crewed mission had flown without a support station, maintaining silence except for scheduled daily check-ins. The isolation data would change how humanity handled deep-space travel. Or so the press releases said. Eli didn’t care about the headlines. He cared about the quiet.

The first week was routine layered over awe. The ship, an oblong, white shell with a rotating harness ring for intermittent gravity, hummed like a patient animal. The sun, no longer the modest coin seen from Earth, sprawled across the viewport, a living field of boiling light. Instruments recorded, Eli maintained, and between tasks he spoke into a recorder, narrating minor details that might later help psychologists diagram the mind under prolonged solitude.

“Day six,” he said. “Dreamed about the sea. I couldn’t remember how to swim.”

In the second week the interference started. It wasn’t a clean break but a stutter. A  frame skipped in a broadcast. The audio crackled mid-report; telemetry delayed. Ground Control told him solar interference was expected at this distance. “Ride it out,” they said. “Your logs are local anyway.” Eli rode it out, marking each glitch, adjusting antenna angles, recalibrating software, the small rituals of control that make a person feel less alone.

By day ten, the silence was not intermittent. It was complete.

He kept talking anyway.

“Day eleven. No contact for thirty-six hours. Systems green. I’m not worried,” he told the recorder, then paused, as if someone would challenge him. “Concerned. Professionally concerned.”

Professionally concerned turned to fiercely methodical. He rerouted power to the comm array, rebooted the primary and redundant channels, and performed a manual alignment using star fixes. Nothing. The ship’s systems purred, serene in their indifference. Outside, solar flares unfurled like banners. He felt the distance from Earth not as numbers but as a pressure in his chest.

He clung to his schedule like a raft. Wake, exercise in the harness ring, systems check, meal, experiment. He read poetry, of all things, left by a previous crew. Rilke, lines about solitude as vast as a room. He laughed at the appropriateness, and then he did not laugh.

The dreams returned. In them he was not alone. There was a presence.  Never seen directly, more like the cool imprint left on a pillow when someone has just risen. He would wake with a certainty that he had not been solitary after all.

“Day seventeen,” he said into the recorder. “This is unnecessary, but I’m documenting subjective experience. I have a sense of… accompaniment.” He almost said “companionship,” corrected himself. The distinction felt important. “No hallucinations. No voices. Just a… sense.”

Three days later, he found the handprint.

It appeared on the viewport in the dim stretch of artificial night, where the sunshade shielded him from the worst glare. Perfectly formed condensation spread along the inner glass, as if someone had pressed a warm palm there. Eli stared at it for a long minute, every instinct to rationalize racing to outrun the primitive part of his mind that recoiled.

“Thermal differential,” he said eventually. “Localized humidity. Microfracture causing a pattern.” He wiped it away. It returned the next night, larger.

The presence in his dreams began to feel less like a trick of isolation and more like a conversation in a language he could not articulate. He would wake with ideas fully formed: small course corrections that shaved fractions of fuel use, subtle timing changes in experiments that yielded cleaner results. He attributed it to a deeper unconscious, freed by solitude.

“Day twenty-two,” he said. “I feel, this is absurd, I feel guided.”

The word hung in the air like a hazard sign.

He pushed through, focusing on survival, on returning. If Earth could not hear him, he would still keep his end of the bargain. Thirty days. The longest solo flight. He would bring back his logs, and they would make sense of this.

On day thirty, he fired the engines to begin his return arc.

The silence broke halfway home. It snapped into place with an ordinary chirp that sounded almost embarrassed to have been absent. Voices flooded his cabin.  Overlapping relief, instructions, questions. “Solace-1, do you read?” “Commander Rowan, we lost telemetry for-” “-you are clear to proceed-” “-repeat your status-”

Eli laughed, a bright, almost startling sound in the small space.

“I read you,” he said. “Thirty days complete.”

The debriefs were exhaustive. The solar storms had been worse than predicted, they explained, the comm blackout not unprecedented but longer than they had modelled. His logs were gold, they said: meticulous, detailed. The anomalous entries, the references to a presence and the handprint, were noted and gently sidestepped as artifacts of isolation. “Understandable,” a psychologist said kindly, as if placing a hand on his shoulder. “Your brain sought patterns to anchor itself.”

Eli nodded. He did not argue. He was tired in a way that sleep didn’t touch.

At home, gravity settled back into his bones. The city, damp and grey, felt almost unreal after the constant light. He fell into a routine of deconditioning exercises, light public appearances, an interview or two where he learned to answer questions about courage and loneliness with practiced warmth.

The nausea began in the third week.

It woke him before dawn, a strange, rolling discomfort that seemed to originate somewhere he could not precisely locate. He stumbled to the bathroom, retched until there was nothing left, then remained kneeling on the cool tile until the feeling passed.

“Adjustment,” he told himself. “Vestibular system. Hormones rebalancing.” The flight surgeons had warned him about readaptation. He checked the literature. Nausea was common. He ignored the timing.  How his body seemed to obey a rhythm it had never kept before.

The fatigue followed. Not the bone-deep exhaustion of training, but a pervasive softening, as if his muscles had been replaced with something more pliant. He found himself napping in the afternoons, waking with a faint confusion that took seconds too long to dissipate.

He did not report it.

There were forms to fill, follow-up appointments scheduled. He attended some and dodged others. He told himself it was nothing. He told himself he was protecting his future flights, the next mission already a rumour in the corridors of the agency. “You did thirty,” someone had said. “Next step is ninety. Then a year.” He carried those numbers like talismans.

The swelling was gradual, almost polite. His abdomen, always lean, softened. Then rounded. At first, it was easy to blame diet, inactivity. He increased his training, cut calories, tracked everything. The curve did not recede.

He stood shirtless one evening before his mirror, turning sideways. The shape was undeniable.

“Impossible,” he said to his reflection. The word felt too small.

He thought of the handprint on the glass, the dreams, the sense of accompaniment. He laughed, a thin, brittle sound, and scrubbed his face with both hands.

Weeks passed. The nausea persisted, a quiet tyrant that structured his mornings. Other symptoms appeared: an odd sensitivity to smells, a tenderness low in his body that made certain movements uncomfortable. He became an expert at deflecting questions. “Just taking it easy,” he told a colleague. “Standard recovery.” He wore looser shirts. He avoided the pool.

The fear was not a single spike but a low, constant hum. Not of what was happening, that he could not name, but of what would be taken from him if he said it aloud. The missions. The sky.

He held out until the fourth month.

Her name was Mara Singh, an old friend from medical school days he’d abandoned for flight. They had dissected cadavers together once, argued over pathology reports, laughed at the same dry jokes. She now worked as a GP, her hands steady, her eyes carrying that particular blend of curiosity and compassion that had made her good even then.

He called her in the evening. “I need a favour,” he said.

“Off the record?” she asked. Some friendships never needed the details spelled out.

“Off the record.”

She saw him after hours, the clinic quiet, fluorescent lights humming like distant insects. He sat on the paper-covered examination table, trying to make his body look smaller, as if that might hide the obvious.

Mara didn’t comment at first. She took his history, listened without interruption as he described the mission, the blackout, the symptoms. Her pen moved in neat, decisive strokes.

“Okay,” she said finally. “We’re going to do some tests.”

“Routine,” he said quickly. “Just to rule things out.”

“Routine,” she agreed, and met his eyes in a way that suggested she knew the word was a kindness.

The tests were simple. Blood drawn. A urine sample. An ultrasound machine wheeled in with a soft squeak, its presence both ordinary and, in that moment, profoundly strange.

“Just lie back,” Mara said.

The gel was cold on his skin. The probe pressed lightly against his abdomen. Eli watched the ceiling, focusing on a small crack that branched like a river delta. The machine emitted soft, rhythmic clicks and a low, steady hum.

Mara was very quiet.

“Say it,” Eli said after a minute, the words coming out more sharply than he intended. “Whatever it is. Say it.”

She did not look at him immediately. Instead, she adjusted the angle of the probe, her brow furrowing in concentration. Then she froze, just for a second.

“There’s… movement,” she said, almost to herself.

He turned his head.

The screen showed a grayscale image that his brain struggled to interpret at first.  The whirl of shadows within shadows, a landscape he was not equipped to read. Then something shifted, a flicker resolving into a shape that was unmistakably, impossibly organic.

A small form, curled, with a rhythm pulsing at its centre.

Eli’s breath caught.

“No,” he said. “That’s not-”

Mara swallowed. She set the probe down carefully, as if any sudden movement might shatter something delicate and dangerous.

She looked at him then, properly, all professional distance stripped away.

“The test results came back immediately for the basics,” she said. “Hormones. Markers.” She hesitated, choosing her words as if each one might alter the reality they were in. “Eli… you’re pregnant.”

The word fell into the room like a dropped instrument, precise and irrevocable.

For a long moment, there was only the hum of the machine, the faint ticking of the wall clock, the sound of Eli’s own pulse loud in his ears.

He thought of the silent days in the ship, the presence that had felt like a hand on his shoulder without touch. He thought of the handprint on the glass, the dreams that had left him with knowledge he could not account for.

He thought of the mission patch: the Earth, the silver line, the solitary star and the promise of solace.

“What does that even mean?” he said finally, his voice barely above a whisper. “How is that even…what is it?”

Mara shook her head slowly. “I don’t know,” she said. “Not yet. We’ll need more tests. We’ll need to understand.”

“No,” he said, louder now. “No official tests. No records. Not yet.” The fear surged, hot and sharp. “If they find out.  The agency.”

“Eli,” she said, gently but firmly, “this isn’t something you can just…ignore.”

He looked back at the screen. The small, flickering shape seemed to shift again, as if responding to the attention, or perhaps just following its own inscrutable path.

For a fleeting, impossible second, he felt the same sense he had felt in the ship.  That quiet, patient accompaniment.

Not alone, it seemed to say.

Not alone at all.

Huxley’s Lament

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The lake lay still beneath the pale blush of dawn, its surface shimmering like glass. A chorus of birdsong floated through the crisp spring air, weaving a melody that should have been soothing. But for Huxley, the sound was a cruel mockery of peace.

He had parked his car at the edge of the dirt track, the tires crunching softly against gravel. The same track he had driven down two weeks ago, heart pounding, hands slick with sweat, the trunk heavy with its silent cargo. He had chosen this place for its isolation, for the way the trees leaned inward like conspirators, shielding the lake from prying eyes. It had seemed perfect then. Safe.

Now, it felt like a trap.

Huxley stepped out of the car, inhaling deeply, as if the scent of damp earth and budding flowers could cleanse the stench of guilt clinging to him. He had come to finish what he started.  To erase every trace.

The memory of that night clawed at him as he walked toward the water. The argument had been loud, vicious. Words like knives, slicing through their years together. Then the rage, blinding and primal, had taken over. He hadn’t meant to kill. Not at first. But when the blood pooled on the kitchen tiles, when the body lay limp and accusing, Huxley had known there was no turning back.

The lake had swallowed the limp, pale body without protest, its dark depths promising secrecy. Huxley had stood and watched until the ripples faded, until the water stilled, before driving away into the night. He hadn’t slept since.

Now, kneeling at the shore, Huxley scanned the ground. A cigarette butt. A torn scrap of cloth snagged on a branch. He cursed under his breath. Careless. He gathered the remnants, shoving them into a plastic bag. His hands trembled. Every rustle of leaves sounded like footsteps. Every whisper of wind like a voice.

He straightened, wiping sweat from his brow, and froze.

The lake was no longer still.

Ripples spread across its surface, slow and deliberate, though the air was calm. Huxley stared, throat tightening. Then he saw it, a pale shape rising from the water, breaking through like a ghost from a dream. Limbs trailing weeds. Eyes like hollow moons.

It was her.

Huxley stumbled back, choking on a cry. The apparition drifted closer, water streaming from her hair, her lips curved in something that might have been a smile or a snarl. Huxley blinked hard, willing the vision away. It didn’t vanish.

“You… shouldn’t be here,” Huxley whispered, voice cracking. His words fell flat against the silence.

The figure tilted its head, as if amused. Then it spoke, not aloud, but inside Huxley’s skull, a voice like the echo of drowning.

You left me in the dark.

Huxley clutched his ears, shaking his head violently. “No. No, you’re dead. You’re gone!”

You thought the lake would keep your secret. But secrets rot and fester. Like flesh.

He turned and ran, branches whipping his face, lungs burning. But the voice followed, threading through the rustle of leaves, the chirp of birds, the pounding of his heart.

You can’t clean this away.

Huxley burst into the clearing where his car waited, fumbling for the keys. His hands were slick, useless. He dropped them, cursed, bent to snatch them up and froze again.

The keys lay in a puddle. A puddle that hadn’t been there before. Water seeped outward, dark and glistening, and in its reflection, he saw her face, grinning wide, teeth like shards of bone.

Huxley screamed.

He drove blindly, tires skidding on the dirt, the car fishtailing as he tore down the track. But the voice was inside him now, coiling like smoke, whispering, laughing. He saw her in every shadow, every flicker of light. In the rearview mirror, a pale figure sat in the back seat, weeds dripping from her hair.

By the time Huxley reached his house, his mind was unravelling. He locked the doors, and drew the curtains, but the lake came with him.  Its scent, its chill, its ghost. He smashed mirrors, tore up floorboards, scrubbed until his hands bled. Cleaning, he thought, giggling maniacally through tears. He had to make it clean. Had to make it right.

When the neighbours found him days later, Huxley was crouched in the kitchen, muttering to himself, surrounded by buckets of water. The tiles gleamed, spotless. His fingernails were gone, worn to the quick. His eyes stared wide and empty. And in the reflection of the water pooled around him, she smiled.

Four Seasons: Summer of ’89

The summer of 1989 hung heavily over Nottingham. The sky was a bright azure streaked by the hazy glare of a bright and burning sun the like of which had not been seen since the heatwave of ‘76 stifling the streets. It made for a boiling pot of desperation and tension amongst the fringes of Nottingham’s criminal underworld.

Freddie Clement walked quickly along Radford Road, his face dripping, his t-shirt sweat-drenched. His trainers felt the heat emanating from the baking pavement, his mind racing harder than his feet.

In Freddie’s back pocket, wrapped in cellophane for protection from his perspiration sat the thing that was about to change and, maybe, end his life.

The Red Queen.

A stamp.

But not just any stamp. This was a rare Victorian misprint. The sort of fault in the production that collectors whispered and dreamed about. The Red Queen was printed in a faulty run, pulled from circulation within hours, and was believed to have been destroyed. Except for two of them. Two had survived. Encased under glass in British museums.

Only now, sheathed in clear plastic wrap, Freddie held a third.

He hadn’t meant to nick it, not really. He wasn’t even sure he wanted it. He was just doing what The Firm told him to. It was a routine job. A quick in-and-out. Some old fella, an avid collector in West Bridgford who owed The Firm money. A bit like sending the bailiffs in except this was anything but a legal repossession. This was theft to cover what was owed.

“Just take enough,” Moulden, Freddie’s gaffer in The Firm, had said, “don’t pick up anything too flashy, and don’t get greedy. I don’t like the old git but, I don’t want to lose him as a customer neither. Think of it as taking a hostage. We’ll take enough of his collection to encourage him to pay his debts plus interest accrued.”

Nothing too flashy.

Too late now.

At the time, Minty was holding the old fella in a bear hug. Minty, like the other goons on The Firm’s payroll was strictly brawn and no brain. That was why Freddie was there. To select the items to take and to make sure Minty didn’t get too carried away.

There was terror in the old fella’s eyes as Freddie dumped a drawer of jewellery in the holdall but, then Freddie sensed something else. A glance. No more than that. And the old fella made sure to stop himself but, it was too late. He’d looked at the nondescript frame on the wall.

It clearly meant something to the old fella. He moaned sadly when Freddie turned to face it. It was unassuming but oddly regal. Something about that tiny stamp set in s larger frame tugged at him. Maybe it was greed. Maybe curiosity. Maybe just that instinct every small-time crook occasionally listened to: this could be your way out.

So, he lifted it off the wall, put it in the holdall, and didn’t say a word.

The old fella crumpled to the floor when Minty let him go.

Freddie heard his sobs as they left.

Two hours later and Freddie was standing in the gloriously air-conditioned atmosphere of Moulden’s office. Moulden sat behind the large oak desk, his tie was loose, his shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbow. He leaned forward and placed a photo in front of Freddie.

The Red Queen.

“Something’s missing from our friend’s house,” Moulden said softly.

Freddie’s stomach lurched and he felt beads of sweat forming and cooling on his brow.

“Recognise this, Freddie?”

“No, boss. Stamp, is it?”

Moulden grimaced, “Don’t treat me like an idiot, Freddie. The old fella reckoned he saw you take it.”

Freddie shifted in his seat. Sweat trickled down his spine. “Nah, not my cup of tea that. Maybe the old man’s mistaken.” He shrugged.

Moulden leaned back in his chair, “Yeah, well, we’ll see about that. He’s being spoken to.”

Freddie felt like he had a golf ball stuck in his throat. He knew that “being spoken to” meant much more than a friendly chat. Clearly, Moulden thought the old fella might have pulled a fast one. That could buy Freddie a bit of breathing space to figure out what to do.

“I hope, for your sake, you’re on the level, Freddie. Because this…this is worth a lot of money. Worth more than your life. Worth more than my life if you can imagine such a thing.”  Moulden leaned back, eyes narrowing. “So just to be crystal clear, Freddie. You sure you didn’t see it? You didn’t take it?”

The air-conditioner hummed. Freddie’s heartbeat pounded in his temples. This was it. A chance to come clean, return the stamp, and take whatever punishment came his way.

“No, boss,” he lied. “Didn’t see it. The old man is telling porkies.”

Moulden stared for a long time, a thin smile carving into his face.

“Then you won’t mind if we check your place.”

Freddie felt dizzy. “My place? It’s… it’s a right tip. You don’t-”

“Oh, we insist.”

Freddie knew he couldn’t go home. He couldn’t go anywhere near his usual streets. He couldn’t keep pretending this was just another job. He was a dead man walking unless he vanished.

He left Moulden’s office shaking. The city suddenly felt too sharp, too loud. Like the heat, Nottingham was closing in on him, making it hard to breath.

He ducked into a cool shady alley between a chippy and a boarded-up bakery and pulled out the stamp.

It didn’t look like much. Just faded crimson ink on creamy paper, Queen Victoria staring sternly without knowing the chaos she’d just caused.

Freddie whispered, “What the hell am I supposed to do with you?”

The stamp, being a stamp, didn’t answer.

Within an hour, Freddie had grabbed his “flight bag”: an emergency bag he kept in the outhouse of a rundown semi in Carlton loose brick in the Hyson Green flats. It was a flight bag in that it contained things he might need if he had to take flight and flee the city. It was meant for evading the police but would hopefully do just as well evading his own mob. It contained cash and clothes. He now wished he got a fake passport but, they were pricey and hard to get hold of discreetly.

He headed to the Broadmarsh bus depot, head down, eyes scanning for The Firm’s goons. Nottingham felt tighter by the step.

He racked his brain thinking of where to go. He needed somewhere out of the way. Somewhere no one respectable, or criminal, bothered with.

He bought a ticket for Skegness.

It was baking hot, but the coastal wind hit cooled him as he stepped off the bus the next morning. The sea air carried salt, diesel, and the faint smell of chips even at 9 a.m. The promenade had not got going yet. A few dog walkers and exercise nuts were out and about. A seagull screamed overhead as if welcoming him to the end of the world.

Perfect.

Freddie found a small B&B called The Sea Nook, run by a widow named Mrs. Rudd. She looked him over with a squint that saw too much.

“Work or hiding?” she asked bluntly as she handed him a key.

“Holiday,” he lied.

“Right,” she sighed. “Breakfast’s at eight.”

Days moved into weeks. The heatwave continued to stretch across Britain.

Freddie lay low, keeping himself to himself. He caught a tan walking the beach every day.

He tried to figure out what to do with the Red Queen.

He didn’t dare sell it. Moulden would hear before the deal was finished.

He thought about burning it. But he couldn’t. Stupid as it was, he felt attached to it now. It had got him into this mess. In a strange twist of logic, he felt that they were in this together.

He had enough money to see out the summer in Skegness. He’d heard of work on the oil rigs. It would be tough, manual, a world away, but it was honest work and decent money. It’d offer him the fresh start he needed.

Then everything fell apart.

He saw the car outside The Sea Nook.

Black Ford Sierra. Tinted windows. A pool car used by The Firm.

Freddie ducked behind a grab machine at the amusement arcade across the road.

Two men stepped out and hammered on The Sea Nook’s front door. He recognised them both as Mrs Rudd opened the door: one was Fisher, Moulden’s favourite dog, a man whose knuckles told more stories than his mouth ever could. The other was Minty.

The turned and looked his way.

They’d found him.

Freddie ran.

Skegness didn’t offer great hiding spots, but Freddie had been there long enough to know the maze of alleys behind the funfair. He darted between peeling kiosks and rusted rides. Minty’s shout carried behind him.

“FREDDIE! YOU’RE MAKING THIS WORSE!”

He already knew that.

Freddie reached the beach, breath tearing at his lungs. The sun reflected glaringly off the sea as the waves crashed into the beach. Freddie’s feet splashed as he ran along the shoreline.

He pulled out the stamp as he ran deeper into the waves.

He’d thought this thing might save him. He thought this might be his one chance at something better.

But as the goons’ footsteps thudded closer in the wet sand, Freddie realised:

The Red Queen wasn’t a ticket out. It was an anchor.

And he needed to cut it loose.

He held it over the water, arm trembling.

Minty and Fisher skidded to a stop in the surf behind him.

“Don’t be stupid, Freddie! Moulden wants it alive!”

“Yeah,” Freddie said softly. “And I want to live.”

He let go.

The stamp fluttered like a wounded bird, caught the wind, and sailed out over the churning water. A wave rose, swallowed it, and the Red Queen was gone forever.

Minty and Fisher stared in disbelief. Unsure of what to do now.

“You’re done, Freddie. Moulden will-”

Freddie turned, surprising himself with the calm in his voice.

“Tell Moulden the sea took me with it. He’ll believe it more than the truth.”

Maybe it was the heat. Maybe Minty and Fisher pitied him. Maybe even Moulden wouldn’t bother chasing a ghost over a dead piece of paper.

Whatever the reason, they didn’t drag him back. They just turned and walked away.

Summer season ended.

Freddie had stayed in Skegness. No point running away to the oil rigs now. A dead man doesn’t need to run.

He got work repairing coin-pushers in the arcades. He even grew to like the gulls. He learned the rhythm of the tides. Mrs. Rudd called him “our Freddie” and made sure he never missed breakfast whilst he earned his keep doing odd jobs around the place.

One evening he sat on the seawall, watching the gulls hovering and dive-bombing into the water.

He felt himself smiling.

Freddie Clement was no more. Not really.

He was just a man with a second chance. A rare thing.

Rarer even than a Victorian misprint.

Rarer than the Red Queen.

Daily Nightly

Eddie Groves drove nights because the days had stopped making sense and life had lost all meaning.  To be awake was an unbearable chore.  Instead, to live in a twilight feeling on the brink of exhaustion, barely functioning as a human being, was just about agreeable. 

Life had lost all meaning for Eddie on 18^th May 2020.  He remembered the date exactly.  He could remember the time, down to the minute, too, if he put his mind to it.  He rarely did. He didn’t want to revisit that time, that place, the exact moment his life fell apart.

He had to get away.  On that night he’d ran.  He ran and kept on running until collapse.  The paramedics were kind.  The police less so, especially when they knew where he’d been running from.  Prime they called him.  As in prime suspect.  When no longer considered as such, he heard some of them still referring to him this way.  As though they still had their suspicions, their doubts about his alibi.  To even call it an alibi sounded shady.  There was a reason he was innocent.  Many reasons, but love and devotion can’t be proven in court.  The fact he had witnesses confirming he was at a press gala at the time of the murder could.  That and the gloating letter sent into the paper from the killer. 

The Hackney Hacker.  Eddie came up with it. Pleased as punch he was.  All serial killers needed a good nickname, didn’t they? 

The guilt hit Eddie hard.

So hard that he’d considered it:  The big escape.  The coward’s way out, some called it.  But Eddie thought otherwise.  He wasn’t brave enough to do it.  He figured one day he would be but, that day had yet to come.

Moving out of London and back up North was him running away.  He couldn’t go back to the flat.  It would only ever be a crime scene to him.  He couldn’t stay in Hackney either.  Everywhere he looked he thought he saw Rose.  Every man in the vicinity could be the Hacker.  It caused him to run again.  He left with the clothes on his back and the cards and cash in his pockets.  His old sub-editor had a mate who did house clearances.  It was unusual to do a clearance on behalf of someone living but, when the circumstances were explained, they sympathised and did it anyway.

He’d grown up round here.  His formative years.  Infancy through to adulthood.  A tired and rundown tourist destination for the underprivileged.  A place that had once thrived on shipyards and steel, now rusting into memory.

Upon his return he’d paid six-month rent on the bedsit.  It overlooked the pier.  The same pier he’d looked at every night considering if he’d ever have the nerve to take the long walk off it.  He didn’t.  He hid himself in the bottom of vodka bottles.  Tucked out of the way.  Sobbing quietly to himself until he passed out. 

Then the night terrors came.  His arrival at home.  The flat they shared.  He was half cut then.  Free champagne and he’d filled his boots.  Especially when he won the award.  Best crime writing: The Hackney Hacker.  Premature to present him with an award when the killer was still out there.  An especially bad mistake when, as Eddie and his colleagues toasted his success at doing what he did best, the Hackney Hacker was at the flat doing what he did best to Rose.

He knew it couldn’t go on.  Rose would have been livid to have seen the state he was in.  Crawling through day after day, drinking, pissing, and puking away the little money he had.  Wasting his life when she no longer had hers.  He could picture her, and in his most hallucinogenic drinking episodes, he could literally see and hear Rose giving him such a rebuke.

Eddie had told Rose that she’d made him whole.  She’d pulled away from him and eyed him thoughtfully, “hmmm, maybe so, Eddie, maybe so, but the most whole I’ve ever seen you is at that bloody typewriter thumping away or jotting into one of those notepads of yours.  I might fill a gap in your life but, writing fills a larger one.”

