“HMO” Social-Realist-Horror by Billy Stanton

"HMO" Social-Realist-Horror by Billy Stanton (House in Multiple Occupation)

H.M.O: a House in Multiple Occupation. Well, they’re still not wrong, are they? There’s no need to take down the council certificate from beside the porch door. It just used to be that our rickety and fungus-eaten bathroom and kitchen facilities, with the toilet that needs four yanks on the antique chain to flush and the fridge-freezer still rammed with past tenants’ Birdseye boxes and the oven that requires an arm to be riskily plunged in towards the gas igniters with a lighter to start up, used to be shared between seven disparate souls and now there’s only me and it.

It. It comes up from the corner of my bedroom these days, right in the spot where the snail trails of damp run down and first gather in the matted brown crust of the carpet. Once, it rose up in the middle of the staircase, as if something in the basement had generated it, or appeared in the middle of a room at above eye level, where it would circle and suck and scream. Now, now, it rises from the corner and stays there, whirling to itself like an old spinning top that can’t be stopped once a spoilt Victorian child has cast it, pumping out a white noise akin to a Henry hoover drawing in all the matter of the universe, and obliterating all other sound in its fury. I’d fair say it also glowers sometimes, all solemn-like, in the way a copper does when an anti-racism demonstration fails to kick off and start giving some back to the assembled fascist counterforces on the sidelines.

It refuses to take me into it, but I wait for it, anyway. You little tornado, you whirlwind of Tabard Street, grace me with your presence one more time. Don’t you know I’m your biggest fan? Aye, right I am. You cleared all the rest of those stinking buggers out of this place, praise Satan. No more- no precious more- do I have to hear the scions of Harley Street professionals drunkenly slurring out the lyrics of drill songs, or Jehovah-ing out leaflets for Lib Dem council runs or developing pitches for documentaries and realist-sitcoms for BBC Three producers in S. Korea-approved streetwear trainers, and a man can scarcely find such blessings often in a secular world. It’s a shame you had to indirectly and prematurely eject the little Hungarian barmaid- the one so scared to speak to her housemates that you wondered how she managed to fulfil the basic duties of her job, and your heart went out with the wondering- as well, but compromise is a must in life, and you have to learn to take a bite with the stroke.

It came first at the end of a week that had just felt wrong. Really, I suppose, a strange sort of stupor had already been in place for a while before; it was like some fairytale enchantment had been cast, putting the castle and its inhabitants into, at the very least, a waking sleep. My pen had fallen from my. hand one Tuesday evening, and not found its way back since; the desperate pull of publication dreams had faded from a paranoid-obsessive screeching in my skull, a creature that lived diurnally and nocturnally, to a thought barely worthy of consideration. Matters of employment had been missed regularly by my fellow sleepyheads, alongside dates, appointments, delivery driver knocks-at-the-door, phone notifications and pub call-outs. The lethargy had settled apparently for good in the manner of those banks of autumn cloud that don’t seem to stir or shift throughout the whole of October and early November, until the real rain and the real cold comes (down South they don’t seem to get these great grey hanging bellies quite so much, and carry on in a musty half-summer until the clocks go back).

When not fully asleep, we could be found huddled in the basement space that doubled as a living room, strewn with blankets and cushions, and dozing before the evening schedule of some obscure digital ITV subsidiary. Usually such an evening would have driven me into unparalleled heights of nihilistic despair, and sent me in search of the sharpest in my collection of disposal razors to scratch and swipe my way through paper-mache effigies of the perpetrators constructed from grainy duplications of their visages ripped from the showbiz pages of Metro, but I slumbered with the rest, feeling as if each leg had been filled with Grandma’s swamp-thick brandy and my head hollowed out and stuffed with grease paper. This was gossamer torment, as sweet and dreamy as an Everly Brothers weepie, as life-negating and draining of one’s essential essence as reading over the Daily Telegraph summary of a G7 summit.

Eventually, the spell was lifted, and the days returned to normal as we picked up the pieces of lives shattered on the kiln of supernatural indolence. We had sniffed around the carcass of decadence and found no scraps to scamper away with: no Wildean or Huysmans-infused masterpieces were produced, no orgiastic delights tasted and no state of haunting and immortal Dionysian bliss reached. Instead, we were the worse off- variously sacked, dumped and made aware of our total inconsequence by the sheer lack of notice given to our disappearing off the face of this blasted earth- and with our sense and understanding of reality destabilised.

What was even more painful was that it seemed impossible to achieve any degree of reorientation. It all reminded me of dreadful passages of my own wanton youth, where this little herbert found himself doubting everything in the material world, and contemplating whether he hadn’t simply woken up in some numbing dream that covered the horrible lurking truth of things. Aye, I was a troubled kid, alright: for a few months I walked around taking special interest in the way the edge of semi-detacheds seemed to meet the backdrop of the sky; the texture and colouring of leaves that poked out from hedgerows; the shadow and illumination of the weak noonday sun on a pile of books in a dim bedroom; the gurning expressions and occult blankness of the faces of television chat show hosts or the arrangement in space of school friends as they defended a corner on the concrete football pitch because it all seemed off in an unplaceable, implacable way. In those days, every gesture and every movement seemed loaded with some special significance or symbolism that further pointed out the fundamental plastic falseness of things: surely it wouldn’t look like that, surely it shouldn’t look like that when you do that. It was a hell without an exit door (as, perhaps, is typical of all Hells, but I persist in the metaphor), a form of torture that couldn’t be ended with a false confession- not to mention, a problem that couldn’t be shared in the fear, purely adolescent or not, of ending up in the nut house. 

The first departure occurred during this time before the little tornado first appeared, out of economic necessity. The rest of us soldiered on, me as aloof and distant as ever, while the other five attempted vainly to gather together sufficient words to explain and process their recent experiences (four of them eventually settled on medical grounds of dismissal- the lingering after-effects of a rapidly evolving virus strain- while the other bought a lot of books on hygge authored by Scandinavian pointdexters in pebble glasses or women with bob haircuts and entirely pastel wardrobes in an attempt to validate their paralytic complacency).

Then, as I previously mentioned, the tornado manifested on the stairs. It was a Tuesday afternoon when it happened. It grew from a rushing speck on the tatty tartan runner to a height of about four feet and sat for a while in front of the astonished eyes which had gathered due to it pouring out that horrible muffled screaming noise. Then the walls seemed to start bending towards it, slanting at the angles you see more often in silent German films. The stairs began to vibrate and buckle like a mechanical bull, fighting against the pull of the whirlwind, this black hole of Greater London. It ate the entirety of the tartan runner, lifting it from its holdings and slurping it away into its centre like a string of loose spaghetti, and then the whole house was put on a spin cycle. We were slung about, slammed against the walls and the bannisters, and crumpled against the ceiling that had momentarily become the floor. 

Isla, the fashion design graduate, was the first to go, her long blonde hair disappearing into the midst of the cyclone while I blinked in and out of consciousness as my head rebounded off plasterboard and oak beams. Then this visitor from Celtic wonderland, this vicious fairy being, was gone.

Remarkably, there was no subsequent questioning as to where Isla had vanished to nor any struggle to cope. Our unfortunate housemate disappeared from our minds as if she had never paid her eight hundred pound a month to the absentee landlord, or skimped out on the accompanying bill payments, at all. This house of five survivors, we wordlessly decided, had always been a house of five. We remembered the tornado, we talked about that with breathless excitement and sweating scalps, but Isla went out for us like a spark in the chip pan.

Kester- or Loachie, as I rechristened him- buried himself in Colin Wilson, Aleister Crowley and secondhand copies of the journals of the Society for Psychical Research in pursuit of a name and history for this thing, but came up with little save for the account of a similar miniature tornado that seemed to hover over the back of an unlucky pig (and do little else before blinking away) on some supposedly haunted farm in Lincolnshire or some other wind- burnt flatland in the 1980s. The rest of us set vigil for the next occurrence, waiting up in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs in shifts, while the other three slept on in the adjacent bedrooms.

When it next visited, it popped up in the middle of one of those very dormitories. Martin- Bormann in my parlance, Fartin’ Martin in that of the rest of the houseshare- was occupying it at the time, and he came reeling out to us, ranting that it was simply silently floating and looking at him- no, judging him. We fair burst into the room while he was still blathering and all but fell on our knees in praise before it. It had a kind of sick beauty about it, one had to admit; up close, before it got to its doing, it was like it was made from the pixellated fuzz of a lifeless television screen back in the days when channels used to shut down for the night, but with a thickness and a richness and a hypnotic spin to it that was close to the poetic. Occasionally, very occasionally, it seemed to stumble or dart about nervously and almost imperceptibly, like it was a living thing withering and dithering under so much worshipful attention.

It took Martin first that time, lifting him by the foot as the wailing began; as whatever lived in the heart of the wind tore the lining of its throat and shredded its polyptic vocal cords. It took Kester too, eventually, once it had expanded itself in size to fill much of the room almost as a sort of party trick, and then shrunk back to its original dimensions. I had the impression, I remember, that it had gained some control of itself; it no longer sent the whole house into a tizzy, but seemed to be able to pick and choose its targets, to exercise its anti-gravitational pull with a precise determination.

It sure tormented Kester, as if it was punishing him for trying to understand it. He was drawn in and then tossed out multiple times, slammed against the hard edges of the desk and the metal bed frame, and pinned up against the wall. 

It utterly savaged him eventually, holding him in place and taking in and then ejecting with vicious force any sharp implement it could gather up from the room, cutting his face and hands to ribbons like a poltergeist gone haywire and turned from typical mischief to grim mercenary sadism. Then it decided to put childish things away and shut the nursery door, and it devoured him wholly amongst a red cloud.

