Sometimes It’s Hard To Be A Woman

I hauled the body over my shoulder again in a fireman’s lift, made trickier by the fact that it was encased in slippery plastic, and hoped that some of the more fluid contents of the bag didn’t leak over me. It was just shy of eight but I rarely had to worry about bumping into anyone. The only signs of the alcoholic downstairs were his nightly snore-fests, audible I would have thought to the entire block. The neighbours across the way, a posse of young men who rarely made their presence heard rather than felt before the wee small hours. As a nocturnal beast myself, that was something I could respect. I don’t think I’d seen or heard of any of the other folk with whom I shared this bower of bliss.

But normal service it seemed had been interrupted, because just as I opened my front door, a young man with long, golden dreads and a nose ring strode onto the landing about to descend the stairs when he spotted me.

“Oh, hi,” he grinned, with an Aussie accent you could cut with a knife and still have enough to balance the drinks on. “You must be our neighbour. Good to meet you. Here, let me help you with that. I’m not taking no for an answer,” he said taking the body as well, before I could tell him where to put his offer. He was tall and well built but even so I could see it cost him no little effort. Just for a second the Cheshire cat smile faltered as the big lunk realised just what I’d been hefting until machismo reasserted itself and he made his way stiffly down the stairs, trying to pretend it was no big deal.

This was definitely not part of the plan and if I could have ripped his innards out and hung them around his neck for decoration I would have.

“What have you got in here,” he said winking, “A body, by any chance?”

This was why predators like me could live in the heart of the city numbering a half million other souls whose lives intersected on a daily basis but didn’t actually connect. City folk were so wrapped up in their own lives it was highly unlikely they’d recognise a body wrapped in bin bags if they were forced to carry it down three flights of steep stairs. It simply wouldn’t have occurred to them. Each and every one cocooned in private worlds constructed with the help of ipods, the daily paper, fantasy conversations where they told there bosses exactly where to stick it, plans for the dinner that night, all necessary props cushioning them from the smother of humanity around them.

Ask Fred West’s former neighbours. Ask the numerous lodgers that had flowed through the house like water over the years. How many saw him burying the evidence in the back garden, heard him torturing young girls in the basement of the house they all shared? When they asked him if the family was getting under his feet, they had no idea that they were right on the money. The fact is you don’t know who or what you’re living next to. Hallelujah and praise the Lord I don’t believe in.

“Name’s Roy,” he said. Maybe he was from New Zealand, I could never tell.

“I’m Rose and I can manage just fine, thanks anyway. And yes, it is a body.”

“Was it an old boyfriend refusing to take the hint,” he sniggered, reaching the first floor with a hand clamped in a death grip on the handrail with me stalking behind him in two minds whether to body snatch and run.

“Don’t be daft,” I gabbled. “It was actually a nosy neighbour who wouldn’t stop bothering me. I keep my exes in jars in the living room like everyone else. Together forever as Rick Astley used to sing. Haven’t heard from him in while mind you. Maybe he’s in a jar on someone’s mantel.”

He stopped short and made the effort to turn and look at me for a moment. Long enough for me to notice some gaffer tape had come loose and a shrivelled finger poked out like a mummified worm. A dark liquid had dribbled down Roy’s vomit green chunky knit pullover. Maybe he hadn’t heard of Rick Astley.

“Sense of humour as well as sensational looks. You know you must be tired, because you’ve been running through my mind since I met you all of two minutes ago,” he said turning to give me another wink….

The Man With The Cross-Stitched Eyes

The club was packed with hundreds of people and the Damned’s Love Song took over from the tender mercies of Placebo. I relaxed slightly finishing my drink in one long swallow. I was standing on the edge of the dance-floor which was flooded with Goths in tight, black clothes with hair combed to the sky as McDiarmid would no doubt have had it. The effects of the alcohol, music I knew and trusted and the presence of so many people anaesthetised me further, taking me back to the times I used to come here looking for my idea of a good time.