So, he wrote.  Writing while drunk was futile.  His handwriting became and illegible scrawl and served no cathartic purpose.  Nor did maudlin pieces about Rose and how much he missed her.  He’d written it out once.  Eloquently describing the loss of the love of his life.  And, once written, everything else became a rehash.  A clichéd effort of diminishing returns.

The writing stopped and the drinking increased to fill the gaps.  Slumped in his chair, staring out the window as the pier lit up in the darkness of the night.  He drank until he slept.  Passed out more like.

He awoke as dawn crept up from the depths of the sea and cast an orange hue into the bedsit.  He was soaked.  A combination of spilled booze and urine soaked his trousers.  He sighed at himself and reached for the vodka bottle dropped and almost empty on the floor to upright it.

He saw the local newspaper soaked dark on the carpet.  It was the same paper he’d apprenticed on before he’d gotten his big break and gone to London to seek fame and fortune.

It was open and had an advert circled in red marker.

Eddie neither remembered buying, reading, or annotating the paper.  He’d later consider it a sign from Rose.  Maybe it was.  Maybe he had a moment of clarity.    

The advert was for a taxicab driver.  Seasonal work.  Christmas.  The nightshift.

Temporary turned to permanent after Christmas.

That was two years ago.  Two years of sobriety.  Somehow sleeping during the day suited him.  Exhaustion gave him dreamless slumber.  He’d get home to his bedsit, sit in the armchair by the window overlooking the beach and, if the tide was in, he’d watch the waves rolling until sleep came.

But Eddie had an itch that would not go away.  It wasn’t alcohol.  That had only ever been a means to an end.  This was something more.  Just as Rose had it called it, this was part of Eddie’s psyche.  He had to write. 

He’d made his career in crime writing and he was bloody good at it too.  He soon got picked up by a broadsheet in London when his local newspaper stories got noticed.  It was his gift and his curse.  It brought him professional success and personal tragedy.  But writing gave him purpose.  Like Rose had said, it made him feel whole.  As whole as he could be anyway. 

Fleet Street was far behind him now and he would never want to return.  He didn’t have a great idea for a novel.  Nor did he have an editor telling him what to do.  Eddie had no life beyond the taxicab and the night shifts.  So that was what he wrote about.

He called it Daily Nightly, and it was about his shifts and this town: where streets were quiet, but never clean. Where the people were tired, but never safe.  

His taxicab was a battered maroon Volvo 240 with a heater that wheezed like a dying pensioner and a smell that never quite shook off the ghosts of spilled chips and wet dogs.

No fare was too big or too small for Eddie.  He’d take anyone anywhere.  It filled his shift time.  When he had no fares he’d write or read the spine-cracked, well-thumbed paperback he kept on the dash.  He’d rotate through books he’d read many times.  In the company of Marlowe, Hammer, Archer.  The familiarity was comforting.  He had no desire to find and read new authors.

Eddie kept his latest notebook on the passenger seat. He’d filled half a dozen already, stashed on his bookshelf in the flat.  It was a battered, dog-eared thing with a cracked spine and pages stained by coffee and rain. It was where he wrote down the strange things — the things that didn’t sit right.

He would always be an ex-crime reporter. Now he was just a cabbie with a habit of noticing.

It started with her.  It wasn’t so much that she looked like Rose.  The similarity started and ended with the auburn hair but the style, beyond shoulder length in waves, was close enough.  She had green eyes too.  He’d seen them in the rearview but, where Rose’s eyes had a mischievous sparkle, this lady’s showed nothing but sadness.  It made this lady look a few years older than Rose.  But then Rose would’ve been older now.  He couldn’t imagine it.

Of all places she’d been his pickup at The Feathered Gull at midnight.  The Feathered Gull a pub that clung to the edge of the docks like a barnacle and was frequented by a rough crowd.  She’d have stood out a mile.  Her trench coat looked to be designer.  Her legs were slender as she climbed in the back of the cab.  Eddie could imagine the attention she’d have received in the place.  The only women he knew to go in there were working and not only were they working behind the bar.  It had that sort of a reputation.

Maybe she’d been that sort too but, to Eddie, she looked to high-class for that, and she looked apprehensive enough to have maybe stepped into the wrong place.

She caught him staring in the mirror and took it that she needed to give instruction.

“Number 13, Ashmere Lane.” She said in an accent that was indistinct, although Eddie felt it suggested, much like himself, she once was local.

He drove, glancing back in the rearview, she gazed out of the side window. 

He knew the address, only there wasn’t anything there, not anymore.  Not for a long time.  The last time a habitable property stood there was Eddie’s last night on the job before he left for London.  The place, a grand (for the area) five-bedroom detached house, had burned to the ground.  One casualty: Patricia Vale.  Survived by her husband, Donald, and daughter, Clara.

Eddie had followed the story from afar during his first few days in London.  He hated to leave a feature without finishing it.  He’d handed it over to someone in the pool of desk reporters. The report had said it was a chip pan fire and the result of Patricia falling asleep on the sofa whilst smoking. 

Except it couldn’t be.  Not in Eddie’s eyes.  When he’d arrived on the scene he’d smelled petrol, or something like it, in the entranceway.  And he could’ve sworn he’d heard a neighbour rubbernecking say that Patricia didn’t even smoke.  It didn’t add up and Eddie was all for telling whoever was on the story just that.  Except, he didn’t.  He started his new job and the old job soon faded into the background and the story was forgotten about.

Of course, life in London took over.  He loved London and found love there.  Eddie would smile when someone would sarcastically remark that they were “living the dream” because Eddie felt he really was living his dream.  He’d met Rose at a Bob Rafelson retrospective at the BFI.  She spilled wine on him.  Her apology was so heartfelt and charming that he ended up buying a replacement glass for wine for her and they sat together.  He reeked of the malbec that was soaking into his shirt and, at some point during Five Easy Pieces, they held hands.  They’d been a couple ever since.  Well, almost ever since.  Until his crime story that fell in his lap, the one he was secretly happy about, the one that he was excited by, the one that won him the plaudits.  No matter the victims.  He stoked the terror that the Hacker reaped on the streets of Hackney. Until the Hacker chose Rose.  Until he-

Pulling up to what was now effectively a vacant plot brought it all back to him.

Eddie waited.  The woman wound down the window stiffly and looked out at the empty overgrown space that had the ruins of a burned-out house in its centre.

“You know about this place?” Eddie asked.

She ignored him and wound the window back up.

“Premier Inn, Seafront.” She said.

Eddie wasn’t usually one for conversation. He preferred to observe and consider each of his fares but, tonight, he chanced his arm.

“You know this place?  The house burned down.  It’d be ten years ago now.” His eyes kept flicking back and forth between the road ahead and the passenger in the mirror behind.  Trying to gauge if there was any reaction.  There was.  A steely green-eyed stare.

“Yes, I know the place.”

“Awful what happened there.  Did you know the family?”

The tough stare wavered, and a thin ridge of tears welled up seemingly held in place by her stoicism.

“Just drive…please” her voice cracked.

 Edie did as he was asked and drove her to the Premier Inn.  She gave him a twenty for the ten-pound fare.

“Keep the change.” She said as she climbed out of the car.

Eddie sat for a split second before there was a knock at his side window.  It was her.  He hastily wound the window down as she leaned to his level.

“And I’d mind my own business if I were you.  Safer that way.” And before Eddie got a chance to respond, she had turned on her heel and entered the hotel. 

Eddie went to the all-night café on the high street and over a few cups of flavourless instant coffee, he wrote out all he knew of the fire at Ashmere Lane, and he resolved to visit the library for the news coverage it garnered at the time.

Eddie was waiting when the library opened and soon placed himself at a microfiche machine on the upper floor.  He knew the exact date of the fire and soon found the story.  It was, as he remembered, reported as a tragic accident.  The story disappeared from the paper as suddenly as it had appeared.  He switched to the internet to trace what then happened to Donald and Clara Vale.

Nothing.

Well, not nothing, as such.  He found an online archived version of the newspaper story and several other Donald and Clara Vales.  But nothing of the two surviving members of that family.  It was if they had disappeared.  Or been erased.

It was lunchtime by the time Eddie had exhausted all avenues of investigation from within the library walls.  He climbed into his cab and drove to the docks.

The Feathered Gull was open.  There were a few tradesmen and dock workers in high viz clothing smoking and vaping outside as Eddie walked in.

“Eddie chuffing Groves! As I live and breathe!” called Jock from behind the bar.  Jock had been the landlord of The Gull for what seemed like forever.  “I thought you were off the sauce, lad?  If you’re relapsing, you’ll not be doing it here, mate.  I like you too much to serve you!” he laughed as he said it but, he meant it.  For, as much as The Gull was a den of thieves, drunkards, and the unsavoury, Jock had a heart of gold and would not want Eddie to find himself back in the bind of a couple of years ago.  A time when Eddie would walk into the place already swaying and steaming.      

“Hey, Jock, long time no see.  No, nothing like that.  I was wondering if I could have a word?”

Jock waved for Eddie to step through the bar and into the back room.

“Sounds serious, Eddie, what can I do for you?”

“I picked up a fare from here last night.  A woman.  Good looking.  A redhead.  I wonder if-“

“Oh, I remember her alright!  Who wouldn’t it?  She was a helluva piece that one, for sure.”

“Did she say why she’d come in here?  No offence, Jock, but I didn’t think this was her scene, so to speak.”

“None taken, Eddie, I thought the same, to be honest.  I had to check with her, like, make sure she’d come into the right place.  For her own sake, like.  She was here to meet someone.”

“Did she say who?”

“Nope but, I saw them together anyway.  She met with Charlie Feltham.”

Jock let the name hang in the air while Eddie cast his mind back to that name.

“Bloody hell, Charlie Feltham!  I thought he was-“

“In prison?  He was.  Just got out last week.”

“And what was she doing meeting him?”

“Well, I figured she might be a high-class escort, you know, Charlie treating himself after getting out and that.  But there was something about her body language that said otherwise.  He was flirty.  Kept reaching to touch her hair and all but, she didn’t respond in kind.  If anything, she was standoffish.  She looked a bit disgusted by him to me.”

“I presume they didn’t leave together?  She was alone when I picked her up.”

“Yeah, they left together.”

“What time?”

“Eleven thirty on the dot.  I looked at my watch as they left. I still couldn’t fathom how they were together.”

“Thanks, Jock.” Eddie said and left.

He drove to the Premier Inn while he ruminated on what Jock had seen.  Who was she, why was she there, and why on earth was she meeting the notorious criminal Charlie Feltham?  Especially, as he’d only just come out of a long stretch for importing illegal drugs from Holland. 

“She left, mate.  Checked out an hour ago.  I called her a cab to take her to the train station.” The girl at the front desk explained.

Eddie gunned the Volvo to the station.  He pulled up sharply outside, not caring that he was on double yellows.  He leaped the barrier and onto the platforms.

She was there.  Suitcase by her side.

“Clara!” he called, and she turned to face him.  Her face flushed.  She caught herself but, it was too late to deny now.

She let Eddie take her case for her and lead her to the platform café where he got her and himself a coffee.  They sat by the window overlooking the platform.

“What gives, Clara?”

Clara sighed, she turned her coffee cup clockwise on the table in front of her, staring deeply into it and wondering if she should say anything.  She wanted to, that was the thing.  She wanted to unburden herself.

“Well, you worked it out.  I suppose I hadn’t really covered my tracks too well.  Going to the house was a mistake.”

“And Charlie Feltham?  Where does he fit in?”

“He caused the fire.  Well, not him personally.  He got someone else to do it,” she fought back the tears, “that bastard couldn’t even remember who he’d asked to do it.  That’s how little he cared.”

“But why?”

“My father worked at the coastguard.  Coastal Operations.  He’d noticed the boats leaving the docks at night and returning a few hours later.  It was a strange pattern and, when he asked colleagues about it, he got the cold shoulder.  He got warned off.  Told to keep his nose out.”

“Feltham’s drug importing?”

“Yes.  I don’t think my father was fully aware of what was going on and how deep the conspiracy ran.  Not until the fire.  Then he realised.  The police and the fire service made no effort to investigate it properly.  The case was closed within a couple of days.  Suspiciously quick.”

“And your father tried to take it further?”

“No.  Charlie Fetltham paid him a visit.  I might have only been a teenager but, I knew that there was something wrong about the fire. We were at my mother’s funeral, and I saw my father called aside to go and speak to the man I then found out was Charlie Feltham.  I hid behind a tree and heard Feltham threaten that I would be next if my father didn’t keep out of it.  He offered some hush money.  My father took an envelope from him and used that money to help us move out of the area.  But he was never the same.  He descended into a deep depression.  I effectively became his carer as he struggled to function until one day I came home from school to find him in the garage.  He’d hung himself.”

Eddie moved his hands to hers over her coffee cup and she looked at him through the tears.  Removing a hand to wipe away the tears, her green eyes became resolute.

“I lost someone too.” He spoke and she looked up at him, “my partner, Rose, she was murdered.” Silence filled the space between them.  A train arrived at the platform.  He went on, “I was covering a series of murders around Hackney.  Grizzly killings.  Young girls on night outs that shouldn’t have had to fear any such thing.  Only I overstepped the mark.  I wrote myself into the story.  Challenged the killer.  Made it personal with him.  Then he made it personal with me.  With Rose.”

Now they were both crying.

“Did they catch him?” Clara asked.

“Sort of.  He had cancer.  He was dying anyway.  By the time they got to him he was on his deathbed.  He never paid for his crimes.  Not in this life anyway.”

“No justice is there?” she became agitated, “I made a vow to myself at my mother’s funeral.  I was going to act upon it but, I discovered Feltham was in prison.  Until last week, that is.”

“Your vow: it wasn’t just about meeting him, was it?”

“I’d like to tell you it was.  I’d like to tell you that I chose the path of the righteous and offered him my forgiveness.  But, no- There’s my train.”

She bustled out of the café with Eddie in tow and she swiftly boarded the train.

Eddie stood aghast on the platform.

“What did you do, Clara?  What did you do?”

The doors closed and the train departed.

Driving past The Feathered Gull on the dockside on his way home, Eddie saw the police vans.  The blue tent.  He saw Jock watching on as police in full coveralls strode about the place.

“What’s all this, Jock?”

“We’ll see in a minute.  Someone called the old bill in.  Body in the water.”

It was a minute.  A minute was just long enough for Eddie to connect the dots.  It was long enough for Clara to be another few miles away.  It was long enough for the police crew to haul Charlie Feltham’s lifeless body from the sea.

That evening, Eddie called the cab company.  Said he wasn’t feeling well.  Took the night off.

He opened Daily Nightly and wrote.  He constructed an article on the Vale family, the fire, on Charlie Feltham, everything.  He sat back, satisfied that he’d written the greatest crime and punishment story ever to fall into his lap.  Destined to never be published.

He went to bed and slept and dreamed of Rose in the good times.

Welfare, My Lovely

In the hazy glow of summer evenings, after the dogs had been walked and the dishes left to soak, five old men shuffled into the Miners Welfare Club in the heart of the village. The place smelled of damp carpet and faded memories, but it was theirs. They sat at the same table, under the faded photo of Arthur Scargill, nursing pints of bitter and recounting stories that had been told a hundred times before.

There was Tommy, who still wore his union badge like a medal. Ron, who’d lost two fingers in the pit but never missed a shift. Len, who spoke only when he had something worth saying. And then Billy “the Mouth,” who had something to say about everything. And then there was Frank.

Frank sat alone.

He’d worked through the strike.

While the rest had stood on picket lines, scavenged for lumps of coal, and relied on handouts for a year, Frank had crossed the picket. Said he had kids to feed. Said he didn’t follow politics. Said they should call a ballot. Said a lot of things that didn’t matter anymore. But the others hadn’t forgotten. They never would. They didn’t even call him by his name. To them he was “Scab”. Not said to his face. Not no more. They ignored him. He was the ghost at the next table, sipping his pint in silence.

One day, Frank didn’t show.

“Maybe the battery’s gone in his mobility scooter” Billy muttered, half-joking.

The next night, Frank limped in. His face was a mess: bruised, swollen, one eye purple and shut. He moved like every step hurt.

“What the bloody hell happened to you?” Ron asked, breaking the unspoken rule.

Frank sat down slowly. “Couple of youths. In hoodies and masks. Took my wallet. Kicked me about a bit.”

Silence fell. Even Billy didn’t make a joke.

“They were laughing.”

Tommy looked at the others. “Where?”

“By the old pit road. Near the allotments.”

They didn’t say much that night. They drank in silence and finished up after just one pint. But something had changed. The next evening, Frank found his usual seat taken by Ron. “You sit here,” he said, pointing to the middle of the group.

Frank hesitated. Then sat.

They talked. Making sure never to mention ’84. They chatted of families, and football, of arthritis, and getting up to pee several times a night. They laughed and took the piss out of each other, then things got serious.

Talk turned from idle chat to revenge.

“They think we’re soft,” Billy said. “Old and slow.”

“We are old and slow,” Len replied.

“But we’re not soft,” Tommy growled.

They knew the lads: local troublemakers on e-bikes, always hanging around the chip shop or the skate park. No respect. No fear.

They decided to teach them some respect and give them something to fear.

Over a round of whisky chasers, they toasted to good luck and set the plan in motion.

On Friday night, they waited by the allotments. Frank in the middle, sat on his mobility scooter, bruises still fresh. The youths came hurtling up the path, laughing, riding in circles on their bikes.

“Oi!” Tommy shouted. “Scumbags!”

The youths laughed. One of them rode straight at Tommy.

Frank intervened. He revved the engine of his scooter. It whined like a dying lawnmower. He turned, aimed, and charged.

The lad saw him coming. Smirked. Accelerated.

It was a game of chicken.

Old man versus youth. Scooter versus e-bike.

Neither swerved.

At the last second, the youth’s eyes widened in the realisation that the old man was not going to stop. He veered off to one side, screaming, and crashing into the hedgerow.

The others abandoned their friend.

The old guys closed in on the prone young man. He tried to disentangle himself from the hedgerow. He cried and wet himself. Ron brought his walking stick around and placed it lengthways under the boy’s chin and said, “You picked the wrong pensioners.”

Frank became a hero.

He sat at the centre of the table. His pint was bought for him.

They laughed, drank, and remembered. Not everything though. Some things were better left in the past.

Four Seasons: Eternal Spring

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Martha had never meant to steal from the dead. Not really. Though, she liked to imagine herself reckless, the sort of girl who could blame the moon or the stars or the taste of cheap cider on her tongue for the things she did. But in truth, she wasn’t reckless.  She was just sixteen, angry at everything, drinking again, and foolish.  But not all foolishness can be forgiven, nor immaturity warrant lenience.

The graveyard sat behind the old church like a shadow that refused to leave. Its iron gates were bent in places where vines and time had won their arguments. Martha and her friends had wandered there after dark, stumbling through the low hanging mist that swamped their ankles.  They were laughing too loudly, pretending not to be scared.

When her friends said their goodbyes and went home to meet curfew, Martha stayed behind.  She said she was going to finish this, tapping at the last third of the cider in her bottle.  Martha had no curfew.  Her friends knew that.  Life at home for Martha was difficult.  From what her friends knew of Martha, and had seen of her parents, they figured they were all as bad as each other: short fuses burning into huge explosions of anger and violence.

Beyond the orange illumination of the streetlight, Martha wandered into the darkness alone, drawn to a particular grave.  The place she often sat and waited out the hours until she went home to a silent house except for the loud drunken snores of her parents. It was a large stone cross raised upon tiers of stone, wide enough for her to sit herself on, put in her headphones and drink and nod her head to the music until it got cold enough to make her shift and start the slow shuffle home.

As she reached the site, she noticed that something was different.  There were flowers: a bouquet resting at its base.  White lilies, impossibly bright in the darkness. 

She didn’t remember deciding. Only the sudden urge to take something beautiful because she was young and hurting and convinced the world owed her something. She lifted the bouquet and swung it against the stone cross sending debris of stalks and petals flying through the air.  She kept on smashing the bouquet until nothing remained other than a few stalks and paper in her hand.  She wiped that hand on her jeans and lifted the cider bottle to her lips, unsteadily swigging until no more remained.  She smashed the bottle on the cross.  Shards of glass shattered around her.  She sliced open her thumb on a sliver of glass.  Blood dripped from her hand onto the grave below.

The first bud appeared the next morning.

Martha woke with a headache brutal enough to fell a horse. Sitting up, she rubbed her temples and froze. A tiny green nub poked out from the nick in her thumb, as if her skin had sprouted a small, curious horn.

“What the hell”

She touched it. It didn’t hurt. The bud felt warm, alive. When she pressed too hard, it tingled.

She told no one.

By lunchtime, there were more of them.

Tiny tendrils curled at her collarbone. A small leaf pushed its way out near her elbow. Her hair, normally unruly, seemed threaded with the faintest hint of vines when it caught the light.

Martha locked herself in the school bathroom for almost an hour, staring at herself. Watching. This was surely impossible. But it was happening right before her eyes.

Her mind flashed back to the graveyard. To the lilies. To the bouquet and the cross.
To the moment she’d destroyed what was never hers to take.

The buds grew faster overnight.

She sat at the foot of her bed, biting her nails to the quick, watching her skin shift. A fragile white blossom bloomed on her forearm, trembling softly with each breath she took. Its petals were perfect, like miniature versions of the lilies she’d stolen.

Panic clawed up her throat.

She tried pulling one out. It screamed through her nerves, pain sharp and blinding, as if she were ripping out a piece of herself.

She didn’t sleep.

By dawn’s early light, she understood:
This was a curse. This was a punishment.

And it was growing and unstoppable.

By the third day, Martha could barely hide what she was becoming. She wore long sleeves, scarves, bandages, and layers of clothing.  Anything to disguise the blooms erupting across her body. Each step felt heavier, as if roots pulled at her ankles. Each breath carried the scent of earth.

Her mother commented on the “new perfume” she must be wearing.

Martha laughed until tears slipped down her face.

By the fourth night, vines had begun to creep along her spine, curling their way upward like they sought the sun.

She stood in front of the mirror, shaking. Her once angular silhouette was softened by petals and greenery. The flowers didn’t wilt. They only multiplied.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to her reflection.

But apologies wouldn’t stop the creeping vines.

It was nearly midnight when she returned to the graveyard. The air was colder than she remembered. The trees sighed as if recognizing her. The gates groaned open.

With every step she took toward the grave, her body reacted.  The flowers opening wider, roots stirring under her skin. She felt them moving; slowly and surely, like they were waking up and striving towards sunlight.

The stone cross stood ominously ahead of her.

There were no flowers.

“Please,” she whispered to the grave, feeling foolish. “I didn’t mean any of this. I’m sorry. I’ll put it back. Take the flower, take it all back, please.”

Her voice cracked. The graveyard remained silent.

Something tugged inside her chest.

A vine burst through her ankle, winding into the soil.

“No, no, no!”

She grasped at it, but it was stronger than she was. Another root pushed free beneath her foot, anchoring her in place. Her breath turned sharp and shallow.

The earth welcomed and pulled her.

She fell to her knees. Grass parted around her palms as if bowing. More vines crawled from her fingertips, burrowing into the dirt. Flowers bloomed where her hands touched.

She tried to stand.

She had no strength against the deep buried roots.

The soil beneath her softened to receive her weight. Her skin, once warm, cooled as bark‑like texture inched up her arms. She could feel her heartbeat slowing.

Something deep within the ground pulsed in answer.

It wasn’t anger.
It wasn’t forgiveness either.
It was inevitability.

Martha looked up at the stone angel, tears slipping down her cheeks. They hit the petals sprouting from her chest and rolled off like dew.

“I didn’t mean any harm,” she choked, voice barely audible.

The branches curling around her shoulders held her with something like tenderness.

More flowers blossomed along her neck, her cheeks, her hair. Her vision blurred—not from tears, but from vines creeping toward her eyes. She didn’t fight them. Not anymore.

She lay back, the earth moulding perfectly to her shape. The roots cradled her spine. The buds opened in waves, releasing gentle scents into the night air.

Her body, once restless and reckless, grew still.

One final breath left her lips.

Then she blossomed.

When the sun rose the next morning, the caretaker found a new bed of lilies and wildflowers blooming at the foot of the old stone cross.

He didn’t question it. Flowers came and went in the graveyard all the time.

But these were different.  These grew in a shape, that if you squinted slightly and tilted your head to one side, appeared to be in the shape of someone kneeling at the gravesite.

And every Spring thereafter, they blossomed again.

Reader on the Storm: My 5 Star Reads of 2025

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I’ve seen these lists on Instagram and, tbh, I have been stacking up my Wishlist based upon some of the recommendations and reviews…so here are my 5 star reads of 2025, in no particular order, based upon my Goodreads reviews…

Mythos by Stephen Fry: a superbly told book about the origins of the Greek myths, many of which we are still very familiar with, in one guise or another.  As you might expect, Fry is a witty and intelligent author who tells each tale with great enthusiasm for the subject. 

Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson: this book will stay with me for a long time.  It’s a haunting drama of self-discovery and identity.  It has an almost dreamlike quality to it.  IMHO it’d make a great indie movie.

Life Lessons from Hip-Hop: 50 Reflections on Creativity, Motivation and Wellbeing by Grant Brydon: what I loved about this book was the way it revealed new artists to me and it was inspiring.  It got my creative juices flowing for sure, and I learned a lot along the way – the illustrations are immense too.

Racing the Light by Rober Crais: it’s a bit of a guilty pleasure this one.  I’ve been reading the Elvis Cole books off and on for years (this is #19).  They never disappoint.  They are effortlessly cool and thrilling.

Ali: A Life by Jonathan Eig: I thought I knew a fair amount about Ali.  He’s such an icon that there are some key things about him most people know.  This book goes all in, though.  It covers his entire life in detail and shows his flaws as much as his triumphs.

The Motel Life by Willy Vlautin: Wow! This book hits hard.  When I finished it, I stared off into the abyss for a good minute or so.  Another one that will stay with me for a long time, and I will definitely read more Vlautin work. 

Set the Night on Fire by Robby Krieger: Disclaimer: I am a huge Doors fan, so I’m an avid reader of anything about them.  Krieger seems to be by far the most level-headed of the band (I have also read the Densmore and Manzarek books) and this is a great insight into his life and that of the band.

