by David Smith
***
The next weeks see her fill bin-bags with old possessions – she can even throw away the music cassettes that are unwound, the novels with pages missing. Catcher in the Rye means nothing anymore. She phones in sick to work more days than she goes in.
One day she stops mid-cleaning, makes a coffee, and grabs a rock cake from the tin. She coughs as she bites and chews, and her mouth feels funny. She runs her tongue over her teeth, and it encounters a hole, a gap, a missing tooth, where before there was a full set.
That evening, as she gets ready for bed, she pays attention to her reflection in the mirror. Daily, there are more and more grey hairs, more wrinkles, and a small spot on her nose.
As winter turns to spring, she carries on with the cleaning. She needs to fill her life with something, after losing her job. With every day that she fills black bags, she feels tired, achy; the spot is getting larger, like an ugly wart, her hair greyer, deep wrinkles line her skinny face and hands, more teeth have fallen out. She is scared to go out the house. She adopts a black dress as her everyday wear.
One day there is a scratching at her back door. She opens it to find a black cat, which comes in, and never leaves.
Summer comes, but she is still making stews in a big pot on the stove. Hiding from the outside world, horrified by her own appearance, she cooks what she can find in her garden: nettles, frogs' legs, newts' eyes.
At night, she sits in an old rocking chair by the window, the cat on her lap. She cackles quietly to herself. She dreams spells that will make him return to keep her company, to make her young again.
This is Where I Died
David Burrows
I stood overlooking verdant fields that were alien to me. In my day this was mud and shell craters; barbed wire and death. Even the sky was different, intensely blue and probably crisp on this October day. Ghosts do not feel cold, but I remember it, clutching my rifle, which seemed to suck the heat from my hands. My hands white and nerveless, shaking from cold and fear.
I looked to my left; others were appearing. Friends and comrades I had known so well in a past so long ago. Jack nodded to me, a smile hovering on his lips. I nodded back, a response enacted every year on this day. My actions were not my own, this was how it had happened. I knew what was to come, but I could not change it. I was in a play and we were mannequins, our strings pulled by an unseen hand, making us dance to a tune no longer remembered.
Corporals dressed the line, there was no sound – ghosts do not hear – but I could see Old Frank's mouth forming the words I knew so well. Old Frank was his nickname, but he wasn't old. Twenty-three, whereas I was twenty. We looked up to him; he seemed to know what to do and when and we followed him. That I couldn't hear him was a blessing in anticipation of the hell to come.
To my right others were appearing. Why did we dress the line? I no longer remember. It was probably important once, but not now. The line was moving and I took a few steps. Tentative at first and then more firmly. We were the second wave and the men in front of us, including Frank, blocked our view. We could afford to be brave, for that line of soft, yielding flesh was a barrier against the hail of lead to come. Such an inadequate and over-used phrase to describe the reality of war. One throwaway line that encompasses all the terror and horror to come. I cried, but tears would not come, the puppet master had not yet decided it was time for tears.
What a waste. I had wanted a wife and children and even grandchildren perhaps. A dream far too distant for a twenty-year-old boy. All too soon someone fell in the line in front and to my right. It looked as though he had tripped. My eyes were riveted on the men in front of me, praying that my protection would remain. I needed them to absorb the horror to come. Perhaps this time I would live? I remembered hope and prayers. My eyes flickered to the heavens. It was at this point that Old Frank had sworn, his left arm ripped from his body as something unseen violated his body. A preacher had told me that swearing was a sin. I prayed that Old Frank went to heaven and not hell. Swearing was not too bad. Not amongst all this terror. Please God, forgive Frank and do not commit his soul to purgatory.
His blood and flesh splattered my face and I ducked, as I had done, so many years ago. I felt the warmth of his blood and remembered the copper taste of his blood in my mouth. I spat and wanted to vomit. This was not how war was meant to be. When we joined up we had talked of heroic deeds and how swiftly the enemy would capitulate.
