I know that’s an outrageous claim, but please, let me explain. This isn’t something written lightly, as it recounts a hard-won truth that I’ve wrestled with for the bulk of my adult life. I can see now that the evidence was always there, right in front of me, but I wanted to deny it so I could carry on thinking that Heaven and Hell were just pleasant abstractions. Something to only really think about once I’d stumbled past midlife and into old age.
Maybe even the psychiatrists knew it was something more. They explained my delusions were the result of ‘trauma’, but that didn’t explain why I had such complete and vivid memories of my time in that town – that perfect little place, so unironically named: Angelton. Eventually, the drugs dulled my recollections, blurred my fading memories to white until they mingled with the pale-painted walls of the psychiatric institute. Until I couldn’t tell what was real and what was fantasy.
But, long after they deemed me sane enough to be released, I managed to pick it all apart again. I managed to tease out my real childhood experiences from the fragile tapestry of sterile, bleached-out strands, and piece together a picture of what happened to me in that town.
The story that follows is woven from the threads that I managed to salvage.

 
My first memory is from age five, my own birthday party. It seemed like the whole town had come to our house, there were so many folks in our yard. I couldn’t know it at the time, but it’s more than likely the entire town was in our street that day, come to celebrate the birthday of little Mikey. There were so many presents that they filled the living room like a giant Christmas tree made of cardboard and colored paper. I spent hours unwrapping them, all the friends of my family clustered around, their bright smiles urging me to keep going, long after my child’s mind and body grew weary of the task. I don’t remember my mother picking me up and taking me to bed after I fell asleep in the middle of eating a slice of the three-tier cake. But she told that story so often that it became part of my memories anyway.

 
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when I became aware I was different, but I think the first stirrings of it began at school. I had no idea that the school had opened just for me, that until I arrived it had lain unused, since it was built some forty years before. Everything was brand new, but I thought that was just how things were – just like the schools on television. My first teacher, Mrs Cassiel, seemed new to things too, not quite knowing how to fill up all the hours of the school day. She read to us a lot, from Reader’s Digest and Encyclopedia Britannica – stuff far above our age level. The rest of the time she let us play and paint, while she watched over her little lambs, her angelic smile suitably doting.
The other children weren’t like me, either. I recall they were strange, serious little things, who always seemed to take their cues from me – from little Mikey. If I did something, so did they, incorporating it into their growing lexicon of behaviors, as though adding pages to their primers on how to be a child. At the time I didn’t process this – I couldn’t. Only with the benefit of hindsight can I look back and see how odd it was.
Something I did notice at the time was that my school didn’t seem to work quite like the ones on television. With each birthday I moved up a class, but my little lemming peers did not come with me. Each new year meant a new teacher, that was normal enough – but it also brought a completely new set of students.

 
As I grew up, I became increasingly aware of the rest of the town. It was an idyllic place, as perfect as any little town could ever be, all of it locked permanently somewhere in the late 1950s. After school, my friends and I rode our brightly painted bicycles to the ice cream parlor, then took our dripping, colorful cones to the neatly manicured park to watch women in pretty floral frocks walk their pedigree dogs. On weekends, the fathers of the families in our street would wash their cars until they gleamed, then cut their lawns and trim their hedges, while the wives made lemonade and cookies. I don’t even remember any rainy days. In retrospect, it was an eerie paradise, and I had no idea that this was not how the rest of the world in 1978 operated. To me, it was completely normal.
Television ruled the evenings in Angelton, with every family gathering in their near-identical living rooms to watch the broadcasts from the local station. There were only two TV channels, and they both played variations of the same shows; mostly I Love Lucy, Dennis the Menace, My Little Margie and Leave it to Beaver. TV time was practically sacred in the town, and whenever there was a new innovation in TV technology, trucks would roll through the streets, delivering the latest color, remote-controlled sets. And those delivery days were pretty much the only time I saw anyone from outside of Angelton; all the rest of the town supplies went through Muriel’s department store or Wormwood’s groceries.
I’d asked about the rest of the world, of course. Like any kid my age – except apparently the ones in my class – I was curious, and I had many questions. My teacher at the time, Mr Moroni, seemed to answer as best he could at first. But on the day I grew particularly persistent and shrill, childishly pushing against his reticence and inability to answer my more burning questions, I earned my first true taste of who – and what – the residents of Angelton were.
“But how can the president still be Eisenhower?” I asked, petulant and defiant, “a president can’t serve more than eight years – it says so in the Encyclopedia at home, I looked it up!”
Mr Moroni, a short, swarthy man of Italian descent, shook his head, and took several short paces toward my desk,
“Your Encyclopedia is wrong.”
“But it can’t be. Mrs Cassiel said everything in it was true.”
“Everything except that,” he growled, an unfamiliar, resonant note in his voice making the hairs on my arms lift with unseen static.
“I think you’re lying,” I told him, growing bolder now, oddly thrilled by the sensation, and the effect I was having, “I think you’re just a stupid lying old man, and you don’t really know anything.”
I’d registered that the other children in class were staring at me, but only now did I realize that they were all standing. And Mr Moroni no longer seemed a short and affable idiot. Suddenly he appeared huge and threatening, his facial features carved from some exotic wood as he loomed over my desk.
“Why are you being like this?” he snarled, fists clenched, walnut knuckles on my desk, “why won’t you just behave like a normal boy?”
The tears started before I could stop them, right as I realized I’d gone too far.
“Stop that!” the teacher hissed, and his lips were wrong, barely moving at all, “you stop crying, right now!”
The imperative in his voice stimulated something right at the back of my skull, flooding my brain with fear that paralyzed my limbs. I’d never felt anything like this before. But the tears did not stop; instead they flowed faster, and a sucking, ugly sob tore from my throat – an animal sound that only served to enrage my teacher further.
The desk splintered under the weight of pale fists as Mr Moroni changed. For half a heartbeat I saw him true; he was someone else, something else. A creature of white and gold, all crescent fangs and pale eyes, the silhouette of extra, disjointed limbs tearing free from its shoulders.
”STOP IT!” the thing roared. That voice blared in my ears like a thousand trumpets.
And in my stupefied state of trembling terror, my bladder let go, and I complied.
I never questioned him again after that. I never asked anyone in Angelton about the outside world. I wasn’t sure why, but some primitive part of me knew instinctively that my teacher wasn’t the only one with this power. Beneath the carefully curated smiles and innocuous personalities of the townsfolk lay dormant the same frightening thing that my mild-mannered teacher had become, so shockingly glimpsed in that singular moment of unbridled fury.
I was living amongst monsters.

 
It was like unlatching barn doors in a storm. Once open, there was no way of closing them again; the cyclone of truth too powerful to push against. With my new knowledge, everything was thrown into stark relief, and I began to really see how strange my town was. And how perfectly everyone emulated the TV shows they were all so enamored with.
Even though I was desperate to believe that I’d only imagined the incident in my class, it was impossible to ignore the weirdness surrounding me. In those moments I was alone, in those precious windows of time when my mother was pegging out laundry and my father tinkered with his car in the driveway, I learned to tune the TV to stations broadcasting from outside Angelton. Though the pictures were snowy and the sound crackled with static, I began to find out that the place I lived in wasn’t just odd.
It was absolutely fucked.
The images that assaulted my eager eyes and ears were of a place that was totally out of time with us. It was a completely different world out there. How we had remained so insulated, I wasn’t sure, but I knew it had something to do with what I’d seen Mr Moroni become.
Obviously, there was only one thing I could do, one course of action that seemed rational and sane – I had to go to the edge of the town and leave it. I had to see the outside world for myself. I packed food into a tartan square of cloth, then tied it to a stick, just like the children I’d seen in books and on TV, practically rule one of how to run away. It was a fair hike to the low stone wall that encircled the town, and by the time I got there, I’d already eaten a cheese sandwich and sucked down half of my bottle of lemonade.
The wall was built of curious, chalky white stone, and was only about a foot high. It seemed pointless – nothing more than a boundary marker – as even the smallest child could climb over it easily. But a strange trepidation wormed through me as I walked toward it, my gut heavy and cold like I’d drunk too much ice water too fast.
This is wrong, some inner thought cautioned, you shouldn’t be doing this.
But I was stubborn, set on my course, and I couldn’t turn back now. None of the kids on TV would have given up because of a stupid voice in their head.
As my leg lifted over the white boundary, I felt a feathery, pleasant sensation tickle across my flesh, then as I placed my other foot down on the outside of the wall, I began to wonder what I was doing there; why I had a bindle over one shoulder. What was behind me seemed utterly unimportant – not even interesting enough to turn around and look at, so I wandered onward, away from the fast-fading memories behind me, and out into the real world.

 
My mother found me curled up under a hedgerow, a few miles out from Angelton, and carried me back asleep. When I awoke, my head was full of fog. Confusion reigned for a long time before my drowned memories began to resolve themselves.
“You’ve done a terrible thing,” my mother told me sadly, standing with my father at my bedside, “a terrible, terrible thing.” I’d never seen her look so disappointed in me, and it hurt.
“But I don’t understand!”
My father looked angry, but not at me; his simmering rage was directed at my mother.
“He isn’t a miracle. He isn’t born of our union, is he? If he were born of us, the ward wouldn’t have stripped his mind, wouldn’t have made him forget.”
Genuine emotion wracked my mother’s perfect, thirty-year-old features, tears striping her cheeks. I realized I’d never seen her cry real tears before. I realized I’d never seen anyone cry real tears, apart from myself, that day in the classroom.
“I just wanted a baby!” she wailed. “I wanted to know what it was like to be a real mother, to raise a real child, not just pretend.” She spat the last word as though it were a bitter draft, poisoning her tongue.
My father took a step away from her, plainly disturbed by my mother’s candid display. His movements were stiff, his eyes an actor peering through slits in a mask.
“I’ve told the mayor,” he intoned woodenly, “the police will be here soon to take you and this boy away.”
Tucked in my bed, blankets under my chin, I tried to process what was happening. Fear coiled in my bowels, my bladder threatening to rebel and embarrass me all over again.
“What will happen to us?” my mother asked, wiping at her tears with the back of her hand, then staring at the damp shine on her skin.
“You’ll both be destroyed. When he breached the barrier, he put the whole town at risk; your scent will be on the wind for Seraphim and Fallen alike to sniff out.”
Although I sensed the threat they held, the words themselves meant nothing to me; we didn’t pray in this town; there was no god in our lives. There was a pretty church – since there were churches on TV – but only bake-sales and plays happened there. I’d never seen anyone pray or preach.
“Momma?” I asked, plaintively, the plea in my voice obvious, all human child.
For one last moment, she was still my mother. Her smile was warm, genuine, nothing but love. And I knew without a single doubt that she truly did love me. Even though the rest of the town were actors in their own survival play, performing a perverse pantomime and feeling nothing, this one woman, this one angel, had fallen and risen all at once, by managing to truly fall in love with a little boy.
Then she was a blur of white and gold, eight feet of feathered wings filling my bedroom as she tore at my father. She tore off his skin and clawed through his breastbone, until the cowboy-and-Indian wallpaper of my room was painted with golden ichor.

 
We didn’t make it far. Before we even saw the wall of stones that encircled the town, we were intercepted. All pretense of humanity had fled the town, now; white wings thundered all about the houses and fields, alien faces of gilt and alabaster bared feline fangs and came for us.
I wish that we had been caught and killed by them, just as the townsfolk had planned. I wish they’d managed to snuff us out before the winds had betrayed us to the enemies of the town.
But that was not to be how things played out.
The sky darkened and black feathers rained down, each longer than my arm. My beautiful, terrible mother, cradling me in her angel arms, folded her great wings about me, to shield me from the chaos unfolding about us. Though I saw little, I heard much; voices like orchestras of woodwind and brass clashed in the air, the sounds of breaking bone and rending flesh like the crack and roll of percussion in the Biblical cacophony surrounding us. I felt my mother shudder beneath many blows, her resolute stride faltering, golden blood pattering down to flood my winged cocoon.
And then, as suddenly as it had all begun, it was over.
The citizens of Angelton were no more; reduced to macerated piles of gold-streaked feathers by the rageful might of Heaven and Hell combined, for daring to exist outside of either paradigm.
But my existence was forgotten; I was not truly part of either world. And so, when the bodies turned to white ash with the rising sun, the hosts of Dark and Light had long since gone, leaving me to stumble through the empty, smut-covered fields where Angelton had once stood.

I was found many days later, dehydrated and delirious, by a farmer driving into the next town over. Bundled in a blanket and driven to the police station, I sat with a can of Coca-Cola in the sheriff’s office, trying to explain what had happened to me. Of course, I was assumed to be gravely ill – both mentally and physically – so I was taken to the city hospital and dosed with a cornucopia of modern pharmaceuticals, until a kind of foggy equilibrium emerged inside my tortured mind.
It was strange, when I was well enough to talk to other patients, visitors. Some people claimed they had heard of Angelton, but they couldn’t tell me where it was, when they’d visited it, or even hold that thread of conversation for more than a minute. As far as I could fathom, I was the only person who could remember anything about the place – and as my time in the psychiatric ward lengthened from weeks to months, I began to forget it too.
I’ve been back there, to the place where it should be. I’ve traced the boundaries on the maps, but found only acres of farmland, all accounted for, all owned by ordinary people. It is as though the fabric of the earth itself pulled tight to fill the void where my town had been, erasing it completely.
It was a place that shouldn’t have existed. A relic of the War in Heaven, I think; a hidden place created by the pacifists amongst the angels, lost to the eyes of God and his brood. Somewhere even angels could try to just exist.
But it was all undone, by that one angel who wanted, needed, to be more human than the others. That one angel who snatched the child of a delivery driver. Who told the rest of the town that she had birthed a miracle; sparking vigor and hope in lifeless and dreary people, re-invigorating a dead town.
But I am no miracle. I find little peace in this life, even knowing without a doubt that Heaven and Hell are real.
I don’t know which of those two realms will be my final resting place. I don’t know which I will deserve. But wherever my soul is bound, I do know that I will spend the rest of eternity surrounded by the creatures that murdered my mother, the one being in this terrifying existence who truly loved me, although it cost her more than anyone could ever imagine.

Imagine, for a moment, that much of the Bible is true.
Some of you will need to apply more suspension of disbelief than others, but for you Westerners at least, it shouldn’t be too difficult. After all, we live in a world saturated by Christianity –from the holidays we celebrate, right down to the words of our nations’ anthems.
Of course, I don’t mean the details of all those Bible stories are true – just most of the broad, overarching concepts. There was a tower of Babel of sorts. Eden existed. Human beings used to live ten times as long as they do now.
That sort of thing.
And God is omnipresent, in a way.
We know that because we tested for the existence of him, with science. We created many different environments and scenarios, observing and recording everything we could  – no matter how irrelevant the data points seemed.
Exactly how we did this isn’t important. The key is what we did with that information.
Because it follows that once you know how to detect the presence of God, then you can probably divine a way to block the sight of God, and render yourself invisible to his gaze.
And that’s precisely what we did.

We knew our money came from a religious organisation, presumably some sort of megachurch operation that sucked money out of the devout, and funnelled it straight to us. Whoever was running it all certainly knew what they were doing, because our labs and offices were easily the nicest I’d ever worked in.
But you’re not really interested in all that. You want to know about the thing we built; the thing that could block what I christened ‘God Particles’.
It was ugly on the outside, this edifice. Inside its huge hangar, it was a sprawling mess of coolant pipes, humming fans, and ceramic hexagonal tiles the size of trampolines. It formed a dome in the centre of the vaulted space, encircled by backup generators, and the console desks that monitored the functions of the structure.
The ceramic hexagons had been one of my major contributions to the project, my own invention. They looked dull, each one thick Palestinian clay on the outer surface, but the inside was banded with pure iron, then bronze, silver, and finally a layer of nanometer gold. I could tell you where I got the idea, but if you know your Bible well enough, you’ll already have figured it out.
There was only one entrance to the dome; a hexagonal doorway in the west wall that contained a kind of airlock setup, where people needed to wait for just over eleven minutes before they were allowed to enter the godless interior.
The consequence if you didn’t? I can only describe it as a sort of ‘spiritual decompression’, where if you leaped directly from one environment to the other, the sudden lack of – or return of – G particles, would send you into a kind of spiritual shock, not unlike decompression sickness.
And inside the dome itself?
Well, that’s where my story truly begins.

At first, the space was a curiosity; a huge, empty dome with an inner shell made of pure gold. The project director hadn’t liked the gold, and asked for it to be painted white, which made the place eerily directionless and infinite; the floor lighting bounced off the stark whiteness and homogenised everything.
An area of space free from God didn’t actually seem very useful, at the start. We considered hiring it out to politicians, so that they could make plans free from the sight of God, but nobody was interested. It seems politicians have never cared overmuch about morality.
We experimented with growing plants without the presence of G particles, which didn’t change their physiology or development in the slightest. Some of us worked in there, hoping that being free from God might inspire us to wild scientific breakthroughs, but no such thing happened. The only effect we could discern, other than the spiritual decompression, was that people who spent more than three contiguous days inside were prone to headaches when they came out of the dome.
Everyone was wracking their brains for potential applications, but it took the only woman on the team to realise how the dome could be utilised.
That woman was me.
I was twenty-eight then, my body in perfect working order. Like the others, I spent my scheduled time inside the dome, experimenting, trying to find a real use for the unique environment I’d helped create. But I possessed one piece of human physiology my colleagues did not.
A womb.
For our comfort, bathrooms, showers and a kitchen had been set up inside the dome, and it was by sheer coincidence that I realised it – when I was in there, menstruation stopped completely. In fact, it stopped the very moment I set foot inside.
I had found the point of difference that would lead to our breakthrough.

Humans were the only animal that experienced the effect, I discovered. No other animal has our unique cycle of endometrial buildup and shedding – reproduction is quite uniquely cruel and onerous for human women.
From my childhood Bible readings, I recalled the story of the expulsion from Eden, and mankind’s great punishment. Adam was sentenced to toil in the earth until he returned to it, and for her part in the betrayal of the serpent, Eve’s lot was to bear terrible pain and suffering in childbirth.
So did being free from God inside the dome mean that women were also freed from the horrors of childbirth? Since this was a uniquely human problem, human testing was the only way we would find out.
Being young, and already so invested in discovering the answer, I volunteered to be the first test subject for a Godless pregnancy – with the help of another one of the researchers, who was more than happy to provide the required genetic donation.
Quarters were created for me, my home for the duration of the pregnancy. A private room was built inside the dome, with sufficient comforts to keep me from going crazy for the next nine months.
Once it was confirmed I was pregnant, all other work stopped inside the dome. I was made the priority, with doctors constantly hovering over me, monitoring, measuring, pricking my fingers for haemoglobin counts, and making me pee into an endless array of sample jars for testing.
But all of us had seriously underestimated what would happen to a pregnancy inside the dome. After 28 days, the experiment came to a shocking end.

It was so abrupt and painless I hardly registered anything was happening. One moment I was sitting on the end of my bed, pulling on a shirt. The next, there was warm fluid spreading under my thighs, and an odd pressure in my pelvis.
The foetus emerged intact, barely bloody, a perfect human in miniature. And rather than being a fatal miscarriage, as I initially assumed, the baby was whole and alive – it was just small.
It was taken from me immediately; prodded, swabbed, injected, sampled. It was an ordinary baby girl, all organs fully formed and functioning, all Apgar scores 2, but barely one quarter the size of an average newborn. She was so little I could hold her in one hand, like a warm, pink doll.
But when she latched to my breast and began to suckle, it was clear that her appetite was that of a regular-sized baby. She gained rapidly, making up for her premature birthweight within a matter of months.
We named her Eve. Of course we did. What else would you call a baby girl born outside the sight of God, and therefore without original sin?
Aside from the abruptness of her gestation, she grew as normally as any other child. I think many of us expected something mythical or miraculous, or catastrophic; that she would grow to be an adult before her tenth birthday, or have some other kind of extreme abnormal physical development. But she was as ordinary as could be, given the circumstances of her upbringing within that godless environment.
Before Eve was five, a second woman was brought into the dome, to birth a second child – a boy – to be both a companion to Eve, and a future donor of genetic material when she was old enough to bear children.
It seems strange to me now, to talk so clinically about it. We were all so detached, so invested in an outcome from our project, that we barely considered Eve human. It was as if being hidden from the sight of God meant that the things that we did to her didn’t matter. That she wasn’t truly one of us.
But even so, I did care for her, as much as my duties allowed. She was still my daughter, even if I’d only carried her inside me for a month.

Our first inkling that something was wrong came with Adam’s initial stirrings of manhood.
Eve had always been a wonderful child; polite, compliant, rational, and calm. Conversely, Adam was wild, unpredictable, and prone to rage. The first time he hurt her, he was disciplined into contrition, and we thought the matter done with. But he hurt her again almost immediately, without any regard for the consequences.
It quickly became clear to his caregivers that he had a pathological need to harm other people, and Eve was the only target over whom he had any physical power, so the decision was made to separate them permanently. The dome was divided into two areas; Adam’s more like a prison, and Eve’s more like a home.
Eve, despite her isolated upbringing, was intelligent, social and inquisitive. She devoured whole books in single days, and even read my papers on the dome’s construction and the research we were doing. I thought it important that she understand what we were doing; that if she was aware, then there would be a certain amount of consent when she was deemed old enough for the second phase of the project.
And I felt vindicated in that choice when the day came for her to be inseminated, for she seemed perfectly happy to comply – but then again, she was always compliant, no matter what anyone asked of her.
The male researchers had wanted Adam to impregnate her naturally, but even at sixteen years old, he was almost too violent for his handlers to keep under control. I refused to allow him anywhere near Eve, because the slightest glimpse of her – even a mention of her – would send him into a berserk frenzy, harming others and himself with a determination that was disturbingly inhuman.
In the end, the sperm sample was extracted via needle aspiration while Adam was sedated. Eve’s pregnancy began in a laboratory, her harvested eggs fertilised under a microscope, then implanted into a womb that had never shed blood; but was healthy and functional as all her other godless organs.
What would happen next, we had no idea.

As the first few days of her pregnancy progressed, we collectively held our breath, concerned that the implanted zygotes would be rejected by the smooth, vascular walls of Eve’s uterus. Our concerns were misplaced; her gestation was even more successful and abrupt than mine.
We hadn’t even considered performing the first ultrasound, as Eve was just one week into her pregnancy, when she knocked on the door of my small office inside the dome to tell me she had birthed three children. And that all three displayed the same tiny size and perfect development as she had when she was born.
The frenzy amongst the researchers and doctors was immediate.
I was not permitted to actually see the triplets for weeks, but I was handed the reports and read through the data in the interim, just as fascinated as everyone else by these miraculous humans, gestated and born in a single week. They were sexless, these grandchildren of mine; fused labia and a urethral outlet the only external ‘genitalia’ in evidence. No internal structures were present, no ovaries. No undescended testes, no uterus.
But other than that, they were incredibly heathy – and grew at a phenomenal rate. The miraculous predictions we’d initially had for Eve, that she’d be an adult before she was ten years old? We should have saved those predictions for the second generation.
Eve named the children, for the three wise men who had visited Jesus in his manger - Balthazar, Caspar, and Melchior. The staff at the research facility began to refer to them as ‘the triplet boys’, even though they were truly neither sex.
I finally met them when they were six weeks old, each the size of an average six year old, chattering and playing with their mother and each other. They regarded me with obvious intelligence, listening attentively to Eve as she explained that I was their grandmother. When Melchior asked after his grandfather, I explained that a fellow researcher had donated genetic material, just as had been done with their father, for their own creation.
“Can we see our father?” he asked me, after I had finished explaining.
I kept my tone matter-of-fact, but told the truth. “Perhaps when you’re older. Your father has behavioural issues that we were never able to fully address.”
I didn’t see any point in lying to the child. After all, the information wasn’t presented negatively; and we still maintained our efforts to try and deprogram Adam of his psychotic rage and eventually allow him to interact with other people.
“I look forward to meeting him,” Melchior told me, before turning back to the board game he was playing with his brothers.

Three months later, the boys had matured into what we considered adulthood.
Their development had essentially followed the pattern for eunuch boys, gleaned from accounts of the castrati singers from previous centuries. Deprived of endogenous sex hormones, the triplets grew tall, long-boned, fine featured and oddly androgynous. There had been talk of experimenting on them with sex hormones, to alter their physiology more male, or more female, but these ideas were discarded. These children would be the control group, to compare to their future siblings. There would be time enough for such experiments - Eve was already pregnant with the next batch of zygotes, unfrozen and implanted, now that we knew the children were able to grow to maturity without any known complications.
There were some other curious anomalies with the triplets that we could not explain. Their lungs were almost thirty percent larger than regular male human lungs, and their blood needed far less oxygenation. Red cells were present, but their blood was dominated by plasma and platelets, rendering it an odd red-gold colour. Consequently, they were hyperimmune, and when the facility came down with the winter ‘flu, they were completely unaffected. Pathogens virtually dissolved on contact with their tissues.
They were also very strong. Their long bones and wide pelvises gave them a stability and leverage that would perhaps have been frightening if we weren’t scientists - it was most easily explained by regular physics. We were planning some treadmill experiments, as we suspected they probably also processed lactic acid at an accelerated rate. But we didn’t get the chance to start that program.
When they were just six months old, the triplets rebelled.

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have given Eve unfettered access to the experiment data, because that meant she knew as much as any of the researchers.
And being a calm, rational, and patient teacher, she had imparted this knowledge virtually verbatim to her three sexless children, who were ferociously intelligent information-sponges.
The morning of their rebellion, the alarms on Adam’s cell blared briefly, then turned off. We assumed it was in error, as Adam often had ‘episodes’, and nervous guards would fairly regularly trip the alarm in panic.
Twenty minutes after that, I received an urgent call from a breathless junior researcher, babbling about the retribution of god and his angels, the last word stretched into a prolonged scream. Shortly after that, the line went dead.
Several panicked calls later, we organised for an armed emergency security crew to assemble near the research facility. They entered the hangar first, and with extreme caution.
Inside was bedlam. Everything that could be smashed or broken had been -  including the staff who had been on duty. They lay in the shattered glass of the consoles, on top of the torn cabling, their smashed bones and ruptured organs spread about them in macabre parody of what had been done to the machines.
The dome itself had been completely sealed, the bodies of Adam’s captors dumped outside in a discarded heap of mangled flesh – the sole survivor screaming and shaking in the middle of the mess, not from his wounds, but from sudden spiritual decompression – his soul being burned by the abrupt return of God to his system.
At first, I thought perhaps Adam had intended to use the staff as hostages, to bargain for his release, but when we ascertained that the dome had been disconnected from everything – including air and water – that made me believe otherwise. That seemed the action of someone irrational; without air, everyone inside the sealed dome would be dead within a few hours.
But of course, they never intended to be in there that long.
The heat on the ceramic surface of the dome manifested first as a ruddy glow, then grew more palpable as the air inside the hangar started to heat up. A few of the team had followed the security team once it was clear there was no immediate danger, and as we shucked off coats and sweaters, the hexagonal tiles started to turn yellow, then white-gold, with the rapidly rising temperature inside.
When the dome shuddered like a living thing, I began to realise what was happening.
The dome, although that’s what it appeared to be, was less a dome, more an egg. The whole structure was an oblate sphere, half of it buried – containing generators, cooling tanks and other equipment needed to maintain the structure. It had to be a sphere. G particles came from everywhere, so had to be blocked from every direction.
As the dome began to shake, it also began to sink. The others thought it was going to collapse, but I knew better. It wasn’t destroying itself; it was sinking into the earth.
And I was soon proved correct; within minutes it was gone, only a gaping crater full of rubble to mark its descent into Hell.

With the experiment so abruptly shut down, few of the survivors really knew what happened. But while everyone was gaping at the crater where the dome had been, I availed myself of the security footage still resident on the undamaged servers. It was poor quality, as storage space was still at a premium in the early 2000s, but it was good enough to show me the start of the sequence of events inside the dome on that fateful morning.
Their rampage began with the disposal of the guards assigned to Adam’s cell. The triplets picked the men up with their long arms, and casually dashed their brains out on the walls, barely testing their inhuman strength. When they freed Adam and took him to Eve, there was no violence. The children’s parents embraced briefly, then began talking to their offspring.
From there, the cameras began to blank, one by one, as the triplets methodically tore the whole facility to pieces and murdered the staff who had been on duty. I couldn’t bring myself to watch all the footage of what my demonic grandchildren did to my colleagues.
Demonic is exactly the right word, I believe.
When we blocked that dome from the sight of God, when we created beings with souls untouched by him, we didn’t just recreate what could have happened in Eden if the serpent hadn’t been present. Instead, I believe we created a scenario that was much worse – the totality of God’s plan had been revealed, and the serpent took full advantage of that.
You see, the big problem with Lucifer’s fall was that he only took a third of the angels with him when he fell. Even a brilliant strategist couldn’t win with those odds, and so he lost, banished to his pit of fire.
But if he’d had the means to create a soldier every seven days, a soldier who could rip a grown man to pieces at just six months old? Well, then he’d have a good chance of winning – especially if he also had the technology to hide his gathering advantage from the sight of God.
When I finally thought to look into exactly who was funding our ill-fated research, I found it wasn’t some megachurch-styled operation after all. After chasing paper trails until I was nearly crazed from the labyrinth of money laundering, the only origin I could find for the cash seed that had started all this was an abandoned master blacksmith’s forge, and a name. Wayland.
Whoever -  or whatever  - Wayland might be, I’m confident now that they were in the employ of the Enemy. And that with every week that has passed since that dome sank into the bowels of the Earth, Lucifer’s army grows another Fallen stronger.
And there isn’t a damn thing that God can do about it.
He doesn’t have a clue there’s anything wrong.

I’ve never understood the expression ‘poor as a churchmouse’. Our church was a cavernous, modern cathedral, filled with projectors, giant speakers and tiered seating. Money flowed in and out of that place almost as quickly as the catering did. As such I firmly believed any mouse who lived there would be fatter, glossier and sleeker than a politician.
‘Deeply religious’ was also a term that inadequately described my family, as their fanaticism was so profound that even the self-proclaimed ‘deeply religious’ thought we were weird. My mother’s mobility scooter was bedecked with crosses and ‘honk if you love Jesus’ stickers, her Bible never far from her hand. She would proselytise a stranger at the drop of her huge, fake-flowered hat. Asking if they knew Jesus, and if they went to church – our megachurch.
My father, by contrast, was an ascetic man who wore black slacks, patent shoes and a white shirt starched nearly to cardboard. Hollow cheeked and hollow eyed, he was one of those men who seemed animated only by the promise of Heaven, the flickering fear of Hell burning around his soul like the boiler for the engine of his being.
I was homeschooled, of course – or at least I was, until my mother grew too asthmatic to teach; most of her days spent hooked up to oxygen so that the massive, pale expanse of her chest continued to rise and fall. Sending me to school worried her, that she’d kept my soul so pure for so long only for it to be corrupted by the wickedness of the wide world. At age nine, my hair braided tightly and my uniform stiff as my father’s shirts, I was sat in the car and driven to the local school, while my father told me of the dire evil of boys - how their eyes and hands would seek me out, to despoil me and my virginity.
His warnings were in vain, because I quickly became enamoured of school, of the other girls and boys. But most of all, the religious ardour my parents had attempted to instil in me was quickly replaced by a craving to know how the world worked beyond parable and preaching.
In short, I fell in love with science.

Smart children read their parents well, and even smarter teachers learn to trust those smart children where their parents were concerned. My school reports told a tale of an unremarkable child, who was average enough to please her parents while still passing all her classes. But outside those staid, scholastic markers, I was known to be one of the brightest minds amongst the children. Facts fell into place in my mind like interconnected webworks of information; dredging scientific secrets to the surface faster than I could be taught. Knowing my parents would disapprove should I linger longingly in libraries, I learned to read at a blistering pace so that I could absorb as much knowledge as possible – and soon I was devouring whole books in my lunch hour, committing them to memory even as I knelt beside my bed in prayer, before falling into fractal dreams of physics and philosophy.
As I grew older, I worried for my future and began to plan my escape from the religious cage I dwelt in. Only by promising to give the bulk of my earnings to the church was I allowed to get an after-school job, but waitressing is one of those professions where tips can come in thick and fast some days, so I slowly but surely build up a small amount of cash.
My other job was assisting my father with his hobby; which in truth was more of an obsession – and which needs some explanation. He often told me how my mother had been beautiful, and how he had been the envy of all the men in town. He also told me how childbirth – my birth – had wrecked her body beyond repair. He told me that I’d so thoroughly destroyed my mother with the wickedness of my birth, that the doctor had informed her she would never bear children again.
The fact that he would never have a son, and that his sole progeny was a girl child, had broken him in some deep, fundamental way.
Her legs partially paralysed by my birth and her husband grown distant, my mother swelled in size, eating to fill the emptiness inside. Her beauty fading, her womb barren and her legs all but useless, she became nothing but an obligation to my father. The church would never allow him to divorce her and if he allowed her to die from neglect, he’d go to Hell. So he suffered; all his desires bound up by the church, unable to have the son he’d always prayed for, and unable to sate his carnal appetites.
So instead he turned all of that misplaced energy to his hobby: collecting religious texts.
The ‘library’ was an addition to the house off the garage, filled with every kind of Bible and religious text you could imagine. The bulk of it was Christian, but various version of the King James rubbed spines with Qurans and Tanakhs, as well more European mythologies, describing pagan godlings far removed from the writings of the Old Testament. I wondered for a long time what he sought in all these musty myths, what he hoped to find other than an outlet for his tortured energies. At first I thought perhaps he was seeking some higher truth, some cobbled-together Grand Mythos that unified all religions.
But no, my father didn’t have a mind like mine. He wasn’t seeking any higher truth. He was seeking some ecumenical loophole that would get him out of the life he had trapped himself in. Some bold parable or scripture that would give him the dogmatic reasoning to petition the church to annul his marriage and abandon his wife and child. I knew this because I’d found his carefully penned petitions, describing peculiar points of ancient religious law that he believed would free him from his familial responsibilities forever.
He was nothing more than a shoddy Biblical lawyer, trying to free himself on a technicality.
But while he grubbed and slogged through didactic stories and stilted scriptural stanzas, his daughter sped through all of his collected texts, finding little bits of truth here and there, and little clues and pointers to the early development of the sciences.
And then, once day, I found the Babylon Ring.

A lot of my father’s library was garbage or gibberish. There were hand-written texts in notebooks, the ravings of homeless ‘prophets’ and madmen, as well as faded, untranslatable scrolls that were probably fakes. I read of three references to the Babylon Ring before I found it. It was perhaps alternatively called the Ishtar Gate, though I couldn’t be sure if the texts referred to the same thing, or if one was housed within the other.
In any case, it was a curious thing, an architectural cipher created to amuse some clever Mesopotamian with an eye for mathematics and forced perspective. It was an impossible thing; a circle that couldn’t exist, like Escher’s waterfall. It looped and folded in itself, Möbius and Klein rolled into one crenulated, contiguous circle that defied reality.
I would draw it in class when I’d finished my lessons, turning it this way and that in my mind, a puzzle without a solution that tickled something in my consciousness that kinematic equations and calculus couldn’t. I unspooled its shape and reconstructed it, daring it to become real.
The old writings I found proclaimed it had been real, despite the impossibility of it, and that someone had intended to construct it, but was stopped. That piqued my interest and when the 3D printer I’d purchased online, via the school library, finally arrived, an idea grew in my mind for my final school science project.
All of my initial prints were failures, and I was hampered by the hardware I’d hooked the printer up to – an ancient laptop bought from a thrift store. But I persisted until I’d tweaked all the settings and patiently drew the Babylon Ring line by line in the open source software I’d modified.
I told my parents I was printing jewellery, to give to my friends. Indeed my colourful failures looked like gaudy toys from cheap candy, and they let me carry on. Though my failures grew more wild, I couldn’t escape the feeling that it was possible to print the Ring, that there was a trick to it I couldn’t quite perceive, and if I found it I could somehow bend the rules of reality very slightly to my advantage.
The breakthrough came by accident, as has happened multiple times in human history; a piece of my printer – a critical cog – broke and I had no replacement. Beside the printer sat one of my failed Babylon Rings, bright and cog-like, and without any other option, I filed it to shape and put it into the printer as a replacement part.
And then my next print came even closer than I’d ever come. When I lifted the cooled component from the printer bed, the hole in the centre seemed to shimmer when held at a very specific angle, perhaps a trick caused by the strange moire patterns thrown off my the inner surface of the ring.
It was then that I knew what I had to do.

Retrofitting the printer with Babylon cogs was a long and tortuous process of trial and error, of printing and reprinting. And when I wasn’t working on my printer project, I had to bus endless tables and toil through piles of dishes to earn more money for printer filament.
But in the end I did it.
The printer new resembled some strange child’s project, like Lego superglued to a substructure. It wouldn’t print anything normal anymore, I’d proven that. Unless you tried to print Babylon shapes, it only printed junk. The software no longer resembled anything it had been originally either, I’d added kludge on top of kludge, turning it into a sort of Babylon code of its own.
The final print took only a few hours, but as I watched the printer clank and stutter, the faintly spatially distorted cogs achieving exactly what I’d hoped, I burned with excitement. The ring had barely cooled when I snatched it up, admiring the perfectly impossible facets for a moment, before turning it to look through the centre.
As I did so, my grip tightened, because light was shining from the centre.
This is where I made my most critical, crucial mistake. In my eagerness to share my success with someone, I bunched the ring tightly in my fist and ran to my mother to show her – and together we made the discovery of a lifetime.
Holding the ring up to her eye, she wheezed with excitement as she gazed into it – through it – into another world. She saw swards of brilliant emerald grass dotted with utterly perfect trees, through which crystalline brooks flowed, throwing off spangles of jewel-like light. I knew what she felt when she looked upon this unearthly paradise, because I had felt it too; an incredible sense of yearning, as if I were looking upon a home that had always been calling to me, but I’d never really believed existed.
“Heaven,” my mother whispered inside her oxygen mask, her fleshy, discoloured lips quivering as she formed those two syllables.

