Tag Archives: urban horror

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.

Staying Alive

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It had begun in a vast, flat landscape, a monochrome of dark and light under a leaden sky.  This is where it was made: where the hunger had sparked into life by a beaten track because someone had bled and died.   The next life was taken by force, and then the next and then the next until the entity began to have shape and form, like a pearl formed from grit.

Locals, human and animal alike, began to avoid the spot and so it languished for a time; the life it had stolen beginning to leach back from whence it came.  But the entity was not beaten so easily.  If the prey would not  come to it, it would go to the prey.

And so the hunt began.

In time it reached the city and stalked the streets taking the old, the sick, the unwary.  But even this was not enough and its wants became more capricious and cruel.  It failed to notice the spirits that followed it: a silent army of sad revenants that grew with each passing day.

This was a night much like any other and it cruised the High Street for a likely victim.  A young man with wild, curly hair wearing only a long leather coat with no top underneath emerged from Mary King’s Close.  He looked furtively about him a couple of times and then stared directly at the entity.  Most people did not have the eyes to see, not until it was too late.

The young man smiled and beckoned, pointing behind him into the murk of Mary King’s Close.  Emboldened by the rush of the hunt, it did as it was bid.   A door slammed shut and someone laughed, a thin, gurgling sound.

Still unconcerned the entity sought out the life force of the young man finding nothing but the taste of grave, a faint odour of corruption.  There was nothing of life here.

“We’ve come for you,” said a watery voice as though talking through only partially formed vocal chords.  “We’ve come for the lives you stole.”

“Yes,” another voice wheezed and the entity recognised the owner was trying to laugh,

“You could say we want our lives back.”

Dead Head

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The thing in the hall slithered closer to the living room door and I pulled the covers over my head trying to blot out the noise and pretend everything was all right.

Muffled noise insinuated itself into my cloth sanctuary; a voice perhaps, or maybe the scrape of claws on the floorboards. I listened intently: nothing that I could make sense of. Maybe it had gone away. Something hit my shoulder with a painful thud and I ignored that too, burrowing deeper into the nest I’d made on the couch. The room was freezing, despite the fact that my central heating had been cranked up to tropical.

A child’s giggle next to my ear almost cracked my resolve, but good things never came of that, so I huddled harder, willing whatever it was to go away. I should never have done that ouja session when I was pissed last night. I had done some stupid things in my life but this, this made moronic a state I could only aspire to with no hope of actually achieving. I risked peeking out and saw it was snowing outside, lending the darkened room a faint luminescence. A concentrated yet flickering spot of darkness appeared in the middle of the room and the hackles went up on the back of my neck. Another giggle devoid of humour hung in the arctic air and I could see my breath streaming from me in plumes as though trying to escape.

“Rose,” it whispered, echoes reverberating round the room as though we were in a vast cave rather than a small tenement flat in Edinburgh. How it knew my name, I’d no idea. The sound of someone walking through the room, feet striking the floor boards hard assaulted my ears, but there was no one there. No one apart from me and the spirit and whatever it had brought with it. I could make out the faint gleam of my mobile in the gloom and if I’d had someone to call, I would’ve.

“Rosieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,” a child’s voice sing-songed. The duvet was pulled off me with sharp tug and I shivered in the pre-doom gloom from nerves or hangover, I didn’t know any more.

