Tag Archives: scottish vampires

Love Bites

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There was something about the three blonde, black-eyed women that was not quite right. At least that’s what Colin thought as he finished one pint and thought about starting another. His thoughts turned as they always did to his bitch ex Jackie who was giving him grief, not letting him see the wee man until he paid up what she said he owed. Fat chance of that when he’d just lost his job in the off-licence where he’d worked for ten years. Who’d have thought offies in Scotland could ever go out of business? You had to get through the cold and smothering dark of the Scottish winter somehow and it was a time honoured national tradition that a vast quantity of booze was just the way to do it.

He decided on a another pint and whisky chaser and lumbered unsteadily to the bar to get them in. The Bingo Wings was a run down shabby sort of place, but you could sit in the gloom and nurse drink and grievances in equal measure with no interference from anyone who knew what was good for them. And from the hot glances thrown his way from the blond bints, he was positive he could show them a thing or two on that front. Talent-spotting wasn’t a usual pastime in the Bingo Wings: there were other more likely venues for that sort of nonsense. No, this was where silent, angry men sat and drank themselves into a well earned oblivion before picking a fight outside to round the evening off.

Christ they were fit though: lush, full figured and from the long legs, not much shy of his six feet frame. He thought maybe they’d been to a fancy dress party because they were all dressed in white see-through dress things that rode right up when they sat down on the bar stools, so you could pretty much see everything. Little tarts.

The nearest one turned her head to look at him, a sinuous, twisting motion accompanied by a fall of white-blond hair that was so long she could have sat on it. Well, if the little slag played her cards right, she’d be sitting on something else before the end of the night.

“Are you sisters then?” he said controlling the slurring with a mighty effort.

The other two turned to stare at him with that same curiously serpentine motion and three pairs of black eyes fixed on his face with a disconcerting intensity. They must have been sisters because their features were almost identical. There was a sharpness about the nose and cheek-bones that he hadn’t noticed at first, but they were still stunners, no doubt about it.

“In a way,” the nearest one answered in a soft voice. He knew it, she was definitely up for it. Wait until Jackie found out that he still had the old one two magic.

“What’s your name?” she continued.

“Eh, Colin. Colin McQuarrie. And what’s yours?” he asked, finally remembering the finer points of leg-over etiquette.

“Margo. And this is Morgan and Marjorie.”

The blond in the middle, Morgan, slid gracefully off her stool and came to stand next to him. Maybe he’d be in the three-way before the night was out if he minded his p’s and q’s. He hurriedly calculated just how much he’d had to drink because it really wouldn’t do to disappoint the ladeez seeing as how they were so up for it. Not if the abuse Jackie had regularly showered him with was anything to go by.

Morgan put a hand on his arm and was so close he could smell her: an intoxicating scent that reminded him of the green promise of spring woods. He was just about to press his mouth to hers when she ruined it by speaking.

That was women for you.

“Did you know you have an elemental attached to you?”

“An elephant? Are you pissed hen?”

The third blond, Marjorie had joined them and stood on his other side. He felt hemmed in for some reason and started to wonder where Rab the barman was; quelling a sudden surge of adrenalin as though some part of his brain was telling him to make a run for it. Why would he run from three lassies?

“An elemental,”

“It’s a lower form of spirit-”

“That attaches itself to people who have done bad things in their lives. It feeds off the energy that creates-”

“What she means is the suffering of the victim. For every bad deed there must be a victim-”

“And for every bad deed, the elemental gets bigger-”

“And bigger and-”

“Yours is the size of a tenement. And it’s still growing.”

He’d lost track of who was saying what but it didn’t matter because it melded into a seamless whole as though the conversation was taking place entirely inside his own head. The three hadn’t taken their eyes from him, tracking his progress like a deer or some other prey that didn’t have a hope in hell. Being hopeless had never felt so good.

“You know those angry, frustrated feelings you get where you want to burn the world and everybody in it?”

He was pretty sure that was Marjorie who was stroking his arm snaking a trail up to the back of his neck. Dumbly he nodded.