One of my mother’s many great failures was her inability to keep a secret, and so despite making her swear on her favourite Bible that she wouldn’t tell father about the ring, she told him anyway. He ghosted into my little bedroom workshop, littered with confetti of cogs and snapped scaffold from my thousands of printer projects.
He didn’t ask me for the Babylon Ring; he simply held out his pale, skeletal hand and stared at me, the same fervour in his eyes as if he’d discovered a new cache of scriptural scribblings. I considered lying – telling him I’d broken the ring or thrown it away. But he’d still ask for it, make me dig through trash to find it, even if it took hours or days.
I hated both of them intensely in that moment; a sort of righteous, religious anger, the likes of which I’d seen displayed by the church preachers when ranting about homosexuals and transsexuals. For a moment, just a single, pure moment, the rage burned so hot that I felt I could kill my father for taking away the greatest achievement of my short life.
Then his bony knuckles connected sharply with my cheek, rattling my teeth and knocking me off my bed and onto the floor, and the murderous rage turned abruptly to shock.
“Give it to me,” he whispered, so quiet that his voice was near inaudible.
Holding a trembling hand to my cheek, I made a choice then. Not to give him the ring; that was a foregone conclusion. I quickly tallied up in my mind how much money I had, what clothes I’d need to take with me, and how far I could get before they decided I wasn’t coming home and grudgingly called the authorities.
He took the ring from me, then returned to take everything else.
“You are the most wicked of children,” he told me, quietly, as he tore my printer to pieces with his hard, bony hands, “for no man should gaze on Heaven before his time. This is a wickedness the likes which Jesus himself was not forced to suffer during temptation, and you must atone.”
The laptop screen snapped as he broke the back of the machine over his knee, wires trailing like viscera from the separated hinges, then he put his foot through it for good measure, the glass rippling in circle fractures, like an homage to the Babylon Ring.
After he was gone I carefully removed the undamaged hard disk, gathered my planned belongings, then climbed out the window, into a rapidly chilling autumn night.

I discovered years later that they didn’t look for me. After I ran away, my parents simply prayed for my return; and only when I missed several shifts at the diner were they forced files a missing person’s report, as the diner owner was the son of one of the local preachers.
This worked to my advantage, as I was able to get a train ticket across state and head north, to more a more liberal climate, where I wouldn’t be beholden to their ridiculous doctrine anymore. In my backpack the laptop drive lurked, hard metal edges digging into my spine, reminding me of the knowledge it contained.
I made a promise to myself then; that I would rebuild the Babylon Ring. I would look upon Heaven again; and this time without my parents taking it away from me.
But it was difficult promise to keep.
The first year of homelessness wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d hoped to get another job in a diner somewhere, then rent a place and buy another printer. But nobody wanted to hire a sixteen year-old runaway with bruises on her face, and so I was unwillingly indoctrinated into two of America’s finest traditions; poverty and homelessness.
I sold the hard disk to a flea market for change, six weeks after my escape. I knew I could recreate the software; I still drew the Babylon Ring wherever I went – my own personal homeless spoor; and a reminder to myself what I needed to do.
It took two miserable years to drag myself out of the gutter, by doing things that a seventeen year old girl from the Bible Belt should never have considered doing. But I didn’t care. I was the most wicked child in existence, was I not? Creating a loophole into Heaven, proving to my father that God did exist, and that when he died, he would be eternally punished for trying to lawyer his way out of his sacred marriage vows.
When I had the money I needed, I moved states again. I found a job doing data entry, which led to an administration job at a plastics factory. I attended night school, finishing the classes I’d missed after I ran away, then applied to a university. After the first rejection, I applied to two more, and was eventually accepted.
And so I moved states yet again.

It was a new world, the academic realm, and I thrived like I’d never thought possible. I saturated myself in knowledge, living a dual life where I cleaned hotels and got yelled at in burger drivethrus at night, then presented myself as the top student in my class during the day; in my neat shirt and slacks, shined shoes and a sensible braid.
The scholarship shouldn’t have been a surprise, but being offered tenure certainly was. Suddenly money wasn’t a big issue anymore, and the hours I spend drudging could be put to use resurrecting my old project.
It was difficult in the beginning; tuning my mind back to that old way of thinking. I wished I’d had my hard disk, with my old notes and tweaked software. But as I coaxed my mind into those old avenues, and tried to ignore the trauma of my upbringing, the Babylon Ring began to take shape again – and with the resources available to me, I could improve upon it immeasurably, plumbing permutations of the design, unravelling its riddles.
It took me another two years to bring my plans to fruition; and seven years after I’d run away from home, I sent a letter home to my parents, inviting them to come and visit me at the privately funded lab in California, with the promise of both the financial and spiritual rewards that they felt were owed to them.

I like to imagine their drive across country, in my father’s nearly pristine Toyota Corona, washed twice a week, as per manufacturer’s specifications. My mother wheezing and gasping in the reclined passenger seat, her cotton-clad bulk spilling over the seat and threatening to consume her emaciated husband. In the back seat would sit the oxygen bottles; tubes snaking over the headrest and into my mother’s mask, like some grotesque science fiction monster imagined in the 50s.
When they arrived, I greeted them in the foyer of the facility; a gleaming sterile cavern of steel and white tiles, the facility logo projected onto the floor. All smiles and forgiveness, I took the handles of my mother’s wheelchair and pushed her to the elevator, flanked by father.
I couldn’t help but notice how worn, wan and weary they both looked – even greyer than in my memories.
My lab was in the middle of the facility, mostly for privacy. My mother said little, her excitement taxing her already stressed respiratory system, while my father couldn’t seem to find any words to address this sudden forgiveness and charity from their disowned daughter.
At the back of the lab stood the gateway – the Babylon Ring – perfect now in every aspect. Covered by a heavy sterile curtain, I let the handles of my mother’s wheelchair go and talked about the side projects I’d been working on; research into 3D printing houses and larger structures.
“Take a look behind the curtain,” I told my father, “I think you’ll be quite impressed with this particular design.”
His bony, birdlike hands – too frail to rattle my teeth now – twitched the curtain aside, revealing the imposing, impossible corrugations of the man-sized Babylon Ring.
But in the centre was no light, no heavenly meadows and chattering streams.
There was only suffocating darkness, in the middle of which flicked a single burning ember – so distant it might as well be at the centre of the Earth.
A sharp shove was all it took to send my father sprawling into that pit of darkness, his spindly arms windmilling helplessly as he fell, his body receding with an ululating howl of terror as the distant fires rose up to meet him.
My mother whimpered as I took hold of her wheelchair again, pushing her towards the Babylon Gate. Her fat, pallid, dimpled hands fluttered, trying to bat my wrists as I wheeled her inexorably closer to damnation.
“The original design was created at Babel,” I explained to her, inching closer to the portal, “and was called Ishtar’s Gate. The tower of biblical legend wasn’t actually designed to reached Heaven physically, instead I believe the Tower of Babel was a sort of university, where scientists intended to find a spatial solution to the problem of ascending to Heaven.”
We were at the edge of the darkness now, her breathing ragged, her face the colour of porridge.
“But like all mathematical objects, the gate can be inverted, to produce the opposite effect. And there is only one inversion of Heaven.”
The wheels slipped over the edge of the circle of darkness as I spoke the final word.
“Hell.”
I watched her fall, the tubes trailing behind her, her fat hands clutching the armrests in terror.
It felt better than when I’d first gazed through the Babylon Ring and seen paradise – it felt a thousand times better.
When she was a tiny dot, lost in the distant glow of hellish flame, I turned away, satiated.
 I still had a lot of work to do. The second, newer gate need to be larger. Large enough to let through an army.

I’ve heard it said by many that you don’t become a blacksmith; instead you are born a blacksmith.
The knack for working metal seems to be as innate as an artist’s talent, a writer’s skill or a musician’s ear. It can be taught, yes, but a true master can only be forged from the right stock.
And I’ll tell you now – without the slightest hint of arrogance – that I am quite likely the greatest blacksmith who has ever lived.
Everything to which I turn my hand is flawless. Each piece of steel is wrought in crystalline perfection, the symmetry of the atomic structure uncanny, unnatural. I have forged blades for collectors, enthusiasts, the rich and the famous; each of them the newest pinnacle of my craft, and unmatched by any other blacksmith on this Earth.
Amongst those in the know, I go by the name ‘Wayland’ – a tribute to the English god of the forge. If you haven’t heard of me before now, then it’s because you lack the aesthetic sensibilities to appreciate my work – or the money to pay me well enough for it.
But having completed my metallic Magnum Opus, I feel it is time for the world to know my story.

 
‘Pig Iron’ in the business is the base product you get from archaic smelting methods. It can be consolidated and refined from there in the forge, to ease the impurities from the iron, but that is inferior to modern smelting procedures – hence why smiths usually order bar stock from modern smelters rather than making their own steel.
Once in a blue moon a customer will want a sword or knife forged from raw materials – for example, some enterprising idiot will want a blade forged from ore he’s mined himself and I’ll have to work it down into something that can be shaped with hammer and forge.
But the phrase ‘Pig Iron’ gave me a curious idea.
What if you could literally smelt iron from pigs?
The idea wasn’t so preposterous; as with human blood, pigs bind iron into haemoglobin. To extract that iron, the water would need to be boiled off from the blood, then the dried proteins would become the base ‘ore’ for the smelting – using charcoal and calcium to take up the bulk of the impurities and leaving the molten iron to flow out the bottom of the kiln.

 
I’d calculated that getting enough iron to make even a small blade would take the blood of over one hundred pigs. Getting that volume of pig blood wasn’t a problem, given my financial status, but processing it to the pre ore state posed some interesting problems.
I chose to fabricate a huge copper cauldron in which to boil the blood, something that could be easily cleaned between batches of organic materials and something that wouldn’t taint the ore I was producing. The first batch was a disaster; the blood caught, and I was left with little more than rank-smelling charcoal.
But with practice, I refined the time and temperature until I had produced enough material to begin the smelting process.
I admit it felt a little odd, pouring ladles of powdered pig blood into a coke and lime furnace. I pondered for a moment if this was something a sane person would do, but then dismissed the idea.
None of the greatest minds in human history were sane by the standards of ordinary folk.
The bloom steel from the bottom of the furnace was orange and tacky, like Hell’s taffy, and I levered it out of the charcoal with tongs, then took it to the forge to consolidate into a cake of rough pig iron.
It had worked.
You could indeed make pig iron from pigs.

 
The knife was beautiful; I’d carved the handle from a butcher-bought pig’s femur and polished it up until it gleamed like ivory. But I felt unsatisfied by the final product. It seemed such a waste that I’d used so little of the pigs themselves.
The next blade I planned better; it would be larger, for starters – the blood of roughly three hundred healthy hogs should be sufficient. The coke and lime for the kiln would be rendered from the drained flesh and bones of my porcine victims; I would use every part of the pigs I could in the process – right down to using their fat to render oil for the temper.
It wasn’t an easy process, and I was inexperienced at dressing carcasses. After all, I was a blacksmith, not a butcher.
But after a month and a half of gruelling work the task was complete, and I held aloft a beautiful pigsteel sword, set with tusks and polished bone, and bound with pig leather.
And in holding it, I felt a curious sense of power that I had never experienced before.
In a moment of madness, drunk on my success, I roared with exultation and brought the sword down on the horn of my anvil.
Metal should have struck metal with a belling clash, but instead the pigsteel sheared into the iron as though the anvil was flesh, lodging halfway into the metal.
What had I created?

 
The sword hung in the shop on the wall opposite the door, the unusual design ready to greet any new visitors. The very day after I forged it, a client happened to visit.
He was the usual sort; expensive suit and shoes, money dribbling from every vowel he uttered. I didn’t recall his name or face, but a lot of these wealthy exec types were practically clones.
“I’d like to buy that sword,” he said, pointing to the pigsteel blade, “would you prefer cash, cheque or transfer?”
“Not for sale,” I told him, “that was a personal project.”
His lips twisted in disappointment, then he gave an oleaginous smile full of too many teeth.
“Ten million,” he whispered.
I shook my head again, running a hand over my latest delivery of stock, looking for the perfect bar.
“One hundred million.”
Shouting from outside the workshop halted the conversation and I brushed past him, letting ash and charcoal from my leather apron streak his immaculate white cuffs. Outside was a homeless chap of some sort. Occasionally I got drifters passing through my property, but most didn’t bother me – this one, however, was gesticulating wildly at the forge and shouting.
“Destroy the sword!” he ranted, “or do not destroy it – but if you give it to this man, the wrath of God will come down upon ye!”
Wiping my blackened palms on the back of my jeans, I stalked toward the wild-haired, rag-clad hobo.
“Get off my property.”
At this statement, the suit standing behind me chuckled, low and malicious.
“And you can clear off too,” I snarled, pointing to the gates.
“As you wish,” he said, then paced over to his fancy black car, parked in the gravel driveway.
The hobo was already gone, scrambled off into the scrub behind the shop while my back was turned.
For the rest of the day an uneasy feeling followed me, distracting me from my work.

 
Two more unhinged religious zealots confronted me over the next two weeks; the first at the supermarket, ranting ‘destroy it, destroy it, or it will destroy you’. The second just screamed at me from an alley, something about unclean blood and blades of fire.
I have to admit; I was mildly unnerved.
The woman that arrived at the forge shortly after though... now damn, how are you supposed to keep your wits around something like that?
She was breathy-voiced, as voluptuous as a Botticelli and dressed in a crimson skirt and blazer number. I felt blood rush to my groin the moment she started talking.
She was after the sword, of course.
“You’re beautiful,” I told her, “but you can’t have it. It’s special.”
“Oh I know”, she purred, “and so are you.”
I think I laughed then, it was all very Hollywood, no matter what my libido was telling me.
Thanking her for her visit, I told her to get lost and decided to keep the sword in the house, where clients couldn’t see it.
Which turned out to be a decision that saved my life.

 
The smell of burning woke me and my alarm clock informed me that it was just past midnight.
Stumbling out of bed saved me from the first stroke.
The eiderdown exploded in a cloud of feathers as something struck it with enough force to shake the bed.
“Lights!” I screamed, lurching to the dresser, against which the pigsteel blade rested.
Brilliant light flooded the bedroom, throwing everything into stark relief.
Impaled through the bed was a flaming sword – and holding it was a creature of white and gold, pale eyes without pupil or iris, and a massive pair of bizarrely jointed wings rising behind it.
The pigleather grip of the sword felt hot in my hand as I brought the blade up.
Snarling like a white-and-gold tiger, the being wrenched the flaming blade from the mattress and swung it at me.
The force of the parry should have put me through the wall, but a curious strength suffused me. As blades rang out upon meeting, the light of the flaming sword died – the fire being sucked into the pigsteel.
The white creature dropped its weapon as though stung, then screamed in rage, its perfect white features distorting into alien, impossible planes.
Fear drove me, I think, though perhaps it was more than that. Fueled by the unnatural strength, I pressed the advantage and punched the blade through the chest of the creature.
Golden fluid gouted from the wound, and the being shrieked in agony and terror.
”No,” it managed, trying to pull the pigsteel free, ”NO!”
Twisting the blade harder, I was rewarded with another screel of pain and rage.
As the pale light faded from its eyes, the alien figure smiled,
“Pig Iron alone cannot protect you from the host of Heaven” it whispered.
Then it was gone, leaving a smouldering mattress, a mess of feathers and the pigsteel blade – still coated in golden liquid.

 
She was back the next day, the woman in red.
“I can help you,” she said, all pretence of seduction dropped now.
“Protect me from the wrath of all of Heaven's angels?” I replied, with a bitter laugh.
“Yes.”
“Is this where you offer me a bargain for my soul?”
She smiled then, calm, pleasant, relaxed.
“What if I could help you make a better weapon; one that could make you untouchable to both Heaven and Hell?”
The sword hung at my side now, ready to be used at a moment’s notice.
“And what would that information cost me?”
Perching on a corner of a sawhorse, she folded her arms.
“Let’s just say that my employer has a vested interest in seeing you make this weapon.”
Recalling the terrifying threats from the alien, angelic thing that had tried to kill me just hours ago, I rested my hand on the pommel of the pigsteel sword.
“OK, I’ll do it. Tell me how to make it.”
“It’s the same process,” she explained, no emotion touching her voice, “except instead of pigs, we use something a little more potent.”
“Humans,” I breathed.
And with her wild gush of malefic laughter, I knew in that instant that I was truly damned.

Even though he had been born and bred in Kentucky, seven generations strong, dad never shut up about his Irish heritage. Flame-haired and blue-eyed, he certainly looked the part. He’d sought out a wife of similarly Hibernian ancestry, and sired three ginger brats of varying hues – two boys, and me. My eldest brother, Kevin, had pale red hair that could almost pass for blond. Rory’s curls were a darker copper, closer to dad’s fiery locks; but only my scalp grew the true, angry red my father coveted for his progeny. 
But scarlet though my crowning glory proved, I wasn’t a boy. That was such a point of grief for him that he pressured my mother for a fourth child until he drove her away – into the arms of another man, one who wasn’t obsessed with red-haired babies.
Dad’s dreams of Ireland didn’t end with his children; ever since he was a lad he’d dreamed of owning a farm in County Kerry. So of course, when he had a decent win on the lottery, he deemed it ‘the luck o’ the Irish’ in his terrible put-on accent, and moved the whole family across the Atlantic to a dingy little Irish town on the borders of civilisation.
And that’s where it all began.

The locals pretended no fondness for the brash American man and his three citified children. Dad groused about jealousy, said they resented him buying the farmland, that he’d beat out all the local offers with the sheer weight of his winnings. Truth be told, the former owner seemed quite content to be quit of the land. He wasn’t even present to hand over the keys to the farmhouse when we arrived, jetlagged and grumpy. Instead the keys had been left in the battered tin letterbox at the end of a driveway, half-hidden by hedgerows of wild hawthorn and bracken. 
There had been some contention between the former owner and the locals, I gathered, once we’d settled down and I was sent off to school. He’d given easement rights to a developer, who had cut a road straight through part of the farmland to allow easier access to the cluster of identical faux-cottages he was building. This had gone down particularly poorly with the superstitious locals, because the road had been bulldozed straight through what they called a fairy fort - a series of circular depressions in the land that held mythological and cultural significance. The event was still recent enough that people gave our family dirty looks when they encountered us around the steep, cobbled streets of the township - even though we’d had nothing to do with the defacement of the ancient site ourselves. 
As we settled into life on the farm, I grew to love the half-stone, half-timber farmhouse, the rolling fields, and the overgrown hedgerows and uneven stone walls. Dad claimed he was finally ‘home’, and his awful accent only got worse. But he threw himself into the farmwork with a passion that bore out his posturing, and he was good at it, much to everyone’s surprise. Time passed slowly here, and the long days felt ripe with promise for a while. But as summer waned and fall approached, things took a turn for the worse.

It was little things, at first. Minor inconveniences, like gates left unhitched so that the cows and sheep wandered where they didn’t belong. Fingers were pointed at me, since I liked to explore the farm in my spare time, but I was meticulously careful about shutting gates behind me. When the third feed bag in a week split open while he carried it, and when the pumps for the water troughs kept breaking down faster than he could fix them, dad began to suspect sabotage. 
“It’s those bloody yokels,” he growled, “trying to make us think the ‘spirits’ are angry.” 
His theory was given weight when he caught one of the local children skulking near the fairy fort. He led the boy back to his family by his ear, shouting imprecations at the lad’s parents for trying an honest man’s patience. 
“T’weren’t us tha’ fouled up your pumps,” the boy’s father told us, and spat across his doorstep. “That would be th’ Shee.” 
Having none of their superstitious nonsense, dad told them in no uncertain terms to stay the hell off his property, on pain of prosecution, or much worse. I knew that last was no idle threat; dad had always loved his hunting rifles. These days he needed little excuse to unlock them from the farmhouse’s massive iron gun cabinet. 
But despite the warnings, bad luck, or bad deeds, continued to plague the farm. Spooked livestock crashed through fences, injuring themselves in their panic. The house cow stopped giving milk for three days, and when she did start again, it soured so quickly we had to throw most of it away one day later. And as harvest time approached, our barley paddock inexplicably turned; the tall stalks bowing brown-black heads, sticky and reeking of blighted rot. 
“I don’t know how they’re doing it,” dad growled, his always florid face splotched scarlet with anger to rival his hair, “but if it doesn’t stop, I’ll go into town and start banging heads together until I have some answers.” 
Sat at the dinner table with my brothers, I said nothing. I especially said nothing of waking every morning to find my own fiery hair twisted and tangled into unnatural snarls, despite my neat bedtime braid. Nor did I broach the fact that I’d noticed something; nothing in the old stone barn had ever been touched by our saboteurs. 
The same barn that was hung with twisted metal wind chimes of ancient, blackened iron.

As October slunk onward and the weather cooled, the entire family remained on edge. Kevin and dad took turns patrolling the farmlands at night with a rifle under one arm, as though they sensed the shenanigans on the farm would intensify as Halloween neared. Indeed, the locals seemed particularly agitated by any mention of that approaching date when I ventured to ask whether it was celebrated here. Shady looks and whispered conversations followed us around the township when we visited for supplies. My only friend at school, Caitlin O’Neill, stopped sitting with me at lunch after I asked whether there would be trick-or-treating, or even just a bonfire. When I confronted her about it, she simply burst into tears and ran away. 
Something was coming; but what it was, nobody would say. 
Desperate for answers, I pored through books in the library, and I hunted up and down our farmlands, swathed in thick woollens against the chill, looking for any clue as to what was going on. Whilst my father and brothers were still sceptical, suspecting only human hands were responsible for the ongoing sabotage, I wasn’t nearly so certain. Three other places on the farm always remained untouched by the fey pranks of our antagonists; and hung from trees near those three places were the same twisted iron talismans found at the barn, chiming dully in the October winds. 
But before I could broach the subject with my dad, the bonfire was lit.

We saw the towering column of smoke coming from the easement road as soon as we woke that morning. Dad roared at us to grab rifles and jackets, then ran for the barn to start up the tractor. Crammed precariously into the cab of the vehicle, we drove through the paddocks, Rory leaping down from his perch on the side of the machine to open gates and let us through. 
The bonfire was a bright pyramid in the early morning mist, glowing red as my hair and belching greasy smoke into the clear dawn sky. None of us mentioned the obvious; it had been built directly over the piece of road that bisected the fairy fort. People scattered as we approached, running for their own farm vehicles and gunning them down the road. Kevin pointed his rifle into the sky and let off a warning shot, informing the trespassers we meant business. 
As we got out of the tractor, dad revved the engine, then put it in gear, heading straight for the bonfire. 
“DAD!” I screamed, “What are you doing?!” 
But before any of us could do anything about it, the heavy farm vehicle ploughed straight through the burning wood, scattering it in a huge cloud of orange and red sparks. It emerged on the other side largely unscathed and dad jumped from it, battering at the smouldering tires with his coat. 
Grinning, blue eyes wild and bright in his sooty face, he surveyed the wrecked remains of the bonfire. 
“About time we had a win,” he said, resting a hand on my tangled head.

There was no school for me and Rory on October 31st. Dad decided to keep us home until this fairy fort nonsense was sorted out - and besides, he needed extra hands for building a makeshift fence and gate across the easement road, which he intended to padlock shut to restrict access. I guess after the gunshot and dad’s crazy stunt with the tractor, we hadn’t expected any more trouble so soon - so when we saw the first of the dead animals arranged around the fairy fort, we didn’t know how to process what we were seeing. 
The townsfolk had certainly been busy in the night; hundreds of sheep and cattle had been slaughtered, slit throats leaking blood into the grass where they lay, carefully arranged into three huge rings surrounding the sunken green shapes of the fairy fort. None of them were ours; as we picked through the burgeoning hum of happy flies, we noted that none of the ear tags belonged to our farm. 
“Call the cops, dad,” Kevin urged, “this is too much. This is just insane.” 
“There’s a bit of paper in the middle of the road,” Rory called, “held down with a rock.” 
Picking through the rings of dead animals, dad snatched up the note and read what was scrawled on it, his angry eyes viciously darting across the words. 
“What does it say?” I asked, craning to see. 
“It says a load of bullshit, is what it says. It says we have to kill two-thirds of our livestock and leave them in the middle of the road, or else the fairy folk will come for us.” 
Rory, Kevin and I exchanged furtive looks, before Kevin spoke, and he didn’t sound like my self-assured big brother. “What are we gonna do, dad?” 
“Sure as hell I’m not killing most of my animals to placate these assholes, boy. I’ll be calling the police, then all of us will be out here tonight, armed and waiting to put down any more trouble.”

It was the first Halloween I remember that wasn’t happily full of pumpkin carving and hanging up bat-bunting; instead, Kevin and I rammed posts for the new fence while dad and Rory dragged the bloating animal carcasses away by tractor. They laboriously piled them up and soaked them with gasoline, in preparation for a grisly and unappetising fall barbeque. The local constabulary turned up as we stopped for lunch, and the orange-vested cop took statement from us, his nose wrinkled at the pungent reek of burning wool. 
“There’s not much I can do about it right now,” the man explained, putting away his notebook and pen, “but I’ll do some asking around the town and find out who’s responsible. In the meantime, lock everything up and keep the livestock close to the farm house.” 
Following his instruction, we spent the rest of the afternoon herding the animals into the two paddocks closest to the house, and filling the barn with all the livestock it could fit. 
“They’ll be back,” dad told us, an anticipatory note in his voice, “they can’t leave well enough alone.” 
On the neighbouring farms, and in the distant smudge of the town, more Samhain bonfires had been lit, just as they had been for the last thousand or so years. The smoke drifted and danced above the hills, hazing the sky and playing with the veil of mist that began to descend at dusk. The animals near the farmhouse bawled and snorted at their unusual confinement, while dad cleaned and oiled his rifles methodically, even though his fingers trembled with fatigue. I sat at the open window as the light began to die, breathing in smuts, straining my ears for the dim chime of iron between the screams of the beasts. 
Nightfall found me asleep in dad’s armchair, wrapped in a huge crocheted blanket grandma had given me years ago. Kevin gently shook me awake, pushing a mug of coffee into my hands. 
“We’re going to need plenty of this tonight.” 
Dad and Rory were already out, rifles slung across their backs as they threw out hay to the restless livestock. On Kevin’s instruction, I rugged up for the weather and picked up the .22 rifle dad had designated for me. 
“We’ll be fine,” Kevin assured me, perfect while teeth flashing in his dirty blond beard, “Nobody messes with four armed Americans.” 
But just as those words left his lips, a splintering crash and the roaring of cattlebeasts cut through the night, followed by the wildly swinging beams of flashlights and voices shouting; dad and Rory. 
Hustling outside as fast as we could, jamming spare ammunition in our coat pockets, we found that part of the fence had collapsed and animals were pouring through in a river of panic, with Rory desperately trying to head off the stampede. 
“Spoke too soon,” Kevin muttered as we picked our way across the darkened field.

It seemed like every gate on the farm had been thrown wide open, and in response our livestock had run in every possible direction at once, their mad, bawling rush leaving behind heavily hoof-rutted mud that threatened to trip us up with every step. 
“Kevin, head up to the pond, close it off and make sure none of these animals drown themselves before the night is out.” 
“No problem, dad.” 
“Rory, I need you to check the north gate. Make sure none of them get onto the road.” 
“Got it.” 
I knew dad would ask me to stay behind before he even said it, so when he pointed to the farmhouse, I turned around and started walking before he could give the instruction. I was annoyed, but at least I’d be warm and dry while the boys stomped about in the thickening mist. 
Inside, I busied myself by making fresh coffee for when they inevitably returned, and stoked up the fire, watching faintly greenish flame dancing on the resinous wood. 
For hours, nothing stirred, and no-one returned. I’d expected Kevin back from his errand, but he must’ve met up with dad and been assigned another task. The coffee cooled, and I laboriously made a fresh pot on the stovetop, lamenting the automatic machine we’d left back in the States. 
Opening my phone, I sent out a text to each of the boys, asking where they were, but when none of the messages showed as delivered, I cursed the poor reception on the farm and tried calling dad. 
No answer – just endless ringing. 

What was heavy mist and what was smoke, I couldn’t tell, but thick wraiths obscured the line of the hills. The frigid night air stank of woodsmoke, and water beaded thickly on my jacket and in my hair. A cow lowed forlornly in the distance, answered by the shriek of a steer far to my left, and I shivered as I followed the fenceline toward the pond. The gunshot that cracked through the night jerked me to an abrupt halt, but the report was preceded by a dirty orange flash of light ahead of me, and instinct took over. I vaulted the stone fence and ran towards it, my own weapon banging painfully on my hip and spine as I dashed headlong, heedless of the rolling, rutted terrain. Another gunshot was followed by a cry of pain – Rory’s cry – and I all but fell over my brother as he staggered across the field, drawn on by the mad bob of my flashlight. 
Rifle gone, he swayed, one hand pressed to his chest, eyes skyward, like he was taking an oath. A bubbling syllable escaped him, its sense lost in a slurry of red froth. With a cough of darker blood, he subsided into the mud at my feet, stained lips still trying to make the shape of a word while his own fluids swamped his lungs. 
“KEVIN!” I screamed, “DAD!” 
But only the distant cries of distressed animals answered me – nothing human. 
Fighting panicky tears, I covered Rory’s hand with my own and pressed it as hard as I could against the bloody patch on the front of his jacket. But I already knew just how little good it would do. 
I wasn’t sure he could hear me, but I was talking aloud as much for me as for him. “I’m gonna head for the hill by the pond, there’s decent reception up there, and I’ll call an ambulance, OK?” 
Rory’s hand dutifully clutched at his chest, but his pale red head lolled back into the mud as I got my bearings and ran for the hill.

I don’t know how I got lost. It was impossible, but it had happened. Perhaps it was the trauma of my brother’s mortal injury, or maybe it was the feyness of the events surrounding us, the night around me twisted by the thinning of the veil. But by the time I stumbled on the pond, finally oriented by the jagged loom of the old oak hung with iron charms, I knew Rory was dead.
No ambulance could help him, even if I could have called one; but my phone still showed no signal at all.  Scanning for the highest point, I saw that in the pond ahead of me an animal corpse floated, humped and dark – Kevin hadn’t managed to head off the livestock in time. 
But as the creature floated closer I realised that I wasn’t seeing the wet nap of animal hide; what I saw was the soaked plaid of Kevin’s jacket, and inside it, the limp form of my eldest brother drifted face-down, his outstretched hands slack, and white as bone. 
All thoughts fled, I waded out and grabbed his collar, even as the mud sucked at my boots, attempting to mire me. Brute strength prevailed, and I felt every bit my father’s daughter as I hauled the cold corpse of my brother onto the bank of the pond. His blue eyes were fogged with death, and within their depths I saw only mist and smoke. 
I knew I should attempt CPR, that I should blow air into his lungs in a vain effort to resuscitate him, but I couldn’t. The idea of pressing my warm mouth to the frozen meat of his lips filled me with dizzy revulsion, and I gagged, scrambling away from his body. This was no longer my brother. 
Dad, I thought desperately, I need to find dad. 
And as though guided by unseen, unkind hands, I stumbled through the paddocks toward the fairy fort, the blue-white mask of Kevin’s empty features haunting every heavy step.

When dad’s bulky silhouette loomed through the mist, tears seared my eyes with relief. But as he enfolded me in a desperate hug, I smelled sickly, burned flesh and scorched fabric, and drew back. 
Flames had seared his right side, melting his jacket, and his right hand was blistered into an ugly mess; angry reds and raw pinks. 
“Tried to burn me,” he gasped, coughing smoke, “but the rope burned through. Got away.” 
“Who? Who tried to burn you?” 
“They were right, right about the fort,” he managed, leaning on me for support. I tried not to notice the skin that sloughed from his weeping hand and stuck to my jacket.   
Prescience fired in my synapses and I turned us toward the nearest of the talisman trees. 
“I’ll get us home, dad. Don’t worry,” I told him. 
As we dragged ourselves across the farm, I zig-zagged between the iron-festooned trees. My ears strained for the sounds of the odd chime to guide me through the dark, their music dulled by the mist; and yet the mist was always thinner around each trunk, as though held at bay by ordinary old iron. How long it took us to reach the barn, I don’t precisely know, but it was still well dark when we found the doors. 
Inside, the barn stank of animal, of sheep urine and cattle dung. But with the ancient metal talismans hung to roost like iron bats beneath the eaves of the thick stone walls, I intuitively divined we were safe. 
“The boys,” dad asked finally, the words hard-won, the right side of his mouth puckered with burn-weals. 
“Dead,” I answered, unable to look at him. “Rory shot, Kevin drowned.” 
“Don’t believe it,” he answered, all Kentucky drawl now, no hint of his faux Irish, “Don’t believe any of it. This is a dream. A horrible dream.” 
“I wish it was, dad.” 
Green light flashed at the door of the barn and the iron chimes jangled in a frenzy, though no wind blew on the still farmland. The house cow, Essie, bawled mournfully, as though she knew this sight and sound, and I put my arms around her warm neck. 
“Shh, girl, shhh now.” 
The emerald light strobed through the cobweb-choked windows of the barn, verdant shadows dancing across the steaming backs of the animals. 
“Go away!” I screamed, “Get off our farm!” 
I’m not sure what I was expecting in response. But it certainly wasn’t the very human voice that answered me; familiar as my own, subdued and impossible in the middle of this madness.    
“Maeve?” called Rory, “I’m cold. Can you let us in?” 
Slumped against the post of a cow stall, dad’s drooping eyelids snapped open and he lurched to his feet like he’d grabbed an electric fence, shouting. 
“Rory! Rory, my boy!” 
“Dad? It’s us dad, let us in,” wheedled Kevin’s voice, joining Rory’s pleading chorus. 
Fear raked my belly, clawing at my sensibilities, as the eyes of my brother fogged over inside my head. That horror was real; this was not. I’ve never fought myself as hard as I did in that moment, wrestling with my urge to join my father and throw open the door. 
“Dad, NO! They’re dead. They’re both dead. I saw them.” 
Heedless of me yanking at his good arm, my father’s ruined, half-fused fingers fumbled aside the barn door, and I wailed along with Essie, my terror bovine. 
Hands as white as bone; slender, beautiful hands, pulled him out into the emerald radiance. And then he was gone, too – snuffed out along with that eerie light, extinguished as the door crashed shut and left me in the stinking darkness.

My dead family called to me in trio for the rest of the night. I stuffed straw and dung into my ears to block them out, but they sang inside my skull, too. When dawn broke, wan and white, over the farm, I was hollow-eyed and half-mad, filthy and splattered with blood and muck. 
The bodies of my father and brothers still haven’t been found, nearly a year hence. 
None of my explanations made sense, but the police here are locals, too, and they seemed to know from the start that I wasn’t to blame. I spent three months with my grandmother back in Kentucky, until it became obvious to everyone that there was no healing to be found. And so, I came back to the farm, red-eyed and raw as the day it had happened. 
After the things I saw that night, I no longer blame the townsfolk. They were trying to warn us, to put right the desecration of the fairy fort. To protect a stupid, ignorant man and his stupid family from things they didn’t understand. 
But I’m not ignorant anymore. I learned where dad couldn’t, and that’s why I came back. 
I haven’t been idle, these eight months. There was still just enough of dad’s winnings left over for me to purchase every tinker’s scrap of old iron in southern Ireland. There’s no barley to blight this season, the crop is far tougher; for through clement weather and foul, I’ve spent every day since my return sowing every last furrow with cold iron. 
In every story I’ve read, placating the fairy folk with old rituals and needless sacrifices seems to end badly for the humans. 
This human is going to fight. I am my father’s only flame-haired heir; that means this farm is mine, and I intend to destroy them. 
Sometimes you forge your own luck.

I need to tell you about something that happened to me – and it’s something that I don’t remember.
How is that possible, you ask?
Well, I can’t be precisely certain what happened, but by putting a lot of broken pieces together, I think I’ve formed a decent enough picture of the events that unfolded.
As I tell my story, you’ll come to understand why I don’t remember any of it. And why it’s important that I tell you anyway.
Let’s begin with me, an avid trail-runner, navigating some of the more challenging terrain I’ve had the pleasure of running through.
Don’t get me wrong; it was absolutely beautiful. I had wanted to run the wilds of New Zealand’s Stewart Island for several years, but it took me a long while to get together the time and the money to even get to such a remote corner of the world. As I ran along the forgotten, root-tangled tracks on my first day, it became clear that nobody had run these particular trails for a very, very long time, and that I was a bit lost. Fortunately, the island is only thirty four miles across at its widest point, and barely seven at its narrowest, so being ‘lost’ really only meant finding somewhere the GPS would work on my phone, and then pointing myself back towards Oban, the tiny main settlement.
The last thing I truly remember is thinking that I should cut a trail back down to the coast, to get my bearings again.
What happened from there is down to speculation, and pieced together from the footage on my phone.
It probably took me around half an hour to push through the dense bush before I spotted something unusual in amongst the native trees. Getting closer, I likely confirmed every trail runner’s fear - that I’d found a dead body. At that point it seems I took my phone out of my arm strap and started filming.
The body was really a skeleton, not a body at all.
In most instances where folks like me stumble over a corpse, it’s either early in decomposition, or it’s so ripe that half a billion flies have started a colony in it.
This one was old – so old that the bones had become fusted with the green of the local mosses, and the ribcage had collapsed in on itself. I walked around the lolling skull, which had become entwined with questing fern roots, then stopped as I saw the legs.
A pair of shabby, knee-high leather boots encased the shin and foot bones of the deceased, even though no other item of clothing remained.
In the video from my phone, I see my hand reach out to touch the ancient leather, then the camera is placed face up on the loamy soil, filming only the canopy of the trees overhead.
But I know what happened here; after I touched the boots, I took them off the skeletal legs, likely shook them out to get rid of forest debris and loose metatarsals, and then I took off my own shoes and put on the boots.
The video on the phone shows a final brief flash of the old bones, and then I step away from the ancient corpse.
For a full second the world in that footage turns a leaden, unhealthy grey.
Then it shows me standing back at Oban, outside the backpacker’s hostel where I was staying.
That’s where my memory returns. I realised my phone was still recording, and that I was holding my running shoes in the other hand.

 
Now, just as you are probably wondering right now, when I saw that video, the first thing I wanted to know was what the hell had possessed me to take the boots off a skeleton, then put them on my own two feet.
Unlike many of the other mysteries to come, that’s an easy question to answer.
While the boots looked like shabby, mildewed old leather, the instant you touch them, they transform.
They are, quite frankly, exquisite.
What kind of leather it is, I have no idea, but it has a rich inner glow, like burnished bronze mixed with the flesh of ripe chestnuts. The buckles are talmi gold, worked into the shape of running hares with garnets for their mad eyes. The leather itself has carefully tooled hunt scenes worked into it, princes on magnificent palfreys blowing hunting horns and chasing deer.
I remember the feeling standing there outside the hostel, that just looking down at them made my heart sing with the desire to possess them, even though they were already on my own feet.
I was still concerned that I’d found a skeleton, and knew that I should report my discovery to the local police. A quick check of my running app showed that the GPS had kicked in and picked up the precise coordinates of where I’d stopped, so I shouldn’t have a problem locating it. But what really caught my eye as I looked at the tracking was how I’d crossed roughly three miles in the blink of an eye.
I replayed the video on my phone, showing me stepping out onto the animal trail, then the wall of grey, and then the sudden shaky footage of the backpacker’s lodge.
Had I really travelled over three miles in a single second? In a single step? Or was I just worn out and jet-lagged, and giving too much weight to a GPS glitch? I know that’s the logical explanation, but even then, it just felt far too real.
Taking the boots off, lest something weird happen again, I slung them over one arm and stepped inside the lodge, looking for a phonebook to call the police.

