Tag Archives: haunted edinburgh

Burn Baby, Burn

Posted on by

“All right back there?” shouted Rufus.

“Peachy,” I said. “Are we there yet?”

The van came to an abrupt halt and I fell across the smaller wulver causing it yip, a high distressed sound. My face was now level with the Guardian’s faithful friend and its top lip wrinkled, a low snarling sound, so basso profundo that I felt it in my chest. I hurriedly pushed myself away from it, pressing for all I was worth into the farthest corner.

“What the hell happened?” I yelled. Ruby and Rufus jumped out the van, shouting something I didn’t catch. Carefully edging towards the door handle, I slowly pulled it down and got out into the cold night. It was snowing heavily as though the city was trying to put out the flames. We were on the winding road that led to the top of Arthur’s Seat and I could see the dull sodium glow of the fires that were razing the city to the ground. Of Ruby and Rufus there was no sign.

Then I heard it: a vast roar of rage that came from further up the road just at the sharp bend in the road. I ran towards it and then down a snow covered grass embankment in time to hear Ruby scream:

“Oh my God. Oh MY GOD!”

But at first I couldn’t see what the fuss was about because a battery of Corpse-candles rose and began buzzing around my head limiting my vision to a mauve coloured blur of light that had its own weight, like a coating of scum on the top of a pond. 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. They didn’t like the wind and driving snow judging by the way they parted slightly after a particularly vicious blast straight from the North Sea.

Ruby was sobbing, a hoarse, guttural sound of defeat and despair and still I could see nothing. But it didn’t matter because by then I felt the thrum of the life force flowing through the Park, Arthur’s Seat and the Crags. The Deadlights rose up and out in that familiar silver spill which could only mean one thing: something or someone was at the point of death. I was lost momentarily in the pull of all that elemental magic, a high that no amount of alcohol or drugs could match.

Or at least I was until a body was hurled from somewhere above, landing with a bone-shattering thud not ten feet from where I stood, ruining the mood.

The body was followed by an enormous mass I couldn’t make out. It took precious seconds before I could work out that 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.

Mortality Tale

Posted on by

Standing for ages at the bus stop near the Minto Hotel desperate for a pee. Still no bloody bus. One had to come soon surely to God? She should have had Jerry pick her up but she’d been so involved with Joyce that she’d forgotten the time. By the time she’d spoken to Jerry, he was three beers in. She calls the taxi number again and then another. Engaged or no answer. She’ll try again in a minute. Another woman is already standing at the bus stop: small and slim with a tailored dog-tooth coat and high heels.

“I’ve only come out in the worst possible outfit haven’t I?” the woman says grinning and sounding a little pissed. “It’s okay though, my husband’s picking me up. He’ll be here any minute.”

Pause.

“Would you by any chance like a lift?”

“No thanks, I my husband’s coming for me.”

Not true but there is something about this woman with the fluting, fake laugh. A white mini pulls up at the curb next to them and the woman totters to the back seat which seems strange to Michelle. The driver rolls down the window.

“Happy to give you a lift darling.”

“No, really it’s not necessary,”

“I insist,” says the man, leaning over to open the passenger door in front. “Always happy to give a lady a free ride,” he continues, winking broadly.

“No,” she says with more force than she’d meant. “My husband’s coming-”

“Don’t know why he’s not here already darling. I wouldn’t let my wife out alone at this time of night. Not with the perverts that go about nowadays.”

“I’ve told you-”

“Okay, okay,” the man laughs, raising his hands in mock surrender. “It’s your funeral, isn’t it Steph?” Giggling from the back seat is the only response. Why on earth had she got in the back?

“Tell you what though, could you do us a favour and shut the door. It’s bloody Baltic.”

There’s no harm in helping him out, is there? She approaches the car, almost slips on the ice and snow slimed pavement and reaches out to shut the door. The woman for some reason has gotten back out the car and is now behind her. Maybe she’s dropped something and is going to retrieve it. Before she can reach out for the door, she’s pushed from behind and falls against the car, hitting her head on the side of the roof. Strong arms bundle her inside and the car screeches off.

Unholy Wedlock

Posted on by

I led the three vampires into the living room and ordered them to stand in front of a small table containing a crystal decanter foolish enough to have its top off.

“You must now bind yourselves to me by blood,” I told them. Another tip from Ravi although I don’t think he had expected me to be foolish enough to use it.

I motioned to them to come forward, extending my two index finger-blades. They hissed, features distorted to display a little of what lay beneath. I’d have to teach them the error of their ways and hope that I wasn’t turning into a ghoulish version of Henry Higgins in the process. If I was very unlucky they’d develop cod-cockney accents and the horror would be complete.