Coffee Break

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Despite the terrorist toxic gas story, not everyone had left Dodge, as I discovered walking down Lothian Road under a steely sky, head bent against the rain squall and vindictive, nipping wind freshly blown in from whipping up the icy, grey waters of the North Sea.  I needed to clear my head and now my sanctuary had been invaded, the best place to do that was just to walk and see where it took me.  I turned left at Shandwick into the city’s West End, normally a thrumming hub, but now a water sodden, wind-blown waste-land.  The darkened windows of the Art Deco building that housed Fraser’s Department Store stared onto the street like the empty eye sockets of a long dead giant.  A particularly vicious tug of the wind almost cost me my hat and by the time I had things under control the welcome orange glow of lights bursting out of the crepuscular gloom from a Starbucks at the corner of Palmerston Place caught my attention.  I hurried towards it and to my utter amazement, found it was open for business.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, maybe no matter what happens, nuclear war, bubonic plague, return of the living dead, there will always be a Starbucks, staffed and ready to serve.  It was housed in an imposing building, a bank in a former life with high vaulted ceilings and now was reduced to eking a living trying to pretend it was someone’s living room complete with comfy chairs where strangers came to drink coffee.  There were two rooms connected by stairs and a long counter near the door, behind which a skinny young man with lank blond hair did the necessary.  I sat in the furthest away room and sipped my drink, glaring unseeingly at the chocolate cake I’d also bought.  There was around fifteen to twenty people in the place and they were all relatively young, bright eyed and feverish, the kind of vibe that I had always imagined would have been around during the war: trying to carry on as though the day was like any other, but knowing it might be your last.

If only I had looked for that damned voodoo doll of Lucille’s.  It was too risky to have sent Keira to collect because I didn’t know where the damned thing was or what Viridian had done with it.  Clearly he hadn’t done very much with it if it was Lucille who’d sent the Hand.  But what death did it’s owner have planned for me?  Well, not doubt I’d be finding that one out and soon, if memory served about these kinds of curses.  I decided to call my old pal Stella.  If she was in on it, it didn’t really make any difference, I wouldn’t be giving away any state secrets: someone had sent me a death curse and I was going to die.  Simple.  But her type were always grandiose, contemptuous of others and it was often their undoing.  She might let something slip.  If she wasn’t in on it, or didn’t at least know about it, she might be persuaded to give a handy hint about what on earth I was going to do to stay alive.  I had done 1471 when she had called me at Lucille’s house and taken a note of the number.  Very organised for me I thought.

I took the creased paper out of my wallet, my mobile from my pocket and dialled.  No answer and there was no way in hell I was leaving a message, because the only thing I could think of was a long, profane and detailed list of what she could do to herself and with what.

I wondered how many people had stayed behind.  The only other customers apart from me in the room I was in, was a huddle of young women at the table next to mine and they appeared to be pouring what looked suspiciously like whisky into their coffee cups and giggling with the manic intensity of people who clearly believe, like REM, that it’s the end of the world as we know it.  Except feeling fine wasn’t even on the menu.  Sad, fucked up, crazy, maybe, but fine was for lunatics and suicides.

Rain pelted down outside and a dark shape slid by the window blotting out what meagre light the day was willing to give up.  Although I hadn’t seen anything much on the way down, the dead were becoming more substantial by the day it seemed.  There was still that sense of waiting for something, an expectation hanging in the air that the world was going to come down upon your defenceless head.  This was a pack of them hunting and I felt the heft of their attention, no, hunger was more precise.  The weight of their desire was a leaden chain around my neck and I felt trapped and panicky.  The barbed hooks of their wants trailed gently over my thoughts searching for a hold, something to anchor on to.  I kept my mind a careful blank, something I had had a lot of practice doing.

The darkness slid by a second time like a crocodile circling an injured baby antelope that had fallen into the river.  The girls fell silent, whisky consumption halted as they scented danger.  What had they seen in last few days?  I was about to find out what the lives of ordinary folk had come down to on Boxing Day in Auld Reekie.

I got up and stood by the connecting archway between the two rooms and wandered down the stairs, just to make sure.  The Starbuck’s employee had obviously gotten the vibe too because he hurried to the door and quickly shut the outside one that led to the street, reassuringly huge and wooden, like it was guarding a fortress.  He clanked the bolts shut and was just returning to the counter when the window imploded inward and a dark, sucking, jabbering whirlwind flew in uprooting chairs and tables and smashing the glass counter in a hail of glass, cakes, pastries and the blood and brains of the young man.  Part of his head, mercifully minus the face rolled awkwardly into the corner of the room where it came to its final resting place.