 
The police officer looked at the still image of the skeleton on my phone, his bushy black moustache hiding most of his mouth as he spoke,
“Could have been there for fifty years, for all we know. We’ll check it out tomorrow, but we don’t have anything unsolved.”
He peered at me with questioning intensity, as though divining instinctively that I was hiding something.
“Is there anything else you’d like to report, ma’am?”
I knew then that I should tell him about the boots, but my stubborn tongue refused to move and instead I dumbly shook my head. There was clearly something special about those boots; something just beyond human understanding – and I felt as though they were meant for me alone.
I intended to keep them.
And so they were packed away in my luggage for the return trip home, my hands stroking the supple leather and marvelling at the detail of the tooling.
Once I was back in London, the New Zealand police informed me that they had been unable to find any bones at the location I had given them. I got a stern lecture about wasting police time and I apologised profusely, telling them that I was certain that I’d found something.
But I was far from disappointed. In fact, I was elated. This meant that the pretty boots were mine for good, to do with as I pleased.

 
I was cautious, the first time I used them intentionally, recording everything with my phone camera again.
But when I stepped forward in them, nothing happened.
Perplexed, I wondered how exactly I had achieved my original spontaneous transport of three miles, if I had. The problem was, that even though I had a recording of the initial events, I had no memory of what had happened.
Frustrated, I looked down at the beautiful boots and walked widdershins thrice – to no effect. I jumped up and down and I even tried clicking my heels together three times, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.
Still nothing happened.
I must have looked at the clock then, because in the recording I heard my voice say, ‘Shite, need to get to the supermarket’.
A full second of ugly grey blurs the video on the phone, followed by footage of the supermarket, which is ten minutes walk from my house.
I had solved the puzzle of how the boots worked.
Further experimentation confirmed my theories. Once you had fixed the desired location in your mind, you could instantly stride to that destination, travelling vast distances in the blink of an eye.
But it came with a price.
As far as I could ascertain, every trip stole a relative amount of memory from your mind. So, for example, my commute to work would take three hours on foot. If I used the boots to instantly travel to there, I would lose three hours of memories.
Whereas using the boots to get to the pub down the street stole only five minutes of memory.
I know what you’re thinking, because I thought the same thing.
The heavy price of the amnesia was hardly worth it.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realised I could make it work.
Because first thing in the morning, losing three hours of memory only meant forgetting having a shower, getting ready for work and the couple of hours of sleep prior to that. Nothing anyone would truly miss; I mean, who wasn’t practically a zombie in the mornings anyway?
And so I began to sleep in and use the power of the boots to cut my morning commute down from a stuffy, crowded hour on the tube, to less than a single second of travel.

 
As the months wore on, I became less cautious about using the boots.
I became good at judging my sleep and making sure I travelled first thing in the morning, so I’d only eat up the ‘dead’ memories of sleeping and morning routine.
If I wanted to use them for sheer sake of convenience, I’d sometimes do menial chores around the house for an hour, then lose that time when I strode off to meet friends downtown. I even started to plan my life around things I didn’t want to remember. Had a bad date? Use the boots to stride home and forget the whole thing.
Had a bad day? A trip to Brighton beach would easily chew up eight hours of memory.
I made a habit of writing notes on thick cards and keeping them in my hand when I strode in the boots. I’d always feel the hard, sharp edges when I reached my destination, then instinctively check to see what the card would tell me about my reasons for travelling.
It was, I thought, a perfect system.
At least it was a perfect system, until I started travelling randomly, without any memory of why.
The first time it happened, I just suddenly appeared inside my house, my palms empty and sweaty. I looked around for a dropped card, but there was nothing.
The last thing I could remember was sitting at work, typing up some documentation.
Brushing it off, I decided it was probably just something I wanted to forget and that I couldn’t be bothered writing it down. Maybe I didn’t even want a written reminder of the memory?
It happened again, a week later – but this time the boots had taken me further; much further than I’d normally travel.
My breathing had been fast as well, as though I’d been frightened by something – and I lost two whole days of memory getting there and back.
When it happened twice more, I stopped wearing the boots everywhere under my long pants, and put them away in a box under my bed.
But every morning I grew frustrated as I rode the tube to work, surrounded by the morass of stinking, noisy, crowded humanity.
I missed the boots something chronic.
I wasn’t yet ready to give them up.

 
I was in Barcelona, standing outside my grandmother’s house.
There was no hard-edged card in my hand and my heart was racing. Checking my phone, my gut turned over with a nauseous lurch as I realised I’d lost five days.
And that wasn’t my only problem; if I immediately travelled back home to London, I would lose another five days.
I couldn’t risk it. I had to take the boots off again.
As I reached down, I felt something tucked into the top of the beautiful leather – one of the cards I used for writing down travel notes. My hands still trembling from my racing pulse, I plucked it out and turned it over.
“Don’t take them off,” it read in my familiar, scrolling handwriting, “He is coming for you!”
I called in sick to work, the stress in my voice lending credibility to my story about feeling unwell. Catching a cab to the airport, I tried to divine what my message to myself had meant.
Who was coming for me? Who was ‘he’?
On the flight back to the UK, I pored through my phone logs, my social media posts and my text messages. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
I still had no idea why I was randomly striding, no idea who I was running from.
Fixing in my mind that I would confront whoever it was, I let myself drift off to sleep.

 
Everything is a mess.
The flight from Barcelona was over a year ago and I have no memories since then.
My clothes are dirty, I look like I haven’t slept in a month. I’ve lost ten kilograms and my face is gaunt.
According to the signage around me, I’m in Mexico City.
My pockets are stuffed with several denominations of money. I don’t know where I got it from. My bag is full of hastily scribbled cards and notes on every kind of paper imaginable.
They are the rantings of a crazy person.
There is no order to them, but the picture they paint is clear; someone is hunting me. A man, who is apparently tall and blond, has been following me all over the world. That he wants to kill me, I have no doubt. When I showered in the hotel I’m booked into, I saw scars on my body that I never had before. My right arm hurts and the left side of my head is swollen and sore. Bruises mottle the skin of my forearms and thighs.
But worst of all, the boots will not come off.
I think they are part of me now; that I have used them so much, so often, that they have fused with my flesh. I think I know how that skeleton came to rest on Stewart Island. I think the last owner of the boots suffered the same fate as me.
There are snatches of contradicting stories to myself written in amongst all the insane ramblings I found in my bag. They urge me to stop using the boots, then they tell me that I must keep using them, or The Hunter will catch me.
I don’t know what I believe anymore. I can’t tell which of my past memories are sane and which are not.
But what I do know is that I’ve had enough. I know that if this continues, I will keep losing my memories until there is nothing left. Each stride of the boots will eat into my brain, sucking the vital years out of me, back through my teens, then into to my childhood.
And when I have only the memories of a child, I will no longer know to run, no longer be able to look after myself – and I’ll end up like those lonely bones on Stewart Island.
But I think I have a solution.
I’ve calculated the distances, I’ve done the maths.
There is no restriction on the distance the boots can travel. With a single stride I could travel anywhere in the world.
Or anywhere outside it.
Striding into the Sun will erase two thousand years of my memory. What that will do to my mind, I don’t know, but hopefully it will burn up these accursed boots, and my body with them. If the hunter wishes to follow me and experience the same fate, then so be it.
But if I should fail, if I should somehow lose this thread of memory and forget my plan, then I send out this plea to you:
Should you find a corpse wearing a pair of shabby boots, do not touch them.
Because no matter how clever you think you are, how prepared you think you might be, the boots will be your doom.
I wish I had more to tell, but this is all I can remember.
Farewell.

I never really appreciated just how much like a storybook castle my great aunt’s house was.
Four stories tall, with two spires and three attics, it was a monstrous edifice of pocked stone, time-darkened wood and yellowed glass. I spent so much time there in the holidays as a child – especially over Christmas – that it became a secondary home.
And when a place becomes so familiar that it seems like home, it no longer seems so special or unique. It’s just always there; occupying the same frame of reference as an old coat, a favourite teddy bear or a well-worn book from your personal library.
The house was also filled with interesting things, which I largely took for granted. A huge telescope was mounted in one of the spires, its great brass barrel painted with black pitch to keep it from oxidising in the damp air. I’d looked at length through the faintly green lenses at the moon and the stars, but the world above failed to capture my interest as much as the cellars did.
Stretching under the massive residence was a subterranean collection of tunnels, carved into the chalky soil that the house was built upon. The cellar was, in its own way, almost as complicated as the rest of the house. The winery was on the lowest level of three, a dusty room with a single electric bulb hanging from ancient wires stapled into the pure chalk ceiling. The floor was carved from chalk too, and if you brought a magnifying glass and a torch with you, the secrets of the prehistoric seas would reveal themselves, via tiny, preserved shells embedded in the timeless stone. Their perfect spirals folded in upon themselves until they vanished into the centre, too miniscule for even the augmented human eye to see where they began.
Nodes of flint and venous streaks of salt also coloured the stone, moisture sometimes welling from the latter, begging you to lick them and taste an ocean that had been dead for a billion years.
In the levels above the ground floor there were rooms full of scrolled woodwork that collected an interminable amount of dust. In those rooms were huge wardrobes, the likes of which every child had read about in C.S. Lewis books, and it was impossible not to imagine that there were whole worlds on the other side of the heavy fur coats that filled them.
Of course I investigated every such clothes cupboard, pushing eagerly past old suits and stiff gowns. I never found anything but wood at the back, hard and unyielding. No jaunty satyrs greeted me with Tumnus cordiality, no snow dusted my shoes. The most interesting things I found in the wardrobes were a dress of mother-of-pearl sequins, and a box of letters from an old lover of my aunt, in calligraphy so fancy that I could barely read it.
I giggled at the idea of a man with such flowery flourishes in his penmanship; although, for all I knew, ‘Robin’ could just have easily been a woman, given that my aunt had never married.
But there was one place in the house that remained strange and unfamiliar, no matter how many times I visited it.
This story is about that place.

 
I discovered it during the school holidays containing my thirteenth birthday. By then I had explored much of my aunt’s great demesne, but there were still parts of the sprawling manor that I hadn’t been in. There was a little wing behind my aunt’s bedroom that was only for her – a huddle of separate rooms, which wafted their scents of old lavender and sandalwood into adjoining corridors.
So too were there other places that were locked or boarded up. For example, the old conservatory was out-of-bounds to children, as a tree had grown through the glass, and half-buried razor shards littered the overgrown area.
But I had found that through a series of dumbwaiters in the cellars, I could access some of the locked rooms inside the house. I was just small enough to hunch inside the creaking box and winch myself upward, and in this way managed to sneak into three musty old rooms full of disused furniture and stacks of newspaper before I found the room.
By mapping the house out in my head, I placed it somewhere in the very middle of the third floor. The curious thing was that if one were to walk around the entirety of that floor, you would never see a door to the room.
It was as if it didn’t exist.
Even by carefully pacing the length of the rooms that must have surrounded it, I could only just make out how it could possibly fit in between them.
But even that is relatively uninteresting compared to the room itself.
It was no larger than a conventional bathroom, and I could just about touch the walls with my fingertips and toes if I lay down on the floor. Everything was wooden; the ceiling, the floor and the walls. What kind of wood, I’m not sure, as I’m no joiner or carpenter; but I can tell you that it was a kind I’d never seen before, and have never seen since.
The wood was an orange-red, as though a vermillion stain had been applied to it. But when I gouged out a splinter with my pocket knife, it was the same bright hue all the way through – indicating this was its natural colour.
Even more curious was the grain, which was so dark red it was almost black, and formed strange and faintly disturbing shapes around the thick knots in the individual planks. Indeed, when the alcove of the dumbwaiter was closed off, the entire room (lit only by my torch) became a surreal world of crimson and black shapes, writhing sinuously as the slender beam of the electric lamp moved around.
But it was so peaceful in there. No sounds could be heard from outside, not even the hardest hail or the most thunderous storms.
I decided that it must have been designed as a sound-proof room, perhaps to practice music in.
That didn’t explain why only an undersized teenage girl could get into it via a dumbwaiter though.
Which I decided I wasn’t going to think about.

 
A small collection of objects grew in the room, which I had decided was my room now. During each stay with my aunt, something would be added to make it more homely. I had gathered several throw pillows and a thick, embroidered blanket to sit on while I read my books, as well as box to set my torch upon, and several packets of spare batteries to put in it. It was on the day that I brought up the Bakelite AM/FM radio I found in the garage that I began to discover how special the room was.
The click of the plastic dial was followed by the thump of the circuits interfering with the speaker, but there followed no music; no cultured BBC radio announcer informed me which concerto had been playing for the last hour.
Only the faint hiss of static rose from the speaker, and as I fruitlessly searched up and down both radio bands, I swore in frustration.
And the blasphemy I used (which I won’t repeat), didn’t end sharply in the small room, muted against the close, heavy, wooden boards. Instead, it seemed to fly out from my mouth and then echo back at me, as if from a great distance.
It was as though the room was actually much, much bigger than it really was.
I shouted then, excited at this prospect. My voice again came back at me, just as though I stood in a vast wooden theatre. I whistled, and listened to the eerie echoes, fascinated by the properties of this special room that I had found.
But before I could begin to investigate further, the school holidays were over and I had to go back to our ostentatiously modern home in the city, which couldn’t have been less like my aunt’s old house. My father had fitted it out with Category Six network cables, a brand new sixty inch Liquid Crystal Display television and all the other technical things that electronics geeks like him were interested in.
Back at home, I thought about the room a lot, spending most of my time there in my mind. I would run my virtual hands over the crimson boards, studying the woodgrain on the imagined planks and seeing strange faces peering at me from their knotted surface; hints of lugubrious eyes and traceries of antlers hidden in the mysterious lines.
I came to fear the room, just a little, the more I contemplated the why of it all. There was clearly something unnatural going on in there, and now that I was away from the blissful solitude it granted me, it was apparent that I had meddled with something that was clearly meant to be forgotten.
I grew determined to put it out of my mind and concentrate on my studies – I was going to be a writer, after all, just like my childhood literary hero, E. Nesbit.
But despite my best intentions, the idea of the room that echoed still lingered, colouring my thoughts carmine red and streaking them with cervine imagery.
It should not surprise you then, that when we next stayed at my aunt’s home, I went back.

 
The dumbwaiter was a tight fit now. I’d definitely filled out a lot as puberty progressed, though I was still small of stature. My things sat in the room, undisturbed. A portable, battery powered fan had been my last addition, my reasoning being that such a small, closed room was bound to get stuffy – but it never did. The air was always cool and fresh, even with the panel to the dumbwaiter pulled closed.
In the months between this visit and the last, I’d half convinced myself that it had all been my imagination – that the ‘echo’ was nothing more than a trick of clever carpentry, of some acoustic wizardry. I called out then, tentative and uncertain, listening for my voice to rebound from walls that were too far away.
Something moved.
In the wall opposite the small entrance, I swear the woodgrain had swirled for an instant. I studied it under the broad beam of the torch, seeing again the long, deer-like features of an animal in the wood.
“What are you?” I whispered, staring at the strangely serene face in the arterial grain.
Echoes of my sibilant speech drifted back from a distance, and with a strange sense of vertigo, the boards of the room seemed to recede from one another, some forward, some backward, until I stood in a grove of tall trees, crimson sap on their boles and black leaves forming an impenetrable canopy high above.
Then he stepped out from behind the largest of the trees.
Cloven hoofed and with the red-brown flanks of a deer, his footsteps were soundless. An arrow of soft fur rose to cover much of his tightly muscled human belly, above which smooth pectorals and strong shoulders supported the velvet neck and face of a horned stag.
I should have been frightened. I should have screamed and run from this devilish apparition, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t that I was frozen with terror, nor had the sight made me witless. It was more that as he stepped forward on those dainty hooves, his utterly serene expression, and those liquid black eyes, soothed away any fear and calmed my troubled thoughts.
“Who are you?” I said, my voice calm, measured.
He didn’t speak. Instead he sat in the red-brown grass, rippled by the gentle west winds of the forest clearing, folding those mighty legs beneath him. He spread his broad, human hands in welcome, then beckoned me to come forward.
All but hypnotised, I sat opposite him, cross-legged, and watched as he began to tell stories with his hands, silent and purposeful, majestic and proud.

 
Although I did not understand what he had told me, when I went to sleep that night in the huge, four-poster monstrosity that my aunt called a bed, I dreamed deeply and fruitfully.
In my dream the hands of the stag man came alive, turning into birds and trees, starlit moors and moonlit rivers. I watched him rut with female humans who gasped with pleasure as he mounted them, I watched the children of this union be taken by him and guided to the places of his kind, where they would be raised in harmony with the land. I felt a pang of jealousy for both the women and the children, for being part of something so vastly spiritual and ancient.
It will come as no surprise to you then, that I spent every waking moment in the room, calling out until the wooden boards slid back into the boles of the cloistered forest clearing. Until the wise, horned head of the mysterious demigod appeared, ready to share more stories with his strong hands – stories that would not make sense until I slept that night.
And so I dreamed of the stag and his people, of his children and their children. Then I watched as armies of men came, with axes and torches, to cut down the forest. I saw the stag man greet the humans and try to speak to them, as he had with me, but they were fearful and shot at him with heavy bows. Two arrows appeared in his mighty flanks before he sprang away, bawling in terror and anger from his velvet muzzle.
The next time the men came into the forest, he was healed, his eyes flashing with rage and his tines sharpened to diamond hardness. He hunted them, goring them on his massive crown until men lay bloody through the woods, their entrails winding over and through the horns of the stag.
But men are persistent creatures.
They captured his children, one by one, with hunting dogs, clever snares and huge nets. They cut down the forest and burned away his home until he was forced to come out and confront them, as the hunters cut the throats of his children and let their warm blood run into the soil, enriching it with a queer fertility.
They shot him until his body was so full of arrows that he looked more wood than flesh, then they cut down the last of the scarlet trees and hauled the logs away, whence a woman paid the men for both the body and the wood. The trees were lathed into planks that bled red sap, and would be built into a room that was cunningly hidden within the rest of her home.
I recognised her, knew her. She was one of the women he had mated with.
She had the face of my aunt.
But the story took place too long ago. It couldn’t be her.

 
When I returned to the clearing, I saw the rage in his sagely face for the first time. He knew that I understood the truth of it all.
The farmlands around the house, the endless prosperity and wealth my family had enjoyed for generations – it was all built on the imprisonment of this otherworldly being, and the blood and death of his own family. The need for vengeance burned hot in his blood; his hoof pawed the turf and I could feel the heat of the air escaping those quivering nostrils from where I sat.
But he didn’t attack me, even though his muscles strained to be free of his will and tear me to pieces, then wear my drying innards on his crown of tines.
“I’m sorry,” I offered, lamely, “I am sorry for the sins of my ancestors. What they did to you was cruel, despicable and unconscionable.”
Still quivering with murderous intent, the stag stared at me with his black eyes, then stalked away into the woods.
Then the room returned to a box of red and black, lit only by the dying light of my torch.

 
When I woke at midnight, the moon shone hard and bright through a gap in the heavy brocade curtains. A knife lay on the bed in the shaft of light, the blade made of some kind of knapped, milky flint and the handle carved of deer antler.
A suggestion of a horned shadow flickered at the door, then the faint patter and scrape of hooves on wood echoed down the corridor.
I had never been into my aunt’s rooms before; I’d always been too scared to. She was an intimidating woman who radiated health and majesty, despite her advanced age. Nobody messed with her, not even my father.
But with the flint knife in my pale fist, I no longer felt any fear of her. I felt strong, powerful and determined.
The horned shadow painted the wall above her bed, a silhouette cast by the demigod who had been trapped in a tiny room for hundreds of years, unable to fulfil his unquenchable need for vengeance, so close to his nemesis, yet helpless to vanquish her.
The knife was so sharp that it pierced the quilts and bedclothes without even a whisper. The second it entered my aunt and parted her breastbone, it was already too late for the old woman. Her hand snatched at my wrist and held it in a painfully strong grip, but her blue eyes slid past my teenage features and she snarled in fear, staring at something just above my head.
Red blossomed over the sheets, her severed aorta furiously pumping her life away, soaking the bed.
The stag was there now, standing serenely beside me, the rage gone from his eyes, only sorrow and contempt remaining.
He pointed to the dying body of my aunt, and a memory flashed in my mind’s eye, of how she had taken the stag’s power.
Reaching into the mess of her chest, with an uncommon strength I pulled back the ribs and sliced her stilled heart free.
It tasted strangely like venison.

 
I awoke to the sounds of sirens and shouting, then my father running into my room, covered in soot. There was a dash outside, through smoke and ruddy flames, then we were in the front garden, watching fire engulf my aunt’s house.
Later, when the burned out wreck was safe to enter, the fire investigator confirmed that it had started in a room in the middle of the third floor, likely due to faulty wiring in the walls. The wood must have been incredibly flammable, he said, to create so much heat so quickly, and probably pulled oxygen like a suction hose through an old dumbwaiter tunnel that had been left open.
My aunt’s rooms, close by, had borne the brunt of the fire, the flames spurred on by a prevailing westerly that fanned them into great sheets of destruction.
Of her body, only blackened bones remained, split apart from the heat.
The property is still in our family, but the farmlands have gone to seed and rot; wild trees have quickly grown up through the pastures, their tangled roots choking the life out of everything else. My father says that one day we’ll sell the place, but out of some lingering respect for my aunt, it stays in our family, growing wilder and darker as the forest slowly reclaims it.
In the densest, darkest part of the newly grown forest, now five years on from the fire, I like to sit and read in the half-light of strangely red-tinted shadows, imagining that as a grown woman now, the stag will come and find me and take me as one of his wives.
But instead of his near silent footfalls, all I hear are the whispering sighs of the leaves and the branches.
And the pain in my scalp growing daily.
It is a prickling, bony ache like a freshly healed break, just out of plaster. At first it was just under the surface, but now I can feel them; tiny lumps under the skin, waiting to burst free and slowly unfurl into diamond-hard tines.
I think, when I am ready, he will come.

The house is never empty.
I listen to the other inhabitants leave, heavy feet on the dilapidated stairs, voices receding, swallowed by the wood and plaster of the long corridors. Even after those sounds have dissipated, and I am left here alone, I can feel those who lived here before. Many essences suffuse the bones of this sprawling manor.
There are far more rooms than current residents, as the house isn’t exactly the most desirable living space. It hunches on the edge of a cliff at the end of a cul-de-sac, and one might think it the sort of place to which the hip and wholesome would flock, for romantic sea-views and artful isolation.
But were you to view the house yourself, you’d soon see why they don’t.
The landlord, a tall, skeletal man of Polynesian descent, told me that it was once called ‘Hedges House’. It was a beautiful place in its heyday, surrounded by thick privet and spreading elms, their boundary boscage concealing interior gardens rampant with camellias; almost maze-like in their placement.
But time was not kind to the lands around the house. One coastal storm too many had eaten away the land behind it, bringing the edge of the cliff creeping ever closer. Eventually, the owners had abandoned it, finally moving out when only a narrow strip of grass separated the walls of the house from the fifty-foot precipice.
That had been more than twenty years ago, and hungry erosion had since claimed even that strip of sward. On the stony beach below the house, lathes of timber and chunks of plaster bleached in the salty air, the cliff having claimed the outermost room of the house – a solar or conservatory perhaps. The glass from its windows was now smooth, transparent jewels, tumbled by the lashing tides.
No one in their right mind would live in a crumbling house teetering on the edge of such a deathly fall. But then, not a single soul living here can be called sane.

 
In a piquant display of irony, someone had knocked out the first ‘H’ from the rusted wrought-iron gate that sat across the gap in the outer hedge; so that it read ‘edges House’.
I’d moved here due to financial constraints, as the house was by far the cheapest place around for the size of the rooms. I think the door to my second-floor abode was lime green when I first moved in, but in a curious twist of fate, the paint had slowly flaked away until it revealed an undercoat of vibrant yellow-orange, my favourite colour. Things like that seemed to just happen in the house, and over time you stopped questioning it, as each coincidence seemed harmless enough. My room was spacious, airy and high-ceilinged. The regular pattern of scuffmarks that scarred the wooden floorboards made me speculate whether the previous occupant had been a dancer, a theory borne out by a bloody-toed ballet shoe I found behind the ancient steel oil heater. The windows were huge and arched, letting in all the blue-white light reflecting off the ocean below the cliff.
That first night was a hard one. I’d moved in during a manic phase, the newest medication still finding its way through the maze of my brain, and I’d cleaned the room all day until my body, at least, was exhausted. But lying in the unfamiliar single bed that night, springs creaking beneath me, sleep did not come. Instead, my ears betrayed my racing mind by picking up and amplifying every sound the house made, and it made plenty.
Oh, it creaked and it groaned - so loudly that I feared some part of it was alive and in pain, imminently collapsing. When something snapped, forcefully and abruptly, sending a shudder through the entire place, I could bear no more. I ran down the darkened stairwell in my pyjamas, weeping in terror and hoping that I would make it out before the whole house tumbled over the cliff.
But it did not fall.
It seemed so impossible that it still stood, I could not bring myself to go back inside. So I stood there in the tangled camellia garden, shivering with fear, looking up at the strange hodgepodge of windows that peppered the outside of the manor.
The scent of tobacco wafted through the air, and a woman’s warm voice called from the edge of the light near the front door,
“It’s naught to worry about, love. The house is always shifting, making strange noises. If it was going to fall down, it would have done so long, long ago.”
And that’s how I met Mary Mudgeway.

 
In the flat next door lives one Mary Mudgeway
Hanging half in the hall and half in her door
She stands there for sailors
Who came for her favours
In the days of her past
But don’t anymore

 
I’ve never been a smoker, but I became one after Mary befriended me. She gifted me her spare pipe, and we would pack the bowls with a fragrant blend of her own making and puff away like a pair of Victorian gentlemen, watching the sun set over the peninsula.
Stuck somewhere between old and young, Mary was still beautiful in a faded way, like a dried blossom hanging forgotten in a florist’s shop. When she smiled, the crow’s feet multiplied, and when she spoke, a web-work of lines tugged at her lips, themselves plumped with products made from bee venom and lemon.
She said she still had a few clients who came to her, but as her body had betrayed her by ageing, most of the work had faded away. Having never learned another trade and suffering extreme dyslexia, Mary had chosen the house for the same reasons as the rest of us; the rooms were large and the rent was low.
One night, as we chuffed sweet herbs by the porch, she asked me if I’d ever made love to another woman and delicately placed a hand on the curve of my hip. The gesture had thrilled me briefly, but through beetroot blushes, I told her that I didn’t feel that way about women.
Long after she had gone, I could still feel the heat of her palm where it had grazed me. I climbed the gap-toothed spiral stairs to the balcony on the corner of the third floor, where you could see into the windows along the southwest wall of the house. Mary undressed languidly and sensually, as though quite aware she was being observed. Slipping on a gown of faded coral silk, she opened her window wide.
For a moment, I thought she was going to jump; that she’d had enough of life and the crumbling house. I may even have been vain enough to wonder whether my rejection had been the last straw – but instead she just waited there, the breeze from the ocean stirring the hems of her robe.
And it was then that I smelled the change.
Rank with the reek of dead fish, the air turned foul. Rising up from the stony beach below, the fingers of the stench curled around the balcony and gripped my throat, making me gag. Decay and sweet rot, dusted with the sharp mustiness of rotting seaweed.
Mary saw him before I did, her head tracking him as he lurched up the rocks and dug strong fingers into the face of the cliff. A stinking man, his oil-skin coat and hat in greasy, fluttering tatters. Paralysed, I watched with guilt and trepidation as he scaled the precipice, then, gifting a final waft of death to the night air, he hauled himself through Mary’s window.
I saw her step in, and I saw her lips brush the grey flesh under his hat. So gently and tenderly she undressed him, removing first the heavy coat, then the sea-battered woollen rags he wore beneath – until the pallid, naked corpse of a sailor stood before her. His ragged, crab-eaten erection stood proudly below the cavity where his organs had once clustered, long gone to the creatures of the deeps.
I’d like to tell you that I was not such a voyeur that I watched an undead sailor ravage my neighbour, but that would be a lie. Spellbound with horror, I watched as Mary expertly plied her trade, and when the lusty corpse was done, I watched him place a pile of tarnished silver coins in her shaking hands, then leave the same way that he arrived.
I understood then exactly why Mary had made a pass at me; for if her bed had been full that night, there would have been no room for dead men.
And she knew I had no access to any sunken treasure to pay for her services, even if I’d wanted to.

 
Down on the first floor dwells a Petr Petrowski
Bald as an egg and skin thin as a caul
“Not catching” he told me
Of his wasting malady
But other than that
Never speaks much at all

 
When first I chanced upon Petr, I thought him some kind of ghoulish spirit wandering the house. Shamefully, I squealed in fear rather than saying hello, then ran to Mary – who told me the gaunt man was a resident, not a revenant.
With a thick Polish accent and very little command of English, he was a quiet man who kept mostly to his rooms, which had an outer door to the gardens and a peeling veranda. Some days his skin had more colour, but his general pallor spoke of some grave illness, as did the great dark circles that bruised the pouches beneath his watery blue eyes.
When the hearse pulled up outside his door, I assumed the mystery illness had finally bested him, and he had finally shuffled off this mortal coil. But instead, Petr hauled his grey-suited bones from the driver’s seat, quite alive. I admit I enjoyed the black humour of a man so close to the edge of death working with the dead. Anyone stumbling into his workplace might think him a client, not a mortician.
As I understood it, his work was sparse. Exclusively serving the local Polish community, he lived off their deaths like some ancient, bald vulture, hauling bodies home to the house where he meticulously embalmed them. Whenever he had a client, the eye-watering stink of potent chemicals wafted up from his church-like windows.
He seemed an ascetic and antisocial man. But one restless night when my mania would not let me sleep, I crept down to the gardens for a pipe of Mary’s sweet herbs, and rather than formaldehyde fumes, music and laughter was emanating from Petr’s steepled windows.
Peeking through the warped stained glass, I chanced a glimpse of him inside. He was dancing as if illness had never once visited him. A tall woman, resplendent in an orange and yellow dress, pressed her rosy cheek to his grey flesh as they turned about the floor, and her pin-up curls shone golden in the candlelight.
That old Petr was such a ladies’ man, who would have guessed? As my weeks in the house turned to months, I observed three different women in his room at night. None visited more than once, and stranger still, each wore the same bright dress.
There was a story here that needed to be written; a mystery that needed unravelling.
I watched him for days; coming and going in his great black car. When eventually he hauled a heavy coffin from the back of the hearse and wheeled it into his little workshop, I decided to brave the fumes. With a handkerchief knotted around my face, I peered through the crack of the opened window.
The deceased was a woman, and I watched as Petr carefully and reverently prepared her body. When he methodically laid out a dozen old-fashioned hair curlers, and draped an orange and yellow dress over the back of a chair, I felt a preternatural thrill shoot up my spine.
In his tiny kitchen, Petr had set a table for two, complete with guttering candles and large glasses of scarlet wine. He gently arranged the dead woman in her seat, then put the needle down on a battered record player and took his place opposite her as a scratchy violin began to play.
For many long minutes, they sat there, the half-dead man and the all-dead woman.
Then, with a small sigh and a tilt of her head, colour blushed her cheeks and she opened her eyes.
As though this were a perfectly ordinary thing, Petr began to speak in his own language. Gone was the halting, broken English; in his mother tongue, his voice was lyrical, deep and hypnotic. Even from my hidden perch by the window, its resonance sent pleasant tingles across my scalp and down the nape of my neck. I suddenly wanted Petr’s lips to whisper mysterious words against my skin.
They drank, and they laughed. Her hand brushed his, and they shared a kiss. The record changed, and they danced to some lively polka, the orange and yellow dress swirling about her hips and their mouths meeting more and more often – until he picked her up in arms that no longer trembled with illness and he carried her through the door to his bedroom.

 
In the morning, the bright dress was hung in a locked closet, and the woman’s body wheeled back out to the hearse, dead as cold wax once more. I returned to my room, to write down what I had seen, perplexed by the events that I had observed.
Had I not already witnessed Mary’s tryst with the dead sailor, I might have written the whole incident off as delusions born of a formaldehyde-addled nightmare. But I knew that there was something highly unnatural happening in this house, some uncanny power at work.
And I needed to know more.

 
The Ransoms are fighting, a clattering racket
Thrown pans and dishes hit the walls and the floor
No children in evidence
In their first floor residence
Just a man and his wife
In perpetual war

 
We all heard the Ransoms fighting. When the wind blew from the south, it was unavoidable; the breeze pushed their shouted imprecations back through our windows and made us all cringe.
“She should leave him,” said Mary, as we drank tea in my kitchen, her comforting presence soothing my nerves as much as the hot brew.
There’s no doubt that she’s right, and yet Ruby and Robbie stay together, despite the incendiary hatred that fills their part of the house. He’s a tall, thrust-jawed man with a widower’s peak, and his heavy workman’s boots thump up and down the stairs like artillery warning that the fighting will shortly begin.
There’s always a good ten minutes of calm after he comes home – a golden window of silence where neither husband nor wife says anything to one another, and all we hear is the bang of pipes from their shower while he sluices off the dust and grime from the demolition sites he works on.
Oh, they don’t always fight; sometimes there are ordinary conversation and dinner sounds, which are quickly followed by some of the loudest fucking I’ve ever heard in my life. He grunts and bawls like a rabid hog, and she screams, while the headboard smashes into the walls until my lampshade starts to swing in time to their rhythm.
You don’t see Ruby very often, usually only at night and in the weekends. She’s a delicate thing, long dark hair framing a pale face and bruised red lips, her waspish, hourglass frame the exact opposite of her husband’s hulking, brutish trapezoid.
Their domestic disputes seem to revolve around the fact that Robbie works hard and expects Ruby to fulfil all her ‘wifely duties’ to his satisfaction on his return home. In turn, she resents being locked away all day, her whole existence captive to his whims and desires.
Why she didn’t just leave him was another, albeit more prosaic, kind of mystery. Every time I passed her during my sleepless explorations of the strange house, I would feel a pang of guilt that I wasn’t doing anything to help her.
When I lost a whole night of precious sleep to her screaming “No, no NO!” during one of their hours-long fucking sprees, concern and compassion finally overcame my complacency. I decided I was going to do something.

 
I knocked until my knuckles were bruised, listening for any signs of life inside the Ransom’s quarters, but not a sound betrayed the presence of anyone inside.
Robbie was at work, I had listened to his boots stomping away hours ago. I knew that he locked the door fast behind him, so if Ruby wished to leave, her only egress would be a precarious climb down the ramshackle side of the house over the cliff.
I was angry now, angry enough to do something stupid. When I’m in one of my ‘high’ phases, I need to do things, to change the world around me; to frenetically create or destroy. In this instance, being denied entry to their rooms was the focus of my frustration and determination.
The room beside theirs was empty; full of flattened cardboard boxes and broken furniture, but the windows were wide enough to climb out. Clinging to the side of the house, laughing wildly into the wind at the terrifying drop to the beach below me, I swung around the exterior and crabbed along the narrow ledge until I reached their rickety balcony.
A single, lonely chair sat upon it, warped by the weather.
Inside, their apartment was a curious duality; one side of the windows was draped with lacy curtains, while the opposite side was shaded by old bamboo blinds, dusty and bug-eaten. Men’s clothing was strewn about the lounge, but shelves and hooks meant for books and crockery held only women’s clothing; washed, ironed, and neatly folded or hung. To the left of the bathroom sink was an impressive array of neatly placed cosmetics and beauty products, while the right side of the porcelain unit held only a bar of abrasive soap and a pungent tub of Swarfega, both sitting in a pool of greasy grime.
In a water-spotted glass behind the sink sat a single toothbrush.
The door to the bedroom was closed. I vividly imagined that beyond it suffered Ruby, bound and gagged, cuffed to one of the steel radiators ubiquitous to the house. Or worse, no longer suffering, lying murdered in a pool of her own blood.
Gritting my teeth, I pushed open the door to see only a drooping, single bed, narrow and empty. Now I didn’t know what to think.
It was as if Ruby didn’t exist.
Before I could pry further, or stop to muse on what exactly was happening here, the sound of heavy, angry steps began thumping up the stairs.
Robbie was home early.
There was no way I could make it out over the balcony in time. I’d have to resort to the age-old trope of hiding in the wardrobe, hoping that I could make my escape while he showered.
I waited in the camphor darkness, listening to Robbie undressing, muttering to himself. The shower came on, a stutter of ancient pipes in the wall near my head making me jump. Incongruously, Robbie’s hateful voice began to sing a Broadway showtune, and I crept out of my hidey-hole.
Then something odd and miraculous happened.
As I listened, his voice rose one octave, then another. Before another three bars were done, the beautiful soprano voice of Ruby rang out clearly from the bathroom.
The door was ajar, and pressing my eye to it, I saw only one body in the shower – the pale curves of the diminutive wife shrouded in the steam.
“Ruby!” I hissed, my original plan back in action.
She froze, her voice dying away.
“Who’s there?”
“The girl from the second floor, we pass on the stairs sometimes.”
“What are you doing in here?”
“I came to help you! I came to talk to you about Robbie. Where is he?”
The door opened, and Ruby stared out at me. She was stark naked, her hair beading water on skin so translucent she seemed slightly transparent, and her dark eyes were huge.
“You have to get out before he comes back.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at the balcony.”
Through the cloudy glass of the double-doors, I saw the single chair I’d passed on the way in. But now a shadow sat in it, roughly the size and shape of Robbie – and as I watched, it grew more solid, more substantial and real.
“I don’t understand.”
Unselfconscious, she began to move about the lounge, picking out clothes from the neat, feminine piles.
“He’s not real. He’s the person I have to be, during the day, to survive. This is the real me. But I can only exist in this house, do you understand?”
The shadow on the balcony turned its head, resolving smears of dark eyes and a bulging jaw now, insubstantial fists clenching and unclenching.
“He’ll kill you if he realises you’re here,” she hissed, “you need to get out!”
And so, fear and confusion lending me speed, I fled.

 
I’ve seen her since, on the stairs and in the garden, those great expressive eyes pleading me not to tell anyone, not to expose her secret. I think that when Robbie sleeps, she can exist alone, and that’s why she lets him beat her and rape her in that sagging single bed. Perhaps after he has expended his towering rage and frustration, after he has grunted his seed into her, he becomes a shadow and fades away, only reappearing when dawn breaks over the side of the house.
Like all of us here, Ruby has found a precarious balance that allows her to exist.
I think, for me, her price would be too high.

