The story should be no more than 4000 words.
Deadline: 18th December 2013
AM
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Story Idea 11
I have been able to see them since the seizure but recently I am beginning to think that they can see me too....
The story should be no more than 4000 words.
AM
The story should be no more than 4000 words.
AM
Idaho Kid
She wouldn't look at me. Not while this Idaho kid was around. Only a few weeks ago she was still coming over to my house at least twice a week, and whenever me and Stan turned up at the beach, it was never long before she appeared, beautiful Kimberley Vaughan with her golden hair and dirty mouth. We were going to change the world. Back then in the long days. We smoked, wrote songs on our thrift store guitars, and slowly planned the revolution.
It was going to be so easy, so obvious that the good would out, and our new land of opportunity, of peace and love would be born. Kim and I would get married and make speeches about what was wrong and what was right, and we'd have a family, five kids and a simple house with a small piece of land. Our destiny fulfilled.
But he changed everything. His name was Stevie, the Idaho kid and Stan said he was here for the whole Summer. He was good looking I had to admit, but real dumb. All brawn and no brain Ma would say and I tried to tell Kim he was only after one thing, but she wouldn't listen.
'You're so jealous Donald Hagen,' she would tease, biting her lip and twisting her hair around her fingers.
'I'm so not,' I'd tell her; but I was. Sick feeling in my stomach jealous. Couldn't eat for days jealous. 'I'm just worried for you,' I tell her. 'He's a stranger, why are you bothering with him. He'll be gone again soon enough.'
I couldn't lose her, not any part of her.
'Stevie says his folks are looking to move out west. His dad's company has an office out here and they're going to relocate.'
She poked me. 'What do you think of that?'
That's what they all say, I thought. And I'll be here to pick up the pieces again. Maybe that is my destiny; Kim will run off into the sunset with the Idaho kid and I'll grow an old man, still shaking his fist and waving the Stars and Stripes.
By Darren Seeley
It was going to be so easy, so obvious that the good would out, and our new land of opportunity, of peace and love would be born. Kim and I would get married and make speeches about what was wrong and what was right, and we'd have a family, five kids and a simple house with a small piece of land. Our destiny fulfilled.
But he changed everything. His name was Stevie, the Idaho kid and Stan said he was here for the whole Summer. He was good looking I had to admit, but real dumb. All brawn and no brain Ma would say and I tried to tell Kim he was only after one thing, but she wouldn't listen.
'You're so jealous Donald Hagen,' she would tease, biting her lip and twisting her hair around her fingers.
'I'm so not,' I'd tell her; but I was. Sick feeling in my stomach jealous. Couldn't eat for days jealous. 'I'm just worried for you,' I tell her. 'He's a stranger, why are you bothering with him. He'll be gone again soon enough.'
I couldn't lose her, not any part of her.
'Stevie says his folks are looking to move out west. His dad's company has an office out here and they're going to relocate.'
She poked me. 'What do you think of that?'
That's what they all say, I thought. And I'll be here to pick up the pieces again. Maybe that is my destiny; Kim will run off into the sunset with the Idaho kid and I'll grow an old man, still shaking his fist and waving the Stars and Stripes.
By Darren Seeley
Inspiration
The pub was quieter than usual for a Thursday night. The Specials were playing on the stereo and Bernard, Peter and Stephen were keeping time with their feet as they glanced around at the other punters in the hopes they would be recognised. That had happened a few times now, since they’d played live on So It Goes, and the lads had gotten a taste for it.
“My round!” Bernard announced as he eyed the punters at the bar and took off with a swagger.
Shortly after Ian walked into the pub and Peter and Stephen barely stifled their groans. They loved Ian, he was the centre of their universe and the band but when he was down, he dragged everyone else down with him, and they could tell from his bearing he was well down.
“Hey Ian.” Peter said as Ian sank into a chair at the table and lit up a fag.
Ian drew deeply and exhaled without making eye contact with either of them. His brow was furrowed, his mouth downturned. Neither Peter nor Stephen attempted speech again until Bernard returned with the round.
“Ian?” Bernard asked as he set down the drinks and it was clear he wasn’t asking for a drink order.
“It’s fucked. It’s so fucked.”
“What is?” asked Peter.
Ian pinned him with a gaze that held so much pain Peter wanted to look away.
“I’ve no control anymore.” Ian said as he dragged hard on his hand rolled.
“Control of what?” Bernard pushed.
“Me and Deb. It’s like we’re stuck in a routine, no ambition, but she resents my success like I’m leaving her behind, but I’m not, we’re just changing our ways, you know, taking different roads.”
Ian dragged deep on the cigarette, held his breath for a long time and then let the smoke burst forth from his lungs. The expelled cloud covered the inhabitants of the table.
“The bedroom is so cold; she always turns on her side, regardless of my timing. We seem to have lost respect for each other but some appeal is seeing us through. The other night she cried out in her sleep but she wasn’t crying out for me. I felt like a failure. I couldn’t stand the taste in my mouth, I felt desperate. How could something so good just not function no more.”
Stephen shifted uncomfortably. “Jesus, it’s like the antithesis of that Captain and Tenillle song.”
Ian wasn’t listening. He was staring into the distance in that way he did and humming a tune under his breath.
“What’s that tune?” Bernard asked, getting his attention.
Ian turned his wide eyes on him. “Just something playing around in my head, it won’t leave me alone.”
Bernard downed his pint in three big gulps and banged it noisily on the table as he stood. “Then let’s go and get it down man.”
By Dayv Metcalfe
“My round!” Bernard announced as he eyed the punters at the bar and took off with a swagger.
Shortly after Ian walked into the pub and Peter and Stephen barely stifled their groans. They loved Ian, he was the centre of their universe and the band but when he was down, he dragged everyone else down with him, and they could tell from his bearing he was well down.
“Hey Ian.” Peter said as Ian sank into a chair at the table and lit up a fag.
Ian drew deeply and exhaled without making eye contact with either of them. His brow was furrowed, his mouth downturned. Neither Peter nor Stephen attempted speech again until Bernard returned with the round.
“Ian?” Bernard asked as he set down the drinks and it was clear he wasn’t asking for a drink order.
“It’s fucked. It’s so fucked.”
“What is?” asked Peter.
Ian pinned him with a gaze that held so much pain Peter wanted to look away.
“I’ve no control anymore.” Ian said as he dragged hard on his hand rolled.
“Control of what?” Bernard pushed.
“Me and Deb. It’s like we’re stuck in a routine, no ambition, but she resents my success like I’m leaving her behind, but I’m not, we’re just changing our ways, you know, taking different roads.”
Ian dragged deep on the cigarette, held his breath for a long time and then let the smoke burst forth from his lungs. The expelled cloud covered the inhabitants of the table.
“The bedroom is so cold; she always turns on her side, regardless of my timing. We seem to have lost respect for each other but some appeal is seeing us through. The other night she cried out in her sleep but she wasn’t crying out for me. I felt like a failure. I couldn’t stand the taste in my mouth, I felt desperate. How could something so good just not function no more.”
Stephen shifted uncomfortably. “Jesus, it’s like the antithesis of that Captain and Tenillle song.”
Ian wasn’t listening. He was staring into the distance in that way he did and humming a tune under his breath.
“What’s that tune?” Bernard asked, getting his attention.
Ian turned his wide eyes on him. “Just something playing around in my head, it won’t leave me alone.”
Bernard downed his pint in three big gulps and banged it noisily on the table as he stood. “Then let’s go and get it down man.”
By Dayv Metcalfe
The Brightest Light
She told me she was over it, it bored her, she was sick of it. I didn't really understand that though, but I was prudent and said, "Oh yeah I would be too! Jesus, News flash! Boring!" She smiled thinly knowing I was trying to be funny and happy for that, but I could see the weight of it, oily heavy on her shoulders. She said she was due on stage in a few hours, and she had twenty minutes. I had only just met her, but she rested her head against my shoulder to 'forget everything.' I didn't say a word and fell asleep with her, when I awoke she was gone. She came to my room again that night and I became her secret lover. I would go to every show, no matter where in the world, be one of the audience, her always looking for me.
A week ago I got her call near midnight. I couldn't be on tour with her this time. It was early morning in Scotland, she was teary and needy, I wanted to feel her head on my shoulder, even though I was needed in Melbourne. Her natural detachment could not make her ask.
"I'm so sick of it! I, I am so sick and tired of everything! "
"I'll come." said I, muttering the sentiment she wanted to shout. She had said to me I smiled like the sun, and I wanted to bathe her in it.
It was a long journey, but I knew I could get to Glasgow in time. The passage was zombie, I only opened my eyes when they let us in and I got a seat close to the stage. When she appeared, with her long hair flaxen and glowing, I stood up, I willed her to see me. Her voice came melodic and exact, she swayed with her partner who moved with her but like a shadow. They vocalized oom pa pa's , trill assembly harmonically perfect, like watching two birds cooperate and dance their song routine. I was enraptured. I loved her so much and in that instant I feared it was the stage presence that stirred the cauldron of desire. I thought hard, and nearly sat down, but when her eyes scanned the crowd again I could see she had seen me, she was ecstatic and her left arm shot up, her presence bloomed, a crescendo, for me being there.
The song's interlude had her attempting peeks at me as she moved with her partner. They faced each other, they put their backs to each other, and when they began to sing again the words reached out to all the crowd, and they all stood up in response. No! They breathed in alarm, she could never be lonely with the crowd there, all twenty thousand of us, she could never be lonely with us facing her, even though it was her brilliant and beautiful shadow that sang those words. I remembered back to a conversation we had had in Melbourne, that was where I had met her, those years ago, after the concert at the Myer Music Bowl in 1976. She said that her marriage was a sham, it was constructed because the band's architects wanted to reach into the family unit, and they needed marriages to depict the right message. She said it was the loneliest thing, especially on stage when you faced your fans. I asked how anyone could ever be so lonely but her reserved resignation surfaced, and she kissed my lips and took my hands without an answer. The precious minutes passed and our heart beats raced in physical exertion, the pheromones filled the air and I hated her faux husband and her success. I said to her, and she caught her breath - "What if your success never ends?" The tears welled in her blue eyes, they fell onto our hands and I knew that it would never end, I would be cast aside by the machinery that used her as a doll on a music box. She saw my understanding and gripped me.
"I think about you always, I want you in the crowd, you are brighter than the brightest stage light, your beams blind me with it. If I know you are there everything is so different! Please, I go crazy if you aren't there!" With those words my own hands gripped hers and my tears made crescents in my eyes, I replied:
"I could be part of your crowd eternally, your silent, secret and greatest trouper, honestly, I could, but what about my feelings?" She looked at me suddenly motionless and emotionless, considering.
"I can't afford to care about your feelings." Her eyes were clear, sharp. Her eye shadow gas blue, like a Nordic fjord. She got up like a Queen and left the room without turning to look at me, swirling the scent of amber, musk and powerful jasmine.
I went back to my room, and thought of my life. I had followed the beautiful blonde women for many years, and always she had rested her head on my shoulder and seemed so glad that I was there. Was I living a fantasy? A curtain suddenly lifted, and I shivered in the Glasgow Hotel room. That night was their last performance for the year, I would be there as usual, and wish for her to see me and smile. When I arrived my mental state was different, there was no magic in the air, the sense of great expectation, of kismet, and the sureness that my secret affair would be acknowledged by her when she saw me in the crowd.
Reality, and a note of danger touched me as I watched my, lover? Some men were watching me, one nodded to another, and another moved around the crowd. My lover shot her arm in the air in recognition of me as her shadow sang about the brightest light, but we hadn't even made eye contact, in fact, she was looking at the crowd generally. Had she been drugged? The curtain in my mind lifted further, of her resting her head against my shoulder, her, head? I caught my breath, and thought of all the souvenir brochures I had bought over the years. Her words to me? The vinyl on the floor arranged and lined up to deliver her specific words. True hit me, but I could not deal with it, I stood up and waved my arms at my flaxen haired lover, shouting "You are not alone! You are not alone!" The men moved in. As a hand grabbed my shoulder I had to slump and admit it, I was a fucking deluded stalker..
By Andy Parker
A week ago I got her call near midnight. I couldn't be on tour with her this time. It was early morning in Scotland, she was teary and needy, I wanted to feel her head on my shoulder, even though I was needed in Melbourne. Her natural detachment could not make her ask.
"I'm so sick of it! I, I am so sick and tired of everything! "
"I'll come." said I, muttering the sentiment she wanted to shout. She had said to me I smiled like the sun, and I wanted to bathe her in it.
It was a long journey, but I knew I could get to Glasgow in time. The passage was zombie, I only opened my eyes when they let us in and I got a seat close to the stage. When she appeared, with her long hair flaxen and glowing, I stood up, I willed her to see me. Her voice came melodic and exact, she swayed with her partner who moved with her but like a shadow. They vocalized oom pa pa's , trill assembly harmonically perfect, like watching two birds cooperate and dance their song routine. I was enraptured. I loved her so much and in that instant I feared it was the stage presence that stirred the cauldron of desire. I thought hard, and nearly sat down, but when her eyes scanned the crowd again I could see she had seen me, she was ecstatic and her left arm shot up, her presence bloomed, a crescendo, for me being there.
The song's interlude had her attempting peeks at me as she moved with her partner. They faced each other, they put their backs to each other, and when they began to sing again the words reached out to all the crowd, and they all stood up in response. No! They breathed in alarm, she could never be lonely with the crowd there, all twenty thousand of us, she could never be lonely with us facing her, even though it was her brilliant and beautiful shadow that sang those words. I remembered back to a conversation we had had in Melbourne, that was where I had met her, those years ago, after the concert at the Myer Music Bowl in 1976. She said that her marriage was a sham, it was constructed because the band's architects wanted to reach into the family unit, and they needed marriages to depict the right message. She said it was the loneliest thing, especially on stage when you faced your fans. I asked how anyone could ever be so lonely but her reserved resignation surfaced, and she kissed my lips and took my hands without an answer. The precious minutes passed and our heart beats raced in physical exertion, the pheromones filled the air and I hated her faux husband and her success. I said to her, and she caught her breath - "What if your success never ends?" The tears welled in her blue eyes, they fell onto our hands and I knew that it would never end, I would be cast aside by the machinery that used her as a doll on a music box. She saw my understanding and gripped me.
"I think about you always, I want you in the crowd, you are brighter than the brightest stage light, your beams blind me with it. If I know you are there everything is so different! Please, I go crazy if you aren't there!" With those words my own hands gripped hers and my tears made crescents in my eyes, I replied:
"I could be part of your crowd eternally, your silent, secret and greatest trouper, honestly, I could, but what about my feelings?" She looked at me suddenly motionless and emotionless, considering.
