Tag Archives: urban horror

Thrice Bitten

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

He decided on another pint and whisky chaser and lumbered unsteadily to the bar to get them in. The Bingo Wings was a run-down 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. So the hot glances thrown his way from the blond bints, weren’t really what he’d come to expect from his inner sanctum, least of all on a blustery Tuesday afternoon. No, talent-spotting wasn’t the usual pastime in the Bingo Wings and there were other more likely venues for that sort of nonsense. 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 serpentine motion and three pairs of black eyes fixed on his face as though he was the most fascinating creature in the world. Probably couldn’t believe their luck. They must have been sisters because their features were almost identical. There was also 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.

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 asked.

“Eh, Colin. Colin McQuarrie. 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 a 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 ladies. 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 brought with it the green promise of spring woods. He was just about to press his mouth to hers and maybe even give her a bit of tongue, when she ruined the moment 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-”

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

“And bigger and-”

“Yours is the size of a tenement. And it’s still growing. You must have been a very naughty boy Colin.”

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 off 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 swallow your soul. While you’re still alive I mean. You’ll be little more than a walking, talking corpse. Isn’t that something?” Margo smiled. Was it just his imagination, or were her teeth more prominent than they had been a moment ago?

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 first there’s something you need to do for us.”

Sometimes It’s Hard To Be A Psycho

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I hauled the body over my shoulder in a fireman’s lift, hindered by the fact that it was encased in slippery plastic. It was just shy of ten and I was confident I wouldn’t bump into any lurking neighbours.

That confidence burst like a balloon as I opened my front door and a young man with golden dreads and a nose ring strode onto the landing.

“Well hi there gorgeous,” he said, with an Aussie accent you could cut with a knife and still have enough to balance the drinks on.

“Let me help you with that,” the fool continued, yanking the body from me. He was tall and fit but even so it cost him no little effort. Just for a second the Cheshire cat smile faltered until machismo reasserted itself and he began to make his way stiffly down the stairs.

“What have you got in here?” he gasped, reaching the second floor. “A body, by any chance? Maybe an old boyfriend refusing to take the hint?” He winked and laughed at his own joke.

“It’s actually a nosy neighbour incapable of minding his own business. I keep my exes in jars in the living room like normal people. Together forever as Rick Astley used to sing.”

He stopped short just as the gaffer tape came loose and a shrivelled finger poked out like a mummified worm. A dark liquid dribbled down his chunky knit pullover and he began to vomit, dropping the body into the stairwell with a sickening crunch. I knew the song was bad, but this was throwing the body out with the bathwater….

Beauty And The Beast

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All I could see of the beast at the bottom of the garden was a pair of red eyes shining out from the thicket of brambles where it was holed up. A trail of blood on the grass told me it was wounded and all the more dangerous for it.

The question was: what flavour of beastie was I entertaining in my own backyard? From the neon eyes clearly not one of the usual suspects. Or at least none of the things that usually roamed the mean streets of Bruntsfield. You’d be surprised what you can find lurking just over your threshold, waiting for a gold embossed invite RSVP.

A low, trickling growl grew into a full throated roar. I flinched despite myself and wondered what the hell I was going to do now. It wasn’t exactly a SSPCA or council call-out because if it was what I suspected, everyone would die. And die hard as Bruce Willis would no doubt have said if he’d known.

I remembered I had a steak in the fridge. It was to have been my Friday night treat: burned to a crisp and washed down with a bottle of Talisker. Now it was destined for the gullet of whatever skulked in the bushes. A beast whose tastes, I was willing to bet, were rather more rarefied than my own.

An icy north wind nipped the back of my neck and I noticed for the first time that no birds sang. It would be dark soon and whatever it was I was going to do, I needed to do it now. I turned to head back to the house when:

“Don’t go,” the beast rasped. “I want to kill you here, out in the open where I can see the light fade from your eyes. A last request you might say.”