The rest of us, me and the two girls cowering in the doorway, were again almost immediately stricken with selective amnesia. Had a doctor had a chance to peer into our open skulls, I’m sure he would have seen a small crater in our brains where some sliver of traumatic memory had been sliced away. We remembered the tornado and its tricks, but we forgot Kester and Martin. There were no memorials for our compatriots; we stood no crudely- taped crosses of twigs in the flowerbeds in the way you sometimes do when a beloved pet dies in childhood. When girlfriends came to call- three or four of them, in fact- we gave deeply frustrating (to them) expressions of absolute ignorance and they departed, if not broken-hearted, at least with another tale to add to their chronicles on the subject of untrustworthy and deceitfully un- reconstructed modern masculinity.

Indeed, anyone in full possession of the facts would have been horrified to see us almost constantly in a state of hysterical and childish giddiness, praying for another visitation from our mysterious and idiosyncratic house pet and a demonstration of the new routines it had learnt. To be honest with you, pal to pal-like, it was the best I ever got on with the two girls Joanna and Bella. I’d taken against them from weekend one due to their clattering, giggling and door-slamming four a.m. returns from the sort of clubs that have an unwritten constitutional policy against the admittance of the overweight, and which exclusively feature DJs with lank long-hair playing the most minimal of music to audiences who await each pre-programmed momentary synth stab with the boggle-eyed fervour usually associated with the dancing on the feast days of St Vitus. But now, I was admitted into their secret world, their pacts and covenants, the gorgeously worthless sublimity of the life lived only for laughs.

They were tremendously judgemental people, it must be said, who delivered their sentences on the unworthy with words dashed in fire and blood and masked in ironic humorous sarcasm; indeed, they seemed to be in sole possession of magic mirrors which could reflect the hidden worst angles and unflattering sides of everyone’s personality and behavioural patterns, and you wouldn’t be wrong to claim that I entered into the spirit of their spit sessions with a particular relish, savouring the opportunity to unleash every one of my nasty instincts which usually stayed belted down except in special circumstances. The only thing they seemed particularly fond of, apart from each other and eventually me, was the tornado itself.

The next time it came, returning to its original spot on the staircase, I detested it for breaking my newfound bonds. For the past couple of weeks we had progressed to eating every meal together and staying up chatting and dancing long into the wee hours of every morning. It had never been so before with anyone in the house, and at the time I’d thought myself well-off: who could enjoy the company of Kester, who with his entrepreneurial arrogance and devotion to every pre-packaged facet of the start-up lifestyle had been an alrighty bore; Marty Bormann, a career alcoholic disguised as a museum-piece bohemian, seemingly incapable of any conversational approach other than enquiring whether you wanted to drop acid with him that evening (his partaking of which, when combined with cheap lager and whiskey, usually left him breaking out in fits of weeping every half hour or so for the rest of the night); Isla, another house ghost, remote and evidently still dreaming of the air-conditioned sanctity of the Dubai boarding school halls of residence? They had been not at all my cup. Here, at last, with the irritants thoroughly digested by some Beelzebubic minion was the actual houseshare fantasy of every homesick (as in sick-of-home) suburban teenager, and what did it matter if it excluded almost all of the rest of humanity? We were better than them anyway; we had our Enfants-Terrible-cushioned-playroom-utopia to prove it.

But our ghost finally came, and it bellowed louder than ever and blew harder too. It hovered above its old spot on the stairs for a long while and then rocketed around the entire house, smashing whatever meagre decoration had made its way onto walls and mantel-pieces; demolishing a collection of VHS tapes left over from the previous owner and spewing the liberated spools of black ribbon over every inch of the place; crashing furniture and white goods off the walls. It was a wonder the police weren’t called for the noise.

We hid under a bed in the furthest bedroom; when it slammed open the door and glided over and around our hiding place, it seemed to take a great pleasure in weighing up its target before dragging Bella out by a length of her hair and blanking her out in a blink. The last glimpse we had of her was her face, horribly stretched and contorted and pale, staring out from the very middle of the tornado; her eyes were bulging like they were about to pop, and her red mouth was hanging wide open in a way that suggested a dislocated or smashed jaw. Then there was no more Bella and no more remembering. The tornado seemed to bow, left the room noiselessly and swiftly and pulled the door gently shut behind itself.

Joanna, as was customary, could no more name or picture her old partner-in- crime (officially titled as such by dint of a flimsy inscribed wooden placard in the shape of a love heart that had been given as a Christmas present, and which hung above the departed’s bed) as she could a member of the original rioting audience of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or the residents of 47 St Davids Road, Prescot, Merseyside. But for the first time, there seemed to be some subtle awareness on her part of an absence, and this awareness eventually made its way down even to oblivious old me. She moped and mithered; she didn’t eat or wash or, by the end, even much communicate. I guess she was struggling, as one naturally would, with the feeling that her own mind had somehow turned against her and erased something which was very much needed in order to continue living; she reminded me of my grandmother, who was one of those who took to the onset of dementia darkly and badly, mourning by the winter window in shadowed and deserted sitting-rooms for memories that she both knew and didn’t know that she’d lost, waiting listlessly and impatiently for the moment when all of it- past, present and future- would be blackness for good and proper. 

I, for my own part, came to await the tornado with a similar kind of hopefulness for the kind mercies and gentle splendours of absolute obliteration. Although I remembered nothing of the total and perfect murders it had committed, I yet seemed to have the inkling that this visitor was capable of such things, and spent nearly all my few waking moments (for that strange sort of sleepy spell had been cast over the two of us again) pondering it. This longing, this restless and haunted wanting, which started sprouting then, has yet to leave me. As such, I was devastated when it claimed Joanna instead of me. We’d both fallen asleep for the sixth or seventh time that day in the furthest bedroom, overlooking the muddy wasteland of the miniature enclosed back garden (a honorary breeding ground for noisy foxes), her on the bed and me on the itchy shag rug. The howling woke me; the tornado was only present for a minute or so, dangling itself above Joanna as she stared silent and wide-eyed into its soul as it lapped up and spewed back out the bedclothes and pillows. Then it took hold of Joanna, suspended her for a moment in an arch suggesting a yoga pose, and took her in.

I beat the rug, I beat the floor, I beat the bed and the walls until my hands were black. After. I sat in the middle of the floor, rubbing my numbed palms on the thin carpet, until I could feel the soreness and the aching in them again. I remembered everything now; the gift of memory was bestowed on the last survivor like an unwanted parting kiss from a greedy mouth. I could see again Kester’s brutalised scarlet face; Bella’s waxen and swollen death mask; Isla’s hair dripping from the bottom of the swirling funnel; Martin hanging by his ankle like an executed man done in the wrong way up. They were horrible visions, to be sure, but even more horrible because they had been denied to me, and I was the only one- surely- amongst them who had ever wholeheartedly wished for death in so much of their conscious life. 

The rest had been distracted and relatively satiated- Joanna and Bella with their pitches for television shows that had no subject other than the supposed messiness of their own cosseted lives, Martin with being neutralised and neutered somewhere out in the cosmos when he wasn’t spilling clumsy chord progressions out of an expensive acoustic guitar, Isla with the promise of secure bonds and property portfolios to inherit, Kester with the sort of world where the digital replaced the wholly material, where the blissful hyperreality of the signifiers of personal and financial success overtook the bleak reality of performatively working at the laptop at two am again to an audience of zero- but they’d been put out of their misery, without ever having to either accept or deny that misery, so unacknowledged was it by them. Here was the horror of their epoch before them- indeed, here they were immersed in it. They lived precariously and without roots; they were entirely transient and forced to constantly validate their existence to themselves and others either consciously or subconsciously, while subsiding in the sort of crumbling and degraded house of former luxury that would have been a spot of on-the-nose symbolic prophecy too far even in a tacky horror novel, and being forced to live beyond their means even to secure that level of atrophied existence. But, thankfully for them perhaps, they were never able to see it clearly, and they tried to paint it all with old-fashioned colours of starving-artist-in-the-garret romanticism or else considered it a temporary setback on the road to riches (and indeed, for some of them, it may well have been, but not as smoothly and happily as they wished). They were never able to recognise that they were disposable, and ultimately as forgettable- as replaceable- as yet another restaurant selfie in the great midnight scroll-session of life. And that there is the rub; when there’s no recognition of the shiteness and wrongness of things, a refusal to recognise, then you might as well just sit and wait for the tornado to blot you out.

It has what I want and I hate it for that, and it knows it. It comes now- and, just as in this very second- it sits in the corner of my bedroom and taunts me, even humiliates me. I call to it, I beg it, but it doesn’t listen, or if it does it takes the greatest pleasure in ignoring me. 

Shut my mouth for good. G’awn, I’ve had more than enough of words and thoughts and feelings, careworn and over-familiar, cliches in the traditional patterns and dreary Sunday afternoon revelations. I’m not a profound man, or even a particularly intelligent one, but I pretend to be and I’m weary of the pretence. Seeing things with even one eye is brutal enough, probably worse than seeing with two because you miss bits of the obvious and the obscure: you fill in the blanks with imagination, and when your imagination is as limited as mine… 

Like the tornado, I seem to regurgitate much of what I swallow; I am a mess, a swirling, twirling, whooshing mess of hot air and television fuzz and screaming soundbites, too tired to make sense, too reactionary to draw helpful conclusions, too unoriginal to hit upon the truths behind the truths.

Apart from the one. The one above, the one I have seared into this doggrel, this dog’s dinner of a recounting, as far from the preciseness and vitality and genuine literacy of a letter or notebook entry from one of those Victorian epistolary narratives as possible. That truth’s an important one; if this Northern boy can’t tear the cover from both North Yorkshire and London as he once expected he could, then he can at least leave this little something to his fellow sufferers, alongside an extremely exotic encounter with the supernatural for paranormal researchers, armchair skeptics, and magicians who think they’re summat intellectually to pick over for the rest of eternity.