A gap had formed in the line of men to my front and I could see the barbed wire and beyond that the enemy trench. Terror tore at my heart. I remember I had wailed then, not for Frank but out of fear for myself. I felt the wind of a round buffet my cheek and my wail turned to a scream. That had been close and I looked to my left just as Jack spun on the spot; I watched as he collapsed to the ground; I could almost hear the puppet master's glee as Jack’s strings were cut. Jack, a furrier from Blackheath. A man who had comforted me as I crouched crying at the bottom of our trench last night, so long ago. He had given me his chocolate. Such a princely gift in this time of deprivation and squalor.
I crouched as more men in the front line fell. Blood misted the air and again I tasted its coppery tang. I wiped my eyes, nearly dropping my rifle and having to fumble to hold it firm. I should have dropped it. I should have jumped in a shell hole like some men did. The terror of failure and cowardice outshone the fear of bullets. Why? Bullets are far more deadly; a testimony to the front rank thinning dangerously now to the point that we were the first wave. I could see helmets above the enemy trench and flashes from muzzles. I remember the sound: the din, the screams and the bangs and the thumps. The slap of something fast hitting flesh. Men to my side fell and I stumbled, thinking that I was hit. I remember the screams of incoherent rage from my remaining comrades, the only act of defiance as we walked to our deaths. The enemy suffered then, our screams must have haunted their dreams. We suffered more though. Flesh against lead. It was a very uneven contest.
Simon fell. We had worked at the same hop farm for several summers. Our summer holiday, away from the colourless terrace street we called home. A different life. Cool summer evenings spent outdoors under cloudless skies. Stars rather than shells. I prayed that I was invisible, which I was. I was a ghost and yet terror tore at every fibre of my once body. Memory is a terrible thing. I remember men funnelling towards a gap in the wire. We had been told not to do this. It was a deathtrap covered by more than one machine gun. Such a terrible weapon where more than one round span bodies around, the puppet master working hard, tugging at strings in time to some forgotten beat.
My time was coming. I remember no longer caring. Death was better than this hell. Was I a coward? I still walked forward, but my rifle was forgotten. I was doing my duty, sacrificing myself for my king. I couldn't even claim that. I had been told to advance. I had been trained to do so. Failure and the fear of cowardice still dogging my steps.
I spun then as something punched me in the kidney and then the other way as something slapped my right shoulder impossibly hard. The sky and the earth exchanged places and I looked up into a blue sky, a bird winging its way as though fleeing the battle. I should have done that. I should have had the sense to flee. I would have had children and spent my summers working at the hop farm. Life was leaving my body. I remembered the pain fading and night surrounding me.
My thoughts turned to my comrades. We would meet again. Next year.
The Letter
Philip Holden
The following letter comes from the old British Museum Library collection in Bloomsbury where it was discovered folded tightly into the spine of an old book in amongst a collection gifted to the Museum during the First World War. The donor was long forgotten, and the collection was a strange mixture of scientific treatises – mostly human anatomy – and eastern mysticism and magic, of the black variety, dating back three hundred years. The collection had been unexamined until just a few years ago when the reading room was renovated and the contents of many such boxes were
catalogued. The books and accompanying papers have now been digitised and may be read by anyone with access to the worldwide web.
This particular letter is a puzzle. It is dated October 31st 1849 and is addressed to a Miss D. Hallsworthy in Lincolnshire and consists of two pieces of paper. Though clearly both written by the same person one sheet is large, closely written on both sides whilst the second is somewhat smaller and the writing more untidy, perhaps frantic. It is a mystery then that the first sheet is typical mid-nineteenth century cotton rag paper whilst the second is an example of paper from the Millington paper mill produced only from around 1912, leading some to believe that the whole is an extravagant hoax.
One final curiosity is a note fastened to the cover of the topmost book, in a bundle bound together with leather straps reading simply, ‘Examine the contents of the box very carefully. Assure yourself there is nothing inside. Tell everyone.’
This is the letter:
My dearest, dearest Sister,
What a wretch I am. And how wretched are you, though you do not know it; cursed beyond imagining.
I hardly dare describe what I am about to suffer nor the fiendish person that has brought me to this end.