And it chuckled, a gurgling, phlegmy affair that couldn’t quite disguise the rustling of old leaves as it tensed, gathering itself for that final leap.

At least it was attention for me.

The End Of The World As We Know It

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Whatever was waiting at the end of the alley, it was something long dead.
And yet, judging by the roars of rage and the maelstrom of rubbish battering the surrounding buildings, that something was not prepared to concede the fact. A little unsteadily, on account of all the whiskey I’d consumed at the World’s End pub, chosen because the name suited my mood, I made my way towards the epicentre.

The sharp crack of a window smashing, the unmistakable tinkle of glass and the thing paused for a heart-beat, as though surprised at its own strength and then the onslaught resumed with renewed frenzy. Walking through the flying shards of assorted crap, arm raised to ward off the worst of it, I was bloodied but still curious.

Which was a shame really because if ever there was a moment when a kindly fate I didn’t believe in should have intervened, turning me back to wend my weary, drunken way home instead of into the belly of the beast, it was then.

The air crackled with static as it rushed me like a rabid dog, maw vast, flayed flanks heaving. Bigger than a grizzly, it pinned me with ease to the ground with talons that sliced through the meat of my shoulders faster than a hot knife through butter.

“Roseeeee,” it growled as drool from its mis-matched jaws fell in ropes across my upturned face.

“You could always just ask for a date like normal people,” I wheezed, forcing myself to lie still in the forlorn hope of minimising further damage to my abused flesh.

The skinned features moved and shiny, black bone protruded through the small craters in its head. It was only as my consciousness began to spot and fade that I realised it was smiling.

Toilet Troubles

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The hand around my throat had been pressing down hard on my carotid and now my vision was beginning to spot, clots of darkness that threatened to join up and take me into oblivion. I forced myself to go limp as though I had fainted letting my attacker take the full force of my dead weight. He shifted his balance to accommodate the fact and loosened his grip on my throat by a fraction. A sense of calm descended on me, the harbinger of my worst berserker rages. Without conscious thought my thumbs quickly flipped the switches on my finger-knives and plunged them into the eyes behind the mask.

My would be murderer screamed, a high pitched feminine sound. He dropped his own knife and threw me bodily out of the toilet cubicle. I landed on the floor, hard, sliding along it only to bang my head on the metal bin. I lay momentarily stunned on my bed of assorted garbage until reality reasserted itself. I staggered to my feet, putting the finger-knives to bed in favour of the two curved blades that hung at my waist only to fall back down, tripping over my trousers and smashing my cheekbone for good measure. The screaming from the bathroom had descended the octaves and was now more of an agonised moaning.

Sounded good to me…

Reign of Fire

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But there was no more time because the world was fire and fire was the world. Through the flames I could make out charred bodies tied to stakes and a man sitting astride a throne of molten bone, his long hair aflame and the skin peeling from his body like an overdone roast. A huge crack appeared in the cobblestoned street and a dark tide rose, taloned beasts fought their way to the surface and flew into the air shrieking their blood lust. I just had time to haul Rufus into the circle with Ruby and I before the horde were upon us. We never stood a chance.

Stockbridge Siren

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I knew I was being followed as I walked down Lothian Road. The walk was supposed to focus my mind on strategy and absorb the energy from the presences in the November night air while I was about it. I got to the block where the old Woolworths had been and felt it again: that sense that eyes were boring into the back of my head. I looked back and got a quick flash of something small and scaled diving into a doorway.

Acting on impulse I jumped onto a number 11 bus intending to get off somewhere along Princes Street. The town was quite crowded for this time on a Wednesday night especially since it was arctic and had started to snow, little flurries soon becoming big, fat, fan dances.

The bus was packed and full of wet, steaming people, some of them in all senses of the word making me want a drink myself. Instead I contented myself with going over what I knew about the Baobhan Sith, or common or garden vampire’s that haunted Stockbridge.