Disappointment, that’s the modern disease, the big one, the killer, with a body count you can’t even begin to tot up- much higher than that of a buzzing windy irritant. Some would say we all had our expectations set too high by someone or other- Hollywood, pop music, liberal-minded teachers in cotton- wool gloves, parents who spared the rod once too often, politicians who abolished child labour laws and the workhouses- but Christ, there has to be something more we can ask for than the manifestation of some daemon, house- sprite or vengeful Brownie to grant us sweet release from a life spent as meagre contributors to the pension fund of some unknown and unknowable bastard who is nothing more to us than the printed name at the bottom of yet another contract.

But right now, right now, the tornado seems to have offered salvation to others while refusing it to me. Think of how lovely it would be to cease to exist- or, rather, to have never existed at all and, as such, to not have to worry about being mourned or leaving behind a trail of destruction in your wake as you slip away. No broken hearts, no wet hankies, no stained eulogies that leave the speaker weak-kneed and trembling at the funeral pulpit: the guilt-free suicide we’ve so many of us desired at one time or another, and which I’ve spent most of my life quietly coveting. All I have to do is dream… all I can do is dream. For my little helper says no. And now, as if by command of the text, it is sinking away into the carpet again, and do I detect a nod of the head as a last mocking gesture, or have I finally lost it? Take me, Mr. Poltergeist, best of your kind. Oh well, maybe next time, eh? I’ve got nothing to do but wait. I’m not going anywhere. The house is already like a tomb, cold and echoing and empty. Days go past outside the windows: the school kids get in fights and throw fried chicken boxes in the flowerbeds, police cars fly up and down in the direction of the city, the withered oldies mutter curses under their breath as they navigate the cracked pavements, the off-licence puts the shutters up and down and opens and locks ups. None of it is worth a jot to me; the Spring can come and go in a second, and the Autumn can stretch on forever- time gets rather out of control when all you’re trying to do is make it pass. Hours become seconds, and minutes become days, with peaks and valleys within that seem both infinite and shallow as a drizzly day puddle. You live in a dream, and outside one too- just like I did in the old days. You don’t sleep, not properly, you just float in and out of the world for passages of time that bear no relation to the structured schedules of average everyday life. It’s wasting, it’s not living, but what is now? Come back Mr. Poltergeist, best of your kind, and take me.


Billy Stanton is a young working-class writer and filmmaker based in London, and originally from Portsmouth. His story ‘Screwfix’ was recently published in ‘New Towns’ (Wild Pressed Books). His short fiction has also appeared in Horla, The Chamber, Tigershark and (soon) Wyldblood magazines. His latest short film ‘Noli is currently in post-production. His blog can be found at: steelcathedrals.wordpress.com


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“The Year Unknown” Fiction by Tim Goldstone

The Chamber Magazine
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There was civil war here once, although official records are careful not to give it that name. If you look through the government-backed newspapers of the time you will find the language they preferred: subversives, agitators, extremists, disturbances, and then: Necessary Measures.

Location: England, the southern seaboard.

You should still stay out of this city.

Post civil-war life. Late November. Pre storm.

Jake stepped out of the warm fug created by the single portable gas heater in Eddie’s Café, its silver-coloured metal guard scorched brown, and down the three breeze blocks acting as steps, into the foul night. He’d felt better sitting up at the counter in Eddie’s, where Tajana had made his fried-egg sandwich just how he liked. Outside again, the filthy, wet night struck him hard in the face. A storm had been building for days, but this was not it.

Jake’s boots were provided by the flour mill but he wore them all the time – being the first perfectly waterproof footwear he’d ever had. He stared up into the oncoming rain to wash the flour dust from his eyes. If he went to sleep with that gunk in them they’d be stuck together when he woke, and still blurry for the early-morning shortcut to the mill, through the marshalling yards, then along the side of the rail tracks in the winter dark.

Frank, flush with prize money from fighting at the docks, had noticed Tajana clearing a small hole in the condensation on the café window with the back of her hand, and had watched her peer into the blackness after Jake. Frank had seen him before in Eddie’s. Smelt him. That flour dust.

The wind pushed Jake in the back, buffeted the café’s flimsy sides and juddered the padlocked metal cage containing the gas bottles, a ragged map of rust rising up around each of their bases; in the summer, kids regularly try to set fire to them. Jake hoicked up the collar on his long, thick overcoat, old army issue. A few, insignia removed, still turn up in the second-hand shops. When troops were deployed at the height of the Measures the city was nicknamed Khaki-on-Sea. But that was the past – as politicians on all sides insist – although not yet a past so far away it could safely be taught in schools. Jake hunched his head back down. There was salt in the rain.

Tajana squinted at him through the café window.

Several knuckles on Frank’s hands were newly broken. It made no difference to Frank. It was because he would keep punching long after his opponent was unconscious on the ground. But that was the part he enjoyed the most. There were fatalities at those dock fights. Frank enjoyed that too.

Tajana hadn’t known that Frank considered her to be his girl. She’d seen him looking at her, but other than telling her what he wanted to eat he’d never said a word to her, and she preferred it that way. Sometimes though, she would say something to a customer and immediately hear Frank’s laugh. Another thing she didn’t know was that Frank had been noting the extra care she always took making Jake’s sandwich.

A split second before Frank began his attack, he would tilt his head rapidly from one side to the other as though he was comparing two annoyingly similar weights inside his head.

Then, just before he unleashed, he would suddenly ask, “What’s your name?” A trick his sergeant had taught him – “Confuses them, Frank me old mate. And punch the vein in their neck.” The sergeant was the only friend he’d ever had, the only person who’d ever helped him. The first time Frank’s laugh had ever been genuine was in a foreign land watching the sergeant feed bits of his peeling sunburnt skin to abandoned half-starved dogs. An hour later Frank had to wipe what was left of the sergeant off his uniform. He couldn’t do it. He’d needed to ask someone help. “Pull yourself together, soldier,” he’d been told, “or you’re

no damn use.” From that day he showed no weakness. He didn’t care that on his return the promise “Jobs for our boys” was an empty slogan. He didn’t need any help, and later, the neat, wiry army chaplain at the homeless-veterans’ hostel who offered it to him, quickly agreed. He’d read Frank’s eyes and wasn’t prepared to risk his life contradicting him. So Frank had walked out of there leaving the chaplain shuddering at the only words Frank had spoken to him in an hour and a half: “I’ve killed for my country with weapons, and I’ve killed for money with my hands. It feels the same. Just one’s quicker.” Frank didn’t need friends now. And he would take what he wanted.

The city was on the coast, but there were no sands, golden or otherwise, here. No shops selling postcards and buckets and spades, although there was sometimes an ice-cream van.

No excited shouting and screaming of holidaymakers running eagerly into surf, no colourful holiday illuminations. This was not that kind of city. People did scream here though, and run.

It was a port, but in a storm you’d be better off staying out at sea. Tajana couldn’t forget the time Jake didn’t want his change and handed it back to her without the owner seeing. It had been enough for her to get an onion to go with her rice after work. It had made all the difference. Before she ate she’d attached a cheap earring she’d found onto a piece of cotton and hung it over her single candle. Her room had no electricity. She cooked in the tiny

fireplace with any fuel she could find – scraps of wood, bits of plastic. She’d used up the Warning Unsafe Structure sign the first night she’d spent there. She had a roof tile as a plate. Tiles fell off regularly in gusts of wind. She’d found one unsmashed in the street. Her idea had worked; the earring moved in the warm candle air and glittered. “I am lucky,” she’d said out loud in her tentative English, and curled up on the floor to sleep before anything could go wrong.

The city hadn’t built a new Memorial in the end, just added names to the old one. No need any more, though, for even a token guard against the Scrapers – those people who’d lost civilian loved ones and bitterly resented that only soldiers’ names had been added. But eventually a concession was made, and the names of the children who took messages through the city, and were killed for it, were officially engraved onto the bronze plaque. Such delicate compromises hold the taut peace that a succession of political leaders have pointed to as success.

The first child that died had been lifted onto the floor of the only vehicle that passed, an ice-cream van, but hadn’t lived to reach help. It had been hot. Blue sky. No clouds at all. Under the full glare of the sun the van went as fast as it could along a road dug up in parts so rubble could be used as missiles. And with every jolt, blood flowed silently out of a crack in a skull not yet fully grown, to the looped shrill desperate warbling of Greensleeves. In the panic no one had thought to turn it off. An hour later the driver had hosed the blood away and was plying his trade on one of the estates. Life went on.

The ignition buttons for the gas rings at Eddie’s Café no longer worked and Tajana had to use matches. She knew how Jake liked his fried-egg sandwich – the yolk runny – so she

scored the bread to help soak the yolk up; she didn’t want any of it wasted by dribbling out. All that protein – he needed it. She knew what job he did. And he liked pepper on the yolk but nowhere else. Tajana had burns from the spitting fat. She’d got used to the ones on her hands, but it was the sudden searing on the insides of her thin wrists that never ceased to shock her and made her want to cry. She didn’t, though.

When the gas bottles were getting low, cooking was the priority at Eddie’s so the washing up, even of greasy plates and frying pans, was done in cold water, leaving her up to her elbows in a film of scum. They’d had soup like that in the camp, until the whooping cough epidemic had brought the Red Cross and proper rations. In front of the sink, Tajana would dream about being a dancer at the Nelson. A lot of those girls used Eddie’s Café. They weren’t pestered there – nobody was. When a long haired fork-lift driver had said loudly about Tajana, “Oi, look, someone’s splashed skin on that skeleton,” Frank had followed him out, and that fork-lift driver wasn’t seen again until what was left of him washed up further along the coast, entangled in neglected sea defences.