One of the customers, a red head wearing a purple fleece that clashed with her hair, began screaming in a high pitched whine that sliced into the brain like a red hot knife through butter.  I’d never not drink again if I got the chance.  The older man sitting beside her tried to calm her down and move to the farthest away corner of the room without much success.  One young guy trapped between the darkness and the window managed to get himself impaled an a huge shard of glass as he tried to force his way out the window and his blood ran like black rain and pooled, oily and viscous on the floor and down the remnants of the glass.

It was an enormous mass, a density of darkness that whirled and turned in on itself in a complex fascinating series of motions that held me transfixed.  I was still spellbound when the entire building began to shake and the detritus from what had already been smashed was borne upwards, and then rained down on the terrified little crowd who all had the same thought: escape.  But it seemed we had a sentient being on our hands because it snatched up the chairs and what remained of the tables within its reach and threw them at the door blocking the only escape route bar the hole in the window, but it was in front of that and the moaning man impaled on the glass shard illustrated the dangers of that particular plan with exquisite clarity.

The darkness boiled in on itself in an endless, sickening churn of billowing black.  And then saw them.  A multitude of faces formed and reformed, teeth bared, eyes wild, black on black and yet every snarl, every ferocious grimace appeared etched indelibly into the formless mass before it disappeared again.  But then I noticed that it wasn’t just made out of darkness; this fusion of partial souls, ghosts and revenants had begun to grow flesh.  I could see an oiled skin under the darkness as it moved in constant motion, another stage perhaps in its evolution.  Was this the change that the thinning of the membrane between worlds was bringing about?

Two of the girls at the table next to mine for some incomprehensible reason had run past me into the room and had tried to jam themselves under a nearby table.  The other three were rooted to the spot on the steps just behind me, crying and screaming for mercy and I didn’t blame them.  A stinking, sulphurous smell radiated out from the heads and one of the girls was copiously sick from her perch under the table.

A high shrieking sound like a freight train being derailed rent the air and the darkness expanded becoming a vast ten foot pillar in the middle of the room, whirling like a dervish making the detritus dance with the power of it and radiating a fevered, humid heat.  But the sound began to take on a rhythm almost as though…yes, it was talking, shaping words with whatever foul collective consciousness it possessed.  I couldn’t make it out at first and then:

“Hungggggggggggggggggggggggggggggrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy”.

A long, snaking limb broke from the pillar and wrapped itself around one of girls behind me, a statuesque blond with dread-locked hair.  Her screams had gone from terrified to ear splittingly hysterical within seconds and the smoke continued to coil around her until only her face was visible.  It was almost a sensual motion, like a lover’s embrace.  She stopped screaming and began to pray, snapping me out of my trance and reminding me forcibly of that little thing called priorities.

“Get to the next room, all of you.  I’ll take care of your friend.” I shouted above the cacophony.  “There’s a window there, break it and get the fuck out of here.”

None of them answered me, shock probably, but that wasn’t going to save their lives.

“Listen to me,” I shouted, “This thing will kill you.  Go.  Now.”  A piece of glass struck one of the girls a glancing blow on her temple and that seemed to galvanise them.  Without a backward glance at their trapped friend they fled screaming up the stairs into the other room and I heard the sound of breaking glass and wondered if Nick Lowe had really known what he was talking about.

“Go now, I’ll take care of it,” I screamed in what I hoped was a reassuring manner, but then another column of darkness went after the girls and I knew I had to do something and do it fast.

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.

A Portrait Of The Spirit As A Young Girl

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Although the place had been wiped clean of ghosts, there was one that had not been persuaded to go. One that was so much a part of the fabric of the house and the people who lived here, that it had refused to make that final journey along the Highway of the Dead.

The question was why.

