Tag Archives: Scottish urban horror

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….

Blood Baths and Dirty Laundry

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That night I had a dream, although sadly it wasn’t of the Martin Luther King variety. I had decided to investigate the wood at the rear of the garden and was trying to plot the course of least resistance through the trees. The sound of my breath was loud in my ears and I could see it curling and dispersing in plumes on the night air. The trees grew steadily more impenetrable and the only light was provided by a sickly moon gilding the twisted tops of the trees. A branch grazed my face, bringing hot, wet blood which I tried to wipe away but couldn’t. It fell in a steady drip down onto my coat and I felt progressively weaker as though it was symbolic of something altogether more corrosive at work.

Then the dream shifted and I was being chased; my only hope was to reach the top of the hill. With implacable dream logic, although I didn’t know what awaited me at the summit I knew with a panicked surge of adrenalin that it was the only chance I had. The cold sucked on my bones and the ground became boggy and possessive of my shoes which I quickly lost. I didn’t have time to reclaim them, this place was redolent with the taint of something that had been waiting here for a long time.

Waiting for me.

I could feel its obscene excitement as it gained on me and ran faster, the trees inflicting hundreds of cuts on my face and body as more of my clothes got ripped away. The terrain abruptly cleared of trees and I toiled upwards eventually reaching a rocky outcrop where I knew I had to rest before I made the final push for the top.

But as I heaved myself wearily up the last few steps, I saw that what I had thought was rock was in fact the figure of an old woman. An queasy greenish glow surrounded her and she was slapping something repeatedly. My dream pursuer forgotten, I knew I had to find out what she was doing. An overwhelming feeling of dread paralysed my legs but something was driving me onwards whatever the cost and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

The old woman was tiny. Her deformed, arthritic fingers plunged rhythmically in and out of what appeared to be a pool of water. It looked rank and foul wafts of steam rose from it to escape into the clean air. She was washing something repeatedly in the fetid water and her head was held down so I couldn’t see her face.

“What are you doing?” my dream self asked despite every instinct I had screaming at me not to attract this creature’s attention. I wanted to run as fast as I could back the way I’d come, but it was as though I was trapped in a set script and that demanded to be played out and my traitorous limbs remained rooted to the spot.

The crone, for that was what she was, finally looked up and I tried to look away but was held in thrall to the power that pulsated around her. Her eyelids had been sewn together over empty sockets and it looked as though someone had hacked her lips from her face. She was filthy and the surface of her skin was crawling with hordes of tiny mites that made it seem as though her features ebbed and flowed as they went about their business.

“Come here child,” she said, without any movement of the raw skin where her lips should have been.

Compelled, I obeyed and walked closer to her. I stared down at what she was washing and saw that it was the red top I’d been wearing that evening, along with coat and hat. She held them between her fingers and trailed them in and out of the stinking pool with an almost voluptuous caressing motion. Then I saw a severed hand float to the surface of the pool and suddenly wasn’t green anymore; it was red and my clothes were covered in blood and other things and still the old woman swirled them around in the blood bath as though wrapping chocolate around some delicious confection.

“You know me child, don’t you?” she whispered in my mind.

And I did. She was the Bean Nighe, the Washerwoman: a premonition of violent death to whoever saw her. The unsuspecting victim always stumbled across her in a wild, lonely place while she washed their bloody clothes.

The scene shifted to me flying up the same hill. My dream self swooped up ravines and up and up and up into the heavens as though on invisible wings. It was an exhilarating ride until all too soon I was at the summit and walking towards the huge cairn that had been built there. Where I had flown, now I could barely walk and each step took all the strength I had. After an age I reached the cairn and saw that it wasn’t any such thing. It was a collection of skulls, some huge and vaguely canine and others human. Sitting on top of the skulls with wings folded was Luke, teeth bared, hair streaming out behind him in the wind. I heard a distressing gurgling sound and I realised he was laughing.

I turned and started to run back down the hill but he swooped after me talons reaching for my eyes. And then I fell; faster and faster down what was now a Mount Everest of skulls, my body bashing on jagged fragments of bone, losing little bits of me as I went. I screamed and cursed until I hit the ground with a bone-crunching thud at the bottom of the mountain where I died reviling the sorry, misbegotten fates that had led me there.

The Company Of Wulvers

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We walked into an enormous room with high vaulted ceilings bathed in enough candlelight to make it look like it had been sprayed with old gold. The mellow wash flattered the hectic crowd as it drank, talked and clinked glasses; some of its members were even dancing to the inevitable ceilidh band who I could just see crammed onto a little podium. The band, a collection of shaggy haired young men, were howling, stamping and playing their fiddles as though their lives depended upon it. Maybe they did. There was enough dark energy here to power the coming of the Antichrist – if you believed in such things.

And then, as though someone had flicked on a switch, it all changed. A raw, roiling energy beat in waves over my head, as though I had just been pitched to the bottom of the ocean, where I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. No one else in the gathering seemed to feel it although the chatter, dancing and drinking became fevered, compulsive even, as though this was the last night on earth and there was nothing left to lose. I began to make out vague shapes flickering above their heads: formless at first, gradually assuming a bestial cast as though something was trying to escape the human clay but couldn’t quite break free.

The band played louder, the dancers whirled faster as though I was standing in the midst of an immensely powerful battery that everyone in the room was simultaneously feeding and draining, feeding and draining. Each time the power peaked it was at a higher level and the party got wilder and uglier in the no time at all I’d been here. A couple of scuffles broke out in the corner of the room, in one a one big burly guy threw a smaller one into a table which promptly collapsed covering him with food and drink which he was made to eat. The strange thing was that the smaller mand didn’t seem too upset about it.

There was still no let up in the power surges and the pain in my head became a vice. Time to leave. Then something else caught my eye and that dark sense of mine began to vibrate in time with the power: a young blond girl, blouse in tatters, head flung back in a weird, grunting ecstasy, with a grizzled head of indeterminate sex nursing at her breasts and rivulets of blood running down her bony ribs. The twisted energy in the room rose in a shimmering multicoloured arc above the heads of the crowd and the force of it was a singing, living thing so intense it had its own gravitational pull.

I’d only felt this much squeezing power once before and I knew it for what it was: shape-shifter. The room had become the pulsing chamber of a gigantic, infarcted, heart, each beat a countdown to detonation that would beggar Hiroshima. And here I was at the epicentre without so much as a table to cower under. Well if cowering was out, there was only one thing for it…