“That’s from the elemental. Sort of like waste products if you see what I mean. You’ll have noticed how it’s getting worse no doubt? That’s the elemental getting stronger. Soon it’ll be powerful enough to consume you and then you’ll be part of it forever. Isn’t that something?” Margo smiled showing small, perfectly formed white teeth.

He was really confused now, unsure if it was the drink or if the women had drugged him. He wasn’t sure he cared, as long as they stayed with him.

“Can’t I get rid of it? I mean, couldn’t you help me?” he said, like a little boy pleading not to be sent to bed. He didn’t question the truth of what he was being told: it was as if he’d always known. Ever since that hit and run that he’d been responsible for as a teenager and then all the other stuff since then…

“Ah, now. We were just getting to that,” said Morgan. “But there’s something you need to do for us first.”

The Devil Inside

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The demon wanted Deacon Brodie’s Heart badly enough to risk making me go fetch it for him. It was an order I wasn’t in a position to refuse.

And therein lay the rub. It was not a Harry Potter type cloak of invisibility so the owner could get up to jolly wheezes after everyone else had gone to bed. No, it was a deadly weapon that in the wrong hands could cause untold destruction. And the taloned grasp of this particular monster definitely counted as the wrong hands.

Yet another triumph in the Rose Garnet book of What The Hell Am I Going To Do Now.

And then of course there was the small matter of where I was going to find it. It wasn’t a body part of the good Deacon’s, no, it was just a talisman he’d owned and then lost. But the association with him had persisted as the Heart had passed from owner to owner down the centuries. By now, it could literally be anywhere and this was the sort of gallows humour that the demon was good at: bring me an impossible prize and I will let you live.

He looked at me pupils narrowed again to golden slits, shadows chasing wildly across the walls. I fancied I could almost here them scratching at the walls.

“One heart coming up,” I sing-songed moronically, starting to stumble over bodies and debris, desperate to cross the threshold and run as far away from my own personal demon as I could get.

For now.

In The Beginning

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Eventually I came to an oddly familiar crag precariously perched on a series of hills above an estuary. A dark sky boiled above oily waves as they dashed themselves on the rocks beneath as though urging them on in their suicidal ambitions.

I had never seen such a bleak, dispiriting place.

Who could live here and more importantly, why?

The roiling clouds cleared just enough for me to make out signs of what passed for human habitation: a series of shambling, dilapidated shacks that looked like the track of some contagion upon diseased skin.

Now I knew what I was looking at and wished to the god I didn’t believe that I had been left in ignorance.

Edinburgh, mon amour.

The Grass Is Always Meaner

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The white light of dawn did not flatter Greyfriars Cemetery. Not that this discouraged the ill advised idiots that flocked here in their droves with no idea about what they were messing with, or what the place was really for. As for me, it had always been my dearest ambition not to be found dead here.

Around four hundred years ago, the cemetery had moonlighted briefly as an open air prison for over a thousand people, their suffering leaving an indelible stain, like smoke damage in a diseased lung. It had been this little wheeze that had attracted such dark energies to the place, rather than its day job as a bone-yard. Now it pulsed with a febrile heat, as though something was about to hatch and I knew I was running out of time.

The great vaults were ornately carved: grinning skulls and coy angels coupled together in a sexless dance of death and resurrection; obsessively carved by the living in the hope of making sense of their own one way ticket.

Many of them were so old that the stone itself was crumbling as though in wry tribute to the way of all flesh. Theses cages of stone and iron were of course only for those rich enough to afford such pointless ostentation, constructed to keep the corpses safe from the attentions of the body-snatchers, or Resurrection Men as they were ironically known. They failed of course.

The grass on the other hand looked healthy and vigorous, fed on the superior nutrients leached from the great and the good. At least they had finally given something back to the community.

Flesh Fish

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I sat in the car because, simply, there was nowhere else to go.

To the west, the darkening stain of an oncoming storm gradually cast a caul over the deserted street where I was parked and the sensation of being smothered was very nearly overwhelming. Yet there was still a shimmering quality to the air, as though trying to contain something that was intent on getting out.

I knew the feeling.