City in Ruins by Don Winslow: This is the final instalment in the Danny Ryan trilogy and it’s just great, as you might expect from Winslow.  IMHO it is not as good as the Power of the Dog trilogy but, I still gave it 5 stars!

The Burning Soul by John Connolly: The Charlie Parker series is another one I dip in and out of.  They’re always thrilling.  The amount of supernatural included varies from book to book but Connolly is a master at getting the balance just right for each story.

The Batman Boxset by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale: Three graphic novels in one boxset.  The Long Halloween is the outstanding part of this set imho.  The boxset combines some of the influences of the Nolan and Reeves movies (which I think are great).

Light My Fire by Ray Manzarek: I told you I am a Doors fan! This book is great.  How he captures the creation of Light My Fire and his organ intro gave me goosebumps.  Manzarek fully bought into keeping the Jim Morrison myth alive, so there’s a fair amount of artistic license in this but, still a great read.

…and a hard rain fell by John Ketwig: John Ketwig not only made his time in Vietnam, the sights, sounds, smells, and his feelings seem so real, it continued into his time outside of Vietnam. Truly gifted writing that is so personal to him that I was absorbed from start to finish.

Breath by Tim Winton: Coming-of-age books can be predictable. I can assure you this is not.   I have never surfed but it gave me what I think would be a pretty close description of it. And it is about much more than just surfing.

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due: If I was pushed to say, this is my book of the year.  This is a fantastic novel full of suspense and gut-wrenching intensity. It is a supernatural story immersed in the grim reality of the period. The horror of this novel is not found where you might expect.

Looks like I had a pretty good year of reading…Here’s to a great 2026!

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Four Seasons: In the Bleak Midwinter

The first snow of winter fell like whispers, soft and secretive, blanketing the city in a fragile white hush. On the edge of a bustling street, where laughter spilled from warm cafés and golden lights glowed behind frosted windows, a man sat alone. He had a name, a past, and a life beyond homelessness, though few remembered it. He was just another shadow on the pavement, a figure hunched beneath layers of worn coats, clutching a paper cup that was never filled.

He had grown used to the cold. It was a companion now, curling around his bones, numbing the ache of hunger and the sting of loneliness. He watched people hurry past, their scarves bright, their cheeks flushed with warmth. They never looked at him for long. Eyes slid away, as if his existence were a crack in their perfect world.

Across the street he saw the towering apartment block. A myriad of differing Christmas lights and decorations adorned the windows. Each a small display of the various occupants’ sense of style and taste. Each apartment looked dry and safe and warm. A tantalising fantasy of safety so close and yet so very very far.

The snow fell heavier. It clung to his shoulders, his hair, his lashes, until he seemed carved from frost. He didn’t move. He couldn’t. His body was tired beyond measure, and his heart, oh, his heart was a hollow drum, echoing with memories of a life that had slipped through his fingers like melting ice.

He thought of home. Not the shelter he sometimes visited, but the real home: the one with laughter in the kitchen and the smell of bread baking. He thought of his daughter’s voice, high and sweet, calling him to play. That was years ago, before mistakes piled up like winter drifts, burying everything good.

A gust of wind swept down the street, sharp as broken glass. He shivered, pulling his coat tighter, but the cold was inside him now, deep and relentless. He closed his eyes and whispered a prayer: not for food, not for money, but for warmth. Just warmth.

His head dropped. His eyes closed.

The snow began to swirl viciously around him. It rose in a glittering spiral, wrapping him in a cocoon of white. He remained in place. He felt his body stiffen, his breath freeze, his heartbeat slow until it was no more than a distant echo.

When the snow settled, he was gone.

In his place stood a figure of pure white. A snowman, tall and silent, with coal-black eyes, a bright orange carrot nose, and a crooked smile. A scarf fluttered around its neck, red against the pale. It was beautiful and yet haunting in its stillness.

Through coal black eyes, he could see the street, the lights, the people. He felt no cold. Frozen in place, he could not move. He was rooted to the spot in a body no longer of flesh but snow. He tried to speak, to call out, but only silence spilled from the gentle crooked curve of the small black pieces of coal on his white round face.

Hours passed. The city grew quiet and dark, the windows of the apartment block were glowing like golden promises. He watched families gather around tables, their laughter spilling into the night. He saw children press their faces to the glass, pointing at him with delight. Look, a snowman! they cried, their voices bright as bells.

They didn’t know. They couldn’t know.

He could never cross the threshold, never feel the heat of a fire or the softness of a bed. He was destined to stand in the snow, looking in at the warmth he had lost.

At first, despair crushed him like ice. He raged against the stillness, against the cruel magic that had bound him. But as days passed, something shifted. He began to notice things: the way the snow sparkled under moonlight, the hush of dawn, songbirds calling their delight at the day, the laughter of children playing around his feet. He became a part of winter’s song, a silent guardian of joy.

And yet, every night, when the stars burned cold and the wind howled through empty streets, he would gaze at the glowing windows and remember. He would imagine stepping inside, shedding his frost, holding his daughter close. He would imagine warmth, not just of fire, but of love.

But imagination was all he had.

Seasons would turn. The snow would melt. And when it did, he would vanish, his body dissolving into water, his soul scattering like mist. But he knew: he knew that when winter returned, so would he. The snow would call him back, shaping him anew, setting him once more outside the circle of light.

Always outside. Always looking in.

He stood in complete stillness beneath the falling snow; his coal eyes fixed on the world he could never touch. A snowman, yes, but more than that. A reminder. A story etched in frost, whispering to those who cared to listen: Warmth is a gift. Hold it close.

He had a name, a past, a life beyond this snowman…

Something Ain’t Right In Boone Town

Thorne adjusted the car seat.  Whoever had last driven the hire car must have been sasquatch sized.  Thorne might only be 5’8” but the seat was about as far back as it would go.  He felt like he was sitting in the back.  Still, it was a small inconvenience given the studio had stumped up the money for Thorne to choose almost any car he wanted.

He gripped the wheel, flexing his hands on the leather, and smiling to himself.    He’d chosen a brand new and gleaming 1969 Dodge Challenger in red with a thick central black stripe on the hood and finer stripes on the sides.  Thorne knew he’d never be able to afford such a car.  Not on his meagre wages. He had hoped to have sold a screenplay by now.  He had five out amongst various studios, sat somewhere within the execs’ buildings.  On a good day, he thought one of them would be on the top of a pile in a producer’s in tray.  On a bad day, he figured they were all in the trash.

Keeping himself active in and around the movie making business was important to Thorne.  He never wanted to consider screenwriting a hobby.  He wanted it to be a career.  He introduced himself to people as a writer.  If he said it often enough, he felt it would manifest itself true.

In the meantime, location scouting for Herman Hodges would do just fine.  Hodges was a veteran TV and movie director.  Thorne had met him while he’d been a gofer on the western series Hawk, and they’d stayed in touch.  Hodges was a patient guy and a mentor to Thorne.  He’d read and reviewed all of Thorne’s screenplays.  He was even supposedly trying to push one, Dead Man in Town, through into production.

Hodges had found this job for Thorne.  A $25 per diem, reasonable expenses paid, and a sweet hire car.  All so he could scout some locations for a new Burt Reynolds series, called Dan August, that was in pre-production.  Hodges order was to scout “not too far and not too wide” which basically meant within the borders of California.  Hodges had run his finger over the Ventura County area as he’d said it.  Close enough to LA to be cheap and yet far enough outside LA to have some great scenic views and locations.  Hodges was very clear that the scripts were godawful, so the scenery better be spectacular.  Hodges tantalisingly said, “we’ll see, kid” when Thorne raised his own availability to script edit and “turn godawful into goddamn!”.

Seat and rearview mirror adjusted, Thorne studied the map laid out on the passenger seat and the list of script locations beside it.  The first thing he needed to do was get out of LA and into Ventura County.  He’d then park and restudy the map. 

He checked his wristwatch: 9AM.  He’d be in Ventura by 10:30AM.  Maybe sooner if he gunned it.  And he surely intended to see what this car could do once he hit Highway 1.  There were more direct ways to get to Ventura County but, Thorne had every intention of enjoying this day and this drive.  The scenic and fun route of Highway 1 won out.

The drive was idyllic.  KHJ radio provided a glorious soundtrack of The Doors, The Beatles, Hendrix and others until the reception faded and Thorne retuned to another station and another.  Chasing the music he so much enjoyed.  The scenery was high cliffs, a winding coast road, crashing waves, and ocean vistas.  It was glorious.

Once into Ventura County, Thorne pulled the car over in a cloud of dust.  He studied the map.  There was a clear route into the heart of the county that Thorne traced with his finger.  He drummed his fingers on the wheel and pondered his next move.  Looking out through the windshield, a turnoff caught his eye.  It wasn’t signposted and, when he checked, the road wasn’t on the map.  This could be just the thing that will make Hodges happy.  Somewhere off the beaten track and previously unused in TV or movies.  Thorne propelled the car across the asphalt and down the road in a spitting cloud of dust and gravel.

Trees lined the road that soon became a track. Their branches hung over, extending towards each other like steepled fingers, causing Thorne to feel like he was driving through an emerald tunnel.  With no end in sight and a slight downward slope, it seemed as though Thorne was entering a deep dark hole.  Buffalo Springfield’s Expecting to Fly, although a few years old was the last track he heard, as he drove on, all radio reception faded into static.

A pinprick in the middle-distance soon became a floating ball of light and, as Thorne travelled towards it, it grew into a vision of sunlight and blue sky beyond the treelined tunnel.  Soon the trees gave way to prairies either side of the dirt track the car drove upon.  Thorne slowed his speed to cope with the undulating surface.  The tracks were deep, uneven, and narrow, as if made by heavy wagons or farm trucks. 

At the sign, Thorne slowed to a standstill.

Boone Town

Pop. 101

Thorne checked the map.  Given he’d just driven down an unchartered road, he figured he could scan the area and find Boone Town but, the area where he thought he had arrived at was just represented by solid green.

Further ahead, down the hill, following the line of the track, and some miles in the distance Thorne could make out the outline of a small town, vague in the simmering heat haze.

“That must be Boone Town,” Thorne muttered to himself.  He tuned the radio finding only static before switching it off and driving ahead slowly with just the rumbling engine for company.

A few miles later and the shimmering town had come sharply into focus.  Thorne slowed the car to a stop and cut the engine at the end of the street that ran though the centre of town.

If this was Boone Town, it was barely a town.  Thorne felt he must be mistaken.  The place in front of him looked like an abandoned western set.  There was one wide dirt road that ran through the centre with old time buildings either side: a saloon, a hardware store, a haberdashery, and other storefronts and unsigned buildings, and a grandly opulent house down at the far end.  At intervals along the side of the road were poles on which to hitch horses. 

Thorne cursed under his breath.  He’d come all this way thinking he’d find some great new locations only to find an abandoned old western set that had probably had Audie Murphy, and others wandering up and down the main street.  Damn it! What was the betting that Hodges had filmed here too?  He slapped the steering wheel causing a stinging sensation in his palms.

Thorne checked his watch: 12:35PM.  He decided to get out and look around but, he’d park up first.  He turned the key in the ignition and got no response.  Not even an attempt to fire, just a single click.  He tried again, and again.  He pumped the gas pedal and tried again.  Nothing.

Out of the car with the hood up, Thorne contemplated that he didn’t know a damn thing about engines.  He’d had creative writing lessons while almost all the other guys were in shop.  Damn it! 

Thorne slammed the hood and leaned back onto the car as he looked down the street.  Maybe there might be someone here after all.  He saw black smoke in the sky and traced it to its point of origin.  A singular chimney at the other end of the street.  Perhaps they’d have a phone or, even better, a mechanic. 

As Thorne walked down the main street, he found himself walking dead centre, like an old-time gunslinger.  He could imagine townsfolk bringing down shutters and locking doors to hide from the imminent shootout. 

As he walked, he realised this was no abandoned film set.  This was a real town.  The buildings were not facades.  They were proper solid structures.  Sure, they were old, maybe even dating back to the 1800s.  But they looked well maintained and lived in. 

Thorne moved over to the sidewalk on his left.  His shoes clacked on the planks as he walked.  He looked through windows as he moved past seeing nothing much more than his own reflection.  Inside the buildings were dark. 

He paused to look through the hardware store door window.  A “closed” sign gently swung.  Either caught by a breeze of the store owner had just shut up shop.  Thorne knocked on the window and stood back. 

As he waited, he looked at his reflection.  He shaped his shoulder length sandy hair back into some semblance of style, he brushed the dust off his faded black t-shirt and light blue jeans.  He, at least, didn’t look like a vagrant or a travelling salesman.  If anything, he looked like what he was, a twentysomething guy lost in the country.

No one came to the door.  He placed his hands in an arch across his brow and pressed against the window, looking through into the store.  It was rigged out like a store in a western.  Bags of flour, and other supplies were laid out, as were two by fours, buckets of nails, and jars of all sizes.  Thorne turned back to the chimney smoke.  He was halfway down main street now and still had another half to go to reach the chimney building.

A couple more buildings along and Thorne reached the saloon.  Complete with two swing saloon doors, Thorne peered over the top of them and into the bar.  There was a bar that ran the length of the indoor area.  Numerous barrels and bottles behind it, and up on the wall a large painting depicting a battle: cowboys and Indians.  The rest of the area had round tables and small chairs stacked around but no patrons. 

Thorne pushed at the doors and the swung open easily.  He stepped into the saloon and walked over to the bar.  He leaned over the bar as far as he could but, there was no one there crouched behind the bar.  Then he heard whistling.

It was a tune he recognised but couldn’t place.  It was faint but, growing louder.  Nearer.  The more he heard the more the tune resonated with him.

“Shall we gather at the river?” Thorne said as the whistler came through a door at the end of the bar.  That caused the whistler, a short and stocky man of over sixty years old, to stop in his tracks. 

For a moment they stood in silence and stared at each other.

The whistler had a bald pate with unkempt tufts of bright white hair either side.  His eyes were bright cobalt blue, the whites slightly bloodshot, and his face was jowly with more unkempt tufts of hair forming a patchy beard of sorts.  His clothing was as expected of a western character.  He wore pink hued long johns, visible because he wore no shirt over the top, and dirty brown trousers, and a black boot.  The end of one of his pant legs was cut off revealing a crude and rough looking wooden leg, like that of a pirate.  He was carrying a sopping wet mop that he held frozen in place like a spear.  The only sound was the water dripping steadily from its grey head onto the wooden floor.

“Howdy!” said Thorne, raising a hand in greeting, instantly and inwardly cringing at his very western movie greeting.

“Harrumph,” croaked the man.  He coughed and repeated more clearly.

“Is this Boone Town?”

“Sure is.”

“Do you have a phone I could use, please?  You see my car broke down up the road.”

“Nope.”

“Ah, ok…is there a mechanic in town.”

“Nope.”

“Anyone who else might have a phone?”

“Nope. Nobody here but me.  You best walk back the ways you came.”

“Er, well, that’s a very long way, sir.  Isn’t there anything else you could do to help me, please? I just need to get my car started or call a cab or a tow truck or something.”

The man placed the mop to one side and walked up to face Thorne from the other side of the bar.  

“Ain’t nothing for you here.  You go on and walk back the road you came in on.  Might take you a whiles.  That’s your only option.”  Although he spoke sternly, there was a softness in his eyes.

“Well, maybe I could have a drink, then I’ll be on my way, sir.”

The man proceeded to get a glass, blow in it and then pour a frothy beer from a barrel.  Thorne took it and drank through the foam sucking in the warm, wet, and malty ale.  He turned and leaned both elbows back on the bar.  The man stayed still behind him.

“You the only person who lives in this town?” Thorne turned to him.

“Yup.”

“Then how come the sign on the way in says population 101?”

“Old sign”, the man shrugged.

“And, how come there’s a building further up the street with smoke coming out of its chimney?”

The man’s posture changed.  He moved forward quickly to the bar causing Thorne to flinch and then hold his own ground.  The man whispered forcefully, as though not wanting to raise his voice.

“I know you done hear me before.  Ain’t nothing for you here, boy.  You git while you can.  You get to walking now and you’ll be out of town and back on the main before sundown.  Someone will help you there.  You ain’t getting no help here.  Now you done had your drink and I’m asking you to leave.”

Thorne narrowed his eyes.  He didn’t like it but, he couldn’t’ force the guy to help him and maybe he could get back to the main highway in a decent time.

“Okay,” Thorne held up both hands and backed away from the bar and walked out of the saloon.  He hesitated for a moment, contemplating going to the chimney building anyway but, he sensed the man was watching him from the doorway and, when he turned, the man was there, looking over the saloon doors sternly.  Thorne waved and smiled and walked in the direction of his car and the road out of Boone Town.  

The prospect of a long trek and no guarantee of a passing vehicle to offer him help gave Thorne pause for thought.  That guy clearly didn’t want to help but, there was still the place down the street with the smoking chimney.  Maybe the resident there had more of a mind to be a good Samaritan.  Maybe they had a phone or a car.

Thorne looked back into Boone Town.  The man with one leg was nowhere to be seen.  Thorne made quickly for the prairie by the side of the road, making a long arching run, crouching a little, across the grass and toward the backs of the buildings on the main street.  He soon made it to the shade of the first building and walked along the rear of the structures parallel to the main street, and in the direction of the building with the smoking chimney.

Thorne peered around the corner of the building where a gap gave him a view of the Saloon opposite.  No sign of the one-legged man.  Thorne quickly moved across the gap to the safety of the unseen rear of the next building.

Thorne walked steadily and stealthily along the rear side of the street, wary that he might bump into the one-legged man and starting to have doubts about his actions.  What if there really was no one else here?  He’d be wasting time he could be using to get back onto the highway.  What if the one-legged man was the epitome of townsfolk here?  It’d mean he’d get no help from anyone and, again, be wasting his time.  Those thoughts were tumbling around in his head.  Before he knew it, he was at the end of the street, facing the building with the smoking chimney.

It was a ramshackle building.  It had, out back, what appeared to be an extension to the main structure.  A single storey.  The front of the building was two storeys high.  Thorne crept up to the back door, it was ajar, he peered cautiously through the gap.

He could just about make out the interior.  It was a kitchen.  He could see a countertop.  A butcher’s block topped with cuts of pink fleshy meat.  To the left of it, he could see an oven, cast iron, old, glowing at the edges of the door.

As if triggered by the sight, Thorne’s nose discovered the smell of roasting meat.  His mouth began to water. 

Thorne saw a shadow move on the floor and ducked back from the doorway, lest he should encounter another unfriendly resident.

He heard voices, there must be at least two people in there.  Thorne placed his ear at the gap in the door.

“I tell you, Red, we don’t get another yield from that drone, we’ll have to go hunting for a new one.”, a man’s voice said.

Another man responded, “he’s all dried up, is what I think.  He ain’t no young buck no more!”

They both laughed riotously.

“Well, maybes you’re right.  If our stud worn out, we need another.”

“That’s a fact.”

Thorne rapped gently on the door.  He heard feet shuffling over.  The door opened and an old man with a surprised look on his face appeared.  His shocked face turned to a broad grin.

“What in the world?” he said in the direction of Thorne, then leaned back and sent his voice back into the kitchen, “Young man, here on our doorstep, Red! A young man!”

He beamed a wide welcoming grin at Thorne and rushed to him, pulling at him into the kitchen where the aroma of roasting meat made him salivate.

“Come, come, young man, let’s get to see you there.  I’ll fix you a drink and some food, how about that?” Clyde continued manhandling Thorne into the room and seated him at a chair by the table.  He proceeded to busy himself in the kitchen pouring at first a coffee, then some homemade lemonade and then carving some roasted meat and slicing some bread and placing it neatly on a plate in front of Thorne who sat there a little stunned.

“Well?  Hungry ain’t you?”, said Red, “Tuck in, son, tuck in!”

Thorne drank first the cool, sweet and tart lemonade quenching his thirst and was gone in three big gulps.  Clyde rushed in to refill the lemonade while Thorne cut into the succulent meat and ate it.  It was as delicious a roast as Thorne had ever had, and the bread, now slathered in fine golden butter was divine.

Clyde and Red nodded their approval at Thorne’s enjoyment of their hospitality.

Red sat himself at the table opposite Thorne, “Good ain’t it?  Best you’ve ever had, I’ll bet.  One thing we do right in Boone Town is cooking…and eating! Ha!” and Red and Clyde collapsed into fits of giggles.

“Now, now, young man, my you are a strapping lad, how comes you find yourself here in our small town?” said Red.

“Well, I work in television in LA.  I scout locations, and, well, I just, sort of found this place.”

Red looked perplexed, not quite understanding what the boy had said.

“You have a girl in LA?”

“No sir.”

Red cast a glance at Clyde, licking his lips.

“Now where are my manners?  I’m Red and this hear is Clyde. And you are?”

“Thorne, Henry Thorne but, everyone just calls me Thorne,” he yawned.

“Tired, son?”

“Well, now you mention it, I guess I am, sir, yes.”

And with that Thorne fell face first into the bloody rare meat on his plate.

Thorne was out for a few hours.  That gave Red and Clyde enough time to call on a few other townsfolk to help carry him gently and reverently in a makeshift stretcher made from a jailhouse blanket.  They returned the blanket from whence it came, with Thorne neatly deposited within it. 

The jailhouse was essentially one big square room with one quarter of it cordoned off by the floor to ceiling bars of two adjoined cells.      

Walt Jurgens, the sheriff of this burg sat with his feet up on his desk snoring.  His chair was tilted back and so was his head, his hat was angled down over his face.  His uniform was aged, no longer a vivid tan colour, it had become faded to beige in places.

Thorne heard the snoring as he awoke from his own enforced slumber.  At first, he thought it was his own breathing he could hear.  Eyes still closed, he held his breath and, sure enough, he continued to hear the Walt’s snorts and wheezes, affirming that he was not alone. 

He rubbed his hands over his face and woke himself up properly.  Groggy still, he rose up to a seated position on the cot and felt a wooziness that caused a feeling of nausea and sparkles to form in his eyes as he tried to open them fully.  His eyes focused on the bars before him, and he followed them to the floor and around the small cell that he occupied. 

Whilst confusion reigned supreme in his head, instinct led the rest of him to locate the cell door, and he staggered unsteadily towards it.  Stumbling on shaky legs he crashed into the barred door his hands clinging to it to stay upright.  The noise woke Walt with a splutter and a start.  His hat fell from his face and into his lap as he raised himself upright.

Walt and Thorne looked at each other in surprise and Thorne flinched as the old geezer leapt from his seat and rushed out of the jail and out into the street.

A murmuring groan came from the cell next to him and he cautiously walked over to look.  In the bunk was a frail old man of skin and bones, his breath rattling weakly in his chest.

Thorne took in his surroundings and returned his gaze to the skeletal figure in the cell next to him.

“Hey, hey,” he whispered, “hey, man, what the hell- “

The old man gasped, and Thorne thought for sure that it would be that man’s very last breath, such was its violent intake.  Instead, the old man opened his eyes weakly and turned his head slightly and slowly to look glassy eyed in Thorne’s direction.

“Look man,” Thorne continued, “I don’t know what in the world is going on here and I sure as hell don’t know how I ended up in a jail cell.  What the hell is this place?”

The old man worked his jaw slowly, warming up his rigid chops, after a few dry lip smacks, he spoke “Boone Town.  This here is Boone Town.”

Thorne rubbed his chin thoughtfully, “Hell, man, that’s right.  I was here and I got talking to two old geezers who gave me food.  Next thing I know, I wake up here.”  Thorne watched the man’s jowls flexing as he warmed up for another effort to speak.

“Replacement.  You. You’re my replacement.” There was a hint of a smirk on his lips when he finished.

“Replacement?  For what?”

The old man’s eyes went wider, as is seeing something far in the distance, something that scared the bejezus out of him, it was a look of stone-cold fear.  He suddenly went rigid, and his head flopped to one side.  Thorne assumed he’d just watched the man die but, the wheezing rattle, faint though it was, returned.

“I see you met Buck.” Came a voice from behind him.

Thorne turned to see a man framed in the doorway silhouetted against the glare of the day.  The man’s face and body were cast in shadow.  The man stepped forward revealing himself in the light from the jailhouse windows.

He was a tall, broad man of over sixty years, with a large stomach that hung over his trousers, and the gun belt that sat there.  Thorne thought for a moment that the man was Jame Arness; such was his height and costume. Straight from the set of Gunsmoke.  Except his face was different.  Similar enough that he could have doubled for Marshall Dillon, though figured Thorne.  The old Sherriff stood a way back watching.

Thorne moved towards the cell bars in the direction of the man and was about to speak before being hushed by a wave of the man’s hand.

“I know, you’ve got a head full of questions, and a gut full of problems.  I understand that, Thorne is it?” he didn’t wait for a reply, “we’ll get to all of that in good time. First things first.  Are you feeling ok?  A bit groggy and disorientated?  Well, we’ll get Doc Randolph to take a look at you.”

Thorne motioned to speak again but, the man cut him off.  “Now, where are my manners.  My name is Cliff, Cliff Hartnett, and well, I guess I’m, sort of the mayor of this here Boone Town, and I’m mighty happy to meet your acquaintance.  Lord knows, we’ve waited long enough, and boy does this town need some young blood,” he grinned and winked.  “Now, I’m gonna go get Doc Randolph and he’ll come in and see to it that you’re fighting fit, then we’ll get you cleaned up and straight to work, I think.” And with that he turned to leave.

Thorne grabbed the bars and began to shout and holler at Hartnett, “Hey man, I have my rights, I want a lawyer, you can’t do this- “

He stopped as Hartnett turned and fixed him with a stern look that then broke into a large smile.

“Oh my, Queenie is just gonna love you, she’s gonna just eat you up!” he smacked his lips in exaggerated fashion and left, the Sherrif keeping step behind him.

Thorne slumped down on his bunk racking his brain to figure a way out of this.  He looked over and saw Buck stirring under his blanket, as if in dream but, his eyes were open, and his face fixed in a grimace.

“Buck, hey Buck, who’s Queenie and what the hell is going on?”

Buck wheezed, his eyes fixed up on the ceiling but, his mind’s eye was elsewhere.

“Queenie.  The Queen Bee.” His eyes widened and a shudder ran through his body, and this time was the last time that breath escaped this man’s lungs.  Buck was dead. 