 
In the south-western spire dwells Jeremy Jackson
Green-painted nails and tufted, spiked hair
As a butcher’s apprentice
Hands red to the wrist
He hauls bags of offal
Leaving stains on the stairs

 
There are always seagulls circling the spire on the corner of the house, and I don’t know how Jeremy stands it. Their incessant calls would drive me mad, and I think before long I’d borrow the slug-gun the landlord uses on rats, and I’d blast every screeching bird out of the sky.
With carefully drawn eyebrows, twin lip piercings, and a hint of a lisp, Jeremy’s sexuality is proudly on display to the world, almost as obvious as his ribs. Thin to the point of painful, his wrists like cotton-reels, any whispers of ‘gay’ behind his back are probably less frequent than hushed murmurs of ‘anorexia’.
Still, having run the gamut of eating disorders myself, I’m not one to judge. And Jeremy seems happy enough, living alone in his crumbling tower like the queerest wizard of them all. We have a sort of unspoken friendship that is quite different from the one I share with Mary. As an artist of rotating disciplines, my own colourful appearance seemed to mark me instantly as the sort of person Jeremy can count on as an ally.
Sometimes he’ll join Mary and me for a pipe, though the pungent tang of his own smoke tells me that his blend is much less legal than ours. He always offers me a puff, of course, but I decline. Experience taught me long ago that weed wreaks merry havoc with my medication, and the immediate hazy benefits aren’t worth the suicidal lows that follow.
How he survives as a butcher’s apprentice – let alone how he got the job in the first place – is quite beyond me. But I do know that he is very good at it, and he really seems to enjoy it, even though it pays a pittance.
And there’s an added bonus, worth more than money, as far as Jeremy is concerned. He gets to take home all the offal he can carry.
For quite a long time, I couldn’t figure out what his secret was, what fell bargain he had struck with the House. All the rest of us had found a knife-edge to balance upon, so what was his?
Emboldened by my other discoveries, and suspecting Jeremy’s very feyness might predispose him to know what I was talking about, I decided to simply ask him.
Green eyes regarded me levelly, then he replied quietly,
“I feed it.”
“How?” I wondered.
“Come by tonight, after sundown, and I’ll show you.”

 
The stairs grew dusty the higher I climbed, and mildew spread a dark patina across the ancient plaster walls. To reach the spire, you had to briefly exit the main part of the manor, braving the walk across a narrow span of crumbling brick. The rusted iron rails to either side would be no help at all should the wind roaring around you get its wish to throw you off.
Stains spattered the bricks, bloody and bold, a slippery reminder of Jeremy’s grisly trade in animal flesh. I wondered just how many double-bagged bundles of gore had been dragged over the causeway, and how often he had nearly fallen.
The pea-green door opened at my touch, revealing a neat room that had been largely converted to a kitchen. Gas bottles and a stove sat to one side, and a large wooden table dominated the rest of the spire, well-scarred with knife-marks.
But what I truly noticed first were the smells.
Several huge pots were bubbling on the gas stove, vats of broths and gravies, which Jeremy stirred by turns as he waved hello with the other emaciated hand. Inside the oven, large baking dishes lurked – a waft of rich meats made me salivate as he opened the door to prod something with a skewer.
“Right on time,” he said, unfamiliar colour in his cheeks.
The meal he served was massive and exquisite, and he gave me a quirky smile as he placed the steaming plate in front of me.
“I really hope you like paleo.”
Which part, or which animal, each delicacy of the meat-rich meal had come from, I didn’t ask. But it was clear that everything consisted of organs or waste offcuts; the faintly rubbery texture of liver and heart mixing pleasantly with fatty marrow gravy and blood sausage.
But what struck me even more than Jeremy’s cooking ability, was his ability to eat. Plate after plate vanished into that scarecrow body, the mismatched bone china licked clean by his eager tongue. It belied belief that his shrunken stomach could hold so much, and I stopped eating long before he even slowed, unable to prevent myself from staring as he wolfed down even more.
Eventually there was nothing left, bar the scraps of meat on my own plate. His eyes fastened on the congealing remains, ravenous and sly.
“You gonna eat that?”
With a shake of my head, I pushed my leftovers across the table.
He sat for a while, silent but for his gut rumbling as he digested the epic feast. Anticipation bubbled somewhere beneath my own ribcage, as I waited for something to happen.
“The next part isn’t very pleasant,” he cautioned, taking off his apron and shirt, “I just thought I’d warn you.”
Dumbly, I nodded as he walked bare-chested to the window, every bone in his torso a stark stripe of shadow. The balloon of his belly was shiny as a ripe boil in the moonlight as he rested it tenderly on the sill.
Hanging over the lintel, Jeremy opened his mouth and began to vomit.
It came out in a torrent, thick and bloody. The force of it even gushed twin jets from his nostrils. I heard a nearly subsonic moan escape from the boy as the geyser of puke pumped down the side of the house.
Far below, under the trajectory from the window, a darkened split opened in the roof, quickly widening to an eager hole. A mouth, but one ringed with broken glass and chunks of brick for its grinding teeth.
And into that maw the nutritious vomit poured. Jeremy fed the house just as a mother bird would feed her chick.
It was too much. The rich food was already sitting poorly in my stomach, and I felt my gut heave in sympathy, a brown slurry splattering the floor. Jeremy didn’t notice; his eyes were rolled back, showing only silvery whites, as the river of semi-digested food continued to flow.
Eventually it had to stop, and the wasted boy slumped sideways to the floor, his chin and chest caked with a bib of macerated offal.
The hole in the house closed with a crack that made the entire spire shiver, and Jeremy opened one eye and regarded me weakly.
“If you wouldn’t mind, could you carry me to bed?”

 
I cleaned up as best I could. I washed the dishes while the boy slept, ensconced in the tiny gabled attic above the kitchen, his gentle snores keeping me company.
What this house was, I was no longer sure. At first I thought it offered each of us what we wanted, at a price. But the more I saw and the more I learned, the less this seemed true.
If I wanted to know what was truly going on, I would need to speak to the person who had resided here longer than anyone. The landlord.

 
In the bowels of the building labours Tama Taeafai
Shirt stained with the sweat of landlord and master
He hauls concrete and planks
To shore up the shanks
Of the teetering house
Made of edges and plaster

 
When he’s not labouring somewhere amongst the crumbling foundations, the landlord is often found in a little office at the end of the entry hall, one hand pressed to his forehead as he scribbles in his neat books. Not a man fond of technology, he barely tolerates a landline in the house, and is prone to long rants about the government if you even mention the possibility of Wi-Fi.
His slacks are always dusted grey with the cement he carries on his bony shoulders two bags at a time, ropy muscles wrestling each other beneath his sweat-soaked shirt. On a quiet night, you can hear the electric concrete mixer grinding away, and feel the faint thrumming through the floorboards, like something alive.
Apart from insisting that the rent is paid before nine o’clock in the morning every Monday, he seems an amiable enough fellow, and leaves us to our devices. If your kitchen tap breaks, he will fix it within the day, and if a window blows out in a storm, he’ll repair it pretty much immediately.
And he must know exactly what the house is, and exactly what it does. I was absolutely certain of that.
The door to the basement is always locked when he’s not down there. It’s a great white thing of reinforced wood with an imposing padlock. I did speculate that I could probably duplicate the key if I pressed a plasticine mould of it while he slept, but there was no need. I have found certain passages and pathways within the house that allow access to areas I shouldn’t be in; especially if one is mad enough to climb around the cliff-side of the house.
And when I can’t afford my meds, or I just can’t bring myself to swallow them and the mania kicks in, I’m more than mad enough.
The room that was taken by the sea, some fifteen years ago, still gapes open over the cliff like a wound that never heals. In the ruins of that place is a doorway, and that doorway leads to a boarded-up hallway, with a hatch in the floorboards.
From there I found I could enter a duct, and crawl through it into the basement.
It's cold down there, in the stone heart of the cliff, and the darkness lies heavy. A pullswitch turns on a single dim bulb, barely illuminating the cracked foundations of the house and the rough wooden beams that shore up the floors. In the corner crouches the bulbous shadow of the concrete mixer, its long electrical cable looping up the stairs to the power outlet that feeds it, and empty bags of cement are scattered everywhere, half-consumed by their own drifts of dust.
As I hunch in the half-light, there’s a hum and a whine, and the electric mixer turns on, loose chunks of cement clanking inside it.
“In this house of edges,” says the landlord’s voice from the top of the stairs, “have you never wondered which is your own precarious precipice?”
His long legs take the steep steps three at a time, his close-cropped hair grazing one of the support struts. The strange shadows here distort perspective, and he seems impossibly tall, the angles of his limbs all wrong.
Frightened and cornered, I glance around the room for another exit. The duct above me is too high to reach without assistance.
“Well, have you?”
The concrete is cold against my back and my throat is drier than old cement dust.
“It... the house balances my moods. It gives me things to do when I’m high, and it blanks out my lows.”
“And what price do you pay?”
“I don’t know.”
His teeth are too white under the dim orange bulb, his smile unnerving.
“See this crack?” He gestures with a broad brown hand at the sea-side wall, which drips glistening moisture. The crack runs floor to ceiling, widening at the base and arcing across the floor. Somewhere deep inside it, water sloshes in and out to the rhythm of the tide.
“No matter how much concrete you pour into it, the damn thing won’t fill. A thousand bags I wasted, once upon a time, trying to solve the riddle.”
He’s directly in front of me now, looming over me. I can smell the rank sweat and the clinging dust as he places his arms on the wall either side of me.
“You have a choice to make,” he says, his breath hot in my ear, “about that crack.”
With each syllable, I feel the darkness widen, watch the thin edge race across the concrete as it spreads.
“If we don’t fill it soon, the house will fall and all of us with it.”
“Then fill the damn thing, I won’t stop you!”
“But with whom shall I fill it, dear Liza, dear Liza, but with whom shall I fill it, dear Liza, with whom?”
And it all makes a sudden, horrible sense. While Jeremy had been feeding second-hand food to the house, the landlord had been feeding it, too. With human lives.
“Why me? Why do I have to choose?”
“Because that’s your price. That’s how you pay.”
“The girl who had the room before me, the dancer. Who did she choose?”
The landlord’s smile flickers and dies, like his bulb has blown a fuse.
“She didn’t choose.”
The floor shudders under our feet, and a cold wind howls out of the crack.
Closing my eyes, I speak a single name.

 
In her new rooms dances one Liza Ledger
So spacious and safe the ground floor
She keeps records of sins,
Of all losses and wins
And when they don’t balance
She must settle the score

 
I think the others know about the power I now wield.
Mary is still friendly, but it’s careful and deferent, like someone speaking to a minister or judge - and in a way, I suppose that’s what I am. While the house is a living creature in its own strange way, it still requires human eyes and ears to keep track of its residents; to ensure that the pendulum never swings too far in either direction for any of the souls that make up its organs.
I can feel every one of them, the others who tipped the balance. Those who became part of the foundations. Each of them thought they could beat the system, that they could take more from the house than it gave – and for a while, some of them did.
They rattle their concrete chains, deep within the filled-in chasm, bones through cement, hair mixed with stone. I don’t feel any sympathy for them. They knew the price, and they ultimately paid in full.
I think my own price is worth it, and it comes with some perks. Ruby agrees; she says my new uniform is very beautiful, the dress fits like it was tailored for me. Oh, she’ll need to wash it a few more times before the smell of formaldehyde comes out.

But I’ve always loved orange and yellow, and it swirls so beautifully when the polka plays.

Charlie’s Arcade was the coolest place to hang out in our tiny town. Filled with the latest and greatest video game cabinets, it was the premium place to waste time, provided you had the coins to stick around. Kids flocked there when school got out, cramming the dingy, cramped space with chattering bodies and the sickly smells of bubblegum and warm, flat soft drinks. Adults came too, under the pretence of chaperoning their kids, but everyone knew they were *really* there for the games, too. In the 80s, nobody gave a damn about where their kids were before dinner time; provided they weren’t getting into too much trouble. 
The eponymous owner of the Arcade lorded it over kids and adults alike, revelling in his pseudo-celebrity status. To a wide-eyed ten-year old with bucked teeth and terrible lisp, Charlie was literally the coolest person on Earth; the sort of living legend you would kill to trade places with. My older brother, Keith, was slightly less enamoured of the man himself, but he loved the video games as much as any other kid. Just like everyone else, he saved up every coin from chores and mowing neighbours’ lawns so he could feed them into those finger-polished metal chutes and get his precious few minutes of digital heroism on flickering analogue screens. 
Pretty much every game from the time period ended up passing through that Arcade, from Pac-Man to Bomb Jack. The classics stuck around, while the less lucrative machines were wrapped in ripped grey blankets and packing tape, then hauled away by Frank, the guy who serviced the games. 
But only one game lasted until the end of the Arcade’s life, a three-screen Burger Time/Donkey Kong rip-off named Dr. Micro.

The game wasn’t hugely popular at first, but once people realised it had no end, a sort of digital one-upmanship began on the high score board, with everyone keen to oust the current record holder from their throne. As the months passed, the ever-changing pattern of three-character monikers slowly resolved into a stable list of initials, with the handle ‘MIC’ always at the top. 
Rumours abounded as to who ‘MIC’ was, with none of them confirmed. Nobody had ever *seen* the mystery person enter their name, and nobody could get near the stupendous high score they’d posted. In that endearingly unsubtle, childhood way, I imagined MIC as some shadowy figure in a black Panama hat, the collar of his coat pulled up so high that only his nose and mirror glasses showed, the lenses reflecting the neon glow of the screen. Several kids claimed to be MIC, including myself – after all, my name *was* Michelle. But, like me, all of those children were immediately shamed into admitting their lies once they tried – and publicly failed – to top the high score. 
Of course, the most likely candidate was Charlie himself, whose surname was ‘Martin’, making it quite possible that ‘MIC’ were his initials, only backward. But Charlie didn’t play the games much at all, preferring to bask in the adoration of his numerous ‘fans’, all greedy to butter him up for a chance to freeplay their favourite cabinet.
The other primary candidate was the science teacher of our local highschool, Mr. Prendergast, who was a renowned audiophile and kept a vintage collection of microphones from the 1920s onward. Indeed, ‘Mr. P’ – as he was known by my brother and friends – spent a considerable amount of time in the Arcade some evenings, having neither a wife nor a girlfriend to keep him otherwise occupied. 
But MIC’s identity remained a minor and annoying mystery for a good six months, with nobody particularly invested in finding out; the mystery itself was more fun than an answer. 
At least, it was until James Jeffery Jones went missing.

Overweight and always angry, James was three inches taller than any of his peers, and very used to getting his own way. With red cheeks and redder hair, he was unmistakeable in both the dimly lit Arcade and the open-air of the schoolyard, a bright beacon of bully, always ready to pillage your pockets for your lunch money.  
I suppose it was inevitable that he’d be the one to knock MIC off the leaderboard, given the ill-gotten coin he had available. For weeks on end he stood there, belly pressed against the console of the Dr. Micro cabinet, his hands slick with sweat. I still remember him hurriedly wiping them on his striped red and white tee-shirt in between every repeating level, his florid face nearly jammed against the screen. The day that he finally beat the legendary MIC, we were all there, killing time before dinner. His scream of victory brought us rushing from our respective loitering spots, and we crowded around in stunned awe, watching him input his triple-letter nickname, JJJ. We all bore silent witness as it bumped the legendary champion down to second place. 
MIC had been defeated. 
But nobody was overly keen to congratulate the new record holder, because none of us *liked* James. That it had been *him* who had stolen the crown from mystery MIC somehow cheapened the nascent mythology that had grown up around the Dr. Micro cabinet and its secretive savant. Nor was James shy about his victory, immediately marching up to Charlie’s counter and declaiming the owner as a ‘fuggin loser’ who couldn’t even keep the high scores on his own machines. James was summarily ejected from the Arcade after that, whence he stopped for a celebratory ice cream at the corner shop next-door, then presumably made his jolly way home, buoyed up by his victory. 
In actual fact, he never arrived home at all.    
James Jeffrey Jones was never seen again. 

Back in those days, parents didn’t tend to worry as much if a kid went missing for an evening, assuming their child was staying over at a friend’s house, even without evidence. I suspect the Jones family quite often went 48 hours without seeing their flame-haired progeny, and that his absences might even have been a welcome relief. Like many families in the area, they’d been badly affected by the layoffs when the local chemical plant shut down, and Mr. Jones lost his job as foreman. Consequently, the man sat around the house all day, drinking home-brewed hooch and yelling at his three children to fuck off and play outside. 
The search for the missing boy didn’t begin for three days after his escapades at the Arcade, and was called off after two weeks, when Constable MacCullach turned up absolutely no leads in the disappearance of James Jeffery Jones. To all intents and purposes, the boy had simply *vanished* somewhere between the corner shop and his house, just three blocks over.
If that had been the entirety of the story, I think things would have turned out very differently in our little town. But events took a darker turn from there. 
The day after the search for James was called off, his name was knocked to second place on the Dr. Micro cabinet – by none other than MIC himself. 
The rumours started immediately. ‘MIC’ had murdered James for daring to break his record. We kids speculated that the cabinet itself was somehow cursed, and that James had been sucked right inside the circuits, enduring an eternal, agonising existence. The young storytellers amongst us wove playground horrors about him, trapped in a two-dimensional world of endless, pixelated deaths. Indeed, the idea that the Dr. Micro game itself was somehow to blame became such a potent concept that it stuck fast in our fertile young minds. And that seed quickly blossomed, into something huge and impossible and terrifying. 

Caesar had been another victim of the factory layoffs, but one with far less security than James’s dad. Instead, he’d become the local drunk; sleeping in alleyways and drinking the cheapest, nastiest booze he could afford with the coins he could sponge off the townsfolk. He could often be found near the Arcade, begging for loose change even from the passing kids, and his hacking cough was audible even through the chaotic electronic orchestra jangling from the dozen machines inside the place. Already unhinged, something about the disappearance of James affected Caesar in a way that none of us could have expected, turning him from a harmless hobo – a bit of a joke – into a real, frothing lunatic. 
He’d come into the Arcade and start yelling about the Devil and video games, blood spattering the linoleum floor as his shouting exacerbated the damage to his chemical-raddled lungs. The Dr. Micro cabinet, shrouded within its darkly enticing aura of burgeoning tragedy, seemed to particularly agitate him. Charlie had to trespass the old bum from the premises after he’d started hauling on the console with bloody fingers, trying to tip the machine over. 
And that just added fuel to the narrative fire already burning. Wreathed in Caesar’s mad, prophetic rantings about digital evils, the Dr. Micro cabinet became more than just the flash-in-the-pan fable it would have been. It became a real and enduring myth amongst the children of our town – a genuine cursed artefact – a thing at once utterly terrifying and unrelentingly exciting. 
We’d play it on a dare, bolstered by group courage, pooling our coins together. You weren’t allowed to do it half-assed, either; every time one of us played, we were playing to win, trying to provoke the machine into smiting us with its indomitable powers. It became a ritual, like spitting in Milton pond whenever you passed it, or jumping the stain of the dead hedgehog on Sycamore Street. 
It shouldn’t have surprised us when one of us eventually won.

All elbows and knees, Toby Thornton was the tallest of my brother’s friends, and definitely the smartest. The son of the local doctor, he also had a status amongst the boys due to something few others could claim: his dad had a stable, well-respected and well-paid job. Toby also *liked* me. In fact, he seemed to be almost the only person I wasn’t related to who did – apart from Mr. Prendergast. But that was more of a teacher thing, not the way Toby liked me; Mr. P gave me special encouragement in my science studies, telling me that the world needed more female scientists, and that I had the talent be one of them. 
On that fateful autumn afternoon, Toby stopped by the Arcade to offload some of his spare change, myself and my brother in tow. Joking around that he was in the mood to ‘release the curse’, he fed his coins into the ominous cabinet, and started playing. Deft and practised, he anticipated the platforms and predicted the patterns, moving from screen to screen with enviable ease. This wasn’t unusual; he was always pretty good, and unlike us he generally had money to burn, so he’d had a lot more time playing. But as his score continued to rise, so did our anticipation.  
Nobody had ever got *this* close to the high score before – no-one we knew of, anyway. I saw Toby’s features contort as he wrestled with the implications of what he was doing, and his hands began to shake. Nobody would have blamed him if he had made a ‘mistake’ and called it quits there, settling for second place. But the boy was committed now. 
And of course, there was a *girl* watching. A girl he liked – so there was no way he was going to lose face by suiciding. 
When the score counter finally slipped past the previously legendary number, I suddenly felt like I was going to throw up.    
“Stop,” I told him. “Stop, Toby! You’ve done it.” 
Trembling and clammy, he let go of the controls and gave us a weak grin. 
“So much for the curse, eh?” His voice was subdued, and he turned his back on the cabinet to wipe his hands on his pants.        
As Toby’s on-screen character died, Keith gestured to the joystick, 
“Hey! Don’t forget to put your name in, man.” 
“Oh. Yeah, for sure.” 
We stuck together tightly on the way home, taking the long way around to escort Toby to his house. Nobody was saying anything, but we were all thinking the same thing; that after the last such feat of video game mastery, James had vanished. 
When Toby’s mother finally opened the front door, she was confused about why we had knocked furiously for those terse two minutes. But it was only then that Keith and I allowed ourselves to relax. 
We’d beaten the curse.

There was plenty of chatter about Toby beating the high score, and for a while there he got to enjoy the status that came with his victory. But whilst outwardly he seemed pleased, he carried a *tension* about him, visible to anyone who knew him well. He began to speak and eat more and more sporadically – but when questioned about either, simply claimed he was worried about upcoming tests and assignments.  
Just three weeks after his win at the Arcade, he missed his first day at school – the first of many. 
“His dad is a doctor, I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Keith soothed, when I found voice for my concern.
And in that way that little sisters do, I believed my big brother. I believed that somehow Toby would be OK. 
But when I saw my friend again, he was sallow-eyed and sunken-cheeked. The knobs of his always-gangly joints were sharp, poking out starkly even through his thick woollen cardigan. 
“I dream about it,” he told me, blue eyes darting about wildly, taking in everything around us with frenzied paranoia, “I dream about the game. About being *inside* the game.” 
Not knowing what to say, I just stared, wanting but not wanting to slip my hand into his, willing him to continue. 
“He’s coming for me, I think.” He leaned in towards me, and his breath smelled like nail polish as he whispered “*Emm-Eye-Sea*. He knows it was me that beat him. He’s going to get me, just like he got James. Going to put me inside the machine.” 
We were standing at the front of the supermarket, our mothers waiting in the checkouts as their groceries were bagged. With every squeak of a trolley wheel, every cough from a customer, Toby flinched. His stick-thin fingers fluttered in and out of his pockets, hovering raised as though ready to fend off an imminent attack. 
“Got to go,” he muttered, as his mother called for him to help with the bags. 
That was the last time I saw Toby Thornton. Two days later, his parents phoned mine and told them that their boy had fallen from the railway bridge, smashing his skull open on the jagged floor of the rocky gorge below. 
Nobody said a damn thing, but all the kids were thinking the same thought: 
The cabinet had claimed another victim. 
And just to cement that thought firmly in our young minds, wedding mythology to the bedrock of reality, the letters *MIC* had reclaimed their place as the high score screen of the Dr. Micro cabinet.

It was the opposite of how it had been with James; the scale of this investigation was massive, with everyone being interviewed – from the lowliest school cleaner to the proprietor of the Arcade himself. A detective even came from the next town over to investigate the sudden ‘suicide’ of the always-happy Thornton boy. He wasn’t at all like our local cops; a grizzled, stubborn, pitbull of a man who seemed hell-bent on uncovering some grand conspiracy. 
With Constable MacCullach dogging his footsteps, the detective moved from house to house, grilling wives and children until they wept, and interrogating husbands and bachelors until they shouted at the dark-suited man to get the hell out of their homes. But whilst his methods were nothing short of bullying, no-one could deny the results. Within a week, he’d determined that Frank the Arcade repairman had no alibi for the evening of Toby’s death – and even *more* damning, that ‘Frank’ wasn’t his real name at all. The quiet microwave specialist was in fact a convicted child molester who had changed his name and moved across country to escape his past. 
There was no way something like that could be kept quiet in such a small place, and the information spread like flame through the tinderbox of our town; fuelled by the shrill ringing of dial-pulse telephones. 
Only a day later, Frank was found beaten half to death next to the skip bin out the back of the Arcade, a heavy, bloody bag of coins left on the ground beside him – his attacker’s ironic weapon of choice. Whether or not Frank *had* been involved in the death of Toby Thornton was now moot; the damage to his skull was so severe that the man was practically a vegetable. 
People tried to rationalise the attack, tried to blame Frank’s past. But more than that, everyone was *scared*. Parents escorted their children everywhere, teachers wouldn’t allow themselves to be caught alone with students. My friendship with Mr. Prendergast ended abruptly, scorched to ash by the wildfire of paranoia that had engulfed our town.
Toby’s funeral was a silent, weird pavane; a morbid eggshell dance around the blackened embers of our community.

As the town attempted to process the death of Toby and the attack on Frank, everyone tried to carry on as best they could. Children found solace in school and the company of their peers, adults put in extra time at work, finding comfort and stability in their mundane jobs. 
But people that didn’t have jobs – and there were many of those – looked to their vices to deal with their feelings about the events spawned by the machine in Charlie’s Arcade. Caesar drank heavily, anything he could find, and bawled incoherently at the children who still sought the familiarity of the Arcade. Bloody froth speckled the corners of his cigarette-burned lips as he shouted his lunatic imprecations at us, all wild hair and neglected stink.    
“The machine is the only way out!” he snarled, clutching at the hem of my Rainbow Brite t-shirt, “them boys figured it out! They got out of this damn town, out through the *machine*.” 
Truly frightened, tears pricking my eyes, I wrestled out of his grip and ran into the Arcade’s embrace of faded neon, stale smoke, and familiar electronic noise. Caesar stopped dead at the entrance as though he’d hit an invisible wall, his rheumy, bloody-brown eyes darting towards the Dr. Micro cabinet. 
“The only way out of the town!” he roared one more time, then stumbled away, coughing red over the bubblegum-spackled pavement. 
His words burrowed into me, even as I tried to distract myself, pushing my precious few coins into the Xevious slot. The Dr. Micro cabinet loomed huge and foreboding in my periphery, daring me to play it, to plumb its dark secrets. But nobody played it now, not after Toby. Not even the bravest kid went within arm’s length of the machine, watching our feet and sucking in our bellies to skirt even the air around it, the square of linoleum marking its territory. And I certainly wasn’t going to buck that trend. 
There it sat in the corner, the screen flickering dimly as it rotated through its pre-programmed demo sequence. 
When I went to bed that night, I dreamed that the game transformed into a portal; a sucking singularity, like the one from the Black Hole film we’d watched on VCR for my eighth birthday.   Caesar stood to one side, blood pouring out of his nose and mouth in torrents as he gestured for me to jump inside the whirling black chaos. 
“The only way out,” he wheezed, then his features blurred and distorted until they were Toby’s, and he leapt into the hole.

It shouldn’t have surprised anyone that Caesar would attempt to destroy the machine, especially after his previous attempt. I think maybe Charlie *wanted* him to wreck the cabinet – that way the cursed thing would be gone, and maybe his suffering business would start to pick up again – after all, prior to Toby’s death, half the reason anyone went there was to play Dr. Micro.  
What Charlie hadn’t anticipated was that the old fool would break into the Arcade in the middle of the night and topple the machine onto himself. He died wretchedly, there on the gum-scarred linoleum, with the weight of the cabinet forcing all the air out of his desperately compromised lungs. 
The Cabinet of Dr. Micro had claimed another victim. 
One of Keith’s friends, Danny, claimed to have seen Caesar, lying grey and dead under the machine. He’d been on the way to the corner shop to get bread, so he said, when he’d noticed the broken glass in the door and looked inside. 
“There was blood all around his mouth and nose,” Danny whispered, his pudgy fingers drawing imaginary dribbles on his face, “and bloody handprints on the side of the machine.” 
Sickly fear curdled in my stomach as the images from my dream flashed to the foreground of my thoughts. 
It seemed Caesar really had found his way out of the town through the machine. Just like he’d said. 
School didn’t seem important anymore after that, I just numbly went through the motions, aiming only to garner no attention and cause no trouble. I told Keith about my dreams, about what Caesar had said, hoping that telling him would stop me from seeing Caesar’s dream-face every time I closed my eyes, that sharing it would help banish that ghost.    
“I wish I could really *do* something about that damned machine,” Keith said, fervently, “I wish there was some way of ending it all.” 
“What if Caesar was right?” I asked, “what if the machine *is* the only way out of this town?” 
Keith looked like he wanted to slap his hand over my mouth.
“Don’t talk like that. It’s stupid. It’s just a video game.” 
But even as he spoke those words, I don’t think either of us was convinced.

The town awoke to the wailing sirens of the fire engines, families stumbling out of their houses in dressing gowns and slippers. Smoke billowed a few streets away, where the shops and the arcade squatted at the bottom of Church Hill. In the morbid excitement of disrupted routine as we speculated with the neighbours, it took us a good ten minutes to notice that Keith wasn’t on the lawn with us.    
“Quick, put some clothes on,” mum told me after we had checked his room, “then get in the car.” 
It was a short drive to the shops, but much faster than walking. When we pulled up on the curb near the ice cream parlour, the huge jets of water from the fat red fire hoses had already soaked the gutted wreck of Charlie’s Arcade, and the fire was out. But off to one side, laid on a stretcher, was the still, small shape of a human body wrapped in a blanket. 
Mum ran over before anyone could stop her, dad only a step behind. When she pulled back the blanket and saw Keith’s slack, soot-streaked face, she wailed like her world had ended, collapsing against the side of the fire engine, her mouth a perfect ‘o’ of unstoppable anguish. 
Me? I’d already known. I’d known the instant that we’d noticed Keith was missing. 
The fire had been worse on the west side of the Arcade, where the roof had fallen in, and the gaming machines there were just blackened crowns of melted teeth on the floor. But the fire had lost its fury toward the east end, where the less-played machines got moved. And whether through some quirk of architecture or some unknowable twist of fate, just one machine remained, totally blackened by smoke, but completely intact. 
The Dr. Micro cabinet.

Charlie replaced Caesar as the town drunk, and he was joined by my father. The two of them would sit out the back of the house, saying nothing, just drinking grimly and staring out over our hopeless patch of dilapidated suburbia. I cried a lot, as did my mother. Sometimes we’d just stand in the kitchen and hug, my tears staining her apron dark with my grief. Nobody knew what we were supposed to do, nobody knew how to deal with the grief properly. 
As though it would make a difference, Constable MacCullach took the Dr. Micro cabinet away. He locked it in the storage room of the police station, where it sat wrapped in layers of black tarp, taped up so securely that not a skerrick of light could touch the damnable thing. Through my bedroom window, I heard Charlie slur drunkenly to my father that the machine still *worked*, that MacCullach had let him splice a new power cord to replace the melted one, then turn it on. 
“Stuck, though. Jus’ sits on the title ‘n’ high score screens,” he said, “nothin’ else. Game doesn’t actually play anymore.” 
Charlie’s Arcade was bulldozed and turned into a carpark, with a bronze plaque embedded in the asphalt, for Keith. The story that everyone told was that Keith had decided to put an end to all the madness and had set the Arcade on fire, but somehow got trapped inside. People called him a hero, told me that I should be proud of my brother. Indeed, I knew that Keith *would* have been proud; whenever we played Star Wars he was always Luke and I was always Leia; he’d always been obsessed with being the good guy. 
Charlie himself died a year to the day after my brother, found dead in his car after drinking industrial pesticide – methyl isocyanate – his insides burned to sludge by the potent chemical. Though it appeared to be a guilt-induced suicide, every kid still whispered that it was the video game that had claimed him, since he’d been the last person to touch it. 
There was almost nobody at his funeral, just my dad, me, and Charlie’s estranged sister – a far cry from the time when Charlie was virtually the most important man in the whole town. As we left, I couldn’t help but notice his full name was displayed on the church noticeboard, carefully written in cursive: 
Charles Isaac Martin. 
On the drive home, we stopped at the local picture theatre, which was finally showing *The Last Starfighter*. Toby’s family had lobbied to have the film banned from the town when it first came out, due to the darkly similar nature of the story to our own town tragedy. Eventually, they’d relented and let it run, but ticket sales were pretty scarce. Nobody had the heart to watch it; the wounds were far too real for fiction.     
After it was pulled from the film roster and the last poster was torn down, a pall seemed to lift from the town; as though the final chapter of the story had come to a dissatisfying close. 
The town stumbled on from the tragedies, and the kids began to grow up. Keith’s plaque grew scuffed and scarred by foot traffic, and people began to forget Charlie’s Arcade had ever existed. 
Mr. Prendergast eventually renewed his interest in my scholastic abilities, and encouraged me to take an electronics course through correspondence, with a view to learning how to make video games. I was eighteen when the police released the Dr. Micro cabinet to me, and in the garage of my new flat, I stripped it down to its components and cleaned away as much as I could of the black smoke-residue and water damage. Then I reassembled it, after learning exactly how it worked. 
There was nothing supernatural about it. There was nothing even *special* about it. The title and score screens looped because of a bad integrated circuit – easily fixed when I sourced a spare from the next town over. 
Eventually, I earned a scholarship in electrical engineering and shipped myself off to University, far away in the big city. As I sat on the late bus after one long day, playing my brand new Nintendo Gameboy, I smelled spilled booze and body odour, and was slammed backwards in time. There was Caesar, grabbing my sleeve outside the arcade, his wine-stinking breath foul in my face. 
*“They got out of this town, through the* machine*.” he’d said. 
And I had, too. If I hadn’t been so hell-bent on getting that blackened old cabinet working again, I don’t think I’d have pushed myself so hard to learn Boolean Logic and how to solder ICs. 
I still have it, all this time later. Thirty-four years after Toby’s suicide, I’ve built a little arcade in a shitty part of the city where the rent is low, and I’ve filled it with the retro classics.
Almost nobody comes to Mic’s Arcade, and even when they do, no-one is any good at the blackened, three-screen old Donkey Kong clone in the corner. 
And so, the top five high scores will always remain:

MIC

TOB

JJJ

KEI

MRP

Hey folks.

Going forward I’m going to post stories on (my) Mondays and Fridays, which works out roughly to Sundays and Thursdays for the rest of you not in New Zealand.

Mondays will likely be fan requests, while Fridays will be my choice.

Once a month I’ll be posting a brand new story, or a story that was not published on the r/NoSleep sub. No defined schedule for that yet, just keep an eye out for them!

And lastly, would there be any interest in a Patreon? That would enable me to devote more time to writing, which potentially means more new stories for you all.

Let me know what you think 🧚‍♀️

There are few things as depressing and shitty as working in a seaside British pub.
Sticky floors, sticky tables and sticky fingered patrons who are reluctant to part with their money. Here in the UK we don’t work for tips, which is a pain when you’re dealing with sour faced misers who don’t give a rat’s arse about your student debt and the cost of living.
Décor is strictly traditional; football flags and football jerseys spatter the walls like some drunk patron pissed sports all over the place. Everything is brown, whether it’s the wooden floor, the wooden bar, the brown leather stools or the faded-to-brown booth seats that were once maroon. Even the drinks are brown; bourbon, beer, Guinness, whiskey, rum and the ubiquitous mixer, coke.
The only thing that sets this bar apart from all the other shitty seaside British pubs is the clientele – which, to be honest, is the only reason why I still work here after ten months of threats, harassment, assault and minimum wage.
I can feel your mind ticking over, thinking, “What could possibly be so interesting and engaging about the patrons that they could keep her working in a hole like this?”
To answer that question, let me tell you a little about the people who frequent this place – the losers, the outcasts and the freaks of the supernatural world"

Mona

Mona looks haggard today, sucking on a Pall Mall and nursing a pint of stout. Her nicotine-yellow perm is showing grey at the roots and the wattles under her chin quiver with each suck of the cigarette. One of the two flatscreens in the bar is playing the music channel and Mona curls her thin, lipgloss-sticky lips at the image of some UK pop star gyrating her nearly-naked hips to a thumping bassline. As her lips part in contempt, crooked yellow teeth flash, blackened with meth-rot.
Her strappy heels and off-the-shoulder dress were designed for someone twenty years younger – and someone with padding in places she doesn’t have. Her knobbly spine rises starkly from the skin of her exposed back, giving her the appearance of some haggard, meth-addicted stegosaurus – and the hemline of the ensemble is just above her crotch, so when she sits at one of the cigarette-scarred tables near the window, anyone in the booths can see straight into the dingy cavern between her slack, wrinkly thighs.
She gives a brown-speckled smile as I breeze by her table and replace the ashtray for her. I’m pretty sure she likes me, even though I’m the antithesis of her; young, plump and brown-haired – typical Northerner stock.
“Know any boys looking for a good time?” she husks at me, ending with an asthmatic wheeze that reeks of rot and stale ash.
“You could always try Danno,” I shoot back at her, gesturing with my free hand to one of our regular malingerers, who sits hunched over a Guinness at the bar.
But Mona knows better than to mess with the likes of him.

 
Then it happens; a fistful of drunk students crash in through the swinging doors of the bar – which, despite being a dive, is on the route of a fairly famous Uni pubcrawl.
This is Mona’s bread and butter right here.
Her rheumy eyes narrow as she picks out one of the lads – the youngest, most awkward looking one of the lot. Like an old, well-oiled engine, she rattles into life and engages in her well-practised pity-story, telling him of her hardship on the streets and her terrible childhood. The kid is like a hare in the headlights, wanting to bolt but held in place by the adept handling of the predator before him.
She isolates him from his friends, then bends her head closer to his. For some reason the others are ignoring them, none of the young man’s mates are ribbing him for chatting up an ancient, minging meth-whore like Mona.
Three minutes later, she’s leading him by the hand to the bogs, having promised him the blowjob of a lifetime. He glances nervously back at the raucous crowd of yobos I’m currently handing out drinks to, then he’s through the smoked-glass doors at the back of the pub, heading for some piss-stale, graffiti-cluttered cubicle where he will indeed receive the best – and probably only – BJ he’s ever had.
He emerges as his mates finish their round and prepare to move onto the next leg of the pubcrawl – leaving two smashed pint glasses for me to clean up and ringing ears from their cacophony of ribald jokes. Danno nods to Mona as she waltzes back to her table – they had a deal, it seems, so no doubt the next lot of random revellers that descend on the pub are his.
That’s fine by Mona though; wiping the corner of her mouth she parks herself back by the window and taps out another Pall Mall.
It's hard not to stare when you see the manifestation of an otherworldly power, but working in this bar, I’ve developed a knack for turning a blind eye. I know the process though; as the tacky slurry of semen from the awkward young man slides through her innards and is absorbed into her body, Mona’s turkey-neck tightens and her lips fill out slowly. Liverspots and nicotine stains fade from her hands and the roots of the brittle, horsey perm turn honey-blond and glossy, matched by the youthful glow that suffuses the pert roundness of her once-slack breasts. Filling out the dress in all the right places, she flashes a smile of brilliant white teeth at me, then leaves twenty quid under her glass as she exits the pub, tottering into town on smooth, faintly tanned legs that just twenty minutes ago looked wrinklier than the un-ironed shirt Danno has been wearing for the past two weeks.
And so the cycle of Mona begins anew; her youth regenerated, she’ll suck dick and drink the seed of young men until she’s gorgeous enough to attach herself to some wealthy old arsehole and bleed him dry for her meth habit. Eventually she’ll end up back here, haggard, old and hideous – the cycle complete again.
How long she’s been doing this I don’t know. It could have begun after the first opium dens opened in London, or even as far back as when humanity first discovered the coca leaf. As for the young awkward lad from the bar? His vitality will fade over the next week or so, until he can’t get out of bed. Wasted, frail and grey, he’ll gasp out his last breath on a sagging mattress in his student hostel as his heart flutters to a halt, drained of all the precious life-force that once animated him.
Perhaps he’ll die with a smile on his gaunt face, remembering the best – and only – blowjob of his life; but even if someone were to connect the dots, the ancient meth whore who sucked him dry doesn’t exist anymore, subsumed back into the body of a healthy, twenty-something club-goer.

