Tag Archives: haunted edinburgh

Wait For Me…

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Martin didn’t mind that he was dead so much as the fact that he’d been killed by his unloving wife of twenty-three years. To add insult to injury the bitch was now living the high life in what had been their suburban semi in Fairmilehead on the outskirts of Edinburgh.

She had laced his dinner with arsenic night after night for weeks and smiled at him over the dinner table as he’d eaten every last poisoned mouthful. She’d tended him devotedly as he’d vomited his guts up and held his hand when the pain got so bad he’d begged her to put a pillow over his face to release him from the agony. Eventually she had relented and, picking up one of the over-stuffed pillows she liked so much, had lowered it gently onto his face with a little quirk of her mouth he didn’t recall having ever seen before.

He had tried not to fight of course, but found that his wasted body’s instinct to survive thought differently. He began to struggle, to signal to her that he’d changed his mind, that she didn’t have to carry out her grisly promise after all. But she only bore down harder with a strength he hadn’t known she had in her. The last sound he heard before he died was his wife’s voice:

“I hope you go to hell you fat bastard. It’s more than you deserve after what you’ve done.”

That was strange he’d thought, because he hadn’t been fat at the end. On the contrary the weeks and months of illness had rendered him skeletal, skin hanging in folds around a wasted frame as though he was wearing a flesh suit that was far too big.

Well, she had got her wish. Except he didn’t think he was in hell. No, it looked very much like he was still here in the home sweet home they’d shared together for over two decades. He had tried to leave, but found he couldn’t get further than the gate at the end of the garden. This was unfortunate as he subsequently discovered that he had also fallen victim to the oldest cliché in the book: she had been having an affaire with his so-called best friend Cliff Morgan, the man he’d played golf with at the Swanston Golf Club twice a month for almost as long as he’d been married to Mary.

Well, as he had been fond of saying when he was alive, this was indeed a pretty pickle. The first time Cliff had come round, he’d tried to get through to him, screaming himself hoarse to make his friend understand what Mary had done. It was only when Cliff put one hand on Mary’s breast, while unbuttoning his trousers with the other that he realised the full horror of his predicament. What was he to do?

What, he wondered, had Mary had meant when she’d referred to something he’d done. He couldn’t for the life or even death of him fathom that one out. He also wasn’t sure what had upset him the most: Mary’s betrayal or Cliff’s. To his surprise, on balance it was his friend’s behaviour that had disturbed him the most. She had killed him to be sure and he wasn’t about to forget that; but strangely it was Cliff’s defection that had cut him to the quick. He hoped fervently that didn’t mean he was some sort of homo. No, that wouldn’t do at all.

Tonight the traitorous love-birds were having a romantic dinner for two: scented candles, roses, and the big dining table set as though it was a fancy restaurant. She of course was done up like a dog’s dinner in a pink evening dress that was far too tight and revealing in all the wrong places for her frumpy body. He had done that hideous Bobbie Charlton comb-over that Colin and Mary had used to laugh about behind his back. Well, she wasn’t laughing now, the two-faced cow, as she slid her stocking-clad foot up and down Cliff’s pinstriped leg and gazed adoringly into his eyes.

Maybe this was hell. Doomed to imprisonment in his own house watching his killer and his best friend canoodle with not a thing he could do about it.

Or at least that’s what he’d thought. Just the other day (although time was fluid in this state so he couldn’t really be sure) he’d met another occupant of the house that could see, hear and understand him perfectly. She said she’d died in the house when she was young and she certainly didn’t look older than sixteen. She told him she used to watch over him when he’d been alive to which he retorted that she had obviously not done a very good job given recent events. She huffed for a few hours and only came round after he’d apologised profusely. Some assiduous flattery and ego massaging later (of which he was rather proud of given he’d never had to do it before), she revealed that yes, there was a way to intervene in the physical world after all. It was tricky and dangerous, even for ghosts such as they, but it could be done.

It would be done, he thought grimly. If it was the last thing he ever did, it would be done. After he’d learned how, the why and when would look after themselves.

Garnett v Tyson

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The Cowgate was in Edinburgh’s Old Town, hidden beneath the South and George IV Bridges like the monstrous child of shamed parents too polite to smother it at birth. It was dark no matter what time of day or year because of the looming tenements on either side, built higher than either sense or sanity dictated. Of course clubs like the Snake-Pit thrived like mushrooms in the grime and lack of light and ‘low-life’ became an elevated state to which the clubbers could only aspire. And I should know. My lack of ambition and taste for irredeemable scum were legendary in this part of town.

