Monthly Archives: November 2016

Midnight Falls

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The client hadn’t told me much, except that something inhuman had taken up residence in the attic of her holiday home and was scaring the straights. I was only too happy to take the job, swapping the febrile demands of the Edinburgh festive season, for the still, frozen solitude of the country.

The car had been loaded with needful things: clothes, Scooby snacks, a crate of Laphroaig and, last and least, the tools of my trade – two of my best obsidian scrying glasses and a ouija board. You needed all the help you could get when you played down among the dead men.

If things did go tits up, I had a small handgun with a mix of silver and iron bullets. I’d rarely used it though, because although iron and silver slowed supernatural critters down, it hardly ever killed them.  And if, by any chance, the beastie hadn’t wanted to kill you before you drilled a hole in it, you would definitely be number one on its bloody, drag-you-to-hell, screaming hit-list afterwards.

All of which meant you only really had your wits to rely on and mine didn’t stretch as far as they used to.

As I drove, the sun finally managed to prise itself clear of the horizon, revealing a clear, crisp winter’s day. A vicious frost last night had tarted up the landscape with a sheen of glimmering silver and the stubborn remnants of a creeping mist softened the stark lines of skeletal trees.

As I drove north over the Forth Road Bridge and into Fife, I switched on the radio, catching some horrendous boy band murdering an old song, aided and abetted by its elderly creator who had a penchant for violating his own work. Feeling a rant coming on, I turned the hellish cacophony off and stuck on a compilation. Placebo kicked off my one woman party with Every Me and Every You and by the time I got to Snapper’s Dumping You, I was singing along like a loon at the top of my voice, drumming my hands on the wheel.

A couple of hours later, hoarse and famished, I stopped off in Inverurie at the Manky Minx pub, devouring a massive lard-ridden fry up washed down with gallons of stewed tea. In the dim, dingy interior, a small collection of punters went about the serious, mostly silent, business of getting as pissed as possible before having to go back to whatever waited at home.

I resumed the journey on a seemingly endless, winding road that was supposed to take me to Midnight Falls. It coiled, like a serpent around the banks of a Loch with a surface as smooth and dark as one of my scrying glasses. There were always local stories about such bodies of water – drowned villages where church bells could be heard tolling on quiet nights when the moon was full. Or others about luckless victims, killed by the untender mercies of loved ones and laid to restless sleep within the glacial depths, only to return for a satisfyingly hideous and brutal showdown.

Jagged, snow covered peaks closed in as my car laboured through the narrow, tricksy mountain passes. The sky darkened and a driving sleet came out of nowhere, obscuring the windscreen in seconds. The wild beauty of these lonely places always appealed, but living here permanently had its own challenges. During the few wan, stillborn months of summer, this part of the country bowed before its insect conquerors and became a biting, buzzing, stinging hell. Alleviated by the deep freeze of winter, the only downside was that you got snowed in and had to eat your own kin to stay alive. Okay, maybe not, but a girl could dream, couldn’t she?

Heavy clouds besieged the sky and I was still in the middle of a vast nowhere. Sleet turned to heavy rain and my flat out wipers only made things worse, the world beyond now a blur of dark grey and sepia. The grunt and thrust of Snapper’s I’ll Stand By Your Man started up from my mobile on the passenger seat – probably the ball-breaking client, Lucille Harper-Hodge, checking where I was.

The road was now a one track affair, thankfully deserted. Keeping the headlights on full beam I spotted a tiny, partially obscured sign pointing to the right. On impulse, I stopped the car, got out into the howling storm and brushed the snow off the sign, finally making out the words, Midnight Falls. You’d think the inhabitants of the village didn’t want to be found – maybe this was going to turn out to be my kind of town after all. I swung the car to the right and travelled down what was little more than a dirt track, overhung with a tunnel of huge trees, spectral in a perpetual dusk of their own creation which leeched most of the remaining light from the day even though it was only just after lunch.