They tended to live in clusters with a dominant vampire calling the shots. They were like insect colonies operating on what seemed to be a form of weird shit telepathy although no one had gotten close enough to know for sure and lived to tell the tale.

Holy water and stakes were a joke and one soul who’d tried them ended up impaled on the pointy end of his own stake driven by slow, incremental degrees through his rectum. It had taken him a long, long time to die so I’d heard. Like Luke she could withstand daylight and although she did not sleep in a coffin, she kept some for her own amusement, once memorably to bury one of her human hangers-on alive.

How she had ever managed to attract any human followers given her meat-eating proclivities was a question for the shrinks frankly.

But then fools and their lives were easily parted in my experience.

Old Gods And New Tricks

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I took a fast black north to Granton, a part of the city clinging for dear life onto the south shore of the Firth of Forth like a spurned lover. The landscape was flat and bleak in a city famed for its curves and vitality. It had been heavily industrialised and then left to rot like so many places in Scotland. To be truthful, it had always depressed the hell out of me: grey and abandoned as though it had been stuck onto the rest of the city as an afterthought by an absent-minded god who had promptly forgotten about it. Trust Ravi to have picked this spot.

My destination, Granton Square, turned out to be more of a circle as I discovered after being turfed unceremoniously out of the taxi by the taciturn driver.

“Watch yourself here hen,” he said through a cigarette clamped between his teeth Clint Eastwood style, “they come out at night.” And with that he roared off down the road speeding on his way to suck the fun out of someone else’s night.

Hen, indeed. Where the hell had that little generic moniker come from?

I stomped round the faux square trying and failing to establish where 1A was. It must basement but I just couldn’t find which one. In the pitch black surprisingly few lights winked out and the street lights only managed an anaemic glow. There was no one about and surprisingly little traffic as though everyone had just decided that this really was not the place to be and had left it to its fate. Rather like Ravi’s previous home in the murky depths of the Gyle.

There was the distant noise of the occasional car, but the serenity of the square absorbed it like an over-indulgent mother. I remembered from somewhere that Granton had not been inhabited by people until comparatively recently and that may have explained the wraith like creatures that stalked the place. These wraiths resembled animals that couldn’t decide what species they belonged to: feline shaped heads, with tusks where teeth should be and legs ending in human hands not paws. One was following me now, a low growling deep down in its malformed throat. I sympathised with both the sentiment and the indecision.

A door slammed and then the sound of someone young and fit on stairs and indeed it was because Ravi burst into view from the building two doors down. He bounded over and picked me up as though I weighed nothing and, swinging me round, kissed me full on the lips. The familiar clean, herbal smell of him made me forget momentarily that I had been considering kneeing him in the nuts.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” he said, putting me down.

“Well to keep me here, you’re going to have to get me a massive drink and get it now.”

“All taken care of. I made some food in case you were hungry, or in between incidents.”

He laughed and the swirl of darkness that always accompanied him hugged him tighter as though protecting him from me. I was again reminded that this man had had a violent past: maybe that was why he was trying so hard to have a peaceful, nurturing present. I hoped to the god that I didn’t believe in that nothing like ever happened to me….

Dark Heart

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I came to in a huge room with a high vaulted roof. A fire crackled merrily in the grate and I wondered if I’d fallen into a fairy tale. Beauty and the Beast perhaps where the twist was that Beauty actually turned out be a bit of Beast herself. I was wrapped in a musty smelling blanket and the appetising smell of roast beast reminded me how hungry I was. The Guardian sat opposite me, bandaged but surprisingly chipper given the filleting he’d just had.

“For you,” he said indicating a little side table to my right. On it was indeed a roasted animal of some unidentifiable species part rodent with a large dash of goat judging by the horned head. Beside it was a cracked goblet, full to the brim with red wine. I did as I was bid.

“I usually prefer my food live and uncooked,” he said smiling.

“Where was I?” I said, ignoring him and stuffing huge mouthfuls of tasty meat down the hatch. “And what the hell is this place?”