It was ten o’clock and still early by satanic orgiast standards, but I was desperate for a drink. I pulled my borrowed clothes around me like a second, ill-fitting skin, heading down the alleyway and toward the nondescript door in what looked like an abandoned tenement.

I knocked on the door and was met with only silence. I tried again, harder with the same response. I drew my fist back preparing for a good old fashioned hammering, but the door swung open and a young, Hispanic looking man appeared in the door-way, the faint boom of a base and drum combo going on from what seemed like miles underground.

“Yes?” said the man, the sibilance of the s sounding loud in the narrow alley. He had a hair net over dark hair and was wearing what appeared to be an all in one lime body-suit.

At least I wasn’t the only one that was sartorially challenged tonight.

“Can I come in?”

“Hmm. Let me think about that,” he said folding his arms pretending to be deep in thought. “No.”

“I’m a regular. Or used to be. I-”

“I know who you are, bitch. Why else do you think you’re barred? I heard all about the fight you started on the dance-floor. Five people injured and one airlifted to hospital.”

“I know, talk about murder on the dance-floor eh? But you know, joking aside there are two types of people in the world: those that like Lionel Ritchie and-”

“Stop,” he said lip curling, “before my sides split.”

“Don’t be like that. I would have thought any bloke brave enough to go out dressed as Catwoman had to have a sense of humour.”

“See how funny you think it is when I rip off your head and piss down the hole. Beat it – I ain’t gonna tell you again.”

Ah bouncers and dress codes, a marriage made in hell by the most sadistic of devils. The door began to close and I wedged the toe of my boot over the threshold.

“We’ve obviously got off on the wrong foot,” I reasoned.

“And I’m about to take yours off if you don’t remove it.”

“Tyson?” A familiar contralto voice floated from somewhere deep in the bowels of the club.

“Tyson? Priceless. Do you do weddings and Bar Mitzvah’s as well?”

Friendly Fire

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We were in a small freezing room, devoid of furniture apart from a gurney that looked like a relic from a haunted asylum horror flick. Undaunted, Vic had been pummelling my bruised flesh and stretching my bones with such a sustained ferocity that I was at points wishing that I really was dead.

“You’ll feel better in the morning,” was all he would say. I was lying under a thin cover stark naked. It was freezing and my teeth would have been chattering were it not for the biting cold.

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

“You never knew your mother and I’m beginning to doubt you ever even had one. Oh, by the way, keep your door locked, you and the blond geezer, what’s his name? Rudy isn’t it? Especially him.”

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

“Rose, haven’t you noticed what tonight is?”

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

“Lock the fucking door, okay? That’s all I’m saying.”

I pondered this with a sinking of spirits that I thought had already flat-lined.

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

“Well that would be an end to all your problems wouldn’t it? Now hold still.”

I felt the slow trickle of something warm across my back and didn’t bother asking him what it was. A low rumbling sound filled the room until a heavy weight fell across me muffling my hearing but it didn’t matter because I could feel it, like a cat’s purr but the effect was chilling. A warm lassitude spread through my limbs as though I had been injected with something. A little voice at the back of my mind was shouting something about danger, but I paid no attention and willingly embraced oblivion. My body had sustained some serious damage and I was at the end of my strength. I had to trust that Vic would help me and with that thought I blacked out.

Something Old, Something New

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Edinburgh’s birth and the land upon which it was built was nothing more than a volcanic plug spewed out of the belly of a bilious god; destined to become a precarious high point where people felt safe from invasion, but unfortunately were not. They built a wall, a stone girdle as though that would protect them from what was within. And when the girdle became too tight, they built up and up giving the world its first plague ridden high rises. But that of course was so Old Town darling, and the New was supposed to be the antidote to all that nasty disease and poverty. And maybe it was, but it was also sterile, without the bloated, infarcted beauty of the old where most of the supernaturals made their home.

But there was a newer, tougher breed of supernatural that had no need of such sentimental aesthetics and I was going to its lair. As I turned left into Dean Terrace past the carefully preserved des res from another era, I tried to focus on the non-existent plan which appeared to be: rooting around in the monster’s lair while it was absent hoping to find The Mask which of course would just be lying at the end of a trial of arrows along with some clues about the identity of two murderers who may or may not have known its owner twenty odd years ago.

Walking along Ann Street I wondered how a flying lizard centuries old had managed to infest one of its mansions. Number 28 was next, the lights were not on but that did not mean no one was home. I walked up the short rubbish strewn, weed filled path and rang the bell which I could hear clanging around the house. No one came. On impulse I pushed at the door and it opened. It wasn’t really that surprising that she didn’t think to lock the door, it wasn’t as though she needed to be security conscious and if random council workers or posties went missing more plausible explanations could be found, palms greased, influence exercised. The beauty of this type of predator was that it lay in wait amongst its prey perfectly camouflaged until it was too late. In the more exclusive areas of the city where ‘neighbour’ was a dirty word, they were practically invisible.