"I can't afford to care about your feelings." Her eyes were clear, sharp. Her eye shadow gas blue, like a Nordic fjord. She got up like a Queen and left the room without turning to look at me, swirling the scent of amber, musk and powerful jasmine.
I went back to my room, and thought of my life. I had followed the beautiful blonde women for many years, and always she had rested her head on my shoulder and seemed so glad that I was there. Was I living a fantasy? A curtain suddenly lifted, and I shivered in the Glasgow Hotel room. That night was their last performance for the year, I would be there as usual, and wish for her to see me and smile. When I arrived my mental state was different, there was no magic in the air, the sense of great expectation, of kismet, and the sureness that my secret affair would be acknowledged by her when she saw me in the crowd.
Reality, and a note of danger touched me as I watched my, lover? Some men were watching me, one nodded to another, and another moved around the crowd. My lover shot her arm in the air in recognition of me as her shadow sang about the brightest light, but we hadn't even made eye contact, in fact, she was looking at the crowd generally. Had she been drugged? The curtain in my mind lifted further, of her resting her head against my shoulder, her, head? I caught my breath, and thought of all the souvenir brochures I had bought over the years. Her words to me? The vinyl on the floor arranged and lined up to deliver her specific words. True hit me, but I could not deal with it, I stood up and waved my arms at my flaxen haired lover, shouting "You are not alone! You are not alone!" The men moved in. As a hand grabbed my shoulder I had to slump and admit it, I was a fucking deluded stalker..
By Andy Parker
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Story Idea 10
Choose a famous song from the 1980's and turn it into a short story without revealing the title of the song.
E.g. Tommy reflected on his past as a dock worker....
The story should be no more than 4000 words.
AM
E.g. Tommy reflected on his past as a dock worker....
The story should be no more than 4000 words.
Deadline: 10th November 2013
AM
15 To Go
Kidneys kidneys everywhere and not one for mum.
Mum, don't make me an orphan. Don't die for want of an organ. I suppose if you did my name would fit, Little Orphan Annie. Except I wasn't so little, and I was 40 and grey as a Wizard. I watched mum breathing shallowly, her skin greenish, she'd need dialysis soon . I watched people walking around the hospital, watched their backs. Kidneys kidneys everywhere, but not a spare for mum. Not only that, there were fifteen wastes of space before her, don't tell me how I know they were wastes of space, I just know, I have intuition, I have powers. They would have burned me for a witch back in the day, and I would have deserved it.
Mum got her dialysis and we went home, she'd be okay for a day or two, before the green started coming back, It should be me that was green, a natural hue though, witch green. I'd be proud of mums deepest lime, if I could get that colour I'd file my teeth to points, just to complete the look. When we got home we drank tea and talked about nicer times. She was sweet my mother, she saw the little things in life, the budding trees, the droning bees. She saw the clouds fleet in wonder, and I couldn't understand. To me it was all a whoosh and the spinning world, spinning like my head, dark corners and cobwebs and fear and hate. Why had this fair lady given birth to a witch like me? She didn't deserve it, she deserved a loving son, or a version of her. A daughter that could sit still with her and sip tea and marvel at the little things.
When I got home, I went straight to my books. Black books, bound in leather. Gothic and smelling of night. Death spells, I wanted death spells. I needed 15, or at least 12. Throughout the night I gathered the information I needed, and in the morning I went into the countryside to find ingredients. I needed mandrake and juniper berries, hawthorne and hazel. The hedgerows provided for me, as they did my ancient sisters. Passer bys smiled and nodded, curious, respectful because they thought I was foraging for food, which was more than acceptable these days. It seemed it was okay to peel a rabbit off the road for dinner, something to do with cooking shows. I did scrape up a hedgehog, but not to eat. I nipped of sprigs of comfrey, I plucked white Bella Donna, into a jar I placed deep red yew berries. I got three types of mosses, six types of fungi and at dusk, I found the last thing I needed, the blood of a child. It is easy to trick a child, and when the little boy came to look at the squashed hedgehog I held out at him, I pierced the back of his hand with a quill, I didn't need much, just a drop and his suddenly watery eyes brightened when I told him it was the luckiest thing in the world to be spiked by a hedgehog.
I got back to my apartment and lay out the ingredients, all looked good, all looked evil, as a collection. In corners shadows scuttled and the lights flickered. From the deepest shadow my familiar padded, Mr Ruth, who slinked up to purr darkly. I quote scripture to my familiar :
" Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument having teeth: thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat [them] small, and shalt make the hills as chaff."
I laughed hysterically, raising my arms and stretching out my fingers like two solid branches ending in curved twigs. Mr Ruth recoiled slightly and I gleamed for a moment before saying "Come on cat, I've got work to do."
I laid out a dozen death spells, all missing the DNA of the target. Correction, I knew one of the targets, but he would not be my first choice, being family. Uncle Bert had a crap kidney but it was all his own fault. He admitted it with a toot and shake of the head, "the bottle dear, I always loved the bottle." Well die then, I always thought.
Uncle Bert it was. I easily got hold of his essence, for I cut his hair every other week.
"How's it going love? what's the news? Oh for a drop. How I wish I rationed out the drop. I could have got it just right, matching my last swig with the moment of death. Instead I have bludgeoned my kidneys."
"Oh Uncle Burt you will grow new Kidneys!"
"Not kidneys love, liver yes, but not my fucking kidneys. I'm on the list, just like your Ma." I shrugged hoping it looked sympathetic, then slipped a lock of his greying hair into my pocket. That night I made the first death spell. I did have a moment of fear for as the ingredients merged through hammer and salve, the shadows shuddered in their corners and Mr Ruth yowled, the front door banged open but I smiled, I knew whatever worked the door was going out, not in.
I had worked three other death spells before my mother asked me about Uncle Burt. "Poor Burt, he fell down dead. I saw it, it was like the door burst open and fingers reached in to snap his heart between thumb and forefinger. It was horrible."
"Heart attacks are Mum, poor Uncle Burt."
"No I mean, the door really did bang open." I looked at Mum, she knew I was odd and her expression was questioning. I had to shrug in that way I do, dismiss her as if she were a child and then say something.
"Up to number 11 in the list of kidneys mum! Wont it be great when you don't have to come in to hospital to have your blood cleaned!" She looked at me, looked at her hands, then looked back and said:
"Just as long as it's clean dear." I hated those words, they chided me.
"Kidney soon mum, kidney soon."
Number nine was a battle. Unbeknownst to me, she was also a witch. When I scratched her, pretending to be a clumsy nurse, her eyes flicked onto mine like magnets of green.
"What are you up to cunt?" Her teeth were showing as she breathed heavily. Her eyes, so green, flamed and her nostrils flared. "Do I know you?" I gave my shrug and she screamed in understanding. Real nurses bustled in and I backed out, feeling her skin under an index finger's nail. Shadows in corners cheered and recoiled in unison. I had to work quickly. The dying witch woman would want to cast spells too. I had to send her a powerful execution. I smeared a mixture of Yew Berry and Boys blood across a splinter of flint, then drove it under my thumb nail. The pain was terribly exquisite. My own blood and pain joined the concoction, and from my thumb burst a dark genie, he looked back at me with supreme confidence then smoked under the door and to my dark sister, kidney number nine.
With disregard to safety, I wanted to see the occurrence. I muttered a phrase, and a sparrow came. Within its soul I boarded, and we sped to the hospital on clever brown wings. The witch was gnashing her teeth, her hand clutching her side. She looked from left to right, she made shapes with her hands. She knew. The door did not bang open, under it came the spirit. He made smoke solid in the form of a Neanderthal, a kindly one that smiled as he closed her mouth with massive hands. He sat on her, and waited, a jowly grin that seemed to say he was doing her a favour. When she stilled, he fell apart, but not before he looked at the sparrow, suddenly frowning. Had I done something wrong? Was the frown a warning or was it displeasure at me for watching, was I being narcissistic? Who cared, I was down to just 8. Pleasure coursed through me at the prospect of more death spells, that was only slightly dented when I learned the next morning that number 1 on the list had got his donor kidney, someone had died in a car accident.
It is very taxing creating spells that dish out murder. The work the inner spirit must perform is immense, and at that coal face primeval couplings bat at each other like sea and land, forest and field. One swings one way, to be taken back by the next, to swing again like a pendulum of existence. I was laid up for many weeks and could perform no spells. Some darkness was being fought, perhaps the spirit of kidney number 9. When I felt the battle over, and my spirit bright again, I went straight to work but to my horror the spell were barren. I collected new ingredients and ruthlessly took the blood of a child by pushing one over and dabbing at the scraped knee . Nothing, no power in the spell. The ability had been robbed of me, and I was reminded of the genies displeasure at my voyeurism.
I was fucking furious. I had no time for my mother for which this was all about and with dreadful realisation I knew it was really all about me and my penchant for witchcraft. I had justified my murders by saying I was the champion of Mum. So what, I thought, I lied to myself, so what. Darkly, I went to the books. If Death Spells would not do, then there was something else, something much more awful, ancient and calamitous that I could call on, even if it ruined me. Shape Shifter.
The ingredients were laughingly banal and available in most refrigerators. It was like buttering bread, literally. With just one unusual topping. The animal I must become, would have to sniff it, reject it, then piss on it. But how? I bought a camera trap and placed the buttered bread on the back lawn. The bread was always eaten by a fox. I would love to become the fox, but, as I say, it always ate the bread. A hedgehog gave it a few bites but didn't urinate on it, and the rabbits had a nibble. Eventually, the animal I was to become slinked up through darkness, sniffed it, then sprayed a fine mist of piss all over the offered bread and butter. Of course, it was the cat.
That night, with the list of the last 8 on a table in front of me, I gobbled down the bread and butter cat piss sandwich and with disgust and nausea awaited developments. I looked at number 8. Catherine Tigerlilly, nice name, a woman in her twenties, poor minx, genetically bad kidneys. She lived in Purfleet, how appropriate I thought as the table suddenly towered over me. There was no pain in the transformation, just a sudden sense of danger. I wasn't a human sized cat, I was a cat! How on earth could a cat commit 8 murders., it would surely take all 9 lives.
By Andy Parker
Mum, don't make me an orphan. Don't die for want of an organ. I suppose if you did my name would fit, Little Orphan Annie. Except I wasn't so little, and I was 40 and grey as a Wizard. I watched mum breathing shallowly, her skin greenish, she'd need dialysis soon . I watched people walking around the hospital, watched their backs. Kidneys kidneys everywhere, but not a spare for mum. Not only that, there were fifteen wastes of space before her, don't tell me how I know they were wastes of space, I just know, I have intuition, I have powers. They would have burned me for a witch back in the day, and I would have deserved it.
Mum got her dialysis and we went home, she'd be okay for a day or two, before the green started coming back, It should be me that was green, a natural hue though, witch green. I'd be proud of mums deepest lime, if I could get that colour I'd file my teeth to points, just to complete the look. When we got home we drank tea and talked about nicer times. She was sweet my mother, she saw the little things in life, the budding trees, the droning bees. She saw the clouds fleet in wonder, and I couldn't understand. To me it was all a whoosh and the spinning world, spinning like my head, dark corners and cobwebs and fear and hate. Why had this fair lady given birth to a witch like me? She didn't deserve it, she deserved a loving son, or a version of her. A daughter that could sit still with her and sip tea and marvel at the little things.
When I got home, I went straight to my books. Black books, bound in leather. Gothic and smelling of night. Death spells, I wanted death spells. I needed 15, or at least 12. Throughout the night I gathered the information I needed, and in the morning I went into the countryside to find ingredients. I needed mandrake and juniper berries, hawthorne and hazel. The hedgerows provided for me, as they did my ancient sisters. Passer bys smiled and nodded, curious, respectful because they thought I was foraging for food, which was more than acceptable these days. It seemed it was okay to peel a rabbit off the road for dinner, something to do with cooking shows. I did scrape up a hedgehog, but not to eat. I nipped of sprigs of comfrey, I plucked white Bella Donna, into a jar I placed deep red yew berries. I got three types of mosses, six types of fungi and at dusk, I found the last thing I needed, the blood of a child. It is easy to trick a child, and when the little boy came to look at the squashed hedgehog I held out at him, I pierced the back of his hand with a quill, I didn't need much, just a drop and his suddenly watery eyes brightened when I told him it was the luckiest thing in the world to be spiked by a hedgehog.
I got back to my apartment and lay out the ingredients, all looked good, all looked evil, as a collection. In corners shadows scuttled and the lights flickered. From the deepest shadow my familiar padded, Mr Ruth, who slinked up to purr darkly. I quote scripture to my familiar :
" Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument having teeth: thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat [them] small, and shalt make the hills as chaff."
I laughed hysterically, raising my arms and stretching out my fingers like two solid branches ending in curved twigs. Mr Ruth recoiled slightly and I gleamed for a moment before saying "Come on cat, I've got work to do."
I laid out a dozen death spells, all missing the DNA of the target. Correction, I knew one of the targets, but he would not be my first choice, being family. Uncle Bert had a crap kidney but it was all his own fault. He admitted it with a toot and shake of the head, "the bottle dear, I always loved the bottle." Well die then, I always thought.
Uncle Bert it was. I easily got hold of his essence, for I cut his hair every other week.
"How's it going love? what's the news? Oh for a drop. How I wish I rationed out the drop. I could have got it just right, matching my last swig with the moment of death. Instead I have bludgeoned my kidneys."
"Oh Uncle Burt you will grow new Kidneys!"
"Not kidneys love, liver yes, but not my fucking kidneys. I'm on the list, just like your Ma." I shrugged hoping it looked sympathetic, then slipped a lock of his greying hair into my pocket. That night I made the first death spell. I did have a moment of fear for as the ingredients merged through hammer and salve, the shadows shuddered in their corners and Mr Ruth yowled, the front door banged open but I smiled, I knew whatever worked the door was going out, not in.
I had worked three other death spells before my mother asked me about Uncle Burt. "Poor Burt, he fell down dead. I saw it, it was like the door burst open and fingers reached in to snap his heart between thumb and forefinger. It was horrible."
"Heart attacks are Mum, poor Uncle Burt."
"No I mean, the door really did bang open." I looked at Mum, she knew I was odd and her expression was questioning. I had to shrug in that way I do, dismiss her as if she were a child and then say something.
"Up to number 11 in the list of kidneys mum! Wont it be great when you don't have to come in to hospital to have your blood cleaned!" She looked at me, looked at her hands, then looked back and said:
"Just as long as it's clean dear." I hated those words, they chided me.
"Kidney soon mum, kidney soon."
Number nine was a battle. Unbeknownst to me, she was also a witch. When I scratched her, pretending to be a clumsy nurse, her eyes flicked onto mine like magnets of green.
