Cold as Ice

Here's my story that won third place in the Friends of Harrogate Library's 2011 ghost story competition. The top three entries were printed in the Harrogate Advertiser on Friday 9th December.

Martha pulled the blanket closer and snuggled down into the sofa. The darkness was softened by the blue glow of computer power buttons. Outside the world was yellow, street lamps reflected by snow. The wind groaned and white flurries sped by.

It had been a busy day. They had started work on the kitchen. She wanted the offices opened by the New Year and had harangued the foreman, Phil, to complete the renovations.

“We don't want to be rushing in here, love,” he had said. “Less’n’ you want flooding.”

Somewhere on the other side of the kitchen’s back wall was Hebble Brook, the stream that babbled through and under Dean Clough, Halifax, once-mighty complex of carpet mills, now home to insurance and software companies.

“Just get it done. And I'm not your love.”

She knew he gossiped about her with his fellow workers. She was known as The Ice Queen. That was fine. As long as she could open on the third of January and get the developers started on the web site, they could mock her to their hearts' content.

There was an exhilarating solitude in the office. It was minus twenty outside, but in here she was cosy and alone. Her ex-husband, Dave, had always said she preferred her own company. It had been worse when their ten-year-old daughter, Liz, had said it too. She had really meant it. Martha had tried not to let it get to her.

Liz was spending more and more time with Dave, and Martha was only slightly ashamed to admit that it suited her – she needed those extra hours to pour into the fledgling business.

After lunchtime Phil had called her into the kitchen. She found all five labourers standing around an alcove they had uncovered. It was a rough cubic foot of darkness. The brook sounded close, bubbling past just a few metres beyond. The space held several small dusty lumps, and in chalk at the back was scrawled:

MARY

SORRY

7/5/1875 – 24/12/1878

Her first thought was, “How long is this going to delay the refurb?”

Ignoring the oversensitive pleas to leave the site undisturbed, Martha picked up one of the lumps and dusted it off - it was a humbug, sticky and ancient.

“Victorian teenage mum?” Phil suggested. “Keeps this Mary a secret, one day she drowns in t’ brook?”

“Aye,” added another. “Mum’s devastated, finds this hole. Maybe she worked here. Makes a secret memorial.”

“Dobson’s humbugs for t’ babbie’s Christmas present.”

Martha had noticed it was snowing. This was the builders’ cue to leave for the day. Phil had asked if she was staying. She had shrugged, and she thought he might try and persuade her to go home, but in the end he said nothing and left.

By five o’clock the blizzard had made travel virtually impossible.

She snuggled further under the blanket and found herself wondering about Mary and her mother. She pictured a harsh December in a nineteenth century Dean Clough, the skies black with smoke, the mills coated in dirty snow.

A haggard young woman and her child walk along the banks of Hebble Brook, grimy grey dresses billowing in the wind, bonnets tied tight. The mother veers into the girl, perhaps accidentally, and knocks Mary into the black water. She does not help, but hurries away, apparently deaf to the bairn's juddering cries who shivers uncontrollably from the icy water. Her squeals and splashes quickly subside as she is washed downstream, and her mum disappears into the winter without a backwards glance.

Martha waited for some strange sound to rise from the humming computers and blowing wind, expecting the scrape of stone from the kitchen, wet footsteps...

“Childish,” she thought to herself. The only sounds were the settling of the mill, the drone of the blizzard.

A loud gust of wind rattled a window. The chattering of tiny teeth a couple of feet from her ear made her heart lurch and start pounding like a drum. The chattering was accompanied by a tremulous moan. She dared not open her eyes. The fluttering drone came right up to her ear, fetid breath tinged with mint broke on her cheek, and the edge of the blanket was lifted. Frigid air washed over her. A tiny quivering body, freezing and damp, climbed in. Martha felt wet hair wiping across her face.

Still she kept her eyes closed. The blanket came back down, sealing them together. She tried to scream, mouth agape, but all she could manage was a thin, empty whistle. The visitor clung on, its damp seeping through Martha’s t-shirt and jeans, sapping her body heat.

Against her breast, Mary gurgled two pitiful, pleading words.

“Mummy. Cold.”