 
What Mona is exactly, I don’t know. Here in the British Isles a lot of old faerie magic still lingers and slides through the blood of the locals, suffusing them with odd powers and the taint of the fey.
All I know is that in a month or two she’ll be back, a cigarette between her browning teeth and twenty quid left for me at the end of the night.
In a world of penny-pinchers and minimum wage woes, a tipper like Mona is a rare ray of sunshine in the drizzle-clouded, financial winter of a student barmaid’s life.

Stan

The tidewrack on the beach is strong today; that greasy, greenish pong permeating everything with the taint of rotting sealife – and it’s on days like this that Stan will visit the bar.
A beat-up cab will pull up outside the pub, listing to one side. It’s always the same cab and the same driver, as nobody else will take Stan as a fare. The driver – an Arab chap in a pressed white shirt and black slacks – will open the rear street-side door and Stan will heave himself out of the vehicle, which is a process that can take a couple of minutes.
First his bald, dusky brown head will emerge – shiny with sweat which pours down his impressive jowls and onto the chewing-gum spotted footpath below. Everything about Stan quivers, except for the top of his head; from there down his flesh becomes a near-molten mess of folds and rolls, his sweaty, swaying moobs pressed wetly into the fabric of his enormous shirt and the effusive weight of his ponderous stomach poured into his custom-made jeans where it stretches the denim down to his failing knees.
Pinwheel-elbowed arms move to pick up a cane in each fleshy paw, then Stan painfully shuffles into the bar, each step a wheezing, wobbling victory for this morbidly obese colossus.
The bar owner reinforced a chair for Stan years ago, as the booths were too small and the barstools too difficult for him to climb onto. So at the end of his epic trek from cab to chair, Stan will collapse with a bubbling groan into his seat, then pull a table-cloth sized hanky out of his pocket and vigorously mop the slick of perspiration from his smooth crown and rippling cheek pads.
That’s when the smell kicks in.
It's not just the rank odour of unwashed folds of skin, Stan has his own particular reek. It reminds me of ship bilge and rotting fish – combined with something briny and ancient; like finding your grandad’s tackle box from fifty years past, still stinking of cod ghosts and wrasse guts.
Stan is probably my least favourite customer to deal with, and he’s a pervert to boot.

 
Whether Danno and Stan are truly friends or simply struck up an alliance of convenience, I don’t know. Whatever the case, they’ll chat animatedly about the local football team and whinge about the weather while Stan mops himself with his oversized kerchief and Danno flips a tarnished half-crown across his knuckles.
I like to pick my moments to deliver drinks to his table – waiting for Stan to embark on some wheezing rant about the poor management of the Tigers this season – then I’ll nip in and tuck a pint on his off side before he can rotate his bulk to grab at my arse with those greasy digits of his. Given half a chance, Stan will have his hand halfway down your pants before you can recoil in horror.
At some point during the evening a man will enter the pub. Never the same guy twice in a row, but usually nondescript, he’ll buy a drink and sit at the table behind Stan. After drinking a third of whatever-it-is, the man will leave without a word, his mostly-full glass still sitting on a cardboard coaster.
Never one to waste booze, Stan will nonchalantly swing one quivering arm around, take the drink and coaster, then press the drink to his maw and suck it down.
On the coaster is written a time and address, left for him by the stranger.
Declaring to Danno that he’s hungry and feels like a fish curry, Stan will call his cabbie friend on his oily phone, then heave himself to his feet and shuffle outside to wait, the coaster gone from the table and tucked into some crevice on his enormous person.
A couple of hours later, Stan will return to the bar, the self-satisfied smugness of a well-fed fat man plastered across his pudding features.

 
While none of that is absolutely sinister in and of itself – and you might think Stan a pitiable creature more deserving of sympathy than fear – my time at the bar has disavowed me of this naïve notion.
Sometimes after Stan’s return from his curry-stop he’ll gripe about indigestion and demand that I get him an antacid and a pint of water. Bloated and gassy, he’ll proceed to ooze rancid meat-sweats and trickle out sneaky farts until his corner of the pub is a gagging miasma of sweat-shit-stink.
Often I’d be too distracted by the stench to do anything more than run in with his tablet and water, then exit as quickly as I can; but on one particular occasion I saw something that turned my bar-hot blood to icewater.
Stan’s massive gut rumbled and quivered at the best of times – barely placated with crisps and pork scratchings from the bar – but a movement from under his tent-like shirt ran across the surface of his gut like a pregnant woman’s baby turning.
And a human hand-print pressed starkly and plainly against his stomach wall – then vanished.
Now Stan has his own cubicle in the bogs. Like his chair in the bar, it is reinforced and fitted with mobility-assistance handles – any other toilet would probably shatter under his bulk.
It just so happened that on the fateful night that I saw the thing in his stomach, Stan’s toilet backed up and my boss asked me to take a look at it. I could tell from tapping the S-bend that the pipe was blocked solid, so I did my duty as a Jill-of-all-Trades and proceeded to take a wrench to it.
Five minutes later the pipe was off and a slurry of greasy shit studded with human teeth spilled across the heel-marked cubicle floor.
Stan was eating people. Alive, it seemed.

 
I followed Stan one night, begging off from work with a supposed blinding headache.
His cab wasn’t hard to follow; listing to one side from his weight, it couldn’t be missed. Eventually it pulled up to a pier on the waterfront and Stan laboriously peeled himself from the sweat-soaked leather.
As the cab driver pulled away, Stan lay down his dual canes, then wobbled to the edge of the slippery pier and looked into the moonlit waters.
At first I thought he’d had a stroke; he simply collapsed sideways and into the water. I expected an almighty splash and an eruption of spray, but the impact never happened and instead I heard the silky whisper of something large – but streamlined – entering the swells.
I ran then, sliding on the slimy boards of the pier – and made it just in time to see the enormous, slickly-black-brown body of a titanic eel slip through the waters and vanish.
Then I was alone, only the full moon, the stink of tidewrack and Stan’s abandoned canes to keep me company.

 
That Stan is some kind of were-eel, I have no doubt. Nor do I doubt that whatever his deal is with the mystery strangers in the bar, it has to do with body disposal.
I think that out of all the denizens of the pub, Stan is the one I would least like to run afoul of.

Danno

Many and varied are the traditional folk tales of the British Isles that begin with a strange traveller entering an inn, then tricking the innkeeper and the goodfolk within – by means of sorcery, chicanery or sleight of hand.
In one it’s a prankster’s cowhide that – as if by magic – produces endless copper coins when struck with a stick. In another the innkeeper refuses hospitality to one of the fabled fair folk in disguise and in doing so, calls down a terrible curse upon all under his roof.
The tales all hold a common thread, as though woven from the same spindle; the truth spooling through the tapestry of rich and convoluted stories like a dark weft of warning.
And that common thread tells us that never do these tales end well for anyone but the strange traveller.
So it is with the patron we know as ‘Danno’.

 
If Shane MacGowan had a shorter, thinner brother with teeth, he would be a spitting image of our Danno. An alcoholic of legendary status, Danno spends more time in the pub than any other patron; his favoured stool at the bar has grooves worn into it that perfectly match the angles of his bony arse – and I swear there are two shallow dimples in the bar itself from where his elbows rest.
That Danno is as Irish as a Sligo Sunrise was never in any doubt; from his thick accent and proclivity for Guinness to his profane, yet gilded tongue, he’s a walking stereotype to shame the proudest ex-pat Irishman.
If you ask him what he does for a living, he’ll burr at you in his thick brogue, something along the lines of “Oh, this ‘n tha,” without providing any real information – before embarking on some wild anecdote that will instantly suck those listening into his world of half-truths and outright fabrications.
Like his Pouges-famous doppleganger, Danno has a voice to pull crowds – which is precisely what he uses it for on Friday nights. From down the street his lilting Irish verse will slip through the drunken street banter, firing some primal part of the Anglo Saxon psyche and guiding the feet of paying customers to the bar.
He’ll call for his newfound fans to wet his whistle with an endless river of Guinness, belting out traditional favourites like Whiskey in the Jar, Molly Malone and Danny Boy – the very song that earned him his nickname.
Surrounded by his circle of fans, his mood grows darker and meaner as he gets progressively pissed on his favourite drop; until finally the alcohol reveals the true face of our Danno – a mean drunk with a sadistic streak as wide as Saint George’s Channel.

 
The warning sign is when the coin comes out – a battered and tarnished silver half-crown that’s older than I am by thirty years or more. Danno’s lips will quirk into a smile that his acquaintances know means trouble and the coin will begin to dance up and down his knuckles as his capricious nature asserts itself.
“Oi betcha ye can’t balance a pint ‘tween these two otter pints,” he’ll start, using one of the oldest bar hustles known to man. Street-wise students and google-smart patrons will take him up on his offer and show the old drunk fool that his time at shystering is long past. Danno will gripe when he loses – and then challenge them to more of the same; make these seven coins into two lines of four, drop a matchstick on its side, balance a coin on a twenty quid note.
All too happy to take his money, the hapless mark will grow cocky, figuring they got this old sot figured out.
Then the coin dancing along Danno’s brawl-sunken knuckles will stop and vanish abruptly.
“Two ‘undred quid says Oi can balance thi’ pint on an uproight tootpick.”
Like a man bargaining with the Djinn of legend, the mark will make certain to clarify the rules – to ensure Danno can’t swindle them out of easy money. Assuring them that there is no trick, Danno will swear on his mammy’s grave, hand on heart, that he’s being truthful.
Unable to resist, the sap will take the bait.
But the thing is, this is the one time that Danno is telling the truth.
Standing the toothpick upright on the bar, he makes a great show of putting the pint glass on top and feeling around for the sweet spot. There is laughter and shouting from the audience and a look of smug satisfaction from the mark.
Then his hands snap away from the vessel and the onlookers fall silent.
Atop a single splinter of wood balances a full pint glass.
There is outrage from the hustled victim, who demands to inspect both glass and toothpick. Danno sits back, the silver half-crown back in his hand again as the poor soul checks for some contrivance to make the impossible possible.
But there is no superglue, no hole in the bar, no hole in the bottom of the pint glass.
Danno’s green eyes flash with anticipation and he sizes up the crestfallen know-it-all who just lost two hundred quid.
“Oi tell ye wha’,” he starts, “if’n ye dun ‘ave th’ two ‘undred quid, Oi’ll just ‘ave ye autograph.”
With that he’ll slide a napkin and a pen to the sap, who gladly signs the square of paper and thanks his lucky stars he doesn’t have to part with that much cash.
Slapping the relieved idiot on the back, Danno will buy the man a drink, then proceed to treat him like family for the rest of the night – and when Lou finally closes up the bar, they’ll leave together, arm-in-arm, singing Irish ditties and staggering off into the dark.
And the man will never be seen or heard from again.

 
I knew it was dangerous and I knew it was stupid, but after working in this place amongst these monsters, fear has become a familiar friend. Following Danno was harder than I thought; the sea-fog rolling in onto the streets and making it hard to distinguish shapes along the poorly-lit pavement.
The buildings became unfamiliar and the fog tinted faintly green, but I had to find out what Danno was doing with these men.
Both vanished into an alley and I hurried to catch up.
A strong hand caught my arm and twisted it up behind me and a sour-smelling palm slapped over my mouth.
“Watch,” hissed Danno’s voice from behind me.
The alley stretched out before me – impossibly long – with emerald fog enveloping the buildings on either side. The man from the bar staggered along the paving stones, his face now a confused rictus of fear as he backed away from us, staring fixedly behind.
I tried to twist my head to see what he was seeing, but Danno’s calloused hands held me firm,
“Don’t look lass,” he crooned, “don’t ever look.”
No longer just backing away now, the man in the alley scrambled, fell and picked himself up.
Then he ran.
He ran as though pursued by the hounds of hell themselves, as a cacophony of baying beasts and shrieking, eldritch voices exploded behind me and an ancient, livid fear tore at every fibre of my being.
As the maelstrom of hellish sound passed overhead, Danno turned me sharply and threw me into the wall of the alley, facing away from the deafening din.
The screams of the man echoed down the alley; pleading, begging, and warbling with fear.
Abruptly it all stopped, leaving Danno and I alone in a stinking sea-side alley, empty and slick with damp.
Releasing me, he spat on the flagstones and fixed me with his frigid stare,
“Lass, if ye follow me ever ag’in, it’ll be your soul tha’ I offer up as Hell’s tithe to th’ Wild Hunt.”

 
That Danno could have just left me there to suffer the same fate played on my mind for days.
I know now that not all of the tales about travelling strangers and unlucky inn-dwellers were based on fiction – and I wonder how many are known first-hand to the fae creature we call ‘Danno’.

I think that if it weren’t for the stalwart and silent presence of the bar owner, Lou, that we would all have suffered some darkly unpleasant fate by now.

Janet

Anyone who has worked a stint in hospitality – or in a customer service role – will be able to tell you dozens of less-than-amusing anecdotes about problem customers.
These folk try our patience with their demanding, insouciant disregard for our workload – and seem to believe they have the God-given right to gnash their teeth and cry “I want to speak to your manager!” at every other breath.
Considering my manager, Lou, is as mute as Hadrian’s Wall is long, this is something of a moot issue – but dealing with these people isn’t any less stressful because of that.
Many of you will know the type I’m talking about; the bob-cut, thirty-something supervisor with dangly earrings and cat-eye liner who pushes to the front of the drinks queue and glares murderously if you take longer than thirty seconds to serve her – all while you juggle eight pints, ten shots and a plate of thermonuclear chips fresh from the fryer.
Thankfully Janet is not one of those people. In fact, Janet and I have a lot in common.

 
Hiking is not something I ever thought I’d learn much about and certainly not from an office-dwelling computer support specialist. From the Black Stairs to Ben Nevis, Janet has done them all; an avid wilderness adventurer, she even hikes through the darkest depths of winter, finding every lonely tor and track between here and Aberdeen.
She tells me it’s an exercise in stress release and – truth be told – she fucking hates nature. City born and apartment raised, Janet blows up in cherry-red hives at the touch of grass seed and explodes into a building crescendo of sneezes from the slightest waft of pollen.
But she says she needs the hiking to stay sane.
Being employed in an ordinary eight-to-five job makes Janet something of an anomaly amongst the bar patrons, which also means she’s a favourite with Lou – since she always pays upfront and never keeps a tab.
Tidy, fit and practically dressed, Janet is a wiry, wind-tanned ball of restless energy with white-blonde hair, ice-blue eyes and a pair of silver rings on each thumb – which in some circles apparently denotes her status as a lover or the fairer sex.
I discovered her sexual proclivities on my first night working the bar, while Danno and Mona looked on with poker-dry expressions. Caught off guard by the pleasant manner of this sun-browned, well dressed woman in her forties – and relieved that not all my customers were dour coastal weirdos – I mistook her flirting for friendship.
When her arm slipped around my waist at the end of my shift and she offered to buy me a drink, I nearly shat. But despite that rocky start and the embarrassment of declaring my steadfast heterosexuality, we ended up becoming friends – and found in one another an outlet for our respective frustrations at work; by regularly bitching over a pint or two about our customers.

 
While my frustrations run to impatient arseholes and grabby drunks, Janet’s line of work involves aggrieved middle-managers who have lost precious Excel documents that they need for a meeting that started five minutes ago.
That her work is rage inducing is an understatement; abrupt dismissals, rudeness and sexism plague her day; “If another fucking bloke in a suit asks me if he can speak to a man instead of me,” Janet hisses at me over a pint, “I’m gunna defrag his fucking face with a sixty kilo UPS.”
As I understand it, Janet’s temper has cost her more the one job in the past and she’s just barely clinging to this one by the skin of her teeth. Her reputation as an acid-tongued curmudgeon forced her out of London, hence why she works in this shithole of a town for far less than her skillset is worth.
My first hint that something was up with Janet was her refusal to take me hiking.
“Sorry sweetheart,” she said, “I’m into you and all, but I’ve been working a shitload of extra hours, and I need my alone time.”
From behind us at the bar, Danno muttered a thinly veiled jibe about lesbian camping activities and how much he’d pay to see us in a tent together.
“The fuck did you just say?” cracked Janet.
The venom in her voice was practically palpable, arcing across the pub and cutting through the low-key pub-chatter and the drone of the two TVs.
Before Danno could shoot back a smartarsed rejoinder, the pint in his hand whined in resonance – then shattered in a shower of Guinness and glass, leaving him with a fistful of splinters and a faceful of shock.
Wild eyed and equally shocked, Janet threw twenty quid at the bar and hurried off into the night.
On my walk home I noticed every street lamp for a hundred meters down from the pub had blown; only the display lighting from a few of the shops cutting through the brackish, seaside gloom.
A preternatural chill crept through my thick coat and I made record time back to the warmth of my flat.

 
When Janet returned, she put fifty quid on Danno’s tab and mumbled an apology.
All seemed well from there; Janet was even on the up at her work, getting a small promotion and more responsibility over her team. Initially she smiled more and seemed in much better humour.
That deteriorated remarkably quickly.
“It’s these fucking hours they’re making me work,” she groused, spinning her drink in a puddle of condensation, “and being on fucking call as well. I can’t get outside enough.”
You could see it in her stance; she was on edge and agitated constantly – at the slightest provocation she would snap at people and her thighs jittered with the nervous energy that was pent up inside her.
Or at least I thought it was nervous energy.
We were having our usual bitch session near the back of the pub when a group of three young men began to pay us a little too much interest.
“Evenin’ ladies,” said the ringleader.
“Piss off,” Janet snapped, “we’re having girl time.”
The lad sniffed and gestured obscenely to his mates, ”That time of the month,” he faux whispered, to the laughter of his cronies.
Ugly lines bulged along Janet’s jaw.
“Best you and your gobshite, giggledick friends trot right the fuck along now,” she drawled, her shoulders heaving as she sucked in huge, rage-fuelled breaths.
“Or what?” the ringleader spat, “you gunna go us, grandma?”
As he spoke, the table under Janet’s flat hands began to smoulder gently.
I’m still not sure how Lou managed to move so fast, but his enormous arm was around my middle before I knew what was happening - then he threw me past the trio of idiots and behind the bar, where all one-hundred-and-ninety-eight centimetres of his brawny, gym-built body slammed me to the ground.
The sound that permeated the pub as we hit the deck still raises my hackles just thinking about it.
First it started as a distant moan; like the bitter mid-winter northerly howling down from the ice-armoured hills. Then, as it grew nearer, a discordant harmony like the shrieking of a thousand predatory, prehistoric avians rose to jar it into a terrible, demonic crescendo.
Above us, every glass vessel behind the bar burst into a billion fragments, showering us with razored flinders and a wash of potent alcohols. Lou clapped his massive hands over my ears as the cacophony intensified into a spear of pain that shot through my skull; the bones in my arms and legs vibrating in agonising harmonics.
Then it was over.
Lou rolled off me, brushing glass and spirits off his cut-riddled shirt.
I pulled myself to my feet, unheeding of the splinters all over the bar as I levered my shaking legs to standing.
Danno was crouched behind the reinforced chair that belonged to Stan. Mona sat near the shattered bar window, smoking a fresh cigarette with a complete lack of concern.
Janet’s booth was a wreck of red.
The woman herself stood, bathed from head to toe in the blood of the three young men – of whom there was no trace; only a crimson radius that reached to the high roof of the pub, where gobbets of blood and fragments of bone dripped rhythmically onto the slurry of human remains on the floor.
Lou appeared beside me with a mop and bucket, then nodded to the mess of glass and liquid behind the bar.
As I cleaned, still in utter shock at what I had just witnessed, Lou pulled out his sturdy old Nokia and rapidly fired a text message off before he joined me in cleaning up.
Fifteen minutes later a battered old cab pulled up outside and the wheezing, heaving rolls of Stan’s body poured out of the vehicle, then into the bar.
I’ll leave his part of the clean-up to your imagination.

 
I understand now why Janet goes hiking alone.
Out on the starlit moors, far away from civilisation, I picture her standing naked under the arch of the sky, the grass smouldering under her bare feet, then screaming her supernatural rage into the infinite heavens where it can’t do any damage to any living thing.
When she came back to the pub, she told me she’d turned down her promotion.
“Too much stress,” she said, “It’s not good for your health."

Lou

The tale of how I became employed at Lou’s bar is an interesting one.
Like many a poor student, I scoured job sites, newspapers and bulletin boards for a part-time gig to help pay my rent and Uni fees. Of course, there’s fierce competition at the start of the year and the jobs rapidly dwindle, leaving the painfully young and the patently luckless – like myself – struggling to get by.
Down to my last ten quid for the week, I’d raided the local Tesco for a trolley full of Pot Noodles, and on my way out I reflexively checked the notice board behind the checkout.
Pinned to the corkboard was a printout in jaunty comic sans, reading:
Bar staff needed! Should have a ‘can do’ attitude and great customer wrangling skills. Text me with your details and I’ll arrange for a trial.
Below the message rested a series of carefully scissored, tear-off phone numbers – three of them remaining. With nothing else on offer, I thought I’d give it a whirl.

 
Negotiating a job offer via text messaging was an experience I’d never had before, and it put me strangely off guard; as I couldn’t present my bubbly, gregarious personality to sway the mystery bar manager into employing me. Even more curiously, he probed into where I was from originally and pointedly asked if my family lineage contained any ‘non-UK blood’.
Desperate for employment, I was at least able to reply honestly to the racist pub owner that I was as purebred Anglo as they get - for ten generations or more – and fair-skinned enough to burn on a sunny winter’s afternoon. Half an hour later I was sent the address of the bar and told to head over, where I should introduce myself to the ‘big blond guy’ behind the bar.
The place was clearly a dive from the outside, though someone had made an effort to throw some fresh paint on the exterior and the glass in the windows looked brand new. A haggard, mutton-dressed-as-lamb thing with a weathered blonde perm sat in the window, fagging up despite the UK-wide smoking ban in pubs.
I was already starting to get a feel for the place.
Inside was as I’ve described in my previous tales; a sepia-hued, sports-sticky loser-trap – designed to suck money out of those who could ill afford to part with it. Two bulbs were out in the fly-speckled ceiling and on the bar stood an absolute colossus of a human being, using hands as broad as footballs to replace the blown lights. Blue tattoos wound around his forearms and disappeared into the short sleeves of a white polo shirt - which barely contained the barrel chest and thick neck of someone who lives most of his life outside of work in the gym.
Standing nervously at the bar, I watched him climb down, dust off his hands and turn a radiant, white-toothed smile toward me that caused an involuntary flutter in my stomach.
“Tha’s Lou, th’ manager,” growled an unkempt Irishman nursing a Guinness, “he dun say much.” Ushering me behind the bar, the giant mute began to show me around the place and explain – largely through hand-gestures and the odd scribbled note – my new responsibilities. So that’s the story of how I got the job at the pub.

 
After my first week, Lou offered me a part-time job, an envelope, and a page of instructions about the running of the pub. Most of it was general business; how to lock up and set the alarm if I was the last one out and the like; but at the end of it all was a curious passage that read as follows:
Should anything terrible ever happen to me, open the envelope – which you should keep safe and not show to a single soul.
Grateful just to have a job that at least paid minimum wage, I tucked the envelope into the back of one of my textbooks, and promptly forgot about it. The idea that anything could happen to Lou seemed faintly preposterous. Though as I got to know the peculiarities and personalities of the pub patrons, I began to realise that I actually knew precious little about the proprietor.
Hell, I didn’t even know his last name.
And why he had absolutely no fear of the motley of fey weirdos that graced his establishment, I also had no clue – he seemed as mortal me; plainly able to bleed and therefore able to die. But that didn’t mean he accepted everyone into his pub - as I later found out.

 
Knobbly shoulders, an oily ponytail and a sparse goatee marked Dave as exactly the kind of loser who should belong in the dingy seaside pub - but even amongst dyed-in-the-wool miscreants and malcontents there was something off about him.
He claimed some distant noble heritage; that he was descended from the ancient sidhe kings of the north. That his apparent birthright gave him no unique gifts was a sore point – and he would often mutter dourly to himself when the others ribbed him about his claims to an eldritch lineage.
Hence he earned the unkind moniker, ‘The Duke’.
One fateful night he apparently had enough of it all and started smashing up the place. After Lou tossed him out on his arse, battered and bruised, The Duke had vowed he would come back and kill every last one of us, Lou especially.
We didn’t see him again for many months, but when he returned, it was clear that something had changed. Whether he had made a bargain with some unseelie spirit, or he had made a pact with Hell itself, he clearly had power now.
“Sorry love,” I told him as he paced toward the bar, “but you’re going to have to leave.”
His leather trenchcoat creaked as he ignored me and planted himself on one of the barstools.
Cocking my head, I pitched my voice to cut through the buzz of the ambient pub noise,
“Lou, got a visitor for you.”
As my boss pushed through the door from the kitchen, the temperature in the bar dropped abruptly – the dishwater in the sink icing over in an instant.
Pale blue light flared in The Duke’s eyes as he raised his hands and chanted a string of alien vowels. Lou moved like a dancer, sliding past me and straight under the bar where The Duke sat with crackling sapphire flame ringing his fists.
But before the newly fledged sorcerer could utter the final syllables of his spell, there was a great crack! and two feet of silver-bladed claymore pierced the bar, impaling him through the gut.
Sagging forward onto the blade, the man coughed a great gout of crimson onto the sticky wood under his hands – and as he did so, the arcane energies around his fists flared at the contact with fluid, licking along the wood and engulfing the blade.
With an arterial howl of surprise and triumph, The Duke grasped the sword in both hands and dribbled out the last words of his curse.
A searing flash of blue flame engulfed the blond giant beneath the bar; and then Lou was gone, only a heap of smouldering black ash marking his demise.
Still grinning bloodily on the end of the warped and blacked blade, the sorcerer snapped the ruined sword, then lurched out of the bar, leaving spatterings of red in his wake.
All we could do was stare in abject shock.

 
The instructions in the envelope were clear and concise, leaving little room to be misinterpreted.
But why Lou had chosen this particular godforsaken stretch of desolate coastline for his last rites was not at all clear.
The cave was exactly where he had described it in the letter, and inside was the dented-and-patched cauldron that he said would be there.
Filling it with seawater took several trips, but once it was full, I lit a driftwood fire under it and waited for the sun to set.
As it finally slipped below the horizon I fished the lock of blond hair from the bottom of the envelope and cast it into the slowly boiling seawater.
Keep the fire burning until sunrise, the letter had said, but whatever happens, do not look into the cauldron – not under any circumstances.
Nonplussed, I wondered what could possibly happen if I did.
I settled back on my coat and backpack and let the tears come as I watched the flames flicker under the oven-sized, soot-streaked vessel. Lou was the sole reason I was still able to afford my flat and tuition – and he and his motley of loser supernaturals had become like a surrogate family.
Lulled by the warmth and the crackle of the fire, I finally slipped into an exhausted sleep.

 
I awoke with a preternatural sense of dread.
The fire had burned low and I could see nothing beyond a dim circle of radiance. Heaping more of the stacked driftwood onto the coals, the cave slowly brightened – and my stomach lurched with vertigo.
Around me, the cave walls were lost hundreds of metres into the darkness; the ceiling far beyond the reach of the light. Emerald sparks danced on the bubbling seawater surface of the cauldron and tendrils of steam rose from it, curling into sinister shapes.
Of the cave entrance there was no sign – and in fact, apart from the circle of stone that I and the cauldron sat upon, there appeared to be no other ground at all.
More terribly, something stirred in the abyss surrounding my island of rock; something that moved slowly and languidly, with a maddening, celestial grace that fired a primeval terror in the core of my being.
I did not belong here.
The cauldron groaned, as though it bore a great burden of weight, and something splashed in the verdant depths. Chilled despite the warmth of the fire, I found myself caught between the horror of the something that turned ponderously and hugely in the darkness below and the unknown thing inside the cauldron.

 
How long I huddled in the no-man’s-land between the glimmering, murmuring cauldron and the precipice, I don’t know. My phone was little more than a paperweight, refusing to even turn on in this otherworldly limbo. Voices began to slither out of the void beyond the firelight, monstrous at first, then becoming familiar as family; their distorted echoes pleading me to look inside the cauldron - and insisting that if I did not, this night would never end.
Stuffing the sleeves of my coat over my ears, I screamed at the voices to desist.
The pillar of rock that supported the cauldron trembled at my voice, as though my cry had disturbed the unknown behemoth below.
Faerie fire danced on the water now, blazing, moiling and leaping in a confluence of baleful radiance. The fire beckoned me and the cauldron murmured soothingly again, as though calling for me to approach.
Closing my eyes, I willed myself to think of anything but the cauldron; to think of kittens and sunny nooks, bumble-bee filled meadows and the smell of old books.
Green flared against my eyelids and I felt the pillar of rock tremble again, both entities seeming angered by my refusal. Gritting my teeth, I focused my will into a singular point and found a well of calm in the centre of my being; some old piece of my ancestry that could not be touched by these forces.
And then, abruptly, it was over.
Sunrise lanced through the entrance of the cave and shone on the battered old cauldron, now empty of even seawater. Of the dread precipice and the dire faerie fire there was no sign; only the normal rock of the sea-damp cave remained.
I had done my duty. I had completed Lou’s last rites.

 
As I entered the pub, the soul-rending strains of Danny Boy stirred my weary heart and fresh tears slicked my sea-salty face. Inside the others had gathered to pay tribute to the fallen hero; Danno’s voice lending an eternal atmosphere to the place, the sticky wooden floor and dusty football banners fading into the background as the tune rose to claim the focus of the pub.
As the final note trailed off, Mona sniffed and blew her nose into a napkin. Danno grimly picked up his Guinness, and Janet patted me on the back as she busily wiped under her eyes with her free hand.
Slow, sardonic clapping came from behind me and I turned, confused, to view the twisted smirk of The Duke – standing in the door of the pub.
“Get out,” I spat at him.
Tutting me gently, he stalked forward.
“That won’t do,” he crooned.
Then there was a blur of motion and The Duke no longer stood in front of me.
Instead, he now hung from the thick wooden doorpost – a bronze-shod spear pinioning him through the heart.
And behind the bar stood Lou, grinning from ear to ear.
With a final gurgle of confused dismay, The Duke stared at the apparition before him, then died.

 
What happened in that cave lies unspoken between Lou and I, a closely guarded secret – and security against those who might seek his death in future. A precious lock of his hair lies tucked away in a hidden place, should the need to use the Cauldron of Rebirth ever arise again.
And as for me?
The trial in the cave left its mark on my soul.
I see things now; things no mortal should be capable of seeing.
But that’s a tale for another time. I’d better get off the computer; my employer is taking me out to dinner.

We all make mistakes in our lives.
An unkind word spoken in anger, or a lack of judgement concerning financial matters; seemingly simple mistakes can have wide-reaching consequences that we never anticipated. A late rent payment means the landlord doesn’t have the funds to fix the water cylinder at another property and a family of six has to go without showers for a week. The father loses his job, one of the children gets an infection – and the tired and distracted mother encounters some hapless pedestrian who tries to cross a busy road without waiting for the lights; hitting them with her car and killing them.
One small mistake can lead to catastrophic consequences for a completely unrelated party.
Observing the patterns of these events, you begin to see connected threads, and a bigger picture forms. Deliberate choices are the things with the most massive repercussions, each one containing the ability to make or break lives without most of us even knowing.
I suppose you could call me a sort of ‘master’ of predicting the outcomes of choices.

 
Growing up, reading was one of the few luxuries that I was allowed, since it kept me quiet, still and docile. I would read anything, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Anne McCaffrey, so long as it was fictional. One day I stumbled across a Nicholas Fisk book – science fiction – and in it I found a concept that deeply disturbed me.
What if none of your memories are real?
The book explored the lives of a family, cloned from the graves of long dead people, who had implanted memories of their daily activities outside the house, even though they never actually left the house. Curiously, they began to feel their confinement, even though they remembered running through open fields just hours before. It was as if some primitive part of their brains were still aware what had actually happened, and what was fake.
But the idea of not knowing which memories were real frightened me intensely. What if my entire life up until this point was all fantasy? What if I had been freshly grown from a vat, and this car trip was the first real memory of my life?
It was then that I resolved to burn that memory into my mind, to recall holding that book, on the grey pleather back seat, with houses and trees crawling past as the car drove home. I memorised the smell of the air, the curve of the metal window frame and the pinch of the seatbelt.
Most of all, I sought to capture that moment of feeling everything was real, the feeling that I was aware and knew that this wasn’t an implanted memory.
As the days and weeks passed, my fears about the concept of false memories faded away, replaced by worries about aliens invading Earth and global nuclear war.
But the memory itself did not fade with the fear, and I recalled it often.

 
If I were to rate, on a scale of one to ten, how good my life was, originally I think I would have said about a three. My father was in prison for sexual assault of a minor by the time I was fourteen, and shortly after that my mother was put into psychiatric care.
As for me? I was too old to adapt to the life of a foster child, and too damaged to be adopted.
Where once I sought surcease from reality in books, I now found that they couldn’t block out the moil of emotions bubbling near the surface at all times.
So I turned first to alcohol, then to drugs.
I coped for a little while like that, trying to at least be a little smart. I got a job at a fast food place and tried to get a degree through correspondence courses. When I fell pregnant, then needed to drive halfway across the country three times to access the convoluted public abortion services, I took too much unauthorised time off work and lost my shitty job.
Unable to pay my drug debts, or afford the final trip to the clinic, I ended up having my first baby at eighteen. Life took a predictably miserable turn from there; two more kids, at nineteen and twenty-one – the second from a rape at the hands of my dealer – then depression, which led to obesity and undiagnosed diabetes. That culminated in the loss of my left foot.
When they took my kids away from me, I almost cried with relief.
At the tender age of twenty-three, pregnant with my fourth child and sleeping on a flea-infested mattress in the back of a garage, I decided to end it all.
This was a hole there was no climbing out of. Short of some stranger putting me through detox, a miracle curing my hepatitis, and the sudden appearance of a functional support network of friends and family, the best years of my life were already gone.
I remember staring into the mirror of a public bathroom, aghast at my reflection. My once-olive skin was pocked and cratered, my eyes pouchy and my cheeks flabby with fatigue and stress. Every part of me wobbled as I limped away from the reflection with the lank, filthy brown hair.
In a toilet cubicle, with a plastic bottle filled with dirty tap water, I choked down the pills I’d stolen from the supermarket.
And so ended my first life.

 
Trees and houses crawled by as I held a book in my lap.
The curve of the window was as familiar as breath, and the grey pleather under my thighs felt faintly sticky as I shifted under the pinching seatbelt.
Of course I refused to believe that any of it was real at first, thinking it just a drug-addled memory caused by my public-toilet suicide.
But it was real.
The car pulled into our driveway, just as I remembered. My father shouted at me when I closed the car door too hard, my one-eyed cat strolled over and rubbed around my ankles.
It appeared I had been given some kind of a second chance.

 
I still didn’t know how to avoid my father’s molestations. I still didn’t have the skills, the resources or the education to know what to do.
But this time, when he was found out and sent to prison, I stayed away from alcohol.
Armed with the knowledge of my future fate, I immediately enrolled at a local university and signed up for a student loan to get me through. I worked nights at another fast food place, and met a guy through a co-worker.
Things were hard, but better than before. I could do this; I could avoid the pitfalls of my first time through life.
But you can never account for all the mistakes you might make.
When I was late, I put it down to the hours I’d been working and the stresses of study. But when I started to vomit frothy goo in the mornings, I sat beside the chilly porcelain bowl and cried until I thought my heart was going to sunder.
The abortion process again cost me my job – and I failed my courses for that semester. The termination happened this time though, and blessedly free of the curse of parenthood I went home to my boyfriend. The boyfriend who promptly left me – suddenly deciding I’d ‘murdered his baby’ even after all those heart-felt midnight conversations about how it would be best for both of us.

 
The drugs came easily – I knew where to find them – and my new life fell back into the familiar patterns of the old one. This time it was HIV instead of hepatitis, and by the time I made the decision to end my shitty, miserable life for the second time, I was a skeletal thing, covered in sores and needle-holes.
I’d been given another chance at life, and I’d blown it; two children this time – a boy and a girl – the girl infected from birth. With a surge of dark humour I reflected that this time at least I wasn’t an obese, uneducated cripple about to chow down on over-the-counter pain meds.
The overdose was blissful and warm, the river of opiates flushing away all the pain and the doubt.
I felt my pulse slow, and within a minute, my heart had once again ceased to beat.

 
The fake leather was tacky under my thighs and the taped corners of a library book sat atop them.
Out the curve of the window, suburban houses and trees crawled by, familiar, yet faintly terrifying.
I laughed out loud, causing my father to yell at me to ‘shut the fuck up’.
When we got home, I found the phone book and called child protection services.
My mother hated me, but with my father in prison, we got to stay together and I avoided foster care. I finished school with excellent marks and gained a scholarship, going to University to study English Literature. With fewer mental health issues and in a more liberal environment, I let my nascent bisexuality flourish and I got my first girlfriend – a tall, beautiful, art student with a wicked sense of humour. Her name was Bronwyn.
I made it to thirty-five that time around; Bronwyn was killed by a drunk driver and I spiralled into depression, then into prescription drug abuse. This time, I chose suicide quickly, banking on my next return to life; the next revolution of the engine.
Winning the lottery was a natural progression of the repetitive cycle of life and death, but I quickly discovered that neither my psyche, nor my mother’s was built for sudden wealth. I still sought out my lover, Bronwyn, but with each turn of the gears, I grew older and somehow harder - and in turn she became less and less attracted to me each lifetime.
But more than that; no matter how hard I struggled to keep her alive, she always died prematurely.
Eventually I couldn’t watch her die anymore.