I made for the door in search of the toilet. It was bound to be in the same place and so I took the spiral stair down two flights and walked along a darkened corridor to the end and turned left. A chill not altogether natural chill raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Something was slithering along the ceiling behind me, but every time I looked around the noise stopped and couldn’t see anything. For a moment I thought I’d made a mistake and either come down the wrong stairs or they’d moved the toilet.

Then just as I was about to turn round and retrace my steps, the unmistakeable depiction of the female form appeared on a dark green door to my left. It opened with a loud screech to darkness and a damp, dank smell of old mould and urine. Fumbling with my hand on the wall, searching for the switch I cut myself on something sharp and swore loudly. The place was hushed as though a silent unseen crowd was monitoring my every move fascinated about what I was going to do next. Well, in a toilet there really wasn’t that much mystery.

I finally found the switch and wished I’d gone about my business in the dark. Even with my glasses on, the fuzzed edges of the walls and door spoke of a heavy emotional detritus left behind by the pain and suffering of the living. I knew that I’d see those familiar vermilion shades were I to take them off and so didn’t bother.

The drip of an old fashioned tap was the only sound and I set about finding the cleanest cubicle. The floor was littered with toilet roll and used tampon wrappers and the stench was beginning to make my gorge rise into my throat. It hadn’t been like this in the old days. But then it wasn’t surprising that no one wanted to clean it given what had happened down here. A dark streak of misery in the corner was in all probability all that remained of one or more of the victims, more emotion than actual ghost.

I pulled down my trousers and was about to get on with it when the door was kicked open. A blur of motion and then I was hauled to my feet by a hand around my throat with a knife pressed against it hard enough to draw blood. A cloth mask with cross stitches where the eye holes should have been covered the face but couldn’t disguise the heavy breathing or the obvious excitement of my attacker. Irrationally it made me remember the little ghosts at the St Birds pad until the fact that I was in a fight for my life managed to percolate through my thick skull.

I started to choke, hands clawing at the one that held my throat in a blind instinctual fight for survival. But The Man With The Cross-Stitched Eyes wasn’t going to take no for an answer….

The Burning

But the guardian hadn’t finished with me yet. I was again swept up out of my body which was left slumped behind the wheel like an abandoned overcoat, to a vantage point above Edinburgh, looking down at a storm tossed coast besieged by the North Sea under a black sky. My spirit was dragged down towards the ominous orange glow generated by many fires dotted around the hostile barren landscape beneath. An irresistible force pulled me further down towards the fires and what was burning there.

As far as the eye could see there was a huge circle consisting of row upon row of stakes rammed into the frozen ground. There must have been thousands of them. Tied to those stakes were women of all ages, all of them being consumed by the roaring, greedy leaping flames, burned while they lived. Some were at the start of the immolation, mostly whole, with tender skin only yet seared by the fire, hair ablaze, and screaming in the knowledge that this was just the beginning. Yet others were blackened twisted shapes, scarcely recognisable as human, carbonised bones fused together, deformed mouths in molten skulls agape as though in outraged protest at the brutality of their fate.

I knew somehow that they were all women. Their collective rage burned liked lava through my mind, taking all before it, leaving nothing of value. The hive like humming became louder, unbearable, when, without warning, a rearing column of flame spewed forth as though from an explosion deep inside the earth.

Something attracted my attention and I saw there was writhing movement within the column, something that appeared to be trapped by means unknown. Against my will, I was moved by the inexorable force closer to this inferno and as I did, I could see what looked like a burning throne with what had been a man sitting upon it. The remnants of his long, dark hair hung in tatters around the red ruin of the face, so lovingly resculpted by the inferno. His hands were blackened sticks scrabbling at what remained of his face. The falsetto ambitions of his screams detonated into the air with no one to hear except me, the burning women and the impersonal immensity of the night sky.

Green Man, Red Devil

But that night something made me opt for Salisbury Crags, Arthur Seat’s neglected offspring, alone but for the wind tangling my hair and the scent of damp earth. Something niggled at the back at of my mind, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. I had reached the Radical Road that curved around the Crags like an old scar in reptilian skin. Although the Crags were only about one hundred and fifty feet high, tell that to the poor souls who had been given the push by so-called loved ones, plunging to painful, splattering death at the bottom. My way was lit by the mauve phosphorescence of corpse candles, behind and below me the rust coloured glow of city lights, like old blood or something long dead.