Martha’s heart stopped.

#FlashFiction: Ethanol

His shoes were red with blood.
The streets were clogged with gore.
He tramped through flesh and juices
And wished he was no more.

He wondered who was left.
He'd walked for lonely days.
City-wide, the only sounds
Were roaring homes ablaze.

Everywhere the carpet
Of crimson offal spread,
Of baggy human bodies,
All dead, all dead, all dead.

Some had burst asunder
Splashing cars and vans
Which stood now at a standstill
A bloody traffic jam.

Joints had failed on others
Skeletons with errors.
Folding up like jellyfish
Twitching rubber terrors.

Faces hung on lamp-posts
Eyeless, swinging masks.
Maws wide open, stretching
Like melting candle wax.

All his fault, this carnage
Plus the MoD.
Craving research into
Bio-weaponry.

The pathogen he'd worked on,
Hadn't worked at all.
But vodka gave him insight -
It needed ethanol.

Drunk and bio-suited,
He tripped and dropped it all.
Misanthropic mishap
Bred of alcohol.

The Leeds Savage Club ebook

A new post! And this isn't fiction. No. It is solid fact.

The inaugural ebook from The Leeds Savage Club is out. It's got all the stuff we exhibited at the Launch Party. And my God, is it good? Yes. The answer is yes.

Download it here. Perhaps you could download it over a chilled bottle of Sauternes. You could read it while sitting in a comfortable leather chair. You could print it while leafing through some Virgil or Homer. The options are virtually without end.

FlashFiction: Smoke and Mirrors

Here's a short Cornelius von Boza story, the old crypto-zoologist adventurer occultist clubman.

The fire which hit the Minerva Club last week killed two of its members. One was burned alive where he sat in his Chesterfield – a civil engineer aged 91. The other died later, while crossing the road, knocked down by a 1974 E-Type Jaguar. The driver fled the scene. While this second death sounds unconnected to a fire, it is in fact intrinsically linked. For the second person whose life was extinguished was the arsonist who caused it in the first place.

The library at the club was crowded. Every chair was occupied by old gentlemen reading such varied publications as 19th century copies of The Gentleman's Magazine, the works of Xenophon, and old Ordnance Survey maps.

Cornelius von Boza, a long-time member, had interests that were... spicier than most. He had avoided the mundane and skirted the ersatz his whole life, until now, at the noble age of a hundred-and-ten, he was hard pressed to find anything in the library that piqued his attention. This is why he read nothing, and simply dozed, wrinkled head nodding, the odd snort erupting from his clogged sinuses.

But old men do not doze for long, and the call of nature woke him up. He was to be congratulated on this, for it was often the case that his bladder failed to tell his brain of its requirements, and just did its business without waking him up. He stopped snorting and his head lifted, and he struggled out of his deep leather chair with several colourful oaths. Out of the library he shambled, like a pile of stiffened body parts thrown into a suit. As soon as he'd left, the arsonist made his move.

“Another log?” James said to the civil engineer, who had about a minute left to live.

“What's that?” the engineer slurred. His name was Jasiahbard Fredericks. He had headed up many impressive civil engineering projects, mostly dams, in places such as Romania, Brazil and Finland.

“Another log? For the fire?” the waiter said.

“I'm not bothered.”

James threw the log on anyway, and a burst of blood-red sparks fled up the chimney. He then withdrew, and continued to withdraw, until he had exited the library, and then the club, and was walking down Pall Mall at a brisk pace.

Jasiahbard felt a burst of warmth from the fire by his side. “My God,” he thought, “that fire's coming on some!”

Indeed it was. It was blazing like a furnace, the former yellow calm of the flames transformed into a bright crimson inferno. He looked into it, fascinated by the change. “Must've been doused in paraffin, that log,” he thought. He didn't think anything further after this. His mind stopped working. He just stared into the dancing hotness, his brain coming to an abrupt halt. All it could do was concentrate on the fire.

