Monthly Archives: April 2013

The Office

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Inside it was dark and smelled of ozone. I took my glasses off and flicked the little torch on. I was in a huge open plan office with broken furniture throwing shadows on the windowless walls. I ran the torch around the ceiling and found it was a long way up and that the unit had a mezzanine floor. Scarlet and burnt orange mingled sickeningly telling their own tale of what had taken up residence in this godforsaken part of the city. Where the hell were twins?

“Ruby. Rufus,” I called. Whatever was here knew of my presence so it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d crept in or marched up and down with a brass band. I motioned to the vampires to follow me over the threshold but they would not obey. All three had returned to there natural form, stubby wings beating hard on bony bodies like heavy fists on flesh. They were on all fours, massive hind quarters and strong forelimbs giving me an inkling that they were built for more than speed. I was betting they could run like dogs although a hell of lot faster. One of them started a growling sound at the back of its throat and the other two took up the refrain. It rose in pitch as though warning of imminent attack and the hackles on the back of my neck rose.

“Come with me,” I said again.

They fell silent and glared at me with slitted red eyes. The sudden silence was shocking after the little siren song I’d just been treated to.

“Stick then,” I said moving back outside and to fasten the collars around each throat. I secured them to a metal grille next to the door and locked them with the key as though they were mere mutts and not the carnivorous monsters that they were. “But if you misbehave I’ll kill you myself.”

It was pathetic move more for the symbolism of sit stay than anything else and I was under no illusions that they could not escape with contemptuous ease but I was running on empty so it would have to do. They’d either go along with me for whatever twisted fucked up reasoning such creatures used, or they wouldn’t.

One of the monsters was trying to say something around all those teeth. I didn’t catch it at first but eventually I made it out each gasping word:

“You. Will. Die. They. Burn. Down. There. They. All. Burn.”

I snorted in disgust and went back inside to whatever waited and the unpleasant smell of sulphur. The spectral colours I saw without my glasses, the residue of unhappiness, violence and pain were familiar to me, but the concentration was not. It was as though someone had thrown luminous paint in those shades over the walls, the floor, the fabric of the building. Whatever haunted this place, it was not a simple thing and it would not go easily. I was also getting the distinct impression that it not just one presence, but legion.

The Dead-Lights raced ahead, lighting the way in more ways than one. They raced along the ceiling, along the walls, into corners and crevices, swept the building and the ground underneath. And that was when the first ball of fire streaked down from the mezzanine and exploded into the wall inches from me. It burned hot and bright but it was no ordinary fire.

I was beginning to understand why the vampires had not wanted to enter the place. Why three flesh eating freaks had the luxury of a choice denied to me was something I’d deal with later. If I survived….

Talking Heads

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Riding the X12 bus home after another dispiriting day at the office usually brought Robert at least some grain of comfort. Not today though. It was just after 6pm on a wild November night with gusts of wind so strong, they shook the bus like a terrier with a rat. Reminded of the Twilight Zone episode where an airplane passenger looks out his window during a storm-racked flight to see a monster on the wing tearing it to shreds, Robert shivered, pulled his anorak tighter around his neck and studiously stared ahead at the CCTV monitor as it flicked from upstairs to down. There was something wrong with the colour, as though it was being leeched out of the screen leaving only a jaundiced, sepia tint. Just like my life, he thought.

He turned to the Metro newspaper article he’d been tussling with all the way from Corstorphine, but it was no use. He was thinking as usual about Jenny, his darling wife, who had not only just told him she was in love with another man, but was pregnant with his child.

That had ‘brought things to a head’ she’d said, smiling faintly, as though her adulterous coupling had been some sort of boil that she was desperate to pop. But she was the one who was going to do the popping in eight months or so. It wasn’t as though she was some prize pig either. Robert couldn’t for the life of him work out where his shy, dowdy, little wife had met her fertile Romeo never mind why he’d been attracted to her.