The redundant dockers still used pilfered metal hooks to fight with, but now only amongst themselves, divided loyalties still raw and untreated. The old docks, with their dark corners and labyrinthine warehouse quarter where dissension first fermented, had gone, their leading part in The Unrest stamped on with concrete and steel, powerful floodlights, high nests of swivelling CCTV cameras. The myriad small yards where on bitter mornings lorry drivers had lit fires on the ground directly under their engines to unfreeze the diesel were replaced with a single massive, numbered and gridded, micromanaged lorry park. No vehicle, no load, no driver moved unobserved any more.

Unlike the other prefabs hurriedly built post civil war to feed the bused-in demolition crews and then the construction workers of the much-heralded, grandiosely named “Regeneration Era”, Eddie’s Café, caught in a blind spot between overlapping administrative areas, had never been removed. Its original name had been Feeding Station 874. It was a shell by the time Eddie acquired it for a few favours and a brown envelope full of notes, but it hadn’t taken him long to re-equip it from the dumps. Since Eddie there had been many owners, but the café always kept the name, Eddie’s Café. It was cheaper than repainting the signs, and Eddie’s was already well-known in that area, one of the first where the momentum of new development had eventually ground to a halt with the phasing out of government incentives, both financial and personal. There were no longer fortunes to be made, no more honours to be bought, no more committees with “Renewal and Revitalisation” proudly in their title and the words “urgent” and “dynamic” in their reports. No more money could be made from the city, and it was abandoned to its own devices, area by area. The same mistakes were being made again, and parts of the city were not as punch-drunk as they seemed.

At night the glaring white from the dock’s new floodlights fell just short of Eddie’s, from where a dim nicotine colour managed to break out through the bare, grimy windows and spill across the uneven tarmac where huge puddles formed, sheened with petrol, oil, diesel. They rippled with the cold wind from the industrial-grey sea that slopped and slapped and gobbed against the dockside. Tajana had watched Jake disappear, swallowed up into the night, and then let the space she’d cleared on the window fill with condensation again. Frank had watched her.

As Jake walked away he heard the rain clattering on the parts of the café patched with tin.  The rain blurred the intermittent lights of the chugging freight trains in the distance; they still moved cautiously out of the place. Some habits clung on, ingrained, just in case.

In unreconstructed backstreets, if you knew the right people, you could still obtain the motley and illegal memorabilia of The Uprising, from leaflets to tattoos, the police no longer having the manpower for periodic crackdowns. The selling of more deadly items was dealt with instantly, by a different force, from outside the city, with all the money and muscle it needed.

Post civil-war life. Early December. Post storm.

It is half past ten in the morning. Inside the shut pub, along the windowsills, there are still flies from the summer, mummified in dust. Tixe sits at the bar, wrapped in the Nelson’s  faded surroundings, the parcel tape holding together the rip in the bar stool crackling slightly every time she shifts her weight.

She and Paul the barman are the only people there. Paul opens up every morning, and Tixe slips in behind him as he goes through the door. She knows he can’t say no to her. She is nineteen. There are still the faintest traces of puppy fat in her face. Her fingernails are bitten down a little and her red nail varnish is flaking, but her red lipstick has been newly applied. Once when she’d had to describe herself in a few words, another dancer with more experience had told her to write “petite”.

Paul hasn’t turned the lights on in the bar yet and it is duller than the December morning Tixe has just walked through, arms folded, quick little steps in high heels, short, tight, faded denim skirt, the cold strong wind off the sea reaching even further into the city than usual today, biting at her bare legs. Most of the debris left by the storm has been cleared now. Or scavenged. Her hair hangs down over her shoulders and strands constantly fall across the sides of her face or over her eyes and eventually, not straightaway, she will remove these by a toss of her head, or a perfunctory brush of her hand if nobody is there to see.

Last night Tixe washed her collection of soft toys in the sink in her one-room bedsit after she’d noticed they had mould on their backs from where she had leant them up against her window. It was unusual for her to spend that long in her room any more. She dried them as much as she could in her only towel, then pegged them up on her makeshift indoor washing line, making it droop. Then she lay under her blankets and listened to the vehicles swishing by on the wet road below, and to the rain’s muffled hissing. Tixe could see her breath, but she wasn’t going to spend money turning on the electric fire. She slept until morning, when outside, directly above her window with the rotten wooden ledge that soaks up rain like a sponge, a seagull called raucously as it pecked at something in the blocked guttering, the overflowing water escaping down the wall.

Paul, wiping down the bar and anxious to be part of things, wanting to appear “in the know”, says, “No one’s seen Tajana since the storm, or Jake. That’s over a week now. They reckon, down at Eddie’s, Frank got them. No one’s seen him either, but that’s not unusual – the stuff he does. I liked Tajana. She shouldn’t have danced here, though. And that Jake seemed OK. Sort of polite. But I don’t know what they’ve got to do with Frank.”

Tixe knew.

Paul puts another shot in Tixe’s glass from the huge Bell’s whisky optic. He is pleased he remembered not to say “Taj” this time. It has become the trend in this city to call New Permanents by their full first name.

Paul says, “Eddie’s is open again now – they fixed that quick.”

“Can’t I have some vodka?” Tixe says.

“No, Warren notices if I take anything from the others. This is the only optic big enough.”

Tixe says, “All right then cheers then.” Her bangles slide down her forearm towards her elbow, clinking as she takes a swig.

Paul wants to ask her out, but he doesn’t know how it works with girls like that. He glances again at the two scar lines on her left wrist, one heavier than the other. A third might have done it but the pain had been too much. Everything else now was extra; her form of optimism. She notices where Jake’s looking and moves her arm so her bangles fall back down. He doesn’t know where these girls get their strength from. He thinks, “There should be medals,” and then, “Or at least a good meal.”

Tixe grimaces at the whisky taste. She says, “I think Jake read too many books,” and drinks again.

Paul still floundered at times. He was used to holiday-season bar work in the resorts strung like tawdry decorations along the coastline of the English Channel. But this was a seaport brooding through winter, freezing sea mists moving in at speed inches above the massive expanse of dark water, swarming ashore at night to lay the first imperceptible corrosions in the buildings of the unfinished Reconstruction Areas. He watches the gulp in Tixe’s throat as she drains her glass.

She says, “Aww that’s disgusting.”

Paul says, “Why do you drink it then?” and immediately regrets it. There is that sudden silence he noticed you got sometimes with Tixe. He can hear her breathing.

Then Tixe says, “Be quiet now little barman.” She says it softly because she doesn’t mind Paul. She thinks anyone who hasn’t hurt her yet might be nice. A hope endlessly deferred.

Paul shoots some vodka in her empty glass, puts his own money in the till and leaves the bar to find the song on the jukebox that he’s heard her ask men to put on for her. Away from Tixe he notices for the first time that morning the familiar mustiness of the carpeting and the stink of stale tobacco.

With her back to him Tixe says sympathetically, “Tajana said chimneys instead of funnels.”

Frank had liked it when Tajana used the wrong words. He had laughed at her and not told her why. It was the first time he’d laughed since the army. Then he had started to leave presents for her at Eddie’s. He called her Taj.

Paul hides Tixe’s drink under the bar as Warren comes in talking to another man. Warren casually snaps a stray piece of chalk left on the bar. He has fat fingers. One day his signet ring would have to be cut off. You have to be careful who you call wharf trash.

“Lovely yeah,” Warren continues. “Powerful car. Only problem is soon as I get drunk the tyres start to squeal.” The man chuckles. Warren nods towards Tixe and says, “Oh well, back to the daily grind – and there she is now. Either too much lipstick or someone’s just shot her in the mouth,” and he laughs loudly and then the man does too. Warren’s experienced eyes check Tixe’s skin for the slightest hue of telltale yellow. There were always rumours it was back.

“Any ferry jobs yet?” Tixe risks.

Warren says, “There might be something coming up,” and adds, “if you’re good.”

The man nods towards Tixe and says, “Is it any good?”

Warren nudges him and says, “I’ll show you in a minute.”

From outside comes the noise of a young child who has just learnt to whistle. But the thin uncertain sounds are snatched away by the wind whipping through the streets before the chilled lips can form a recognisable tune.

Warren warns, “Tixe, get yourself changed now. Paul boy, wipe those tables.”

Paul under his breath: “No rest for the wicked.”

Tixe whispers back, “We get a lot done, though,” and remembers the first time she’d got drunk before stepping up onto the Nelson’s stage – the twelve-foot-square wooden platform, ten inches high – and how she hadn’t felt the usual humiliation scrambling around the stage afterwards picking up her clothes. Now she can’t sleep without a drink.

As Warren and the man move through into the back there is more laughter as Warren says loudly, “She knows what to do with the drunken sailor all right.”

Paul sees Tixe looking into her lap.

They hear the man ask Warren, “You still with that wife of yours?”

Warren laughs contentedly. “Nah, I chucked her out. Silly cow got herself cancered up.”

Holding out that he could get jobs on the ferries for the girls was Warren’s way of having power over them. Most of the girls saw a job on the ferries as a step up. Warren knew people, and his connections went back to The Unrest. There was always a high turnaround of ferry girls; the shift hours and their cramped cabins, with the bunk beds, near the engines, wrecked them. He could arrange a job on one if he chose, and then the girl would “owe him big time” – a phrase he loved to use. Tixe stayed working at the Nelson because she thought it was her best chance of a ferry job. It excited her to see them leaving for France at night, all lit up, and she shuddered with the glamour of it all. Tixe was one of Warren’s best girls – and by best he meant most explicit – and he’d noticed the rise in takings when she was on. She was an asset, a word he also liked to use. Tixe was going nowhere. He didn’t mind her getting free drinks from Paul. It was something he had over his barman, a little bit of power in his back pocket for casual use later, like some people would swing a sag – the local improvised cosh: you took off a sock, dropped any coins you had into the bottom of it, tied a tight knot just above them. No doorman was going to take both your socks and all your change off you before you entered a club.