To my left was a fish shop which, although it displayed the closed sign, still had meat of indeterminate origin in the window. Great, grey eels were stacked on one side next to what looked like a small pieces of shark meat. Dun coloured fillets rubbed innards with something that had a huge head and lots of small, sharp teeth reminding me of an old school-mate from primary school.

A blurred burst of purple and red in the interior of the shop made me look again. The darkened interior stared blankly back at me and the hairs began to rise on the back of my neck because in that brief monent I had seen a familiar hulking shape: a creature I knew had never been burdened with the vulgarity of a pulse and the flesh over-coat that contained it.

Two doors down in the window above the grocer’s, the corner of a net curtain twitched as though hastily dropped by whatever was behind it. I was trapped in the eye of the storm, knowing that something irrevocable was just about come crashing down, something from which neither I nor this benighted village was ever going to escape.

I did what I normally did when faced with the end of the world, the end of humanity, the end of the end: I pulled out my hip flask and drained it dry.

Monday, Monday

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I woke up after seven to darkness and the dead, so closely packed it was impossible to tell how many there were. They stood silently, their milky eyes though blind, still able to track me wherever I went, like a field of grey translucent sun flowers.

Had my live visitors wrecked my wards earlier today? I’d rip their limbs off and feed them to them if they had, but somehow I didn’t think it was their style. Besides the wards were so powerful, I didn’t see how anyone could disable them but me.

The Deadlights woke, excited by the promise of all that dark energy and the room thrummed with them, making my head hurt worse than it already did. I waded effortfully through the frozen press of the dead, as though miles down underwater, with a million tonnes of water bearing down on my unprotected head.

I remembered I had a job on tonight and as if to confirm I got a full on visual from one of the Boabhan Sith showing the unmistakable shape of Salisbury Crags and the whispered message:

“The Guardian is awake. You must come.”

I also remembered that it was probably a bad idea given the Hand-of-Glory some kind soul had sent me last night.

It would be madness, mayhem, murder and worse if I accepted such a rash invitation. But then again, it was either that or spend a cheerless Monday night in the cold bosom of the dearly departed.

Of course I went.

Diabolus Ex Machina

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Midnight Falls had been a haven for all those who sought refuge from the human world; an increasingly precious commodity. Morgana had established a nest in the hills and Tobias’s predecessors had built the town. Occasional skirmishes meant that there were casualties on both sides, but nothing dramatic enough to risk all out war about. Midnight Fall’s real attraction was the spell of forgetting strong enough to compel most of the humans who came here to leave none the wiser. Those impervious few who stayed were tolerated as long as they didn’t poke their noses, or anything else for that matter, where they were most decidedly not wanted. That may have accounted for the ostensibly human Harper-Hodges. But more importantly for the creatures of Midnight Falls, a compromise of sorts had been attained. Not perfect and certainly not amicable, but it worked.

Everything in the garden was, if not rosy, rare steak bloody. That changed when Morgana was challenged for her throne by a younger, stronger contender called Lilith. Morgana, fuelled by the carelessness of passing millennia had, like many of the old ones, become distracted from the more Machiavellian machinations of the slaughter house that was the nest. But she wasn’t down and out yet.

She conjured and made a pact with the demon Baphomet. Many were sacrificed: human; vampire; all to satisfy her demon lover and he was as good as his word. Better. In celebration, Morgana unleashed unparalleled carnage the chief attraction of which was Lilith’s torture which consisted of a piece by piece live dismemberment lasting months. When Morgana got bored with Lilith’s screams, she gave her to the tender mercies of Baphomet who gained more power than he had in centuries. That’s demons for you: whatever the bargain, they always came out on top while you whined on like an impotent idiot about how that’s not what you meant at around the same time they scooped your intestines out and used them as draft excluders.

The demon’s presence poisoned Midnight Falls drip by drop and the were folk withered under its influence. Nothing too alarming at first: their beast forms became subtly distorted. Then the deformities became more gross, less easily dismissed. The more powerful were better equipped to preserve the shape they once had, but in truth they all suffered. And it wasn’t just their beast form that was altering, their sense of identity was too. Meanwhile Morgana had decided to make the subjugation of the weres a sign of her new power not to mention a permanent source of live food for her growing brood.