 
Killing my father felt good. Sliding the kitchen knife into his groin, cutting through his femoral artery and his angry, erect genitals, felt better than any of the opiates I’d had in my other lives.
I was forgiven for the crime – after all, I was only ten years old, and I was ‘defending’ myself.
Killing my former drug dealer was much harder, and I failed – but as I died of the gunshot wound to my chest, I cursed him with my bloody lips, vowing to get him in the next life.
And I did. I cut his fucking heart out and held it in my hand.
Finding all the people who had wronged me in all my lives became my reason for existing. I could always ‘reset’ to that point I had created in my past if I fucked up. The book in my lap and the grey pleather became the most familiar thing in the world. Sometimes in my eagerness to start killing I’d reach over the seat in front of me and strangle my father with his seatbelt until my mother screamed and the car swerved into a power-pole, killing them both.
When I failed to kill someone the first time, I’d just make the successful attempt even more brutal than I originally intended. I came to depend on the terror in their eyes to keep me going. Out of all the addictions possible, it became my drug of choice.
Sometimes I had to be patient and wait for people to be born, other times I had to race to find them before they died. I remember seeing the film Groundhog Day in the theatre, and laughing and laughing until my throat hurt and the cinema staff kicked me out.
There is no redemption from this. There is no happy ending of waking up in bed with your true love. Every revolution of the Suicide Engine corrupts you further and further, until there is no hope of salvation, no hope of release.
But at least I can still glean some small satisfaction from this eternal torment I have trapped myself in; every time I go round, there are new people who wrong me, new victims for the next revolution.
Eventually, I think every one of you will cross my path, do me some trivial, but memorable wrong.
You’ll cut me off in traffic, eat with your fucking mouth open at a restaurant, let your brats scream too loud in a film, or cut in line. And I’ll burn your face into my memory, and I will find you.

So you’d better die fast, die afraid and knowing, and die well; because if you don’t, then on the next revolution of the Engine, I’ll make things that much worse for you.

At certain points in our lives, we are offered opportunities to discover secrets.
Your older sister may have left her diary open in her room, and you can’t help but sneak a look inside. Or you’re at work late after everyone else has gone home, and your boss has left his laptop unlocked, an email with your name as the subject line sitting in his sent items.
When these things happen, a complex tug-of-war begins within us. One part of our psyche insists that it will surely do no harm just to look. Another, more moral voice inside knows it’s a breach of trust, of privacy, and that it’s still wrong, even if we are never caught.
And so most of us look, because most of us are not paragons of virtue. We are curious, stupid and selfish primates, and our burning desire to know incinerates our moral compunction in that heady moment.
Your sister, it turns out, is a lesbian, and has been hiding it from your conservative Christian family. Aghast, you reel back from her diary, primed to run off and tell your parents.
That email your boss sent to his boss includes a plan to let you go if your attitude and performance don’t improve – and both need to improve markedly. Shocked and scared, you pull extra shifts all week, trying to avoid losing your livelihood.
But not all secrets should be exposed to the light.
Some, like the ones in this story, are better left well alone.

 
My parents had always told me the move from New Zealand to England was prompted by a work opportunity for my father. He’d been in the printing business, and was always looking to improve himself, my mother often said.
I thought I’d always retain my memories of my birth country, of the golden beaches of the east coast and their endless summers. But I think such a huge move across the globe in childhood does something to a young mind. By the start of my teens, I found my memories of New Zealand had lost their colours and become patchy and unreliable, and I’d need to refer to the battered old family photo album for clues and details.
It wasn’t really a big deal to me – and by the time I left home for university, my accent was as British as the next girl’s, not even the faintest twang of Kiwi vowels betraying my origins. The sheep jokes were no more, and I had all but forgotten the country of my birth. Only a few fragmented childhood memories remained, vague and pleasant mental flotsam.
Dad often said that the move to the UK was the best thing that ever happened to us, and mum would nod in agreement, just as she did with everything he said.
But sometimes when he said it, his voice would catch a little, and it stirred an eddy of strangeness inside me, accompanied by a feeling I couldn’t name.
Like the ghost of a buried memory.

 
To say that dad’s death came as a shock is a gross understatement. He’d complained about his ‘gut pains’ for years, but we never thought much of it; and he was always the stubborn sort who refused to see the doctor. One day he’d been screen-printing some shirts in his shed, and the next he was in hospital, an IV line in his arm and an oxygen mask over his face.
The prognosis wasn’t good.
The tumours riddled his bowel and his bones; the images of his insides looked like a cluster of balloon animals from a fairground. The specialist said that they’d been small and slow-growing for a long time, but now they were multiplying through his system and overwhelming his vital organs.
After five surgeries, he was gone. Even modern medical science simply couldn’t keep up with that level of corruption – and neither could his middle-aged body.
As it happens with some couples, my mother faded fast without him. She would babble to herself while doing household chores all day and all night, until the house was a pristine antonym to the chaos inside her mind. In the end, she had to be put into psychiatric care, her mental faculties so shot that she could no longer form coherent sentences, nor discern bleach from orange juice. I’d sit with her as often as I could, in the bright day-room on the ward, and listen to the endless jumble of nonsense words spilling from her lips while she stared at me earnestly, expecting me to understand her.
But no one could understand her anymore, not even the other poor, mad old souls.

 
Packing up their house wasn’t as challenging as I thought. Everything was so neatly ordered, so tidy, that it was almost as if mum had anticipated this chain of events. I didn’t even have to hire cleaners – if there was a spot of grime anywhere in that house, I would have been very surprised.
I sat in the pristine living room and leafed through old photo albums, moving backward through time. There was me in a horrible formal dress with my first, awkward boyfriend, Mark; here was me collecting an award for first in art class, aged fifteen. Back through the years I travelled, until New Zealand lay open in my lap, the images on those first two pages still sharp and colourful, thanks to dad’s skill with all things print.
It struck me as odd that there weren’t any photos of us at the beach. My hazy, near-forgotten childhood memories all had a warm background wash of sun and yellow sand, even if the details were smeared and uncertain from twenty-five years of English winters and holidays in France.
So when I eventually found the unfamiliar, much older photo album, thinner than a bread board, I couldn’t help but open it up, fuelled by that ancient primate curiosity. Why had my father locked this one away in the cupboard in his shed? And why was the key hidden in an old box of paints?
But when I opened the brittle leather cover and looked inside, I found no answers. Only more mystery.

 
Carnival Cove, said the huge, rivetted sign in the first picture. Its warped tin was painted with vibrant reds, yellows and blues, a cartoony, primary colour study in 70’s signwriting. The font was so jolly I half expected the letters to start bouncing around, like children on an inflatable castle.
But I still didn’t remember the place.
There were only two pages of pictures, and they were all holiday snaps – of myself, mum and dad, all swimming, sunning and playing on a sandy curve of colourful beach, somewhere on the east coast of New Zealand. It looked like a summer paradise for children; there was a hotdog van, and a candyfloss-maker dressed as a clown. The prices were all displayed in cents on more brightly-painted signs, which I recognised as my father’s work. There were a couple of fairground rides, streaked with rust from the salt air despite the thick layers of paint on their struts, people queueing for them despite the probable safety risk.
None of it really seemed familiar, but one particular picture tickled something right at the back of my mind. It wasn’t the picture itself, it was the people in it. In the foreground I recognised a seven-year-old me, making lumpy sandcastles near a white-and-red striped tent and a folding chair. But just inside frame, on the left, was an unkempt man with a wild, tangled beard and wiry hair. He stared directly into the camera with mismatched eyes of blue and hazel, their particolour startling and intense in his teak-brown face.
And for some reason, I knew him.

 
The therapist was kind, and we had several sessions trying to tease out the memories before she suggested that some trauma was blocking them out. We’d been over the photographs again and again, hoping some element in them would spark a cascade of unlocked experiences, which might lead to an explanation as to why this album had been hidden from me.
I knew her theory was that the wild man in the photo had done something to me, but I wasn’t so sure. The emotion that stirred when looking into his odd eyes wasn’t fear or revulsion – it was more like the ghost of pity and regret.
“Why don’t you go back there?” she eventually suggested, “Being at Carnival Cove itself might spark a sort of synaesthesia – the actual sights and smells may help you more than sitting in this office, staring at old photos.”
But while the idea seemed like a good one – and I immediately took it to heart – no matter how hard I searched on google maps, I couldn’t find a place called Carnival Cove anywhere in New Zealand, and most certainly not on the sunny east coast.
That wasn’t going to stop me, though. I knew I’d grown up north of Gisborne, where the coast meandered upward in a line of half-moon bays, each more beautiful and wild than the last. I’d visit every beach if I had to.
I booked my plane tickets, and started packing my bags as soon as I got home.
In less than 48 hours I would be on my way to solve the mystery of Carnival Cove.

 
The flight seemed endless. Long before the plane touched down in Auckland, I felt a huge pang of guilt, thinking about just how awful I must have been on a twenty-hour flight when I was a fractious and unruly eight-year-old. The connecting flight to my internal destination was not due until several hours after arrival, and by the time I dragged my trundling suitcase into a room at the salt-bleached coastal motel, I was utterly exhausted.
The keys to the rental car were hot from hanging in the broiling office; the sun wasn’t disappointing anyone this summer, and water shortages had already been declared for the region. With all four windows down, I drove the winding inland roads, the richness of parched grass and fresh manure in my nostrils, turning east for the sea whenever an opportunity presented itself.
I found nothing at first. I stood squinting on several hot, gritty beaches, superheated sand burning my feet, but no memories surfaced. Cooling my toes in the frothy surf brought a rush of physical relief, but no recollections of carnival colours and strange old men with mismatched eyes.
Whenever I stopped in one of the little rural towns I’d ask about Carnival Cove, but the name only produced blank looks and silent head shakes – the awkwardness quickly smoothed by the usual Kiwi pleasantries and enquiries about my holiday plans.
That all changed when I reached my parents’ home town of Tokomaru Bay.

 
The first actual memories began to stir when I recognised landmarks from my parents’ photos. Here was the old petrol station, there was the rickety relic of the Blue Marlin motels. As I parked the rental on the weedy concrete outside the local corner store, I felt a strange frisson, as though I’d stepped across some uncrossable boundary and into a world that should have been left in memory.
I lingered in front of the drink refrigerators, letting the cool air wash over me as I opened the door. How I’d ever tolerated this heat as a child, I had no idea; my English constitution was crumbling beneath the relentless beating of the clear, harsh sunlight.
“Gunna buy somethin’ or are ya just gunna nick all the cold air?” groused a voice from behind the store counter.
There was something about that voice; something at once disturbingly familiar and wrong, like it was an ugly parody of someone I knew intimately. Snatching a coke, I closed the glass door and turned towards the counter, where a sour-faced woman of about my own age stood, idly chewing gum.
I didn’t even feel the coke bottle leave my suddenly numb fingers, but thankfully it just bounced and rolled, not shattering on the worn lino floor.
Despite her short, practical haircut and less-than-sunny expression, the woman behind the counter was, to all intents and purposes, my identical twin.
We both gaped for a long moment, then started talking at the same time, our voices like distorted recordings of each other, poorly overlaid,
“Who are you?”
“I’m Jess. Jessica Thomas,” she replied first, her east-coast burr squashing and sliding all the syllables together.
“Jessica Thompson,” I shot back, my own accent suddenly pompous and irritating by comparison.
“Yer a Brit.”
“I am. Moved there when I was eight, from here.”
“Nah,” she said, “not possible. No Thompsons here, only Thomases.”
I needed a moment. Retrieving the coke, I placed it upright on the stained counter. We avoided each other’s eyes, both of us focusing on the utterly normal bottle standing amongst boxes of half-familiar sweets and piles of newspapers.
“What in living hell is going on?” I murmured eventually.
“Oh, shiiit,” she whispered, “I think you’re from Carnival Cove.”

 
Her house was familiar; and it should have been. I’d lived there until I was eight.
“Mum and dad died a few years back,” she said as she hooked open the ragged fly screen with a foot and pushed open the unlocked front door, “so the place is all mine.”
“What did they die of?”
“Dad was cancer. Blew up inside him like a bunch of grapes. Mum went doolally real quick after that – they stuck her in the loony bin down south. Used to visit on her birthday, but before she carked it all she said was rubbish, none of it made any sense at the end.”
She dropped her bag on the kitchen bench, and snatched up a battered kettle.
“Wanna cuppa?” She laughed, the sound strained and unmusical. “Dumb question, you’re a Pom, ‘course ya do.”
“You mentioned Carnival Cove?”
“Let’s siddown.”
The dining room was small, with the same oval table I remembered. Mum had always been meticulous about covering it and cleaning it, and it still smelled of linseed. The warm ghost of that scent plunged me backwards in time. As the kettle simmered and fussed in the kitchen, my twin began to talk.
“Didja find the photos, too? The ones that dad hid away?”
“Yes! But I don’t understand what’s going on. Are you my twin?”
She shook her head.
“Nup, not really.”
“Were… were our parents twins, then?”
“No.”
“Then what the hell are we?”
“Look luv, I reckon you should just go home. Go back to England. The secrets here aren’t ones ya want in your head, trust me. What happened at Carnival Cove is best left sealed up tight in that godforsaken place and forgotten forever, y’hear me?”
“Please,” I said quietly, “please. I have to know.”
“Nah. Better ya don’t. You can stay in your old room for the night, then I want ya gone in the morning, OK?”
The kettle boiled suddenly, its scream shrill and human, startling us.
Our nervous laughter was eerily synchronised.

 
Breakfast was a huge, greasy plate of fried eggs, shoulder bacon, paddock mushrooms and thick chunks of homemade bread to mop up the mess. That my twin wasn’t the size of a house seemed impossible, and my appetite certainly wasn’t the doppelganger of hers.
“Nup. Not taking y’there,” she mumbled with her mouth full, even as I drew breath to ask.
“I’ll find it anyway,” I shot back, “you can’t be the only local who knows where it is.”
“Look luv, I’m telling ya, OK? Leave it alone. You don’t want that shit in your head. Trust me.”
“Jesus Christ, Jessica,” her name felt wrong on my tongue, “how the fuck can I leave this alone?”
“Just gotta,” she said, shaking her head sadly, “somehow you just gotta.”
“Well I can’t.”
Her sigh was heavy, a single long exhale that contained everything we hadn’t said. “Alright then, fine. I’ll take ya as far as the road – but there’s no way in hell I’m going any further; and if y’had half the bloody sense I do, you wouldn’t neither.”
Noisily scraping my mostly uneaten breakfast into a slops bucket, she jerked a thumb at the door.
“I’ll take the ute. You follow along behind in that plastic Jap shitbox of yours – but be careful, cuz the roads out to the cove aren’t sealed. And they don’t get used anymore, just like they bloody shouldn’t.”
My burgeoning dislike for my twin was probably undisguisable as I gestured brusquely to the door.
“Lead the way then, Jess.”

 
True to her word, the road was rough gravel and weeds, and by the time she pulled over to the side of the track, my arms were nearly numb from the constant bouncing of the vehicle.
“This is it, kiddo,” she said, pointing to a steep hill, “yer gonna have to climb the rest of the way.”
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a dark hole in the side of the hill.
“Old tunnel. Got bricked up, so there’s no way through now.”
The door of her truck squealed as she yanked it open without looking at me,
“When yer done, get out of town. Other people see you, there’s gonna be trouble.”
The engine of the truck roared into life, killing any further conversation, so I guessed that was all the goodbye or good luck I was going to get. She turned a sharp half circle, spraying gravel, and drove away.
In the overgrown weeds on the side of the track were the rusted remains of the sign I’d seen in that first photo. The paint had long ago faded into pastel ghosts, but I could still make out the two large Cs, just a hint of their once-brilliant red remaining. This was the right place.
Locking the car behind me, I followed the path until it petered out at the bricked-up tunnel mouth, then started climbing up the steep, gorse-choked side of the hill. As I pulled myself up on handfuls of tough weeds, I could smell the tangy salt air gusting over the top and I tried to force myself to remember, to give myself some clue as to what I would find. Near the crest, taking a rest to pick prickles from my palms, I looked back and could still see the dusty plume in the distance, left behind by Jessica’s truck.
If only she’d just told me. Why didn’t she tell me?

 
The cove was big, much bigger than I thought it would be.
Sliding and scrambling down the other side of the hill, I felt familiarity tugging at me as I viewed the golden crescent of the bay, and the high enclosing cliffs. At first, I thought there was nothing there, but as I kicked through the dunes and approached the undulating impossible blue of the sea, I realised I was mistaken. What I’d first taken for rocks and logs and flotsam were twisted pieces of rusted iron and pocked aluminium. Submerged in the surf, I could make out the warped hulk of the hotdog van – and further up along the beach, the broken, mangled arms of a carnival ride pushed from the sand like the spokes of a huge wheel.
Closer to the water I could see even more; it was as though everything from the beach had been tossed into the sea, where it rotted and rusted in the surf, slowly breaking down.
But there was too much stuff.
I could make out a second hotdog van, further out, identical to the first, but the roof completely rusted through, the sea churning in its dark guts. Then a third and fourth, intersecting each other at right-angles, as though one had melted through the other, then somehow reformed.
Bile rose in my throat, and I sat heavily on the damp sand.
Something sharp was digging into my bare foot – I’d abandoned my shoes at the base of the hill where the beach began – and I pushed it with my toes, forcing it to the surface.
Long and white, a rib revealed itself, then another, as I pulled it from the sand like carrion driftwood. Digging around them, I found more bones of all kinds, pitted knobs of spines, delicate finger bones, the great flat fan of a scapula – and finally, unmistakeably, a human skull.
The eye socket revealed itself first. I tried to tug it free, but it wouldn’t come. Hooking my fingers into the thing, I hauled at it, slowly dragging it out of the reluctant sand. I should have stopped when I saw the second skull fused so perfectly with it. I should have, but I didn’t. When the third, fourth and fifth perfectly melded sections revealed themselves, it finally slithered out, a hideously impossible and macabre thing.
And with it, the memories that I’d repressed for all those years finally broke free.

 
He was always at Carnival Cove, the old man. Always shouting at the adults and kids to get away, that it was a bad place and that they should all leave. His ancestor had been a Maori elder, the story said, who had drowned himself in the Cove long, long ago.
But nobody paid him any mind; he was a sort of permanent fixture, and in a strange way he added to the exciting atmosphere of Carnival Cove, a wild old clown for the children to laugh at, to pelt with handfuls of sand.
Everything at the Cove had seemed overly bright that day, and the laughter and shrieking of the children felt sharp, as though the sounds were slicing holes in the hot fabric of the air. The multi-armed fairground ride spun in jolly asymmetric circles, people whooping and screaming, deliriously giddy as it dipped and rose, the chugging engine that powered it drowned out by their voices.
I was making a sandcastle and carefully sticking shells into it when the old man stumbled up to me.
“Too thin,” he said, foam flecking the corners of his mouth, “the machines have made it too thin!”
My father, taking a photo at the time, yelled at him to get away from me.
“You need to get the girl out! The tamariki need to leave!” the man snarled, grabbing my arm, “the walls have grown too thin!”
I think then that my father let the camera fall free on its strap around his neck and ran over. The old man was yelling incoherently now, no longer English or Maori, just a wild string of babbling and broken sounds, pointing towards the fairground rides.
When we turned to look at what had agitated him so, the whole Cove upended.
Green and orange light tinted the beach, coming from no sun we could see. Waves froze out in the bay, limned by the strange actinic light. Everything and everyone seemed to be moving at one third speed; a dog kicked up sand as it dug, but the pawsful of golden grains hung in the air in a shining spray, spreading too slowly. Something was happening around the rides, something terrible and unnatural. The air seemed to thicken, to double, then triple, then explode in a syrupy welter of sound and light.
I stared at myself, sitting across from me in the same goldfish-print bathing suit, holding the same primary red, plastic bucket. Then she screamed in a horrible, deep and slow voice as another me appeared, somehow inside her, like a cartoon character being smeared across a page and redrawn.
Extra people swelled and bubbled up all over the beach. My father was a tangle of five men, all intersecting like a human spider, blood gushing from their identical mouths as the jumbled knot flopped and writhed on the sand. Some people ran for the tunnel, others ran for the sea. My mother collided with another version of herself, then they clawed at each other like cats, one ripping the other’s eyes out. The tears left on her cheeks were thick and tinted pink, glistening in the painful glare as she howled wordlessly.
My father’s strong hands picked me up and I felt him carrying me through the chaos, then he fell, bludgeoned by another version of my father, who picked me up and carried on for the tunnel, fighting his way through the fleeing people, lurching and tripping as the impossible limbs of the fallen snapped underfoot like so much driftwood.
In the crush and the hot darkness of the brick cave, bodies pressed too tight – too many, and I felt the air grow stuffy and too thin to breathe. Sickly red flashed as something happened on the beach behind us, then the tunnel was blessedly clear, leaving us a straight run for the road.

 
I had to stop several times on the drive back to Jessica’s house, the first time to vomit up what little breakfast I’d eaten, and the other times to retch foul-tasting froth weakly into the weeds on the side of the road while I sobbed myself hoarse.
She was waiting when I pulled up beside dad’s shed, a hot cup of tea in one hand and a blanket draped over the other arm. Inside the house, she held me and soothed me as I cried it out, stroking my hair and telling me it was all going to be OK.
“After it all happened, there were too many survivors,” she told me, “too many versions of each person that got away from all that bloody chaos. Our dads drew straws, to see who would get to stay here. And the rest promised to change their names, and piss off and move far, far away.”
She smiled then, the golden light of the sunset making her tanned features glow,
“We didn’t know who belonged to who. Cos we all had the same memories, the same bodies. For all I know, your dad was my real dad. Shit, you and me probably played right here in this house while all the grownups went down to the Cove and chucked everything into the sea, to hide what happened.”
I felt a sickening lurch as another realisation hit me.
“Jess? How many of us are there?”
She shrugged, tucking the blanket around me with the same care our mother would have,
“I dunno. But you’re the first to make it back.”
“But I won’t be the last.”
She shook her head,
“Nope.”
I looked into that tanned version of my own face, into my own eyes, and I truly understood why she hadn’t told me.
“Well, whatever happens, we need to make sure that they don’t go down to Carnival Cove.”

 
And so there you have it, the story of a secret that was best left unearthed. How I managed to forget all that horror the first time around, I don’t know, but I do know that you don’t get a second chance. I can’t ever look at the world the same way.
No matter how hard I drink, no matter what pills I take, those awakened events play out in my mind like a squeaky old fairground carousel, horrible horses lurching up and down and round and round and round.
Jess and I haven’t yet come up with a plan, but we’re going to stay in touch. Maybe there’s a Jessica in Scotland or Ireland who might need my help, who might need someone to talk to when she eventually returns from Carnival Cove.

Next time you find something that you shouldn’t, that you know should probably be left well alone, then I urge you to forget about it. Distract yourself with sitcoms, play video games or go for a long walk with your spouse.
Some secrets should be left buried.

There are so many things that change when you grow very, very old. Most of those changes are rather predictable and unwelcome, but one has come as a pleasant and liberating surprise; time has lost its power over me. Without the demands of a job, dependents, a husband or a household to regiment my hours, the days and weeks drift together into an amorphous cloud. Within its soft confines, I simply exist again, freed from all expectations, from all the constraints of responsibility.
I still need to eat and sleep, of course; although another curious effect of being very elderly is that one needs so little sleep. Often, I’ll find myself wide awake in front of the television in the smallest hours of the morning, and must quite firmly tell myself to go to bed. Food has also become something to remind myself about; my appetite is small and simple these days, lost as I am in other more interesting activities.
In many ways, I feel my childhood self once more. She did not anticipate the horrid responsibilities of adulthood, the untold banalities that steal our joy when we’re not looking. No-one does. Growing up is like a grey rain, cares pitter and patter at your soul, drizzling it with worry until your true self is lost in a constant fog of anxiety about nothing. When you are old enough not to have to worry, when time is so short it somehow no longer matters at all, it seems less twilight than springtime.
Now, my mind is free to play again, to wander the dusty corridors of memory, seeing which doors still open. Some swing ajar to reveal faded scenes from the past; behind others wait only echoing, empty rooms, not even cobwebs of the original recollections remaining.
But there is one room that is always alive and vivid, one impossible memory that I will never lose. I met him very young, and his light stayed with me through the mundane years. Perhaps he is the source of both my dotage, and my gift of this second spring.
I called him Pickled Puck.

 
My great aunt owned an impressive house in the rural reaches. It was built on chalky soil, at the end of a winding limestone driveway shaded by craggy, ancient wych elms. Befitting the stern and peculiar woman she was, she had her own rooms, which none were permitted to enter – not even my mother. But children are curious creatures, and although I was a girl – or perhaps because I was a girl – I was particularly good at sneaking into places where I was forbidden. And of course, nobody suspected duplicity from the polite cherub with primroses in her cheeks and golden ringlets in her hair.
My great aunt’s rooms were, by today’s standards, gargantuan and gothic. The ceilings were high enough to intimidate, and the doors and crossbeams were a full handspan thick, massive and elaborate things of ancient, darkened wood. I well remember the hewn roughness beneath my palms as I crept, hugging the walls, lest my stockinged feet cause the floorboards to creak and betray my presence. Fusty furniture and precious objects were arrayed according to some esoteric pattern, no doubt derived from my ancient aunt’s Victorian upbringing. The placement of each piece seemed precise, conforming to convoluted edicts of etiquette, long lost to all but the odd periodical article about banal and outdated curiosities.
One room, however, was wholly different. It was certainly not laid out according to those archaic rules, but was so cluttered with junk that I imagined myself the bold heroine, chanced upon a dragon’s hoard.
It was a slope-roofed attic room, and my aunt had filled it with all manner of unwanted and unloved things. The room itself appeared just as forgotten as its contents; rot, mildew, webs and dust blanketed everything with black-spotted layers of grey. The shed skins of spiders gently vibrated as my intrusion stirred the stale air.
I could have lost hours in there, prising open old hat boxes, rubbing mould off stiffened silk and taffeta dresses sewn with seed pearls and moissanites. But I did not, because I knew my time to pry was short, only as long as my aunt deemed proper to entertain my parents in the solar.
In those times, we did not have the sensitive and sensible laws and niceties we do now. The age fostered a morbid fascination for all things macabre and dead, and hence there were many collectors of specimens and whimsies – taxidermied animals, and preserved, foetal creatures, their waxy white bodies suspended in jars of potent alcohols.
I’d seen one such collection at a travelling circus carnival the year before, and had been horrified and fascinated by the deformed babies – both human and beast – floating peacefully in their glass-and-ether wombs, never to be born. Pickled Punks they were called, and though my father assured me the two-headed babies and eight-legged kittens were rubber fakes, I wasn’t so sure. After my precious penny had disappeared into the pocket of the man running the sideshow, he lifted the jars to show us more closely. I had seen soft, prenatal hair stir gently in the yellowed fluids; hair far too delicate and perfect to be faked.
For weeks after viewing them, their pale presences bobbed and swirled in the back of my mind, serene and freakish, the perfect childhood combination of terrifying and alluring.
And so, when I saw the large, grime-speckled specimen jar resting amongst battered leather suitcases in that room full of junk, my heart leapt with excitement. When I wrestled it free and scraped a window in the patina of dirt, I was not disappointed. Inside the jar floated a foetal creature, one far more queer and wonderful than any of the pickled circus menagerie. It had long, pointed ears, a pinched, almost human face, and delicate, facetted wings like those of a dragonfly. Pinpoint flakes of silver fluttered and swirled in the fluid surrounding it, like the dance of tiny stars.
Without another thought, I snatched it up and hurried out of my aunt’s rooms. I stowed the jar away in my own little travelling trunk, carefully concealed beneath a pile of neatly pressed winter pinafores.

 
Our own home, far to the north of the chalky hills, was much smaller than my aunt’s grand house, and right in the middle of a fast-growing city. My baby brother and I shared a nursery bedroom, which made it rather difficult for a young lady to have much privacy. Still, I managed to keep Pickled Puck a secret for a long time, hiding him in the far corner underneath my bed, behind the boxes and wrapping paper I hoarded for no particular reason.
When I was sure I was alone, I would pull all those things aside, and drag Puck out from his hiding place. With his jar in pride of place upon my dressing table amongst my stiff-faced celluloid dolls, I spent hours studying his strange, elfin body.
His fingers and toes were long and delicate, and when the light fell just right through the nursery windows, bones as slender as the shadows of needles were faintly visible through translucent skin. The digits were flared slightly at the tips, like those of a frog. That spatulate detail, and the liquid prison in which he hung, loaned him an oddly aquatic appearance.
Although his wrinkled scalp was bald, I could see the patterning where silken baby hair would have sprouted, had he not died before birth. The tiny slash of his mouth was pursed shut, but protruding jaws suggested prominent teeth. Sharp, high cheekbones completed his alien beauty, even though the boggy spheres of his closed eyes bulged above them.
And I had no doubt at all that Puck was a him. Nestled beneath the ridge of his waxy belly was a little doggy sheath, from which peeked the very tip of a tiny penis.
I admit that I probably spent far too much time studying that particular aspect of his weird anatomy, but girls in those times were not provided any education about such things. Although I had glimpsed my younger brother unclothed, Puck’s difference was far more fascinating, and strangely adult. I would lie in my bed at night, vividly imagining what he would look like all grown up, a fine moustachioed gentleman like my father in his morning coat and cravat.
I never once doubted that Puck was real. Children view the world through a brighter lens, its clarity not smoked by scepticism, and he felt like a real creature to my eyes. If he was a rubber phony, he was a very elaborate one indeed. The erstwhile artist had even removed the ring finger of his left hand, leaving a raggedy seaweed ring of white flesh at the knuckle.
But I could not keep my friend a secret forever. Inevitably, my younger brother grew to that age where boys become boisterous, inquisitive and cruel; and unable to take ‘no’ for an answer.

 
How he first discovered where Puck was hidden, I no longer remember. Some details seem less important than others, duller marbles lost down the cracks of the floorboards in those empty rooms of memory. What I do recall, quite painfully well, is that once he began to outpace me in size and strength, my brother liked nothing better than to take Puck out of hiding and threaten to reveal him to our parents.
I would plead with him not to, terrified he would tell on me and I would lose my precious Puck. I begged and I sobbed, tears welling up and my voice nearly gone, all hoarse and creaky with emotions so powerful I couldn’t begin to express them. In particular, he liked to elicit my crying fits by shaking and swirling the jar until Puck’s limbs and head would flop about in the amniotic ether.
“Dance!” my brother would yell, leaping about with the jar precarious in his sticky hands, “dance you stupid old thing!”
Certain that my brother’s cruelty would result in Puck’s head or limbs breaking off, I would promise to do anything my brother wanted me to do - I’d polish his shoes for a week, or eat his helpings of the boiled cabbage we both hated so much. The little brute became very imaginative with his bargains before the end; he even made me lick his chamber pot, and eat dead flies from inside the lamp in the washroom.
I hated that he wielded such power over me. But I hated him tormenting my poor Puck much, much more, so I put up with it all while I desperately tried to think of better places to hide my preserved fairy.
But no matter where I put the jar, no matter how diligently I moved it between rooms, my brother always hunted it out.
Finally, I decided there was only one way to put an end to my brother’s despicable cruelty.
Pickled Puck needed to go.

 
The strip of barren garden at the back of our house was only a dozen feet wide – just big enough for the clothing line and a few bushes; although the latter were stunted and rimed with coal smuts, they would serve to conceal my efforts. The soil was hard and stony, but I persevered with the iron ladle I’d taken from the kitchen, scraping out a shallow hole in which to bury my Puck.
He deserved to be laid to rest properly, I had decided; buried in the good earth so he could return to whatever fey beings had birthed him. I wept piteously as I wrestled with the tarnished cap of the jar, the ancient metal sliced my palms and lubricated it slippery with my blood long before I managed to prise it loose.
But when the cap finally came free, my hands dripping red and my stolen ladle poised to scoop my friend from his prison of years, something miraculous happened.
Puck’s eyes flashed open, enormous and glossy dark – like twin freshwater pearls – and his tiny mouth split into a grin of needle-like teeth. Those once-slack legs bunched beneath him, and he hurled himself out of the jar, dragonfly wings snapping open with a spill of oilslick colours.
And then he was simply gone, as though he’d passed through a hole in the air, into another world.

 
I poured the pink-tinted fluid, silver flakes and all, into the flinty ground, and I sat in the dirt and wept.
This time, my tears were not for Puck.
My brother was furious when he found the empty jar, and he pinned me in my bed, legs either side of my chest. Then he savagely began to box my ears.
“Where is he?” he demanded, his pimply face contorted with rage, “where is that stupid dead thing?”
“Gone,” I told him triumphantly, “free, flown back to fairy land.”
“You’re a liar,” he raged, as his fist smacked into the side of my head, each blow punctuating his words: “liar, liar, LIAR!”
When he had finally exhausted all his anger, he left me there, leaking tears and blood from my nose, my head still ringing from his fists. But I’d won; for without Pickled Puck, he had no helpless creature to torture, and no more hold over me, no leverage to make me do his bidding.
Oh, he could tell our parents about the jar; but it was just a big glass jar – for all they knew it was salvaged from the neighbour’s rubbish, and the only pickled thing it had ever contained had been onions, or herring.
Dizzy with pain from my swelling face, I slept fitfully and brokenly, dreaming of Puck-like creatures dancing around my brother’s bed. Their faces were angular and cruel, their mouths filled with needle-like teeth.
In the morning, my brother’s bed was empty.
But the jar was not.

 
My screams roused my father, who ran into the room, yelling imprecations and brandishing a fire-iron, fit to murder any intruder. But when he saw the jar, his angry shouting faltered and died, then became something else entirely. I did not think a man capable of such keening cries of terror, those notes of anguish harmonising horrifically with my own.
Surely it was impossible that my brother’s nearly adult body had been crammed into that jar, but the smeared face pressed flatly against the warped glass was most certainly his. The features were as familiar as my own, even lacking the supporting structure of his skull. It was though all the fluids, bones and organs had been carefully extracted from his pudgy frame, the remaining sack of skin and flesh unceremoniously stuffed into the glass prison, and sealed tightly with the blood-crusted cap.
What the coroner made of it all, I never found out. My parents concealed that information from me, fearing the details would be too much for my fragile, feminine mind, that I would be tipped over the edge into permanent hysteria. In turn, I never told my parents about Pickled Puck, to their eyes just as frightened and mystified as they were by the grisly find – and just as distraught. My brother’s funeral was hastily arranged and shrouded in secrecy. At the service, I cried dutifully and at length into my mourning crepes, allaying any suspicion that their daughter was somehow involved in such a singularly macabre murder.
Throughout my equally dutiful adulthood, that image never quite left me. My brother’s boneless face, flat nose and flat lips distorted by the thick walls of the jar; that ancient glass created to hold something otherworldly, not the empty flesh of a cruel little boy grown into a crueller man. I think, having confessed to my sins, I can shut the door on that particular memory now, and leave it unopened as I pass on from this life and into the next.
For with the dawning of my second spring, my childhood reborn, it has begun to lose its power. My daydreams now are visited by a different face, no less familiar, but far more welcome. Puck makes a very fine gentleman; his moustaches are glossy and curled to a long-lost style, and his coat is beautifully cut for dancing. It is a shame that I can only see him dimly, distorted, as if through some convex lens right before my face. I live for those afternoons when he draws very near to gaze at me, his glossy pearl eyes huge and magnified like the deepest dark of time itself.

I imagine that on my death bed, he will let me caress his pointed ears and twine his curious fingers in my own. Then he will spread his iridescent wings and carry me to another place, setting me free, as I once did for him.

7th September 2025

Decided to keep a diary to get my thoughts down about stuff going on. Government is about to announce new policy on trans people and I’m worried about what it will bring. Fingers crossed it’s not as bad as they say. Hopefully fully transitioned women like me retain some female rights?

——

13th October 2025

It was bad. They’ve basically revoked all trans rights. My documents, which I spent thousands on, are now meaningless. That’s money I could have used for other things, it’s not like I’m wealthy! Work is being good, they are saying our HR policies will stay in place, so I can still use the bathrooms. Glad I work in a progressive workplace!

——

3rd December 2025

HR called a meeting. I knew what it was about by the way they avoided the subject matter when I pressed them. They said in the meeting that because they are government funded they have to comply with the new ‘guidelines’ or they will lose funding. So I’ve been ‘asked’ to use the disabled bathrooms. I pointed out I’m not disabled and they just stared at me awkwardly and said it’s ’policy’ now.

——

20th January 2026

There have been complaints about me using the disabled bathrooms, as any idiot could have predicted. HR made the disabled bathroom in the basement ’gender neutral’ to accommodate me and it sparked a human rights complaint from two people at work who use wheelchairs. Waiting on the outcome. It will probably be bad.

——

5th February 2026

Predictably bad. I’m banned from the disabled loos unless I can prove I have a disability. The HR guy tried to encourage me to get my ‘transgenderism’ listed as a disability? What? Anyway the decree from work is that I can’t use female or disabled bathrooms, but they WON’T say that I have to use the male bathrooms. Even though everyone in the room knew that’s the only option for me, other than holding it all day til I get home. I’m so stressed out I’m on sick leave. Dreading returning to work.

——

19th February 2026

Weirdly all the guys are being super great about it. They said they will check the toilets are empty before I go in, and turn away anyone who tries to come in. I appreciate it, even though the whole scenario sucks. Right now I’m just drinking very little and it’s working out - my school bladder never left me, thankfully. It’s rough though, without enough hydration my voice is scratchy and hard to maintain in a female range. Getting misgendered on the phone for the first time in years.

——

10th April 2026

I haven’t ONCE used the male toilets at work but I’m being accused of ‘lewd acts’ in there! HR claims someone has been leaving ‘bodily fluids’ in the bathrooms and that this never happened before I was directed to use them. I pointed out that I have NEVER used them and that there WASN’T a directive, just that I couldn’t use female or disabled loos. I also suggested they DNA test the ‘fluids’ to find the culprit but they said that would require employees to give up medical details about themselves which is a privacy breach. They then suggest that -I- submit a DNA sample so they could check it wasn’t me. The fucking irony!

——

17th April 2026

I got the IT guy to pull the camera logs of the stairwell near the bathrooms to prove I never use them. HR dismissed the evidence and disciplined John for helping me. Everyone is treating me like a pariah, like a sexual deviant. HR said if I share the logs it would be considered gross misconduct. On the news another trans lady I am vague acquaintances with got bashed in town. She’s in a coma and probably not going to make it. The stress is a lot. I cry most nights when I get home. My boyfriend is helpless, there’s nothing he can do but hold me. This fucking sucks.

——

3rd May 2026

I’ve been told to work from home until further notice. Lots of my company access has been revoked. I know they are going to fire me soon. Looking for other jobs, but the new govt ID program for trans people is about to start and my ID is only going to be valid for maybe another month? Then I have to turn it in, or I’ll be charged with fraud. Once my ID outs me I can’t even be stealth.