Warren hadn’t needed a weapon since he’d left school, where he’d unscrewed the blades from pencil sharpeners. He had other ways now of getting what he wanted. “Got anything to eat?” Tixe asks Paul.

Paul chucks her a packet of salt-and-vinegar-flavoured crisps, the ones they couldn’t get rid of. Warren always warned him not to feed the girls for free. Tixe fishes in her little purse for coins, handing them to Paul on her open palm, looking up from under her fringe, her big brown eyes presented to him in black mascara.

“That’s OK,” Paul says.

She knew the effect that look had on men, and once, before she’d got work dancing at the Nelson, a woman: Molly. Tixe had told herself, “A girl needs to eat.”

Tixe had waited until Molly’s eyes closed before releasing a yawn. In the morning, Molly brought Tixe breakfast in bed. Tixe hung around in the woman’s flat as long as she could bear it, but in the end she had to ask bluntly for money. When Molly became tearful, Tixe pretended she’d just meant a loan for a taxi. Molly gave her a handful of change from the bottom of her handbag, some loose cigarettes she’d forgotten she had, and a quarter-full box of England’s Glory matches.

Tixe’s look hadn’t worked on Frank, though, alone in that place with him, in between the coils of gigantic black chain and the piles of girders waiting to support a structure that had been paid for but was never going to arrive.

Tucking into her salt-and-vinegar crisps Tixe consoles herself yet again that anyone would have told Frank what he wanted to know, about Tajana setting her sights on Jake, about Tajana dancing and the men who shouted at her – no she didn’t know their names and yes she would find out. She would. Yes. Yes. Yes. She’d known she was in trouble when she’d seen Frank’s wide intense smile with the gums showing above the teeth. Frank’s threats were never veiled. If Frank asked you something it wasn’t a question, it was a test with a right or wrong answer. Even Warren was afraid of Frank, however much he called him wharf trash behind his back. Tixe told Frank about that too. Frank had needed to bend down to place his knuckles under Tixe’s chin, using them to turn her head towards a grubby discarded holdall with a broken zip, twenty yards away. “You’d look good in a rucksack,” he’d said. “You’re little enough to fit in that,” and walked off. Tixe could have cried with relief. She knew Frank didn’t make jokes – that she’d just heard a direct threat. But she remained physically unharmed. She needed her looks. She knew what they all said: cheap but pretty.

Tixe finishes her crisps, rubs her fingers around the inside of the empty packet, then sucks them. Jake had once told her, grinning, “Human beings have nine thousand taste buds. You have two. One for salt and one for sugar.” She starts to drum along to the song Paul has put on the jukebox, using the rings on her fingers to bang against a green glass ashtray that is heavy enough to kill someone. Paul puts another whisky shot into her glass. She doesn’t grimace at all this time.

Tixe had chosen her own dancing name to look good on the blackboard – the shorter the name the larger it could be chalked. It didn’t take long before some girls became known even outside the Nelson by just their blackboard name. Tixe didn’t mind, though. She liked her dancing name. If the blackboard wasn’t moved into the porch in time the rain made a mess of even the shortest name.

Tixe had got her name in an alleyway down the side of the derelict cinema where she’d seen the word “Exit” reflected in her compact mirror, litter blowing against her ankles. The corner of a torn poster on the opposite wall had flapped manically, the only band names still distinguishable: Empty Vessels, Bulkhead.

Paul hears the loud footsteps of Warren and the man on the narrow wooden stairs in the back.

Tixe says, “One more and I’ll go and get changed . . . Please?”

Paul wants to keep her with him downstairs. He pours her another whisky before he passes her the duffle bag she keeps behind the bar. She knocks the drink back in one.

Paul remembers something Jake had told him and says, “Did you know they put Nelson’s body in brandy?”

Tixe shrugs and says, “Why the hell not?”

Outside a child is whistling again. An older child this time, whistling unmistakably one of the old Resistance songs. It sounds ghostly in the cold air and only a few hear it in between

The deep slow barks of a reclamation yard guard dog before both sounds are drowned out by a rumbling convoy of lorries. Only a few people recognise the tune, but one of them begins to mouth the words under his breath.

“I better go up then,” Tixe says matter-of-factly, wiping her crisp-greased fingers on a bar towel.

Paul sees Tixe wince as she gets off the stool. The stage isn’t sprung. Warren doesn’t let the girls use liniment on their pulls and sprains because of the smell, and Tixe daren’t mix painkillers with alcohol again. Warren had advised her, “Ignore your pain, girl. I am.” She walks into the back and Paul listens for her light tread on the stairs as outside the heavy sky lowers itself down possessively over this city. It’s quarter to eleven in the morning. Time to turn the lights on. He still doesn’t know why they call themselves dancers. He wonders again what’s happened to Jake and Tajana.

Post civil-war life. Late November. Storm.

When Tajana had arrived at the Nelson, Tixe showed her to the toilets. They’d walked along a narrow corridor amongst the peeling paint, the damp, the dirt. The thin raggedly cut lino laid directly onto uneven flagstones was mapped with the marks of stiletto heels. The ceiling was low and when they reached the toilet door they were standing directly under a botched repair in the flat roof. The repair was made of corrugated Perspex that trapped rainwater until it turned to a sludge of algae. It had bathed Tixe and Tajana in its dark-green light. While they talked, heavy raindrops had begun to plop and splatter above their heads, like plump insects hitting a windscreen.

Tajana had whispered, “I have no water at room, I must wash face at café in washing up before plates. Can use water here?”

“Yes,” said Tixe. “Help yourself.”

Then Tajana confided, “Frank gives me prizes. I’m worry.” She mistook Tixe’s puzzled look and said, “You know, Frank? Big.”

“Yes, I know Frank,” Tixe said, and then realised. “Oh, presents. Not prizes, Tajana. Presents.”

“Thank you,” Tajana said. “Presents,” and she had placed her hand for a second on Tixe’s shoulder. Tixe was shocked at how light it was – she hardly felt it – and how cold.

Tajana said, “You lucky with Jake. Is kind.”

“Oh, no,” Tixe said, surprised. “We’re not . . . together.”

“Oh, I’m mistake. Sorry,” and for the first time Tixe saw Tajana smile, just a little bit. “I make his egg,” Tajana had added, then disappeared into the toilets, and just before the door shut she’d said, “Thank you.” At first Tixe wasn’t sure what for, but then she’d had an uneasy feeling in the part of her stomach where she sometimes felt hunger. Nothing that another drink couldn’t get rid of, though. Alcohol worked when she was hungry too.

Tixe had assumed someone else would have told Tajana to change her name for the blackboard – Tajana wasn’t her responsibility anyway. All Tixe had done was tell her where the Nelson was and what to say to Warren to get what he called an “audition”. Another word he liked to use. Tixe couldn’t imagine what you’d have to do to fail, but that was before she’d seen Tajana on the stage.

One of the men next to the stage had bellowed at Tajana, “Oi! Put ’em away for the lads!” and his friends had laughed. Then they booed her. She hadn’t known you should choose a different name, so her real name had been chalked up outside for everyone to see, on top of the smear where another girl’s name had been rubbed out by the palm of a hand.

Afterwards, Tixe had watched Tajana through the Nelson’s water-blurred window. The rain had become torrential. She saw her run outside. Then she’d seen her bump into Jake, and at that Tixe felt better and turned away. A man had come over with a vodka for her. There’d been a piece of lemon in it.

“Where’s your coat?” Jake said loudly to Tajana through the torrents of rain.

After a long pause Tajana said, “I have not got one.” Jake had offered her his.

“No,” she’d said. Her bare arms were mottled with cold, and her teeth were beginning to chatter.

Even though he disliked the place, Jake had been about to go into the Nelson to give Tixe the Maritime Employment leaflet he’d spent weeks trying to get hold of for her. He’d been shocked to see Tajana coming out of there. He’d realised he hadn’t seen her anywhere else but in Eddie’s. In the cold, the constellation of burn scars over her hands and wrists were a vivid purple.

Tajana spoke as though remembering each syllable just in time. “They did not like my dance. But I cannot do cooking more. It hurts me. Too much. But your egg – I am sorry. But I’m go home now,” she’d explained.

It shocked Jake that he’d never thought of her as living anywhere. Tajana’s clenched jaw and the determined look in her eyes – as though fixed on something way in the distance – reminded Jake of a propaganda poster he’d seen in a book in the library; another showpiece project, another concession.

After a second refusal of his coat he decided he’d have to walk her to Eddie’s. The flow of water in a roadside gutter had started to carry away pieces of broken glass, and litter was piling up over the drains. He opened his coat and moved Tajana – already bedraggled – in close so that some of the heavy material would be covering her. Their faces touched for a second – he could smell on her skin a mixture of pub smoke and fresh new chilled wet air brought into the city on an increasingly powerful wind, from far out at sea.

Behind them the deluge had extinguished Tajana’s name on the blackboard, and all over the city a cascade of roof tiles was falling and smashing.

As they rounded a corner, storm rain, sweeping in all along the shoreline, appearing in the distance as drifting smoke, had driven straight at them. A cat with a wound on the side of its face had flattened itself, anchoring its bony body to the ground against the gusts of wind. Tajana had stumbled, shivering violently all over him, clinging on as they passed the old wharf with its tang of sodden rusting iron and its abandoned military watchtower. Children still played the old game – daring each other to lick the railings. They tasted like salt, blood and iron: the history of the port on the tip of their tongues. They spat it out, but the taste stayed with them.