It wasn’t as though she worked for a living, Robert had seen to that. He’d insisted she stay home and taken care of her every need. Or at least, that’s what he’d thought. Clearly he’d turned out to be a bit of a disappointment between the sheets. Images of the pair in a hundred different positions came unbidden as they always did, searing themselves into his brain. The bitch had actually told him that she hadn’t wanted kids, but apparently she had.

Just not Robert’s.

Round and round on the vicious cycle merry-go-round. When would it end? Christ he needed to pull himself together. He heard a faint, insectile whine and looked up at the monitor again. He couldn’t tell which part of the bus the camera was spying on because the picture had distorted as though it was being stretched. But that wasn’t it either, because as he watched, Robert could see what looked like a face forming, with sharp humanoid features and long gleaming eyes. The lipless mouth opened impossibly wide as though in a silent scream.

Was that what the whine was?

The wind rocked the bus as it rounded a sharp bend and Robert thought they were going to tip over. Good, he thought. It would be a relief if it ended here for all of them, here in the no man’s land of the A8 as it led away from the city into the enveloping dark. If his life was ruined everyone else’s should be too.

The alien head on the monitor had now developed serrated teeth the colour of old dishwater. Was it smiling for Christ’s sake? It was almost as though it could hear his thoughts. Was that even possible? Had his distress driven him over an edge that he couldn’t even see any more, much less scramble back onto.

Free me, it said, voice like the tinkling of tiny, malevolent bells. Free it? And then what? His head felt heavy as though he’d been drinking all day as opposed to the four pints with whisky chasers he’d downed in quick succession during his lunch-hour, uncaring of the consequences.

Free me. Kill them all.

“What, all of them?” Robert asked aloud, prompting curious looks from his fellow passengers.

All.

Robert thought for a moment. He wasn’t a monster godammit.

“Can we start with the fat guy at the back and just see how it goes?”

When The Moon Is Fat

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We were in a small freezing room, devoid of furniture apart from a gurney that looked like a relic from a haunted asylum horror flick. Undaunted, Vic had been pummelling my bruised flesh and stretching my aching bones with such a sustained ferocity that I was seriously considering asking him to knock me out.

“You’ll feel better in the morning,” was all he would say. I lay under a thin cover stark naked and feeling like my entire body had been set alight. And not in a good way.

“My mother always told me to live in the present,” I moaned.

“You never knew your mother and I’m beginning to doubt you ever even had one. Oh, by the way, what I said to the blond geezer, what’s his name? Rudy isn’t it? Brave bloke by the way. Takes guts to even think about standing up to Mike or me. Oh yeah and talking of guts, unless you want to lose them, lock your door when you turn in tonight.”

“What about all that owe you stuff Vic, are you planning to off us in an all singing all dancing show of just how grateful you are?”

“Rose, don’t you know what tonight is?”

“Go on, amaze me.” I winced as he dug his fingers deep into the meat of my shoulders.

“Just think about it.”

I did. My spirits, low enough to do an Olympic level limbo, flatlined.

“What if it doesn’t hold,” I said eventually. “The door, I mean.”

“Don’t even think about it. Now hold still.”

“What do you know about wulvers Vic?”

The pummelling paused and then:

“Enough to know you leave them the fuck alone. Here goes.”

I felt the slow trickle of something warm across my back and didn’t bother asking him what it was. A low rumbling sound filled the room until a heavy weight fell across me muffling my hearing but it didn’t matter because I could feel it, like a cat’s purr. A warm lassitude spread through my limbs as though I had been injected with something. A persistent little voice at the back of my mind was trying to remind me about something vital but I was too tired to make the effort and instead opted for the proffered oblivion. I was at the end of whatever served as my rope and if my body didn’t heal some of the damage it had suffered over the past few days it was Goodnight Vienna, whatever the hell that turned out to mean. As long as it didn’t involve Midge Ure, I was psyched.