Sullenly they extended their wrists and I slashed each in turn, quick slicing motions that brought brackish blood smelling faintly of the sea welling up from pale skins. Like an old hand I caught it in the decanter before slashing my own wrist, taking care to do it horizontally. The wrist was probably not the best place but I only needed a few drops and the symbolism was worth it. The delicate patter as my blood joined theirs: a metallic tang, a brief spot of crimson in the darkness of the viscous fluid marked the most dangerous point of our brief acquaintance. Morgan’s cheeks visibly hollowed and Marjorie choked, drool running down her perfect chin onto her t-shirt.

They were, I realised, starving. For the first time I felt like the idiot in the tigers’ cage who had volunteered just to impress but now wished he hadn’t as they picked his limbs off like boys with flies’ wings. A brief hiatus, pregnant with the import of what I’d just done hung heavy in the room. To my knowledge no one had messed about with this particular little ménage a quatre and there was usually a good reason for that.

“To blood of thine add blood of mine, together ere we die. So mote it be,” I whispered. The spell was cast and, much like the act of flinging yourself under the wheels of a bus, there was no undoing it. No going back.

With their gaze boring into the back of my head I locked the decanter in a small cupboard by the window, noticing absently that snow was falling thick and fast obscuring the world as though some old god had wished it away. Even Fife, usually all too visible from this window, was a distant nightmare that I couldn’t see anymore. I needed to get going or I’d suffer the same fate. I threaded the key onto a chain and put it around my neck where it hung glistening dully in the meagre light. No sound disturbed the gravid silence apart from the tick-tock of the clock and the faint rumble of traffic muffled by the snow.

A marriage made in Hell, indeed. But who was going to wear the trousers?

Carnivore Carnage

Posted on by

The three vampires materialised out of the gloom luminous against the night sky gravid with snow.

“We found nothing mistress,” said Morgan in her best imitation of polite. I wasn’t fooled though, being able to see into her bloody little fantasies with me as head scream queen. Of the three she was adapting the fastest to simulating humanity. Was it so wrong to improve the already considerable skills of a ravening predator?

Her prey of choice was, after all, only human.

“There’s nothing here,” said Margaret in her fluting, girlish voice. Marjorie said nothing, curling her lip to reveal sharp, white teeth.

“Where are the…brother and sister?” asked Morgan.

“I was hoping you’d be able to tell me,” I said.

Marjorie lifted a slender hand.

“Something comes.”

A milky, tainted light appeared from our left, coming from the city. But it wasn’t anything to do with the fire. A multitude of corpse-candles, will o’ the wisps, fizzed past my face and I involuntarily stepped back to avoid them. Their touch bewitched the mind into seeing what it wanted to see: loved ones long dead; treasure beyond counting; the list limited only by the imagination of the willing victim. I wasn’t ready to know the shape of my heart’s desire.

Not yet.

A chill wind blew my hair across a frozen face obliterating momentarily the piles of rubble and hulking machinery dotted around like a dinosaur’s graveyard. I was bone weary and sore from my assorted wounds. The playful scratch by Morgan throbbed and I suspected it was infected.

But I hadn’t been paying proper attention because the tainted light had not passed with the corpse candles. A low sepia cloud descended with the suddenness of a tsunami. It roiled in on itself briefly before covering the ground, enveloping everything in its path. I could see odd elongated shapes within it, like the distorted shadows of human beings thrown out by a fire. One shape raised a six fingered hand the fingers of which looked as though they had more joints than any mere human possessed.

Mistress…

The Sith were afraid. My beautiful bold carnivores were finally afraid. A thrill of satisfaction gave me the strength to go for the knives hanging at my belt. Whatever it was would have to pry these steel babies from my cold dead hands.

Winter Holiday

Posted on by

“Right here,” I said, pointing at a massive oak tree bowed down with snow like an old giant that had frozen to death. Between the dark and the driving storm, visibility was just down to a few feet and I’d almost missed the turn off.

“The house is about a mile down this road.”

“Christ Rose, give me some notice.”

“You try noticing anything from the back seat at night in a snow storm. See that light up there? That’s Vic and Michael’s place.”

“What, up that bastard hill? We’ll never get the car up there.”

He was right as it turned out, we couldn’t. The car kept sliding and eventually slid into a bank of soft snow from where it couldn’t be moved. Swearing, Rufus forced the car door open and had to do the same for mine. He stood with difficulty, snow encasing his legs up to mid-thigh and claiming the rest of him under a clotted blanket of ice crystals.

“Can’t you call your friends to come get us?” he shouted above the noise of the wind. “The weather’s too bad and I won’t be able to lug you all that way.”

“They weren’t in when I called. I’ll give it a another go,” I said, dialling.

“What?”

I suppressed a smile.

“You made me drive all this way to the middle of nowhere, for fu-”

“We’re just outside Perth,”I reminded him primly. “It’s hardly the middle of nowhere. Oh hi, Vic. It’s me. Everything sweet? Sorry to hear that. Listen, we’ve got a bit of a problem. We’re at the bottom of the hill, cars in a snow drift and I’m not in great shape. Can you come get us?”