Looking at me warily from the corner of the room, the ghost fiddled with its over-sized granny glasses, the pattern of the wall paper behind it showing clearly through the insubstantial body. The forehead just above the left eye had been stoved in and something fluid glistened inside. This was how it remembered the injury it had received, a vague recollection of an outrage perpetrated on a body it no longer possessed.

I held out my hand and it came.

A wave of loneliness crashed over me casting me adrift on a vast featureless sea under a sullen sky, moorings cut, compass broken. But there was a lifeline because now we had a connection, a conduit through which, with a little luck, the spirit would yield its secrets.

Grudging details came at first, like reluctant suitors on a first date. In life it had been called Anne, but what had rooted it here in death was still buried deep down under the surface like a sleeping leviathan. My death sense began to whisper to it, threats and enticements in equal measure, prodding the monster to wake. The two shape-shifters in the room with me whined, afraid of something that could never be the quarry of mere tooth and claw. Creatures of rage and appetite, death held no such hot-blooded seductions.

Capitulation when it came was as sudden as it was complete. My death sense swarmed eagerly over and around the spirit in filaments of spun blue and silver lights. The ghost gained more solidity and in the process the extent of the head-injury was more clearly revealed. Previous reluctance forgotten, it, she, now wanted desperately to tell me everything and the trickle of information became a flood.

At last the frenetic jumble of images slowed into a sequence: two boys one of whom had short fair hair and looked around ten, the other a teenager. There was now a third child, a girl, all of them playing in a fast flowing stream swollen with recent rain. The rich scent of damp earth carried with it the tease of summer and the children’s laughter hung lightly on the warmed air. A brief moment of suspension and then I was inside the girl, Anne, and into a running commentary: a loop run by this forlorn piece of consciousness for more years now than it had been alive.

Adam starts saying that Phineas fancied Jenny so we laugh and Phineas tells us we’re being stupid. That just makes it funnier though. Stupid is as stupid does, mum always says. It’s kind of cold in the shallows of the stream and maybe that’s why mum has told us not to play here. I get a picture of her with her angry face on, but she always worries too much. My big brothers are here so it’ll be okay.

Phin lifts a big rock and shouts to us to come over and see what he’s found underneath it. I think he’s playing a joke on Adam and I for laughing at him. He can be mean like that sometimes. But then Adam shouts to me to come see. I turn too quick and put my foot down hard on a stone that moves when I stand on it. I lose my balance and fall face down into the river bed and smack my head hard and everything goes all black. Then it’s all weird because I’m above my body, looking at it face down in the water. It’s all red round my head and I think it must be blood, but then I think no, silly, how could it be? I watch the red bits spread in the water and shout to my brothers as they pull me onto the bank. They look so funny with their mouths flapping trying to pick me up and Phineas even blows air from his mouth into mine when they get me onto the bank. Yuck, why are boys so gross! I really hope Amanda Strathmartin didn’t see that because she’d blab to the whole school about how I was snogging my brother and then I’d have to go to a new school and and it would all just be stupid and I don’t think there are any others, not near ones anyway.

But then some men with stretchers come and take my body away, but that’s daft, ‘cos it can’t really be me can it? I’m here, amn’t I? Anyway, I’d better stay by the river and wait for mum to come get me because I don’t know if I can move. It’s so cold out here and now I don’t know how long I’ve been waiting. But it’s gone all dark and I start to cry ‘cos mum’s not come for me. She must be really angry with me this time, because she’s never not come before. After a while though I get the hang of things and find that if I really try, I can move. It takes ages though and it’s quite hard to do, so as I head off in the direction of our house I have plenty time to grump about why they’ve just left me behind.

I finally make it back to the house in a total strop and all I want to do is find mum. But the door is hanging open and the house is empty and that’s never happened before – not that I remember anyway. Where have they all gone?