Some time passed before the Sherriff returned with an elderly gentleman carrying a doctor’s black bag.

“Doc Randolph?” Thorne asked.

“That’s right, son.  Here to check you out.” He placed the black bag on the desk and waited while the Sherriff moved over to the cell.

“Buck is dead.” Thorne said.

The Sherriff and the Doc exchanged a glance.

“I’ll see to it,” said the Sherriff and the Doc nodded solemnly.

“Well, I guess that puts a whole lot of importance on this examination, doesn’t it?” the Doc sighed.

After some convoluted wrangling, the Sherriff managed to cuff Thorne through the bars and proceeded to unlock and open the cell door.  Doc walked into the small space and the Sherriff went next door to place Buck’s blanket over his deceased face.

The Doc was giving Thorne a cursory examination, checking his eyes, teeth, and throat and feeling his muscles through his clothes, as he spoke.

“You sexually active, Mr Thorne?”

“What?”

“Sex, Mr Thorne, you have had sex, you are sexually active?”

“Well, no, er, I mean, yes but not, I mean, I don’t have a girl or anything.”

“Fine, fine,” the Doc continued.  He looked at the Sherriff and nodded. “He’ll do.  As long as everything works, he’ll do.  He seems even stronger than Buck.” He chuckled to himself, “hopefully he’ll last longer.”

“Look mister,” pleaded Thorne.

“Please, just call me Doc, everyone does”

“Doc, please.  I don’t know what’s going on here and I don’t want to know.  I just need to get back home to LA, please.  Won’t you just let me go home?”

The Doc looked at Thorne for a long time.  He was thinking.

“Look, son, I know this is all a bit strange, and, well you might ask what is going on and, in time, you’ll find out, for sure and you’ll get used to it, you really will, I promise you that but,” he sighed sympathetically, “you won’t be going home.  I’m sorry, I realise that’s a shock and all but, sometimes you must think of the bigger picture.  The greater good, if you will.”

Thorne pulled against the cuffs on the bars and cried, “what the hell does that even mean? Why can’t anyone be straight with me?”

“I’ll be straight with you,” Cliff Hartnett stood in the doorway, tall that he was, he was resting his hands on the top of the frame and leaning into the jailhouse. “It’s time to meet Queenie and get to workin’.  Doc, he ready?”

“Yessir”.

They gagged Thorne and led him down the street towards the grand looking house at the end.  Thorne saw the man from the saloon.  He was out sweeping the stoop.  They exchanged a look.  The one-legged man shook his head sadly and cast his eyes down back to his sweeping.

They trudged towards the house and up the wooden steps and through the ornate glass framed doors.  Inside was a grand hallway with a large central staircase.

Upstairs was all velvet drapery, carpet runners, and occasional tables holding ornate vases with fresh flowers.  The floral smell was almost overpowering.

At a doorway, dressed in velvet curtains, the group paused.  Hartnett took Thorne by the elbow and led him through into a reception room.  He sat Thorne on a chez longe and squatted down on his haunches in front of him.  There was a humming sound in Thornes ears, he felt light-headed, woozy.

Hartnett spoke softly and sombrely.

“Now, what happens next is important.  You’re going to meet Queenie and, well, she’s different to us.  She’s more important than us too.  She’s the most important thing in Boone Town.  She’s sensitive too, so I’m keeping you gagged.  She wouldn’t like to hear you hollering, shouting, and screaming.  We learned that the hard way many many years ago and now we know better.  What you need to know, what I implore you to understand is this – Queenie means life or death to you, to us, and to all of Boone Town.  Now, you might not be able to comprehend it right now but, I promise you, if there is one thing you need to know and be clear on it’s that Queenie keeps us all alive and now you need to do your part to help with that.  She feeds us but, to feed us, she must herself be satiated, she needs the seed to supply the food we eat here.  You’re a part of the hive now, boy, whether you like it or not.  You’re a drone, and this is what drones do.  That’s what Buck was, now you.  The rest of us here in Boone Town, we’re workers.  We can’t do what you do.  We don’t have the, ahem, equipment.”

Hartnett rose back to full height and pulled Thorne to his feet and gently guided him to a set of double doors.  He took a handle in each hand and pushed the doors open.

The first thing Thorne noticed was that the humming became louder and more intrusive, he could feel it vibrating in his jaw and in his gut. 

In the centre of the room was an ornately carved four-poster bed with voile fabric hung down each side.  Thorne could make out a shape behind the veils.  It was large.  Queenie must be a big woman.

His gaze was transfixed on the bed.  He saw out the corner of his eye Hartnett perform what looked like a small bow before he approached the nearest veil.  He pulled it across to one side.

Thorne’s eyes struggled to take it all in.

Queenie had some femininity about her but a woman she was not.  She was large, fat and fleshy, and covered in a fine layer of dark hair or fur.  Her body was shaped like a rotund worm, with no discernible limbs.  Her head was larger and not human.  It had two large round eyes of a fibrous appearance, upon the top were antenna, and beneath were mandibles. 

Thorne’s mind worked as he took in the sight before him.  Queenie.  The Queen Bee!  Thorne’s mind took him back to biology class and his rudimentary understanding of bees.  The workers, they do everything, fix the hive, forage, everything, except…the drones, they do that, they impregnate, they are the only ones who do that…and Hartnett had called him a drone!  

Queenie’s head slowly turned towards Thorne.  Her antenna twitched forwards and the mandibles clicked and rubbed together discharging drool.

Although Thorne could see no eyes, he was transfixed by the sight before him, and he gazed into those large orbs as the humming grew louder sending an electric pulse throbbing rhythmically through his body.  He found himself disgusted but, his body reacted as if excited.

“Take your pants off” whispered Hartnett.  

Memorial Park: Epilogue

Photo by Matt Hardy on Pexels.com

The boy is skimming stones.  He’s got the hang of it now.  Leaning low and slinging his arm.  His feet buried in the pebbles on the beach.  Smiling.  Proud that he’s mastered the technique the man showed him.

The man stands watching him for a time.  Letting the boy have his fun.

The boy turns and sees the man.  He hefts the stone in his hand smiling.  A “watch this!” look on his face.  He flings the stone.  It skims 3, 4, 5 times before hitting the face of a small wave.

“You’ve got the hang of that!” the man calls over.

“Do you think you could skim one all the way across?”

“Not me! In theory, with enough momentum, you could!”

The pebbles rattle as they both walk towards each other.  The boy eyes the sack the man is carrying. It looks almost empty.  Lacking weight.  He nods towards it.

“Anything much?”

“A mackerel.”

“Just one?”

“Yep, it’ll do for now.  I’ll try closer to sunset.  Might fare better then.”

The boy nods.  The man sees his own mannerisms in the boy.  It ages the boy.  When skimming stones the boy looked his age. Early teens at a guess.  Now he looks older.  More tired.  Up close the man sees the dirt on his skin, the dark circles under his eyes, the haunting look within them.  The boy has seen horrors.  More than anyone should have seen.  It makes the man’s heart feel heavy.

The boy turns back to the sea.

“What’s that place called again, out there?”

“France.”

“And it’s the same for them as us?”

“I believe so”

“Believe so?”

The boy was of an age where everything was up for dissection, picked apart and reimagined through his own eyes.  A challenge.  Everything was a debate.  It was tiring.  The boy had no concept of countries, travel, of a small world connected by phone signals, the internet.  The man remembered but the boy did not.

“I spoke to a guy.  French.  From France.  He’d crossed the channel.  The sea there.  He thought it might be better here.”

“It isn’t.”

“I know.”

The boy stands gazing out to sea.  The man thinks and hopes the conversation is over and they can move on.

“What if he’d gone the other way?”

The man sighs.  “The other way?”

“The other direction.  Instead of coming here.  He’d gone further away?”

The man put down the sack and stood with his hands on his hips.

“Really?”

“What?” the boy turned to him.

“How can I answer that?  How could I know?”

The boy shrugs and starts sifting through pebbles to find a flat one to skim.

The man picks up the sack again.  Smiles to himself.  Happy that the conversation has ended.

Darkness falls. 

They keep the fire small and low. 

The man had caught more mackerel at sunset.  The two sit staring into the embers of the fire.

“Four days.” The boy croaks, coughs, then repeats, “Four days.”

“Yep.”

“Longest for a while.  Since when it were freezing.  We didn’t see any for thirty-seven days.  That’s our record.”

“Yep.”

“You don’t think?”

The man looks across the fire at the boy.  Sees the optimism flickering in his eyes, igniting its own fire of hopefulness.

“No.” the man extinguishes the boy’s expectation.

They are less active at night.  The man has a theory.  He does not share it with the boy.  He wants to avoid the endless conversation and debate it would provoke.

His theory is that they need the warmth of the sun.  Like reptiles.  That’s why they see less of them in Winter. 

If he talked to the boy, he’d have to explain the seasons, then calendars, then God knows what else.  He’d rather mull it over in his own head than face a continuous dialogue.

The man wakes at dawn.  The boy is not there.

The man sits up abruptly.  Spies the makeshift mackerel net is gone.  He raises himself and walks down the pebbled beach to the edge of the sea.  He hears the gentle lapping of the water.  He focuses his attention.  Hears the rattle of pebbles as they roll over each other in the tide.

The he hears screaming.

It’s not the boy.  He’s calm, quiet, and still. Waist deep in the murky waters of the English Channel.  The screaming comes from one of them.  It has decomposed to become unrecognisable as male or female and is of no discernible age.  It senses the boy.  Maybe, thinks the man, it can even see the boy through those cloudy lifeless eyes.  But it cannot get to him.  It will not step into the water.  It shuffles back and forth with the waves.  Somewhat sprightly thinks the man.

The boy sees the man approaching.  He can sneak up to the creature on the shore.  It is preoccupied with the boy and the water.

The man rushes and pushes.  The creature’s screams go into a panicked high-pitched squeal.  It thrashes in the water.  It is almost comical.  The water is barely six inches deep.  The creature writhes and screams as though drowning or burning.  The water causes it pain.    

The man, on all fours from the force of the push, watches intently in case the creature recovers composure and makes for the boy. 

In a moment the creature ceases to move.  It rests in place.  Small brown waves lap around it.  Its body collapses in on itself and it flattens into a putrid cloud of fluids.  A stench of rancid gas is released into the air.

The boy makes for shore in a wide arc ensuring he goes nowhere near the corpse of the creature.  It is now a raggedly decayed stringy shape with whiteness of bones showing through as the flesh, of what it was, dissolves into the surf.

The man thinks.  He has encountered many of them on his travels both before and after he discovered the boy.  He’s seen them in water.  They’ve crossed rivers and streams in pursuit of their prey.  Never has he seen them fear water or shrink back from its touch.

But that was not the sea.  That was fresh water.  This is salt water.

The man rediscovers something he thought was lost to him.

Hope

“Monty,” the boy says, “Why you laughing?”

Memorial Park

Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

“Death makes Angels of us all and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as raven’s claws“

Monty leaned against the Rolls.  It was hot, he decided to take off the thick wool suit jacket.  He knew he shouldn’t, it was company policy to keep it on but, it was absolutely baking hot.  If a mourner came out, or worse, his boss, it’d be the end of him. 

He’d been with Osbourne & Sons Funeral Service for just over a year.  He, sort of, liked it.  It was peaceful.  Monty always thought of himself as a sombre melancholy person, so to be surrounded by grief and condolence suited him.  But the heat of a bright August midday didn’t.  Monty preferred a grey morning, with fine rain and mourners with umbrellas.  It fitted the mood.  Like the weather was showing its respect for the dead.  He almost smiled at that. 

The mourners and the rest of the staff were inside the centre at Memorial Park.  No doubt baking too.  He could just about here the music playing.  Kris Kristofferson.  Interesting choice.  They had all sorts these days.  It certainly beats Robbie Williams in the originality stakes.

He took off his peaked driver cap and wiped his sleeve instinctively across his sweaty brow.  He frowned at the dark damp streak it left on his crisp white shirt sleeve.  He eyed his jacket, considering whether he should put it back on.  He had to be immaculately turned out, respectful throughout.  He felt the pressure of expectancy from his boss and mourners alike. Everything has to be perfect for someone’s final day on earth.

The irony of the name Osbourne & Sons was not lost on him.  There were no “sons”.  Charlie Osbourne, Charles to the customers, had no children.  He just thought it sounded better as a company name.  In the same way the seating, the box of tissues, tea, coffee, and the décor back at headquarters were fashioned to create supportive and respectful tones.  All part of the branding. Same as Monty having to keep his jacket and hat on, no matter what.  In this heat, it felt like torture, or some sort of endurance test.  He resolved to give it ten minutes, then put the jacket back on, to be on the safe side.

He shifted his position and felt the burn of the hot metal bonnet of the Rolls through his trousers.  He’d stand for a bit.  He wasn’t supposed to lean on the Rolls either.  Looks unprofessional according to Charlie.

He looked over to the doors of the chapel.  It was quiet now.  They must be doing the eulogies.  He looked across the cemetery.  The chapel was on elevated ground in the centre of Memorial Park.  Graves of various ages and types surrounded him.  He looked down the slope, across the headstones toward the cemetery border wall and the pub beyond it.  The Plough.  Even at this time, there were drinkers on the picnic benches out front.  He licked his lips.  How good would an ice-cold pint of lager taste right now.  He’d head to his own local, The Harrow, once he clocked off.  He wouldn’t mind the sunshine and the heat then. Sat in a beer garden, soaking up vitamin D and lager in equal measure.

He scanned the cemetery through the heat haze and spotted the plot awaiting the customer inside the chapel.  It was a short drive down one of the lanes leading from the chapel and it was close to the road too, so it wouldn’t be too far to drive once the coffin was returned to the hearse.

The gravediggers were stood around, leaning on shovels.  As if they’d dug the grave with them.  Monty knew they had a mini digger parked up in a shed, hidden away somewhere.  They were all shirtless in the sun, their overalls tied around their waists.  Monty hoped they’d make themselves scarce or, at least, cover up before the funeral party got there, otherwise Charlie would be apoplectic.  

A splash turned Monty back to the Rolls.  A large splodge of bird muck streaked down the windscreen.  He leaned inside the car to get the wipes from the glovebox.  Then the shouting started.

Those gravediggers, messing about.  Screaming and hollering at each other.  They’d better cut that out before the mourners leave the chapel, thought Monty.

He shook his head and turned away as movement caught his eye.  Down, towards the Plough, someone was climbing over the graveyard wall and out towards the pub.  From that distance he was just a silhouetted figure against the brightness of the sunny day.  He held his hand up to shield the sun from his eyes.

“What the hell?” he muttered.  What is going on today, he thought.  The carousing from the gravediggers was getting louder but, Monty was transfixed by the figure, now over the wall and heading toward the drinkers outside The Plough.  The figure was moving erratically.  A drunk maybe, gone for a pee in the graveyard.  What is the world coming to?

The other drinkers on the picnic benches stood and moved toward the figure, then some of them scattered in a panic whilst two fellas remained and manhandled the person.  A scuffle ensued.  The two guys grabbing at the figure were tossed aside.  One of the guys stumbled to his feet and was picked up and raised above the figure’s head.  How could he be so strong?

Monty felt like he was watching a silent movie.  He couldn’t hear a thing from the pub frontage but, he could see chaos and panic.  The figure was running amok.  Monty didn’t know if he should go over there or call the police.  He reached into his pocket and pulled out his mobile.  It was switched off, as per regulations, and he waited for the logos to appear, his eyes flicking from the phone screen to the bedlam across at the pub.

No signal.  Shit.  Of course, there was never a signal up here.

The nearby scream roused him and turned his head back towards the gravediggers.  Bloody idiots.  Mucking about whilst on the job. 

Except they weren’t mucking about, were they?  Monty couldn’t quite tell. 

One of the guys was running towards Monty.  Screaming in a high pitch.  Monty leaned to one side to see around him.  The gravediggers he was running from were in disarray.  There was another person there.  It looked like a lady, in one of those Chanel two-piece suits, except her skirt was pulled up a bit allowing her to move quickly and freely as she chased the gravedigger running towards Monty.  The other two guys looked to be prone on the floor.  She was raging.  Covered in dirt, hair all over the place.

The runner was almost a hundred metres away and his pace hadn’t slowed, and his screaming hadn’t stopped.

Monty looked back at his phone.  Still nothing.

The woman had caught up quickly and tackled him to the ground.  Once down, she attacked him with strength and frenzy.  He was literally torn limb from limb.  She held up a severed arm, stripped it of clothing and gorged on its flesh.

Monty froze.  The woman looked at him.  Her glassy eyes focused on his.  She sniffed the air and began striding towards him.  Her brisk walk broke into a run.

Monty snapped out of it and ran for the chapel.  He reached the glass doors to be faced with a vision of hell on earth.

Every mourner in the chapel was in a panic.  Running for their lives, trying to dodge the subject of the funeral as he barrelled around the space attacking everyone.  Like a fox running amok in a hen house.  It was a frenzy of killing and wanton bloodlust. 

The bodies piled at the door blocking their exit from this terror.  A face, half ripped off, revealing sinew and jawbone beneath, spraying blood and spit, splattered against the door.

Monty turned and reacted in time to duck the lunge of the woman.  He heard the thud of her hitting the doors instead of him, though he did not look back.  He scrambled into the hearse and locked the doors.

The woman gathered herself up and made for the car.  Bloodied hands smeared against the window as she tried to find purchase and seize the meal from within that she so desired.

Monty sat sweating and crying.  Willing himself to get a grip.  To find a way out of this nightmare. 

He reached for the ignition.  Nothing.

He checked his pockets.  No keys.

He looked around the hearse in vain.  The keys were not there. 

His jacket!

He looked out at the woman and, beyond her, the chapel, where the glass had now cracked and the mourners, once victims, had reanimated and become killers like their attacker.  All dead eyes were on him.

He spied, a few metres between him and the chapel door, his jacket, knocked from the bonnet of the car, the key fob hanging out of the inside pocket. 

Glinting in the midday sun.   

Memorial Park: The Gumdrop Gang

Powderham : Headstones by Lewis Clarke is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0

The echoes of their voices linger, a symphony of friendship’s grace.

“A fucking sweet shop? What are we the fucking gumdrop gang?”

“If there’s one thing I like about you, Simon, and there may only be one thing, it’s your ability to embrace new ideas.”

Simon was a mug, good and proper, but we’d knocked about since school, so we had somehow formed a bond that meant we were stuck in the same crew forever (in his mind) …for now (in mine).

“Have you heard this?” Simon continued, dragging Arthur into the conversation, “fucking Mr Cadbury here wants to rob Mercer’s gaff and take him for all the sweets and pop we can carry.  What do you make of that, lad?”

Arthur muttered and stuttered as he always did whenever anyone put him on the spot.  Arthur always sat on the fence, so much so he had become splinter proof, until either me or Simon forced our dominance, and he’d side with whoever came out on top.  If going with the flow was an Olympic sport, Arthur’d be getting measured for his GB tracksuit.

I knew Simon’d be against my idea but, I knew something Simon didn’t, so I’d let him run his mouth off for a while before I got him to shut up and wind his neck in.

“The fucking great pick’n’mix robbery, eh, Arthur?  Let’s corner the black market in fucking sherbert dibdabs, shall we?  Fucking crime of the century!  What a fucking joke!”

Arthur sat back.  He looked a bit relieved.  He knew that Simon wasn’t really asking Arthur’s opinion on anything.  Simon just wanted to riff off as many sweet shop puns as he could.  Given that Simon was a mug, as I mentioned, he had neither the wit nor vocabulary to riff very far before he ran out of steam.  Which, it seemed he’d done right about now.       

“Are you done?” I asked.

Simon took an age to answer, his eyes darted about the ceiling as he searched his peabrain for another insult about sweetshops but, he found the cupboard of his imagination was bare.  He coughed and muttered the same “fucking joke” comment from before.  He was done.

“Right, now you’ve punched yourself out, let me explain.  Mercer’s, the sweetshop in a sleepy little village Mossbank, in the shadow of Cleethorpes, appears to be a rundown, past it’s sell by date, sweetshop,” Simon tutted but, no more, after I gave him a look, “except the thing with Mercer’s is, it’s not as unsuccessful as it seems.  I’ve had it on good authority that Mercer’s is a front for the Town mob. The place would’ve gone under years ago otherwise.”

“A front for the Town mob?” Simon guffawed sceptically.

“Shut your mouth and hear me out.  You’ve had your time.  Now let me speak.  The Town mob have many illegal business enterprises all across the county.  They’re the biggest crime syndicate around here with no real competition.  That much we all know.  Seeing as their businesses are strictly cash and they are successful, they have to launder the money through legit businesses to be able to get their hands on it.  Mercer’s is one such business.  Nobody, and especially not the inland revenue has any compulsion to audit a poxy little sweetshop in a poxy little village, even when its profits are far from poxy.  Do you get it?”

“Aye, well, there’s one thing saying it and there’s another it being true.” Sulked Simon.  “Who’s your source?”

I was hoping I wouldn’t have to reveal who had told me.  I considered telling Simon a lie but, I figured he’d spot it.  We’d known each other too long to trick each other.

“Frank Gruder.”

I left the name hanging in amongst the blue hued smoke of my exhaled cigarette.

Simon and Arthur looked at each other in disbelief.

“Fucking Grizzly Gruder? That drunk fuck who doesn’t know what day it is half the time?  That Frank Gruder?!” Simon spat.

“He’s a fucking loon” chimed in Arthur.

I waited it out.  I knew they’d be more than doubtful of the legitimacy of my intel but, I was hoping I’d win them round once I explained.

A hush finally fell, and they gave me time to continue.

“Grizzly Gruder is a lush, alright, we all know that.  The guy walks around in a drunken stupor most of the time.  He’s harmless right?  Most people don’t even notice him no more.  He wanders in and out of every street, back alley, boozer, and shop in Mossbank and no one bats an eye.  He’s invisible.  So, one evening, he’s rummaging around a skip out the back of Mercer’s and who should come out of the place?  Alf Mercer, of course, but, who’s he deep in conversation with?  Eric Swift.  That’s who.  They’re talking out in the open and without a care in the world.  So, Grizzly, keeps his head low and spies them through a gap in the skip.  Alf Mercer is concerned at the amount of dough Swift is sending his way.  He’s nervous.  He thinks that he might get rumbled by the old bill.  Swift grabs Mercer and holds him up close to his face and tells him in no uncertain terms that Alf’s in no position to negotiate and that the Town mob own him.  That Swift personally owns him, so the arrangement remains, until Swift bloody well says so.”  I sat back to let it sink in.

“What the actual fuck, Ray?  What the actual fuck?  Grizzly, the same Grizzly who shat himself on the 3C bus, the same guy who lives to drink, he’s your source?  He’s somehow got inside information on Mercer and, what, that there’s a pile of cash in Mercer’s somewhere?  How can we trust a word that drunk fuck says?” Simon threw his hands up in exasperation and Arthur, pet that he is, nodded along in agreement.

“Look, I know he’s a drunk.  And I’ve heard stories about him too.  But, on this, I trust him.”

“And how come he told you anyway?  When do you ever speak to Grizzy fucking Gruder?”

“Well, there’s the thing.  He used to live on my street.”

“What?! Never!”

“Yep, he had a wife and child.  She was a couple of years older than me, Heather.  I was just a kid but, I think she died.  After that, well, I guess that was the first step in Frank Gruder becoming Grizzly Gruder.  I think that’s why I still notice when he’s around.  He’s invisible to everyone else.  I throw him a few quid here and there.”

“And your Samaritans act got him to cough up the intel on Mercer’s?  Bullshit!”

“You see it any way you want, Simon.”

The silence was deafening.  I could see Simon’s cogs turning, so I chose again to speak.

“Do you have any alternative plans?  Another score we could go after, maybe?” Nothing, as I suspected, “How about you, Arthur, any masterplans up your shell suit sleeves?” Nothing again, “I thought as much.  Look, this is a decent tip, and I think we should move on it.  We have nothing to lose and all to gain.”  

I let the silence hang in the air once again.

Eventually, Simon grumbled his consent that this was as good a plan as anyone of us had, so we might as well do it.  Arthur nodded along, looking as vacant as ever.  

****

All I could hear was the siren of the alarm and Simon screaming as he bled out all over the shop floor.  Arthur slid in the ever-growing pool of crimson around Simon as he sat, propped up against the counter, colour draining from his face and eyes glazing over.  Gunsmoke filled the air.  Everything was hazy of vision and abstract, dreamlike.

Everything had gone smoothly at first.  We all burst into the shop finding Alf Mercer alone.  Threatening him with our bats.  He cowered, he shook, he pissed himself.  Great.  He led us to the safe.  No hesitation.  It was all going too well.  We took our eye off the ball.  Or, rather, we took our eye of Alf fucking Mercer.

None of us clocked that he had a sawn-off shotgun in a cubby hole next to the safe.  None of us spotted him grab it.  None of us even realised he’d turned with it in his hand.  None of us even considered he’d have a firearm, let alone the gumption to use it.  Next thing we know he’d blown Simon’s bollocks into bloody smithereens.  Instinctively, I walloped Mercer on the head with my bat.  I felt the shudder through my whole arm.  I saw Mercer’s eyes roll back and a huge gash split open and piss blood down his face.

Adrenalin took over for Simon and, somehow, he managed to drag himself from the back office and into the main shop.  A broad streak of red dragged behind him.  Artery shot through.  He’d be dead in seconds.

Arthur made a dash for the safe and, in doing so, inadvertently stepped on a panic button embedded in the floor.  That was when the alarm siren wailed and red lights began to flash in the shopfront.

Arthur dashed off to Simon’s side.  I went to the safe.  Fucking locked.  Mercer had no intention of opening it.  Lord knows what was in there.  Thousands of pounds.  So near and yet so very, very far.  There was no way of pulling that safe out of its place and we had next to no time before the old bill or, even worse, the Town mob turned up.

I took a few notes out of the cash register and grabbed a jar off the counter.

I pulled Arthur up by the collar and dragged him with me.  We ran from the shop around the corner and to our car. 

Simon would be found.  The Town mob and the police would know it was us.

For twenty-five quid and a tub of cola cubes, one way or another, we were dead men walking.