“Well? Are they coming?”

“They said they’re busy and could we come back tomorrow. I’m kidding,” I said as he punched the roof of the car. “Listen be cool with Vic and Michael. Try not to piss them off.”

A dark shape materialised behind him, an arm closed around his throat pulling him backwards. He yelped something incomprehensible and then started choking as the arm was pulled tighter. A high laugh rang out and then something thumped the window beside me as a smeared bestial face pressed itself against the glass, nose flattened, teeth bared.

“Hi guys,” I said. “That was quick. Say hello to Rufus.”

Ring of Roses

Posted on by

A heavy sleet was being vomited from above when I got out the taxi a couple of streets from Crowe’s house. I walked towards it, a Victorian stone villa set in grounds too big to be called a mere garden, ploughing my way through drifts of freshly fallen snow. The gate was open as though someone had recently passed through and not bothered to close it behind them. But I knew that it had been left that way by the Baobhan Sith as an ironic invitation to me, as though I was the vampire. I decided to accept and trod the path, unsullied by human footprints.

The front garden faced the main road but the back was secluded, protected as it was by a thickly planted line of mature trees, skeletal sentinels whose branches pierced a bruised sky. A blur of movement exploded to my right, brief but unmistakable. I hurried to the huge beech hedge where it had been, certain I’d find the perpetrator, but found nothing and no one.

Then, from a ground floor window the pale oval of a face appeared.

I retreated to the summerhouse and the face tracked my progress, or at least it did until something far more interesting caught its attention. I followed the trajectory of its gaze and there, as though appearing out of nowhere, were the three Baobhan Sith, naked and dancing sinuously in the snow to music only they could hear.

But I knew something the voyeur did not, that this was no cheap peep show, but the prelude to a far meatier entertainment. One of the Sith tossed an armful of blond hair over her right shoulder raising her breast in the process as though inviting the watcher behind glass to come play. In reality it was a signal to her blood sisters and I knew the real games were about to commence.

Fairy Liquid

Posted on by

It’s your round by the way,” said Rufus.

Without a word, I pulled out the capacious hip-flask from my coat and poured a hefty belt of green liquid into each of our three empty shot glasses.

“What is it?” Ruby asked.

“It’s the green fairy,” I replied, “Also known as, the devil in a bottle, or if you’re one of those quaint types that insist on calling a spade a shovel, Absinthe.”

Meeting the green Man-Goat tonight reminded me that I had some.

“And just to cement our status as one big, happy family,” I grinned at the two blanched faces, “I decided that absinthe really would make the heart grow fonder.”

“Except in your case,” muttered Rufus under his breath.

I raised my glass and smiled.

“I’ll drink to that.”

The Ice Cream Man Cometh….

Posted on by

The Ice Cream Man drove slowly along Constitution Street, the strains of Greensleeves trailing discordantly in his wake. It was two in the morning and raining hard, but the Ice Cream Man had no need of such irrelevancies as lights or window-wipers. Truth to tell they disturbed his concentration and that was Bad For Business.

A muffled sob from the back of the van told him that they weren’t all dead yet. Never mind, they’d soon wish they were. The hunger was on him tonight, an appetite that was getting harder to satisfy by the day. Sometimes he wasn’t sure he wanted to keep up the effort. In those darker moods that seemed to take him more and more these days, he felt he could burn the world down and laugh as the flames came to claim him too.

But not tonight.

A police squad car passed by, the occupants blind and deaf to the ice cream van’s siren song; unlike the unfortunate specimens he’d caught and stacked in the back. Of course they had passed: only prey heard his call and having heard became his. It was too easy really and the boredom made him cruel. Take last night…

He smiled to himself and began to whistle tunelessly, the world beyond the windscreen, a smeared blur of light and shadow.

But the minute she woke and came to the window, face a pale oval, smooth and perfect as an egg, he knew. As he always did.

“Come on down Cathy,” he intoned solemnly through the loudspeaker. “I’ve got your favourite. Just pop some slippers on sweetheart. You don’t need money so you won’t need to disturb your dear old mammy. I’ve got a special surprise for you in the back. Best get it while it’s cold though.”

The long painted mouth sneered briefly. She’d get it alright.

The Ice Cream Man Cometh.

Little Pigs

Posted on by

I dreamt I was flying high above a white mountain at night. As I swooped closer I made out the glint of bone on the moonlit slopes and with that realisation I began to plummet downwards. Something big and winged was trying to catch me with its claws but my descent was too rapid. Just before I hit the broke-bone mountain, I was jerked awake by the sound of a frantic pounding on the door.

“Rose. Let me in,” shouted Rufus. “Rose! Quick!” The last word degenerated into a long drawn out shriek.