Jake and Tajana were now nearing the former front line of the city’s indelible near past, horrifying, or glorious, depending on your allegiances, where after two sweltering, breathless days and nights one late June, the long-smouldering Insurgency had finally ignited.

By the time a CCTV camera picked up the two bedraggled figures crossing the old battleground – now a vast exposed span of cracked and stained concrete that in summer was criss-crossed with the shadows of cranes, elongating and contracting with the movement of the sun – Tajana’s arms were wrapped so tightly around Jake’s waist that she was walking sideways with the front of her body moulded to the left side of his, making them constantly veer off course through pools of quickly gathering water. Jake had felt the wetness seeping through his boots.

Certain historians will tell you there are bodies under all that hastily laid concrete. Locals know that’s a lie; that’s not where the bodies are.

The CCTV cameras had picked out Frank, fists clenched, teeth bared, now a hundred yards behind Jake and Tajana, his rapid marching stride making no allowances for the full-frontal assault of the accelerating storm.

Staggering along now in weather pounding the coast and smashing sea defences, all Jake had wanted was to find somewhere safe. For them both. He’d thought of the abandoned shacks further inland along the estuary. But he knew in this storm they’d be grateful just to make it to Eddie’s.

Out to sea a distress flare had shot up through the grey air. Tajana had begun to weep. Not for herself, for others. Always for others. Then, in the middle of it all, instinctively, they had stopped, and clung on to each other. It was all they could think of to do.


Tim Goldstone is a published and broadcast writer. ‘The Year Unknown’ first appeared in The Mechanics’ Institute Review Anthology 15, in 2018. He has roamed widely, including throughout the UK, Western and Eastern Europe, and North Africa, and currently lives in Wales. Loiters in twitter @muddygold 


“Cheap Sunglasses” Fiction by Rie Sheridan Rose

Gillian studied her reflection in the mirror with a worried frown. She looked tired—lines and wrinkles she had never seen before marring the smoothness of her skin. Her eyes looked a bit funny as well…there was an almost golden tint to them, and they used to be sapphire blue. Even the pupils appeared dodgy—more oval than circular. What the hell was going on?

            The most maddening thing, of course, was her hair. She reached up to brush it from her face, and a big clump of it came off in her hand. She felt tears welling up. Her red curls had always been her best feature. Blinking back the tears, she covered her head with a scarf—shades of Grandma Cora for the gods sake—and shrugged into her coat.

            Hopefully the new doctor she was seeing could tell her what was wrong. She glanced at her watch. If she didn’t hurry, she’d be late for the appointment.

            She programmed the address into her GPS and followed the directions on auto-pilot, still worrying about the changes to her appearance. And it wasn’t just that. If it were just superficial changes to the outside, she might be able to live with it…but the constant hissing sound inside her head was driving her mad.

            Thank the gods for Marc. When she’d confided to him on a night of dedicated drinking, he’d clucked his tongue and pulled out a pen.

            “You go see my friend Doctor Asclepius. Here’s his address. If anyone knows anything about all this mad shite you are going through, it will be him.”

            “But how expensive is it? You know I’m between positions at the moment.”

            Marc waved a hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about it. Tell ’im to put it on my tab. Least I can do for you, gorgeous.”

            She tried to protest, but when Marc Urie got something into his head, it was impossible to change his mind.

            “Maybe I can give him my headache,” Gillian growled aloud to the empty car as the streets outside it got more and more rundown, and the scent of decay and debris penetrated even with the windows closed. “Sent me off on some fool’s errand, I bet. Laughing up his sleeve at how easy I am to punk.”

            YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR DESTINATION chirped the happy little voice on the GPS, and she pulled into the parking lot of a Greek revival office building. She looked at the scribbled address Marc had written on a soggy cocktail napkin, and then up at the facade of the building. This was the place, all right. “Let’s hope this guy is as good as Marc says.”

            She bent for her purse, and the hissing in her head surged. She rubbed her temples, feeling a bit of roughness under her fingertips. Her skin was so dry lately…

            Forcing herself to walk into the building without a stagger, she spoke to the woman at the reception desk. “I have an appointment with Dr. Asclepius at ten.”

            “Do you have your insurance card?”

            Gillian could feel her face heating. “It’s to be charged to Mr. Marc Urie.”

            “Oh…so you’re Marc’s friend. Of course. Through that door, and first right.”

            She followed the directions, feeling a bit dirty for the way the receptionist had spoken to her. As if she couldn’t pay her own way, but had to rely on the kindness of strangers, as it were…and the worst part was that it was true.

            She found the room the receptionist had indicated and sat in the patient’s chair, taking off her scarf and scratching her itchy scalp. More hair came off in her hand. She bit her lip to keep from crying.

            After twenty minutes, she had just about decided to leave in frustration when there was a rap on the door and a man breezed in without waiting for an answer. He was muscular, with a bushy graying beard and twinkling blue eyes. Gillian felt marginally better.

            “Miss Gorgon, is it?”

            “Gordon. Gillian Gordon.”

            “Forgive me. My nurse has horrible handwriting.” He plopped down in the other chair. “What seems to be the problem then?”

            “It seems so silly, now. It’s just…well…my eyes seem to be changing, and I’ve got terribly dry skin, and new wrinkles, and—my hair is falling out.”

            “I see,”

            “Plus, there’s this hissing…”

       “Hissing?”

       “Yes. It’s like it’s inside my head.”

       “Is it like white noise hissing, or a tea kettle, or what?”

       “None of those. It’s…organic. Like an angry cat…or maybe a…snake?”

       “Interesting.” He made a note on her chart. “How old are you, Miss Gordon?”

       The question startled her. “I turned twenty-one in February.”

       He nodded thoughtfully and made another mark on his chart.

       “And these changes started when?”

       “I noticed the first symptoms about six weeks ago.”

            “I thought as much.” He made a note on her chart, sighed, capped his pen, and then leaned forward confidentially, his hands laced in his lap. “I’m afraid I wasn’t so wrong about your name, my dear.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “I could send you for a battery of tests, but I don’t think they would do any good. This isn’t a normal ailment.” He sighed again. “Have you read much mythology?”

            She blinked at the apparent non sequitur. “Some. What you get in school, of course.”

            “What is your heritage? Bloodline-wise.”

            “Is that important? Largely English, a bit Irish, some Italian on my father’s side, I believe.”

            “Any Greek, perhaps?”

            “Not to my knowledge.”

            “I think you should invest in one of the DNA tests to be sure, but I believe your knowledge is incomplete, my dear.”

            He reached over and patted her knee. “Don’t be alarmed. This is a perfectly natural occurrence. You’re just coming into your birthright, that’s all.”

            “What do you mean, Doctor?”

            He stood and reached into a cabinet hanging over the desk. He rummaged through it for a moment, and pulled out a pair of dark sunglasses. He handed them to her with a solemn expression.

            “I’m afraid you must wear these at all times from now on, Miss Gordon. Unless you’re home alone, it’s imperative. And, I would suggest removing all your mirrors to prevent…accidents. Marc was quite right to send you to me. No one else would be able to diagnose this condition…but I’ve seen it before.”

            She glanced down at the sunglasses, wondering what he was going on about.

            “You’ll also wish to invest in a collection of kerchiefs. Perhaps a hoodie or two. Believe me, you won’t want to go about with your head uncovered.”

            “I don’t understand!”

            He hunkered down beside her, taking her cold hands in his. “The snakes will be coming next.”

            “Snakes?” She tried to pull away, but his hold was deceptively loose.

            “Do you know the story of Medusa?”

            “Of course…”

            “Wear the sunglasses.”

            “W-why?”

            “My dear, you’re evolving. Somewhere in your ancestry, there was a gorgon. You’ve inherited the gene. It’s recessive, but there are triggers that will awaken it. Stress can be a factor, for example. Marc mentioned you were between jobs. That could be a factor. The bottom line is…you’re turning into one of those creatures.”

            She felt the tears running down her face, and shook her head. “No. That’s impossible. You must be wrong!”

            “I’ve been doing this job for a very long time. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth.” He released her hands with a pat of sympathy.

            Gillian sobbed into her hands. And felt flickering tongues licking away her tears.

       He let her cry herself out, moving back behind his desk and pointedly working on papers stacked there.

       When she could pull herself together, she reached up and ran her fingers through the wriggling mass of creatures that had sprouted on her scalp.

       “What’s the cure?” she asked, tying her scarf about her head and squaring her shoulders.

       “Cure?”

       “There’s a cure for everything these days, isn’t there? I’ll pay for it. No matter what the cost. I’ll rob a bank if I have to!”

       “My dear, I am afraid it doesn’t work that way.”

       She surged to her feet. “I refuse to accept that.”

       “Feel free to search, but I have never heard of any way to reverse genetics.”

       “If there is a way, I’ll find it.”

       “I believe you will.” He rose to his feet and stuck out his hand. “Best of luck.”

       Gillian ignored the outstretched hand, walked to the door and turned. “One more thing, Doctor…”

       “Yes?”

       She lowered the sunglasses and stared at him over the top of them.

       He gasped—and froze into stone.

       “I had to know for sure.”             Pushing the sunglasses back into place, she smiled grimly. She couldn’t wait to show Marc…


Bio:

Rie Sheridan Rose multitasks. A lot. Her short stories appear in numerous anthologies, including Killing It Softly Vol. 1 & 2, Hides the Dark Tower, Dark Divinations, and On Fire. She has authored twelve novels, six poetry chapbooks, and lyrics for dozens of songs. She tweets as @RieSheridanRose.

Publisher’s Note: Check back frequently for The Chamber’s written interview with Rie Sheridan Rose. Date of publication to be announced later.