Now it’s all changed and somehow I’m floating above my own body. I must be in hospital ‘cos people in white coats are shouting and putting metal things on my bare, naked chest with electricity coming out. Either that or I’m in the loony bin. Amanda Strathmartin would really love this. I think about this for so long I start to feel funny. I can see mum and dad just outside, dad being held back by more people in white coats. What does he think he’s doing? Maybe I’m dreaming or something, maybe that’s it and it’s all okay. I try to call out mum and dad, but either they can’t hear or my voice has packed up. Dad’s face is all red and mum looks like she’s been crying. I float near the ceiling and next thing hear this man with a stupid pointy beard say: “She was dead on arrival, it’s no use. Simon, better get someone to tell the parents.”

They can’t mean me can they? What is dead anyway? How can I be dead if I can still think things and see and hear stuff? But everything changes again and now I’m back at the house and it really does look as though someone has died because dad has his black suit on and the boys have their hair brushed in daft side partings which makes me laugh because I know how much they hate that! Dad’s face is all screwed up and he smells of that stuff adults drink that makes them act all silly and embarrassing.

“What is it dad?” I say and touch him on the arm but he doesn’t seem to hear me. I find mum in the kitchen crying and she won’t pay attention to me either. What’s wrong with everyone? Are they playing a joke to teach me a lesson about playing in the stream? But the boys were doing it too, so how is that fair?

But then I have a thought which makes me think that maybe I have gone loop the loop and am in the loony bin: they’re not ignoring me on purpose, this is my funeral. It must be because I don’t have a body and now I don’t have a mum and dad and two stinky brothers anymore. Did I do something wrong? I shouldn’t have played where mum told me not to, but I wasn’t bad enough for this, was I? Maybe if I say I’m sorry, it’ll come all right again. I’m a bit worried about mum and dad to be honest, hope they’re going to be okay because they look awful upset…

Midnight Falls

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 The client hadn’t told me much, except that something inhuman had taken up residence in the attic of her holiday home and was scaring the straights. I was only to happy to take the job, swapping the horror of the festive season in Edinburgh, for horror of a different kind in the freezing solitude of the country.

The car had been loaded with needful things: clothes, Scooby snacks, a crate of Laphroaig and, last and least, the tools of my trade – two of the best of my remaining obsidian scrying glasses and a ouija board – just in case I really wanted to get down and dirty among the dead men.

If things did go tits up, I had a small handgun with a mix of silver and iron bullets. I’d rarely had to use it though, because although it might slow the supernatural critters down, it hardly ever killed them. The old wives’ tales, like silver killing werewolves or stakes for vampires, were just that.  True, a silver bullet had more effect than the ordinary kind, but you could also be assured that if the beastie hadn’t wanted to kill you before you drilled a hole in it, you would definitely be number one on its bloody, drag-you-to-hell screaming hit-list after.

All of which meant you only really had your wits to rely on and mine didn’t stretch as far as they used to.

As I drove, the sun finally managed to prise itself clear of the horizon, revealing a clear, crisp winter’s day. A vicious frost last night had tarted up the landscape with glimmering silver and the stubborn remnants of a creeping mist softened the stark lines of skeletal trees .  As I drove north over the Forth Road Bridge and into Fife, I switched on the radio, catching some horrendous boy band demolishing an old song, aided and abetted by its elderly creator who had previous for violating his own work.  Feeling a rant coming on,  I turned the hellish cacophony off and stuck on a compilation.  Placebo kicked off my one woman party with Every Me and Every You and by the time I got to Snapper’s Dumping You, I was singing along like a loon at the top of my voice, drumming my hands on the wheel.

A couple of hours later, hoarse and famished, I stopped off in Inverurie at the Manky Minx pub, devouring a massive lard-ridden fry up washed down with gallons of stewed tea. In the dim, dingy interior, a small collection of punters went about the serious, mostly silent, business of getting as pissed as possible before having to go back to whatever waited at home.