Please, I beg you, do not tell Mother the contents of this letter. I am afraid that it would drive her to madness and I cannot bear to think on that. You, I know, are strong and have ever been my support. But even you I fear to be crushed under the weight of knowledge that I must share.
I have been given but one hour and barely the light of a single candle to write this. I am sick with fear and dizzy with disbelief that I should be in this predicament to which, through my words, I must bring you in mind and imagination, though thank God, not in your person. However, write I must, making my account as full as time permits.
Believe me when I say, were it not for the foulest threats ranged against you and Mother, I would have summoned up the courage to fight, even to the death. But then I fear you would have heard nothing from me, nor could I then have protected you from the vengeance that is now being wreaked on me. Hence, I have no choice at all. My fate is before me and is terrible.
I should explain how I came to this pass. As you know, I have been working in London these five years for Mr Eldridge, editor of the London Advertiser. My fond ambition to be a writer, I thought that the position as junior clerk would afford me some opportunity and I was as industrious as any youth of seventeen years could be.
I believe that Mr Eldridge soon came to see in me some accomplishment and he sent me to attend Bow Street to report on the dramas that there daily played to a small crowd of reporters and the city's lowest creatures.
Having discharged my duties thus in short reports of crime and punishment, I occasionally added embroidery to what sometimes seemed dispiriting commonplace lives held up to the blind judgement of justice. Eldridge would grunt, strike out my most lurid prose and, gradually, direct me to work that afforded more licence for the artistry I thought I possessed.
Within two years I came to be Eldridge’s principal reporter of entertainments, offered at the many music halls of which I know Mother would not approve. I may say that both on the stage and off, I saw such things that completed my education as a man of the world, or at least that nether-world that exists, I suppose, in all great cities and away from the gaze of good Christians. And I wish to God I had stayed reporting honest thievery and murder.
But enough. It was, I think just a week ago that I was instructed to attend the performance of a Fakir or a magician who had excited some attention from an acquaintance of Mr Eldridge and I attended late that afternoon the second house at the Green Gate Tavern, opposite the much more salubrious Eagle, in the City Road.
It was a dark, wet and foggy evening and the roads were filthy with mud. A few miserable citizens ventured out and only hardened drinkers lingered in the Tavern. Yet, it was at the Green Gate that the magician was to be seen. Amongst the broken drunkards and incorrigible moll-hunters of the tavern was an imperious Chinaman with a painted face and dressed in a red silk gown. An easel on the stage declared him to be “Fu-Chow the One True Magician of the East.”
He was not commanding the attention of the crowd. He produced living lizards from a red flame and caused a bottle of water to boil over and turn to bubbling tar, yet the crowd jeered and continued with their drinking.
Finally, it seemed in a rage, the magician pulled a damask cloth covering a cabinet; a red painted box little taller and no wider than a coffin. He opened both the front and the back to show it empty and invited a volunteer to assist. The first drunken man to stagger forward proved too corpulent to fit within the cabinet and he gave way to another who was smaller but no less inebriated. The smaller man walked with a stoop and used a cheap bamboo walking stick in his left hand. After stepping into the cabinet, the doors front and back were closed.
After a moment and some incantations, almost inaudible over the din of the Green Gate customers, the Chinaman opened once more the cabinet to reveal not, as one would expect in this age of cheap trickery, an empty cabinet but instead a skeleton. I was intrigued, especially as the skeleton both stooped and held, wedged between its bony fingers the same bamboo cane which the cripple had taken onto the stage. The Chinaman, far from being triumphant, cursed and kicked the cabinet violently. Even then, the audience bayed and catcalled, one shouting that they were well rid of the man. Then a bottle was thrown and, no doubt in fear, Fu-Chow called for the curtain to be rung down.
Out in the street I pondered a little on the trick I had seen, for a trick it surely was. No rational mind would spend more than a moment on it. I decided that the stooping man was a confederate of the Chinaman and that there was no more to the illusion. Would that I had thought longer and even ventured backstage to enquire of the man. I did not. And instead I wrote a mocking account of “The One True Magician of the Green Gate Tavern” which was published in the following evening edition. I was, I must admit, too proud even to admit to myself that I was troubled by the skills of the magician I had seen, and instead I sought to belittle him and his conjuring in the eyes of our readers.