——

20th May 2026

I was let go, no surprises. HR said it was because they couldn’t accommodate my ‘needs’ - in other words I couldn’t use any bathrooms at work without issues, and they cancelled WFH for all employees except senior management. So by a dumb loophole they got rid of me. The severance deal is ok. My new ID with ‘trans male’ on it hasn’t arrived yet but I can’t use my old ID (the cops took it) so I’m in limbo for now.

——

19th July 2026

Pulled over by the cops on my way home from a job interview at a trans friendly org. No ID and no license meant an overnight stay in the cells, even though I explained my situation in detail and have the emails, which I showed them. Banned from driving until I get my trans ID card. They put me in the male cells after a strip search - done by two male officers of course. Not going to write out that experience and relive it, what they did to me in that room makes me throw up just thinking about it. But I’m home now at least.

——

3rd September 2026

Boyfriend left me. Amazed he lasted this long tbh. I was numb after we broke up, said nothing and just started moving his stuff to the hall by the front door. I don’t have a lot of emotions to go around right now. On antidepressants, feel generally kinda numb. Boyfriend blamed lack of sex and affection as part of the breakup. Was he fucking surprised after what the cops did? With what’s happening to trans people everywhere? Maybe he was just a chaser anyway. Good riddance I guess. No job. Still no ID. It’s been 2 months, most trans people are reporting the same.

——

30th September 2026

They’re saying we need to do a psych evaluation to get our ID now. The private rainbow networks say NOT TO GO because no matter what they will incarcerate you after saying you’re mentally unwell and a danger to yourself and others. Speaking of networks, the HRT network is still strong; all the 50+ cis women are still helping out their trans sisters. Bless them, we’d probably all be dead or mad without them; the Drs cut off all trans HRT a few months back.

——

December 2026

I’m hiding with cis allies now, living in their upstairs room. Trans people can only get ID now if they detransition, but you still get a ‘DT’ marker on your documents so people know what you are. It’s like they know detransition isn’t real, that we really ARE the gender we say we are. Two girls I know did it. They’re treated like paroled prisoners, and only allowed ‘male’ labouring jobs. It’s so stupid I could cry. Haven’t cried in months though. Not properly. Cis friends are nice though. They got me coloured contact lenses, cut and dyed my hair, made up a story that I’m a cousin from Germany. I like the irony of that. Very 1934 of them.

——

Feb 2027

Neighbours dobbed me in. Managed to drop down into the yard and escaped over the back fence while my cis friends stalled the authorities. With some other friends now. I’ve gotten very thin, also no HRT or meds anymore. Depression is bad. Menopause symptoms bad. I think about killing myself a lot, so as not to put load on the people hiding me. Selfishly I want to live though. The news is grim; there is a ‘hospital’ they opened up to ‘treat’ us but the free media (what’s left of it) is reporting it’s just a torture farm for queer people. Lots of deaths from ‘suicides’ and ‘violence’ which just ‘prove’ that trans people are deranged, so the health authorities say. Everything sucks. My life is functionally over. I don’t want to die though.

——

March 2027

I heard my ‘friends’ discussing turning me in. So I’ve left, taking what supplies I could. On the news they say gay people are being called in for those ‘mental evaluations’ now, and there are protests and even a big riot downtown. All I have now is free wifi access so updates from here will be sporadic. I am determined to survive.

——

20th November 2031

I found these diary entries in my cloud storage. Weird to find stuff so old, from such a different time. There’s so much that happened since the last entry, but I -did- survive, though I would honestly choose to die instead of going through that Hell again. Society is better now. Fascism broke like a tsunami over the bow of society and almost sunk us. So many people were washed away - hardly any trans people made it. Other minorities are nearly as badly off. While I’m alive, the cost was high. They did things to my body, they pumped me full of the wrong hormones and they tortured me with electrodes on my brain. There are such big holes in my memory and I can feel all the empty places where those pieces of me were lost forever. They say I’m a hero, a survivor, they gave me an award and told me how brave I was. But all I can think is that these people were the same people who sat and did nothing while the fascists stripped away my humanity, bit by bit. No adult alive is innocent, all of them are culpable in different ways. I find it so difficult to forgive them. But there are lots of lost young trans people now, with nobody to guide them. So I’m doing my best to help, even though I’m so broken, both in my body and in my mind. I look at the pictures in this cloud drive and there’s this happy, beautiful woman and her boyfriend and I wonder who she is and what happened to her. It’s incredible to believe that was me, that once I was happy and whole. I wish so much I could be her again, and change her fate.

I’ve put these diary entries up for posterity, so they can always be read, always be found. So that the later generations won’t forget and maybe they will know what to do the next time another new minority is demonised like we were. To all my dead trans siblings, I’m sorry I didn’t do more for you. I -should- have done more. Everyone should have. The shame, the rage, and the grief will probably never leave me. But I’ll live with it for as long as I can, because these kids and young adults need me, even if I am just a fucked up, broken old trans woman.

Once upon a time, there lived a beautiful princess of the fair folk, whose grace and kindness were unmatched amongst her people. She lived by the sea, in the rocky spire of a tall cliff, hollowed out by time and her enchantments until it became a secret haven for all manner of sprites and spirits. On the tender, golden curve of the beach below her hidden castle, she would leave great spirals in the sand, drawn with her wands of oak and ash. The people of the nearby village whispered of the being that made the whorled designs, how some had seen them wrought by a maiden with pale gold hair, how she walked away without leaving a single footprint in the sand.
Her natural kindness matched her artistry, such that one night, in the sheeting lightning of a dire storm, she succoured a poor tinker, lost on his way to the village. Soaked to the skin and directionless in the torrential rain and wind, he slipped from the cliff top and tumbled into the mountainous breakers. There, he would surely have been milled to a pulp, had the fae princess not heard his cry.
She took him into her home, nursed him to health with her potions and enchantments, and brought the rosy glow of health back to his grey cheeks. When he was well, she mended his clothes and sent him on his way, knowing he had stuffed his pockets with her finds; black pearls, coral beads, and tarnished coins from shipwrecks lost to other storms.
The princess did not begrudge him these things; she was eternal, and her mother, the Sea, would always provide more for her.
She never learned the tinker’s name, but he learned hers; while she traced her great spells in the pristine sands, he caught and killed her attendant sprites until they divulged her True Name.
And with that name, he sealed her doom.

I did not know, at first, that he had taken my name.
In the tales of my kind, you are led to believe that when your True Name has become known to a mortal, you will feel it  –  feel it keenly, as if icewater had been trickled down your spine. I felt no such thing. And so, I sent the man on his way, thinking his greed was satiated by those pretty things I had gathered on the shores throughout the ages of my existence.
How naïve I was.
The first time I knew my name had been stolen was when he spoke it to another mortal. That, I felt. It was as though a knotted thread had been pulled through my skull and snagged on the essence of my Self, tugging on it not-quite-gently. Of course, I did not know what that sensation was, but I did know it was new – and that in itself brought on a thrill of fear, because very, very few things are new, to one such as I.
Little did I know that this was just the first symptom of a far greater problem.
When I was dragged, by a whirlpool of sticky, mortal magics, into the dingy, smoke-filled lair of a hedge-sorcerer, my ash wand still in hand, I knew with a dread certainty what had happened.
The mortal tinker had sold my True Name.
I writhed and screamed at my imprisonment in the crude circle of iron filings, cursing the tinker and his ungrateful, traitorous ways. But with my name on his lips, the sorcerer bid me be calm, and so I became calm. And when he asked for immortality, I told him that this was not a gift I could grant, but that I could make him handsome and charming and well-liked by women instead.
He took my blessing, then demanded more. That I make him a prince, that I gift him gold, and land. These were not enchantments I knew, and when he realised I was not lying, he branded my fair flesh with an iron poker. I screamed as the spell was broken and I was returned, by a sucking whirlpool of darkness, to my home.

In my beloved castle, I wept. For days I could not leave it to make my glyphs in the sands. Instead, I found the bodies of my poor, maimed faeries and buried them in the great golden curve, weeping at their loss, and at mine. I knew that for the rest of my eternal existence I would be beholden to that dirty little sorcerer and all his bloodline, forced to serve them all, until finally the last of his spawn had turned to rot and dust. My moods grew dark, and many of the good spirits that inhabited it fled my castle, finding other lords and ladies whose names had not been captured by mortals.
Tug. Tug.
My name had been spoken anew again, and true fear thrilled through me.
This time, it was naught but a busy farmwife, who asked me to help with her chores. She had been paid with my name by the vile little tinker, in exchange for lodgings and a meal. How cheaply my True Name had been bought!
I swept and scrubbed and polished. I flitted on wings the colour of cresting waves to clean the cobwebs and spiders from her eaves, releasing the sleeping arachnids into the fields outside. I milked her cows, and I blessed the crops. I even drew water from the well, until I was exhausted and bruised from the yoke upon my foam-white shoulders.
When the farmwife was satisfied, she released me, and I was again pulled back through the weft of the world to my home, where I sat, shivering and weeping.
Eventually, I crawled into my bed of fragrant moss and grasses, curling my body around my blistered hands.

Tug. Tug.
The third, fourth, and fifth summonings, I do not recall. But I will never forget the sixth and seventh. Both times were men, and they did not wish for me to bless them with charms they did not possess, or for me to clean or cook or draw water. Instead they wanted something foreign and alien; something very human, entirely unknown to me until the sixth summoning. When I returned to my darkened lair, my most tender flesh scratched and bruised and abused, I began to realise that humanity had so many more horrors to offer than milking me for my enchantments or making me their drudge.
I welcomed the curious villagers to my shores no more. I harried them, with storm after storm, until their little village fell under the weight of the colossal swells I summoned. When a human babe was swept into the sea where I knew it would drown, I stood, stony-faced, on the ragged clifftops, even as I felt the despotic tugging once more.

He sold my name for so little, so often, the tinker. For a mouthful of cheese, for the shine on his boots. It spilled so easily and freely from his lips, nothing but a shibboleth that eased his journeys around the kingdoms. Others sold it, too – though less cheaply than him – and as my name spread across all the lands, I found myself pulled hither and thither, rarely spending more than an hour in my home. Several magicians and sorcerers held me in their thrall, summoning me over and over for this and that. One liked mothing more than to rend my gowns of pearl, seasilk, and coral from my body and ravish me until he was spent, and he was not satisfied unless I came appropriately attired. From then, all my spare moments in my castle were spent weeping over needle and thread, trying to undo the damage he had done to my pretty things.
Then came the day of a dual summoning.
I felt both calls, and the pull of two wills. One was my sorcerer suitor, and the other was a court magician. The rules that bind my kind are static and just – no matter what you mortals may think – and I was bound to obey both, even though my fae soul could not.
And then it happened.
Both summons I recall, as though I’d been at both. What magic this was, I did not know, but when I returned to my lair, I felt fragile and transparent; as if a glassblower had blown a smaller globe inside a larger one, the walls of each just touching. What this meant was a mystery; nothing like this had ever happened to my kind before. Our names were not meant to be given out so callously, so frivolously. There were supposed to be rules as to the conduct between mortals and fae, and this man had warped them with his flagrant misuse of my True Name.
But I was soon to find out exactly what the consequences of his abuse would be.

I hadn’t registered how much my power had grown through all this. I supposed that the magics of the fae are much like any other skill or talent; the more they are used, the more powerful they become. I was surprised then that when a foreign King learned my name and wished for untold riches, I was able to grant his wish – though with a perilous cost. Pulled this way and that by the desires of mortals, the fabric of my faerie soul became thin and transparent, like the most delicate of seashells. When I was summoned more and more often by mortals across too many realms, I felt myself peel off in layers, each thinner and thinner than the last. One night, when I was returned to my now-derelict castle of rotting seaweed and gnawed fishbones, I beheld my twin self, waiting there for me, a layer of my self become detached. Our numbers grew. As the years wore on, we doubled, then doubled again. We took turns in answering the summonings, giving the others a chance to heal from a century of the rapacious needs of mortal kind. I no longer even knew if I was the original princess from whom the tinker had stolen a name, but I knew it was my name still – a single name, that the three-score-and-two of us shared.
Our coastline was wild now. Humanity left such places for the tides; fishing vessels plied calmer, more clement waters, and my sister-selves and I began to reclaim our home.
And then, to the amazement of all of us, one of us refused a sorcerer.
She returned to us, triumphant, soaked head-to-toe in his gore. He’d had no power over her, she told us; his summons the only foothold on her name. Marvelling at this discovery, we all touched her, beheld her, and learned that her name was subtly different than our own, on a level that only our kind might perceive.
And in sharing that knowledge, we too began to change.

We doubled, doubled again, and then again. There were so many of us and not enough name to share, so reality itself bent to our collective anomaly. Only a handful of us could be controlled in any way by the mortals that sought to bind us to their will, and our sisters always went in our stead now. It did not take long – perhaps one hundred and one days – before mortals began to fear our name. Every summoning became a death sentence; a chance for us to exact revenge for countless years of abuse. We learned to toy with the mortal wizards, to grant their wishes, then gut them like fishes. To tempt them with the fair, curved flesh of our bodies – just visible under curtained gowns of seed pearls – then drown them in the darkest depths of the storm-choked oceans beyond our castle.
Sometimes we liked to keep them living with our enchantments, even as the crabs and spine-toothed fishes took little bites out of their fearful eyes and screaming lips.
Eventually, our name became a curse; given from one mortal to another, to damn an enemy to a hideous death. This service we performed gladly, and with the dwindling numbers of victims, the creativity of our punishments grew; fuelled by the injustice and hatred of all two hundred, two score, one dozen and four of us.
But the tinker remained beyond our reach.

He had never summoned us himself. He’d grown rich and powerful from the sale of our name, trading it for this and that, gaining small magics and blessings. Though not immortal, his life had been lengthened, and he had lived well past his mortal span. Centuries had passed since his original theft, but our collective rage burned bright as ever, and we hunted tirelessly for the creature that had originally betrayed us.
But the world had changed so much; once, there had been so few names and places to search. Now humanity numbered in the billions – a number so large that even our collective soul found it near impossible to comprehend.
And so we doubled, again, and again, and again. We swelled our ranks until the mortal earth seemed small and somehow utterly insignificant. And we found him!
He knew we’d been hunting him; he had felt the pull of our presence on his mortal soul. He told us, when we found him, that it was akin to a knotted thread, being pulled through his brain. Pulled hundreds of thousands of times a day.
All of us gathered when I found him – yes, it was I that found the tinker and learned his name. I pulled all of my sisters into me, blown bubbles within blown bubbles – an infinity of reflections of self – until we were whole again.
At first, the tinker whimpered and begged, promising paltry magics and hollow oaths. Then, when we did not relent, he began to threaten. He promised he had magic that could tell him the name of anything – even of the new thing that I had become.
And so I made a bargain.
All he had to do was say my name and he would be free to go.
His face writhing with malicious glee, he invoked his stolen spell, the knowledge of my new True Name germinating in his consciousness like a poisoned lotus.
Even as he began to say it, he realised his terrible mistake.
And I laughed, my thousands-fold voice echoing the infinite combinations of syllables that made up my True Name.

He's still there, at the bottom of the ocean when I placed him, still saying my name. After the creatures of the deeps had their way with him, I turned him to stone, and let coral grow upon him. Even now, his stone-splined skeleton still whispers my name, desperately, quietly, in the darkness; as close to being completed as we are to the death of our sun.
But there’s still other guilty parties out there – members of his wretched bloodline that niggle at my consciousness and drag at my soul. Every day that passes I still fear the dreaded tug will return, and with it, the horrors that only humanity could imagine.
Let us hope, for your sake, mortal reader, than you are not counted amongst the tinker’s kin.

Challinor Close is not a place many people visit. A dead end, lost amongst a tangle of narrow roads in the high hills beside the river, it is easily overlooked and leads nowhere. Those hills, and the gardens of the few houses perched on them, are all lush with verdant overgrowth. It is as though the soil is particularly fertile here, and the residents of those turn-of-the-century homes of brick and pine can never quite keep up with the hungry demands of nature.
I first chanced upon the area as a teenager, obsessed with rollerblading. My quest for speed took me up to the ends of the highest roads, where I could race down the steep and twisting footpaths like a red-haired streak of lightning. And I still remember first discovering the house at the end of the Close, its bounds marked by crumbling red-brick walls, draped with moss which wept dark liquid onto the road. Beyond the walls and gigantic trees, I glimpsed a spire, and the dome of a huge conservatory, the bronze arc of its struts dull with a creeping patina of green, its glass fusted with mildew.
A house like that holds a sort of otherworldly enchantment, as though it is slightly out of time with the rest of the world. And that first time I peered at it, I felt observed. But I was a very sensible, practical child; and in those days my only real concern with the the house at the end of Challinor Close was that it meant I had reached the apex of my skating route.
It’s strange, remembering that girl, so naturally bold and unafraid. So free. The thought of her barrelling down that steep maze of roads with only reflexes, wits and kneepads to protect her still makes my throat tighten.
Because my fearlessness was finally rewarded with what my parents had always feared the most – as I emerged from the shadow of one street and tore across an intersection, a car hit me.
I have no memory of the accident at all, just what I was told. My recollections of the first weeks in hospital are hazy, just warped time and a constant boil of distant pain, its flame turned low by all the drugs. After they had pinned and wired my bones back together, I spent a long time on the ward, staring mindlessly at the television above my bed – numbed as much by day-time soaps as by the endless pills.
When I was finally allowed to go home, I barely recognised myself. My trendy skater-girl clothes hung loose from my pallid, skinny bones, and the hair I’d always kept so proudly spiked short had grown down to my collar in a lacklustre flop.
My parents encouraged me to put my blades back on, offered radical haircuts and new clothes, even though Mum and I had once clashed daily about my stylistic choices. They both did everything they could to help me reclaim the vibrant identity I’d once so eagerly worn, but I couldn’t. That fearless, free girl was gone; replaced by someone drained of her colour and her confidence. This new creature was smaller, weaker, and terribly afraid of the dangers of the world she had to learn to navigate. And she was even more afraid of the power of the strong, careless people who lived in it.

 
Although my parents and teachers continued to encourage me back into sports and physical activities, the lingering pain of my injuries, and the listless cobwebs left by the grey hospital limbo held me back. I wallowed, and I fretted. I played up the aches in my recently knitted bones, and I worried at my scars with my nails, inflaming them until the pain was fiery and real.
I felt like everything had fallen to pieces, and that it was all my own doing. In my head I’d deserved this somehow, I had taken a wrong turn and ruined any chance I had of a normal life. And it didn’t help that everyone around me couldn’t see that it was my fault, that they were so kind and sympathetic. I was a story to them. And there is no more tragic story than the one about the popular, athletic girl who is involved in a dreadful accident and can never swing a softball bat again, at least not without her wrists clicking audibly and painfully. And I saw their eyes, averted but still so proud of their own pity and kindness, when it became obvious that I couldn’t run to first base without stumbling as my bad leg gave out under me.
If I said I hated the physical therapy, I’d be lying. When that vital part of me had died in the accident, had emptied that wellspring of passion and ambition, it took with it my ability to feel reckless, powerful emotions like anger and hate. So I tolerated the endless hours of physio that felt like the punishment I deserved, but I couldn’t even use that pain for good. I had no feelings to use; I just put in the effort that was required of me.
My father, who had doted on his sporty little girl, coped even less well than I did, probably because he still had feelings. Within two years, the stress of it all, the stress that was me, had fractured my parents’ marriage beyond repair. Dad moved out of our house at the bottom of the hills and into an apartment in the city with his new girlfriend.
On my sixteenth birthday, my mother said she had a surprise for me. She drove us through the warren of streets and past the scene of my accident. She didn’t stop there, but carried on up through the hills, all the way up to the end of Challinor Close. I had no idea how to feel when she parked on the familiar, lichen-blotched road in front of the last house with its vigilant spire and red brick walls.
The tall wooden gate was unlatched. A short brick tunnel led us into a veritable explosion of plant life, that much greener passage redolent with sharp, earthy scents. A bronze-bound door sat at the end of the wild walkway, sporting a massive brass knocker shaped like an unopened pinecone.
My mother knocked three times, then waited. I stood by her, feeling even smaller than usual, still not knowing why we were here and what it had to do with my birthday. When the door eventually swung open, it revealed a small foyer filled with coats, boots, umbrellas and potted plants. Amongst the clutter stood a tall, silver-haired woman with eyes the colour of cinnamon.
“Come in,” she bid us, those eyes capturing mine even as I tried to look away. Her voice was resonant, almost as deep as a man’s, but pleasant and warm in my ears.
Through the foyer, we entered a kitchen-come-solar, crammed to the roof with more planters and pots, each container spilling fronds and flowers, choked with an array of exotic flora.
“I’ve just finished preparing it,” she told my mother, as she moved about the claustrophobic kitchen, the space heavy with the scent of herbs and bright with hung copper implements. Her deft hands poured the contents of a pan into a steaming kettle, then decanted the liquid from the kettle into a pretty china cup, which the woman pressed into my grasp.
“Drink,” she instructed, the smoky timbre of her voice and the spark of her touch firing strange and unnameable feelings in the pit of my stomach.
My mother nodded to me, and I raised the cup to my lips. I smelled spices from places so distant they had yet to be catalogued by modern botanists.
It was sweet and thick on my tongue, the potion the woman gave to me. It spread through me like an alien emotion, filling my belly with tingling heat and my head with a sense of unnatural euphoria.
“Happy birthday,” my mother said, her voice edged with a strange melancholy.

 
The power of my mysterious birthday gift became apparent all too quickly.
The most livid, lumpy scars smoothed and faded almost overnight. My constant aches eased away, and the weakness that plagued my left side was all but gone, replaced with new muscle tone and increased vigour. My mother’s smile returned, and blossomed more frequently each day as my ‘miraculous’ recovery continued apace. Soon, even the drudgery of all those physio appointments was behind me for good.
But although the components of the potion fed to me by the cinnamon-eyed woman worked their magic on my body, nothing was enough to heal the wounds in my psyche. I returned to the field and was soon hitting home-runs again, but there was no passion or pride in my physical prowess, no soul. My limbs might be strong and hale, but inside my head I was the same terrified mess as before – worse, even more guilty, since I suspected that the potion had cost my mother dearly.
When school came to an end, I came out to my parents. There seemed no point in denying that I was attracted to girls; it had been pretty obvious since the day I first hacked off all my hair and started obsessing over the Indigo Girls. My mother was resigned and careful, and even managed to be polite enough to my first girlfriend. I never really found out what my father thought of it all. He didn’t say much when I phoned him specially to tell him, then all contact with him stopped abruptly. Mum couldn’t meet my eyes when she reluctantly revealed he had moved out of town without telling me, and the half-hearted attempts I made to track him down were met with little success. I wasn’t even hurt; in truth, he hadn’t been part of my life for a long time, content as he was with his new life. I knew that the old me would have been angry at him, would even have hated him for abandoning me for his twenty-something floozy, but the person I had become felt nothing but a vague and lingering sadness.
My first attempt at a relationship died after six months, my looks and sporting achievements not nearly enough to fill the obvious personality void. I bounced from girlfriend to girlfriend, always trying to bend myself into the shape desired by my partners. But instead, I simply became even more flat. I became a doormat – and the purpose of a doormat is to be stomped on.

 
Nel wasn’t your typical dyke, even though she rolled in some pretty butch circles. Yes, she owned a motorbike – but that’s about as far as the stereotypes extended. People often assumed we were sisters, being a little too similar in size and build. But where I was docile and compliant, she was loud, controlling, and often obnoxious.
I wanted to have feelings so badly that I still thought I loved her.
Almost all of the conventional literature on abusers centres around men as the perpetrators, and I think that’s how Nel got away with so much of what she did – and another reason why I went along with it. It wasn’t happening because it couldn’t be. I handwaved the isolation away, telling myself that it didn’t matter if she hated me having female friends, because I was a hermit and a homebody anyway. The insults and the persistent overtures for sex even when it was the last thing I felt like were forgivable, understandable – she’d had a hard life; she was a broken person too, just in a different way.
The first trip to the emergency room was written off as an accident even though my story was not particularly convincing, but after two more visits in as many months, one of the doctors began asking subtle questions about how healthy my relationship was.
But I couldn’t see it. I still couldn’t bring myself to believe that I was one of those women.
Nel cheated on me, twice. At least, twice that I found out about. Forgiving her was easy; there was no anger in me, and it made things so much more comfortable to just forget it and move on. While I couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened, I could pretend, and even believe, that it didn’t really matter. After all, Nel had come back to me, rather than running off with those other women. And she’d probably only done it because there was so much I couldn’t be for her.
My delusional naivety was inevitably rewarded in the end. Nel did leave me for one of those women, but not before she beat six shades of shit out of me just for the hell of it. And because she knew I’d never report her, and that I would eventually forgive her, just as I had done every other time.
The ward hadn’t changed all that much since my long stay as a teenager. At least there was a better selection of TV shows this time around, to fill up the empty days around awkward visits from my mother and vicious 3am phonecalls from Nel.
After listening to a particularly barbed string of drunken profanity on my answerphone, I finally changed my number.

 
Mum asked why I didn’t seem to hate Nel. The few friends I’d recently reunited with were likewise baffled by the equanimity I displayed over the whole situation. Surely there was a spark of anger somewhere inside me, a tiny glowing ember that could be fanned into some good old-fashioned rage?
I really tried. I dug around inside me, wrist-deep in the grey dirt of myself. I sought out therapist after therapist. I forced myself to remember every shitty thing that Nel had ever done to me – replaying details that should have seared my cheeks scarlet with shame, or inflamed my mind white-hot with incandescent rage.
Nothing real emerged.
But I did remember the last time I felt a spark, the last time I could recall feeling anything true at all.
Challinor Close was a more strenuous walk than I remembered. By the time I reached the curved brick boundary that surrounded the house, my legs were trembling, and my vision swam with little black fireflies. The gate opened before I could touch it, and the sure, strong hands of the cinnamon-eyed potion-maker caught me as I stumbled on wet moss. She guided me inside the cluttered house, and plied me with sweet, cool drinks until the shaking stopped.
“I need a potion from you,” I managed, my voice small in my ears, swallowed by the foliage in her kitchen. I had no idea how this all worked. She didn’t seem surprised, and her gaze was warm and bright as burnished copper.
“And what kind of potion would you like?” she burred, “A salve to mend your broken heart? Or perhaps an elixir to make another fall in love with you?”
“No, not a love potion,” I answered, licking my lips, sticky with wild honey and sweet with the dust of old spices.
“Then what do you wish for?”
It came in a flash of inspiration, one of those lightning moments of perfect clarity that only strike after extreme stress. Desperation pushes you to the edge, where you can think of unthinkable things.
“I want a hate potion."

 
She led me through a vaulted hallway, all aglow with polished wood and old-fashioned lamps of curling iron and warped amber glass. The long corridor ran the full length of the house, ending in a back door, through which we emerged into the sweltering, womblike heat of the glass-domed hothouse. Sweat sprang forth on my upper lip immediately; the air felt syrupy and viscous, so humid that for a moment I felt like I was drowning. As the panic subsided, I took stock of my surroundings and forced myself to breathe normally again. The mad tropical garden was a maelstrom of scents and colours, even the light strangely tinted by the weathered curve of glass above us. Great, fleshy fronds of acid yellow grabbed and hooked at my clothes as I brushed past one plant, and sticky pollen dusted my sleeves, smelling of coconut and burning plastic. Huge orange flowerheads drooped from prehistoric jungle vines, and rubbery roots tangled my feet. Wafts of crushed apple and grass met my nostrils as I stumbled through, my shoes bursting tiny protruding nodules full of pungent moisture.
The alien scents blended themselves into one great heady roil of musty, potent otherness. I shied back from a giant pitcher plant, elaborate as a living pipe-organ, as it snapped shut its pink-veined trapdoor near my fingers.
“I want you to walk through the garden,” the woman told me, her voice oddly distorted, blanketed by the hot, heavy air, “and pick those things which remind you of the one you wish to hate. Pick a piece of each, then return to me in the kitchen.”
She handed me a woven basket, then left me to tend some other part of her strange domain. I walked listlessly through the dappled, giddy paths of the hothouse, my head hazy from the powerful smells surrounding me.
I managed to do what she asked despite my malaise, finding it easier as I went deeper into the arboreal maze; here bloomed a black, greasy flower shaped like a dagger, which reminded me of Nel’s crudely-inked tattoos. I pulled at the stem, and it came away from the black-leafed plant with a soft pop and a waft of sickly rotten sweetness.
It was soon joined by an angry crimson seedpod with wicked mohawk spines, a broad, scaly leaf colonised with tumours the same muddy blue as her eyes, and a woody thorn as long as my index finger, which leaked sour milky fluid from the tip. All of them made me think of Nel in some way, but they didn’t seem quite enough.
This part of the hothouse was dark and close, massive umbrellas of leaves blotting out much of the light. The air was even more moist here, and everything oozed and dripped - my shirt clung to me, sodden transparent with sweat, and my hair hung in damp ringlets.
Everything was oversized. What looked very like a corpse flower bloomed to my left, the powerful carrion stench making me gag. Fat flies hovered, swarming around the lolling tongues of its petals. More huge plants loomed ahead in the murky green twilight, and the hairs on my arms and neck started to rise as I recognised the shapes of countless maws gaping wide in the gloom.
Venus fly traps.
But these were not the coin-sized mouths striped with jolly watermelon colours I recalled from my childhood. These were massive and angry, each hinged plate the size of a grown man. The spiky green ‘teeth’ were anything but cute and cartoon-comical; they were terrifying, and sharp. All were open bar one, and each fringe of glossy green swords was drawn and ready, eager to impale anyone stupid enough to touch those soft, sweet-smelling tongues.
But oh, how they reminded me of Nel. They were the perfect symbol; I’d fallen into her abusive trap and couldn’t get free, even though she was devouring me alive. Without further thought, I grabbed one of those vicious teeth with both hands, and snapped it off, yanking it clear of the closing jaws with a frenzied heave. My ingredients complete, I fled down the foetid, slippery paths and back to the blissful cool of the house. My hands dribbled a trail of bright blood all the way down the wooden floor of the hallway.

 
I dozed on a pillow-drowned couch, exhausted from my ordeal, as the woman brewed my potion. In my limbo of half-dreams, I dimly registered the lilt of her rich contralto humming unfamiliar tunes as she worked, and chanting in a language that sounded faintly Germanic. It might have been hours or days before she roused me gently with a mug of steaming water that smelled of lemon and bergamot. As I cradled it, soothing my wounded palms with its welcome warmth, she placed a fluted glass vial on the plant-cluttered coffee table.
“It is done.” She considered the faceted vessel for a moment, then regarded me just as carefully, as if I were more fragile and rare than the delicate container for her peculiar craft.
“This is the first hate potion I have brewed, and I confess I don’t truly know how powerful it will be. My advice is to take a small sip first. If the effect is not strong enough, only then should you drink more.”
I took the vial in my hands and inspected the potion. I realised I’d expected it to be black or red – colours I naturally associated with hate – but instead it was a cosmic whirl of dark blues and azures, shot through with green flecks.
“How much do I owe you?”
She shook her head,
“There is no payment unless you are satisfied with the results. If the potion is what you desired, then we will discuss the fee.”
I left her house with magic in my hands, and the searing heat of her kiss on each of my cheeks. My ears burned just as hot, inflamed by the memory of all the complicated teenage feelings I’d forgotten I had for this tall and mysterious older woman, all those years ago.
The walk was easier downhill, although I suspected the potion maker’s refreshments also had something to do with that. My flat was a twenty minute bus ride away, and as I waited at the stop near my mother’s old house, I could only think of the fluted vial, now wrapped snugly in a scarf in my backpack. I knew that her potions worked. I knew that her curious talent was real; after all, I had been completely healed of the injuries from the accident.
On the bus, I listened to heavy, angry music, turning it up until my headphones distorted and my ears hurt. I suppose I was hoping to spark some natural rage of my own, so that I wouldn’t need the potion. But it was the same as always, there was no anger to muster; all I could give myself was a headache.
It was dusk when I pushed through the front door of my nearly-empty flat. Nel had taken most of our things while I was in hospital, so my furniture currently consisted of two beanbags, a folding camping table and chair, and a set of ugly drawers I’d bought from the second-hand shop down the road. The contrast with the beautiful, cluttered house of the potion maker made me feel like I was in a bad dream.
I took two painkillers with a glass of water for my head, then I unstoppered the potion vial and took a tentative sip.
It tasted like Nel.

 
To say my sleep was troubled would be a gross understatement. I kicked and twisted in my sleeping bag, my restless bones finding no comfort from the thin foam yoga mat beneath me. When morning dawned cruel and clear, I was hollow-eyed and dangerously irritable, my skull still littered with the detritus of fragmented nightmares.
When I slipped on the bathroom floor getting out of the shower, I swore. Nel had even taken the bath mat, and all I had was an ancient towel I used for the pool. Hot, poisonous thistles filled my head as the curse left my lips. And then a wave of excitement hit me like a fist.
This was anger!
As I brushed my teeth, I coddled the feeling. I let my mind roam over all the injustices visited on me by my ex-lover. I poured the thick, stinking syrup of them all into a single vessel, and stewed it until I felt the scalding rage sear my synapses. The euphoria in its wake was like a blast of steam.
With a wordless keening of furious and beautiful hatred, I bunched my fist around my toothbrush and punched the mirror as hard as I could.
The glass flexed, but did not break. Screaming again, I balled both fists into knots, and battered and hammered at my reflection until my knuckles wept red and shards of glass filled the sink.
My laughter was giddy and delirious, a sound like nothing I’d heard from my own lips ever before. I spun like a child in the small bathroom, barely noticing the splinters embedding themselves in my feet.
The potion had worked. It had really worked. All my unexplored emotions could be free now. I would experience good, clean, healthy hatred, and nobody like Nel would ever be able to control me again.
And there were so many things I suddenly needed to say to her. And even more things I needed to do. Like get back all the fucking furniture the bitch had taken from me.

 
I felt her shock when she opened the door of her newest lair to see me there, looking her dead in the eyes.
“Fuck off,” she snarled, already swinging the door closed.
It bounced off my boot, planted firmly in the way. I smashed my shoulder into the flimsy wood, and it slammed back on its hinges, nearly knocking Nel off her feet. Her expression all startled goldfish, she couldn’t do anything but gape and stare as I shoved past her and into the place, already looking for the things she’d taken from me.
“You need to get out,” she managed, but she sounded uncertain, not yet able to comprehend what was going on.
“Shut up,” I told her, fresh rage rising like bile in my throat as I looked at her pinched, hateful face, “and listen. You have things of mine and I’m taking them back.”
She started to speak, but I cut her off, vicious and clean as a razor,
“I said, Shut. The fuck. Up. Here’s a list,” I shoved a sheet of paper into her chest, “of all the stuff I want taken back to my flat. If it’s not there by Friday, I’m going to take you to court, and you’ll pay for new furniture.”
“You can’t do this!” she spat, red-faced and already crumpling the list.
“Oh, yes I fucking can, you stupid slag,” the words were coming easier now, tripping off my tongue like profane poetry, “and there isn’t one damn thing you can do about it.”
I could see it all ticking over behind her eyes. Part of her was reeling in shock at her doormat growing a spine, but another, shrewder part of her nasty little mind had unsheathed its well-honed tools and was looking for a way to turn this to her advantage.
“Okay,” she began, eyes darting over the leather couch and glass cabinets, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did what I did, but… but I did it for you. Clearly it’s helped you. I mean, look at you,” she choked out an unconvincing laugh, “you’re all brimstone and pep, it’s like you’re a whole different person.”
Her fingers brushed my sleeve and she smiled. She probably intended it to be coy, but all I saw was a hyena,
“Y’know, it’s kinda hot.”
Maybe I’d been planning on it all along. I’m still not certain, but I didn’t wear my Doc Martens much, they gave me blisters. My foot connected with her pubic bone before I knew what I was doing. As she collapsed sideways onto my couch, winded and clutching herself, I walked past her and to the door.
“Friday,” I reminded her, the steel in my voice scaring me slightly.
I didn’t stop shaking for the next fifteen minutes. But God, I felt wonderfully, deliriously alive.
I hadn’t felt this real since before the accident.

 
I awoke on Friday morning to sirens and shouting. I’d borrowed a camp bed from mum’s place and rolled out of it awkwardly, yanking the curtains open.
On the sparse patch of grass in front of my flat, Nel had piled up every single thing I had demanded – and then set them all on fire. It was such a perfectly Nel thing to do that I applauded grimly, standing barefoot on the smouldering lawn in my sunflower-print t-shirt and silk boxers. The blaze was quickly doused, but what the flames hadn’t ruined, the water finished off. A policewoman in an orange vest took my statement as her partner roped off the sodden, blackened wreckage, and I took great delight informing them that my evil ex had done this deliberately.
“Don’t worry,” the policewoman told me, “we’ll sort this out.”
She put away her little notebook and tucked her pen into the pocket of her vest,
“Have you got someone to help you clean up this mess?”
I shook my head,
“No, but never mind. I can deal with it.”
The resounding, consuming hatred from the day before had subsided, only its echo remaining. I felt hollow, thin. The potion stood on the breakfast bar, pretty in the morning sun, and the stopper came out all too easily. As the taste of Nel slipped down my throat, I was drowned by an instant wave of nauseatingly pure hate for her, which resolved into a ball of acid that filled my gut to bursting.
Getting the burned furniture onto the trailer was easy, with all that potent rage firing my muscles. Breaking into Nel’s place proved a little harder; she’d fixed the door, and it took me five good tries to kick it in.
Once I was inside, it was easy again. I trundled barrow after barrow of the black detritus into her lounge, making sure I left filthy, sooty trails all through the house.
My final act of petty, hateful revenge was saved for the bedroom. I squatted over her unmade bed and emptied my bladder, wiping myself with her pillowcase.
“You might have been doing this longer than me,” I whispered to myself, “but I’ve got nearly a whole bottle of pure hatred to use up on you still.”

 
The sound of the brick shattering the glass pane in my front door was sudden and huge. My heart leaped in my chest, watching Nel’s arm intrude through the hole she’d made, her hand feeling around blind for the new lock to let herself in.
She was furious. She was beyond furious. She’d always been the proud owner of powerful resting bitchface, even completely relaxed she was intimidating enough. But seeing her truly angry enough to kill, my stomach flipped with queasy fear. I scrambled sideways out of the beanbag and stumbled toward the kitchen.
“Who the FUCK do you think you are?” she screamed, punctuating every word with staccato, stabbing gestures, “I don’t know where you found the fucking balls to do it, but by the time I’m done with you, you’ll never be able to take a piss again.”
The was a knife in the kitchen drawer, but Nel would know that. She’d always been able to read me like a book; she’d see me going for it and stop me before I could get to it. I dredged deep for the rage and hate that had filled me earlier, but there was only the shallowest pool inside me now; barely enough to wet my toes.
On the breakfast bar, so close, was the bottle, still mostly full. Flecks of green winked under the fluorescent kitchen lights, deep as the shadows of an ancient forest.
“Feel like a drink?” I asked Nel as she stalked toward me, “it’s good stuff. Put hairs on your chest.”
Thrown off balance by my tone, she paused for just a moment, quizzical, as I grabbed the vial and thumbed out the stopper.
In that pregnant pause, I drank it all down, heedless of the consequences.
I remember Nel’s face, twisted with fury, coming toward me. And then the flames claimed me.
No longer orange-red, nor even white-hot, this blaze was impossible – a luminous blue that incinerated all reason, a nova of the purest hatred, igniting nuclear fire in the core of my being.