"What are you up to cunt?" Her teeth were showing as she breathed heavily. Her eyes, so green, flamed and her nostrils flared. "Do I know you?" I gave my shrug and she screamed in understanding. Real nurses bustled in and I backed out, feeling her skin under an index finger's nail. Shadows in corners cheered and recoiled in unison. I had to work quickly. The dying witch woman would want to cast spells too. I had to send her a powerful execution. I smeared a mixture of Yew Berry and Boys blood across a splinter of flint, then drove it under my thumb nail. The pain was terribly exquisite. My own blood and pain joined the concoction, and from my thumb burst a dark genie, he looked back at me with supreme confidence then smoked under the door and to my dark sister, kidney number nine.
With disregard to safety, I wanted to see the occurrence. I muttered a phrase, and a sparrow came. Within its soul I boarded, and we sped to the hospital on clever brown wings. The witch was gnashing her teeth, her hand clutching her side. She looked from left to right, she made shapes with her hands. She knew. The door did not bang open, under it came the spirit. He made smoke solid in the form of a Neanderthal, a kindly one that smiled as he closed her mouth with massive hands. He sat on her, and waited, a jowly grin that seemed to say he was doing her a favour. When she stilled, he fell apart, but not before he looked at the sparrow, suddenly frowning. Had I done something wrong? Was the frown a warning or was it displeasure at me for watching, was I being narcissistic? Who cared, I was down to just 8. Pleasure coursed through me at the prospect of more death spells, that was only slightly dented when I learned the next morning that number 1 on the list had got his donor kidney, someone had died in a car accident.
It is very taxing creating spells that dish out murder. The work the inner spirit must perform is immense, and at that coal face primeval couplings bat at each other like sea and land, forest and field. One swings one way, to be taken back by the next, to swing again like a pendulum of existence. I was laid up for many weeks and could perform no spells. Some darkness was being fought, perhaps the spirit of kidney number 9. When I felt the battle over, and my spirit bright again, I went straight to work but to my horror the spell were barren. I collected new ingredients and ruthlessly took the blood of a child by pushing one over and dabbing at the scraped knee . Nothing, no power in the spell. The ability had been robbed of me, and I was reminded of the genies displeasure at my voyeurism.
I was fucking furious. I had no time for my mother for which this was all about and with dreadful realisation I knew it was really all about me and my penchant for witchcraft. I had justified my murders by saying I was the champion of Mum. So what, I thought, I lied to myself, so what. Darkly, I went to the books. If Death Spells would not do, then there was something else, something much more awful, ancient and calamitous that I could call on, even if it ruined me. Shape Shifter.
The ingredients were laughingly banal and available in most refrigerators. It was like buttering bread, literally. With just one unusual topping. The animal I must become, would have to sniff it, reject it, then piss on it. But how? I bought a camera trap and placed the buttered bread on the back lawn. The bread was always eaten by a fox. I would love to become the fox, but, as I say, it always ate the bread. A hedgehog gave it a few bites but didn't urinate on it, and the rabbits had a nibble. Eventually, the animal I was to become slinked up through darkness, sniffed it, then sprayed a fine mist of piss all over the offered bread and butter. Of course, it was the cat.
That night, with the list of the last 8 on a table in front of me, I gobbled down the bread and butter cat piss sandwich and with disgust and nausea awaited developments. I looked at number 8. Catherine Tigerlilly, nice name, a woman in her twenties, poor minx, genetically bad kidneys. She lived in Purfleet, how appropriate I thought as the table suddenly towered over me. There was no pain in the transformation, just a sudden sense of danger. I wasn't a human sized cat, I was a cat! How on earth could a cat commit 8 murders., it would surely take all 9 lives.
By Andy Parker
He Will Provide
(Excerpts from Annie’s Reynolds journal)
27th June 2013
It’s been days since I found out and I can’t stop crying. Even now tears are blurring my vision and smudging these words. All my life I’ve heard people talk about heartache, I even thought I’d had it a few times, but this feeling, this horrific pain, couldn’t be summed up by such an innocuous sounding word. The pain in my heart is unrelenting. The only reprieve I get is when I wake in the morning and for just the briefest moment my mind is blank, the pain; absent. Then I remember and in the blink of an eye its back. I can’t fathom how such a perfectly healthy organ could be causing me so much pain.
I’m worried about how it will be at the end. I don’t think I can endure any more than this.
I’ve been trying to control my tears around Mum. She keeps saying I’m crying like she’s already dead. I just can’t get passed the fact that I believe she won’t survive. She’s fifteenth on that heart transplant list and she’s only been given six months to live. When I spoke to the nurse she said some people waited for years. This pain comes from the knowledge that she’s not going to make it. I’m sure of it. She will leave and my world will never be the same.
30th July 2013
Mum’s been on the list for thirty three days. During that time one person has come off, having received a donor heart, and one person has been added. Apparently they are a higher priority than mum so she remains in fifteenth place. I told the doctor this wasn’t fair. How was mum supposed to work her way up the list if people jumped the queue? Mum said, "It’s God’s will. If he wants me to live he will provide."
I’m having a hard time with the religious thing. I’ve always let her be with her beliefs before, assuming no harm could come of it. Now I know I was wrong with that approach. Instead of clinging to life (and me) with a positive fighting spirit, she is quietly accepting, trusting in some plan a fictional character has for her. It makes me want to tear my hair out. Yes I want to be a supportive daughter and I want her to be comforted but I am sick of sharing her heart with a myth.
4th July 2013
Went to visit mum today, her face is swollen from the meds and her skin has taken on a greyish hue. I faked a sore stomach and went and cried in the toilet. My mum is fading away and there is nothing I can do.
6th July 2013
It’s 3am and I still haven’t slept. I had a thought earlier and it won’t leave me alone. What if mum was further up the list? The people ahead of her are just as sick, if not sicker, than her, what if their hearts gave out? Mum had been warned to avoid exercise and undue excitement – what would it take to make a fragile heart stop? Is it considered murder if you scare someone to death? I don’t think it is.
7th July 2013
I got the list! I can’t bring myself to write down what I had to do to get it, but I got it. The Hippocratic Oath doesn’t hold as much sway these days as I hope it used to.
10th July 2013
Today the pain in my heart is almost bearable. There’s an excitement building in me that is masking it nicely. I’ve taken action and that has given me the illusion of control. I had a moment, as the envelopes left my hand and disappeared into the red post box, when I was assailed by doubt. The contents of those envelopes could mean the end of someone’s life. I knew this, that was my intention, but once those envelopes left my hand I began to think of my potential victims as people and not just names on a list. People with families that wanted them to live as desperately as I wanted mum to. I can’t think like this – yes, they are people but they are not important to me, all that is important is saving mum.
13th July 2013
I am becoming obsessed with the obits. I’m buying every newspaper out there and scanning for the names on the list. Today three of them appeared. I thought I’d be consumed with guilt but I wasn’t, I was thrilled - it was like seeing my numbers come up in the lotto. Still, as I read the sympathy messages an uneasy feeling settled in my gut. It helped to dehumanise them and think of them as the numbers they were on the list. They are just obstacles in my path. It helped even more when I realised that the fake scratch cards I’d sent were only responsible for two of the deaths; numbers twelve and four. Number twenty six had died in a car accident.
14th July 2013
Took mum for check up on her pacemaker today. Her Doctor told us she had moved up two places on the list. I said "Fantastic!" Mum said "God will provide."
How can she think that? If she believes in God’s will then surely he was the one that gave her the heart disease in the first place!
I want to tell her what I’m doing, how I’m providing for her, not God but of course I can’t.
15th July 2013
Today I paid two of the teens from the council flats down the road to dress in ‘Scream’ masks and target the list members in ground floor flats. They jumped out at them when they neared their windows. One of them had a retractable knife that he hit against the windows. I’m not sure how fruitful this action was, from where I was hiding I heard screams but none of them were followed up by ambulance sirens. I’ll have to wait to see what shows up in the obits.
17th July 2013
I’m concerned. Three more people have died from the list, though not in mum’s favour – numbers nineteen, twenty-three and twenty five. The obits sighted their causes of death to be car accidents. This just doesn’t feel right to me. Four people from the list have now died in car accidents. What if someone has had the same idea as me? If so, their loved one is lower on the list than mum which puts her in the firing line. I’m probably just being paranoid – Oh God, I don’t think I am!
20th July 2013
I’m scared. Number twenty four has died in a car accident. The funeral is tomorrow and it’s open so I’m going to attend and see what I can find out.
21st July 2013
I really don’t know what to do. I managed to talk to number twenty fours cousin and the police are suspicious of her death. She didn’t have a drivers licence but she’d been found dead in the driver’s seat of a stolen car; the apparent victim of a hit and run collision. The suspicion came from the traces of a substance around her mouth which may or may not have been chloroform. I’m now convinced someone is murdering these people but I can’t go to the police without exposing my own intentions with the list. I can’t just wait until they try to get at mum, I have to do something.
23rd July 2013
I think I’ve found him. The first victim was number twenty six on a list of thirty, leaving me three possible suspects. Number twenty eights brother was extremely over protective of her when I rang acting as a nurse from the hospital. He demanded to know what "we" were doing to save his sisters life and intimated he was the only one looking out for her interests. I’m going to go and talk to him. Maybe I can convince him to spare mum.
(Charing Cross Hospital 23rd July 2013)
Doctor Brown rushed into the consultation room where his patient was waiting. He knew she would be in shock, having had the news broken to her by policemen on her doorstep and then rushed over to the hospital. He noted her hands were shaking and he regretted he couldn’t give her time to deal with her grief but they were racing against the clock.
"Mrs Reynolds, I am sorry for your loss, but this gives us a great opportunity."
"I don’t understand." Mrs Reynolds cut in with a weak voice. "Annie couldn’t drive. She applied for her provisional years ago but she never learned. How could she have been driving that car?"
Doctor Brown cleared his throat, wishing he didn’t have to rush this fragile woman so much.
"I realise this is all a big shock for you but that’s what I wanted to talk to you about Mrs Reynolds. On Annie’s provisional license she left the organ donation check box clear. As her next of kin you can authorise the donation of her heart but we have to move fast."
Mrs Reynolds blinked at him and then smiled slightly. "No Doctor."
"No?" Doctor Brown frowned.
Again, that slight smile. "Doctor Brown, if God wants me to live I’ll move up that list of yours, I’ve already gone up two places. I’m not going to jump the queue. God will provide Doctor. Give that heart of my daughters to someone that needs it more. That’s what Annie would’ve wanted."
By Dayv Metcalfe
The List
It didn't matter that it was a heart.
It could have been a lung, or a liver. Anything, that without for some period of time, she could no longer survive and would slowly, or perhaps quickly die. But a heart made sense, was life itself and no-one could doubt its necessity. Some people can live without a liver can't they? For a while, and there's folks out there with only one lung.
Annie's mother needs a new heart. It's serious and Annie has been worried. Every day on her way to her mother's room in the hospital she walks down the stark corridors, dragging her feet on the tired linoleum and making syncopated squeaks with the toes of her sneakers. She glances through flapping doors into forbidden worlds of things that have gone wrong and the worried faces of those trying to put those things right again. Even where the babies are, there's always something to worry about.
Annie knows her mother won't see Thanksgiving. The doctors say this, but they offer hope in the form of a transplant from a suitable donor and Annie's mother is number fifteen on the list. Getting there seems an awfully long way off. Some distance point way beyond the time she has left to live Annie thinks.
In the room her mother is oddly free of foreign devices, tape and wires. As if, if she wished, she could sit up, swing her legs across the bed, slip to the floor and walk straight out of the hospital and hail a cab in the street to take her home.
But she is pale, and breathes with difficultly. Annie imagines her mother's tired and failing heart, wheezing and spluttering in her chest with every beat like an idling badly tuned lawnmower. She speaks to Annie quietly, with effort, and tells her stories of when she was younger, what a good girl she was and how she nearly didn't make it into the world because the cord got wrapped around her neck starving her of oxygen until a quick thinking nurse grabbed some scissors and cut it from around her neck and tossed it aside like a dangerous snake. Of how in the first few weeks she wouldn't feed, and this made Annie's mother feel helpless and worried. That her baby may die because then so young so new, it didn't know that it had to eat to survive and some reflex that should be there wasn't there. And unlike now with their immutable connection, their mother daughter bond, baby Annie couldn't understand her mother's desperate pleas.
Annie stroked the back of her mother's hand, taking care to not touch the green plastic butterfly where the intravenous cannula had been inserted. She ran a finger around the transparent edge of the plaster holding it in place and wished it didn't pinch her mother's skin so. Annie speaks to her mother and tells her all the things they will do when she is well.
They will fix things in the house and visit places they used to before this room became so unhappily familiar. Annie's mother's new heart will let her swim again, at Choke Canyon and in the gentle waves at Rockport beach. But it's so hard to imagine it now with her like this, shrunk and on hold, slighter than she really is. They imagine from whom her new heart will come, and they pray for someone young, and strong and please god Annie says, immortal.
Annie couldn't wait for fifteen other people on the list to be saved. Fifteen perfect arcs to occur before her mother can be promised a mere chance of life. Annie knew she must reduce the list but hadn't worked out the details of how. Not the chemistry or butchery or whatever it would take to see the heart, their heart cupped in a surgeon's hands ready to reanimate her dying mother. The task was daunting and irrevocable and it would take courage.
Annie's mother lived for another twelve years after the transplant. She ran eight marathons in that time and swam in the ocean every week in Rockport. She hadn't particularly wanted to blaze these trails preferring to perhaps tend her garden, read and take gentle day trips to the lakes. But she felt that she owed it to Annie to achieve something that would be extraordinary even for someone of her age who hadn't undergone such a life changing surgery. To know that Annie would be proud and had not acted in vain she couldn't rest, just exist to live an ordinary life.
She visited Annie almost every week, taking the three bus journey to the facility. They treated her differently to the other visitors. Subtle things, sometimes just a look but it wasn't a judgement, more of an acknowledgement of the terrible circumstances and of what she must be feeling for her daughter.
Annie killed nine of the people on the list before she was finally caught and incarcerated in the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville. Her mother was there when they gave Annie the lethal injection, saw her daughter's life taken because her own had been saved.
The press were there from every continent. The story was a sensation around the world, with its tragic Shakespearean plot exciting the public and eliciting much debate.
Someone made a movie about it. It did so-so at the box office.
By Darren Seeley
It could have been a lung, or a liver. Anything, that without for some period of time, she could no longer survive and would slowly, or perhaps quickly die. But a heart made sense, was life itself and no-one could doubt its necessity. Some people can live without a liver can't they? For a while, and there's folks out there with only one lung.
Annie's mother needs a new heart. It's serious and Annie has been worried. Every day on her way to her mother's room in the hospital she walks down the stark corridors, dragging her feet on the tired linoleum and making syncopated squeaks with the toes of her sneakers. She glances through flapping doors into forbidden worlds of things that have gone wrong and the worried faces of those trying to put those things right again. Even where the babies are, there's always something to worry about.