As though to contradict me, a breeze carrying with it the scent of spring and the promise of another sullen east coast summer ruffled over my skin. My menagerie had gone on ahead, and a series of stimulating images of a biker gang who had come here for drugs washed down with some relaxing S and M action told me they were hot on the trail. I stopped for a moment all the better to savour what I had been sent. Even from these pictures, the weight of the gang’s murderous past and present hung around them in shreds of darkness like Jacob Marley’s chains except theirs was not one that could be unforged by some paltry good deeds after the fact. The huge and bloated elementals that had attached themselves to each and every gang member were testimony to that.

The dim glamour of the resulting darkness signalled their presence to me and mine like a beacon. But tonight there was something else hunting in the Park of the Holy Rood, something infinitely worse than a dozen Hell’s Angels painting the city blood red.

The corpse-candles were still with me buzzing around my head and wouldn’t shift when I tried to swat them. Whatever was out there would be getting a great heads up with my whereabouts all thanks to these little bastards. I remembered the old tales about them, that they lead unwary travellers to their deaths in peat bogs and over the edges of cliffs. The wind had turned chill and bitter and I focussed as hard as I could to find my monsters.

The thrum of the life force flowing through the Park, Arthur’s Seat and the Crags was intoxicating enough that I almost didn’t care that my links with the menagerie had been severed. If I could have stood there propped against the rock feeling the elemental magic surge through me for ever that wouldn’t have been a bad way to spend eternity.

And then a body was hurled from the top of the crags, landing with a bone-shattering thud not ten feet from where I stood and for the second time that night another connection was broken.

It was swiftly followed by an enormous mass I couldn’t make out although both were locked in a fight to the death the ripping of skin audible even above the frenzied snarling and snapping. The second arrival was a creature of smoke and darkness swirling in upon itself and yet at the core, a scarlet light burned as though whatever it was had caught fire. The unmistakable sickly sweet smell assailed the night and my nostrils. Demon. A huge horned head whipped round to look at me through gold-slitted eyes and I could see a skin forming all over its body as though it was being born before my eyes. The skin was blackened, blistered as though burned in a fire, with ridges and whorls of a darker matter like ulcerous growths. It was the sheer size of the thing however: in excess of fifteen feet high, golden eyes glowing through the billowing smoke it gave off as though being consumed by black flames.

It roared, vast red maw lined with gigantic mismatched teeth that overlapped, some even protruded through the demon’s own flesh and gouts of what passed for its blood ran down into the scarred and pitted chest the size of a barn. The first arrival was tiny by comparison, the skin dark green, two horns atop the shaggy head and a disturbingly finely boned human face. Hands tipped with dagger-like claws and hooves for feet made it seem as though the god Pan come to life. Except this creature didn’t have much life left, with its slit belly and one hand clasped across it trying to keep the contents from spooling out onto the dirt road.

The roar of the demon wasn’t a respite because something was happening deep in its core: a shuddering, tearing, volcanic eruption as though it was being torn apart from the inside. But that wasn’t it either. That would have been lucky and whatever else tonight was, good fortune had no part in it.

But no one the told the green man. He mustered what final strength he had to roll clear and prepare for a final pointless assault on the demon. He didn’t have the power to get up and face his enemy so he beckoned it closer with a contemptuous flick of his hand, dark with his own blood. Most people, creatures, animals would at least try to make a run for it, even if the attempt was doomed. I don’t think the demon noticed because it was too busy giving birth to something right before my very eyes. The green man snarled in response and tried to lever himself upright, not managing because of the grievousness of the mortal wound in his belly.

“You shall not pass,” he growled.

Cliches even in extremis – you had to admire it. But life, somehow, was like that: significant events for which there were only borrowed words and hackneyed phrases.