I resumed the journey on a seemingly endless, winding road that was supposed to take me to Midnight Falls.  It coiled, like a serpent around the banks of a Loch with a surface as smooth and dark as one of my scrying glasses. There were always local stories about such bodies of water, like drowned villages where church bells could be heard tolling on quiet nights when the moon was full. Or others about luckless victims, killed by the untender mercies of loved ones and laid to restless sleep within the glacial depths, only to return for a satisfyingly hideous and brutal showdown.

Jagged, snow covered peaks closed in as my car laboured through the narrow, tricksy mountain passes.  The sky darkened and a driving sleet came out of nowhere, obscuring the windscreen in seconds. The wild beauty of these lonely places always appealed, but  living here permanently had its own challenges. During the few wan, stillborn months called summer, this part of the country bowed before its insect conquerors and became a biting, buzzing, stinging hell – only alleviated by the deep freeze of winter when you got snowed in and had to eat your own kin to stay alive. If I’d had a family, I’d have given it a go.

Heavy clouds besieged the sky and I was still in the middle of a vast nowhere.  Sleet turned to heavy rain and my flat out  wipers only made things worse, the world beyond now a blur of dark grey and sepia.  The grunt and thrust of Snapper’s I’ll Stand By Your Man started up from my mobile on the passenger seat – probably the ball-breaking client, Lucille Harper-Hodge, checking where I was.

The road was now a one track affair, thankfully deserted.  Keeping the headlights on full beam I spotted a tiny, partially obscured sign pointing to the right. On impulse, I stopped the car, got out into the howling storm and brushed the snow off the sign, finally making out the words, Midnight Falls. You’d think the inhabitants of the village didn’t want to be found – maybe this was going to turn out to be my kind of town after all. I swung the car to the right and travelled down what was little more than a dirt track overhung with a tunnel of  huge trees, spectral in a perpetual dusk of their own creation which leeched most of the remaining light from  the day although it wasn’t even lunchtime.

Once free of the trees it brightened slightly as I drove up a steep hill, the gradient so extreme, the car was struggling even in seond gear.  When I eventually reached the top, I discovered Midnight Falls laid out beneath me, like a dark canker on the coast, caught between the turbulent Irish Sea on one side and impenetrable mountains on the other.  What manner of man or beast made their home in such an isolated, Godforsaken spot?

I was about to find out.

The doppelganger

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She’s walking along the Bridges, hair glinting like copper wire in the December sun, unaware that by the time she reaches the High Street she is as good as dead.  Although dead would be better than what’s waiting for her, literally just around the corner.  The fact that she’s got no choice in the matter is an irony sweet enough to suck on, because she has herself been Chosen.  Through every fault of her own, she’s come top of the stupid-cow-born-to-be-a-victim Hit Parade and she’ll get hers, make no mistake.

Heading down the High Street now the bitch actually has a jaunty spring in her step so it is definitely time to decide which part of her to latch onto.  It’s a big decision and well worth taking time over. She’s pretty well rugged up but the face is naked (flesh is best), and what a young, open face it is, all freckles and big brown eyes, now squinting against the low slung sun, oblivious to everything but the rut of her small, nothing life.  She’s so thick that she has no idea what’s about to hit her.  The fact is she’s being given an honour she doesn’t deserve by becoming a member of a very select and exclusive club.  She is after all only human.  But looking on the bright side, all of that humanity can be rinsed away like blood and matter down the plug hole: the hideous boyfriend; the dreary friends she never really liked; and that appalling record collection mostly consisting of some little dwarf called Prince.  Well the victim formerly known as Jane was herself going to be renamed if she played her cards wrong.

The steady pulse of her life force ebbs and flows and the intimacy of this moment is so profound it feels raw, exposed, like being flayed alive by a true connoisseur of the craft.  It will take time to replicate this girl down to the last eyelash but when it’s finally done, the simulacrum will stalk the world; spirit made flesh while the so-called ‘real’ Jane lies rotting somewhere, anywhere.  This dance has been done so many times, the names, faces, identities of the Chosen have blurred, become a composite making up a greater whole, superior in every way that counts.  Oh, some of her so-called friends might notice some improvements to the original model, true, but that is a risk worth taking.  Most of them would assume she’d just changed, maybe even coming up with entertaining hypotheses on those dismal nights out down the pub about why that would be.  But whatever they decided, it wouldn’t change the script and they’d do what humans always did with anything they couldn’t quite grasp: pretend they did.