Annie knows her mother won't see Thanksgiving. The doctors say this, but they offer hope in the form of a transplant from a suitable donor and Annie's mother is number fifteen on the list. Getting there seems an awfully long way off. Some distance point way beyond the time she has left to live Annie thinks.
In the room her mother is oddly free of foreign devices, tape and wires. As if, if she wished, she could sit up, swing her legs across the bed, slip to the floor and walk straight out of the hospital and hail a cab in the street to take her home.
But she is pale, and breathes with difficultly. Annie imagines her mother's tired and failing heart, wheezing and spluttering in her chest with every beat like an idling badly tuned lawnmower. She speaks to Annie quietly, with effort, and tells her stories of when she was younger, what a good girl she was and how she nearly didn't make it into the world because the cord got wrapped around her neck starving her of oxygen until a quick thinking nurse grabbed some scissors and cut it from around her neck and tossed it aside like a dangerous snake. Of how in the first few weeks she wouldn't feed, and this made Annie's mother feel helpless and worried. That her baby may die because then so young so new, it didn't know that it had to eat to survive and some reflex that should be there wasn't there. And unlike now with their immutable connection, their mother daughter bond, baby Annie couldn't understand her mother's desperate pleas.
Annie stroked the back of her mother's hand, taking care to not touch the green plastic butterfly where the intravenous cannula had been inserted. She ran a finger around the transparent edge of the plaster holding it in place and wished it didn't pinch her mother's skin so. Annie speaks to her mother and tells her all the things they will do when she is well.
They will fix things in the house and visit places they used to before this room became so unhappily familiar. Annie's mother's new heart will let her swim again, at Choke Canyon and in the gentle waves at Rockport beach. But it's so hard to imagine it now with her like this, shrunk and on hold, slighter than she really is. They imagine from whom her new heart will come, and they pray for someone young, and strong and please god Annie says, immortal.
Annie couldn't wait for fifteen other people on the list to be saved. Fifteen perfect arcs to occur before her mother can be promised a mere chance of life. Annie knew she must reduce the list but hadn't worked out the details of how. Not the chemistry or butchery or whatever it would take to see the heart, their heart cupped in a surgeon's hands ready to reanimate her dying mother. The task was daunting and irrevocable and it would take courage.
Annie's mother lived for another twelve years after the transplant. She ran eight marathons in that time and swam in the ocean every week in Rockport. She hadn't particularly wanted to blaze these trails preferring to perhaps tend her garden, read and take gentle day trips to the lakes. But she felt that she owed it to Annie to achieve something that would be extraordinary even for someone of her age who hadn't undergone such a life changing surgery. To know that Annie would be proud and had not acted in vain she couldn't rest, just exist to live an ordinary life.
She visited Annie almost every week, taking the three bus journey to the facility. They treated her differently to the other visitors. Subtle things, sometimes just a look but it wasn't a judgement, more of an acknowledgement of the terrible circumstances and of what she must be feeling for her daughter.
Annie killed nine of the people on the list before she was finally caught and incarcerated in the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville. Her mother was there when they gave Annie the lethal injection, saw her daughter's life taken because her own had been saved.
The press were there from every continent. The story was a sensation around the world, with its tragic Shakespearean plot exciting the public and eliciting much debate.
Someone made a movie about it. It did so-so at the box office.
By Darren Seeley
Monday, September 2, 2013
Story Idea 9
Annie's mother is dying, but being 15th on the transplant list means she wont make it.
Something needs to be done to shorten the list....
The story should be no more than 4000 words.
AM
Something needs to be done to shorten the list....
The story should be no more than 4000 words.
Deadline: 29th September 2013
AM
Frank
Frank was an idiot. A brand spanking new Triumph Bonneville motorcycle straight off the boat from England, and he'd already rebored the carburetter and changed out the sprocket when I saw him.
'It's gonna end in tears Franky boy,' I said. All for a lousy twenty extra miles per hour. He was a speed demon. A real seat of the pants guy, made of the right stuff. That's why when he came back from the Jupiter 59 Mission, I knew it was big. A serious, serious businesss. And Frank was never gonna be the same.
****
We arrived at Edwards airforce base in March of nineteen fifty seven and there we all met for the first time. Me, Gordon, Scottie Carpenter, Neil, Bob and Frank. We were all test pilots, and came from the services as engineers. Frank and I worked together with the NASA guys on the development of the landing systems for Jupiter and after some frustrating problems we finally managed to crack it in the summer of the following year.
It's scary to think what we were working with then, the kind of hardware we relied on. Hell, there's more technology in my cellphone than what we used to put Neil on the moon, and Jupiter was ten years earlier.
Over the months, we all the became a pretty tight team though Bob left in the autumn and we never really knew why. He said he'd been seconded for some secret military mission, hush hush kinda thing. Gordy said it was Cuba but anyway he was replaced by Ed Irving.
We knew it would be one of us. I knew it would be Frank, and sure enough Christmas came early for him that year when in November Mr Glennan called to tell Frank he was going be the first man into space.
I couldn't say I wasn't a little disappointed. I suppose we all were really but Frank was the right choice and we all knew it.
There was a certain relief that came with the news of Frank's appointment and only when I knew the call had finally come did I realise I'd been waiting for it myself.
Gloria knew, she said for the past eighteen months when I was home, I wouldn't stray more than a few feet from the kitchen, from the telephone. It must have been a big deal for her too. She lived every day with the same danger as me and whilst I didn't say it, I knew that hurtling fifty miles above the Mojave desert in an X-15 at three and a half thousand miles an hour was different from right up there, in the dark, the unknown. She wouldn't see me at the end of a days work or get the Hi honey, I'm safe and well call I made after the routine test flights that's for sure. It would be a black car and two sombre men in regalia at the door reminding her of the amazing sacrifice I had made for my country.
Still it was down to Frank now, for him and his loved ones and for that at least, as funny as it sounds, I was glad it wasn't me.
The night of the call was a big celebration. We already had a reputation as hell raisers which in part was true it was fair to say, but we worked hard and needed to let off a little steam now and then.
Our little band had become celebrities. Joe public had a massive appetite for the 'Space Race,' and we received a lot of attention, not all good but it culminated in a sweet deal that saw access to us and our stories sold for a quarter of million dollars to Life magazine. Split between us it sure made the long days shorter and well, it was something nice for the girls. We spent money on the house and for Gloria, a whole new wardrobe. She said she felt like a movie star. It made her happy and I was glad.
Frank bought a motorcycle.
After the excitement about Frank died down it was back to the grind and even more intense training. This time against a deadline set by NASA. Two of us, me and Scottie, trained side by side with Frank.
At the end of April, Frank began to get really nervous. He confided in me quite a bit and I guess I could say I knew the real Frank, the man behind the bravado, the sleek hair and dangerous twinkle in his eye. Frank wasn't tall but he was magnetic, so the moment he walked into a room, everyone turned to hear what he might say. One night, over a couple of beers in the base bar Frank told me he was scared. I told him there wasn't a man on the planet, or any other planet for that matter, that wouldn't be frightened. We didn't talk percentages but the chances of him not coming back, or of not even making it out of the atmosphere alive were finely balanced. We weren't kidding ourselves, but what a thing to be the first. The first human into space, and beating the ruskies and all.
It was that conversation that I kept going back to after he came back. We'd spent a good couple of hours discussing every stage of the launch, boost and rentry with the aim of finding something that had been missed, a little detail that could be ironed out and would give Frank just a couple more ounzes of confidence. 'You're gonna be a hero Frankie,' I said. 'Come June, every man, woman and child's gonna be waving a flag for you.' He'd smiled I remember, and nodded his head just a little as he rolled the thought around.
If it was going to happen, it would be mechanical failure that got him, so once the tests and checks had been done and redone it would be in the lap of the gods. I was angry when he came back. They told us about the research into the human immune system in microgavity conditions and how Frank would have been highly susceptible to bacteria either in his environment or dormant inside his body. Whilst the training was designed to prepare us for the conditions we would encounter, as best they could be understood from earth, no one could know what really would happen to our bodies.
Some said we weren't meant to travel into space and that we inhabitat this planet for a reason. There were quite a few dissenters, those who weren't waving a flag on launch day, and when Frank came back I wanted them to know the truth but all they got was validation when it was announced that Frank had been rushed to the Holy Cross Centre for Disease Control.
They let me visit a couple of times and we spoke on the telephone through a plate glass wall. Two government agents were posted outside the door to his room and I guessed this was to keep any press at bay. Frank was big news.
He was hooked up to a dozen or so monitors and when he spoke, he was different, slow, as if something wasn't working right in his brain. They had told me strictly not to ask him any questions about the flight but I was burning to know. He said he hadn't seen anyone else really but that men in suits came daily and asked him a lot of questions. They didn't know what was wrong with him. When I asked the doctors, they answered curtly as if making Frank better wasn't a priority.
When I learned the truth, things like that made sense. I was approached by NASA shortly after Frank came back. They wanted me to head the next mission and launch date was set for less than six months. When I was called to the White House for the mission briefing, I knew something was happening. Frank wasn't ill and what they told me changed everything.
In a universe so unexplained, unknown and unexplored, man will always be overwhelmed by curiosity and his desire for knowledge will know no bounds. What we didn't know back then as we raced so hard to put man into space, was that we were already up there. The human species inhabited space and they'd been waiting for Frank for two thousand years.
I came to Mars in nineteen sixty four on board a transporter ship built by the first humans. I've been here with them now for forty eight years. It's taken that long for us, well the second humans, to get up to speed with the technology that had been developed since the first humans left the planet in a.d. thirty two but now the whole species live as one despite the obvious differences.
When they released Frank from Holy Cross he found a very large sum of money in his bank account. We laughed but knew they could have taken more permanent action to stop him talking rather that pumping him full of tranquilizers. He never did tell anyone and things came to light in the natural order of things, mainly when there was money to be made in leaving earth once again.
Frank died three years after Project Jupiter in the Mojave desert. A blowout on his motorcycle at one hundred and thirty eight miles an hour. They gave him a hero's send off, tickertape in Times Square kinda deal. The journey he took will remain in history for many reasons.
He may not have been the first man into space but he was my friend and I miss him.
***
By Darren Seeley
Directive 2.51
Do not get emotionally attached to patients. The sad fact was, sometimes they died.
The rule made a lot of sense and Daniel had always thought health professionals were foolish to ever choose to get emotionally attached to their patients. That was until he was grinning at his patient as he breathed the stale tasting air that circulated through his hazmat suit and realised choice didn’t come into it. Against his will he was well and truly emotionally attached. Like the rest of America he was fascinated by this man, this hero that had gone where no other man had. From the first moment he’d met him, almost a year previous, he’d been in awe of him. Now he was desperate to help him.
“Morning Frank, how are you feeling?” Daniel asked as he skim read the chart from the end of the hospital bed. Daniel had known Frank as a handsome man with an easy charm, the charm was still there but his face and neck were obscured by inflamed patches of skin with sporadic blisters and flakes that made him hard to look at.
“Itchy.” Frank answered with a rueful grin.
Daniel managed not to grimace as a dry patch of skin on his friends face split and thick plasma leaked out. Instead he swept his eyes to the small TV set and watched Lucy yelling comically at Ricky. The TV was the only piece of non-medical equipment in the room and he’d bought it from his home to entertain his chronically bored friend. Every other surface was clear as Get Well Soon cards and flowers were not permitted within the room, instead these offerings to the astronaut lined the perimeter that had been set up at the hospital entrance and there were thousands of them.
“You’re due another application of cream in twenty minutes, I’m sure that will help.” When he looked away from the TV he saw that Frank was staring at him.
“Do you really have to wear that thing around me? You don’t honestly think I’ve been infected by some space germs do you?”
“Yes I do and no I don’t. You appear to just have a severe case of eczema. What I can’t explain is why the treatment is not clearing it up.”
“I’m telling you Doc, it was the same when I was a kid. My Mum slathered me with cream for months; nothing. Then my Dad took us on a holiday to the coast and after a few days of playing in the surf my skin cleared up.”
Daniel could see that the salt water could have an exfoliating affect so he scribbled instructions for the assistant that had been security cleared to assist him with the astronauts care. “I’ll have a salt bath arranged for you.”
Frank grinned and more clear liquid oozed down his face. “Not quite the same as a surf beach is it Doc?”
“That salt bath is about as close as you are going to get right now.”
“You could sneak me out under cover of darkness.” Frank teased.
Daniel fixed him with an un-amused look.
“Alright, alright. But any chance of getting these off?” Frank raised his taped up hands. “I feel like a kid that can’t be trusted not to scratch his measles.”
Daniel caught one of his raised hands and worked the blood pressure belt up his arm. “Kids can’t be trusted not to scratch their measles and neither, my friend, can you.”
Frank rolled his eyes as Daniel inflated the cuff and then released it as he listened to his stethoscope.
“Are you still experiencing hunger?”
“Yes, I’m starving. This hospital’s food doesn’t cut the mustard.”
“Never had any complaints before.” Daniel consulted the chart again. “You ate two hours ago, how could you still be hungry?”
“Doc, you were the one that put me on that training regime that had me eating six times a day, guess my body is just used to that routine.”
“Okay.” Daniel clipped the chart back on the end of the bed. “I’ll see if I can’t scare you up a protein shake.”
“Steak would be better.”
Daniel laughed. “In your dreams.”
Behind him Frank groaned dramatically. “Doc, you’re killing me!”
19th June 1959 – Daniel was studying the latest skin scrapings from Frank under a microscope when two men in business suits burst into the lab without knocking. The first man, Jeremy Faulkner, he knew as the Director of NASA, a man he had worked with for years. The second he knew only from the T.V, he was President Eisenhower’s VP, Richard Nixon.
“Gentlemen?” Daniel queried with a frown.
“Dan, we have a problem.” Jeremy said as he closed the door and pulled at the tight knot of his tie. He was clearly unnerved by the man at his side.
“”A problem?” Richard interrupted. “Men, this is more than a problem, this is a catastrophe!” He shook his head as he spoke and Daniel was fascinated by the drooping jowls of his face that struggled to keep up with the action.
“Doctor you are out of time.” The VP asserted.
“I beg your pardon?” Daniel frowned and looked at Jeremy for clarification.
“It’s the public Dan, they want to know what’s happened to Frank – they are demanding to know.”
“And what do you think the public’s reaction is going to be when they see him? His skin is bright red and spontaneously splits? Do you think that is going to allay the nation’s fears of alien interaction? The look of eczema would be alarming to anyone who’d not seen the condition before but a case as severe as Frank’s? Even I’m finding it hard to look at him.” Daniel challenged.
“I agree with you completely.” Richard said with a nod as Jeremy tugged harder at his tie as though he couldn’t get enough air. He also was looking everywhere in the room except for at Daniel.