Memorial Park: The Man in the Hat

This craggy stone a covering is for an architector’s bed;
That lofty buildings raisèd high, yet now lyes low his head;
His line and rule, so death concludes, are lockèd up in store;
Build they who list, or they who wist, for he can build no more.

Wednesday.  William always walked here at night.  It was peaceful.  Just outside the city, the cemetery dated back to the 1850’s.  This night was cold and still, the kind of night where the air felt heavy with secrets. The cemetery, shrouded in mist, seemed to stretch endlessly under the pale moonlight. Each tombstone stood like a silent sentinel, guarding the memories of those who lay beneath.

William had forever been drawn to the cemetery. It was a place of quiet reflection, a sanctuary from the chaos of the world. Tonight, it felt different. There was an unsettling chill in the air, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched.

He walked along the narrow paths, his footsteps echoing softly against the gravel. He pulled his coat collar up to his ears, trying to ward off the cold. The wind whispered through the trees, carrying with it the faint scent of damp earth and decaying leaves.

He paused by an old oak tree, its gnarled branches reaching out like skeletal fingers. He felt something; call it intuition.  He looked around, his eyes scanning the shadows for any sign of movement. That’s when he saw a man standing several yards away, partially obscured by the fog. He wore a long, dark coat and a wide-brimmed hat that cast a moonlit shadow over his face.

William’s heart skipped a beat. He hadn’t seen anyone else in the cemetery when he arrived. Who was this man, and why was he here? He took a cautious step forward, his curiosity piqued. The man remained still; he was just a silhouette in the night, but he seemed to be facing towards him.  His gaze fixed upon him.

“Hello?” he said. “Are you ok?”

The man didn’t respond. Instead, his right hand moved slowly up to his hat.  He tapped the brim and nodded as though in greeting, then he turned and walked away and into the mist. William felt a shiver run down his spine. There was something otherworldly about the way the man in the hat had moved, and what was with the tap of the hat.  Did that man know William or was it a simple, old-fashioned gesture to a fellow cemetery visitor? 

William walked across to the spot where the man in the hat had been standing, but there was no trace of him.

He shook his head, trying to dispel the unease that had settled over him. He decided to continue his usual route through the cemetery; a loop that took deep into the graveyard and back to the cemetery gates. He hoped that walking the familiar paths would calm his nerves.

As he wandered deeper into the cemetery, the feeling of being watched grew stronger. He glanced over his shoulder repeatedly, half-expecting to see the man in the hat. But each time, he saw nothing but shadows.

William reached the halfway point of his walk, the old mausoleum at the heart of the cemetery. It was a grand structure, its stone walls covered in ivy. He had always found it fascinating, a relic of a bygone era. He approached the entrance, his fingers tracing the intricate carvings on the door.

Suddenly, he felt a presence behind him. He spun around, heart pounding in his chest. The man in the hat was standing there, closer this time. His face was still hidden in shadow, but he could feel his eyes upon him.

“Why are you following me?” he demanded, trying to sound firm and assertive.

The man remained silent, his form flickering like a candle in the wind. William took a small step forward, squinting in the darkness at the figure.  As he focused upon the figure, his fear began to give way to a strange sense of recognition. There was something familiar about him, something he couldn’t quite place.

“Who are you?” William asked again, his voice softer this time.

The man in the hat lifted his hand, raised his head to the moonlight and, with one finger, he tilted the brim of the hat upwards.  And, for the first time, William caught a glimpse of the man’s face. William’s breath caught in his throat.

The man in the hat smiled knowingly and raised his arm aloft pointing over William’s shoulder at the mausoleum behind him.

William followed the path of the finger and looked upon the ornately carved name on the mausoleum.

“William Cartwright.  That’s my name.” he raised his hands to his head in despair and felt the wide brim of the hat upon his own head.

The man in the hat, with William’s own face, smiled, a sad, knowing smile. He tipped his hat and then he was gone.

In that moment, memories flooded William’s mind. He saw himself on a cobbled street corner.  He felt a shove from behind.  He fell into the road into the path of a horse and cart.  He saw himself standing in the cemetery, wearing the same dark coat and wide-brimmed hat, watching from afar as a sparsely attended funeral took place.  The mausoleum looked new. He remembered the cold, the fog, and the feeling of being watched. Of being haunted by his own memories.

*********************************

Thursday.  William always walked here at night.  It was peaceful.

Memorial Park: Bumpy

In memory of a life taken too soon, A soul whose light was extinguished by violence. May justice be served, and peace found, Forever remembered, forever mourned.

Bumpy Maynard was a grass.

That was according to Hampton Kinnear.  I’d never even heard of Bumpy until just then.  He was strictly low-grade.  He worked for Mitchum’s mob across town.  I hardly thought the geezer would have had much to grass up, unless Mitchum’s small-time racket of slot machines was worth anything to the old bill.

This is where Hampton cut in to tell me, “He saw something he shouldn’t have, Ted, that’s all you need to know.” He sat back after that, sipping his brandy, like that was enough to set me on my way.

It wasn’t.  But there was no point discussing anything with Hampton.  He was supposedly my boss and didn’t he just love it.  Such is life.  I couldn’t expect to be higher up the ranks and, at least, I had Hampton’s cards marked.  A short guy with a Napolean complex and designs on the positions above him in the firm. 

I drove over to Bumpy’s place.  He had lodgings in a scrapyard on the outskirts of town, opposite the dog track.  I walked past the rickety corrugated iron roofed, breeze block shack twice before I twigged it was his gaff.  Personally, I wouldn’t have kept a dog in there.

I didn’t bother knocking.  I gave the door an almighty kick and it fell in on itself raising a cloud of dust from the floor.

I had the right place.  Bumpy confirmed it.  By being laid out on his cot, half out of his sleeping bag, pale and dead as you like, a needle sticking out of his arm.  All well and good then except something about it bugged me.  The look frozen on Bumpy’s face at the time of expiry was not one of junky’s delight.  His eyes were fixed in fear at the needle protruding from the crook of his arm and a quick looksee revealed no other tracks.  Bumpy was no user.  It was a set up.  And a poor one at that.

I scanned the shack for anything that might seem important.  To say the room was sparse would be a diabolical understatement.  If it weren’t for the bed, and Bumpy in it, I’d have pegged it for a storage shed and nothing more.

There was a curtain hanging loosely across a doorframe in the back wall.  I pushed two fingers through the side and pulled the curtain back.  It was a bathroom, of sorts.  A putrid toilet and sink.  Lord knows where, or if, Bumpy ever showered.  It stank to high heaven.  I stepped close to the small high window to breathe.

The window was just a square in the wall.  It had a wooden frame and no glass except for a small, jagged shard sticking in the edge of the frame.  Upon it billowing in the draught was a scrap of blood-stained material.

I exited the shack and walked its perimeter to the outside of that same window. 

Glass fragments were scattered on the floor.  Someone had broken that window and made their escape.  I pulled the material into my hand, and I squatted beside the glass on the floor.  There was a smattering of blood there that formed a trail leading into the maze of stacked cars in the scrapyard.  I followed the red spotted trail.

I found the bleeder in about two minutes, the trail led to a clumsy attempt to hide in the boot of an Austin Allegro.  The red handprint on the bumper gave it away.  I raised the boot expecting a flurry of kicks and punches.  Instead, I found a frightened girl curled up and lodged as far away as possible in the interior.

I extended a hand to help her out.  I put on my best smile and stated that I would not hurt her and, that was true.  It was only when she stepped out of the old banger that I realised how young and heavily pregnant she was.

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“Ha! Stroll on! You’re not even sixteen, I’ll bet.”  I grabbed her wrist tightly, “Go on.  Truth.”

“I’m sixteen in two months.”

“Jesus Christ.  You go to a catholic school or something?” she looked at me vacantly, “no sex education at your school, then?” I laughed.

“It’s not like that.  He’s nice.”

“Who’s that?  Bumpy?  In case it escaped your notice, he’s opted out of playing happy families on account of him being dead.”

“Not him! No!” she screwed up her face. “He’s not the father.  He was nice to me.”

“Who then?”

“Not telling”

“Oh, very mature that is.  Suppose I beat it out of you, how about that?”

She eyed me up and down and sussed out my bark was worse than my bite and, when it came to pregnant children, she was correct.

“You wouldn’t”

“Maybe not but someone would.  Probably your dad if he hasn’t found out already.”

“Ain’t got no parents.  I’m from the Grange.”

The Grange was a children’s home out of town.  We’d had many a crew member brought up there before joining the firm.  It was a renowned den of iniquity.  A YTS for thugs and prozzies alike.

“So, what business did you have with Bumpy then eh?” I changed tac.

“He was going to help me, like.”

“Yeah, how?”

“He said he could get me out of the Grange.  Set me up in a council flat.  Help me keep the baby.”

“And why would Bumpy do that?  He’s a bottom feeder in this business.  He doesn’t have any clout to help no one.”

“He does actually.  He did anyways.” She caught herself.

“Look, you’d better explain what the hell is going on or I’m going to have to take you to my boss and I don’t think he’d be as patient as me.”

She visibly shook at the prospect, “Your boss?”

I caught her as she almost fainted.  Her legs went out from under her, and I hoisted her by her armpits to sit on the Allegro’s bumper.  I got it now, or I thought I got some of it anyway.

“Hampton’s the father?”

She nodded grimly.

“And Bumpy?”

“He was old bill.  Undercover.  Reckoned that I could get the flat and all that, all I had to do was tell on Hampton and what he’s done.”

I nodded.  It certainly made sense.  I bet Bumpy, or whatever his real name was, couldn’t believe it when he stumbled on this girl and that he could get to Hampton without having to put in too much risky undercover graft.

I put my overcoat across her shoulders, “So you were there with Bumpy when-?”

“I was in the toilet.  I seem to want to go most of the time these days.  I heard someone come in, so I stayed hidden.  Then I climbed out the window.”

“But you had a peek, didn’t you?  Through the gap in the curtains?”

She nodded.

“Hampton?”

Another nod.

“Right.”

I dropped her off at the Grove Hill Police Station.  I told her to go in and ask for Detective Burton.  He was a decent copper and straight as they come.  Not in anyone’s pocket.  I told her to take her time in there.  I gave her an address where the coppers would find Hampton.  Or what was left of him.

No one plays me for a mug. 

Memorial Park: Night of the Grizzly

“Forever Young, Forever Loved, Forever Missed”

“I can’t see a goddamn thing!”

Wash glanced over the top of the Werewolf By Night comic he was reading, “Jeez, Zephi, you got the damn thing twisted! Your ear’s damn near poking out the eye hole!”  Wash slowly clambered off the bed and slouched over to where Zephi was sat.  He pulled at the red ski mask and twisted it around Zephi’s head and into place, slapping Zephi a couple of times as he squirmed.

Zephi sat blinking heavily and moving his eyes around to see how much his peripheral vision was affected by the thick woollen fabric of the mask.

Wash tutted, “Man, you know you don’t need no mask.  That damn old honky fool will just see a black boy.  And all black boys look alike.  You could walk in there with your ID hanging around your neck and he still couldn’t pick you out of a line up!”.

Zephi pulled at the top of the ski-mask sliding it up and off his head.  His hair had caught fragments of red wool in it.  He contorted his face with freedom after the restrictive feeling he’d had with it on.  “Damn! That thing is tight to my face, man.  It gonna leave a mark if I wear it too long.  Maybe I should just skip the whole thing.  It don’t feel right”.

Wash put the comic down and perched himself on the end of the bed and looked Zephi in the eye.   “I know it ain’t right too, man.  But what else are we to do?  Ain’t no honest work round here.  Everybody gotta hustle to survive and we gotta find a way out.  I sure as hell ain’t gonna go slinging rocks for Elijah Monsell and those Black Reaper dudes.  Once you’re in that life, man, there ain’t no way out of it.”

Zephi twirled the ski mask on his finger, “I know, Wash, I know.  But holding up a liquor store ain’t us either, man.  We better than that.”

“Sure, we better than that.  That’s why this is a one-time thing, man.  We in and out like lightning.  The whole thing becomes just another case for the NYPD and they’re sure as shit not looking at no robberies with so many murders going on.  And we get the dough we need to set ourselves up.  That place we always drooling at the window of, up on West 37^th? They got a sale on.  We can get turntables, speakers, the whole damn get up for $500.  That sale won’t last forever. And we have, what, $35 between us? Shit, we be fools not to do this.  Destiny is calling us, man.”

Zephi smiled at the prospect.  He pictured himself and Wash up on stage, working together, Wash passing vinyls and Zephi listening as he places it on the second turntable, bobbing his head to the beat, choosing the perfect time to scratch and switch tracks.  The crowd in front of them, a hot sweaty, joyous mess of limbs, bouncing and hollering as the beat drops.  He nodded his head in time with the beat in his head and in his heart.  He looked at Wash and knew that he could see it too.

“Let’s go”.

A full bright white moon hung low in the October sky, as the two made their way through the streets.  Wash made sure they stuck to back alleys and stayed away from the main roads that criss-crossed the blocks.  Cops were liable to pull up on them and dispense a beating if they felt like it, seeing as they were two black kids out at close to midnight.  And there was more of a police street presence than ever, especially since the murder rate had started to break the previous highs and, to top it off, there was talk on the news of a serial killer on the loose in the city.  Worse than Son of Sam and all that shit.  This sick bastard tore his victims apart.  Shredded them like crispy duck.

The store was always open late.  Some old white dude ran the place.  He never seemed to take a day off.  He was always in there.  Wash and Zephi knew, at this time, on a Sunday night, it was sure to be quiet and they also knew the place would be stacked with Friday and Saturday’s cash, given that the banks don’t open till Monday morning.

They ran up on the store and squeezed down the side of the building into a dark shadow between the wall and the dumpsters.  The stench was awful but, the cover from the street was good.  They felt a surge of excitement and Wash felt like he needed to puke or shit or something, they were both so nervous.  Wash was the first to get the gun out from the back of his belt.  It glimmered in the glow from the streetlight.  Zephi pulled out a boxcutter and extended the blade. 

Wash had taken his older brother’s gun from the shoebox under his bed.  Zephi had no siblings and no gun in the house, so he made do with the knife.  Both knew they wouldn’t use either, although Wash had said he’d shoot into the ceiling if he had to scare the store owner.  They’d agreed if that didn’t work either, they’d have to leave empty handed.  They weren’t killers.

They both looked at each other and took a few deep breaths.  Zephi had a moment where he’d wished he’d brought the ski mask after all but, pushed it from his mind.

They stormed forcefully into the store, Wash leading the way and pointing the gun at the counter.  But the guy wasn’t there.  Wash nodded to Zephi and over to the counter and Zephi followed the direction and made his way around the counter to jimmy open the register.  Wash moved slowly and quietly further into the store, checking the aisles for the owner.

Zephi stepped around the counter, scanning the store, and watching Wash slowly stepping down the centre aisle.  He felt a foot slide from under him and he grabbed the counter to stop himself from slipping over, dropping the blade as he did so.  He looked down at his feet and saw that he’d slipped in something. 

Blood and entrails were splattered on the floor between the counter and the wall of liquor bottles behind it.  His feet skidded and slid as he tried to find purchase.  The bottles rattled as he elbowed them, gripping on to whatever he could to make sure he did not fall into that mess.  He looked for longer than he’d wanted, he saw beyond the blood, he saw the fibres of torn flesh, the stringy veins, the squashed entrails excreting dark brown and green gunk.  He felt bile rise in his throat.  He gripped the counter.  He manoeuvred himself back into the main store space and away from the counter and the owner’s dead and torn body, trying to make his mouth form the words to explain to Wash what he just saw. 

Zephi looked for Wash.  He was way down the back of the store now.  Gun raised.  And that’s when they both heard it.

A low and guttural growl.  Way off to the back right of the store.  A high stacked shelf of tins obscured the view but, Zephi thought he could see hair.  No, it was fur bristling up above it.  That would make this the biggest dog he’d have ever seen.

Wash had heard it too.  It was much closer to him.  A single row of shelves away.  He froze in place and turned on his heel, to look in the direction of the noise.  That was no dog.  It was a huge brown grizzly bear rearing up and standing at over ten feet tall.

BLAM! Wash’s gun went off, firing a bullet into the ceiling, as he toppled backwards from the force of the bear leaping through the shelving and sinking its huge teeth into Wash’s neck.  Its razorlike teeth snapped through Wash like a liquorice stick.  Its claws raked and shredded his body.  Blood sprayed in a high and wide arc and Zephi inadvertently let out a scream.  He turned to run, his sneakers slipping on the floor. 

He got to the door and stopped, his hand on the handle.  “Wash…Wash!!”, he turned to go back and help his friend but, he could see that Wash was already torn almost in half, his head hanging by threads of skin and tissue.  The bear lunged for Zephi.  He felt its teeth rip into his shoulder, snapping frantically to try and get to his neck. 

He was about to lose consciousness when he heard a shot ring out, then another and another.  He heard glass tinkling onto the floor behind him as he lay prone in place.  The bear was on top of him, crushing him with its weight.  But it was changing before his eyes.  In time it was no beast.  A man lay across Zephi.  Sinewy, pale, and naked.  Blood oozed from the bullet wounds in his side. 

Zephi’s eyes closed but, he heard the cops.

“What the fuck, John?  That was a dog or something, wasn’t it?”.

“It can’t have been, Todd, look at him.  It was all a blur.  Everything happened so fast.  He’s a man.  A mad man.  Some sort of nutjob.”

“We’d better call this in quickly, I think that kid’s alive”.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A pulse.  He could feel it.  In his temples.  The beating of his heart.  Wait.  No.  Not in his temples.  In his jaw.  A slowing pulse.  Not his own.  Something living, clenched in his teeth.

Fog filled Zephi’s vision.  A small figure shuffled towards him.  Wash.  His head lolled to one side, his throat torn open and glistening exposed tendons and sinew.  He was smiling.

“Hey man, you think you’re busted up! Take a look at my goddamn self, man.  It’s like I been passed through a cheese grater.” Wash chuckled.

“Wash?  But, you’re-“

“Well, yeah and no.  Technically, I’m undead.  Doomed to wander the afterlife in limbo until the beast’s bloodline is severed.”

“What the-“

“I know, right! Look, man, Werewolf by Night.  I lent you that comic.  You remember?  That Jack Russell dude, when the moon was full? Well, last night the moon was full, except there’s a twist, man.  One none of us seen coming.  That thing that attacked me weren’t no wolf right, you seen it!”

“It was a man…no a bear…it was-“

“BOTH! That mother was a freaking Were Bear, which has a godawful rhyme to it, doesn’t it.  Damn uncoolest beast ever to walk the face of the earth but, that dude killed me, as you can see,” he bowed extravagantly, “but he didn’t kill you.“ Wash jabbed a near severed finger at Zephi, “Now, you’re the goddamn were bear bloodline, man.  And, soon as that moon is full, you’re gonna change.  You’re gonna get a hunger like none you ever had before and you gonna kill and kill again.  And you ain’t never gonna be satisfied man.  Trust me.”   

SNARL!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“Wash!”

“Wash? Who’s that?” the doctor asked as she gazed upon Zephi, tucked tightly in the hospital bed, going through some sort of fevered dream.

“Washington Kenton, his friend who died at the scene.” Responded the nurse putting the finishing touches to checking Zephi’s IV.

Zephi’s eyes snapped open.

“Holy shit. I’m a Werebear.”

Memorial Park: Many Unhappy Returns

Skulls on the headstone by Bill Nicholls is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0

“Here lies a soul who left this world on the day they entered it,

Alone in their final moments but forever remembered in our hearts.

May they find the peace and companionship in the afterlife that eluded them in this one.“

The cake held thirty candles.  He counted them to double check.  A perfect circle of wax sticks, each awaiting a flame.  In the centre, an iced symbol: an inverted pentagram enclosed within a circle.  The letters, ornately scribed in duck egg blue icing ran around the circumference reading “Many Unhappy Returns, Ben”.  The cake, ordered by, and delivered to Ben Woodard, sat in the centre of a small green baized card table between the bed and the bay window in his Skegness bedsit. 

The room was in half darkness.  An orange glow from the streetlight directly outside was diluted by the brighter glow of a full bright white moon hanging low in the October sky.  It shone through the dirty ragged net curtains in a near perfect square shaft of light encompassing the cake on the table.

Ben had commissioned the cake from the bakery below.  He told them it was a joke. For a friend.  Both were lies.  He had no friends, and this was no joke.

The ghastly clock on the dusty mantle chimed.  The sound of rushing water through old and rattling pipes reverberated around the room.  Darwin entered the bedsit carrying another bucket of cold water.  Pouring it into the old tin tub he’d hauled up to the room earlier.  He wiped his hands absentmindedly on his brown corduroy trousers cinched at the waist with an overlong cracked leather belt. 

Ben had once been a big guy.  He was tall and broad and could carry the extra weight.  Now he was skin and bones in oversized clothes.  Fasting was part of his preparation. 

This was fully two years in the making.  It all started when he’d picked up that book.  It was just a book then.  He hadn’t known what a grimoire was.  That old brown and weathered book, bound in what seemed like pigskin but, from within the pages, purported to be human.  The book that called to him.  It whispered in his ear, so close he could feel the breath of the speaker.  A woman’s voice.  Yet the book was yards away, in a pile of other old books in a wet cardboard box, at the bookstall under the bridge arch by the river.  He had to buy it.  There was no choice.  The book demanded it.

Ben had devoured the book in a single sitting.  It became a sole source of comfort in an otherwise murky and unpleasant life of solitude.  A solitude he grew to love.  It was him and the book now.  No other was needed. 

Ordering the cake for his thirtieth birthday was the first time he had spoken to anyone in a month.  The book had challenged him to a vow of silence.  He’d gladly accepted the challenge.  As gladly as he had accepted other challenges from within its aged brown pages.

The grimoire sat upon its own cushion, on a bedside table, by Ben’s bed.  It was the last thing he would read and touch before sleeping and the first thing he would reach for upon waking.  The book consumed his every conscious moment and pervaded his dreams.  The book was his only confidant.

The book rested upon its deep crimson velvet cushion.  Tabs of dayglo coloured reference bookmarks permeated the edge of the ancient tome.  Places where the written words had spoken to him directly, whispered in that same soft female voice, seeping, and absorbed into his very being.  A warm hand caressing his soul.

It had led to this moment.  The grimoire’s pages from its very first utterance had been laying the foundations and building upon them with a regime of discipline and sacrifice.  Ben had imbibed the first drops of knowledge that the grimoire had allowed him to taste.  That first rush of knowing.  The learning of truths of the world, the universe, heaven and hell, and all in-betweens had been a kaleidoscopic miasma clearing into singular vision and focus.  A drop, a single grain of sand, of truth beyond this perceived world: the bedsit, the street, the job, Ben’s joyless insignificant existence in a mundane world of his own choosing evaporated before him.  His mind’s eye opened.  His pupils dilated.  Absorbing all light.  And darkness.

Ben lived for the book and the book lived through Ben.  The book had sought to build upon Ben’s first taste, his first hit, and upon his tolerance to burden himself with the knowledge, with the opened doors of perception.  To look and, finally, step beyond.

In that gloomy bedsit, on the ninth day of October, the rite began. 

Ben stripped naked and stepped into the tub, manoeuvring himself into a kneeling position.  He used a small jug to lift and tip the cold water over him.  His bald wet head, freshly shaved down to the skin in the communal bathroom, glistened in the light from the window.  He had shaved all hair from his body as instructed by the book. 

Now he washed.  He scrubbed the large red block of carbolic soap over him.  It did not lather much.  It stuttered and caught on his body in patches where the skin was not fully wet.  He gradually became slick in the soap.  As the book had advised, he paid particular attention to every crevice and part of his body.  A leathery smell emanated from the soap and swathed him.

He rinsed himself slowly.  Jug upon jug of water from the tub poured over him, splashing over the sides onto the threadbare carpet.  The water became pink, then red as the soap infused it.

Washed clean from head to foot, Ben stepped out of the tub.  Naked, he ventured into the kitchenette.  He took the box of black matches from the worktop.  He turned about face and walked to the chair by the card table.  He sat and stared at the cake.

He’d memorised the incantation.  It was long and complicated.  Full of words that no dictionary had ever known.  Learned phonetically in the soft cool whisper from the pages of the book.

Time passed but wasn’t noticed.  The ghastly clock chimed often before the incantation finished.  All that was left was the lighting of the candles and the final twenty-nine words.  Not words, names.  The twenty-nine that had gone before.  Ben Woodard would be his thirtieth utterance on his thirtieth birthday.  A divine symmetry for a mortal moment.

A candle was lighted for each name spoken.  A long list of names sectioned into six names for each century that the tome had existed.  Each name was a person who had imbibed the knowledge, consumed the power, and moved into enlightenment.

Skarde Gulbrandsen was the first person the book had chosen.  The book had boiled up from the depths of hell and was found resting atop a charred coagulated volcanic flow.  The book did not burn.  It spoke.

Gretchen Northfolke was next.  The hermit witch.  She found the book, clutched by a deceased Skarde in a leafy pit of snakes deep in the Wyre Forest. 

Her body, putrefied and enclosed in her hovel, in the depths of the woods was happened upon by a vagrant and petty thief, the third name on the list, Thomas Ambrose.

And so on, through the years and centuries the book made itself found by those who needed it.  William Pynchebeck, the 18^th century graverobber.  Amelia Latonour, in gilded age Boston. On and on, the book collected owners, subjects, and devotees.  

Ben Woodard, in his shabby bedsit, above a bakery, overlooking a derelict warehouse, recounted the last names on the list.  His hand shaking in anticipation as he lighted each candle and got closer to his own name.

Carole Lewis…

…Steed Montrose…

…Lucien Volendam…

…Ben Woodard…

The explosion rocked the street. 

Car alarms rang out from several streets away.  The two-storey building that housed the bedsit disintegrated into dust, leaving no trace of the bedsit nor the bakery below.  The warehouse across the street crumbled into rubble from the blast and fires raged around the blast site igniting parked cars and adjacent buildings.

TV news crews mingled with the fire service and volunteers as they searched through the rubble and the dust for any survivors or, more likely, to retrieve the dead.  No one was found dead or alive.  It was unconfirmed but a gas leak was deemed the likely cause.  Ben Woodard was the only person linked to the address unaccounted for.  It was a miracle no one else was killed. 