An acquaintance of his, a retired Bishop of Norwich, the Right Reverend Gulliver Plunkett, was unable to stop what happening next. It unfolded too quickly. He noticed Jasiahbard move in the corner of his eye. Looking up from his Homer, he saw his friend stand up and approach the fire, which he noted was roaring away with alarming ferocity. Quite calmly, Jasiahbard bent down and put his hand into the fluttering flames, grabbing the uppermost log. Gulliver couldn't believe what he was seeing, and just gaped as fire raced up Jasiahbard's sleeve. Seeming to not notice and remaining perfectly silent, he then straightened up and returned to his parliament green Chesterfield, the fire spreading all over his jacket and setting his entire torso alight. He sat down, cradling the furiously burning log in his lap like a cat. His entire upper portion had become a torch, a mass of bright red flames. His lounge chair smoked and then burst into fire as well. It was only then that the man started screaming. Plunkett later mentioned that 'screaming' didn't do the sound justice, however. It had been more of a screeching, like the call of a large bird in terrible pain. It had been, in his words, 'terribly upsetting'.

The fire spread quickly over the poor civil engineer. His trousers caught, his shoes burned, his hair flared up, and now his seat was a bonfire. The surrounding carpet smouldered and then that too sprouted flames.

The old gents nearby rose from their chairs and a wave of panic could be felt sweeping the library. The heat from the burning engineer was extraordinary, and Plunkett left his own chair to get away.

“Men!” someone shouted from near the door to the entrance hall. “Fly!”

The waiters were spinning into action, shepherding the confused and frightened old members out of the room. Most of the doddering codgers were unable to run, and could only shuffle along while the fire spread behind them. Even Plunkett could see they weren't going to make it. They were too many and too slow. Before even half of them could get to the door, they would be overtaken by the fleet flames, himself included.

A waiter came running up with a fire extinguisher and blew its smoky contents at the base of the chair, and the charred figure that sat in it. The figure's screeching stopped at the abrupt blast of the extinguisher. The fire did not waver one jot. It was a sizeable blaze, but the extinguisher should have had at least some effect. But it had none. The waiter performed a second blast, keeping it going for half a minute right at the base of the fire, but to no avail.

“What's wrong with this damn thing?” the young waiter asked himself. “Should have sorted that fire in a jiffy!”

By now, the ex-bishop was halfway to the door, shuffling as fast as he could. The knot of old men who had made it to the exit were stuck, caught in the bottleneck. He wasn't going to get out. No way.

“Out of my way!” someone barked at the door. There was a commotion and angry shouts, and the plug of old men protested in the most emphatic manner they could muster. But they were unable to hold back the man who was trying to get into the room. Through the crowd he pushed, and Cornelius emerged. He looked this way and that, then seeming to realise something, headed straight for the former bishop and the fire.

“Bless me!” Cornelius demanded as he approached.

“I know!” Plunkett concurred. “It's a tragedy! But come, we must evacuate immediately!”

“No!” Cornelius shouted at him. He was now standing before him, their saggy faces almost touching. “I mean, literally, bless me! Perform your rites, do your genuflections, and bless me, blast your eyes!”

The fire was spreading ever further. The engineer was a vague black shape in the middle of it, slumped on the chair whose legs even now gave way, sending a plume of fire to the ceiling. It was mere yards away. Plunkett's eyes were scorched by the incredible heat.

“Come on, old fellow, we must away,” he said, taking von Boza's arm. “No time to lose.”

“If you want to save yourself and this club, you will bless me now, otherwise both you and I and all these others will die. Now...” Cornelius grabbed the bishop's hands in his and held them up between their faces. “... Bless me, damn you!”

Cornelius let go of his hands, and automatically, the ex-clergyman reeled off, “I bless you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” and made the sign of the Cross.

Cornelius walked towards the fire.

A second waiter was tackling the blaze with another extinguisher, but he was having as little success as the first. The fire just would not react as a fire should. It burned just as brightly, and devoured the carpet around the chair just as greedily.

“Mr von Boza!” the first waiter yelped, aghast at the man's approach. “Get out now!”

The waiter would have taken hold of the errant pensioner by the scruff of the neck in the next moment, had Cornelius not done something quite unexpected and unzipped his fly, extracting from its humid insides what could only be described as an exceedingly wrinkled penis.

“Get out of the way! This'll do the trick!”