Tobias, when he became leader had a brilliant, awful idea. The were-folk would take their own power source and gain the necessary strength to seal Morgana and her kind up for good in her mountain fortress. That power source was a captive spirit, to be kept in a state somewhere between life and oblivion enabling the were folk to feed from its life force for all time to come. The entity had to be powerful enough to perform this role but at the same time quiescent enough to control. And, in their desperation, that’s what the fools did. I didn’t bother asking what rituals were involved because I had an idea and it wasn’t a jolly old tea party. But it was Tobias who did the incantations and made the sacrifices, because as leader that was his cross to bear.

But he hadn’t done it very well because the force of nature that was the black dog was wakening. Tobias had hoped it would have been a slower process and then I turned up, hastening the inevitable. In any case, their prisoner didn’t yield the power for which they had hoped. Their beast selves were still increasingly degenerating and now so were the human. One half couldn’t live without the other. Now they were quadruply screwed: no leader; no power source; Morgana on the warpath; and a vengeful demonic spirit on their tails.

Talk about Diabolic intervention. Unfortunately for all of us, it had gone beyond mere words.

Hide and Bleed

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It’s so traditional to wait on disaster befalling you, so why not ring in the changes and seek it out yourself? At least that’s what I told myself when I took out my scrying glass and signed my own death warrant.

The gleaming reflections of my scrying glass soon revealed my murderer-to-be perched on the top of Salisbury Crags. His tall, powerful frame and wings, the pinions of which rested on the ground on either side of him as he balanced on the Crags edge, were limned in red as the winter sun set over Edinburgh. It could have been classic fallen angel stuff as he contemplated his new kingdom with all the grace and terrible beauty of a Gustav Doré illustration. Except this kingdom was no more than a holding pen and the beast so delicately poised above it would gladly annihilate everyone and everything in it.

He turned quickly as though aware of being spyed upon and the last rays of the dying sun made a halo around his head the colour of old blood. The hair was long, a burnished blue black, stray strands of which were being blown across his face as though he was a wild animal staring out from behind bars. His skin was dark and the high cheekbones and tip-tilted eyes gave his face an easy glamour not often found in this forgotten, frozen corner of the world.

He wore old, battered leathers and a pair of boots that had metallic sigils of unknown origin worked into them. The nose was straight, the mouth full above the cleft chin. It was a terrible beauty, the last face you looked upon as you died screaming, giving him the gift of your intestines and gladly.

For the old ones like Luke, there was no need to fear the last faltering rays of a dying star because nothing interfered with their games of hide and bleed. The red ruin that day in and night out swelled and blocked city gutters up and down the length and breadth of the country was more than testament to that.

But he was on my trail and I was going to have to face up to that and try to find a way to kill him before he killed me. The slightly tricky part was how could you kill the unkillable before it killed you…

Killing Me Softly

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The parasite first got my attention when it tried to suck my soul on Edinburgh’s High Street.  I watched with a certain clinical detachment as the grey, ragged substance of it began to swell outwards, misshapen teeth sunk into the exposed flesh in my hand.  Not physically you understand because at this stage in the little bastards evolution it didn’t have a body.  What it did have however, was a will hell bent on finding a way.  It was a doppelganger: a vicious predator that survived by duplicating what it fed on, human or non, it didn’t matter.

I watched it chow on down, lip curling as it began the transformation.  What had been a plume of dirty smoke began to balloon out in a parody of humanity, the skull taking shape, gaping maw still barnacled onto my hand.  I shook the offending appendage from side to side and the beast swung with it, at this stage at least weightless, like a jellyfish in tune with the ebb and flow of the ocean.  What it was really doing was getting in tune with me: the way I walked, to quote an old Cramps song, would soon be the way we walked.

Although it was a primitive spirit, without much in the way of intelligence its ability to replicate whatever it latched onto was an architectural achievement of Gaudi-esque proportions.  Although I suppose strictly speaking it was a master forger good enough to fool the victims family and friends, at least for a little while.  The thing was that the original always died while the copy piloted by the doppelganger, painted the town blood red.