It was the day after publication that a message reached me at the Fleet Street office of the Advertiser to request urgently, but politely, that I attend a house in Clerkenwell that afternoon where Fu-Chow himself would be glad to show me some of the secrets of his trade. Perhaps you have already guessed that the magician was seeking some recompense for my dismissing his performance and I am afraid you are correct. To my lasting regret I did not think on this until it was too late.
The magician Fu-Chow himself answered the door at my first knock and smiled at me broadly. He was indeed from the east, his tanned, yellowish skin was taut, over a round, clean-shaven face. I estimated him to be perhaps forty-five or a little older.
Immediately he began gabbling at me in a mixture of broken English and what I supposed was his own tongue. No sooner had I entered the house than I was led down to a cellar lit only by candles in which stood the same red painted cabinet I had seen on stage. Fu-Chow explained to me that I should examine the cabinet very carefully. He urged me to assure myself that it was empty. These were undoubtedly words of English that he had practiced for his performance, for they were pronounced clearly and carefully unlike his earlier gibberish. Finally, and comically I thought at the time, he prompted me to “tell everyone”, although there were only the two of us in the cellar room.
He gestured into the box and I innocently stepped inside as he closed first one door and then another. A small chink of candlelight illuminated the inside, which appeared plain and smooth. I tried to make a joke of the unsettling situation by asking him questions. Whom did he suppose I should tell about this cabinet? Was I too to be transformed into a collection of bones?
My dear sister, he laughed. It was a laugh so high in pitch that it seemed to pierce my heart and it spoke only of his demented triumph at my imprisonment. It was then that he slipped this paper and a small pencil throu
gh the crack in the cabinet and told me to write an account of what I had seen. Though he assured me that I would not be transformed as the stooped man had been at the Green Gate, I was - I am - fearful that he was hiding his true object from me so that I should write this account to you. Further he swore that, should I not co-operate, he would seek out all my family and cause them to enter this self-same cabinet to face who knows what end?
I have but a slender hope that you will receive this before I die.
Though I can hardly place my faith in this loathsome beast he has promised that he will deliver this letter. My entreaties to bring this letter direct to your hand have been met with silence. On one occasion only has he uttered anything about his intent. Through the merest gap in the cabinet - through which the faint light of the candle seeps - I heard his fearsome voice tell that my letter would be “found”.
I cannot but suppose he means that it will be after my death. Or that he is completely without his wits for, in his ranting, he says there will be a time when my letter will fly through the air like a vapour to materialize before the eyes of hundreds, if not thousands of people. Quite insane. He wants me to tell you that one day his magic will be understood and welcomed by all peoples, by emperors and paupers and on that day will my letter be seen.
I have no more paper and so must close with only love for you and Mother.
Your fond brother, John.
The second, smaller sheet is undated:
My dear sister,
On this second page I have to continue but I hardly know how to explain what has happened. In the blink of an eye my fear has increased tenfold.
No sooner had I slipped my letter to you through the narrow gap than the room in which this cabinet sits was bathed in light. It was a harsh, sickly light so unlike the candle it replaced. I cannot say that I had slept for it was but a moment. I had sighed, closed my eyes momentarily and opened them again as I heard a hissing and the now familiar crackling laugh of my tormentor. Still held in my hand was the pencil I had used, but the room, such as I could discern seemed, indeed smelled, changed.
I called out, asking the Chinaman what had happened and he answered with a laugh.
‘It has worked,’ he called triumphantly. Yet his voice sounded changed, his command of English more accomplished. I asked him the time, fearing that I had been drugged. Again he laughed and slipped me this second sheet of writing paper with which to continue my letter and then he urged me to record this, the most insane story of all.
He claimed to me that it was now the year 1914 and that had caused me to die, to waste away in this box, and then to come alive again at his bidding. As he spoke I peeped out into the now brighter room in which I had been ensnared and I saw not the flushed face of the man I had met just moments before but the grizzled face of an ancient, bearded man. The voice was recognizable; the same strange accent but now undoubtedly far older and creaking as if he had few breaths left in his body.