I had no great urge to get involved in what was someone else’s beef and turned to leave before I found out just what the newborn looked like. The stench and heat became overpowering and I turned my head back in time to see an second horned head tearing itself free from the first, a process that appeared to be causing it no little effort. Flesh and bone parted with a series of ear-splitting cracks accompanied by another long drawn out bellow and then there were two, identical down to the last detail. I had no doubt that they’d soon they’d be rampaging round the city, the soft human population falling before them like skittles.

As for me, I had more immediate things to attend to.

It was only when the third head appeared announced by the now familiar crack that I realised with a bitter, sinking heart that that wasn’t true. The bastard was now splitting into three and who knew how many more. A city always had its share of devils, demons and other things that thrived in its dark places, but a creature that could reproduce itself to this extent was not something the delicate equilibrium between human and non could support. The question was: who had called it? Following hot on the heels of who was why.

The demons had turned the combined weight of their attention to the green man, so there were to be no more of their brethren at least for now. A giant head with curling, ram-like horns swayed closer to the green man who flicked his head aside in a vain attempt to avoid the eyes. With my own sunglasses firmly in place I strode towards the devil and the deep green man, ready but not willing. I a threw curse stone that had been forged in Roman times at one of the unholy trinity and it thunked it straight between the eyes. I’d bought it on the black market and had known only two things about it: people had died to make it a potent protection; and that it was priceless.

Well it was demon bait now. I just hoped it was worth the sacrifice.

Gorier Than Thou

Hauling myself out of my earthen tomb I saw I was in a fair sized chamber about sixteen feet high by fifteen with the ceiling and sides reinforced with a timber frame. That was when I realised I’d made a big mistake. Ghouls didn’t build and they always lived in nests. Always. I hadn’t come across any other individuals and it occurred to me that maybe this was the first to enjoy the single life. Not only that, but it was far smarter than it was supposed to be.

Flicking the beam of my torch around the room I saw that death had made its playground here, down among the body parts and scraps of human meat left by a creature whose murderous ambition was larger than its capacity to ever consume. I remembered a shed I’d been in where the spiders clearly ruled and every inch of the walls was covered in webbing and the partially consumed bodies of the insects they’d caught. This was just on a much larger scale.

The ghoul seemed to have a twisted aesthetic sense too, because on one side of the cavern was an earthen wall decorated by still dripping intestines. A dessicated brain had been carefully placed above it complete with two still fresh eyeballs still attached to the nerves. It was almost comical if your taste ran to the grotesque, as though a murderous child had tried to depict a human being using body parts instead of crayon. A primitive but discernable organisation had gone on here judging by the mound of legs separated from an adjacent mound of arms in the far corner of the room and in the other, a carefully constructed hill of skulls built in a rough pyramid.

But the piece de resistance and the sole source of light was the human head at the apex of the pyramid. The skull pan had been roughly sawn open and the brain scooped out to be replaced with a guttering fat yellow candle that I would have be money on was made up of human fat. The fry up I’d had this morning almost came back up to meet me. The head must have been reasonably fresh, because the face still had a leathered flesh, lips shrivelled over gums and the few remaining teeth. The eyes had been hollowed out and the lids sewn shut as though in a parody of sleep.

The smell was so intense that every breath had to be carefully judged so I didn’t vomit up the good Talisker I’d just had. There was no avoiding it, it demanded acknowledgment and that’s what I had to give it to stay on this killing floor. On the wall opposite the intestines, a neat array of human ears had been pinned in a straight line. They were in various stages of decomposition and thin clear coloured gel dripped from them onto the floor. One of the ears had a stud stained with its owners dried blood. It occurred to me the ghoul had tried some interior decorating on for size and uncovered hidden talent. The floor was carpeted with the now familiar mostly pulverised bone and in the middle was a roughly hewn block of wood, roughly the size of a human body complete with restraints and blood stained implements comprising a large curved blade, axe and saw. All were encrusted with dark stains that it didn’t take a genius to figure out what they were.

And then a soft moan that seemed to come from above…

Tall Dark And Bloody

Ruby leaned forward almost spilling her whisky in the process, intent on getting her point across.

“So something is happening that is shaping spirit into its own image and giving it unimaginable power in the process. That means they’re remaining here and evolving into beings that are much darker. You’ve just seen it yourself. That doppelganger was much more powerful than it had any right to be.”