“What am I missing here?”
Jeremy started speaking in a rush but Nixon cut him off with a wave of his hand. His dark eyes fixed onto Daniels and for almost a minute the only sounds that could be heard in the room were their breathing and the steady humming of the refrigerator filled with blood samples.
“Doctor, I don’t need to tell you how important this race to space is do I? This whole nation wants, no damn it, they need us to win this race and the Republican’s will be the government to deliver that dream for them. Next year is an election year and this recession is already killing us – we need the public behind us on this or I’ll lose out to the Democrats. I need to produce a healthy Frank Bowman to the public to restore their faith in us and our commitment to this race.”
Daniel found himself losing patience with the man. “With all due respect Vice President Nixon, I am doing my best with Frank but he is not ready to meet the public. I’m sorry if that is hurting your campaign for presidency.”
Nixon narrowed his eyes at him but it was Jeremy that spoke. “Dan, we have a solution.” Still Jeremy couldn’t quite meet his eyes. “And it’s to employ Directive 2.51.”
Daniel gave a sigh of impatience. “Sorry Jeremy but I’m not fluent in NASA’s directives. Just tell me straight.”
Jeremy blew air between his teeth and then gave one final tug on his tie. “We are going to use Franks body double to appease the public.”
“His what?”
Nixon breathed out impatiently through his nose while Jeremy raised his hands in a placating manner towards Daniel. “With the importance of this mission being so great it was decided that should anything happen to Frank his double would step in to face the public.”
Daniel was aghast. “What?”
“Did you think Frank was chosen for his skill alone?” Jeremy laughed humourlessly. “We matched the facial features of the astronaut potentials to members of the Secret Service – Frank and his double were the closest. With Frank having no family and next to no close relationships, he was the perfect choice.”
Daniel leaned heavily back on the lab bench he’d been working on. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “So Frank Bowman risked his life for this country and now some other guy gets to face the public and get all the glory while we wait for Frank to recover?”
Nixon fixed him with that look again. “Doctor, I don’t think you understand. Frank is now a risk to National Security. The meteor dust found on the hull of the spaceship would suggest he has been exposed to some contaminant and we cannot risk that contaminate infecting others.”
“Contaminant? He has eczema for God’s sake!”
“Doctor, your country thanks you for your efforts but we’ll take it from here.” Richard nodded curtly and left the room. Jeremy went to follow but Daniel grabbed him by the arm.
“What is he going to do to Frank?”
“You know what has to happen Dan. He could be contagious.”
Daniel wasn’t a violent man but he squeezed Jeremy’s arm harder. “If that were true, you would be able to look me in the eyes. Why is this the first I’m hearing about this meteor dust? I’ve done numerous studies on Frank and have been telling you the Hazmat suits were unnecessary. Are you really going to let them kill Frank just so that asshole can get elected next year?”
“Dan I have no control over this, we both have to go along with it. You’ve signed documents that agree with all directives put in place by NASA and the US government, if you make a fuss they’ll be forced to deal with you.” Jeremy yanked his arm free and strode to the door. “Start destroying the files on Frank.”
Daniel spun and smashed his fist against the lab table. The microscope toppled to the side and Frank’s perfectly normal skin sample fell to the floor.
20th June 1959 – Frank woke as Daniel was tearing off the tapings around his hands.
“What’s going on Doc?” He asked groggily as he raised his head off the bed. “Where’s your hazmat suit?”
“We’re going to the coast like you wanted.” Daniel tore away the last of the taping and pulled the bed sheet free. “Come on.”
“Doc, what’s going on?” Frank asked as he followed Daniel to the door, when Daniel turned he noticed new splits on Franks face.
“They’re going to kill you; they think something is wrong with you.”
Frank blinked in surprise and shook his head. “Is there something wrong with me?”
Daniel gave a fleeting smile. “Do you think I would be busting you out of here if there was?”
“Good point.”
“Follow me and stay quiet.”
Daniel led them along a darkened corridor. The entire ward had been sealed off for Frank and the silence that surrounded them made their footsteps seem inordinately loud. Once they reached the end of the corridor Daniel paused. Beyond the door was a short walk to the entrance of the private car park but they would have to pass the dispensary and the dispensary was very rarely unattended, even at 3am.
“Frank, I want you to walk beside me, act like everything’s normal. If anyone tries to stop us you let me do the talking – just stay quiet.”
“Roger that.”
They entered the main part of the hospital and walked briskly towards the car park door. As they approached the dispensary a nurse Daniel vaguely recognised left the office carrying a tray. She gasped when she saw Frank but the look of revulsion on her face suggested the reaction had nothing to do with her recognition of the astronaut. As she gasped Frank’s stomach gave off an ungodly growl that made the nurse’s step falter. Frank slowed in reaction and Daniel had to grasp his arm and speed him along. Frank grunted lightly and under Daniel’s hand he felt liquid seep into the sleeve of the hospital gown where he must have torn the skin.
“What the hell was that noise?” Daniel whispered as they put distance between themselves and the nurse.
“I’m hungry.”
They made the door to the car park un-accosted but as they passed through it Daniel noticed the nurse was still standing in the corridor staring at them. He hurried them through and shut the door.
“Almost there. There’s a private exit that leads around the back and down past the river for a couple of miles and then out onto the highway. We can sneak out and no one will know we are gone until it’s too late.”
Again Frank’s stomach growled, even louder than before.
Daniel thought he may have a chocolate bar in the glove box so he rushed forward to unlock the car but as he pulled the door open two moist hands fastened to the sides of his head. Before he could react his neck was jerked to the side savagely and his limp body fell to the ground.
Frank looked down at the lifeless body at his feet and knew he should be feeling something. He’d been friends with Daniel and now, not only was he dead, but he had died by his hands. Still he felt nothing except for the new strength that flowed through his limbs and the hunger.
The hunger wasn’t new, it had been with him since he’d first woken at the hospital and it was unrelenting. Nothing seemed to appease it, the more he ate, the more his body demanded. Another growl sounded from his stomach and with it a came a savage stomach cramp.
Frank knelt on the ground beside his friend’s body and pulled the man’s forearm to his mouth. The muscle was tough and very hard to bite through but the reward was worth the effort.
By Dayv Metcalfe
Frank's Tank
The World was ravenously ready to watch the drama. To hear the astronaut's first words after he was collected from a seething ocean. To watch open mouthed as Frank Bowman told them what it was like to look back at them, all together. Instead, as the recovery craft got close to the bobbing capsule, and Frank Bowman emerged, he tried to shout something as he waved his arms madly. The cameras stopped rolling. Pre prepared newspaper headlines, suppose to be full of quotes, data and feelings, were instead full of what? Where, and whys? Newly formed NASA (with a hovering military) said there had been a health problem, and that Frank had been rushed to hospital. One paper reported that he had gone to The Holy Cross, disease control, but quickly corrected the story, and suggested he had a collapsed lung.
A week passed. No Frank Bowman. Where was the hero, the people needed him, he had been built up so much, they positively desired him. People were getting twitchy. Eager for their man and the new stories he could tell. What exactly was wrong? He remained secluded in what had become known as 'Frank's Tank', rumours abounded, some humorous: -
"He has gone on holiday!"
"He has defected to the Reds!"
Some thought provoking:-
"He met God."
"He has seen us all at once and hates us."
Some ideas about his absenteeism were cleverly creative, and one in particular made Frank spit his pea and ham soup out.
"He hasn't been in space at all, he has been in a submarine and when he appeared in that capsule, he felt guilty and tried to tell us."
By Andy Parker
A week passed. No Frank Bowman. Where was the hero, the people needed him, he had been built up so much, they positively desired him. People were getting twitchy. Eager for their man and the new stories he could tell. What exactly was wrong? He remained secluded in what had become known as 'Frank's Tank', rumours abounded, some humorous: -
"He has gone on holiday!"
"He has defected to the Reds!"
Some thought provoking:-
"He met God."
"He has seen us all at once and hates us."
Some ideas about his absenteeism were cleverly creative, and one in particular made Frank spit his pea and ham soup out.
"He hasn't been in space at all, he has been in a submarine and when he appeared in that capsule, he felt guilty and tried to tell us."
By Andy Parker
Monday, July 29, 2013
Story Idea 8
Headline - 7th June 1959: Frank Bowman, the first man in space, splashed down at 3pm today!
Concerns were raised when Frank was rushed into Holy Cross Center for Disease Control....
AM
Concerns were raised when Frank was rushed into Holy Cross Center for Disease Control....
The story should be no more than 4000 words.
Deadline: 30th August 2013
AM
The Security System
Kim had never identified with the despair of a fictional character quite the way she did as she beheld the litter ridden streets of Tooting. She hadn’t exactly been anticipating the gold paved streets Dick Whittington had, but torn apart rubbish, apparently the result of desperate urban foxes, was not what she had been expecting at all. The first niggles of doubt had set in.
Some people migrated to pursue dreams or career, others to escape poor living conditions and some even to avoid political persecution. Kim had migrated because it had seemed like a good idea at the time.
She’d been single, her employment contract had ended and she’d just plain fancied a change. She already had some friends abroad so she’d bought a ticket with the majority of her savings and followed them.
London Town. The Big Smoke.
Kim was a positive soul so as she’d dragged her suitcase along the pavement, trying to avoid baked beans cans and torn chip packets, she’d repeated the mantra ‘everything is going to be okay’.
It had to be. Her ticket had been one way and her bank balance was woefully deficient of the funds it would take her to get back to the sunny shores of Auckland.
Her positivity was tested further when she’d discovered the warm welcome her ex-pat friends had promised apparently had an expiry date. After one week of dossing on their tiny couch, in their tiny flat, the cheerful smiles turned to queries of her move out date. As week two rolled into week three the queries were steadily getting frostier and Kim knew she was endangering her friendship status.
Kim’s mantra was getting worn out as her stress levels increased. She couldn’t find work and without work she couldn’t afford housing and if she alienated the few friends she had in the city, her future looked very bleak indeed.
Her niggles of doubt had turned into outright certainties. Moving abroad had been a bad fucking idea.
It was the morning she’d woken with a cramp in her back but was too despondent to move as she’d stared unseeingly at the ceiling, that she found the ad.
“Tooting flat - free rent. Only those morally deficient need apply.”
Kim had genuinely smiled as she’d read it, for the first time in a long time. She appreciated a good sense of humour so she’d used the last of her phone credit to make an appointment.
It was a terraced house and the very nature of a terraced house was that, bar the paint job, they were generally indistinguishable from the next. Still, as Kim paused on the approach of the second house in the row, she was filled with a sense of foreboding and wished she was about to enter any of the neighbouring houses instead. She was suddenly extremely conscious that she hadn’t told anyone where she was going.
Kim got her phone out of her bag and texted one of the friends she was staying with. She hit send; T-Mobile hit her back with a no credit message. She was on her own. She tapped her foot rapidly on the pathway, she could go back to the flat she was unwanted at or she could knock on the door that could potentially decrease her cortisol production.
She knocked on the door.
The man that answered could’ve been described as normal, in the same way the house in the terrace resembled the others, the same but not quite.
He was thrumming with anticipation that didn’t marry up with Kim’s expectation of a landlord. His thinning hair was plastered to his head with sweat and the temperature was sixteen degrees at best. Despite her disquiet, when he offered her entrance, Kim took it. She gripped her useless phone in her hand as some sort of talisman as he locked the door behind them with an emotion that could only be described as glee.
“So, you’re ad said free rent.” Kim said as she pressed herself against the hall wall to let him pass.
“You will never pay rent.” The odd landlord grinned and headed off down the hall. As a twenty three year old girl in a stranger’s home, she was concerned, as a homeless person with no other prospects; she was compelled to follow him into the house.
She found him standing in the centre of a large reception room, empty of all furnishings, and he was rubbing his hands together. It was at exactly that moment that Kim realised she was being the stupid girl from the horror movies everyone always shouted instructions at.
“You know what, I’ve changed my mind.” Kim said as she took a step backwards.
The man’s grin made her blood run cold. “Too late.”
Kim spun around to run, sure that she could make it to the front door before he could catch her. She stopped dead in her tracks. There was something in front of her blocking the door, a smoky black mass that she instinctively knew she didn’t want to run through. Before her eyes the mass solidified until it resembled hundreds of squirming eel-like creatures that were coated in a thick, black oily substance. Razor sharp teeth protruded from their mouths and the black substance dripped from the tips, if she looked down she knew she’d see the black goo pooling at her feet. They writhed against one another but regardless of the direction of their movement their angry red eyes remained on her. They were studying her.
Kim was frozen. In some distance part of her mind she knew she should be screaming or running or even fainting but it was as though she were observing the scene from outside her body with no control of her motor skills.
The thing closed the gap between them and she heard the man behind her squeal in delight. “I want to watch!” He exclaimed as he clapped his hands together.
The things attention immediately switched to him, the red eyed eels seeming to study him intently as they had done her. The sound of its voice was Kim’s undoing. It was an accumulation of all the most terrifying sounds she could’ve imagined and yet as it rasped its message she heard them all individually which heightened her terror.
“Corrrrupppptionnnnn.” The thing advanced towards the man as the sounds of skin rending, eyes popping, bones splintering still echoed in her head. She fainted dead away.
When she woke there was a shard of light bathing her face from a gap in the curtains. She was slow, groggy, wondering why she was laying on the floor when she recognised that she was in a stranger’s house. She saw her useless phone on the floor and jerked upright as memories rushed to the fore. A strangled cry escaped her as she saw the black thing drifting a few feet from her and behind it was a pool of congealing blood. The two walls near the pool had red splatter marks on them and the weird man was nowhere to be seen. She scooted backwards on her arse and the thing followed her. When her back hit the wall she screamed in desperation.
“Sssssttoppp.” Its voice made the word sound like teeth being filed, pins being driven under nails, toes being struck with a hammer and even though it made her need to scream more she stopped as though It’s will superseded hers.
The writhing, oily, eel-like creatures morphed back into the black smoky mass and drifted towards her. Every fibre of her being wanted to scream for all she was worth but apparently she was still under It’s will. The black mass drifted through her and a coldness seeped into her bones that chilled her to the point where she wondered if she would ever feel warm again, if she lived that long. Her eyes rolled up into her head as the thing communicated with her. Knowledge flashed in her minds eye and when the thing receded and drifted in front of her, she knew whole heartedly that It wouldn’t hurt her. It couldn’t hurt her. The certainty didn’t reduce her need to get gone.
As though to reassure her It confirmed her thoughts. “Sssssaaafe.”
She took comfort in the word despite the fact that it sounded like someone chewing jagged shards of glass. Comfort enough to inch her way up the wall to a standing position.
The thing floated before her as she made her way slowly out of the reception room and into the hall. It followed.