I watched my own skull gaining flesh as the mouth worked ever more feverishly on my arm, siphoning my essence and growing stronger by the second.  Within seconds it had grown to five feet eleven and sported a short crop of hair dyed an alarming shade of scarlet.  I gazed critically at it, vowing I’d kill Mariella for talking me into letting her loose on my hair while we were both too drunk to remember anything about it.  My second self was on its knees, jaw working, gaining mass, solidity and an exact copy of my leopard print fake fur in a matter of seconds.

I began to feel a little faint, although that might have had something to do with the vat of whisky I’d had last night.  It was two in the afternoon in the heart of a frozen November and people shouldered past me with grim purpose and if they noticed anything it would just be a tall young woman standing stock still in the middle of the street.  But through the milling throng, I realised that I was wrong, someone had noticed the freak show and was staring at me with an expression of concern on her plump face.  I knew she could see my new best friend because her eyes were flicking between us and she was evidently deciding what to do.  She took a purposeful step in my direction which for some reason aroused me from my torpor.  The last thing I needed was some idiot who fancied herself as a bit of a psychic trying to help me out.  That particular little parlour game always ended in tears and sometimes in other less disposable body fluids.

I was beside the creepy Museum of Childhood and quickly ducked into on of the innumerable closes that infest the High Street, although I’d no idea which one I’d picked which could be very bad news.  I waited a few seconds scanning the street from the safety of the close and the plump woman had disappeared.  I looked down at the thing that was killing me softly and the increased heft of it wasn’t exactly a good sign.

“What am I going to do with you?” I asked it softly, running my hand along its brow complete with dark eyebrows and strange, silver-grey eyes upturned and fixed on mine while it sucked on me like a monstrous baby.  The disturbing thing was that I could touch it.  It had gone from nothing to something in under ten minutes.  I had noticed that the spirit world had become much more active lately; reports of the demonic had shot through the roof, but relatively unusual spirits like this doppelganger never had this much juice.

And yet here we were.

My speciality was communicating with spirits, but that was a euphemism for so much more.  I saw what they saw, felt what they felt in glorious Technicolor and surround sound.  Most of them were just re-runs, sad little shades who’d become stuck doing a particular, usually random thing with not much mind remaining.  But some of them had deliberately chosen not to pass on, usually the deranged, the ones who’d felt cheated by an uncaring universe and were out for blood as long as it was someone else’s.  But this ‘communication’ meant that some of the spirit’s essence stayed with me permanently and in my own way I wasn’t so dissimilar to the parasite I was trying to dislodge.

With every encounter, I was stronger, changed, carrying with me another alien piece in the vast jig-saw puzzle that was my life.  And if I didn’t stop this transference process in time I would consume the spirit totally, just as the parasite was trying to consume me.  That meant that I could kill pure spirit, whether it was the soul of a dead person, or my newest little friend that had become so attached to me.  But I could only kill if I was stronger than the spirit I was siphoning and so far I had been lucky: if you could call the Frankenstein patchwork that I’d become lucky.  Because make no mistake: you are what you eat and the bad shit I’d consumed lately was going to do more than harden my arteries.

“While I’m loving this whole weird twin thing,” I crooned to the thing stroking its/my hair, “the thing is, this town definitely ain’t big enough for the both of us and it’s not me who’s going to leave.”  The doppelganger began to purr, a wet, rasping sound and I staggered against the wall of the close.  A chill wind fresh from whipping up mischief in the North Sea nipped at my face reviving me slightly and  I realised I was close to passing out.  My lack of adrenalin was literally going to be the death of me one day soon.