“Well to answer your second question first, this is the heart of the city. So many souls living and dying here have made it…beat shall we say. You were about to join the Highway of the Dead. Had you fallen all the way, I wouldn’t have been able to bring you back.”

“The Highway of the Dead runs through your gaffe. That sounds cosy. Why?”

“Rose,” he said gently, “I keep telling you. This is the Edinburgh’s heart. When its citizens die, they converge here and make the journey together.”

“Journey? Where?”

He smiled. “Where do you think? To whatever’s next. I take care of all the people who live here, my people, from the cradle to the grave. Sort of like a supernatural welfare state.”

He laughed, but if it was a joke, I didn’t get it.

“So you’re telling me I didn’t fall all the way and if I had I would have died? Well what bastard pushed me?”

“Yes you would have died. Would that have been so bad? You are a very troubled soul Rose. Death might bring you peace.” He smiled. “One of my servants was angry at your presumption to open that which was not offered. I caught you before you hit the ground. I may be injured, but this is my home and I am master here.”

The handsome human features became neutral, composed. He was healing at a rate of knots and I knew that was my cue to get the hell out of Dodge.

There was only one teensy tiny little problem however.

I didn’t know how.

The Office

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Inside it was dark and smelled of ozone. I took my glasses off and flicked the little torch on. I was in a huge open plan office with broken furniture throwing shadows on the windowless walls. I ran the torch around the ceiling and found it was a long way up and that the unit had a mezzanine floor. Scarlet and burnt orange mingled sickeningly telling their own tale of what had taken up residence in this godforsaken part of the city. Where the hell were twins?

“Ruby. Rufus,” I called. Whatever was here knew of my presence so it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d crept in or marched up and down with a brass band. I motioned to the vampires to follow me over the threshold but they would not obey. All three had returned to there natural form, stubby wings beating hard on bony bodies like heavy fists on flesh. They were on all fours, massive hind quarters and strong forelimbs giving me an inkling that they were built for more than speed. I was betting they could run like dogs although a hell of lot faster. One of them started a growling sound at the back of its throat and the other two took up the refrain. It rose in pitch as though warning of imminent attack and the hackles on the back of my neck rose.

“Come with me,” I said again.

They fell silent and glared at me with slitted red eyes. The sudden silence was shocking after the little siren song I’d just been treated to.

“Stick then,” I said moving back outside and to fasten the collars around each throat. I secured them to a metal grille next to the door and locked them with the key as though they were mere mutts and not the carnivorous monsters that they were. “But if you misbehave I’ll kill you myself.”

It was pathetic move more for the symbolism of sit stay than anything else and I was under no illusions that they could not escape with contemptuous ease but I was running on empty so it would have to do. They’d either go along with me for whatever twisted fucked up reasoning such creatures used, or they wouldn’t.

One of the monsters was trying to say something around all those teeth. I didn’t catch it at first but eventually I made it out each gasping word:

“You. Will. Die. They. Burn. Down. There. They. All. Burn.”

I snorted in disgust and went back inside to whatever waited and the unpleasant smell of sulphur. The spectral colours I saw without my glasses, the residue of unhappiness, violence and pain were familiar to me, but the concentration was not. It was as though someone had thrown luminous paint in those shades over the walls, the floor, the fabric of the building. Whatever haunted this place, it was not a simple thing and it would not go easily. I was also getting the distinct impression that it not just one presence, but legion.

The Dead-Lights raced ahead, lighting the way in more ways than one. They raced along the ceiling, along the walls, into corners and crevices, swept the building and the ground underneath. And that was when the first ball of fire streaked down from the mezzanine and exploded into the wall inches from me. It burned hot and bright but it was no ordinary fire.

I was beginning to understand why the vampires had not wanted to enter the place. Why three flesh eating freaks had the luxury of a choice denied to me was something I’d deal with later. If I survived….