Oh sister, should you be delivered of this letter read it only once and then destroy it. Do not seek help, do not cause any other living creature to read its content. The fiend has explained, and I cannot but believe he has the power, that he has placed some kind of hex, a spell over the very paper and the words that I am writing. He has told me, with a cold voice that commands my absolute and terrible faith, that it is so arranged that the cabinet, with my living body within, will be buried here under the floor of this cellar and that I shall die as I feared I would, trapped and without hope.
But he has a yet greater torture prepared for me. He tells me that I was revived after sixty years by his reading the first page of my letter and thus, should these pages be read in their entirety, then no matter how long I have been beneath the earth and no matter how corrupt my body I should be revived... I should become alive again, though trapped, in order to die once again within this cursed cabinet.
Mark my words, sister, should by some miracle, you receive this do not I pray, cause it to be read again. Destroy it. Allow me to rest in peace.
Eternally,
Your brother, John.
Trick and Treat
David Smith
Harvey was sitting in his favourite chair eating a bowl of soup and a Spam sandwich. It wasn’t proper Spam, because the foodbank tended towards generic rather than name brands, but it still tasted grand. It was a taste rich with associations from his childhood, when tinned meats and potted pastes were a staple for Sunday teatimes. Harvey smiled at the memory of his mum spreading Stork margarine onto Mother’s Pride sliced white at the kitchen press.
He was watching The One Show as he ate, more from habit than from interest. They were talking to some camp-as-Christmas comedian Harvey had never heard of, who was moaning about the demise of Bonfire Night and the rise of Halloween. He made a joke about blowing the houses of parliament. Dirty git.
It was already dark outside and the house was freezing, so Harvey had popped out of his day clothes and into his well-worn thermal jim-jams and dressing gown. A blanket, two pairs of socks and tatty tartan slippers completed the ensemble, but he was still bloody freezing.
His cat, Ponsonby, a huge, longhair, marmalade tabby, was sitting on the sofa licking his arse. ‘Stop that, you dirty bugger,’ Harvey said. ‘You’re putting me off my dinner.’
Ponsonby paused and looked up. His one good eye narrowed as he considered Harvey’s words. After a few seconds he resumed his licking, this time, if anything, more fervently than before.
There was a knock at the door. Harvey jumped, almost spilling his soup into his lap. He rarely had visitors, and had already received this week’s food drop off. Must be one of the neighbours, he thought. I hope nothing bad’s happened. He peeled back the blanket, hauled himself from the chair and shuffled to the door.
The little girl standing on his front step was a sweetheart. She had long blonde curly hair, partially covered by a black pointed hat, and big blue eyes that sparkled in the light from the hallway. In addition to the hat she was wearing a black full-length dress and a matching black cape with red lining. She had a rice crispy wart stuck to her chin and carried a small plastic cauldron in one hand and a witch’s broom in the other.
‘Hello, love,’ said Harvey, ‘trick or treating, is it?’
The girl smiled and held the cauldron toward him. It was empty.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Harvey, ‘but I don’t have anything. We don’t get many trick or treaters down this end.’ Harvey lived on the outskirts of the village in a small house at the top of a narrow lane.
The girl looked crestfallen. Her smile faltered. For a moment Harvey thought she might cry.
‘Hold on, I’ll see if I can find a 50p’ he said. ‘Your mum and dad can take you to the shop and buy you something with that.’
He smiled a gummy smile, looking beyond the girl to see if he could see her parents waiting by the gate. There was no one there. Harvey frowned.
‘You shouldn’t be out on your own after dark,’ he said. ‘What are your parents thinking of?’ He thought the girl was probably only six or seven: eight at most.
The girl rattled her cauldron again. Poor little bugger, thought Harvey. She doesn’t want 50p, she wants a treat. ‘Hold up,’ he said, ‘I’ve just remembered...’