Once free of the trees it brightened a little as I drove up a steep hill, the gradient so extreme, the car was struggling even in seond gear. When I eventually reached the top, I discovered Midnight Falls laid out beneath me, like a dark canker on the coast, caught between the turbulent Irish Sea on one side and impenetrable mountains on the other. What manner of man or beast made their home in such an isolated, Godforsaken spot?

I was about to find out.

I Scry

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The thing clinging to the living-room ceiling winked at me and, wiggling its little backside, vented the contents of its bowels on the corpse in the half-open casket beneath. It giggled, a high girlish sound and scuttled to the corner of the room where it hung upside down, watching me and rubbing its six fingered hands over vestigial ears like a monstrous, mutated bat.

Not paying it any attention, I picked my way through the wrecked furniture, moved aside the teetering piles of clothes on the hitherto untouched fake leather sofa, and sat down. Sure enough, within a couple of minutes, the creature began to creep back towards the centre of the room and the dead body. Posing for a moment like a prize diver showing off a new move, it dropped down onto the open portion of the casket where it began to dry hump the stiff with more vigour than skill. While I certainly knew that feeling well enough, I also knew something the creature did not: that in life as in showbiz, timing was everything.

Beyond the window, night smothered the remaining light. Not a difficult task given this was the desiccated heart of winter with its perpetual dark only ever leavened by shades of grey.
I had already broken my own rule of not getting caught after sundown here in Gilmerton, a village only just within city limits that didn’t have any other boundaries which dared apply. Perhaps that was why, in true old fashioned pioneer spirit, the hardy soul that had survived here for the past two years only thought he had a poltergeist to deal with. I couldn’t wait to tell him that it was so much worse than something that just wanted to throw a few pots and pans around.

A phlegmy chuckle was muffled by whatever the thing was doing to the corpse, a woman of indeterminate age – although given the part of town I was in she could easily have been anything under thirty. Isa Simpson had been a big woman, someone the quacks would have classified as morbidly obese. The collapsed lower third of her face and missing lips indicated an absence of teeth and grey, straggling hair struggled to make it to her shoulders. Her distraught brother Alec Simpson had told me that the whole sorry business had begun last week when she’d died of a heart-attack. Furniture had been thrown including plates and cutlery, some of which had struck their two little nephews glancing blows and injured the dog. Worst of all, no one could get near the body to take it for burial due to the hail of missiles which had ensued when they’d tried.

A feral growling reminded me why I was here. Crossing the room, I took the scrying glass out of my pocket and, ignoring the humper, positioned the obsidian surface to reflect the corpse’s face. Scrying glasses, if you made them properly and had the eyes to see, showed not just the surface of things, but also any lurking behemoths awaiting the chance to break through.

And there it was: reflected in the polished glass was a fluttering of eyelids that should have been well beyond that type of tease. I edged forward to get a better look, making sure I didn’t touch the monstrous little bastard – time enough for that later. I moved the glass closer and the creature paused in its labours for a few seconds, before whipping round to goggle at me in exaggerated horror, its jaw dislocating itself and stretching all the way down to its bony knees, like a Looney Tunes cartoon. But there was nothing funny about that vast maw, flipped open to reveal countless layers of jagged, yellow teeth. The skin was black and lustrous like a seal, broken by protruding outcrops of malformed bone jutting out all over the head. It was as though it couldn’t decide what species of creature it had wanted to be and had tried out several, not liking any of them enough to evolve one way or the other. It stared at me out of the sewn up slits where its eyes should have been, tiny ticks of movement underneath, like pupae trying to hatch. The arms and legs were elongated with too many joints like a spider without any of its good points. I was sure of one thing: it was dead and it had stayed here for a very good reason.

Through the scrying-glass the news was dark indeed: a spectral face thrashed behind the dead flesh mask, mouth agape, like a negative of an old film with the sound turned down. A chunk of what had been the sideboard flew towards me and I ducked, missing a nasty concussion. We had been doing this dance for a good hour now and after my discovery with the scrying glass, I had to admit with a bitter, sinking heart, that we were going to be doing it a whole lot longer.
The creature laughed…..