“Ashes” Fiction by Ethan Maiden

There you go, daddy. There you go to the next place where mummy is waiting.

I was there when he stopped breathing. Just like I had been there with mum. I had become some kind of grim reaper watching over as they passed over. Did I feel fear? Of course. But did I feel sorrow – unashamedly not.

It hadn’t been a secret that I didn’t get on with my parents. I was an only child and their special little daughter. In my younger years I had been spoilt rotten, getting anything I wanted. Dad (Patrick) had been a partner in a successful architectural firm and we had a significant amount of wealth. It paid for my first car, my education and eventual marriage to Stephen. But behind everything, there comes a price and as they say; ‘you reap what you sow.’

*

 Dad’s funeral took place on a blustery morning in March at 11:00 to be precise. It was a small affair with distant family relatives and his old work associates. Dad had ensured he had a life plan and the whole thing had been paid off in advance. All I had to do was arrange the thing and show up.

            I nodded to the, ‘Sarah, we’re sorry for your loss,’ condolences.

            I hate to admit it, but I resented both my parents. I was told to get out and get a job, to fend for myself. I remember the arguing. I could still see mum collapsing to the floor grabbing her chest. She couldn’t breathe. I reached for the phone to call an ambulance but…

I’d tried to be the rock to get dad through the grief. 

            ‘Sarah, I miss her every day,’ dad would say.

            ‘Me too dad.’

            Little white lies don’t hurt … not sometimes.

*

            Dad had insisted on being cremated instead of a burial like mum.

            The ashes were placed in a grey ceramic urn which found its way onto my fire mantelpiece. Stephen said he enjoyed having it there, like dad was still here with us. They had had a special relationship. They went fishing and had a beer watching the game. When mum died Stephen had been the rock to pull dad through the grief.

            ‘Are you scattering them like he asked?’ Stephen asked.

            I nodded, ‘in the sea.’

            ‘When?’

            ‘He said he wanted to go after a week.’

            ‘Huh?’

            ‘He said to me that when he died he wanted to stay just one more week with me, before he is left to rest forever.’

            ‘Well, you have one more week with him, so enjoy,’ Stephen said.

*

            The following day we met with dad’s solicitor. Marcus Hind was a smart chap wearing a navy pinstripe suit, wavy grey hair and thick glasses that showcased his bright hazel eyes. Marcus’ office was on the top floor of the building which housed other small businesses in the centre of town. Stephen and I arrived at just past noon for our appointment.

Butterflies fluttered in my stomach. Dad had been wealthy, that was common knowledge. However how much was still in question. He took early retirement and amongst his assets were a healthy bank balance, a property in Spain and the manor residence where he had passed away.

            ‘You’ll be wondering what details were in your father’s will?’ Marcus asked staring down at the paper.

Oh, you betcha!

            ‘I’d prefer to have him here, Mr. Hind,’ I said, gripping Stephen’s hand.

            Marcus mumbled something I couldn’t quite make out before staring up at us. ‘So, Patrick left the house and the residence in Spain to you.’ Marcus pulled from below his desk a leather black briefcase. ‘Inside this case is the property paperwork as well as the remains of his entire bank balance in cash. I believe it’s in the region of two hundred and forty thousand pounds.’

            ‘All that money can fit in there?’ Stephen asked, pointing with a gaping mouth.

            ‘You’d be surprised,’ Marcus said.

            I went to take it and Marcus quickly slid it back from my grasp.

            ‘There is one more thing Patrick requested.’ Marcus said. ‘The case is locked and will remain locked for the week. In seven days, I will provide the combination code.’

            ‘What?’ I asked, bemused. ‘Is this a joke?’

            ‘Afraid not,’ Marcus said. ‘That’s the conditions Patrick requested.’

            Marcus slid the case back to us. I picked it up, the weight made me almost drop the damn thing. A scent rushed up to me – burnt paper or smoke from a fire. I took hold of the steel handle and left.

            So much money in my grasp … a week will fly by … no problem.

*

            There is a powerful aura around the thing(s) you want the most. The wealth alone in this case was enough to see me through the rest of my life without struggle. Stephen and I had agreed early on in the relationship that we wouldn’t have children. We or more I was selfish. We enjoyed our extravagant holidays and lived the lifestyle we wanted – a life with freedom and without restrictions.

            I set the case on the kitchen table and went to the lounge. The urn stood tall on the mantelpiece.

            ‘This is your last joke, huh?’ I asked. ‘One more week?’

            The urn stared at me and I felt tingles spread across the entirety of my skin.

            That night – it started.

            I woke at just past midnight. Stephen snored next to me as per usual. For some reason I felt wide awake at such a nocturnal hour. Ice filled the room; it felt more like December than early spring. I sat up and rubbed my arms to remind my body of warmth. When I exhaled I saw my breath float and then evaporate before my eyes.

            My surroundings felt off. I could swear I was being watched. I glanced around the shadow filled room. For some reason our eyes like to play mean tricks on us and I’m sure I saw a silhouette run across the landing. Nothing was there obviously, but I couldn’t shake the unease festering in my gut. I laid on my side and held my eyes closed hoping for the sleep to take me. Eventually it did.

*

            The following day I stood staring at the briefcase on the kitchen table. I stroked and smelt the leather. The combination was set to 0-0-0. I thought about rolling the numbers to see if I’d drop lucky. Maybe there’d be a click and the fortune would be mine.

Jokes on you, papa.

My hands moved closer but before I could make contact there was a small bang from the lounge.

            I headed in and saw that the urn had moved across the mantelpiece to the right by at least a foot. Stephen was at work so there was no way he could have moved it.

            ‘Hello, someone there?’

            My spine arched, just like a cat when you give it a stroke. I had to get out of this place. I threw on my jacket and headed out. I wanted to stay out as long as possible; being alone in this house had my nerves jingling.

            I walked to town to buy a few groceries, that passed a little time and hopefully Stephen would be home by the time I got back. I bought the essentials – milk, bread, eggs and a bottle of white wine.

            On the way back, I saw a homeless man sat on the street. He wore a red beanie hat, green jacket and had facial hair to his chest. He sat sorrowfully with a steel cup that held the change he had been given throughout the day. I ransacked my pockets to see if I had anything to give. My hand waddled out a measly £1.34 but as Tesco say – ‘every little helps.’ I bent down to throw it in the pot when the homeless man stared up at me.

            Have we met?

            ‘I have no need for your blood money,’ he said.

            I stopped before dropping it in, startled by what I’d just heard, ‘what?’

            ‘That money is no good to me.’

            ‘I … I don’t know what you mean,’ I said shaking my head in disbelief.

            ‘You know exactly what I mean,’ he replied, toneless.

            I put the coins back in my pocket and hurried back up the street not daring to look back.

*

            I was pacing the kitchen when Stephen arrived home.

            ‘Sarah, what’s wrong?’ he asked, dropping his work bag down.

            My arms were folded and I bit my nails.

            ‘Something’s not right Steve,’ I said.

            ‘What do you mean?’

            I pointed to the briefcase. ‘Ever since we brought that thing back I’ve been feeling … strange.’

            ‘Strange?’

            ‘I … I can’t explain.’

            He moved closer placing his warm hands on my shoulders. ‘You’ve been through a lot,’ he said. ‘First your mum and now your dad in a short space of time. The grief has no doubt taken its toll on you.’

            ‘That’s not it Steve … I know something is wrong.’

            He grimaced and assured me nothing would happen whilst he was here. He would protect me.

*

            Stephen could say what he wanted but when night came that’s when the shadows played their devious tricks.

Again I woke in the middle of the night. For once Stephen wasn’t snoring. I think it was worse that I was engulfed in silence, it somehow made the atmosphere eerier. At least Stephen’s heavy breathing brought a realism to everything.

            The cold fell over me the same as before. I sat upright and stared at the open bedroom door which led to the landing. The staircase creaked. My heart thundered. Thud … thud … thud.

            Mum?

            I struggled to breathe.

            My throat felt as though it was closing with a barricade of ice.

            I gasped trying hard to suck in the air.

            Stephen woke and started shaking me by the shoulders.

            ‘Jesus Christ Sarah, what’s wrong?’

            ‘Mu … mu …,’ I mumbled pointing to my throat.

            My whole body started to shake.

            Stephen laid me down and held me tight.

            ‘I need to call an ambulance.’

            And then the ice in my throat melted. The beating in my chest relaxed and the air returned to normal.

            ‘I … I don’t know what happened,’ I said finding my voice a few moments later.

            ‘You looked like you were having a heart attack,’ Stephen said.

*

            The following two days and nights went without incident. I put the episode down to a panic attack with everything that had happened lately. Still the briefcase sat on the kitchen table. I had to fight the urge to keep my thumbs from scrolling down the numbers. I wanted what was inside … I needed it.

            My hands reached down and I started on the numbers one through nine on all three dials. After an hour or so I flicked them all back to 0 with a huff and sigh.

            A few more days … that’s all.

            It was that night when my fears were suddenly turned up a notch. My eyes popped open to the cold air. This time I felt no struggle to breathe, well not initially. The cold air puffed out of me and I swamped the quilt to keep warm.

            The stairs creaked and not in the way we expect in the midnight hour. They creaked as if someone was climbing them. Something was coming up the stairs.

            I rolled onto my back staring so hard I thought my eyes would pop out of their sockets.

            Time stood still; I was frozen in time.

            Next to me Stephen slept silently. No snores; no heavy breathing and I actually thought he could be dead.

            I glanced up and saw … it.

            The face.

            The right side of a pale white face peeked at me from behind the doorframe. Its hand crawled round spidery and gripped hold of the frame.

            I wanted to scream. My heart wasn’t beating, it felt like it had stopped altogether.

