Tag Archives: dark fantasy

The Burning

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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…

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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.

Love Thy Neighbour

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When I moved into my new flat in Home Street, the first thing I did was to make peace with the spirits who haunted it – or so I thought. It was just routine, the first rule of good house-keeping and something I always did in a new place.

But I hadn’t reckoned on the thing that haunted the small cupboard in the stairwell, not then.

I had laid out my offerings as usual, consisting of supermarket own brand cognac accompanied by some slices of Madeira which for some reason was always a favourite. The spiritual under-class who refused to pass on, choosing instead to crowd this world with their unwanted presences and unseemly demands had a very sweet, and undeniably alcoholic, tooth.

It was Wednesday lunchtime in a drear and dreich July and I still hadn’t fully unpacked. But some things were more important than settling in.

The flat was poky and dark with loose windows through which the dull roar of the midday traffic and a seeping damp insinuated themselves. I remember I had lit a few candles to get me in the mood and was nibbling absent-mindedly on some cake when they came.

I was aware of the grey smog before I saw it, death sense pinging its presence back to me like a bat’s sonar. And of course I smelt it too, damp and mildew underlaid with that sickly-sweet scent of decay.

They came flowing towards me, men women and children, some whole, more not. The dead soon forgot their appearance in life and evolved into other forms most of which were often not recognisably human. A dark blur raced around the walls of the cramped living-room while a group of children in Edwardian clothes gaped at me, teeth sharp, eyes bright.

The cuckoo clock chimed the half hour and that’s when I became of the presence outside the door.

It wanted in. Not like the ghosts of those who had died appeased by stale sweets and cheap booze, no, this wanted in. A crushing pressure on my chest made it difficult to breath and I fell to floor with the realisation that what was waiting for me outside wasn’t going to be bought off or bargained with.

I didn’t understand, it had never gone like this before. What the hell was waiting for me on the other side of the door? I reached up to the pine coffee table scrabbling for my mobile, but either it wasn’t there or I was unable to reach it.

A click of the lock and then a slow wet, slither in the hall told me my guest had arrived….

Piggy In The Middle

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I caught the X12 at the Ingliston Park and Ride just in time and settled into my seat shaking the rain from my hood. It was just gone 6.50 am on a gloomy Monday in July and I had an urgent appointment with a woman in Burdiehouse about a supernatural parasite that had laid its eggs in her toilet cistern. Of course she didn’t realise that, but what hadn’t escaped her was that it didn’t appear to be a fault with the plumbing, given the fact that the plumber in question had run screaming from her top floor flat and she’d heard nothing from him since. So distraught was he, that he’d left all his tools in an untidy spill in her hallway.

“Oi,” said a voice from the seat behind me, “You’ve soaked me, you inconsiderate bitch.”

I turned my head in disbelief and saw a young girl of perhaps eighteen glowering at me. She was blond and petite, pale blue eyes dominating a delicate, heart-shaped face. She might have been pretty minus the scowl but what really caught my attention was the seven foot elemental attached to her. A long, veined tentacle thicker than one of her thighs had wrapped itself around her body, penetrating the flesh at the base of her neck. The elemental itself was a pulsating mass, featureless and unformed for now. It had also not been in situ for that long judging by the size. These things could grow to the size of skyscrapers if left long enough and if the host had sufficient juice.

The thing about these creatures was that they made the hosts, well, not to put to fine a point on it, crazy – and not the lovable, harmless ditzy variety either. That meant the hosts with the most needed to get rid of their uninvited, joy-riding parasites before they got too entrenched. Once that happened it was Goodnight Vienna.

I specialised in getting rid of these things and from what I could see, this one looked distinctly doable. The tentacle on this one throbbed rhythmically as it sucked on the girl’s life force. A faint blush spread like an angry rash over her pale skin and I wondered what cocktail the elemental was feeding her.

“Listen-” I began.

“No, you listen.”

She jabbed a slender forefinger inches from my face in staccato counterpoint to the torrent of abuse spewing from the rosebud mouth. The tentacle coiled more possessively around the slender body and the peristaltic contractions became more pronounced.

I turned away from her and she jabbed me in the back, hard.

“Oi, you, you ignorant cow. I’m going to rip off your head and spew down the hole and you’ll thank me for it by the time I’ve finished with you.”

“Not without a head I won’t,” I said without turning round.

I fished around for a pen and paper in my bag and started scribbling a note for her all the while knowing it was hopeless. Even if I gave it to her and managed to get off the bus without her stuffing it down my presumably still attached throat, the chances of her ringing me for help rather than more abuse were remote.

I sighed and tried to ignore the frantic jabbing in my back. I was getting off at Haymarket and we were nearly there. But my troubles had, it seemed, only just begun as a sweet little old lady dressed in lilac sat down next to me.

“What a to do!” she said breezily. “No one’s leaving this bus until we’re all extra special friends again.”

She smiled, revealing a row of jagged brown teeth and a distinctly vulpine glint in her eyes.

Shape-shifter.

One of the old guard that hunted human meat and weren’t too fussed how they got it. She might look like a vulnerable oldster, but judging by the dark maroon aura that was almost choking me she was in fact an exceptionally dangerous predator.

A shape-shifter that wasn’t for shifting beside me and an enraged maniac at my back. I was now officially between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea or Scylla and Charybdis if you more classically inclined. And all before I’d had my morning latte.

The question was, which way could I jump.