“Let me get this straight-” I said, just as a tall, muscular man with long black hair and dressed in nothing but jeans, denim waistcoat and biker boots strode over to the table and plonked himself down, grinning expectantly at us. Brown skin and high cheek-bones suggested Native American somewhere in the family tree. There was nothing under the unbuttoned waistcoat but smooth, brown chest against which a turquoise beaded necklace with a silver dragon’s head gleamed as though it had a life of its own. A black tattoo with a complicated design I didn’t recognise encircled the top of his arm and finished just shy of his collar-bone. Slanting dark eyes simmered under black brows and if I had been prone to such things, I would’ve been afraid. The only people who don’t wear clothes in a Scottish winter are either impervious to pain, mentally ill, or both.

“Ladies,” he said leaning back in his chair while crossing long, jean clad legs at the ankles. And that was all it took. One word in that low-down-dirty voice with its west coast gloss before I knew this man was trouble: capital letters; twenty feet high in screaming pillar-box red. It wasn’t just the assurance with which he moved, or the sheer physical impact of his presence indicating a man who not just didn’t know the meaning of the word no, but had never actually heard it spoken. No, I could actually see what he’d done, what he was capable of and it was no wonder most people just did his bidding without having to be asked twice. Violent death, past, present and the promise of future clung to him like a second skin and I knew that because his aura was thick enough to choke an elephant, black shot with dark reds and purples so dense it had its own gravity and I found it difficult to breathe. He grinned revealing sharp white teeth.

“Can I buy you a drink? The polite request was belied by a hard, knowing look from obsidian eyes. And they were all for me even though he addressed both of us. I wondered who I had pissed off lately. Silly really, because that was a never-ending list.

“No, thank you. We’re absolutely fine,” Ruby said smiling sweetly.

“I absolutely insist,” he said never taking his eyes off me. “It would be my… pleasure…” The suggestive tone was thick enough to cut with a knife and then balance your drinks on.

I rarely had any trouble with men in bars or at least not the type I didn’t invite. That’s probably because I’m five ten, stronger than most men and not averse to extreme physical violence when the mood takes me. Sometimes though you came across someone who wouldn’t take off you fuck for an answer and then you were in a whole brave, new world of pain.

“Well,” he said, “How about a little more conversation and we can keep the action on ice for later?”

Fresh Hell

As my old mother might have said if I’d ever met her, “It’ll end in tears,” and it usually did along with a rain of other, less disposable bodily fluids.

I was sitting in the living room of a terraced house opposite Bill and Bella McKinstry, their two kids Montel and Imani running around hyper and hysterical, which from the non-reaction of their elders appeared to be the default position. Bill and Bella sounded like a comedy duo, but nothing could have been less amusing than this god-forsaken set-up.

The room itself was rectangular with two sets of windows facing the front and back gardens. Seventies décor reigned supreme complete with mustard brown swirly carpet and stone fireplace in front of which an electric fire squatted like an enormous toad. Through the window, over Alec’s shoulder, darkness routed the day and the sodium lights began their thankless vigil even though it wasn’t 4pm yet.

Bella heaved herself off the fake leather sofa muttering about putting some lights on, although that didn’t turn out to be an improvement. The kids had drawn on the walls over the peeling, yellowing woodchip and there was a mound of dirty washing spilling out of the adjoining kitchen to within inches of my feet. Bill was small, thin and wizened, dark eyes looking out soulfully from beneath a base ball cap onto a world that hadn’t been kind to him in the past and wasn’t expected to change anytime soon. He was chain-smoking roll-ups and a small graveyard of the butts lay in the large glass ashtray bearing the legend “World’s Best Dad.” She by contrast was large, blond and anxious, wearing a dirty pink shell suit, small mouth set in a permanent sneer of disgusted disbelief as though that was the only expression she had had any use for and couldn’t remember the rest. I couldn’t decide what age they were: it could have been over forty or under twenty. Poverty and nae luck tended to do that to a person.

I was about to find out how far their run of bad luck had really stretched, although the mere fact that they needed my services spoke volumes.