She wanted to run but was uncertain of the boundaries of the apparent truce they had. When her hand gripped the deadbolt she could’ve shouted for joy but instead she cringed as that horrific voice whispered through her mind.
“Sssssaaafe.”
She darted out the door and ran down the street, chancing a glance back to see if she was being followed. The door of the house was slowly closing and Kim thanked God she would never have to see the house or It again.
One week later Kim was back, standing on the doorstep with her suitcase by her side.
With each day that had passed Kim had felt compelled to return to the house and though she’d tried to fight it she had ultimately given in to the compulsion. That had happened at about the same time Kim had convinced herself that the thing in the house wasn’t evil. It wanted to eradicate evil and needed her help to do that and that was why she had been unharmed.
Only now that she was about to enter did she remember the fear she’d felt in It’s presence and began to doubt herself.
Kim stared at the front door, understanding her initial uneasiness now that she knew what lurked within. As she stared, mumbling her mantra under her breath, the door opened before her. If It had been on the threshold she didn’t think she could’ve entered but the way was clear so she dragged her case into the hall. Every hair on her body stood on end. She couldn’t see It but she knew it was there.
For what seemed like ten minutes she stood waiting but she remained alone in the entrance and eventually made her way into the reception room. The room was empty save for the congealed mass of blood coating the wooden floor and filling the room with a smell that made her want to gag. Kim pinched her nose closed as she surveyed the dark clots on the floor. She was surprised at the lack of flies feasting on the remains of the man but recognised that expectation may have been the blame of many a director’s artistic license. Unable to bear the mess any longer Kim went in search of cleaning products. In the kitchen she came across a large cupboard filled with tubs of baking soda and litres of white vinegar. On the inside of the cupboard door was a printed page from wikiHow with instructions on removing blood stains from hardwood flooring. The sheer volume of supplies in the cupboard coupled with the old stains she’d seen on the floor drove home just how many times It had done it’s thing.
Next to the cupboard was a wallet and in it she found the man’s driver’s license. The same name was on the pile of bills the wallet was sitting on, including a mortgage statement. The man It had killed was the owner of the house so he’d been providing victims for It for quite some time.
Kim scrubbed at the latest stain and wondered what had gotten the man killed. Had he grown addicted to providing victims for It and had therefore eradicated any goodness he’d had in himself?
Kim had no intention of falling into the same trap. She had a plan. For starters she wasn’t going to be staying around for long, once she had a job she would leave, and she intended to be much smarter with luring the victims. No Gumtree ads for her, she couldn’t be sure who would turn up on her doorstep, no she intended to let the victims come to It. Deserving ones.
The house wasn’t in a good area so Kim made sure that, every other day when she left the house, the front window was left wide open. Sure enough when she got back to the house a few hours later there would be a pool of blood from the latest would-be thief.
Despite the unsavoury job of having to do clean up, things were looking up for Kim. She still didn’t have a job but the house had proved to be a treasure trove. Not only had she found almost twenty thousand pounds sewn into the spare mattress, there had been multiple heirlooms and antiques she had sold for great profit.
She’d felt guilty when she’d come across recent letters from his son and realised she was effectively stealing his inheritance, but that feeling hadn’t lasted. She told herself she was saving the son from the knowledge of It. Plus, he would eventually get the inheritance of the house once she left and she was going to leave, just not yet. Sooner or later she would start looking for work again and then she would leave. For the time being she was happy to enjoy London with her ill gotten gains.
Kim returned home one afternoon after having her nails and hair done. When she entered the house she could hear a man’s strangled cries from the reception room.
She paused wondering if she should go back out and return once it was all over with but then she realised she had a chance to see how It did it’s thing. She often wondered as she scrubbed the floors what It did with the bones – did It eat them? Surely it wouldn’t hurt to have a peak?
“Honey, I’m home.” She called as she stepped into the room.
Oily black eels with blood red eyes were swarming over the thief. When he saw her his cries grew louder and more frantic. “Help me!”
Kim shrugged at him. “Sucks to be you, bro.”
The eels immediately ceased their writhing and every set of red eyes darted to her. It relinquished its hold on the man and he dropped to the ground.
“Corrrrupppptionnnnn.” It’s voice sounded like flesh blistering and boils erupting as It advanced.
Before Kim could run It was on her. The eels squeezed around her limbs mercilessly and where the black oil that dripped from their teeth landed on her skin it burned like acid. The pain that lanced into her as the first set of teeth dug into her flesh was agonizing. Hundreds more followed until she teetered on the brink of insanity with pain.
Her last thought as she was slowly eaten was that she should’ve left when she’d had the chance.
By Dayv Metcalfe
Some people migrated to pursue dreams or career, others to escape poor living conditions and some even to avoid political persecution. Kim had migrated because it had seemed like a good idea at the time.
She’d been single, her employment contract had ended and she’d just plain fancied a change. She already had some friends abroad so she’d bought a ticket with the majority of her savings and followed them.
London Town. The Big Smoke.
Kim was a positive soul so as she’d dragged her suitcase along the pavement, trying to avoid baked beans cans and torn chip packets, she’d repeated the mantra ‘everything is going to be okay’.
It had to be. Her ticket had been one way and her bank balance was woefully deficient of the funds it would take her to get back to the sunny shores of Auckland.
Her positivity was tested further when she’d discovered the warm welcome her ex-pat friends had promised apparently had an expiry date. After one week of dossing on their tiny couch, in their tiny flat, the cheerful smiles turned to queries of her move out date. As week two rolled into week three the queries were steadily getting frostier and Kim knew she was endangering her friendship status.
Kim’s mantra was getting worn out as her stress levels increased. She couldn’t find work and without work she couldn’t afford housing and if she alienated the few friends she had in the city, her future looked very bleak indeed.
Her niggles of doubt had turned into outright certainties. Moving abroad had been a bad fucking idea.
It was the morning she’d woken with a cramp in her back but was too despondent to move as she’d stared unseeingly at the ceiling, that she found the ad.
“Tooting flat - free rent. Only those morally deficient need apply.”
Kim had genuinely smiled as she’d read it, for the first time in a long time. She appreciated a good sense of humour so she’d used the last of her phone credit to make an appointment.
It was a terraced house and the very nature of a terraced house was that, bar the paint job, they were generally indistinguishable from the next. Still, as Kim paused on the approach of the second house in the row, she was filled with a sense of foreboding and wished she was about to enter any of the neighbouring houses instead. She was suddenly extremely conscious that she hadn’t told anyone where she was going.
Kim got her phone out of her bag and texted one of the friends she was staying with. She hit send; T-Mobile hit her back with a no credit message. She was on her own. She tapped her foot rapidly on the pathway, she could go back to the flat she was unwanted at or she could knock on the door that could potentially decrease her cortisol production.
She knocked on the door.
The man that answered could’ve been described as normal, in the same way the house in the terrace resembled the others, the same but not quite.
He was thrumming with anticipation that didn’t marry up with Kim’s expectation of a landlord. His thinning hair was plastered to his head with sweat and the temperature was sixteen degrees at best. Despite her disquiet, when he offered her entrance, Kim took it. She gripped her useless phone in her hand as some sort of talisman as he locked the door behind them with an emotion that could only be described as glee.
“So, you’re ad said free rent.” Kim said as she pressed herself against the hall wall to let him pass.
“You will never pay rent.” The odd landlord grinned and headed off down the hall. As a twenty three year old girl in a stranger’s home, she was concerned, as a homeless person with no other prospects; she was compelled to follow him into the house.
She found him standing in the centre of a large reception room, empty of all furnishings, and he was rubbing his hands together. It was at exactly that moment that Kim realised she was being the stupid girl from the horror movies everyone always shouted instructions at.
“You know what, I’ve changed my mind.” Kim said as she took a step backwards.
The man’s grin made her blood run cold. “Too late.”
Kim spun around to run, sure that she could make it to the front door before he could catch her. She stopped dead in her tracks. There was something in front of her blocking the door, a smoky black mass that she instinctively knew she didn’t want to run through. Before her eyes the mass solidified until it resembled hundreds of squirming eel-like creatures that were coated in a thick, black oily substance. Razor sharp teeth protruded from their mouths and the black substance dripped from the tips, if she looked down she knew she’d see the black goo pooling at her feet. They writhed against one another but regardless of the direction of their movement their angry red eyes remained on her. They were studying her.
Kim was frozen. In some distance part of her mind she knew she should be screaming or running or even fainting but it was as though she were observing the scene from outside her body with no control of her motor skills.
The thing closed the gap between them and she heard the man behind her squeal in delight. “I want to watch!” He exclaimed as he clapped his hands together.
The things attention immediately switched to him, the red eyed eels seeming to study him intently as they had done her. The sound of its voice was Kim’s undoing. It was an accumulation of all the most terrifying sounds she could’ve imagined and yet as it rasped its message she heard them all individually which heightened her terror.
“Corrrrupppptionnnnn.” The thing advanced towards the man as the sounds of skin rending, eyes popping, bones splintering still echoed in her head. She fainted dead away.
When she woke there was a shard of light bathing her face from a gap in the curtains. She was slow, groggy, wondering why she was laying on the floor when she recognised that she was in a stranger’s house. She saw her useless phone on the floor and jerked upright as memories rushed to the fore. A strangled cry escaped her as she saw the black thing drifting a few feet from her and behind it was a pool of congealing blood. The two walls near the pool had red splatter marks on them and the weird man was nowhere to be seen. She scooted backwards on her arse and the thing followed her. When her back hit the wall she screamed in desperation.
“Sssssttoppp.” Its voice made the word sound like teeth being filed, pins being driven under nails, toes being struck with a hammer and even though it made her need to scream more she stopped as though It’s will superseded hers.
The writhing, oily, eel-like creatures morphed back into the black smoky mass and drifted towards her. Every fibre of her being wanted to scream for all she was worth but apparently she was still under It’s will. The black mass drifted through her and a coldness seeped into her bones that chilled her to the point where she wondered if she would ever feel warm again, if she lived that long. Her eyes rolled up into her head as the thing communicated with her. Knowledge flashed in her minds eye and when the thing receded and drifted in front of her, she knew whole heartedly that It wouldn’t hurt her. It couldn’t hurt her. The certainty didn’t reduce her need to get gone.
As though to reassure her It confirmed her thoughts. “Sssssaaafe.”
She took comfort in the word despite the fact that it sounded like someone chewing jagged shards of glass. Comfort enough to inch her way up the wall to a standing position.
The thing floated before her as she made her way slowly out of the reception room and into the hall. It followed.
She wanted to run but was uncertain of the boundaries of the apparent truce they had. When her hand gripped the deadbolt she could’ve shouted for joy but instead she cringed as that horrific voice whispered through her mind.
“Sssssaaafe.”
She darted out the door and ran down the street, chancing a glance back to see if she was being followed. The door of the house was slowly closing and Kim thanked God she would never have to see the house or It again.
One week later Kim was back, standing on the doorstep with her suitcase by her side.
With each day that had passed Kim had felt compelled to return to the house and though she’d tried to fight it she had ultimately given in to the compulsion. That had happened at about the same time Kim had convinced herself that the thing in the house wasn’t evil. It wanted to eradicate evil and needed her help to do that and that was why she had been unharmed.
Only now that she was about to enter did she remember the fear she’d felt in It’s presence and began to doubt herself.
Kim stared at the front door, understanding her initial uneasiness now that she knew what lurked within. As she stared, mumbling her mantra under her breath, the door opened before her. If It had been on the threshold she didn’t think she could’ve entered but the way was clear so she dragged her case into the hall. Every hair on her body stood on end. She couldn’t see It but she knew it was there.
For what seemed like ten minutes she stood waiting but she remained alone in the entrance and eventually made her way into the reception room. The room was empty save for the congealed mass of blood coating the wooden floor and filling the room with a smell that made her want to gag. Kim pinched her nose closed as she surveyed the dark clots on the floor. She was surprised at the lack of flies feasting on the remains of the man but recognised that expectation may have been the blame of many a director’s artistic license. Unable to bear the mess any longer Kim went in search of cleaning products. In the kitchen she came across a large cupboard filled with tubs of baking soda and litres of white vinegar. On the inside of the cupboard door was a printed page from wikiHow with instructions on removing blood stains from hardwood flooring. The sheer volume of supplies in the cupboard coupled with the old stains she’d seen on the floor drove home just how many times It had done it’s thing.
Next to the cupboard was a wallet and in it she found the man’s driver’s license. The same name was on the pile of bills the wallet was sitting on, including a mortgage statement. The man It had killed was the owner of the house so he’d been providing victims for It for quite some time.
Kim scrubbed at the latest stain and wondered what had gotten the man killed. Had he grown addicted to providing victims for It and had therefore eradicated any goodness he’d had in himself?
Kim had no intention of falling into the same trap. She had a plan. For starters she wasn’t going to be staying around for long, once she had a job she would leave, and she intended to be much smarter with luring the victims. No Gumtree ads for her, she couldn’t be sure who would turn up on her doorstep, no she intended to let the victims come to It. Deserving ones.
The house wasn’t in a good area so Kim made sure that, every other day when she left the house, the front window was left wide open. Sure enough when she got back to the house a few hours later there would be a pool of blood from the latest would-be thief.
Despite the unsavoury job of having to do clean up, things were looking up for Kim. She still didn’t have a job but the house had proved to be a treasure trove. Not only had she found almost twenty thousand pounds sewn into the spare mattress, there had been multiple heirlooms and antiques she had sold for great profit.
She’d felt guilty when she’d come across recent letters from his son and realised she was effectively stealing his inheritance, but that feeling hadn’t lasted. She told herself she was saving the son from the knowledge of It. Plus, he would eventually get the inheritance of the house once she left and she was going to leave, just not yet. Sooner or later she would start looking for work again and then she would leave. For the time being she was happy to enjoy London with her ill gotten gains.
Kim returned home one afternoon after having her nails and hair done. When she entered the house she could hear a man’s strangled cries from the reception room.
She paused wondering if she should go back out and return once it was all over with but then she realised she had a chance to see how It did it’s thing. She often wondered as she scrubbed the floors what It did with the bones – did It eat them? Surely it wouldn’t hurt to have a peak?
“Honey, I’m home.” She called as she stepped into the room.
Oily black eels with blood red eyes were swarming over the thief. When he saw her his cries grew louder and more frantic. “Help me!”
Kim shrugged at him. “Sucks to be you, bro.”
The eels immediately ceased their writhing and every set of red eyes darted to her. It relinquished its hold on the man and he dropped to the ground.
“Corrrrupppptionnnnn.” It’s voice sounded like flesh blistering and boils erupting as It advanced.
Before Kim could run It was on her. The eels squeezed around her limbs mercilessly and where the black oil that dripped from their teeth landed on her skin it burned like acid. The pain that lanced into her as the first set of teeth dug into her flesh was agonizing. Hundreds more followed until she teetered on the brink of insanity with pain.