And even if you saw past the beguiling disguise, if you dared to try telling the police that the little old lady next door was a vampire, you’d be buying your own personal one-way ticket to the nut-house…

Foxed

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At first I thought the pounding was an alcohol based manifestation caused by all the Talisker I’d sucked on down before I finally got to bed last night, but it turned out to be someone at the door. A very determined someone judging by the damn good thrashing that was being administered. I sighed and buried my head under the pillow burrowing down into drunken oblivion where I belonged. It was only when the shouting started, punctuated by vicious kicks to the door that I knew the chances of it being a new meter man or untrained neighbour were positively anorexic.

I uncovered my head and was rewarded by a man’s voice shouting heated but still quite inventive abuse at top volume. Beginning to warm up myself, I pulled the curtains on my four poster, leapt out of bed, managing to pull on dressing gown, blade from the dresser and my dark glasses, all before I reached the door.

Good sense and hangover reasserted themselves and so I paused palm on the painted wood and looked through the spy-hole. There were two of them: he was tall and thin, she short and plump and apparently trying to placate him, gaze darting around the stairwell nervously. The Fox twins: he Rufus her Ruby. Now this was beginning to seriously tick me off. These guys were part of the so-called psychic community within which I was persona non grata all on account of my little penchant for search and destroy missions. Most of the community was made up of losers, morons and no-talent, superstitious weirdos. Apart from these two who together formed the Fox Agency performing discreet services to the supernaturally challenged. She was an exceptionally powerful clairvoyant and he was one of the best exorcists that I’d ever had the misfortune to come across. I say misfortune because some of the demons he’d cast out had come calling for me and were only persuaded to leave after much blood and not a few body parts, thankfully none of them mine. But that was a whole other story.

“She’s obviously not in,” I heard Ruby say.

“Of course she is, it’s not like she’s got anywhere else to go. She wasn’t out on a hunt last night, so there’s no reason she can’t answer the flaming door.” her brother told her.

“Well at least that’s something,” she said looking pained, “but how do you know?”

Yes, how the hell did he know?

“Never mind that. Psychotic bitches like that don’t have friends and they don’t have anywhere to go when they’re not out making the world a worse place. Stands to reason they’ll be tucked up in their kip-”

I had heard enough and wrenched the door open.

“Well psycho-bitch is up now and you’ll both be familiar with the old saying, beware your heart’s desire? Good, because I’ve got high hopes you’re going to get it,” I said.

Two surprised faces whipped round. She was about five feet and everything about her was round and compact including her lips which were tightly compressed in a clearly heroic effort not to cry. She was wearing a duffle-coat and clutching a small back-pack for dear life. He was about six four; broad of shoulder but no real meat on him yet to pad the frame out. They didn’t really look anything alike apart from the fair hair and the same expressive hazel eyes.

“Yes?,” said Rufus staring at me, uncertainty evicting rage in the click of a door opening: “Can I help you?”

Rosie By Lamp Light

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I came to tied to a chair in an empty, carpet-less room. It smelled of dust underlaid with a coppery hint of old blood and the only light came from the streetlight outside. Viciously tight bindings bit into raw flesh that felt as if someone had tried to flay it from my body while I’d been out.

I was alone.

Seconds pounded past on little leaden feet but frankly I was glad for even that meagre attention because it proved I was still alive. And then, a slight sound so faint it was almost imperceptible accompanied by a cool breeze across ravaged skin made me look up.

The demon covered the ceiling and still there was not enough room for him to spread his wings to their full extent. He didn’t hover so much as hang, neck bent at an impossible angle, lustrous black hair concealing his face. Only the gold of his eyes shone out through the hair, so bright they generated light that now played around the room: clearly the source of what I had fondly imagined had come from outside.

He must have heard some sound, perhaps the dilation of arteries, or the frantic pumping of blood by an agitated heart because he snarled, a low, rumbling growl that froze what was left of my blood.

Time stopped, my aches and pains fled, evicted by the certain knowledge that this was how it was going to end; here in this dirty little room at the hands of a creature so vile, even its own kind shunned it. Then with a deafening roar, a torrent of dark water surged into the room from the walls, the ceiling and from beneath the floor, slapping wetly about the legs of the chair. In seconds it was knee high and I realised it wasn’t water because in its discoloured brackish depths, solid shapes swam.

“Are you going to kill me Lukastor?”

Sometimes It’s Hard To Be A Woman

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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

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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

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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.