Too surprised to argue, the pair of waiters and the equally surprised bishop watched as Cornelius strode right up to the conflagration and began urinating onto it. The curve of golden fluid that issued from his nether regions had a miraculous effect where it touched the fire, which began going out immediately. The roaring blaze shrunk before their disgusted but amazed eyes; the carpet was doused, then the collapsed chair, and finally its dead occupant. Ammonia-laced smoke boiled off the charred remains, and with the fire out, Cornelius restored his dignity and put away his member.

“I hope I get some thanks for this,” he said to the dumbfounded onlookers.

“How on earth did you do that?” the first waiter asked.

Cornelius sighed, as if to explain was too tedious. But then he said, “What we had here was no ordinary fire.” He indicated the blackened lump that had been Jasiahbard the civil engineer. “No fire could do that much damage in so short a time, and resist the extinguishers used by you heroic but ultimately useless waiters.”

The gaggle of old men who had been trying to flee the library were drifting back, the hazard eliminated and an interesting tale in the offing proving too strong a lure.

Cornelius continued, “I had left the room to attend to my toilet, but heard a commotion which precipitated my early return. I managed to regain the library through the terrified throng at the door, and saw something most extraordinary. A fire, blood-red, consuming poor Mr Fredericks, a burning log in his lap. Not only that. I saw in the mirror opposite something impossible – the fire had no reflection.”

“No reflection?” spluttered the bishop. “Poppycock!”

“Not poppycock,” countered Cornelius. “Seemingly impossible, but occurring just the same. I could see the chair and its unfortunate occupant peeling and turning black, but none of the fire or smoke. I knew at once what was afoot. We had on our hands what is known as a vampire fire.”

“A what?” gasped the first waiter.

“A vampire fire,” one of the returning members said.

“I heard,” said the waiter. “It's silly, is what I mean.”

“Silly, you say? No,” said Cornelius. “Quite serious, actually. A vampire fire – a vamfire, if you will - casts no reflection, and has the power to hypnotise. It must have hypnotised Jasiahbard and made him grab the burning log.”

“Preposterous,” announced the bishop. “How could such a fire come to be?”

“With a log, taken from a tree that has grown over a vampire's grave. They occur mostly in the Baltics – Wallachia and places like that. Of course, not many people know they exist. And I remember seeing one of the new waiters loitering with a log just before I went to the lavatory.”

“Assuming this drivel were true,” challenged the bishop. “Why would someone use such a log to start a 'vampire fire'?”

“They are first rate assassination methods. The target is made to pick up the log which starts a fire. It kills him and burns evidence that might have been left by the assassin.”

“Who would wish to kill a civil engineer?” Plunkett wanted to know.

“Someone from Romania, perhaps, who was disgruntled at the building of one of his dams. He built several, I believe, one or two of which were fairly controversial, flooding some very old estates. Some very powerful people lived on those estates.”

“Why piss on the fire?” the first waiter asked.

“Normal extinguishing equipment cannot douse a vampire fire. Only holy water. I got the bishop to bless me, and then used my own water to put it out.”

“Urine is not holy water,” said the bishop.

“Holy water. Holy urine. It's all the same to a vampire fire.”

When Cornelius finished speaking, everyone just looked at him, astounded at the implausible theory but impressed by the unshakeable conviction with which he evidently believed it.

“And now we have a runaway arsonist assassin on our hands,” Cornelius said. He turned to one of the other waiters, one who wasn't holding a fire extinguisher. “Be a good fellow and bring the car round.”

Dream of the Prairie Dog

All the prairie dog wanted was to get up to the clouds. They looked so mouth-wateringly succulent. The thing was a ground-dwelling creature, however, and the sky was inaccessible.

It had to get up there. The food down here was bland and dry – the same old fruits and nuts, day in, day out, with no variety. If he could just get up there and have a nibble, a taste, of those gorgeous white fluffy balls, he would be sated.

He set to working out how to get into the sky. He wondered if he could use a piece of grass as a springboard to launch himself heavenward. He found a promising blade that looked strong enough and grew at just the right angle. He took a running jump across the prairie and leapt at the blade, but it just bent under his weight and he landed in an undignified heap.