Joe “Muzzy” Musgrove pushed back the visor on his helmet.  Dust piled around his boots as he searched the wreckage of the structure.  He’d sometimes come to this bakery on his way to the fire station. 

He kicked at the dust, causing clouds of grey ash to rise.  He heard a faint sound.  A murmur from below.  He tilted his head to listen.  He crouched to the floor placing his ear close to the ground.  A whisper.  He heard it.  A survivor?  Ben whatshisname?  Muzzy’s hand inexplicably rose from the ashes clutching a book.  An old tome, bookmarked throughout with dayglo tabs.  He listened again, and the book spoke to him.

Memorial Park: The Meeting

“What we do in life echoes in Eternity”

It was that time again.  I didn’t want to go out.  Not really.  It was cold and wet.  As it had been all day.  One of those days you have the lights on all the time.  Outside my grimy window, it looked dark and foreboding.

But I had to go.  I’d committed to it.  I had told Cher, my long-suffering partner, that I wanted to change.  Be a better man.  Whatever that means.  We were already separated.  She had the flat above the Tesco Express on the high street.  I had a bedsit less than a mile away.  It was the cheapest place I could find where I’d get my own bathroom, tiny though it was. 

I’d been there 3-months now.  I’d almost started calling it home but, was trying not to.  That’d be like giving up.  I’d been back to the flat, my real home but, I felt like a visitor.  A ghost more like.  Like Scrooge at his own funeral. 

By rights I probably should have been a ghost.  I’d had more scrapes than I could remember.  Literally.  I couldn’t remember any of them.  Blackout drunk benders do that to you.

I do remember that last time.  Just the waking up part.  I had a bad feeling in my gut before I even opened my eyes that day.  I was in a cell.  They call it a secure facility, but it felt like a prison cell.  Sectioned for my own good, they told me, after smashing up the flat.  Cher didn’t press charges.  She’s a pretty amazing person.  She just wanted me to get help and to get better.  I thought I wanted to die.

That was when I moved out.  The first time I went back to the flat, to pick up clothes and toiletries, was like entering a crime scene.  Cher had done her best to clean up but, you could still see the aftermath if you looked closely enough: the boarded-up kitchen window, the replacement tv from the charity shop. 

It was gut wrenching but, not as heartbreaking as how Cher kept her distance from me and how she kept glancing to the door.  I could see the fear in her eyes.   She no longer trusted me.  I couldn’t blame her.  We talked pleasantly but, it felt forced and fake.  There wasn’t so much an elephant in the room, there was a black hole.  An irretrievable gaping chasm in my memory and an indelibly implanted memory for her.

My promise to Cher was that I’d seek help.  That I’d beat this addiction.  Give up drinking and go to meetings.  Do the full twelve steps. 

Futile really when I think about it.  I don’t think Cher will ever have me back.  I don’t think I can rebuild that trust.  She knows it.  I know it.  We are heading for a break-up. 

I think she’s avoiding it, so I don’t spiral out of control completely and top myself.  Sadly, that’s a genuine possibility.  It’s been a genuine possibility for a while.  Life feels too hard to live sometimes. 

The inevitability of the breakup makes me want to drink.  The shame of it makes me want to drink.  Living and breathing makes me want to drink.  It’s a constant want. 

I am my own worst enemy.  Plenty have said it and it’s true.  Boredom comes a close second.  Both lead to booze.

I go to a meeting once a week.  The same location.  The Holy Trinity church has a backroom.  Well, it has two. The other is used, on the same night, for a diet club.  It can be awkward when you arrive at the same time as someone going to the diet club, and you go separate ways in the lobby.  They know where you’re going and they’re maybe a tad less embarrassed about where they are going.  We both look sheepish when we part.

I’ve been almost every week since the incident at Cher’s.  The times that I didn’t make it coincided with relapses.  That doesn’t mean I was drunk on those days.  More likely, I was recovering from a binge and plucking up the courage to go back in there and admit I’m back to day number one.  I haven’t told Cher about the relapses.  Thankfully, I haven’t called her when drunk or gone round there.  My binges were solitary sessions sat on my bed, thinking of the past and waiting for the booze to kick in and for me to pass out.

I find the meetings a very solemn experience.  There are some laughs in there.  Plenty of people who don’t take themselves too seriously.  I admire them.  They’ve accepted their truth. Who they are.  They have an illness and live with it.  I’m nowhere near that level.  My truth is locked away deep within me.  I can’t reach it but, it affects me every minute of every day.  The booze gave me respite.  Laughable really.  I can’t stay drunk forever.  It wears off.  Reality returns.  It’s like trying to fight gravity.

On this night, rain was battering down when I arrived.  Dramatic flashes of lightning and distant rumbles of thunder welcomed me, as I stepped off the bus.  I lifted my collar high and dashed through the pavement surface water, immediately feeling the wetness soak through my trainers and the cling of the wet material of my jeans to my shins.  I made it under the canopy of the church entrance in seconds but, was already sodden.  My hair plastered to my head, and I felt a trickle of rainwater run from the back of my scalp beneath my collar and down my spine.

As I hung my jacket, I saw and recognised the other coats there.  They were dry.  They hadn’t been caught in the sudden downpour.  My jacket dripped water onto the threadbare carpet below the coatrack.     

Handshakes, smiles, remarks about the rain, and a piping hot black coffee greeted me.  The chairs were laid out in a semi-circle around the table up front.  Candles were lit but, the main lights were on.  Pamphlets were spread, as usual, in a crescent on the table.  An old, cracked copy of The Big Book was front and centre.  Pete sat stoically behind it, flanked by Gordon and Joan.  Always the same.

I was usually the youngest person in there.  Occasionally someone younger appeared but, only ever for one meeting.  I never saw them again.  Maybe they found another meeting.  Maybe they returned to the drink.  I’ll never know.

I sat in my usual seat, over to one side, leaving empty seats either side of me.  Very British.  I placed the coffee on the threadbare maroon carpet between my feet.  Watched the steam float up from the swirling centre.  Looked at the dark patch of damp on my legs.  I was scruffy looking.  I knew that.  I needed to tidy myself up.  Shave, get a haircut, start showering regularly, wear better clothes.  Lots to work on.

The main lights were switched off, replaced by a gently pulsing candlelight.  Pete began the preamble.

Thunder rumbled overhead and the door opened to a bulky man silhouetted by the stark brightness of the hallway.  Pete stopped.  Nodded his head to the man and continued his preamble while the man sat at the nearest chair to him, next to the door as it closed and pitched us back into the glow of candlelight.  A drop of rainwater fell from the back of my hair and onto my neck, sending a shiver down my spine.

Each took a turn to speak.  Starting with Joan to Pete’s left.  Joan is a dour middle-aged woman with a stark short haircut, dyed an orangey red that just accentuates her paleness, reminding me of Pennywise from It! if I was to be so cruel of thought.  She tells the same updates each week: every morning she goes for a swim in a local lake, she cycles, she works, as far as I can tell but, I don’t know what her job is, goes to a meeting, she reads the big book, prays and sleeps.  And for all that it sounds so dull to me, I give her credit, she has got herself together, she used to drink two bottles of gin a day.  She’s made it.  She’s where I want to be.  Or is she?  It all sounds so lifeless, so much of a grind for day-to-day sobriety.  She works so hard to stay sober but, even now after a year or so since her last relapse, she’s one sip away from oblivion.  Is this how my life will be?

It was the next voice.  The guy who had entered the room at the last minute.  That shook me to my core.

“My name is Alan, and I am an alcoholic.”

I thought I was going to puke.  It was all I could do to swallow down the bile I could feel rising.  I broke out in a sweat and began to shake.  It was him.  Mr Kinnear.

The murmur of welcome around the room was a blur.  I tried to compose myself and willed my head to turn his way.  The candlelight flickered on an older face, sagging around the edges, morphing into jowls that hung loosely.  His hair was much thinner, and white.  Still swept back but his scalp showed between the strands.  My gaze moved down to his hands clasped between his knees.  Those hands.  The same hands that…

“This is my first meeting here.  I’ve been to others off and on but, I moved to a bungalow just up the road, so this is my closest now.  I’d like to stick to it.  It’s been 2 days since my last drink.  I’ve nowt else to say, really.  Thank you for making me welcome.”

An affirmative hum pitched around the room.  I was reeling.

There was a catch in his voice but, it was him alright.  It was the same baritone voice that used to callout to “walk, don’t run” in the corridors.  The one that whispered closely in my ear of secrets: our secrets.  The same soft voice I’d hear when one of those hands clasped the nape of my neck, calling me son, making me feel special.

An old man called Ted, who’d lost most of his tongue to cancer spoke next.  Old Ted would drone on for a while, as he always did.  I wondered if this was the only place people would listen to him.  At times his speech was indecipherable, and he had a tendency to repeat himself, tell the same stories, lament the same mistakes and offer the same advice. 

I heard Ted but, didn’t listen.  I couldn’t take my eyes off Mr. Kinnear.  I watched him as he nodded solemnly to Ted’s ramblings and shifted his weight in the chair, crossing and uncrossing his legs.  I flinched when he appeared to look my way, and I quickly stared at my untouched coffee.

“Alan, could you put the lights on,” Pete said. 

Alan obliged and it was my first time to look at him properly.  My eyes strained against the pain of being subjected to bright fluorescent lighting after the dimness of candlelight.  I braced myself when he looked my way.  Nothing in his manner or his eyes suggested that he recognised me.  He even sent a faint smile my way before he got up and left the room, cigarette packet in hand.

I stood on shaky legs and followed, hearing Pete as I left, “I didn’t think you smoked?”

I burst out of the church building and into the driving rain, turning to see Mr Kinnear, squashed up against the closed half of the door, sheltering in the alcove of the doorway, lighting a cigarette.  He spoke through the side of his mouth, the lit cigarette bobbing up and down like an amber beacon.

“Michael Beckley, as I live and breathe.  Step out of the rain, son.  There’s room here.  Smoke?”

I froze in place.  The rain battered down on my head but, I felt nothing except a warm trickle on the inside of my leg.

“Y-y-you- “was all I could muster.

He cackled at that. 

“Thought you might have outgrown that stutter by now, son.  Guess not.  I’d ask what brings you here but, we’re all here for the same thing aren’t we?” He blew smoke outward and upwards into the rain.

Pete popped his head out the door, “Alan, Michael, we’re about to commence the second part,” he paused to look at me quizzically, stood there in the downpour.

My legs felt like jelly, my head thumped with a fast-beating pulsation, I let out a guttural cry and I ran.  I ran to the main road, heading toward my bedsit but, I kept on running.  I ran through the rain, splashing through puddles, kicking up spray, full pelt until my lungs burned and I could run no more.  I turned a corner and entered a park where I collapsed onto a bench, heaving deep breaths and letting out throaty sobs.

I don’t know how much time passed.  The rain had stopped, I could hear it dripping from leaves and running down gutters and into drains.  I found myself curled on my side on the bench.  Soaked to the skin and shivering.  I felt someone sit next to me.

“Funny bumping into you again,” Mr. Kinnear’s voice was low and soft.  I heard him unscrew a bottle and drink deeply.  I shuffled myself upright and away from him to the other side of the bench.  I stared at the floor, then forced myself to look at him.

He sat, staring ahead, not at me, a bottle of whisky open in his hand.  I could smell the fumes; I wanted a taste.

“Must be twenty years, son.  Did you ever think of me, Michael?”

“C-c-course I did.”

“I thought of you too, son.  A lot.”, he continued to look ahead, took a long pull on the whisky, and passed the bottle to me.  I held it in my hands.  “We had some good times, son.  No reason we can’t pick up where we left off.” He placed his hand at the top of my thigh.

———-

I woke as the light broke through the gap in the curtains.  Laid on top of the covers, stripped naked.  I’d felt this way many times before.  Shamed, guilty, anxious, and unable to remember the night before.

I sat upright.  My head pounding.  I looked over and reached down to the pile of wet clothes beside my bed.  I lifted them and carried them towards my laundry bag. On my way, a crippling realisation hit me: it wasn’t just rain that had soaked my clothes.  I saw blood.  Splattered and matted against my jeans.  My hands!  My hands were crimson streaked.  I checked myself; I was not injured.  This was not my blood.

I washed my hands vigorously and splashed water on my face.  I looked in the mirror, willing myself to remember.

I had held the bottle in my hands.

But I did not drink.

A red mist descended upon me.

I had lifted the bottle over my head, whisky spilling down my arm.

The radio alarm clock ticked over to 0700AM, and the local radio station halted my recollection of the night before.

“Some awful news coming through this morning.  A man in his 60’s has been found murdered in Osborne Park.  A dogwalker who found the body said that it looked as though the man had been beaten to death.  As yet he has not been named and there is no further statement from the police but, isn’t it awful to think that something like this could happen here?  On a lighter note, we’ll be taking your calls about wind turbines…”

I looked back at myself in the mirror.  I saw Michael Beckley, twelve years old, a promising 800 metre runner, heading to his first coaching session, after school with Mr. Kinnear.  He said I was a special talent.  A special boy.

I spoke to Michael.

“It’s going to be ok.  He won’t hurt you.  I promise.”    

Memorial Park: Tartarus Rising

Together in life, together in rest, Two brothers, forever blessed.

Their bond unbroken, their love so true, In our hearts, they live anew.

The pounding on my door that woke me synchronised with the pounding in my head.  A fierce rhythm of pain.  I rolled out of bed, staggered across the living space and out of the flat and down the narrow staircase to the front door.

It was the police.  A Sargent Polston, flanked by a nameless uniform.  I led them back up to my flat.  He asked me to confirm who I was.  I showed him my ID:  Chet Matthews.  Yes, my brother is Coltrane “Colt” Matthews.  Unusual names.  My parents were jazz fans.

We stood awkwardly in my living area.  I blushed.  The place was an absolute tip.  A mess of takeaway cartons, pizza boxes, empty wine bottles, and beer cans.  I glanced nervously at the remnants of a joint in the ashtray.

Polston and the uniform didn’t notice.  Or, if they did, nothing was said. 

Instead, Polston regrettably informed me that my brother was dead.

My knees buckled.  I dropped onto the sofa squashing a pizza box and causing a guff of stale aromas into the already stuffy atmosphere.  A metallic taste rolled around my too dry mouth.  I was stunned.  I felt my jaw move, unable to utter a sound.  I did not cry.

Polston moved to sit next to me then thought better of it.  He wouldn’t want to stain the suit.  He patted me awkwardly at arm’s length on the shoulder.

“I understand it’s a big shock.  Want you to know it’s not being treated as suspicious.  No one else involved.  There’ll be an inquiry, of course.” Polston said.

I squeezed out a whisper.  A single word.  Flat and listless.

“How?”

Polston gave the uniform a look.  He took the cue and busied himself trying to find a clean glass for water.  Good luck with that.

“I’m not supposed to.  There will be a full enquiry.  A postmortem.”  Polston considered me.  He felt sorry for me and made a decision to break protocol.  “Just this once.  Off the record.  I’ll deny I said anything…Suicide by hanging.  Rigor had set in.  Sorry.  Detail you don’t need to know.  It happened last night.  Exact time to be determined.”

A realisation hit me.  The missed call.  The voicemail.  I said nothing.  My white knuckles gripped my knees.

“Is there someone who could be with you?  You shouldn’t be alone.”

“No.  There’s no one.  I have no one.  Now.”

Polston had no answer to that.  He gave me his card.  Take care of yourself.  He left, taking the uniform, halfway through washing a glass, with him.

I closed the front door and raced back up the stairs.  I scrambled for my phone.  One missed call.  One voicemail.  My thumb hovered.  I couldn’t.  Not now.  I’d failed him enough.  I couldn’t take one more final failure as a brother.  I’d been passed out drunk and unable to hear my phone.  Again.  Too late now.

The next few days blurred into one.  I called work.  Compassionate leave for a week.  No guarantees I could return though.  That’s agency work.  Zero hours contract.  Zero actual compassion.

Then Polston called.  I could go to Colt’s penthouse.  They’d cleaned it up.  No trace of what had happened.  It might help with the grieving process, he said.  Closure.

Colt was my opposite in many ways.  He was three years older but, many years wiser.  Of the two of us, he was the one with the good job, the career, a nice car, a pristine minimalist penthouse apartment with panoramic views of the city.  The only thing that clashed with the aesthetic in his place was the framed photo of us.  Taken when he was eleven, and I was eight, with mum and dad.  Ten years before the cancer took each of them within six months of each other.

Inside the clean, bright white space of his penthouse living room, I stood in the middle of a circle of scrubbed and bleached hardwood floor.  I looked at the exposed wooden beam overhead.

This is the place.  I pictured a rope looped around the beam and could hear it creaking as it rubbed whilst he swung gently.

I looked around for what he would have stood on.  A stool was missing from the breakfast bar.  Maybe it had been taken into evidence.  Why was I concerned about the bloody stool?  I shook the thought from my head.  Polston was at my shoulder, looking up too.

“Terrible.  Such a shame.”  He tutted.  “No note.  We looked everywhere.  Not much to search.  Seems he lived more, er, simply than you.  Very tidy and clean.”

“Yes.  He was good like that.”  I wrapped my fingers tightly around my phone in my pocket.  “Could I stay?  I mean, have a moment.  Alone?”

Polston.  Hands in pockets, rocked on his heels, feeling sorry for me again.  “OK.  Sure.  I’ll wait outside.  Take your time.”  He looked at his watch.  He probably needed to be somewhere.  A proper case to investigate.

The door clicked shut and I was left alone.  I wandered the flat.  Room to room.  Not to snoop.  I was not inclined to find Colt’s porn stash, if he had one, or check for condoms in his bedside drawers.  It wasn’t Colt’s private life I was seeking.  It was a connection I was looking for.  Something, anything, that brought me closer to him.  He was my brother but, I barely knew him.  It was all superficial.  Like a character in a book.  I knew nothing of him as a person.  What did he like? Did he have hobbies?  A favourite colour? I didn’t know Coltrane Matthews at all.  He was just Colt, my brother.

I looked in his fridge: salad, chicken, a few sauce bottles, and a litre of oat milk.  The cupboards contained uniformed crockery.  No personalised mugs.  Nothing of him.  The place was like a stale air b’n’b.  Devoid of personality.  Bereft of character.

I returned to the bleached circle.  Hands on hips.  Exasperated.  I knew no more of my brother now than I had when I entered.  Except for the exact place that he had killed himself.

I turned full circle.  One last surveillance of the room.  The plush white sofas didn’t even show a dent we he had sat.  He had a large wall-mounted TV, a record player with the LP still on the turntable.  The needle was in the middle.

Of all the cold precision of Colt’s place, this stood out to me.  A record player.  A vinyl album of all things.  I didn’t picture Colt as a hipster.  Maybe it was jazz.  Something mum and dad would have listened to.  I looked down at the record.  The centre label was black with a single line of embossed gold lettering:

Tartarus Rising

Which meant nothing to me.

I reached down to pluck the needle from the centre of the record.  Whatever it was, it had been listened to.  Colt was listening to this.  It  must have been playing when he-

I picked up the record and carefully slid it into its sleeve.  The album cover was also entirely black, front and back.  The only marking was the same gold embossed writing on the spine:

Tartarus Rising by King Tantalus

I looked for where the record should go.  There was no shelf of albums.  No record box.  This was the only record Colt owned.  The record he was listening to when he took his own life.

I slid the album under my arm and covered it with my jacket.  I picked up the framed family photo and carried it with me.

“OK?”  Polston checked his watch again oblivious to my theft.

“Fine.”

“Look I have to…” Polston threw a thumb towards the lift.

“Me too.” 

We rode the lift together in awkward silence.

Colt’s funeral was a quiet and empty affair.  I, the only surviving relative, stood alone at the front.  A representative from Colt’s firm stood halfway back.  Polston was by the door.  No friends.  No lovers, current or ex.  There was no wake.  I took a bottle of whisky home.

Halfway through the bottle, in the gloom of the fading daylight, I glanced at the album propped against the TV.  I reached for my phone and played the voicemail.

A droning sound.  Not quite bagpipes.  Eastern maybe.  A raga perhaps.  Distant.  Hypnotic.  Colt’s voice.  Dreamy.  Slurred.  Whispering.  Was he stoned?

“Can you hear it?  Can you hear it?  My God.  Stars.”

I awoke at dawn, flat on the floor.  Drool connected my face to the carpet.  My phone was still in hand.  I looked at the half empty whisky bottle and shook my head.

I opened my phone to the search engine and typed “Tartarus Rising by King Tantalus”.  Nothing relevant was found.  Nothing of the album or the artist as I tried each separately.  Just Greek mythology of Tartarus (an underworld worse than Hades) and King Tantalus (punished in Tartarus – stood in water that he could not drink and next to a tree of which the fruit he could not reach, he was driven mad).  I needed to know more about this record.  I also needed some fresh air.  Some time to think.

I was still feeling groggy from the whisky as I walked into the city.  In the market square I stood.  Pigeons flocking and swooping around me.  A maelstrom of feathers and flapping.  I turned and looked.  I saw a passageway between two shops.  It was narrow and dark with a sign above, rocking in the breeze.  It was red with white lettering: Oracle Records.

I walked down the foul smelling, piss-soaked and rubbish strewn passage to the closed shop door at the end.  I pushed and entered.  A wind chime above the door rang out the opening melody to a familiar song I couldn’t quite place.

The sole light source was a dusty apex skylight centred above, green with moss and streaked with bird muck.  It caused the sunlight to penetrate the gloom in sharp edged beams.  Dust motes floated within them.

The shop was laid out with racks of LPs along each outer wall and a centre square of crates, allowing just enough space to walk around.  At the back was what I assumed to be the sales counter.  Behind it an elderly man with long white dishevelled hair and a wispy pointed beard stood quietly watching me.  Thick glasses sat upon his small, hooked nose giving him the look of an aged bushbaby.  All wide eyed and furry.

He smiled a wide gap-toothed grin and blinked his enormous cobalt blue eyes.

“Welcome, welcome.  First time visitors are always welcome here.” He waved me closer.

I shuffled forward a step.  Unsure of how to proceed.  He looked at me expectantly.

“I’m looking for information on a particular album.”

“Information?”  He looked surprised, his eyes widening even further.  “It may have escaped your notice but, this is a record shop.  Emphasis on the word “shop”.  This is not an information centre.  You have libraries or the worldwide web for that!”

“Yes.  I looked on the internet.  I found nothing on this record.  Nothing at all.”

He looked to the skylight stroking his beard for what felt like an eternity.  I readied myself to leave.

“Well? What is it?  The album?”  he sounded bored.

“I should have brought it with me.  It belonged to my brother.  Tartarus Rising by King Tantalus.  Have you-?”

The shopkeeper disappeared, only to reappear next to me having ducked under the counter.  He was sprightly for an old man.  He darted past me, set the closed sign, and locked the door.

He grabbed me by the arms.  He had strong hands too.  He stared intently into my eyes with his huge blue gaze.

“You have it?  Where?”

“Yes.  I have it.  At home. What-?”

“I’ll take it off your hands.  Name your price.” His grip pressure increased.

“It’s not for sale.  I just wanted to know more about it.”

The sprightly shopkeeper took up what looked like a yoga position.  He had one leg bent and his foot resting knee of his standing leg, resembling a stork.  He stroked his beard, his large eyes sizing me up.

“Not selling?  Then I’m not sure I can help…Unless!” He wagged his finger at me.  “You give it to me.”

“If I’m not selling, why would I give it away?”

“You might after I tell you about it.”

“I can assure you, I won’t.  It was my brother’s.  He was listening to it when he…”

“I see.  That’s to be expected.” He resumed beard stroking.  “Are you planning on listening to it?”

“I suppose so. Yes. Why?”

“It’ll be the last thing you hear if you do.  You really do know nothing about it.”

“When I searched for it, I read about Tartarus and I read about King Tantalus but, it was all Greek mythology.  Nothing about the album or the musician that made it.”

“Well, the album you have has long been considered somewhat of a myth itself.  No one was really sure if it existed.  Some bootlegs, proven to be fake, circulated at one time but, this is the first confirmation I have heard of its actual existence.  No one knows who King Tantalus was.  There were theories, of course, all unsubstantiated.  Syd Barrett, the ghost of Tim Buckley, Jim Morrison even.  Silly rumours all!”

“So, if no one knew who made it or that it even existed, why all the fuss?”

“In the sixties many artists dabbled in the dark arts.  Aleister Crowley was on the cover of Sargent Pepper.  The Stones did Their Satanic Majesties schtick.  Jimmy Page bought Crowley’s house.  Somewhere along the way someone first spoke of Tartarus Rising.  It was said to be the most glorious music.  So unearthly as to turn the listener mad.  In 1969 a singer/songwriter called CW Jepson spoke of listening to Tartarus Rising.  Except he was confined to a padded room in Broadmoor.  When he was not speaking in tongues or rocking in place, drooling, he spoke of digging the sound, and the stars he saw.   He killed himself, so they say.  Despite being straightjacketed at the time, he bit off and choked on his own tongue.  So, there’s the question.  Knowing it would be the last thing you heard before madness and death, would you still listen to it?”

He saw my look of disbelief.  “Baloney eh?  Perhaps.  Perhaps not.  The curse of King Tantalus indeed.” He spoke.

“Would you?” I asked.

“I would, sir.  I have lived a full life.  What do I have to lose?  A few years as my health deteriorates!  No, thank you!  Give me glorious wonder, madness, and death.  Now sir, I return the question.  Will you?”

I began to sweat and feel a little dizzy.  “I have to leave.”

“Not without assurances, sir.  The album.  I need it!”

He grabbed me forcefully.  Pinning me to the shelf.  I levered his weight to one side and pushed him from me and onto the floor, losing his glasses in the process.  Blind without them, I left him fumbling across the floor while I unlocked the door and fled.

Returning home, I poured myself a whisky to calm my nerves.  I placed the drink between my feet and played the voicemail again.

I awoke with a dry mouth and eyes caked in sleep.  The whisky remained untouched on the floor.  Was that small sample of Tartarus Rising playing in the background of Colt’s voicemail enough to render me unconscious?  My thumb hovered over the play button when there was a knock on my door.

“Parcel for Matthews.  Jesus! You OK, mate?  You look like death warmed up!”