Her last thought as she was slowly eaten was that she should’ve left when she’d had the chance.
By Dayv Metcalfe
Food Sex and Shelter
She gets on my nerves. I thought about us splitting up all the time. We had been together seven years and were due to get married in the next. I did not go to bed thinking about white dresses an ornate cake and lazy cocktails on far away beaches. I went to bed thinking how annoying it was to hear her eat. It seemed she spoke to her food as she chewed away, making love to it with little grunts of pleasure. Certainly in a more adoring way than our actual love making. She'd laugh at nothing, then not laugh when something was funny. The overly blue eye shadow she put on made me think of ABBA.
One day she said to me, "let's go for a walk." She had caught me rolling a joint on her dead mother's bible. It was a bad habit of mine but the bible always seemed to be handy. I told her I truly felt bad and would never do it again but she seemed to have something else on her mind. We walked through the May spring, the bluebells were out and birds flitted around with important work. She was wearing that skirt that caught men's eyes, and heaps of blue eye shadow. We didn't talk whilst we walked, in fact we hardly ever talked, conversation had been scant for a long time, but that was because we were overly comfortable with each other surely? As we threaded out way through the beech wood, I felt guilty for getting annoyed with her. How she ate? What was wrong with me. I knew what was wrong with me, I didn't want to be with her, and in my defence, she didn't want to be with me.
We left the beech wood and the old chalk hill fort rose before us. It was a strange place, solemn. I felt a sudden coolness as the equinox winds bounced off the downs and clipped at the edge of the woods. The Romans hadn't touched this fort apparently, it was old and out of use when they invaded. But a strange tale was told of a small group of warriors from the Cantii tribe hiding within the hollow hill, making lightning strikes against Roman Legions before disappearing back into the chalk mound with spoils of food and women. We had come here one night in the early days, torches and sleeping bags in hand. Telling each other the story as we climbed then continuing and embellishing around a fire. We had laid down, suddenly nervous as our ecstatic tales of food and fires and sex concluded. The stars appeared, and a silence descended as we pondered our stories of supernatural violence and romance.
As we ascended on this day, I suddenly wondered why we were going there. Emma seemed intent on something, we had never talked about what happened that night, what we experienced. It was too surreal, too unearthly for us to discuss. We had to put it down to the bottles of red wine, but we remembered, we remembered privately and in every detail.
At the top the solemnness had taken over, the Kent country side was verdant around us and the beech tree wood rocked with the wind. It was strange that this place wasn't on the tourist map, you would see the odd walker with a dog, but not hoards of visitors. We sat down where we had made the fire all those years ago.
"Are you going to say it or am I?" She was looking at a mound in the centre of the flattened out top and not at me as she spoke those words.
"Are we splitting up?" She turned to look at me as if I were from another planet.
"No you gonk, about that night." Oh, I said. I feared I sounded disappointed. I paused then related events.
"It was a hell of a feast. They brought out that steaming cauldron, then made a long table from lengths of wood. They set the table, they piled it with slow cooked meats from many beasts. The broth smelt of juniper berries and hazel nuts, wild garlic and nettles. We drank from ewers of a type of beer. There was black bread smothered in fat, hot and delicious smelling. Behind in that little mound we could see a light flickering orange. There were seven of them, painted in whirling blues with their hair spiked up with chalk. They didn't speak, but ate, they ate like you eat, muttering and grunting and slurping away." Emma smiled at me.
"Food Sex and Shelter. What else can someone want?" She was very faraway with her words.
"We imagined it didn't we? Or engaged in a ghostly scene." I remembered my full belly, and when I got home there was grease on my clothes.
"No we didn't. The world is different to how we are taught it, and when we come up against the difference, we reject it." She nodded, more to herself than to me.
The day was ending and dusk settled around us. I wanted to go home, but Emma kept looking at the mound, a slight smile on her face. I was so sure we were heading to the top of the hill to say goodbye, and I felt cowardly disappointment. I thought we would carry on living in the house until one of us moved out, her hopefully, we could probably still be friends. Maybe I should say it. I searched for some words, nearly found them, then a crack of orange light appeared from the mound. Emma caught her breath and I froze.
The seven Celtic warriors filed out then made a line in front of us. This time there was no feast. They were dressed for battle, that is, they held weaponry and were naked and engorged . They did not look at me, they looked at Emma and with tremendous understanding I realized. They wanted her, all those years ago she knew they did but had chosen me. My indifference towards her had made her make this decision. All at once the frivolous dislikes I had about her fled. Emma, my fiancé stood and did not even look at me.
"Emma?" I stood too. "You can't, what are you doing?" The words Food Sex and Shelter rung in my ears and I screamed "Conversation! You need to be able to have a fucking conversation!" She looked back then, only to cock an eye brow. Slowly, dreamlike, she walked towards the painted men of the Cantii tribe. They closed around her and led her into the hollow hill.
By Andy Parker
One day she said to me, "let's go for a walk." She had caught me rolling a joint on her dead mother's bible. It was a bad habit of mine but the bible always seemed to be handy. I told her I truly felt bad and would never do it again but she seemed to have something else on her mind. We walked through the May spring, the bluebells were out and birds flitted around with important work. She was wearing that skirt that caught men's eyes, and heaps of blue eye shadow. We didn't talk whilst we walked, in fact we hardly ever talked, conversation had been scant for a long time, but that was because we were overly comfortable with each other surely? As we threaded out way through the beech wood, I felt guilty for getting annoyed with her. How she ate? What was wrong with me. I knew what was wrong with me, I didn't want to be with her, and in my defence, she didn't want to be with me.
We left the beech wood and the old chalk hill fort rose before us. It was a strange place, solemn. I felt a sudden coolness as the equinox winds bounced off the downs and clipped at the edge of the woods. The Romans hadn't touched this fort apparently, it was old and out of use when they invaded. But a strange tale was told of a small group of warriors from the Cantii tribe hiding within the hollow hill, making lightning strikes against Roman Legions before disappearing back into the chalk mound with spoils of food and women. We had come here one night in the early days, torches and sleeping bags in hand. Telling each other the story as we climbed then continuing and embellishing around a fire. We had laid down, suddenly nervous as our ecstatic tales of food and fires and sex concluded. The stars appeared, and a silence descended as we pondered our stories of supernatural violence and romance.
As we ascended on this day, I suddenly wondered why we were going there. Emma seemed intent on something, we had never talked about what happened that night, what we experienced. It was too surreal, too unearthly for us to discuss. We had to put it down to the bottles of red wine, but we remembered, we remembered privately and in every detail.
At the top the solemnness had taken over, the Kent country side was verdant around us and the beech tree wood rocked with the wind. It was strange that this place wasn't on the tourist map, you would see the odd walker with a dog, but not hoards of visitors. We sat down where we had made the fire all those years ago.
"Are you going to say it or am I?" She was looking at a mound in the centre of the flattened out top and not at me as she spoke those words.
"Are we splitting up?" She turned to look at me as if I were from another planet.
"No you gonk, about that night." Oh, I said. I feared I sounded disappointed. I paused then related events.
"It was a hell of a feast. They brought out that steaming cauldron, then made a long table from lengths of wood. They set the table, they piled it with slow cooked meats from many beasts. The broth smelt of juniper berries and hazel nuts, wild garlic and nettles. We drank from ewers of a type of beer. There was black bread smothered in fat, hot and delicious smelling. Behind in that little mound we could see a light flickering orange. There were seven of them, painted in whirling blues with their hair spiked up with chalk. They didn't speak, but ate, they ate like you eat, muttering and grunting and slurping away." Emma smiled at me.
"Food Sex and Shelter. What else can someone want?" She was very faraway with her words.
"We imagined it didn't we? Or engaged in a ghostly scene." I remembered my full belly, and when I got home there was grease on my clothes.
"No we didn't. The world is different to how we are taught it, and when we come up against the difference, we reject it." She nodded, more to herself than to me.
The day was ending and dusk settled around us. I wanted to go home, but Emma kept looking at the mound, a slight smile on her face. I was so sure we were heading to the top of the hill to say goodbye, and I felt cowardly disappointment. I thought we would carry on living in the house until one of us moved out, her hopefully, we could probably still be friends. Maybe I should say it. I searched for some words, nearly found them, then a crack of orange light appeared from the mound. Emma caught her breath and I froze.
The seven Celtic warriors filed out then made a line in front of us. This time there was no feast. They were dressed for battle, that is, they held weaponry and were naked and engorged . They did not look at me, they looked at Emma and with tremendous understanding I realized. They wanted her, all those years ago she knew they did but had chosen me. My indifference towards her had made her make this decision. All at once the frivolous dislikes I had about her fled. Emma, my fiancé stood and did not even look at me.
"Emma?" I stood too. "You can't, what are you doing?" The words Food Sex and Shelter rung in my ears and I screamed "Conversation! You need to be able to have a fucking conversation!" She looked back then, only to cock an eye brow. Slowly, dreamlike, she walked towards the painted men of the Cantii tribe. They closed around her and led her into the hollow hill.
By Andy Parker
Kathryn
They burned his house in Carlsway to the ground. He'd seen the flames from The Old Coach at Craw and had run across the fields with Ted and the others arriving in the garden breathless, desolate. There was nothing to be done, the house was a wall of angry white fire, the hottest it would be. Everything was lost.
Beyond the house to the north, they could see a line of lanterns floating up the hillside through the forest back toward the town. Held aloft by dark invisible hands, their light cast quick and sharp shadows through the trees like a clashing of swords.
In front of the burning house the group had moved back a safe distance and they remained in silence for some time sitting among the swirling smoke and watching the fire decimate the timbers. Beside them in the lake everything was mirrored and when the blackened and precarious skeleton of the house eventually lurched and collapsed to the ground it sent a heralding cascade of burning ash into the air. As they looked the reflection burst across the water like a dying amber star.
As the house fell, the men felt the air sucked from around them with a low whooshing sound, as if the fire were gasping for a final lungful of oxygen to keep it alight. Daire looked upwards to the night sky through a galaxy of cinders and whispered a prayer.
Ted was first to speak, putting a hand on Daire's shoulder. 'Well it's done now. You'll not be worrying at least. Waiting for it to come'.
'She was going to leave Ted.' Daire's face was mottled black from the flying ash and patches of his skin glowed from the heat of the fire which still licked around the pile of debris that once was his home. Ted saw how Daire's tears had dissolved lines down his cheeks, saw the hurt in his eyes.
'I know Daire,' Ted paused, then looking over to his son Martin he added, 'You'll be staying with us now.'
Martin joined in enthusiastically looking back at Ted as he spoke, 'That's right Daire, we've plenty of room with the little ones sharing a cot.'
'That'll be good,' said Daire. 'Until things are put right at least. Thank you, really.' He looked at them both.
Ted nodded. 'You're welcome as long as it takes Daire, you know that.' Ted looked towards the smoldering remains of the house. 'It's a terrible thing they've done. A terrible thing.'
Bill Mahey came over from Dirnham with a machine a few days after the fire and together he and Daire began the work to clear the house remains. They separated what could be reused, Daire would rebuild the house in time, but there was precious little. A few shingles here and there from the roof, and the back room window frame was largely unscathed. Everything else they buried in a pit dug away at the edge of the forest.
In the garden, Bill and Daire looked at the sign erected the night of the fire.
'They've not done this for a while Bill,' Daire said.
'Aye Daire, and I can't say I ever thought I'd see it again. You'll not be taking it down now. I wouldn't even touch it if I was you. They'll be coming for it in time.'
'We'd made the plans Bill. She had her family out to the west; an aunt and cousins. Ted was bringing a horse down for her, did you know that?'
'I did Daire, but they couldn't let her go. You understand? Not out there on her own. It wouldn't be good for the village.'
'But how would they know Bill? She'd have been careful, travelling at night and all.'
Bill chose his words carefully, mulling them over and hearing how they sounded in his own head before finally speaking. 'Daire. Everyone knew. The news of this travelled long ago away from Carlsway, on all points to the sea I don't doubt. It's the way of things.'
'She was sick Bill, I know, but not this.' Daire's eyes led Bill's to a willow coffin which sat a dozen or so feet away on an area of grass the fire hadn't reached. Beside it was a small mound; Kate's body. Bill bowed his head.
Daire had found her in the tangle of the house and had carefully removed her as soon as the fire had abated. They had cut her throat thank God and here over her charred body he'd laid Sweet grass and Dog roses from the garden. Daire walked over to Kate and after kneeling over her for a while, carefully and tenderly, lifted her up. As he held her, the grass and roses slipped away to the ground and they shared one final gruesome embrace before Daire lowered her naked twisted body into the coffin.
Daire had been to the forest to collect Kate's favourite White spotted orchids and these he placed upon her chest, closing her buckled and blistered hands around them. As he closed the lid he realised that leaving her would be the hardest thing he could imagine doing and even though it was too soon, he knew all that is born must return to the earth in time. Beauty is given back to god.
Bill watched from a distance. Presently, he looked up and spoke quietly. 'Kathryn was a fine woman Daire.'
'Aye, she was,' said Daire and he looked again at the sign. It was made of wood. A stake around six feet high had been driven into the ground and near the top, a rough timber board had been nailed to it. Painted on the board in the deepest red, were two broad stokes that formed an unmistakable cross.
By Darren Seeley
Beyond the house to the north, they could see a line of lanterns floating up the hillside through the forest back toward the town. Held aloft by dark invisible hands, their light cast quick and sharp shadows through the trees like a clashing of swords.
In front of the burning house the group had moved back a safe distance and they remained in silence for some time sitting among the swirling smoke and watching the fire decimate the timbers. Beside them in the lake everything was mirrored and when the blackened and precarious skeleton of the house eventually lurched and collapsed to the ground it sent a heralding cascade of burning ash into the air. As they looked the reflection burst across the water like a dying amber star.
As the house fell, the men felt the air sucked from around them with a low whooshing sound, as if the fire were gasping for a final lungful of oxygen to keep it alight. Daire looked upwards to the night sky through a galaxy of cinders and whispered a prayer.
Ted was first to speak, putting a hand on Daire's shoulder. 'Well it's done now. You'll not be worrying at least. Waiting for it to come'.
'She was going to leave Ted.' Daire's face was mottled black from the flying ash and patches of his skin glowed from the heat of the fire which still licked around the pile of debris that once was his home. Ted saw how Daire's tears had dissolved lines down his cheeks, saw the hurt in his eyes.
'I know Daire,' Ted paused, then looking over to his son Martin he added, 'You'll be staying with us now.'
Martin joined in enthusiastically looking back at Ted as he spoke, 'That's right Daire, we've plenty of room with the little ones sharing a cot.'
'That'll be good,' said Daire. 'Until things are put right at least. Thank you, really.' He looked at them both.