Swinging my legs wearily over the side of the bed, I shuffled like the crone I’d become to the door, pausing as I reached it. A ferocious growling and the sound of splintering wood didn’t lift my torpor. Damn Vic was good. But what the hell-

“Rose!” Somewhere out in the dark, something snarled. Given it hadn’t already attacked, I decided that whatever was stalking us wasn’t in a hurry.

“Oh Jesus,” Rufus moaned.

“Reports of Jesus’ caring side have been greatly exaggerated,” I said, flicking on the overhead light, unbolting the door and dragging Rufus inside before he had time to reply. He’d been facing the thing on the landing and fell backwards onto the floor, legs blocking the opening. Outside, something moved, a scrape of claw, a flash of fang and neon yellow eye. The beast snarled again, softly this time, confident perhaps that its supper snack wasn’t going anywhere.

“Pull your legs up,” I whispered to Rufus who didn’t respond.

Maybe he couldn’t. The tricking growl was making my hackles rise, Christ alone knew what it was doing to him. I was going to have to haul him out the way by which point the monster in the hall would have torn both our throats out. A taut silence followed by the scrape of claws, the beast was gathering itself for a final lunge. My sensitive eyes picked out the wooden remnants of the door from the neighbouring room.

Just as I was about to grab Rufus’ shoulders to pull him out the way he raised his legs and kicked it shut. I ran forward to bolt it just as the creature crashed against it, roaring with rage. A splintering sound and the top hinge looked like it was just about to fall out. My fingers, numb with whatever Vic had worked, fumbled with the bolt and a wave of dizziness threatened to evolve into a fully fledged black-out.

The door was just about to give way for good, but there was only silence beyond it. Had the thing left? I was distracted by a loud banshee screech of only to discover it was Rufus dragging a squat chest of drawers towards me evidently intent on barricading the door.

It would never hold.

Night Clubbing

Posted on by

Esther may have looked like your kindly neighbourhood grand-mother but she was the high priestess of a feared fringe cult and no one in their wrong mind, never mind their right, crossed her.

On the plus side, you always knew where you were with Esther. Tyson must indeed have been new. I never knew why she stooped to working in the club as their security, but then she most likely had reasons of her own. She always did. She probably didn’t get my problem with Lionel Ritchie so we were even.

“Rose,” she called after me as I walked down the corridor to the bar.

I turned.

“After tonight please don’t come here again. It wouldn’t be…wise.”

She stared after me as I walked down the stairs, the force of which I could feel as if it were a gun pressed into the middle of my back. It didn’t bode well that the boss was willing for me to come in tonight but that after that I was effectively barred.

The landing below boasted a massive oak door with a neon green snake above it, its tongue flickering in and out as the light changed. It looked overdone, ludicrous a clumsy half-assed attempt to depict a door-way to another world. Typical of satan-botherers, but different from how I remembered the place. Back then, the worst excesses of some of the clientele had been tempered presumably to widen the appeal of the club.

I took the last steps down to the landing pausing beneath the snake. The tackiness I could just about take, but something else was wrong about that door-way. I paused, staring at the frame surrounding the door. There appeared to be a coagulated darkness hanging in moving clumps around it as though it was alive with a dull hen-sick green just visible somewhere at its core. I hadn’t seen so many elementals cluster around a mere door before. They were the bacteria of the supernatural world, lying in wait for live prey to attach themselves to and infect. There was life in the club all right, but judging by the bouncer, most of it wasn’t sentient.

As though to confirm that thought, something fell from the door-jamb creating an inky pool visible even on the already dark tiled floor. But that wasn’t what bothered me. I took my glasses off to get a better view and quickly wished I hadn’t. The tell-tale phosphorescent crimson and orange of violent death lit the place up like a fun-fair; so bright I had to quickly put my glasses back in place.

I called the Deadlights and they circled me in lazy loops of white and blue lights. I took my first steps through the door and I heard a sizzle and the screech of something exiting life as it dropped from above onto them. At least I wouldn’t have a little passenger riding me for the rest of the night. But that was where the positives ended. I walked into a vast room with a high-vaulted ceiling covered in sigils of unknown origin. Pretentious, moi?

A vast mirror ball turned slowly sending light shards to the far flung corners of the room and swallowed by the light from the equally vast curved bar that dominated the far wall. It was empty but there were hidden rooms branching off from the main one, where people could talk or get up to less innocent activities. Not that there was any music playing, nor anyone to hear it judging by the empty tables around the circular dance-floor. The DJ had obviously not arrived yet. When I used to come here it was a guy called Dave who had failed to come to terms with the sad fact that he was never going to be the next Aleister Crowley. He liked German death-metal leavened, strangely enough by the odd Lionel Ritchie and Chris de Burgh tracks thrown in for the sheer hell of it. And hell it most certainly was….