He then asked the Higgs Boson if he could have all his mass taken away, so he would have no weight and could float up into the firmament. But the Higgs Boson was unable to comply, being both a theoretical sub-atomic particle, and without even the slightest glimmer of sentience.

He then asked a graviton if he could be imbued with anti-gravitational properties, but this scheme was doomed to failure also, due to the reasons given some moments ago for the Higgs Boson.

The prairie dog saw aeroplanes flying overhead, and saved long and hard to charter a flight. The only thing he was capable of saving were fruits and nuts, which were not a legitimate currency as far as the aviation industry were concerned. So even with a hundred nuts, he found hiring a private plane impossible.

He made a lot of friends amongst his own kind with his stash of nuts, and they offered to help him. They would make a prairie dog pyramid, balancing on each other's backs and forming a great organic triangle, up which the prairie dog could scamper to the sky. The co-ordination required to achieve this, and the feat of balancing it demanded, were quite beyond the capabilities of these simple rodents, and all they managed to achieve were pyramids three prairie dogs high, and no higher. They always came tumbling down in a pile, and never made it even one-thousandth of the way up to the clouds.

The prairie dog had run out of ideas, until one day, a thunderstorm came. He had the brainwave of riding a lightning bolt up into the heights, if only he could predict where a lightning bolt might land. Fortunately, there was an isolated tree that bore the brunt of lightning strikes – a blackened, charred stump, which was still tall enough to attract the electrical discharge. The prairie dog climbed the blasted, twisted tree and sat at the top. The rain lashed down and he looked up through the murk of the stormy day to the great black clouds above. He would have to be careful not to get struck himself, so he stayed alert, looking for any bolts that might come rocketing down.

He didn't have to wait long. A zig-zagging line of blazing white raced down to meet him. He dodged it just in time and it crashed into the top of the tree. The prairie dog leapt through the sparks and fire and grabbed hold of the slippery, hot lightning, and pelted up it as fast as he could. His paws were singed, but he ignored the pain, and in no time at all, he was up in the roiling clouds. The lightning bolt dissipated just as he alighted from it.

All was black and wet and thundery. He'd made it. He sat on an outcropping of grey fluff and sniffed its tangy ozone scent. His nostrils crackled. His mouth gaped wide as he went for a bite, but something in the corner of his eye made him pause. The surrounding clouds were looming closer, brooding black and grey and enormous as cities. The prairie dog quailed and hunkered down, suddenly scared. They gathered around and the wind ruffled his wet fur. Before he could jump back down to the prairie, the clouds enveloped him, eating him alive, and when they had passed by, there was nothing but a new cloud, tiny in comparison to the behemoths that surrounded it. But this one wasn't grey; it was red.

Jenny Gets Watched

Her lips glisten like a thumb dipped in blood, plump and wet and suckable. I watch, aware that if someone is watching me, they might discern dark motives. A man watching a woman he doesn't know might be construed as innocent, or the kind of thing men are expected to do, or it could be something more malignant. I know which it is, but would an observer?

She is reading a book called The Inheritors by William somebody... I can't see the rest. I've never read it, whoever it is. It's a Penguin Classic. Not my thing.

Every so often she looks up and squints at the departures monitor through her thick glasses. She's on her way... somewhere. We are on platform ten. The only train coming soon is the 11:11 to Leeds and mine is after that. She is wearing a charcoal-grey business suit with a crisp white shirt, against which (I can't help noticing) her breasts strain in a very diverting way.

When she looks up at 11:04, she catches me staring, and pulls a disapproving face. Then she returns to her book. My face burns red and I feel small.

At 11:09 her train comes and I follow her progress, not to mention her breasts, as she gets up and leaves.

Wow.

I don't feel so small anymore.

***

It pleases me to see her reading something worthwhile like that. The usual choice for the commuter is chick-lit or Harry Potter for the girls, and Dan Brown or Harry Potter for the boys. Snobby, I know. But The Inheritors! William Golding! Good stuff!