Ted nodded. 'You're welcome as long as it takes Daire, you know that.' Ted looked towards the smoldering remains of the house. 'It's a terrible thing they've done. A terrible thing.'
Bill Mahey came over from Dirnham with a machine a few days after the fire and together he and Daire began the work to clear the house remains. They separated what could be reused, Daire would rebuild the house in time, but there was precious little. A few shingles here and there from the roof, and the back room window frame was largely unscathed. Everything else they buried in a pit dug away at the edge of the forest.
In the garden, Bill and Daire looked at the sign erected the night of the fire.
'They've not done this for a while Bill,' Daire said.
'Aye Daire, and I can't say I ever thought I'd see it again. You'll not be taking it down now. I wouldn't even touch it if I was you. They'll be coming for it in time.'
'We'd made the plans Bill. She had her family out to the west; an aunt and cousins. Ted was bringing a horse down for her, did you know that?'
'I did Daire, but they couldn't let her go. You understand? Not out there on her own. It wouldn't be good for the village.'
'But how would they know Bill? She'd have been careful, travelling at night and all.'
Bill chose his words carefully, mulling them over and hearing how they sounded in his own head before finally speaking. 'Daire. Everyone knew. The news of this travelled long ago away from Carlsway, on all points to the sea I don't doubt. It's the way of things.'
'She was sick Bill, I know, but not this.' Daire's eyes led Bill's to a willow coffin which sat a dozen or so feet away on an area of grass the fire hadn't reached. Beside it was a small mound; Kate's body. Bill bowed his head.
Daire had found her in the tangle of the house and had carefully removed her as soon as the fire had abated. They had cut her throat thank God and here over her charred body he'd laid Sweet grass and Dog roses from the garden. Daire walked over to Kate and after kneeling over her for a while, carefully and tenderly, lifted her up. As he held her, the grass and roses slipped away to the ground and they shared one final gruesome embrace before Daire lowered her naked twisted body into the coffin.
Daire had been to the forest to collect Kate's favourite White spotted orchids and these he placed upon her chest, closing her buckled and blistered hands around them. As he closed the lid he realised that leaving her would be the hardest thing he could imagine doing and even though it was too soon, he knew all that is born must return to the earth in time. Beauty is given back to god.
Bill watched from a distance. Presently, he looked up and spoke quietly. 'Kathryn was a fine woman Daire.'
'Aye, she was,' said Daire and he looked again at the sign. It was made of wood. A stake around six feet high had been driven into the ground and near the top, a rough timber board had been nailed to it. Painted on the board in the deepest red, were two broad stokes that formed an unmistakable cross.
By Darren Seeley
Monday, June 24, 2013
Story Idea 7
She's going to leave...
AM
The story should be no more than 4000 words.
Deadline: 21st July 2013
AM
Heirloom
After two or so hours they had buried the last one, tamping down the dry friable soil which wouldn't quite cling together.
Audrey stood up and bent away from her outstretched hands as she slapped them together noisily.
The red dust whipped and twisted around her in unpredictable clouds and she turned her head this way and that to protect her face. She looked back down to Paul still sitting on the ground and saw that one of the heads had already pushed its way back up through the ground. Paul looked despondent.
'It's just what it does Paul. We know that now and it's not necessarily a bad thing.' Audrey forced a positive singsongy lilt into her voice.
'How can any of this not be a bad thing?' He got up off the ground and patted the back of his jeans. Audrey walked over and grabbed his arm, wrapping both of hers around it and pulling herself into his body. With her head against his chest she could smell the day on him, the landscape, the heat and fear.
She stared at the ivory head, no bigger than an egg, now proud of the surface. The crudely carved yellowing and expressionless face was turned upwards to the sky but it would follow the arc of the sun they had learned, it sinking once again beneath the soil when the day ended and the sun disappeared behind the mountains and below the distant horizon.
This place was new. Nearly two hundred miles west from Socorro and a hundred more from home. They had chosen it from the book and Paul had a good feeling this time he said.
They returned on State Route Seventy Seven and headed home, south west to Globe on the shimmering blacktop.
Paul was at the wheel, silent and contemplative, a familiar mood for him after the burials. Audrey hung an arm over the top of the car door letting the warm Arizona air wrap around her fingers. Her wrist would jolt backwards from time to time as the wind met the full force of her closed hand, and she playfully tried to push against it.
Paul spoke.
'I'm not sure I can do this for much longer Aud.' he turned his head meeting her eyes with an intensity. She saw his desperation, the guilt and loss had changed his face, remapped the wrinkles which once exaggerated a beguiling sparkle in his eyes.
'I know baby,' she said sliding a hand across his leg. 'We can do this though, together yeah?' She squeezed his leg to emphasise her point, show her love and hide her doubt.
Paul curled his hand around hers and lifted it to his mouth, kissing her fingers.
Audrey smiled. 'We've managed to lose three of them.'
'Are you counting that one,' Paul said gesturing behind him.
'Yes,' said Audrey hesitantly.
'It may come back Aud, I don't think we can be so sure this early. At least wait until we're home then we'll know.'
'You said you had a feeling earlier and I feel that too. I know the first two came back initially but that was before we found the book. We know what to do now and they will stay buried. And if they don't we'll just try again until they do.' She lifted the seatbelt up and over her head, turning her body towards him.
Paul shook his head. 'You make it sound so easy, Jesus. Like a fucking treasure hunt or something.'
Audrey frowned and squeezed his leg again. 'Hey, do you think I don't know how serious this is? But what choice do we really have. No one can help us Paul. We are utterly alone and I'm so frightened, we have to get on with this now, find Ellie and get as far away from here as we can.'
'But we'll never forget what we've done.' Paul was choked.
She unclipped the seatbelt that was still around her waist, and threw her arms around him wanting to shelter every inch of him in her embrace.
Paul slowed the car and turned into the gas station.
***
Audrey's aunt had died four years ago. In her will she had left a wooden box, an heirloom that belonged to and had been in their family as long as anyone could remember. Her uncle had brought it to the funeral telling Audrey that he wanted to pass it on now not knowing when he would see her again. Audrey wasn't around that much he'd said.
When asked, Audrey's mother knew very little about the box, just remembering it as a ornament in the family house. It remained locked but even as a curious child it never held any mystery for her she recalled, and she never knew what was inside.
With the dark wooden box, Audrey's uncle had given her a silver coloured key which was tarnished and pitted with age. When Audrey first held it, the fine electricity of its metallicness made her fingers tingle and when she slid it into the latch that secured the box it released the mechanism without a sound.
The day after the funeral she had opened the box and seen for the first time the six ivory statues wrapped in a heavy dark linen cloth. A few hours later Audrey's uncle was killed by a hit and run driver a couple of blocks from his house. Paul's father died the same evening of a massive heart attack and their twelve year old daughter Ellie after leaving for school the next morning, had not been seen now for nearly four years. A terrible thing had come into their lives.
Their grief had initially overwhelmed any thought that the heirloom was responsible, but as they gradually returned to normal life following the investigations and searches, bad things continued to happen and it was Paul who first raised the possibility and the coincidence. That their lives were being destroyed.
Audrey believed it and took the box of statues to a thrift store. She had been keeping them in a cupboard under the stairs and the first time it took her three weeks to realise they had returned to the house. She had dismissed the strange incident as a moment of misrememberance; whilst imagining herself removing the box and delivering it to the Salvation Army, she hadn't actually done it. The second time the box returned Audrey hid until Paul came home and he found her shaking and incoherent sitting among some old furniture in the garage.
They had found the book after a a couple of years during another attempt to dismantle the box. Paul had inadvertently pushed something and the base had fallen out revealing a secret compartment. Inside was a small clothbound book which held the answers Audrey and Paul had been seeking.
***
'Hey, do you want me to take over for a while?' Audrey stretched her arms above her head and let her hand drop to the back of Paul's neck which she stroked affectionately.
'No, I'm fine,' Paul replied. 'We've just passed Sharton, so only another half an hour now.'
'I can smell it, can you?' Audrey looked behind her to the rear of the car.
'Yeah, a bit. I don't think it ever quite disappeared from the last one.' Paul briefly took his hands off the steering wheel and grimaced. 'I want to change the car when this is over.'
'Definitely,' said Audrey. 'I was thinking, are these people really random? I know the book says it must be the first person we see after the burials but I can't help feeling it knows, is influencing us in some way.'
'You mean are they chosen by something, someone other than us?'
'Yes. Perhaps they are bad people Paul. Maybe, that is why we are being made to do this.' There was a desperation in her voice.
Paul turned to Audrey and smiled. 'That would help baby wouldn't it.'
Audrey began to sob. 'Yes,' she said covering her face with her hands. She looked at Paul. 'I just want Ellie back.'
Paul stroked her hair away from her eyes. 'I know honey and we will get her back whatever it takes.' He looked in the rearview mirror. 'Whatever it takes.'
By Darren Seeley
Audrey stood up and bent away from her outstretched hands as she slapped them together noisily.
The red dust whipped and twisted around her in unpredictable clouds and she turned her head this way and that to protect her face. She looked back down to Paul still sitting on the ground and saw that one of the heads had already pushed its way back up through the ground. Paul looked despondent.
'It's just what it does Paul. We know that now and it's not necessarily a bad thing.' Audrey forced a positive singsongy lilt into her voice.
'How can any of this not be a bad thing?' He got up off the ground and patted the back of his jeans. Audrey walked over and grabbed his arm, wrapping both of hers around it and pulling herself into his body. With her head against his chest she could smell the day on him, the landscape, the heat and fear.
She stared at the ivory head, no bigger than an egg, now proud of the surface. The crudely carved yellowing and expressionless face was turned upwards to the sky but it would follow the arc of the sun they had learned, it sinking once again beneath the soil when the day ended and the sun disappeared behind the mountains and below the distant horizon.
This place was new. Nearly two hundred miles west from Socorro and a hundred more from home. They had chosen it from the book and Paul had a good feeling this time he said.
They returned on State Route Seventy Seven and headed home, south west to Globe on the shimmering blacktop.
Paul was at the wheel, silent and contemplative, a familiar mood for him after the burials. Audrey hung an arm over the top of the car door letting the warm Arizona air wrap around her fingers. Her wrist would jolt backwards from time to time as the wind met the full force of her closed hand, and she playfully tried to push against it.
Paul spoke.
'I'm not sure I can do this for much longer Aud.' he turned his head meeting her eyes with an intensity. She saw his desperation, the guilt and loss had changed his face, remapped the wrinkles which once exaggerated a beguiling sparkle in his eyes.
'I know baby,' she said sliding a hand across his leg. 'We can do this though, together yeah?' She squeezed his leg to emphasise her point, show her love and hide her doubt.
Paul curled his hand around hers and lifted it to his mouth, kissing her fingers.
Audrey smiled. 'We've managed to lose three of them.'
'Are you counting that one,' Paul said gesturing behind him.
'Yes,' said Audrey hesitantly.
'It may come back Aud, I don't think we can be so sure this early. At least wait until we're home then we'll know.'
'You said you had a feeling earlier and I feel that too. I know the first two came back initially but that was before we found the book. We know what to do now and they will stay buried. And if they don't we'll just try again until they do.' She lifted the seatbelt up and over her head, turning her body towards him.
Paul shook his head. 'You make it sound so easy, Jesus. Like a fucking treasure hunt or something.'
Audrey frowned and squeezed his leg again. 'Hey, do you think I don't know how serious this is? But what choice do we really have. No one can help us Paul. We are utterly alone and I'm so frightened, we have to get on with this now, find Ellie and get as far away from here as we can.'
'But we'll never forget what we've done.' Paul was choked.
She unclipped the seatbelt that was still around her waist, and threw her arms around him wanting to shelter every inch of him in her embrace.
Paul slowed the car and turned into the gas station.
***
Audrey's aunt had died four years ago. In her will she had left a wooden box, an heirloom that belonged to and had been in their family as long as anyone could remember. Her uncle had brought it to the funeral telling Audrey that he wanted to pass it on now not knowing when he would see her again. Audrey wasn't around that much he'd said.
When asked, Audrey's mother knew very little about the box, just remembering it as a ornament in the family house. It remained locked but even as a curious child it never held any mystery for her she recalled, and she never knew what was inside.
With the dark wooden box, Audrey's uncle had given her a silver coloured key which was tarnished and pitted with age. When Audrey first held it, the fine electricity of its metallicness made her fingers tingle and when she slid it into the latch that secured the box it released the mechanism without a sound.
The day after the funeral she had opened the box and seen for the first time the six ivory statues wrapped in a heavy dark linen cloth. A few hours later Audrey's uncle was killed by a hit and run driver a couple of blocks from his house. Paul's father died the same evening of a massive heart attack and their twelve year old daughter Ellie after leaving for school the next morning, had not been seen now for nearly four years. A terrible thing had come into their lives.
Their grief had initially overwhelmed any thought that the heirloom was responsible, but as they gradually returned to normal life following the investigations and searches, bad things continued to happen and it was Paul who first raised the possibility and the coincidence. That their lives were being destroyed.
Audrey believed it and took the box of statues to a thrift store. She had been keeping them in a cupboard under the stairs and the first time it took her three weeks to realise they had returned to the house. She had dismissed the strange incident as a moment of misrememberance; whilst imagining herself removing the box and delivering it to the Salvation Army, she hadn't actually done it. The second time the box returned Audrey hid until Paul came home and he found her shaking and incoherent sitting among some old furniture in the garage.
They had found the book after a a couple of years during another attempt to dismantle the box. Paul had inadvertently pushed something and the base had fallen out revealing a secret compartment. Inside was a small clothbound book which held the answers Audrey and Paul had been seeking.
***
'Hey, do you want me to take over for a while?' Audrey stretched her arms above her head and let her hand drop to the back of Paul's neck which she stroked affectionately.
'No, I'm fine,' Paul replied. 'We've just passed Sharton, so only another half an hour now.'
'I can smell it, can you?' Audrey looked behind her to the rear of the car.
'Yeah, a bit. I don't think it ever quite disappeared from the last one.' Paul briefly took his hands off the steering wheel and grimaced. 'I want to change the car when this is over.'
'Definitely,' said Audrey. 'I was thinking, are these people really random? I know the book says it must be the first person we see after the burials but I can't help feeling it knows, is influencing us in some way.'
'You mean are they chosen by something, someone other than us?'
'Yes. Perhaps they are bad people Paul. Maybe, that is why we are being made to do this.' There was a desperation in her voice.
Paul turned to Audrey and smiled. 'That would help baby wouldn't it.'
Audrey began to sob. 'Yes,' she said covering her face with her hands. She looked at Paul. 'I just want Ellie back.'
Paul stroked her hair away from her eyes. 'I know honey and we will get her back whatever it takes.' He looked in the rearview mirror. 'Whatever it takes.'
By Darren Seeley
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