I smiled and nodded at the delivery driver and took the parcel upstairs.

I had the small record player unboxed and plugged in within minutes.

I slid the vinyl from its black sleeve and placed it on the turntable.  I flicked the switch.  The record began to rotate.  The deep blackness of the vinyl and the rotating gold of the label lettering within it was hypnotic.  King Tantalus – never satiated: thirst never quenched; hunger never gratified.

I placed the needle on the record.

—————————————-

Polston stood at the top of the stairs.  The flash of the camera dazzled him.  As the spots cleared from his vision, the crime scene photographer came into focus.  Then the room.

Blood splattered every surface.  Wall.  Floor.  Ceiling.  Sofa.  Everything had received a spray of blood.  Now dried black.

“Nasty.”  The pathologist, Harrison.  “One of the worst I’ve seen.  A real bloodbath.  Sliced himself up good and proper this one.”

“Chet.  Chet was his name.  How long?”

“With the flies and everything, I’d say a week.  Samples will confirm it.”

“How?”

“The common kitchen knife.  I’m not sure in what order he did it but he cut of his nose, ears, most of his face.  He even took out his own eyes.  Eventually he hit an artery, hence the spray.  Psychotic episode maybe.  Did you know him?”

“Sort of.  Him and his brother.”

“Madness run in the family?” Harrison chuckled.

“You could say that.”

Polston crouched being careful not to touch anything.  He brought himself down to eye level with the record player.

The vinyl was clogged with blood and matter.  The needle in the centre.  No longer turning.

—————————————-

George unloaded the van while Ravi watched.

“Another load of house clearance stuff, George?”

“Yeah, a few of them.  One of ‘em was nasty though.  Suicide it was.  Made a right mess of the place.  The cleaners had been in but, you could still see the stains.”

“Gross!  Mind if I take a look?”  Ravi nudged the cardboard box of records with his foot.

“Help yourself.  Take what you want, mate.  I don’t think they’re any collectors’ items in there.”

Ravi plucked out a black album with nothing but gold embossed writing on the spine.

“Interesting…” he muttered to himself.

Memorial Park: See Emily Play

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

There is no other day

The song has ended but the melody lingers on

Tyler Barrett had never felt so alone.  He sat staring at the place setting in front of him on the once white tablecloth strewn with detritus of the wedding reception and stained with food and wine spillages.  It wasn’t so much his own place setting that bothered him, it was the place setting next to him that stuck a dagger into his heart: Amber Barrett.  Although that would be changing soon, no doubt.  She’d revert to Gilmour as soon as the divorce goes through.  The divorce papers that she’d served him this morning on the doorstep, suitcase in hand, off to her mother’s, no doubt.  Those same papers he’d inexplicably brought with him, folded neatly, and tucked inside his suit jacket.

Despite the copious drinking, the forced laughter during the speeches, and the fixed grin in photos and suchlike, Tyler felt dead behind the eyes and as sober as a judge.  He needed to get out.  He looked around for the bride and groom, they were at opposite ends of the function room chatting and smiling with family and friends.  He saw them keep glancing at each other through the haze of disco lights and long since dissipated dry ice.  Separate but, still connected.  He felt sick.

He unintentionally burst through the double doors exiting the function room, banging the left-hand door against the golf club’s captain’s board, and startling on old lady in the process.  He hadn’t gauged his strength there.  He realised he was more inebriated than he thought.  Apologising, he swiftly moved past her, through the foyer, and out into the cool night air.

Tyler’s shoes crunched on the gravel.  It was a warm evening.  The bonus of a summer wedding.  He took in a deep breath and did actually feel a little woozy.  He had knocked back quite a few drinks.  He squinted into the bright light of his phone as he brought it up to his face.  He felt his contact lenses itching.

His cheap and not so cheerful chain hotel was a two-mile walk according to the map.  Tyler sighed and slouched his shoulders.  He switched apps to get an Uber but, the next available was forty-five minutes away.  Another sigh.

Tyler looked back at the clubhouse.  He did not want to have to go back in there and wait for an Uber.  He contemplated looking for local cabs but, couldn’t be bothered with the hassle.  He resolved that he’d walk, and he crunched a few steps away from the building and toward the drive.

Something caught his eye down the first fairway.  A deer maybe, or a fox.  It was a flash of colour fifty metres or so away.  Just close enough for the light emanating from the clubhouse to reflect on its fur.  Beyond it was total darkness.

It was at that moment that a thought manifested itself in Tyler’s brain.  He looked at his phone once again.  Yes.  It wasn’t totally clear but, he could walk in a straight line, as the crow flies, down the first fairway, and keep walking through whatever green was on the map, and he’d come out directly opposite his hotel.  It was barely a mile.  He could make it in less than half the time.

He walked onto the first tee and down the sloped grass and onto the fairway.  He walked straight down the middle because no one would be teeing off at this time.  He smiled to himself.  How’s this for dynamic, Amber? He thought.

Tyler soon found himself beyond the dimming lights of the clubhouse but, he found his eyes, itchy contacts, and all, adjusting well to the darkness.  He could see the grass beneath his feet and a few yards ahead.  He looked up to the sky but, it was a cloudy night, covering any light from the moon and he could see no stars.

The grass became longer notifying Tyler that he had reached the end of the fairway.  He looked at his phone.  The light hurt his eyes.  He squinted again at the map but only watched an empty expanse with not even a marker to show where he was.  It was as though he had found himself in a sea of green.  No signal.

Oh well, he could remember what he’d seen before. It was a straight walk.  All he had to do was keep going.  He looked ahead.  The fairway and rough ended, leading into undergrowth.  The view was murky.  He switched on the torch on his phone and shone it in the direction he would walk. 

There were a few well-worn trails leading into the bushes.  No doubt, many a golfer had gone in there to retrieve wayward balls or take a pee.  Tyler switched off his torch and was once again lunged into pitch black darkness.  He stood still for a moment, willing his eyes to adjust quickly. 

He could make out two of the trails and opted for the one on the left.  He moved on, shoes swishing through the longer grass and beyond the first line of shrubbery.

It was as if he’d walked through a doorway.  Although, he could not see much more than beyond his outstretched hand, he could feel that he was in a more open space.  Like being in a grand hall or a church.  The tree canopy must have been way up high, and there was little below it to get in Tyler’s way as he continued walking.

The groundsmen do a great job, he thought, the woods near his home were rife with brambles and almost impenetrable.  Something he now realised he hadn’t thought of when he chose this route.  His luck was in.  This was a well-maintained bit of woodland.

The ground undulated, slowing Tyler, as he carefully walked down and up gradients, wary of tripping on exposed tree roots.  He stopped and smiled, breathing in the fine smells of sweet wood scent, blossoms, and leaves.  He nodded affirmation to himself on his dynamism.  Amber just didn’t know him.  He was as assertive as anyone.  Maybe even more so.

So pleased with himself, he whistled a tune of his own making.  An “I’m happily walking through the woods, making my own way in life, and Amber can get stuffed” sort of tune.

Coming up to the crest of a rise, Tyler paused, resting his hand against the trunk of a tree.  The bark was rough but, soft and comforting, and almost warm to the touch.  He’d expected to see the lights of the main road between the golf course and the hotel by now.  He strained to look further ahead and discern between bushes and trees and look beyond the undergrowth.  Only darkness awaited.

A whistle.

He heard it.  Just then.

He placed a finger on his lips.  He had not whistled.  Not this time.

It was a shrill note that started high and then dipped into a lower pitch, then stopped.

Tyler froze in place.  Now his eyes and ears couldn’t take in enough of what was around him.  The openness he’d felt had been replaced by a cutoff and closed in feeling.  Branches and leaves brushed his head, and he batted them off like swatting at flies. 

Every fibre in is being strained to hear sounds. 

Nothing.

Not even the rustling of mice, squirrels and whatever else might live in here.

A bird.  That must be it.  It wasn’t a whistle.  It was a bird call.

Tyler chuckled to himself.  As if he’d nearly scared himself there.  He walked on.

The whistle came again.  Was it closer or louder?  He couldn’t tell.  It sounded nearby.

“He-hello?” his voice caught before he could speak, and then it was more of an uncomfortable mumble.  He coughed.  Be assertive. “Hello? Is someone there?”

“Yes.” A girl’s childish voice whispered so close to Tyler’s ear; he felt her breath tickle him. 

He jumped away from the sound, “Shit!”, and caught his foot on a tree root and crashed noisily into a bush.

A giggle.

Tyler righted himself, brushing thorny twigs and sticking buds of plants from his suit.

“What the? Who are you? Where are you?”

A small cold hand took Tyler’s, entwining her tiny fingers in his.  Tyler looked down to his right and there she was.

A little girl.  Six or Seven years old, in a billowing party dress, looking back up at him with a pale face and deep wide eyes, framed with long flowing hair held back in a band.

Tyler did not want to hold the girl’s hand but, she must be lost.  Maybe she came from the wedding reception too, although he couldn’t remember seeing her.  He knelt down to her level to speak to her.

“What are you doing out here at this time of the night?  Where are you parents?  Are they back at the clubhouse? The wedding party?”

“No, silly,” she slapped him lightly on the arm, “I’m having a picnic.  A teddy bears picnic.” She inhaled sharply, eyes widening, excited, “You should come too! Oh, please say you will?”

Tyler looked at the little girl, astonished.

“Look, it’s the middle of the night.  You shouldn’t even be out.  I need to get you back to your parents, never mind a picnic.” Tyler started to walk, pulling at the girl to follow, back in the direction of the clubhouse.  But the girl stood fast.

“Not that way.” She pointed back the way Tyler had been walking before, “this way.”

Tyler looked at her long and hard.

“What’s your name?  I’m Tyler.”

“Emily.  Emily Jayne Miriam Hardwick.  247 Balcombe Avenue”

“Yes, yes, ok, Emily.  Ok, it’s nice to meet you but, you shouldn’t be in the woods on your own at this time of night.”

“You are.”

“Well…yes…I am but, that’s because I am an adult,” Tyler wagged his finger in the air, resting his case.

Emily folded her arms and pouted.

“So, your parents, are they that way? The way you said?”

“Hmmm, sure.”

Emily took Tyler back by the hand and guided him further into the darkness of the woods.

Tyler figured her parents were maybe by the main road, not the clubhouse.  Maybe they were even staying at the hotel too.  That’d be a coincidence.

They’d walked only a matter of minutes when Tyler saw lights ahead.

“Oh, thank god,” he muttered under his breath.

They walked towards the lights.

Emily pushed through a small gap in the foliage and disappeared.  Tyler, still holding her hand, followed.  It was a much tighter squeeze.  Branches pulled at Tyler, and he let go of Emily’s hand whilst he fought against them.  Pushing his way through a gap that was too small for him, he felt branches snap, leaves scraped against his head, thorns dug through the suit and into his arms, legs, and torso.  He persevered and pushed on through the thick bushes.  Thorns scratched at his face.  He closed his eyes and squeezed through.

It felt to Tyler that the bushes and trees were actively trying to prevent him from getting through.  He felt the vines pulling him back.  Resisting him. 

A final push saw him burst through the vegetation and fall into a heap, vines clinging to his legs, thorns sticking him all over like a pin cushion, and scrapes and scratches that already felt sore, bleeding and weeping.

He pushed himself up from his prone position.  He was bathed in light.  He raised his head and looked around.  The light that bathed him was candlelight producing a warm orange glow, flickering, and causing shadows to dance before him.  There were many candles placed in and around trees.  In exposed roots and crevices of branches.  This must have been the light he’d seen.

It was a clearing and within the centre was a gingham blanket and on the blanket were plates, teacups, saucers, and a teapot.  And, seated around the edge of the blanket were several teddy bears of various sizes.  Emily sat cross-legged and shuffled herself in amongst them.

“Here it is, Tyler.  The picnic I told you about.”  She was smiling. Proud.

Tyler crawled over to the blanket and looked over at her.

“Listen to me, Emily, this, this, whatever it is,”

“Picnic, silly”

“Yes, alright, this picnic.  It’s not right, I need to get you to your parents right now.”

“But-“

“Emily!” Tyler spoke sternly, and Emily stiffened, “Stop!  Please, let’s go find your parents.”

“I’m not moving, “Emily crossed her arms and harumphed, “Not until we have eaten.”

Tyler picked up a plate, then tipped a teacup upside down.  All were empty.

“There’s nothing to eat, Emily, it’s all pretend.”

A teddy bear tipped forward slightly, and Emily turned to it.  Then she looked back at Tyler.  Her face no longer showed an angelic smile nor even the faux grumpiness of a six-year-old not getting her way. 

She was smiling but, it was more of a smirk.  A sinister grin.  Her head tilted forward, and she gazed at Tyler through mean eyes. 

“Oh, yes there is.” She said brightly.

Her head tilted to one side, to the fallen teddy.  Except it wasn’t there, it was closer to Tyler.  It was moving.  It grabbed his wrist firmly.

Tyler tried to pull away but, the teddy bear was incredibly strong.  It clamped him to the ground.  Tyler turned and saw the other bears had moved too.  Another grabbed his other wrist, and then he felt small arms clasp at his ankles.  He was prone, trapped on all fours.  The bears converged upon him.

It wasn’t the first bite that killed him nor even the one-hundredth.  It was a long, slow, and agonising death as Tyler was devoured dreadful and painful mouthful by dreadful and painful mouthful until almost nothing remained.

——–

Constable Howie trudged through the undergrowth towards the sound of a barking dog and grumbled to himself.  This wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he’d been assigned a missing persons case.

He’d thought it’d be something exciting, not some drunken guy, probably suicidal after getting dumped by his wife, who’d wandered out of a wedding reception.

It had been a right palaver even getting this far.  The hotel had emptied his room into lost property, and no one had reported him missing until he didn’t turn up to work for a few days.  His, soon to be ex, wife had mentioned he’d gone to the wedding reception.  She also dropped in the imminent divorce.  She seemed pretty nonplussed whether something bad had happened to him or not.  After that, Howie had followed the trail and ended up watching the CCTV of Tyler Barrett staggering drunkenly onto the golf course.

“Found something?”

The handler pulled at the dog and pointed down at the ground.

“Could be something.  I nearly missed it.  Thought the dog had gone loopy.”

Howie squatted down and looked at the ground.  He couldn’t see anything other than mud, leaves, and twigs, then the light caught it.  He took out a pencil and a clear plastic evidence bag.  He slowly and gently pushed the two contact lenses into the bag.

Memorial Park: Scooter

Photo by Ksenia Chernaya on Pexels.com

Though you left us in an unexpected moment, your spirit lives on.

Scooter Mears’s place was over the hill.  A solid and square brick house surrounded by a ramshackle collection of lean-tos and shacks, each one housing chickens.  Why he couldn’t just have built one coop was beyond anyone’s guess.  Scooter always had his own way of doing things.

We called him Scooter on account of his uncanny similarity to the muppet.  He had a ginger mop of hair that fell in ringlets and large round glasses with thick frames and even thicker lenses.  He’d been given the name by Greg Christie at secondary school. It was in retaliation for Scooter calling Greg “Greeeg” because Greg was by far the tallest in the year, and school, and Scooter thought it funny to call him an elongated Greg. And it was funny.  Just not to Greg.

All of that had happened over forty years ago and Greg had long since left the area.  I heard he was up north somewhere, doing well for himself in business.  Scooter, on the other hand, had a less fortuitous life.  His parents died not long after he left school.  Cancer took one and a heart attack took the other.  All within 3-months.  From what I could tell, Scooter had never gotten over it.  Then, maybe, the loss of both parents so young is something you never do.

They’d had this small holding in the family as long as anyone could remember.  Was once a farm but, piece by piece, the Mears had sold off the land around the main house.  Sheep farming is tough and unforgiving.  Many farms around had done similar, over the years, to make ends meet.    

I’d been called to go and visit with Scooter.  He hadn’t been seen for a couple of weeks and, with the snow having fallen pretty heavy, there was a general concern he may have got snowed in and be running out of supplies.

I’d hitched up a bunch of essentials to the back of the quad bike.  It was just tins of soup, extra blankets, bottled water, stuff to help Scooter get through until the thaw.  Even if he was ok up there, I’d leave them all with him.  I’m sure they wouldn’t go to waste.

Starting the engine.  The snow having obliterated all tracks, I gazed up to the hilltop, picking my spot to drive towards, and began my journey at a steady pace.  I’d attended my fair share of quad bike accidents.  All of them horrible, and nothing I’d want to replicate.

At the brow of the hill, I pulled the quad bike to a standstill.  It shifted slightly under me as it settled itself in the deep snow.  I raised my goggles to my hat and lifted myself up to stand and surveyed the view.  The village stretched out behind me.  Concentric circles of houses built around the church.  Some houses had the signs of poor insulation on their rooftops.  Others, including my own, were pristine white.  Like a Christmas card.

I looked down towards the Mears’ place.  It was covered in a blanket of thick white snow.  I’d expected some patches of the roof would be without snow.  I knew the place would have poor insulation in places.  The chimney should have been smoking too.  It wasn’t.  The place looked cold and desolate.  A knot formed in my stomach.

Upon approaching the Mears’ farmhouse, I noticed that the snow had drifted up the side of each exterior wall illustrating how the blizzard had blown from every compass point during the night.

I cut the engine and dismounted the quad bike.  My boots crunched compacting the snow as I made my way to the front door.  The drift was up around a third of the narrow door.  Once it was eggshell blue, now most of that had peeled and cracked leaving a sodden brown wood beneath.

I knocked but, didn’t wait.  I moved along the side of the house to the nearest window.  It was frosted over.  I placed my arched hands either side of my head and pushed my face up against it.  It just gave me a blurred view of the living room within.  I could barely discern the shapes of furniture and the door through to the kitchen out back.

There’s something in the human psyche that forms an instinct beyond the physical.  Like the sense of someone watching you, or that there’s someone in the room you’re about to enter.  Maybe it’s a primitive intuition that has eluded being evolved out of the human nervous system.  Maybe it’s more than that.  I’m not spiritual.  I am not inclined to believe in any religion of hereafter but, maybe there’s more to us than just existing on a revolving piece of rock in the cosmos.  Maybe.  Well, my primordial gut was telling me there was no one in the house.  Not living anyway.

I tried the doors and windows.  All were locked or frozen shut.  I opted for a forced entrance at the rear of the house.  A back door with an embedded pane of glass covering half of it from the top.  This door had been here since before Scooter was born.  Before the days of safety glass.  True enough, it shattered into jagged shards when I struck it with my baton.  If my instinct had been wrong, the sound of the smashing window would have roused anyone from within the house.  But there was nothing.  No movement except the beaded curtain in the doorway across the kitchen rattling in the fresh breeze brought in by the broken window.

I knocked some particularly lethal looking fragments of glass from the frame and reached through, turned the key and unlocked the door.  After a couple of good solid tugs, I manged to lever the door open with a grinding screech of frozen wood scraping across frozen snow.

I entered the kitchen.  It was messy.  Empty tins lined the countertop.  A saucepan with the remnants if one of the empty tins caked at the bottom sat upon the stove.  A loaf of bread with a slice from it laid on a chopping board, the serrated knife resting on top of it.  The place was as cold as outside.  The tap had a frozen drip of water hanging from it.

My voice caught in my throat as I tried to call Scooter.  I coughed and composed myself before calling him again even though I was certain I’d get no answer. 

I made my way through the ground floor.  Each room was dirty, cluttered, and frozen.  The place must have had no heating for days.  Probably from before the snowfall.  I chill ran up my spine and it wasn’t from the cold air.  I wondered where I’d find Scooter and what state he’d be in.

I climbed the stairs half expecting and, maybe, even hoping, that I’d find Scooter tucked up in bed having died peacefully in his sleep.  But he was not there.  The bed was unmade.  The bathroom and other bedrooms were empty too.  No sign of Scooter.

I stood, back in Scooter’s bedroom, with my hands on my hips wondering where the hell Scooter was.  He might be out on the land somewhere.  Maybe he’d fallen, injured himself.  Maybe then he’d be alive, if he was lucky.  No one could spend much more than a night in these conditions, and Scooter had clearly not been home for some time.  I made a move for my radio to call it in and get a search party organised.  Scooter no longer had much land, so it probably wouldn’t take too long to scour the acreage provided the weather held off and we had daylight.

But then that damned instinct kicked in again.  Except maybe this time it was a cop’s intuition or logical thought.  I hadn’t checked the outbuildings.  I’d do that before I called the control room.

There were several outbuildings.  The first, just outside the house was a chicken coop.  I popped the latch and poked my head inside to find four perfectly frozen and preserved chickens.  Each sat on straw nests.  Eyes closed.  They could be mistaken for sleeping were it not for the frosted sheen on their feathers.  I backed out and made for the barn.

It was where the Mears’ used to store their tractor and plough, when they had cause to own one.  Now, I suspected it’d be used for storage or some sort.  A large shed full of junk if the house was anything to go by.  I reached the double door to find a chain running through the handles with a padlock glistening in frost.

Being locked from the outside told me that Scooter would not be in there.  I pulled at the door anyway and peered through a thin gap and into the murky space of the barn.  There was something there.  A shape in the centre.  It glistened.  I took my torch and shone it through the gap.  It appeared to be a large black bin bag.  Full.  Hanging in place.  Big enough for a man, for Scooter to be inside?

I extended my baton and slid the narrow end through the padlock.  Once I found the right angle and force it broke.  The chains slithered out of the door handles and rattled to the ground.  I took a deep breath and entered the barn.   

Suspended from the centra beam, maybe 5 feet from the ground, was a black shape of over 10 feet in length with a girth of more than 3 feet. Elongated, like a badly rolled cigar.  It reminded me of body bags in shape, and colour.  But the texture wasn’t that of the black rubber body bags a man in my profession is all too familiar with.  It looked scaly, similar but, not quite the same, as snakeskin.  The light hit his and showed a criss-crossed pattern embossed within the blackness, like a crosshatch but, neat, symmetrical, and precise.  And it glistened.  Not slimy but, wet, in a way.  Like it had a sheen of sweat.

The shape put me in mind of a cocoon.  Like a cocoon, it hung by a twisted thread of shimmering silk.  I racked my brain.  Had Scooter been a creative?  Was this some sort of art instillation?  It seemed so unlike the Scooter I knew but many a person had hobbies and interests beyond those generally perceived.  Perhaps Scooter was a clandestine sculptor.  It seemed so out of the ordinary but, this was turning into a far from ordinary day.         

Instinctively I reached a gloved hand upward to touch it but, recoiled when I saw that there was movement from within it.  An undetermined form was inside this large black sheened sack.  Whatever was inside, it moved in place, barely perceptible, only noticeable due to the refracting light on the surface film.  A protrusion stretched the casing, the membrane whitened under the pressure from within, then returned to deep blackness after the movement subsided.

I circled the hanging object observing its undulating surface and looking up at the threads of twine that held it suspended from the beam.

I took my right glove in my teeth and pulled my hand free.  I tentatively reached out towards the object and gently placed my hand on the surface.

It was fibrous and warm to the touch.  Like a tightly woven hessian cloth.  I could feel the threads beneath my hand.  The strands forming ridges in an intricate weave that created a hard shell with flexibility for the movement of whatever was within it.

I figured it was some sort of cocoon.  My rudimentary learnings on nature trails in the scouts reminded me that a cocoon is a woven protection created by moths, whereas a chrysalis is much harder shell created by butterflies. 

If this was a cocoon, housing a moth, it’d be a specimen over 6 feet in length, and that’s without wingspan taken into consideration.  My mind could not fathom how this could even be.  Could I have discovered a natural phenomenon taking place?

The cocoon pulsed beneath my hand and the fabric a few inches above stretched near white once again.  I staggered back in awe of the spectacle before me.  I shook my head and regained my composure and focus.  The barn had been locked from the outside and Scooter was still nowhere to be found.  I raised the radio to call it in.  The radio hissed static.  It was strange to be out of range of the station and comms towers.  The snowstorms might have hampered the system.  I retrieved my phone and found that had zero bars and no connection, which was more likely, reception was always patchy outside of the town.  Instead, I used the phone to take photos and document the scene.

I didn’t really want to leave the barn but, I had to continue my search for Scooter and I also resolved to return to the station and notify the local conservation group.  I finally turned myself away and headed for the barn door when I heard an almighty crack.

It was the same sort of piercing crack that ice on the old mill pond makes when it fractures.  The sound echoes through the small basin, bouncing off the tress and through the ground up through your feet and into your sternum.  This was the same but, more visceral.  The vibration swept up my legs and into my gut, making my bowels quake and my stomach turn over, I felt nauseous.

I turned back to the cocoon which had now split at the base, maybe only six inches or so.  A vibrant green puss leaked out of the crack in long drooling globs stretching and extending to the floor of the barn.  The stench was overwhelming.  Similar to when I found a drowned sheep lodged half in, half out of the water of the Thorn Brook, over on Thorn’s farm a while back.  The bloated flesh had putrefied, and maggots crawled within its belly’s rotten cavity.  I gagged and held a glove over my nose and mouth.

I watched as the fission grew in length and more rancid fluids spilled out, from a mucus-like substance it became a gushing release.  The scission now ran the length of the cocoon revealing an orange lining of stringy tissue, not dissimilar to the flesh of a pumpkin.

Pressure began to apply at the base of the cocoon, and a form began to shift itself in a slithering motion, forcing its way out of its protective sheath.

The form was covered in dripping and congealed slime that loosened as it hit the rancid air of the barn.  Gradually the form became recognisable.  Hands.  It was a pair of hands.  Clasped together as if in prayer.  The form gradually manoeuvred itself free of the grip of the cocoon.  The clasped hands reached the floor of the barn. and the forearms were revealed, followed by a head, all covered in a thick green gunk.

The phlegm of the cocoon was so thickly applied to the body writing itself free that it became shapeless.  A large bulbous appendage beyond the shoulders.  It reached a critical point where gravity took over and the whole body from within the cocoon slipped to the floor with a sickening splat.  Steam rose all around it.  I stood, jaw-dropped and dumbfounded.

As the vapor rose from the shape on the barn floor, so it began to be revealed.  The hands remained clasped together tightly, the head moved around in circles, as if removing a crick from one’s neck.  The encasement of slime began to shift.  Until I could see the thick glasses upon its face and the shock of unruly red hair ringlets atop.  Oh my god! Was this-?