But at some point the new body always destroyed itself, as though responding to an alarm call that could not be bargained with or shut down.  And so it would begin again in a never-ending cycle and yes, the club became a little less exclusive with the passage of time as more and more members swelled its ranks.  For now though, the girl’s essence is like fine wine coursing through veins soon-to-be-made flesh and her blind instinct to survive makes her malleable.

What was the legend humans told about this?  Ah yes: if you met your doppelganger, or double, you would surely die.  True in a way, but not the whole truth.  But what could you expect from creatures who were only fit to be food.  Doppelgangers were as far above humans in the evolutionary chain as humans were to amoebas.  Like a pupa emerging from its chrysalis, I begin to remember myself and the rebirth begins.  And in the act of naming, the ‘I’ becomes separate from yet connected to her.  At least for now.

Like a drunk on the stroke of New Year poised for an unsought kiss, my mouth extends wider, wider, until her face is covered by it and the hooks slide into the tender meat in a movement that is almost sexual, although I cannot feel such a thing, not yet anyway.  In the time spent between the Chosen after the last body has worn out, most of the vices of the living are quickly forgotten, until the next one of course.  She continues walking, although she stumbles slightly and I feel her brief moment of nausea.

I delve deeper, deeper into the bare essentials of her, until I am she and she is me and we are Jane.

She is shopping for ingredients for a meal she’s going to make for her boyfriend Tom.  It’s a complicated vegetarian curry, because Tom’s a veggie and she wants to surprise him with what she can do if she really tries.  She’s been thinking about going veggie herself because he’s always going on and on about how her eating habits are ‘an affront to any right-minded person’.  He’s probably right and anyway if they’re going to spend the rest of their lives together, a little compromise goes a long way.  Besides, tonight’s the night and she’s going to ask him to move in so they can be a proper couple.  He’s been a bit distant recently and she did wonder for a bit if he was having an affair, but he’d never do that to her.  Not her Tom.  They just need to spend more time together that’s all.

I absorb her thoughts about tonight although her mind barely registers the violation, like a stone skiffing the smooth surface of a pond.  She feels a surge of brief but intense panic as though something terrible has happened, but she can’t think what it is.  Shush my pet, my darling, everything’s fine, no need to worry about a thing.  And after I refine her thoughts a little, divert them into more exciting channels, she does shush, starting to feel a little better.  Pretty soon she’s verging on perky, giggling even, as a thought comes out of nowhere accompanied by an sense of ineffable rightness with the world.

She can’t believe she didn’t see it before, but, she could really turn this Tom situation around and have some fun for a change.  Why not give the fat tosser a gourmet meal of iron filings; a playful reminder that he really shouldn’t be two-timing her with that raddled old tart from down the road?  A wavering smile, not entirely her own, lifts the corners of her mouth causing an old woman passing by to smile in return.  If only she knew.

Yes, iron filings, that should do the job nicely.  Compared to the revolting swill he usually ate, she wouldn’t be surprised if he begged for seconds.  And let’s not forget, the cheap, meat-dodging bastard was always looking for new ways to supplement the iron in his diet.

And that was where I stepped out of the doppelganger’s thoughts and back into my own.  Momentarily disorientated, I watched Jane saunter ahead down the Royal Mile with the doppelganger swinging gently from her face.

Who am I?  Well, that’s a good question and most days I’m not sure I know the answer.  My name though is Rose Garnett and I’m a stealer of souls.  By the time I’m finished with the doppelganger, it won’t be doubling up on anyone anytime soon.