She is dressed smartly. She has a briefcase. It is open (left so when she'd taken the book out) and, forgive my nosiness, but I can make out the red ribbon and buff folders of actual briefs. A lawyer. Doing well for herself, then, and let's refrain from the usual jibes at lawyers, just for the time being. I want to appreciate her without it being deadened by cynicism. As a teacher, it makes me happy. Not that we don't do well for ourselves generally – women, I mean. Barriers are coming down all the time. It's just that when you teach where I do, in the comprehensive of a run-down village with deprived pupils, you start to lose hope a little. Yet here she is, a lawyer.

A young man is looking at her. His eyes move up and down. He looks intent. I don't like him one jot. When she catches him gawping he looks away, abashed. Good for you, Jennifer! I always said in lessons, don't let things get you down, Jenny, but tackle them head-on, and you'll go far.

Now she's getting up and boarding her train.

So is he.

Great Responsibility

He felt intimated. It was really nothing to feel intimated about, but he felt it all the same.

All it had been was a fly. A tiny grubby fly, that he’d swatted out of existence. He’d read in the paper a discovery by scientists concerning flies and how to swat them effectively. Apparently they had very cleverly-wired little brains that enabled them to anticipate an impending swat. If the compound eyes on their twitchy heads saw the right kind of motion, their legs would push them off into the air and they would buzz off on an escape route pre-calculated by their special avoidance system. All very ingenious and fascinating.

The article had gone on to say how you could outwit their avoidance system. Instead of aiming directly for the insect with your rolled-up newspaper, you had to aim slightly ahead of it. The fly’s calculations would send it right into the path of your falling club.

He’d been reading the article on a boring Saturday afternoon, and as chance would have it, a fly had been bothering him. Eager to put the science into practice, he rolled up the paper and watched the fly loop and swoop around the living room. It flitted through the shafts of light slanting in from outside, making glitters of dust swirl and eddy in the most exquisitely slight and subtle ways. While he waited for it to choose a place to land, he found himself admiring how unexpectedly beautiful the scene was. The fly, a little motorised speck. Its drowsy, quiet buzzing. The twinkling motes, meandering in the air in many directions at once, some winking out as the light left them, others fading up like microscopic bulbs on dimmer switches. They gathered into sheets and streams and blobs, scintillating globular clusters of shining dots shepherded by air currents.

The fly circled through them like a shark through a school of fish, and despite its minuscule influence, its fragile but frantically flapping wings caused enough wind to disturb them. Lazily floating specks would careen and tumble away and some would disappear into the gloom between the shafts of light.

He watched until the fly left the light itself, and landed on a bookcase. Forgetting the prettiness of what he’d just seen, he got out of his chair slowly and carefully made his way across the room. The fly bustled around on the third shelf, first facing this way, then deciding it didn’t like this way, and turning round to face that way. Maybe it didn’t like the books on that particular shelf – history wasn’t a favourite subject of flies, evidently.

As he passed through the shafts of light that hit him at head height, his eyes became flooded with brightness from the side, and he lost sight of the bookcase. His vision was filled with gold, which quickly disappeared into the relative darkness between shafts, only to be replaced by another flash of gold, and so on – four gold flashes as he went through four shafts. He wondered if the fly had sensed the same thing, the beautiful gold followed by the cool gloom, time after time. It was a pleasant experience. He didn’t expect the fly knew about things like 'pleasant' and 'unpleasant' in the same way he did. But it could sense the light and dark, he guessed.

Then he was at the bookcase. The fly was still there, preening its head with its legs as it faced a weighty tome on European history. Aim ahead of it, the article had said. He lifted the rolled-up paper, held tight in his right fist. The fly turned to the right, in the direction of the light, and he brought the paper down, aiming for a spot just in front of it. The fly saw the danger and pushed off with its legs, its wings springing into action and lifting it further. But the scientists had thwarted it. His papery club smacked it out of the air and down onto the bookcase shelf, and then it wasn’t only the books that were history.

As soon as he’d done it, he felt remorse. What a stupid thing to do, he thought. He looked at the little squashed body. It wasn’t moving. He’d given it a mortal whack.

At the back of his mind he was aware he was feeling bad over an incredibly trivial matter. Maybe he was having one of those moments of clarity.

The gold and dark flashed in his eyes again when he went back to this chair. The fly wouldn’t be seeing those alternating stripes again, that was for sure, whether it had derived some basic fly-ish form of satisfaction from it or not.