He turned from the door and shuffled down the hallway to the kitchen. There was a Quality Street tin on the worktop by the sink. He pulled at the lid, the pressure on his fingertips sending a flare of arthritis up his arm. He put the lid to one side and peered into the tin. There were a few biscuits – Jammy Dodgers and digestives – and a crumpled box with a torn end. He lifted the box and tilted it. A small plastic tray slipped from the end. In the middle of the tray sat a single jam tart – an apricot one, Harvey’s least favourite.
Harvey moved to stand under the light in the centre of the room and examined the tart closely. Good: no mould. He popped it back in the box and returned to the hallway.
The door was still open, but the girl was gone. Harvey
shuffled to the door and looked outside. There was no sign of her on his footpath or down the lane. He sighed and turned, making his way back to the kitchen and replacing the tart in the tin. He picked himself out a digestive and shuffled back to the living room.
The girl was sitting on the sofa, her hat placed on the cushion beside her. She looked up and smiled. Ponsonby was sitting on her lap, purring as she stroked his head and neck.
‘Oi, you mustn’t be in here, love,’ said Harvey, ‘Don’t you know it’s dangerous to walk into a stranger’s house all on your own?’
He started forward, intending to shoo the girl from the room. He took a couple of steps then stopped, a puzzled look coming over his face. He wondered if he might be having a stroke, because his legs seemed to have stopped working. He expected them to collapse beneath him at any second, but they didn’t. They were supporting him, but he was rooted to the spot, standing just in front of the chair he’d been sitting in a few minutes earlier. He tried to move again. Nothing.
The girl’s smile disappeared. Suddenly she didn’t look a sweetheart at all. The big blue eyes still sparkled, but with an altogether colder light.
Her hands moved from Ponsonby’s head and ears to rest on either cheek. Her fingers stiffened as her grip tightened and the cat howled as she viciously twisted her hands. The howl cut off abruptly, replaced with a terrible snapping and tearing sound. Ponsonby’s head turned almost full circle, his body pinned between the girl’s thighs, the light in his good eye fading as he went limp in her hands. A vile smell filled the room as the cat’s bowel and bladder emptied, the two liquids – one brown and thick the other greenish-yellow and steaming – streaming into the girl’s lap and down her legs.
Harvey felt a river running down his own leg and realised he had pissed himself. He felt ashamed and terrified at the same time. He watched, horribly fascinated, as the girl lifted the cat above her head, lowering the animal headfirst towards her open mouth. Surely she isn’t going to try to...
There was a wet, tearing sound as the girl opened her mouth wider, then wider, then wider still. The skin around her mouth and jaw seemed elastic. It stretched and pulled like warm toffee as her lower jaw dislocated. Her features, hideously distorted, resembled the white mask in a horror film Harvey had seen a trailer for the previous evening.
Harvey’s heart was pounding, the sound of it seeming to fill his ears. It faltered and restarted as the cat disappeared down the gaping hole of the girl’s mouth, then stopped completely when she swallowed. The last thing Harvey saw before the darkness took him was Ponsonby’s tail disappearing over the girl’s lips and the great bulge of his body sliding down her distended throat. Harvey fell back into his armchair, his heart as still as the grave that would soon accommodate him.
The girl stood, the shit and piss in her lap sliding to the floor as though from the surface of a freshly seasoned non-stick pan, leaving not a single stain on her clothes. She picked up her hat and placed it back over her golden curls, her beautiful blue eyes shining. Picking up her cauldron and broomstick she smiled brightly and skipped from the room, an innocent child trick-or-treating once again.
‘Thank you ever so much,’ she said, casting one final glance towards Harvey’s body, ‘it’s been lovely, truly lovely.’
The Three Tales
Sue Marlow
The theatre production that evening was a collection of Victorian short stories based on the supernatural, a subject which intrigued and inspired writers of the time. There were three players, two young women and a man. The stage set was minimal; four lamps stood like sentinels in a square emitting a sulphurous yellow glow. In the centre of the stage hung a single bare light bulb, and beneath it in a row were three large tea chests each with a hinged lid. They contained a few small props and, as the tales unfolded, were also used to represent a table, chairs, a bridge and doors.