            Then real fear struck me. It was my dad.

            His black eye on show had sunken into his skull and his pale face matched the moon which crept through the curtains.

            A sinister smile crept on the corner of his lip. Crooked teeth fell from his mouth. Dad was mocking me. Even from the grave he was still making my life hell.

            I rolled Stephen over.

            His face had changed.

            Lying next to me now was dad’s frozen corpse.

            This time the screaming did come and I was shaken out of my fit of fear by Stephen.

*

            I tried to explain everything. Stephen looked understanding but I knew deep down he doubted my every word.

            ‘It was just a nightmare,’ he said.

            I walked to the lounge and stared at the urn. That thing was fucking cursed. Could it really be that dad was still here in some way? I pushed his face out of my head.

            I went to speak with Marcus.

            After explaining everything he sat in silence gathering his thoughts.

            ‘I want that code,’ I said. ‘I want to get the money, take the keys and get the hell away from here.’

            Marcus tapped his fingers in a praying pose against his lips. ‘You have twenty-four hours before you get the code, Sarah.’

            ‘No; I want that damn code now!’

            ‘Twenty … four … hours.’ 

            ‘Well I’ll just take that urn and scatter his ashes in the sea if I have to. Good riddance to him.’

            ‘That’s up to you,’ Marcus said.

            He wasn’t budging his stance.

            I got up and stormed out of the office.

            If twenty-four hours was all I had to wait to get my hands on all that money then so bloody be it. One last push of patience.

That night I got in bed early.

Stephen had stayed downstairs to watch the game with a beer.

When I woke this time, Stephen still wasn’t beside me.

Stood above me was my mother.

Her decaying corpse stared down at me.

Her once tanned face was now rotted flesh and bone.

The stench made me want to vomit.

Mum was almost bald but a few loose strands of frizzled hair.

‘M … mum?’ I muttered.

She wore the white gown she had been buried in, it was dirty with stains of mud and earth flowing from knees to her chest.

Then I heard the distant sound of thud … thud … thud.

That horrific noise.

Was it my heart or hers? I couldn’t be sure.

‘Mum … please.’

She pointed at me and her mouth gaped open as though yelling at me, the way she had done all those years ago.

My dad again peeked from the doorframe smiling with that mocking dead expression.

Thud … thud … thud.

The beating of my heart grew.

Thud … thud … THUD.

I couldn’t breathe.

‘Mum … dad … please,’ I strained.

I fell to the bed and started to panic. My hands and toes tensed so hard I thought they’d snap like chicken bone. The muscles and veins in my neck bulged from the thinning skin. This was it; I was dying and my parents were embracing every second.

Stephen came running up the stairs; dad retreated out of view and mum crumbled to the floor vanishing in an instant.          

‘Sarah … Sarah!’ he yelled shaking me.

I managed to take in some much needed oxygen and filled my lungs to capacity.

‘That’s it baby, long hard breaths,’ Stephen reassured me.

My hands relaxed. My muscles started to unclench.

Stephen grabbed hold of me and hugged me tight.

‘Where were you?’ I asked still catching breath.

‘I fell asleep on the sofa.’

‘You were supposed to be here … to keep me safe.’

*

The day I’d been waiting for had finally come. After a long and otherworldly week I’d get what was due to me. But first I had business to attend to.

I grabbed the urn and threw it in the car. Stephen was working so I had all day to carry out the task in hand.

The seafront was an hour’s drive away.  It was a gusty day which suited me. On the way I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror.

Jesus Christ Sarah, you’ve aged. Your eyes have bags dropping near your chin. The creases in your face crater like the Grand Canyon and that hair is in dying need of a colour.

Don’t worry we’ll have plenty of cash to sort these things out. All in due time.

It was my mother’s voice that spoke the words.

‘So, you think you can still dictate my life, huh?’ I asked the urn sat innocently beside me. ‘Coming to me in the night … and using mum!’ I said shaking my head. ‘How dare you use mum to get at me. No … no sir; it will all be over today daddy.’

Sarah, you sound hysterical.

I parked at the pay and display next to the beach. £1.30 for an hour’s stay was fine by me. I used the change which should have gone to that homeless chap that freaked me out. Grabbing the urn and my umbrella I headed out down the stone steps. The beach was quiet, a few dog and casual walkers here and there. The sea – wild with a strong scent of salt infiltrating my nostrils.

Surfers would embrace these high waves.

I reached the sea and put down my umbrella. My feet paddled in the ice-cold water and I took the urn holding it out in front of me.

‘Dad. I want to say something. What I put you and mum through was wrong, and I apologise. Thing is, you being in my home is a constant reminder, and I don’t want reminding of the last time I saw you alive. The night terrors are obviously my mind playing the guilt card. I hope you understand. Farewell daddy; be at peace.’

I unlocked the urn and emptied the contents into the sea.

Rolls of money fell into the water.

Bundles of £50 notes held by elastic bands washed out to the sea. There must have been a dozen or so.

What the hell?

I checked the urn and it was empty. Just an empty ceramic container. No ashes and now – no cash. The sea carried the money out and into the waves. I stood speechless as they disappeared under the water.

*

I ran back to the car as fast as my legs would take me. I yanked out my phone out and dialled Marcus’ office.

‘Hello, Marcus H-’

‘Is this some kind of a joke?’ I asked.

‘Sorry?’

‘The urn … it was filled with cash, not my fucking dad.’

‘I see. You scattered it then?’ Marcus asked, irritatingly calm.

‘Yes I scattered them. What’s going on?’

‘Come by the office and we can sort this whole thing out.’

‘Give me the code,’ I said.

‘Pardon me.’

‘The code … give me the fucking code to the case.’

And then Marcus gave it me. I questioned whether he was joking.

He wasn’t.

*

When I arrived home, I ran to the front door with excitement. My hands rushed the key in the lock and I shot through to the kitchen. The briefcase stood on top of the table as I’d left it. I pumped in the code and pulled back the lid.

My hands clasped my mouth like I’d been hit with an arrow in the chest.

Thud … thud … thud …

I took a double take to make sure my eyes were not deceiving me.

Ashes.

The entire case was filled with ashes.

*

Marcus sat behind his desk. I stormed in and smacked the table.

‘What is happening?’

‘Oh Sarah. You have been a naughty girl.’

‘What does that mean you fucking weasel?’

Marcus slipped his computer screen around to face me. On the monitor was the image of a hidden camera. It was staring at my father’s bed. My dad was in it.

‘Where did you get this?’ I asked.

‘Well, you see that your father had become quite suspicious following your mother’s untimely death. So, he set this camera up for proof if he ever needed it, which he certainly did. Didn’t he Sarah?’

‘No … this isn’t happening …’ I muttered, unable to steady myself.

I fell into the chair.

‘Let’s have a watch, shall we?’ Marcus said and pushed play.

I remembered. I didn’t need to see it, but I couldn’t take my eyes away. I entered the bedroom whilst dad was asleep. I remembered his face. I took the pillow and held it tight against his face. I pressed down harder and harder. Dad’s hands gripped as he fought, damn he tried to fight. Yet he was frail, all too frail. I pushed harder until he fell limp …

‘Oh dear Sarah,’ Marcus said. ‘First your mother and then your father.’

Thud … thud … thud.

‘Dad … had suspicions?’

‘The constant discussions over money? The arguing? He heard you say that you’d kill her?’

Mum needed an ambulance. I could have saved her but I didn’t make the call. I watched her die in front of me. Thud … thud …

‘He set me up?’

‘Of course,’ Marcus said ‘He was a dying man but you couldn’t be patient could you, Sarah? You had to have his fortune didn’t you?’

I was close to tears. Marcus had the incriminating evidence and my life was over.

‘The money in the urn was all that was left,’ Marcus continued. ‘Patrick had sold the property in Spain and donated his fortune to charity. The only possession he had was the manor house, which he has kindly left … to me.’

‘You?’ I asked.

Marcus chuckled. ‘He came to me with his suspicions a while ago and we made a deal. And when you make a deal with me, the agreement is final.’

‘Who are you?’

Marcus just smiled. There was a burning behind those eyes – a blackness.

Suddenly fear had substituted the rage in me. This … thing in front of me made my stomach churn.

‘What are you? Is that what the combination to the case was – a clue?’ I asked.

‘I take great pleasure in seeing a sinner’s world fall apart.’

‘The night terrors … the homeless man, it was you, wasn’t it?’

Marcus again smiled with his crooked teeth and burning eyes. ‘I like to have my fun now and again.’

I rushed to my feet almost stumbling to the floor. The blue carpet had changed to bare floorboards. The nice paint of the office had started to peel away. Marcus just sat watching my disbelief as the surroundings fell to desolation.

I ran out of the door which fell from its hinges to the floor. I headed down the stairs. The other small businesses in the building were vacant. Not a soul in sight. I fell through the door and turned to see the entire building boarded up and worthy of demolition.

I had to get home. I had to see Stephen.

*

I flew over the speed limit the whole way. I wasn’t thinking straight and who could blame me?

When I arrived home, a police car was parked outside the house. What had happened now? Had that Marcus thing got to Stephen?

I ran in the house and found two officers with Stephen huddled around his laptop. My face fell. They turned. I saw behind them the footage of me suffocating my father playing on the screen.

Tears fell down Stephen’s cheeks.

‘Sarah … how could you?’ he asked.

‘I … I’m sorry.’

The police officers moved toward me.

The briefcase of ashes remained on the kitchen table; the code still read 6-6-6.

Copyright © Ethan Maiden


Bio:

Ethan works for a utilities company in South Yorkshire.
Writing fiction has become a hobby over the past couple of years and he hopes to one day publish a novel.
Ethan notes Stephen King and H.P Lovecraft as influences behind his work.