But the seduction of the hunt was as ever too strong and I knew I’d risk everything for it.  Sometimes I wasn’t sure what I liked best: the hunt; or the kill.  That was the other prong of this wonderful talent I enjoyed so much: I could kill spirit so that it did not exist anywhere on any plane at any time.  It was the reason the psychic community shunned me because they felt, rather wetly I thought, that all forms of existence were sacred.  I shunned them because a) I had to keep my end up on the shunning front and b) I thought they were lily livered liberals and would personally liked to have inserted their own little doppelganger passenger in an intimate part of their anatomy for a few months to see if that changed their minds.  Whatever they liked to believe, there were beings in this world that deserved the kiss of death that only I could give them.  But I didn’t do it for the victims; no, I did it because I liked it.  Without wanting to sound like a high school cheerleader with a profound punning disability, the thrill of the chase was to die for.  As long as the thrill was mine and someone or something else did the dying.

Now I was about to find out what little doppelgangers were made of and if I survived I’d wear its skin next to mine.

Until the next hunt that is.

Midnight Falls Part 2

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I drove carefully down into the village.  To my right, half way up what looked like an outcrop of volcanic rock sat a church with lights blazing like a beacon from every window.  I wondered just how the faithful managed the treacherous climb because I couldn’t see any obvious road or path.  To my left was a harbour filled with a motley collection of boats that sat still on the greasily smooth water.  Here and there people had put on lights in their houses, because even this early you needed a warm orange glow to ward off the smother of perpetual night in the freezing dark heart of winter.

My directions were thankfully excellent and for a change I hadn’t gotten lost as I drove along what passed for the main street: a huddle of shuttered shops and bedraggled collection of houses.  The place seemed deserted without so much as a stray car to pollute the silence.  I pulled over into a parking space just to read the directions over one more time and stuck the interior light on noticing it was snowing heavily.  I was supposed to carry straight on and out of the village, up a ubiquitously steep incline and the Harper-Hodges’ house was the first on the left.  I caught a movement at the edge of my vision and got an impression of a pale blur being pressed up at the window.  I whipped around but only saw a shadowy figure backing away from the car at speed.  I peered down the length of the street, but whoever, or whatever it was had disappeared into the snow storm.  The street was as before, completely empty, with the only sign of life being the lights from the houses.

It was probably just one of the crazy Deliverance style banjo playing locals, I reassured myself.  It never fails to amaze me how being in an unknown place, far from city life, can bring out the terrified bigot in you.  I decided I should get to the house pronto and dig in for the long night ahead.

I indicated, although there was no need with no one around, and set off for the house.  Where the village ended, the road was again thickly lined with massive trees, so enormous it was hard to see through them even in winter.  The thought came unbidden that it was as though they were trying to hide something from prying eyes.  Sure enough, the first left was the winding driveway to a Victorian monstrosity set in formal gardens that had been allowed to run wild.  No doubt the occupants had better things to do with their time.  Reproduction old-fashioned lamps lined the drive and more lights were set on the house itself drawing attention to the sheer scale of the house’s awesome ugliness.  There also seemed to be a small wood to one side of the grounds.  I’d explore them tomorrow when the weather was better and have a good old poke around.

I was starving and desperate for a drink, so I quickly parked and started to unload the car at the entrance to the monstrosity as I already thought of it.  Close up I could see that gargoyle’s had been dotted around the building which looked as though it had been carved from a dark red sandstone and glowed in the winter light like phosphorescent blood.

The snow had stopped and an intense cold had set in.  Frost had slimed a possessive, glittering trail over grass and statue, roof tile and path.  Wood-smoke mingled with pine and other night scents I couldn’t name.  A crow cawed hoarsely from the wood, I paused for a second, enjoying the heady sensation of being away from the enormous simmering bell jar of the city where millions of lives intersected but rarely touched.

I fumbled for the key to the Harper-Hodges’ house and, after bad temperedly dislodging most of the contents of my pocket, even managed to find it.

Lucille had thoughtfully arranged for the central heating to be left on given it was the depths of December and I was profoundly grateful.  This made me feel a little guilty about hating her house but it had to be done.

Walking down the narrow hall-way, I began to sweat slightly in my full length fake fur coat.  I headed for what I thought was the living room at the back of the house and as I did, the telephone rang, its insistent summons ringing through the empty house.  It could only be the client, so I ignored it – the arrangement had been that I’d check in the following day so that’s what I was going to do.  There had to be some perks to being a psycho, sorry psychic.