Corpsed

The thing clinging to the living room ceiling winked at me and wiggled its little backside before venting 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 pile of clothes on the untouched fake leather sofa, and sat down. Sure enough, within a couple of minutes, it 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 stealthily dropped down onto the open portion of the half casket where it began to vigorously dry hump the stiff. While I certainly knew that feeling well enough, I also knew something the creature did not: that in death as in showbiz, timing was everything.

Beyond the window, the dark extinguished the remaining light. Not a difficult task given this was the frozen heart of a Scottish winter: perpetual dark leavened by shades of grey. Twisted as my sense of fun undoubtedly was, being caught after dark and on the job in a run down housing estate in Gilmerton, was not my idea of a night on the town. Gilmerton, while technically within city limits, did have any others which dared to apply. Perhaps that was why, in true old fashioned pioneer spirit, the hardy family that had survived here for the past two years only thought they a poltergeist to deal with. I hadn’t had the heart to tell them it was so much worse than something that just wanted to throw the pots and pans around.

A phlegmy chuckle this time, muffled by whatever it 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 absence of lips indicated a teeth free zone and grey, straggling hair struggled to make it to her shoulders.

Her distraught husband had told me that the whole sorry business began last week when she’d died of a heart-attack. While it was true pots and pans had been thrown, some of which had even struck the two little boys Kenny and Ryan glancing blows and injured Tyson the dog, there was a new and sinister aspect to this little mortality tale: the creature appeared to be guarding the body. No one could get near to take it for burial and so it lay in all its decomposing splendour stinking up the house and giving the family a whole new take on dust to dust.

A feral growling sound reminded me what I was here for. Crossing the room, I took the scrying glass out of my pocket and, studiously ignoring the humper, positioned the obsidian surface to reflect the corpse’s eyes. Scrying glasses, if you made them properly and had the eyes to see, showed not just the surface, but the behemoth lurking underneath waiting to break it.

From the frantic activity it looked like something was about to….

Dietary Fibre

Murder always drew the bad stuff to it: a lonely spot at the side of a road where a hit and run victim had died; the bedroom where a sadistic killer finished off his thirteenth victim; the site of a car crash engineered by a unloving husband for his unsuspecting wife. But the real jackpot were the murderers themselves, hoaching with enough raw, spiritual sewage to generate enough power to light up the city. Oh, and little old me of course.

Not being a telepath I couldn’t access the murdering bastard’s memories directly, but the evil spirits that infested them could. They literally ate into the homicidal maniac’s fond recollections and I ate them. From these memories it was possible to piece the victims final moments together and it was rarely a pretty picture. But I couldn’t deny, it was indeed a proud moment when you realised you were standing at the top of such a distinguished food chain.

And then the dreams…

There Goes The Neighbourhood…

The spirits of the dead filled Morningside Road while the living went about their Saturday afternoon business, oblivious for the most part to this silent invasion. While I could see every sad, dessicated detail of the revenant army, what I couldn’t figure out was what the hell they wanted.

The dead tended to forget the finer points of the flesh overcoats they had worn in life. As the years passed, that memory loss became the gateway to a sinister evolution of form and sometimes even substance. That explained the dark, shark-like shapes frenetically circling above my head and even the serpentine coils of some of the earthbound. What it didn’t explain was why they were all acting in concert, as though co-ordinated by a single mind.

Navy clouds massed above and within minutes, a torrent of water fell from the sky washing the debris and the living both from the streets. The dead remained, impassive, motionless and then, as though at an unseen signal, swung round as one to fix their lightless eyes on me. The weight of their attention drove the breath from my lungs as though I was being dragged miles down into the sunless depths of the sea.

Gasping, I did the only thing I could do: walked on, oblivious to the rain driving into my face but not the mortal danger. Recovering slightly, I picked up the pace, trying not to be too obvious about it in case that triggered the imminent attack.

I was heading for Holy Corner and the sleeping guardians formed from years of the worship of a god that didn’t exist. Whether or not they would deign to wake and protect me was a whole other can of worms that I’d have the pleasure of opening if I lived long enough to reach the can-opener.