“Sc-Sc-Scooter?” the sound stuck in my throat.

The head, slick with embryonic fluids, turned slowly towards me.  The liquid ran from his spectacle lenses, and I saw the eyes of Scooter blink and focus on me.  His mouth opened in a grotesque yawl he mewed like newborn lamb seeking the comforting nudge and lick of its mother.  It was the ugliest sound I’ve ever heard in my life.

As Scooter laid there, he began to flex and tremble in place.  The slick sheen that covered him slid away and revealed that beyond his shoulders were the component parts of an insect.  A thorax, heavily furred and matted wet, started from beneath his armpits.  It was rotund and was a couple of feet long.  Afterwards, his body had the elongated cylinder of his abdomen that tapered off to a point after several feet.  To the outside of the abdomen, sturdy but sinuous legs, four each side, stretched and loosened.  Across his back four sets of wings, the fore and aft, symmetrically began to extend and expand outward.  They were almost translucent at first, and I could see the haemolymph fluid, the equivalent of blood, pumped through them thickening them and providing colouration in each wing.  The colours were black and red in thick stripes leading from front to back.

I stepped back and fell on my backside.  Scooter, the moth, rose up on ever steadying and strengthening legs.  The wings flapped causing warm ripples of air within the barn.  Scooter was reborn. 

He approached me dipping his head to bring his face up to me.  I could feel his breath in my place.  It smelled sweet and floral.  He smiled.  It was the happiest I’d ever seen Scooter.

He turned and strode purposely out of the barn door.  I crawled on my hands and knees to follow and watch.

His wings flapped in place until, at last, he rose in the air.  After that, he flew into the night, towards the moon, until he became a speck in the sky.

I looked back into the barn.  The carcass of Scooter’s cocoon was dissolving quietly into the ground leaving a vaguely human skeletal form of bone and ligaments.

I trudged back to the quadbike in a daze.  I kept looking up to the sky somehow expecting Scooter to fly back overhead but, I knew he was gone.  I also knew no one back at the station or the village would believe a word of it. 

I’d have to report something.  The journey back gave me time to think.  

Hell of a day.  Hell of a day.  

Memorial Park: Tendrils

Photo by KoolShooters on Pexels.com

“Together in life, together in rest, A mother’s love, forever blessed. In heaven’s embrace, they find peace, Their bond of love will never cease.”

He woke with a start but, it wasn’t like in the movies.  He didn’t sit bolt upright, sweating and screaming.  His eyes just opened, and his pupils dilated in the darkness.  A small light source, the moon or, maybe, a distant security light, offered some very faint luminosity in the gloom of the small grey and murky room.

He was sweating.  He felt his t-shirt clinging to his shoulders and back and his legs sticking to the mattress.  He knew the grey marl he wore would be darker all over.  His internal body temperature had risen.  He felt boiling hot and shiveringly cold all at once, as the sweat-drenched t-shirt cooled.  The room was cold.  It always was.

The coarse blanket felt as heavy as lead over his body.  He felt pinned in place.  He was laid flat on his back with his arms outside and along the top of the cover.  Goosebumps protruded as his fine arm hairs stood on end.  He blinked sweat from his eyes, feeling the sting of the saltiness in them.

He didn’t sit up.  There was no point in getting out of bed.  He had nowhere he could go and nothing he could do.  He had to ride it out as usual.  He’d wait until sleep, or the dawn crept up on him, whichever came first.  If he did sleep, he knew he’d dream the same dream.  Every night it was the same.  The dreams were vivid, they made him feel, they made him remember and relive.

He’d tried not sleeping.  He could manage a day or two but then the night would come, his eyes would ache, and he’d nod and sleep and dream again.  No escape.

He angled an ear and listened to the silence of the night.  He was so used to the noise of chatter, shouting, banging and slamming, that the stillness of the night gripped him.  It was just him and his thoughts.  Those invasive reflections of dread that come in the night.  Each contemplation bit sedately into his flesh.  Like leeches, suckered on to his skin, draining him of rationale, imbibing him with fear, dread and self-loathing in its place.

It always began with an itch.  Nothing more than a minor irritation in the centre of his chest.  A blemish perhaps.  A small lump, a pimple to be pinched and removed.  He squeezed it between his fingernails.  It hurt a little, then a lot.  A surging pain clutched him and froze him into a rigid bodily cramp.  He forced himself to move and adjust.  He shifted his weight slightly on the hard mattress, gaining some relief from the painful stiffness that encased him.   

He tried to remember the meditations he’d learned in those classes.  He inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly.  Trying to focus on the point his breath entered and left his body.  “This too shall pass” he whispered to himself.  The unease will pass, he thinks.  But it won’t.  Oh, how he wished he could exhale one final time. 

He summoned up the courage to close his eyes.  He twitched in place as slumber creeped upon him.   His mind drifted. 

He heard the laughter.  His child’s giggle.  It was contagious.  It led to his wife’s snorts.  She only did that when she found something hilarious.  He couldn’t remember what he’d said that was so funny.  He wasn’t laughing though.  His thoughts were elsewhere.  His mind was on the bottle.  It was almost full.  Heavy beneath his seat.  It had a couple of large mouthfuls already taken out of it.  Followed by breath spray and chewing gum.  He imagined it rolling gently in place, rocking with the motion of the car.  That glorious golden liquid sloshing tantalisingly.  He licked his lips.  His mouth was dry.  He felt the odour of whisky rising from his gut into his pharynx.  He reached for another chewing gum, feigning a chuckle to distract his wife from the fact it was his third chewing gum in the last hour.  He almost properly connected to them at that moment.  His chuckle, faked at first, rose barely perceptibly into a genuine laugh.  For a second, one magnificent second, it was him, the man she loved, the father to his child, he was there, he was present.  The second passed and the fear returned with a vengeance.  The anxiety of being caught.  After all the promises.  After the recriminations, the lies, and the final sobbing admissions.  The final chance given.  This weekend away.  An opportunity to rekindle what once was.   

The source of the itch was no pimple.  A microscopic thread, immeasurable in diameter, escaped a pore, diametrically aligned to his heart, in the centre of his torso.  It thickened as it hit the air, barely perceptible other than a slight irritant to him.  Akin to the touch of a spider.  He scraped a fingernail across it. 

Another tiny thread, a centimetre away, followed the last, breaking into air, striving to pull and reach something, anything, it could cling to.   Another thread surfaced through the skin.  Wiry. It became emboldened when outside of his body, they would thicken, as if they extracted nutrients from the atmosphere and grew stronger.  Bolder.

He submerged slowly, and warmly into his dreamscape.

His hands were on the steering wheel.  They were white knuckled in a tight and clammy grip.  He felt the anxiety of the moment remembered.  He felt the mint of the gum hot in his mouth.  He felt a bead of sweat run to the small of his back.  He felt the fuzziness of his whisky-soaked woolly cottoned brain.  He watched the windscreen wipers work valiantly against the pounding rain in a losing battle with the elements.  He heard their juddering movement against the glass.  The windscreen was steaming up. 

His eyes felt like rolling back into his head.  He’d overdone it.  He’d had too much of the bottle.  It was just supposed to take the edge off.  It was only to stop the shaking.  Instead, he felt sick to his stomach.  He wanted to wail and sob and crawl on his knees over broken glass seeking forgiveness one more time.  He wanted to throw open the door and disappear into the road.  He no longer knew Recognised himself.  Who was detestable man, a joke of a father and a husband?

The rough blanket had been forced down the bed beyond his toes.  His t-shirt and short had split open at the seams, force by the pressure of the multiplying tendrils secreting from his skin. It was as though each centimetre of his epidermis had a fine tendril writhing in the air, reaching for purchase, and growing in gradual thickness, filling the space above his body.  Some clung to the bed, some reached toward the wall, extending beyond his prone figure, reaching for attachment.

His eyes rolled back into his head.  They gleamed white with visibly inflamed blood vessels within them, creating a meandering scrawl of red veins. The evocation of that day continued.

The radio was loud.  The music was indecipherable from the noise within the car.  It combined with the hammering of the rain, the jerky windscreen wipers, and the raucous laughter to create a cacophony.  It was a wall of sound penetrating his eardrums and causing his head to throb.  His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down and bile rose in his throat.  A panic burned behind his eyes and scorched his lungs in cavernous gasps.

Something dashed in front of the car.  A dark blur of movement streaked and distorted by the smeared rainwater and steamed windscreen.  His reaction and avoidance instinct kicked in a fraction too late.  The thud was loud and impactful.  Gravity felt lost as he shifted in his seat pushed by the force of the swerve he’d initiated.  He heard a screech of tyres.  He heard the roar of the engine.  He heard the melody of the music on the radio and the rub of the wipers on glass.  He heard screams.  His perspective spun.  The world tumbled out of control, spiralling before him.  Then everything was silent.  Blackness followed.      

Back in the room, his eyes rolled back into place.  Pupils fixed.  A thousand-yard stare.  Tears fell down his temples soaking the pillow beneath his head.  He saw the tendrils.  A magnificent constellation of tangled vines weaving and bobbing in the atmosphere above him.  Writhing like a nest of glistening black snakes.  His memories and regrets had taken form.

After the crash, he felt the wet tarmac on his cheek.  He cast a glance down to the ground.  It was wet with blood and rain.  Some of the blood was his but, most of it was theirs.  The road stretched out, to the edge of his vision, slick with it.  A deep crimson smear that followed the trajectory they had taken.  In the distance he saw the crumpled metal of what their car was once.  Broken glass was everywhere.  He felt himself swallowing some sharp fragments.  He smelled the petrol and the engine.  He smelled the booze on his weak breath as he laid still.  He did not see them, his wife and child but, he felt they were gone.  A gaping chasm consumed his heart and soul.  An abyss from which there was no escape.

The police confirmed he was the sole survivor. He had been thrown from the car.  They smelled the alcohol on him.  He was arrested in his hospital bed that very same day.  He was broken in body and mind.  The body would heal.  The mind would not. 

The tendrils surrounded him now.  Clinging to the walls and the bed, reaching to the sagging bunk above his body.  It enveloped him in a cocoon of regret and abhorrence.  Those black, ribboning vines interwove into a coarse layer that enclosed him.  The strands of his regret and self-loathing returned to him.  They wrapped him, circling his limbs like a constrictor.  They wound tighter and tighter as he felt the burning hatred of himself.  They enclosed his head and face becoming airtight.  Breath would not come; he did not struggle.  He accepted the tightening death grip of the tendrils upon and around him.  Suffocation was slow and warm and welcome.  He succumbed willingly.  He deserved this.  

A distant bell rang and awoke him.  Doors were clanging open further down the wing.  All prisoners being roused from their bunks.  The noise rumbled louder until it reached his cell.  The door swung open with a metallic thump.  Shouts, laughter and banging echoed across the wing.

A loud yawn came from the bunk overhead.  The bed rocked as his cell mate above him shifted his weight and swung his legs over to dangle over the side.  Feet suspended in mid-air.

He rubbed his eyes and face as his bunkmate dropped to the floor beside him.    

“I heard you in the night.” The bunkmate spoke.  “Mumbling to yourself.  Nightmares again, eh?  It happens every night.  I might have to ask for a different cell.  No offense”.

He turned away from his bunkmate and focused his gaze upon the underside of the bunk atop.  He looked at the interwoven wires and the grotty, thin mattress pressed upon it. 

Last night was not new to him.  It was the norm.  Whether imprisoned or not, it would remain the same.  He could never forgive himself.  He’d been sentenced to 36 months but, he’d resigned himself to his own punishment.  A life sentence of regret, remorse and hate.  He accepted his purgatory without parole.   

New for 2025: Memorial Park

This is a new series of short stories and flash fictions centered around the occupants of Memorial Park…

…Imagine a graveyard shrouded in mist, where the air is thick with mystery and the ordinary rules of reality seem to bend. The ancient tombstones, covered in ivy and moss, whisper secrets of the past. As you walk through, you notice that the shadows cast by the moonlight move independently, dancing to an unseen rhythm.

In this graveyard, the statues of angels and gargoyles come to life at midnight, their stone wings rustling as they stretch and take flight. The trees, gnarled and twisted, seem to shift and change positions when you’re not looking, their branches forming eerie shapes against the night sky.

The ground beneath your feet feels alive, pulsing with an otherworldly energy. Occasionally, you might catch a glimpse of ghostly figures, not in a state of unrest, but engaged in lively conversations or playing games from eras long past. The air is filled with the faint sound of music, as if an invisible orchestra is performing a hauntingly beautiful symphony.

In this extraordinary graveyard, time flows differently. You might find yourself stepping into a different era with each turn, encountering people from various points in history, all coexisting in this enchanted space. Here, the boundary between the living and the dead is blurred, and the extraordinary is just a part of the everyday.

Welcome to Memorial Park…

Flash Fiction: Christmas Special [Quartet 25]

The Naughty List

The suit was green, not red, fringes of dishevelled, blackened fur.  The beard was matted, and nicotine stained yellow, amongst the dirty grey and white.  The hands were gloved.  In one hand was a machete, in the other was the list.  It had been decided: zero tolerance for the naughty. 

ID Santa

The persistent smell capped off what had been a terrible Christmas.  The dishevelled, and soon bereft of pine needles, tree.  Zero presents underneath.  The half-cooked turkey and tepid overboiled vegetables. It was December 28^th when they found the guy in a red suit rotting, dead, and blocking the chimney.  

The Morning After the Night Before Christmas

So, he slept through after the Party?  He drank too much.  And he missed a day of work.  Plenty do.  Yeah, it’s an important job.  Yeah, a lot of people are depending on him.  But, cut Santa some slack.  It’s the first time he’s ever been too hungover to work.

Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer

The sound had come from the barn.  Snorting, grunting, snarling, and chewing.  Mrs. Claus entered and followed the sound.

“Santa?  That you?  You’re going to be late for w-”, she stopped in her tracks. 

Rudolph tore at the entrails of the wide-eyed and very dead Santa.  Blood stained his nose.

Flash Fiction: Quartet 24

Geraldo’s on the Case

The dog is an English Springer Spaniel named Geraldo.  Philip knows the dog as well as he knows its handler, Patrick.  Geraldo scuttles across the conveyor, over and around the cases.  Philip’s suitcase appears.  A click, barely perceptible to the human ear.  Geraldo ignores the Philip’s case and moves on.

Crossroads

This was the place on the card left under his door earlier that day.  It made promises.  Suggested a deal was to be made.  What was there to lose?  The only luck he’d ever known was the bad kind.  Maybe he deserved this chance.  In this life anyways.

He is Risen

I was shot.  I remember.  But the sensation of the bullet entering my body, me bleeding out, and breathing my last breath are lost to me.  Hours, maybe days, later, my eyes open.  A little cloudy and blurred.  Feeling stiff and sore.  With an insatiable hunger for human flesh.

There Might Be Giants

Sheriff Redding stepped down to the body, or what was left of him, laid out flat as the proverbial pancake.  A human rug punctured with bones, flesh and eight pints of blood framing his form.  The indentation in which he stood was a human footprint the size of an SUV.

Flash Fiction: Quartet 23

The Restorer

Rain falls on the window.  The rattling sound becomes white noise, a static soundtrack to his work.  He switches on the overhead fluorescent lighting.  The rain has darkened the natural light.  He continues diligently, stitching the disparate parts of his creation together.  To make her whole.  The next step: Resurrection.

Last Words

“Please, forgive me.” They were strange last words to hear.

Miller had seen plenty of people pass on.  As a paramedic, it came with the territory.  But this was different.  Weird.

The cops saw just how weird.  At his house, past the secret hatch, and inside the underground bunker.

Discovery

Eighteen months on board this craft.  Home and family left behind.  Not knowing if there would be a return.  No one had ever ventured this far into space.  Into the realm of another galaxy.  And there, in the distance was the speck of their destination.  A planet called Earth.

The Order

The voice spoke with unwavering authority.  It repeated the instruction once more.  He was certain now.  It had always spoken the truth.  It had never failed him.  But this was big.  The biggest challenge yet.  He was at the entrance gate.  His mantra “Get in.  Kill everyone.  And get out.” 

Flash Fiction: Quartet 22

Rolling Thunder Redux

The pilot was jacked up.  Knuckles white on the controls.  He opened the bomb bay doors.  No ground to air fire.  This would be the perfect drop.  The ultimate shock and awe.  The spectators at the air show in Fort Lauderdale didn’t know what was coming to them.

No Such Thing As…

“MUMMY!!”.  Cheryl enters the boy’s room.  He okay.  Just a nightmare.  She comforts him.  He shivers, hugging her tight, looking fearfully over her shoulder.  He points to the wardrobe.  “Monster” he whispers.  Cheryl follows his gaze, walks over to the wardrobe smiling back, “There’s no such thing as-“.  She’s gone.

Purgatory Package

The parcel, wrapped in brown paper, and tied with string, had to be signed for.  It was nondescript and shoebox sized.  The lid sealed tight with black candle wax.  Written atop in red marker read “Do not open!  Here be the abyss”.  He grabbed a knife and broke the seal.   

Lot #17

Vince drove homeward.  The lost property auction had gone well.  He’d won five cases.  The last, Lot#17, was a trunk.  Empty, it’d get him his day’s spending back.  He pulled over.  A knocking.  A flat tyre.  But the knocking didn’t stop. The tapping came from Lot#17. 

Flash Fiction: Quartet 21

Speakeasy

A soft 3-times rap on the door.  Eyes scan through the slot.  Bolts shift.  Everyone looks up.  Nervous.  Could be a raid.  Nerves disappeared after a few drinks.  A soundscape of music, laughter, whoops, and hollers.  Money and booze flowed in equal measure.  Fontaine surveyed his kingdom and drank milk.

The Trip

I gaze upon the city from the rooftop.  A million screaming souls before me.  Chaos reigns.  I escape the confines of my physical being.  I become primordial.  A God in my own image.  I will walk across mountain tops and chop down the sun with the edge of my hand.   

Fixing a Hole

The irony of burying a guy called Rocky (after the Stallone character, not Marciano) in a quarry was not lost on me.  Rocky found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, flirting with Sandrine: Charlie Pasello, a made man’s Goomah.  It was Rocky’s biggest, and last, mistake.

Lucifer Rising

It wasn’t even supposed to work.  Crowther suggested it.  He was always trying to spice up the parties with weird shit.  A corny pentagram in chalk on the floor lined with candles.  Sat in a circle.  Eyes closed. Then He spoke into their essence.  “I am He. Worship Me.  Obey.”

Flash Fiction: Quartet 20

Four Flash Fictions of 50 words or less…

Embrace

A loving, warming hug, shrouded in a woolly cotton brained rapturous sleep.  Clasping his arms around himself in an intimate and cozy embrace.  The canvas material is rough.  The sleeves long, bound, and steadfast.  The nurses check on him every twenty minutes.  It’s for his own good they say.      

Spree

He’d set fire to the bed where his mother lay.  The fire service arrived sometime later.  Once the fire was extinguished the remote cottage was ruinous, charred black, and smouldering.  They identified the mother and assumed his was the other body.  It was not.  His spree was about to begin.

Rogue

The blue lights flash, creating light and shadows in pulses.  The driver sits on the curb, cuffed hands behind his back.  The cop walks behind, muttering. In one hand a kilo of cocaine.  Enough is enough.  The cop aims the gun at the back of the driver’s head. Payback.

Patience

Fifteen years served.  Never grassed or told a soul about it.  He was hassled, bullied, threatened, and beaten.  He didn’t yield and tell them where it was.  Freedom.  He went there.  Careful not to be followed.  There stands a brand-new block of accommodation.  A lot can happen in fifteen years. 

Flash Fiction: Quartet 19

Invocation

“There is no need for darkness, candles, or pentagrams, my friends.  Silly follies of amateurs.  I am no amateur as your well spent coin avows.  This is your first foray into the spirit world, and I am to be your guide.” He smiled at their nervous energy.  The séance began.

Dark Age of Destiny

The sword was almost too heavy for the squire to wield.  His knight had fallen in the chaos of battle.  A heavier sword protruded through his bloodied armour.  Clashes of metal, screams of agony, and splatters of blood surrounded him.  He’d fight to the death for his knight’s honour.

Beyond Terrestrial

Plunkett set the Junk Shop door’s sign to “closed”.  He shuffled to the stockroom.  In the darkness a portable TV flickered and displayed static.  Plunkett checked the TV, gave it a bash, it was not plugged in. The screen rolled quickly and slowed as the image became clearer.  First contact. 

Welcome to the Cosmos

The man in the long grey coat and trilby stood upon the stage and grabbed the curtain.  “Come with me.  Those who are weary of this world.  For we have new worlds here.  Take a giant step outside your mind.” Those who followed were never seen again…in this world anyhow.

Flash Fiction: Quartet 18

Hosted

They said you can’t feel it but, you can.  “Such a tiny thing released into your ear.  You won’t even notice.”  I noticed.  It made me cough and gag.  And I feel it now, hooking itself onto my brain.  Gradually seizing control.  Our tiny new overlords from another world.

Creak

The creak on the stair wakes me every night.  Footsteps follow.  Faint at first, gathering volume as they make their way downstairs.  A murder happened here but not here.  Not really.  They tore the place down.  Where once stood a house, now stands a bungalow.  My home.  Haunted.

The Man from Oz

He’d have called himself a larrikin.  Came to visit with family but, thought he’d rip a few people off along the way and then scarper back to the other side of the world.  Got caught with his hands in the till, though, didn’t he?  He’s never going home. 

Frozen

That old chest freezer sure came in handy.  Funny how things work.  He’s in there freezing, while I’m out here awaiting a thaw.  When Spring comes and the earth softens, I’ll move him.  It’ll be worth the wait so when he’s buried, I can piss on his grave.

Flash Fiction: Quartet 17

Four Flash Fictions of 50 words or less…

Hardware

Some would-be killers is dumb.  Come into my store and buy all their BTK copycat shit in one haul.  No legal reason to stop ‘em.  I make a copy of their ID.  Say it’s store policy.  Keep the receipts and ID in a file.  For when the cops come calling. 

Something ain’t right in Boone Town

No children seen.  Elderly adults run Boone Town.  The sound of children, though.  Not laughter, not talking, grunts of an infant note.  Clear as day.  From the school.  It ain’t no school.  It’s a farm.  Dentures by day hide sharpened teeth by night.  The hunger for young flesh transcends all.

Duck

A slightly sun faded blue plastic duck, won at a fair, sits on my desk.  It stares silently and happily into space.  It has a smile on its yellow moulded beak.  Until today.  The eyes stare at me.  Into me.  The beak snarls downwards.  It is angry.  It wants blood.

The Visitors

The explosion rocked the street.  Windows shattered, car and house alarms rang out.  Neighbours streamed out of houses in puzzlement and wonder.  Eyes drawn to the night sky.  The brightly lit craft loomed large.  Landing vehicles exited from its core and swooped to the ground.  Destroying everything in their sights.

Flash Fiction: Quartet 16

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Flash fictions of 50 words or less.

Possession

The priests work in shifts.  Holed up in my room.  Chanting monotonous prayers.  Fighting the good fight to save my soul.  Mother brings them coffee and sandwiches. A picture of worry and fright.   They don’t know because they didn’t ask.  I am a willing host.  I asked for the Demon.

Last Christmas

A fingernail scraped at an edge of tape until it started to give, it became a tab that the nail could get under and find purchase to pull and begin unwrapping the present.  The box contained pink packing peanuts.  Pink from the blood that oozed within.  The wet warm heart.

Shock

We never knew what caused it.   He just came to school one day, a streak of white through the middle of his hair.  When asked, he never answered, he’d just stare off into the distance for minutes until something broke his trance. Kids would tease him to make it happen.

After the Waves

Routine was vital.  Routine was good.  Tend to the vegetables.  Pull water from the river.  Stock up the firewood.  So much to do each day.  Sunup to sunrise.  When the first wave came, she stayed put.  By the second, she knew no help was coming.  She left.  Found this place. 

Flash Fiction: Quartet 15

Four Flash Fictions of 50 words or less…

Absent

Never go to bed on an argument, they say.  We slept in separate beds last night.  I heard her in the morning but, didn’t get up to see her.  The house was empty when I awoke.  I’m not sure why I went to that particular drawer.  Her passport was gone.

Hooch 13

Marvin Gaye, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Aretha Franklin, James Brown.  Mortars, bullets, tracers, mines, agent orange, napalm.  Marijuana, Opium, Heroin, Speed, Alcohol.  A perfect fusion of survivors’ instinct and survivors’ guilt.  Bodies caked in mud, blood, sweat, and tears.  Eight thousand miles from home, with a thousand-yard stare.

Alone Again Or

In the cottage Bryan woke with a start.  Not sitting upright and sweating: this isn’t a movie.  His eyes blinked open, wide, adjusting to the dark, straining for a light source.  None to be found.  Secluded island.  No electricity.  Bryan, the only inhabitant.  Then who’s that knocking at the door?

Minxy’s Garage

Jump leads will do.  Hook them up to a car battery.  Plenty of them around in Minxy’s garage.  Minxy’s a facilitator for the firm.  The guy in the hotseat is Monroe.  He’s in the firm. Or was.  He talks to cops.  Now he’s going to talk to me. And scream.

Flash Fiction: Quartet 14

Four Flash Fictions using fifty words or under…

Bang Bang

My hand was shaking so much, I’m not sure how I even managed to hit the target.  He looked just as surprised.  It’s not like the movies.  He passed out, voided his bowels, and died silently in his own blood and excrement.  No poignant last words.  Just death.

Time’s Up

Long shadows on the driveway in the morning alerted me to their presence.  I’d had a good run.  Two years it took them to find me.  I’d heard of others who’d been found in two weeks.  I prayed I’d endure the inevitable torture.  If I can’t have it, they can’t.

A Stroll

The park was bathed in golden early morning sunshine.  The pathway was muddy after torrential rain.  I found my way easily.  The location engrained in my brain.  I could find my way in the dark and had before.  I was right to be concerned.  A finger had been exposed.

Breakdown

A flat and no spare.  Rain lashing down.  Cheryl slapped her hands on the steering wheel over and over again and screamed.  Blue lights flashed behind her.  Relax and compose yourself, she thought, they can help you.  Just don’t let them look in the boot.  She put on a smile.