The décor of the house was clearly fighting a running battle with its obvious age, being modern and full of designer type stuff straight from those lifestyle magazines to which I could never imagine anyone seriously aspiring.  A cream deep pile carpet made the room difficult to relax in.  Why did people choose colours like that?  The doomed guest with a tragically full glass of red wine, predestined to spill it over the unspoiled expanse, would have recurring nightmares ever after.  The only thing that wouldn’t recur would be the invitation.

The furniture was chrome and white and the overall effect was of being in a dentist’s waiting room.  There was no real sense of the person or people that lived here, just a shit load of money.  The funny thing was that I couldn’t pick up anything at all about the room’s past, almost as though it had been wiped clean, like the décor.  It was such a complete void that I had no sense whatsoever of the history of the place.  Now that was a disturbing thought.  Give me a room, any room and I could usually sense at least some of the things that had happened in it over the years.  The residue of emotions, deeds and lives past was well nigh impossible to get rid of.  But not here.  I looked around and saw a few framed photos scattered around showing a smiling, bronzed, blond couple looking unnervingly like brother and sister.  Must be mine hosts.

The large French windows faced into the garden and I could see a whole battery of yet more lights.  The place must be lit up like Blackpool by night.  There were so many of them that I began to appreciate that it went beyond the cosmetic or even security.  The Harper-Hodges’ were definitely scared of something, the question was, what.  I hadn’t really been able to make head or tale of the story of the malign presence.  The storm outside had intensified, so it didn’t look like I was going anywhere anytime soon.  I spied a fine malt whiskey being held prisoner by a gaggle of crystal tumblers and made straight for it, pouring a hefty belt.  No sense in using up my emergency stash when there was no emergency.

Sitting on the uncomfortable white leather sofa, drink teetering precariously on the arm, I waited for whatever the house had to show me.  The whiskey was going down well, so much so I’d have to replace it before I left this featureless hell-hole.  And that was when it struck me.  Every city, town, street, tenement, flat had its own history which left imprints, traces of those who had lived and died there.  Mostly those traces were like video re-runs, stories on a loop which only the sensitive could watch.  Occasionally however, it was more sinister: genuine hauntings by the vengeful dead, those who by sheer willpower had resisted the natural progression of things because of some wrong, real or imagined.  But not in this house.

But there was no commotion in this house.  Just a vacuum – and it wasn’t just the natural world that abhorred it.  The supernatural wasn’t keen either.  You never could tell what might be attracted by such a space.  I shivered despite the heat and leaned back, closing my eyes.   The ‘phone, which was right beside me on a fussy looking glass table, began to ring.  Stretching a languid hand over, I picked up the receiver:

“Hello?”

“Rosie” a familiar voice rasped.

“Who’s this?”

“It’s the flamin’ Archbishop of Canterbury, who do you think?”

I couldn’t believe this.

“Who gave you this number Stella?” I said, voice tight with dislike.

“Listen shit-for-brains,” she coughed and there was a hawking and spitting sound, “You know I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire, so I’m only going to say this once”

I was intrigued and disgusted and didn’t know which way I wanted to fall.  Stella was a powerful witch, and also one of the most degenerate characters I’d ever had the misfortune to rub shoulders with. She was of indeterminate age, small, blond and looked like a misanthropic pig.  Which was just about the size of it really.  If there was something unsavoury, foul or downright wicked going on, Stella had a trotter in it.  She was also obsessed with what she thought were the finer things in life, and would sacrifice anyone or anything to get her hands on them.  We had had innumerable run ins over the years and sad to say we probably knew each other better than a lot of friends.  Although come to think of it, she didn’t have any.  Ahhh, maybe she was missing me.

“Get on with it, for Christ’s sake” I muttered.

“You’re all heart.  And you’re going to love this,” she dragged the moment out to its kicking, screaming limit, and I could just see her in my mind’s eye, lush, blond hair framing a podgy face lascivious with malice.

“Ruby told me you’re in Midnight Falls, but if you don’t get the hell out of Dodge tonight, you’re going to die there.”  The words came out in a rush like a bob sleigh whizzing down the north face of K2.  She waited, no doubt relishing the prospect of my horror at the thought of an untimely demise. I didn’t give her the benefit of a reaction, thinking she might give me more detail that way and I could find out what the hell she was on about.  The lady was nothing if not perverse.  But then, why tell me at all?

“Straight up,” she continued chattily, “I’ve been casting the runes for months now and the message is always the same.  Although…” she paused clearly thinking about something she didn’t like as much as my long overdue shuffling off of the old mortal coil.  That was interesting because Stella didn’t really do thoughtful.

“Midnight Falls has always been a favourite spot for me, there’s lots of juice up there ‘cos the village is cursed.  But you knew that, right?”  She seemed to be having difficulty containing herself, as though she were about to impart a wonderful surprise.

“I can’t believe you buy into all that cursed crap.  Listen to yourself, you sound about three years old.”

She didn’t miss a beat, clearly a woman with a mission, “I’ve heard reports of four different sightings of Black Dogs around that area within the last month.”

That brought me up short because I knew this was bad, the worst.  Black Dogs were associated with black magic, sacrifice and portents of death.  Genuine sightings were very rare and the unfortunates who’d done the seeing generally didn’t get the chance to see much of anything else.

“But that’s not all,” Get on with it, I thought, refusing to play her stupid game.  Just when I was about to put the receiver down, she cracked, caught up in the orgasmic rush of being the bearer of bad news.

“Given the fact that you’ve got all the psychic ability of a teaspoon, you probably haven’t noticed that there’s a spell of forgetting hovering over Midnight Falls.  I saw it right away when I consulted the runes.  Something big is about to happen there.  No idea what it is,” here a raucous gurgle of laughter worthy of the witches in MacBeth,

“But Black Dog sightings mean that there’s heavy duty black magic being performed.  And the fact that this just happens to be in and around the place where you’ve decided to do your Mystic Meg routine, ain’t exactly what I’d call good.  Actually on second thoughts, I’m being a wee bit previous, it could be very good.  Stay where you are my darling and worst of luck to you.”

I laughed along with her, genuinely amused, “And you just thought you’d call me to make sure I knew about my impending doom did you?  I didn’t know you cared Stell.”

“I don’t – and don’t call me Stell you little shit, or you’ll be in an even sorrier state than you are now.  You’re a pathetic loser Rose.  I can’t believe that Ruby rates you, because no one else does.  You’re, well know one actually knows what the hell you are.  One thing I do know is that you’ll drag Ruby down with you and anyone else stupid enough to get involved with you.  But a deal’s a deal and I made Ruby a promise.  And I always keep my promises – you know that Rosie.”

That was a thinly veiled threat and I knew how good the vindictive old harridan was at fulfilling them.  Some said she was into every kind of dark magic there was, including a few that no one except her knew about.  She was quite capable of sending me one of her deadly little surprises one of these long winter nights, just for the hell of it.

But I had to hand it to Ruby.  My soft hearted, irresistible friend, to whom even malevolent old monsters held themselves in debt.  I wondered though what Ruby could possibly have done to have achieved this sort of honour.  I’d better have a firm word with her: she was far too trusting for her own good and Stella was, well, Stella.  The thing was though, Stella was right.  I wasn’t popular with a lot of the, shall we say, psychic community in Edinburgh.  I was seen at best as a loose cannon and at worst as spawn of the devil.  That didn’t make the Satanists or black magic brethren take me to their collective bosoms.  No, they hated me the most seeing in me a threat to their carefully constructed bullshit beliefs.  The fact was, no one knew what I was because no one had had the sort of powers I had.  And when people can’t make sense of something, well, you know the script.

Confused and not a little pissed, I hung up on the evil old cow who was still in mid-curse and promptly fell asleep on the infernal sofa.  I woke up in the afternoon with a crick in my neck, drink all over the carpet, and the sound of birds intoning  a funereal dirge in the uncanny, blue twilight that passed for dusk.

At least the carpet had lost its cherry.