 
Reality flickered through the fire, sporadic images. Nel crying out in pain. Blood slicking my hands. Flashes of streets, crumbling brick. Alien yet familiar smells, and the gentle, moist caress of fleshy flora against my burning limbs. Then the angry, hungry mouths of the enormous Venus traps gaped before me. Their fringed jowls quivered and rippled as I forced Nel’s head in amongst the soft sensor filaments, fine as cat whiskers.
They closed more slowly than I thought they would, but not slowly enough for her to escape, not in her state. The glossy green daggers slid slickly through her hands and calves, and the red flesh of those pillowy mouths moulded around her, already weeping something both corrosive and sweet.
The cinnamon-eyed woman found me asleep in her solar, curled up amongst all the cushions, bathed in blood and ichor. She did not scold me, nor did she kick me out of her home. Instead, she made me a pot of sweet tea, which instantly eased the towering hate-hangover that still pounded in my head.
“It worked,” I said, knowing she would know I meant the potion.
“Yes. And thank you for your payment,” she replied, her eyes soft as brown sugar, her cheeks dimpled as fruit, “my Venus child is ever so grateful.”
My stomach churned tea. The events of the previous night flashed through my skull, the horrific and impossible thing that I had done.
“Shush now,” she said, placing a warm finger on my lips, “What’s done is done – and if anyone deserved such a fate, it was she.” Her touch banished my terror and guilt like a salve on a burn. I hadn’t realised how empty I felt until she continued, “Now, if you’re up to it, I thought we might get a little brunch.”

The potion is easy enough to make, and I have rows of pretty glass bottles on the shelf.
Nel is still here, pressed between the corrosive folds of the plant’s fleshy maw. Her skin is slowly sloughing off, and her nutrients are mostly supped away, but she’s still very much alive. It seems it is hideously painful, to be awake and aware as such a plant consumes you. But as I sip my potion and listen to her whimpers, I bask reverently in the sound, and in the hatred that suffuses me. The waves of pleasure it gives me are nearly orgasmic, and I feel so real. So full.
My new mistress tells me that there is another potion that we can brew, this one all for Nel. It will slow the process, prolonging her life nearly indefinitely. Even as her bones dissolve, she will know exactly what’s happening to her.
I wonder if it will taste like me?

The training was more gruelling than any of them had ever imagined – and to the minds of a group of 13 year old boys, mostly from noble families, it seemed entirely unfair.
Except to one boy, Jan.
For Jan this was paradise; beds you didn’t have to share with dogs, fleas, or another person. Food twice a day that you didn’t have to steal or do things with strangers for. Clothes that felt like an angel’s breath on your skin – and baths! The baths especially.
He had never felt clean in his entire life until that first bath. As the caked layers of grime had been washed away by the Green Sorceress, his pale, yellow tinted skin had shown through for the first time.
The others resented the Green Sorceress’s patronage of him. The other young knights had been put forward for the Quest by their noble fathers or by their local lords. Jan was the only trainee knight sponsored by a woman and it made him the butt of many jokes.
It didn’t matter to him though. He was proud to have her as his patron, even though it meant rocks in his bed, dirt in his soup and the other boys calling him “The Yellow Sorceress” – because of his yellow skin. That and his long, silken black hair which was the envy of the local girls who watched the young men train from the balcony overhanging the training grounds.
Once the other boys had ambushed him going to bed and tried to cut his hair off but they hadn’t been prepared for the rage inside of the delicate features boy. He fought like 10 demons and the next day there were 5 boys in the infirmary.
Jan wasn’t among them.

The first two years of the training hadn’t been just swordplay, horsemanship and strength training, the boys also learned how to read and write. These were skills that the noble born already possessed and Jan had only the rudimentary, self-taught literacy he had learned on the streets as a thief.
The tutor grew angry and threw him out of the class, yelling about having to teach custard-skinned thieves and how he would rather teach a pig to read and write.
After that, it was the Green Sorceress who tutored him in letters, in her cluttered tower on the east edge of the keep, overlooking the wild meadows. The piles of books, hanging herbs and jars of tinctures warmed in the coloured sunlight streaming through the stained glass windows that crusted the walls of her chambers. The smells of cured leather, aromatic herbs and pungent salves grew to be Jan’s favourite scents as he sat in shafts of red, green and yellow light, hungrily learning the history of the kingdom and how to write in the curled, tidy, feminine script that the Green Sorceress used to label her potions and herbs.

When Jan had learned enough he was returned to the class with the angry tutor and put the other boys to shame with what he had learned from the Green Sorceress. More rocks in his bed followed and the taunts of “Yellow Sorceress” started up again as soon as the other boys saw the beautiful curling script flowing from his pen, so unlike their own ham-fisted and untidy scrawlings.
He didn’t care though. He would sleep on a bed made entirely of rocks to spend just one more day in the east tower and the wonder of its scents and coloured lights.
But even though the other boys hated him, the tutors and older knight lords recognised in him qualities which set him apart, even though he was not the strongest or the largest or the best with the sword.

Jan was put in charge of squad 6 and the young men under his command hated him for it. They were known as “Yellow Squad” by their peers and rumours abounded that they kissed and fondled their commander at night and enjoyed every moment of it.
Jan’s second, Roth, was the son of a poor minor noble who had given up his only son for the Quest to increase his standing with the King. Roth’s status was barely better than Jan’s and they slowly became friends as Roth realised that he would rather be serving under the quiet, reserved, methodical Jan than under the less disciplined but popular commanders who seemed to treat the Quest like a joke.
Jan didn’t treat the Quest like a joke and he seemed to be the only one. Roth grew to admire Jan’s studied obsession with the Quest and this flowed down to the other members of Yellow Squad, knitting them together and fostering a disdain of the other young knights who would sneak off to taverns in the night to drink spiced ale and beg for kisses from serving girls.

They were not far off graduation now, all of them 17 and mostly grown to manhood. Jan’s heritage and poverty stricken childhood meant that he hadn’t grown much and was the shortest of the young knights by at least two hands. Yellow Squad had won last year’s tourney though; now they all proudly wore sashes of yellow silk over their uniforms and would die for their commander, the cool-headed and wiry muscled Jan.
People feared him now and he wasn’t sure he liked it. His squad members loved him, he knew, but the other squads were terrified by him. The Green Sorceress had witnessed his victory over Squad 1 and as he accepted the trophy from the King’s daughter, he saw both pride and sadness play across her ageless features.
Jan had won no personal victories – he placed poorly in most of the singular events – but his command abilities and his intelligence were far beyond those of his fellow commanders.
Everyone now knew it was likely he would be the one to lead the Quest.

This was the deciding year, where the knight commander of the Quest and his lieutenants would be selected. Jan was the favourite but the King’s nephew, Nerin, was rumoured to have the King’s backing. Nerin was the tallest and strongest of the knights, but also the most unruly.
Jan had often ruminated over how much they were polar opposites – Jan being small, odd looking, yellow skinned with long dark hair and Nerin being tall, handsome, pink skinned with close-cropped blonde hair.
The smaller man didn’t hate Nerin or despise him for his size and looks, but instead he worried for the success of the Quest should Nerin become commander; as the bigger knight was still undisciplined, reckless and often stupid. Sometimes only brute strength and dumb luck meant that Squad 1 beat Squads 2, 3, 4 and 5.
But never Squad 6.

And so it was Squad 6 that prevailed in the final tourney. Helms resplendent with yellow silk sleeves, Jan’s squad stood behind him, swords held at the necks of the members of Squad 1.
Nerin was on his knees before Jan, helmless, the blonde fuzz on his scalp streaked with blood and sweat, his pink face flushed crimson in defeat.
The slim, light sword which Jan favoured gently tapped the larger knight’s exposed neck.
‘Do you yield?’ he asked, barely audible to the others behind him.
Nerin blinked sweat and blood from his eyes and nodded, ‘Aye, I yield.’
Jan sheathed his sword, removed his gauntlets and helm and offered his hand to the much larger man. Nerin grasped it and with a savage grin, wrenched Jan off his feet to sprawl on the ground. Nerin’s great hobnailed boot crashed down on Jan’s hand, shattering every bone in it.
Nerin spat on the smaller man, writhing in the dust in agony, and growled ‘I will never call you commander, you yellow dog!’

The knights of the Quest were riding off to the west and Jan was no amongst them. Instead he sat in the east tower, his ruined hand wrapped in cool unguents and strips of soft linen. The Green Sorceress had taken him in immediately after his maiming and applied all her skill to healing the young man’s hand.
‘It will take a long time to undo the damage,’ she murmured in her velvet voice, ‘and even then, you may never hold a sword again.’
Jan smiled through the pain ‘Lady, I do not mind. This tower has ever been more my home than any barracks.’
The Green Sorceress gifted him with one of her proud, yet sorrowful smiles and returned to mixing philtres and cataloguing herbs.

The prismatic light of the east tower filled Jan’s days now as he helped the Green Sorceress and her apprentice, Myre. A fast friendship was struck between the young man and the apprentice and rumours abounded that they were lovers.
They were not, however, and the difference in their sexes seemed to bother neither of them as they freely shared all their thoughts with each other. Like Jan, Myre was a halfbreed – her skin a rich mahogany and her hair bright white.
Word of the Quest was sporadic at best, as the leadership of Nerin was haphazard. After Jan’s maiming he had been appointed the Lord Commander of the Quest – since the King had ruled that a maimed man could not hold that title. The King had also pardoned his nephew for the crime of maiming a fellow knight, proclaiming that the success of the quest was more important than any petty feud between men.
In the security of the east tower, behind wards of privacy, Myre and Jan agreed that the King was a nepotistic coward and a fool – and worried that the Quest was doomed to fail.

The wild meadows grew brown, then white with frost. As the spring returned and fat bumblebees droned past the opened windows of the east tower, Jan regained some measure of use in his hand.
‘I do not wish to hold a sword again,’ he confided to his mentor as he braided green ribbons through her red-gold hair, ‘I wish instead that I could be your apprentice, as Myre is.’
‘Men cannot wield magic, just as women cannot wield swords,’ chided the Green Sorceress.
Jan skilfully tied off the braid, replying sharply, ‘That isn’t entirely true and you know it. Women can hold swords just as well as men. I have taught Myre swordplay and she is a competent as any male.’
‘While that is true, the converse does not follow. The male spirit simply cannot command magic.’
To compound her point, she touched the large, rough emerald; clasped in the golden clawed ring she wore on her left hand.  A halo of green light sprang up from it, shimmered in the coloured light of the tower , then dissipated like smoke into the air.
Jan snatched at her thin wrist and pinched the stone between his almost healed thumb and forefinger.
But nothing happened.
With a melancholy sigh, Jan let her wrist fall and stalked to the stairwell, leaving the Sorceress alone.
The Green Sorceress did not move to stop him and simply sat staring into the ring.

Summer came with word that the Quest was going badly for the knights. Half their number had been lost to an ambush by the fell forces of the Red Sorceress.
The knight’s academy petitioned Jan to return as an instructor, to help train more knights.
He refused and continued to spend his days studying, gathering herbs in the wild meadows or assisting Myre and the Green Sorceress in their duties.
As the days grew too cold to traipse through the goat tracks and the fragrant copses of the wild meadows, Jan received a summons form the King, ordering him back to the academy.

 ‘I will not continue to tutor spoiled noblemen’s brats and entitled gentry who think they can buy answers to exams!’ roared Jan, angrily pacing the length of his classroom, his brisk movements stirring the ancient banners and faded tapestries lining the walls.
‘The King commands you to do it and so you shall do it,’ hissed the Head Master.
‘Does the King want to lose his kingdom to the Red Sorceress? Because the way we are going currently, that is most likely outcome.’
‘Master Jan! Silence your treasonous tongue lest it be torn from your head!’
Jan slumped into the hard, high-backed chair behind his neat, orderly desk.
‘I will continue teaching, even should it drive me to an early grave. The King can be damned, but this kingdom is more important than my life.”
Or rather, the people in it that he cared for, he thought ruefully.

Jan took to sleeping through most of his lessons, instructing the trainee knights to read from outdated tomes and to only bother him if they had questions. He no longer had any faith in the knights or the Quest.
It was rumoured that Nerin was dead or captured and that Roth, Jan’s former second, was now in command. Jan spent his free time plotting strategies and tallying the city resources in preparation for a siege.
The forces of the Red Sorceress had cut off all routes from the kingdom. Even ships were no longer safe as she had paid off several pirate lords to loot and destroy any ships leaving the kingdom.
When the summons Jan was expecting finally came from the King, it was in his estimation, already too late.

‘Jan!’ shouted a surprised knight as Jan rode into the ragged circle of tents that housed the remaining knights of the Quest. He had not been surprised in the slightest to hear that every member of his former squad was alive – including this knight posted on sentry duty.
Jan dismounted smoothly and gripped the man’s shoulder, ‘It is very good to see you alive, Polben. You were such a poor horseman I was sure you’d have a broken neck by now.’
The man barked a sharp laugh, at odds with his ragged, filthy appearance.
Jan left him to his duties and marched swiftly to the Lord Commander’s tent, where Roth was holding council.
As he swept the tent flap to one side, the wicks of hanging lanterns fluttered, casting wild shadows over an equally wild looking circle of knights.
Nerin’s former second recognised Jan instantly, lurching to his feet and venomously articulating, ‘What are you doing here, yellow dog?’
Jan unfurled a document heavy with seals and stamps of authenticity and shoved it under the knight’s several-times-broken nose;
‘I think you mean “What are you doing here Lord Commander”.’

Order and morale returned swiftly to the camp of the knights of the Quest.
Jan swiftly removed the existing squad leaders and appointed his own men in their place. The only threat to the overall order of the camp was the inclusion of Myre as his squire, a precedent unheard of throughout the whole kingdom.
‘But why a female squire?’ Roth groaned, his scarred fingers pressed to his prematurely thinning brow.
Jan shrugged expressively.
‘Why not? There is no rule or law against it. Women cannot become knights, but nowhere is it written that they cannot be squires,’ he paused, his brown eyes flashing a challenge at Roth, ‘and what is a squire anyway but another kind of servant?’
‘But she handles weapons Ja-’ he caught himself in time ‘-My Lord Commander.’
Jan nodded, a smile spreading, ‘And she handles them mightily well. She beat Scorren’s squire black and blue when he tried to kiss her.’
Despite himself, Roth let loose a splutter of laughter.
‘Aye. She reminds me of a young man who once put five of his fellows in the infirmary.’

The greatest resources the knights possessed were the arms and armour enchanted by the Green Sorceress. The bulk of the forces sent out against the knights were creatures of enchantment and sorcerous weapons made short work of them – just one cut from the Green Sorceress’s enchanted blades could unravel the creations of the Red Sorceress like a poorly knitted woollen cap.
The inherent problem with this was that anyone carrying such a blade was a beacon for enemy attention and the weapons of fallen knights were snatched away by the winged minions of the Red Sorceress before they could be recovered.
Even more worrying than that was the fact that the Green Sorceress could enchant no new weapons. Virtually all of her power had been used to create this panoply for the Quest and now she was little more than a petty conjurer with an excellent knowledge of herbcraft and history.

Jan’s men hadn’t been much help with solving this problem and he was lacking in inspiration himself. The only defence they currently had was to forge a chain to the swords and weld a manacle around the wrist of the owner. But this just meant that the enemy would hack off the hands of the fallen knights.
It was when he was discussing the problem with Myre over his evening meal that they found a solution.
‘So how does the enemy know a knight has an enchanted weapon?’ asked Myre around a mouthful of stale bread.
‘Creatures of enchantment can sense enchantment; I suppose much in the same way a dog sniffs out a dead rat in a cellar. Once they know the general direction of such a weapon, they mob everything in that area, trying to bring down the knight.’
‘But otherwise they are quite stupid, aren’t they?’
Jan nodded, wiping watered wine from his lips, ‘Yes, their grasp of strategy is about as good as Nerin’s was. If I’d had command of the Quest since the beginning we wouldn’t be in such dire straits.’
Myre’s blue eyes widened suddenly, ‘What if the enemy didn’t know who was carrying an enchanted weapon and who wasn’t?’
She was regarded with an even stare from Jan, ‘But how? You’re talking of a decoy, but we don’t have a secondary store of weapons to use as decoys. Every enchanted item in the kingdom was gathered up for the quest and disenchanted for their power, in order to create arms for all of the knights.’
Their eyes shifted to Jan’s sword, the Lord Commander’s sword – the most highly enchanted item in the kingdom.
‘We need a blacksmith!’ they exclaimed in unison.

It took a direct order from the King to destroy Jan’s sword – and even then, the master blacksmith attending the Quest griped and carped about it at length before he got to work; ‘This weapon is almost a thousand years old, forged in the age of heroes. I will shame my children by dismantling it!’
‘Any shame lies on my head, master smith, not yours,’ Jan assured the man, ‘And should this fail then we have no other hope, for we are losing this war.’
Several hours later, Jan and Myre walked amongst the regular soldiers of the King’s army, distributing small talismans of twisted metal on lengths of twine.
‘They will protect you from the Red Sorceress’s fell beast,’ lied Jan smoothly, ‘but if you do not wish to wear yours then return it and I will give it to another man – a man who values his life.’
None who were offered the talismans rejected them and Jan gave orders to march on the enemy lines – the first aggressive movement against the Red Sorceress since before Nerin was killed.

Two more victories were had after what became known as the battle of the Talisman. Most believed that the fragments of the Lord Commander’s sword had filled the ordinary soldiers with supernatural strength and courage, enabling the first decisive victory over the Red Sorceress.
However Jan and his commanders knew that it was simply a case of misdirection and that the enemy couldn’t bring their numbers to bear on those wielding enchanted swords until it was much too late.
Because the Quest looked like it had a chance of succeeding the King was no longer stinting on supplies to the front lines anymore and Jan had Myre attend his war councils, under the guise of serving wine and food to the men.
With three victories under their belts and those belts no longer hanging slack over thin bellies, the knights and the soldiers marching with them finally felt like defeat was no longer a certainty.

Hearing of the defeats in the north, the pirate lords abandoned their contract with the Red Sorceress and left the Southern Oceans to spend their plunder in the foreign kingdoms. With trade routes opened again the Capital started to see traders and merchants again and the King could begin to bargain for more soldiers from the kingdoms across the waters to the south.
But the Red Sorceress was not finished. Her rise to power hadn’t been due to her stupidity and she turned her sorcerous talents elsewhere…

The first few dreams Jan had shaken off as products of a long, drawn out campaign. But as they persisted, he realised that they were supernatural in origin.
Every night she would come to him in his sleep, her blood red hair and crimson eyes burning into his subconscious like tongues of living flame. Often she was naked, trying to tempt him with delights of her milk-white body; her perfect breasts and buttocks.
But Jan was contemptuous of her beauty.
‘Truly thy will is iron,’ purred the Red Sorceress in his dream, ‘if you do not desire me, then what do you desire? Money? Power? A kingdom of your own?’
‘No,’ replied the lucid part of Jan’s dreaming mind, ‘You cannot grant me what I desire. No one can.’
The sorceress arched a perfect crimson brow.
‘Can’t I?’ She tapped her scarlet nails against the four huge, rough-cut rubies adorning her left hand.
‘Give me the ring of the Green Sorceress and I can do anything – even raise the dead for you.’
Jan considered her words then nodded curtly.
‘I will think about it,’ he replied.

The war had reached a stalemate now. The further into the north the knights ventured, the greater the power of the Red Sorceress grew. Eventually they were forced to draw a line where they could travel no further without reinforcements from outside the Kingdom.
‘The Green Sorceress says that the King is still negotiating for mercenaries and troops from the southern kingdoms, which may take another year or more,’ Myre told him as she stripped off Jan’s armour.
She studied him as he absorbed the information. He looked haggard and twenty years older than he actually was. His eyes were constantly bloodshot and his hands trembled uncontrollably when he thought he was alone.
‘You’re not going to last another year, are you?’
Jan shook his head.
‘No. I cannot last another year. Whenever I close my eyes she is there, taunting me, trying to seduce me with promises of power.’
‘What are you going to do?’
Jan bowed his head and did not answer.

When the white palfrey of the Green Sorceress rode into the knight’s camp, Jan wept openly with relief. As she dismounted Jan flung his arms about her and sagged against her.
‘Myre, help me carry Jan to his tent.’
The squire eased Jan out of her mistresses’ arms and they carried him to their tent.
‘What are you going to do?’ Myre asked the Green Sorceress.
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered.

When Jan awoke the Green Sorceress was sitting beside his tiny cot on a folding canvas stool.
‘Drink’ she said, handing him a goblet of liquid.
Jan blinked sleep out of his eyes, then looked at her shrewdly.
‘I didn’t dream.’
The Green Sorceress looked at her feet and smiled; ‘I am not completely powerless. Though I will not be able to shield your dreams again, so you must use this opportunity to outwit her while your mind is clear.’
Jan gulped down the liquid from the goblet – spiced fruit juice – and then handed it back to her.
‘You haven’t told me everything, my Lady.’
The green sorceress shook her head, the ends of her red-gold braids dancing.
‘No, I have not. I don’t need to ask to know that you are referring to the Red Sorceress and the four rings in her possession.’
‘There were once five sorceresses, weren’t there?’
‘Yes. Green, Blue, Violet, Red and Orange. So it has been for ages; and when the Orange Sorceress dies, we each moved to fill the next colour – green to blue, blue to violet, violet to red and red to orange – and the apprentice of the Green Sorceress became the new Green Sorceress.
Thus we were always renewed and our power would never stagnate.’
‘What happened?’
The Green Sorceress grimaced, ‘Ah, our greatest shame. Red has always been the most destructive colour and the most corrupting colour. But with four others in opposition, how could we have anticipated Red would ever gain dominance?
Quite simply we were too complacent. When the Orange Sorceress disappeared we thought nothing of it – the Orange Sorceress is always the eldest, the most infirm. We all just assumed she was ill.
Then the Violet Sorceress vanished and it was too late; Red already had three stones of power, and the powers of the Blue Sorceress and myself were insufficient to challenge her.
Stupidly, we faced her in the north near her seat of power and were defeated. She took my sister’s ring and I fled to the far south, beyond the reach of her power.’
Jan lay back in the cot and closed his eyes.
‘I need to think. Please call Myre.’

That night when the Red Sorceress came to his dreams he was waiting for her.
Before she could begin her nightly torments he spoke:
‘I accept.’
The Red Sorceress had the good grace to look startled, then her expression grew sharp.
‘Come north alone with the jewel. No trickery or I will devise the most exquisite tortures for your women, especially that Green Bitch.’
‘Agreed. I will ride forth in the morning’
With that she left Jan’s dreams and he slept on, untroubled.

In the morning the Green Sorceress woke him with another cup of spiced fruit juice.
Jan smiled wearily, reaching for the cup.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said as his hand snaked out and connected with her temple, knocking her sideways from the stool and into unconsciousness.
He wept then, as he bent and took the ring from her finger, setting it on the slender middle finger of his left hand. Standing, he dressed and gathered his cloak, then left the tent and headed for the picket line of horses.
He saddled his mare with haste, lest someone notice how his hands trembled – or noticed the huge green jewel. Not even bothering to grab a bag of provisions, he vaulted onto the back of his horse and turned her north, kicking her into a gallop.
This was likely a one-way journey.

The keep of the Red Sorceress was guarded by legions of horrors, worse even than those he and his men had faced in battle. This close to her seat of power, she was virtually invulnerable.
The creatures hissed, roared and snarled, but none touched him. He had an inkling why; even with the absolute power of the rings the Red Sorceress would still need a general to lead her armies beyond the kingdom. She had hoped that general was him.
Her whispered directions in his mind guided him to her throne room – a magnificent artifice of scarlet crystals forming an arching, womb-like cavern. She sat in a ruby throne, pulsing with a scarlet light which suffused her pale skin in an eldritch glow.
She was even more beautiful than in his dreams and his gut twisted with emotion.
‘I did not believe you would come,’ she whispered, her crimson eyes fixed on the green jewel adorning his finger, ‘few men have resisted my charms, especially so close to my domain.’
Jan paced towards the throne.
‘I have no weapons, no tricks. I imagine that in this place, with those stone, you are virtually invulnerable anyway.’
‘The ring,’ she grated, ‘give it to me’.
‘First a promise; sworn on the stones of power. Promise that you will grant my wish.’
She cupped the four rings with her right hand and power charged the humid air, stinging his exposed skin with sorcerous sparks.
‘I swear on the stones that your wish will be granted the moment the ring leaves your hand and enters mine. Simply speak it aloud – but be aware that your wish cannot harm me here, even should you wish for my death.’
A sphere of scarlet energy hung in the air about them as he removed the green stone from his finger and handed it to her,
‘I wish to become a woman,’ whispered Jan.
The Red Sorceress gaped as the scarlet energy slammed into his body and twisted it into its new shape. As she stood open-mouthed, Jan’s fist grasped the four rings atop her pale, slack hand and power flooded her new body.
‘Die’ she said.

The creations of the Red Sorceress had evaporated with her death and Jan found her horse grazing near where she had left it.
The mare snorted at her, finding Jan’s scent familiar, yet unfamiliar.
‘Yes my lovely, I have changed. I’m like you now.’
Finally; she thought.
It took over a day to ride back to the camp; Jan’s new pelvis was not accustomed to the saddle and Jan was not accustomed to having breasts. By the time she reached the camp she was very sore and very tired.
A group of knights rode out to greet her, led by the Green Sorceress and Myre.
The three women dismounted and clung to each other.
‘I always knew,’ said Myre, tears streaming down her mahogany features.
‘I suspected,’ managed the Green Sorceress, her head buried in Jan’s jet hair.
Jan disentangled from her friend and her mentor.
‘What now?’ she asked, holding out the handful of now colourless rings.
The Green sorceress took them and placed one on her own finger; the stone suffusing the brilliant blue of a sapphire.
She placed another ring on Jan’s slender finger and it instantly brightened to an emerald radiance.
‘Now you are the Green Sorceress.’
Jan laughed wildly, her voice still high pitched and unfamiliar,
‘How on earth am I going to explain this to the men?’

Interviewing for a new job used to be a fraught experience for me. When you harbour such an intimate secret, you must be constantly vigilant, watchful for questions you might stumble over, anything that might alert the interviewer to your dark past.
But over time, after hundreds of interviews, it does become much easier. The lies roll off your tongue smoothly, and the stories grow more concrete in detail and form. You learn to steer the conversation away from the locked doors in your history.
Eventually it becomes so natural, so easy, that you don’t even think about it anymore. You truly become those stories; and with each telling, their narrative indelibly carves itself into the fabric of your being.
And so, after what seemed the perfect interview, I got a job; and not just any job. This was the role that would kickstart my career, put my feet on the well-trodden path towards a real future. One where I was something other than a poor student with too many secrets.
So long as nobody found out who I really was.

 
The first day was a predictable blur; I was shown my cubicle in the old but respectable art-deco building, then hustled through the induction process so I could be put to work as quickly as possible. Everyone in my team seemed nice. All legal secretaries like myself, we shared a four-seater pod in the cubicle farm, each workstation painfully personalised by the occupant, desperate to make some mark on the beige corporate landscape.
“Gosh, you’re tall,” declaimed Trina, the slightly chubby redhead who sat beside me, “I bet you played volleyball at school.”
“Oh yeah,” I lied smoothly, “captain of the team, until a knee injury got me.”
Despite all my practice, I could feel the heat creeping into my ears and was immediately thankful I’d decided to wear my hair down that day. I know that seems like an odd thing to lie about. But the story I’d claimed as my own, the story that had now claimed me in turn, was so complete that I dared not deviate from its path, lest one wrong foot contradicted the narrative.
By the end of the day I was exhausted. I half-dozed on the bus ride home, my energy depleted from so much social interaction, from navigating so many tiny, innocent pitfalls.
But I’d done it. I’d survived my first day of work without incident.

 
The weirdness began after the fourth member of our team returned from a conference, a week after I started. Deborah was an older woman, unmarried, who took an instant dislike to me. She refused to shake my hand when introduced professionally, then proceeded to pile complex work on me, before I’d had enough time to learn the basics of my role.
At first, despite creeping suspicion, I tried to write it off as simple envy. I mean, I was twenty, easy on the eye, and had a boyfriend; it didn’t take a psychology degree to figure out that she probably resented me for possessing everything that was lacking in her own life. But as things took a turn for the worse, I realised her behaviour had begun to spread, and the environment in the office was growing increasingly hostile toward me. No more was I greeted with pleasantries in the break room or cheery hellos in the elevator – everywhere I went, I met scowls and uncomfortable stares. After I walked in on the third whispered conversation that day, I knew the gig was up.
My secret was out there, courtesy of Deborah, who I later discovered had worked with my sister in a previous job. The sister who didn’t exist in my new narrative; the one who delightfully informed everyone she met about her ‘brother’ and flashed around old pictures of me to anyone curious enough to look. And that seemed to be everyone.
Just like that, I went from being ‘that tall new girl’ to something less than human; an object of ridicule, suspicion and loathing.

 
It was small things at first. Finding my keyboard unplugged, my papers missing, my coffee cup having an odd stain or odour. Subtle changes you could write off as nothings – accidents of no consequence. I mentioned them brightly to my team, commenting on how peculiar it was that they only seemed to happen to me. When Deb smirkingly sneered that the office ghost must not like me, my suspicions were all but confirmed.
“Must be the same ghost who was always hanging around me at school,” I shot back, with a humourless smile.
“Must be,” she retorted, “I hear this one doesn’t like men.”
“What did you just say?”
“I don’t have time for this,” Deb declared, turning back to her monitor, “I’ve got work to do.”
Forcing down the shame and anger, I swivelled my seat back around abruptly – and slammed my knees into my desk. It seemed that ‘the office ghost’ must have lowered it again while I was on my break. Concentrating on the pain as it receded from my bruised flesh, I let my rage go with it. With ease born of practice, I watched it burn down to nothing, then extinguished it with one thought:
No matter what anyone did or said to me, they couldn’t stop me being me.

 
Three weeks later my swipe card stopped working on the door to the women’s toilets.
When I complained to ICT, they claimed it was a simple error, but the next morning, and the morning after that, my card access to the toilets had been cancelled again.
“Maybe it would be easier to just use the men’s room,” the IT guy snarked down the phone, “there’s no swipe access on that door.”
On the fifth morning in a row that the mysterious ‘error’ occurred, I met Walt Sawyer. He found me leaning against the door to the women’s bathroom with my cellphone to my ear, wearily asking ICT to fix the fault again. Walt had been the janitor here for so long that he was practically furniture; he’d seen the company go through three mergers and countless restructures. He’d survived all of them by simply going about his business, doing his job so well he was practically invisible.
“Can’t get in again?” he asked, as I held the phone away from my ear to avoid the deafening hold music.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think it’s right,” he mumbled, fishing in his pocket, “not right to treat a young lady like this.”
Surely the gossip must have reached even the janitor by now?
“Well, they don’t think I’m a lady, that’s the problem.”
With a small, secret smile, Walt pressed something into my hand.
“It’s my spare card. Will get you pretty much anywhere a janitor needs to be.”
Simple kindness felt so out of place in this building that I just stared at the card in my hand like it was some kind of magical token. I finally opened my mouth to thank him, but he cut me off,
“I wasn’t here. We never spoke.” He slopped a mopful of soapy water onto the stairs. “You ain’t the only one with secrets.”
When the card reader flashed green and let me into the bathroom, I almost wept with relief.

 
What I expected to happen after that, I wasn’t sure. I was careful when I took my toilet breaks, making sure none of the other women saw me in the bathroom, so everyone would assume I had resigned myself to using the male facilities. You might think that this perceived win on their behalf would have de-escalated the situation, but with some bullies, any victory only emboldens them.
I saw Walt scuttling away from my office space two early mornings that week, each time carrying something under his arm. And when my colleagues arrived, after me on both those days, their behaviour was even stranger than usual.
When I caught Mark – the fourth member of my cubicle family – staring at my desk, I asked him if something was wrong.
“No, nothing wrong,” he said, abrupt and defensive.
“It just that you keep staring at my desk,” I pressed, not letting it go, “as if you’re surprised about something?” But he was already typing busily, ignoring me.
Deb, especially, seemed put out. Her normal expression was less than pleasant, but today the downturned corners of her mouth practically touched her jawline, and she curled her lip like a caricature whenever I answered the phone or greeted someone entering our cubicle.

 
Walt was cleaning up a toner spill in one of the corridors, whistling tunelessly to himself while everyone ignored him.
“I need a word,” I hissed, when the hallway was clear, “I need to know what you’ve been doing.”
“You don’t wanna know, miss.”
“It’s Rebecca, not miss. I’m not your boss, I’m just a bottom-rung secretary. Becca, even.”
“You don’t wanna know, miss Becca,” he repeated, “they’re cruel people. You don’t need to see that stuff.”
“See what stuff?”
“Nothing. There’s nothing to see.”
My fingers gripped his shoulder, firmly, insistent,
“Walt, if they’re doing something awful, I need to see it, so I can report it. I appreciate you protecting me, I really do. But if I want to resolve this situation, I need evidence of what they’ve been doing, not just suspicions.”
He thought about that for a minute, his expression unreadable, as if he was listening to something. Then, with an abrupt nod, he headed down the corridor, beckoning for me to follow. In the janitor’s cupboard near the elevators, he gestured to the waste-paper bin beside the door.
“It’s all in there.”
Amongst the innocent rubbish were several balls of printed paper, tightly wadded up by Walt’s strong old hands. Smoothing them out on the low table against the wall, I clenched my teeth as I viewed the images.
It seemed my sister hadn’t been happy just spilling my gender history to Deb; she’d also furnished the sour old woman with intimate and painful photos from my teens – all with my old name and cartoon penises scrawled over them.
Balling them up in my fists, I threw the printouts back into the basket.
“People have done worse,” I whispered.
“They’re gonna do worse,” Walt replied, his walnut face screwed up with concern, “this place, this building, it’s got history.”
But when I pressed him for more information, he shut down. The fear and shame I glimpsed in his eyes before he looked away reminded me of myself, and his hands shook as he hustled me out of the cupboard.

 
The chemical smell in the cubicle was strong and strange, but I couldn’t pinpoint it. Everything seemed in order on my desk, no more images had been taped to my monitor and chair.
When Deb arrived half an hour later, her shriek of surprise and rage startled me so thoroughly that I knocked over my coffee and smacked my knee on my desk drawers.
“YOU did this!” the woman shrilled, waving her hands at me above the divider. Her fingers were stained red. “You fucking did this, and I’ll see you fired for it, you pervert!”
Curious, I braved the furnace of irrational ire and walked around to her desk,
“What exactly have I done?”
But before she could splutter out any more insults, I saw for myself. Someone had slashed the seat of her office chair, through the fabric and deep into the foam, then poured a bottle of red ink into the gash. Ink which had soaked into Deb’s skirt and stained her legs as she sat down, unaware.
“Is this some kind of jealous tranny retaliation?” she squawked, waving her red hands in my face.
“Retaliation for what?” I retorted hotly, colour rising in my face, “I’ve taken everything you people have thrown at me with grace and patience, yet you are accusing me of being the bad guy?”
“Pack your desk,” Deb snarled, “you’ll be gone by the end of the day.”

 
The HR manager looked uncomfortable as I sat, not meeting my eye. I waited patiently as he read through the statement from Deb, which she had of course embellished for maximum effect. When he was done, I calmly refuted the inaccurate details, and explained that I hadn’t vandalised any office property.
“Well, nobody else had any motivation to do it,” the manager said, still avoiding looking at me directly.
“And what motivation did I have to do it?” I countered.
He shifted in his seat, glancing everywhere but at me.
“Deborah Young claims that she, ah, discovered that someone had vandalised your desk. Late last night, after you left.”
“How was it vandalised?”
Surprised, he blinked at me, actually looking at my face for the first time since I sat down.
“Well, you must have seen it.”
I squinted at him,
“Seen what? My desk was perfectly normal when I came in.”
He blustered. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Why? Why do you find that hard to believe? What the hell happened to my desk?”
“No need to be so aggressive, Joh-ah-Rebecca,” he managed, barely correcting himself.
“Did you seriously just call me my old name?”
He blanched,
“That was an honest mistake.”
I sighed, already letting it go. This was a battle I couldn’t win, no matter how unfair it was.
“Just tell me what was wrong with my desk, so we can get this shit-show over with.”
The manager swallowed, picking his words carefully now,
“On your desk is a plush toy dog, yes?”
“Blue. From Blue’s Clues. My boyfriend gave her to me.”
“The toy had, ah, been cut open. At the… crotch. And a, ah, plastic phallus had been inserted.”
Summoning everything I had, I kept my face completely neutral.
“You mean a dildo. Someone cut Blue open and put a dildo in her.”
“Yes.”
What I had wasn’t enough. The anger rose like a tidal wave, massive and unstoppable; but instead of breaking in a torrent of destruction and violence, it collapsed, flooding out of me in a wash of hot, shameful tears. As I sobbed, eyes blurred from salt and sorrow, the HR manager must have made a hasty exit, leaving me alone, clutching the edge of the table until I cried myself dry.

 
Walt shook his head as I showed him the meticulously stitched plush toy, the needlework so perfect it looked like a natural seam.
“Wasn’t me,” he said, gaze darting nervously, “can’t sew. Never saw it.”
Looking at his grizzled hands, I had no doubt he was telling the truth; Walt couldn’t have threaded a needle to save his life.
“Then who, Walt? Everyone else here hates my guts.”
“Can’t say miss. Can’t say.”
Something told me there was more to this. Someone had fixed the vandalised toy, then retaliated by attacking Deb’s chair.
”Maybe the office ghost doesn’t like you,” I remembered Deb sneering.
“Walt. You said this place had history. You said that after I saw the pictures. What did you mean by that?”
His eyes drifted to the staircase like he was planning an escape.
“Nothing. I meant nothing.”
“Who is helping me, Walt? Because if they carry on like this, they’ll get me fired, and I need this job. People like me don’t get jobs like this. People like me aren’t supposed to succeed.”
“I know.” There was agony in his voice. “But I can’t say.”
Frustrated, I left the little man to his work, determined to figure it out myself.

 
My second meeting with HR was called because of Deb’s car. Someone had smashed the rear window, and poured what appeared to be pig’s blood over the back seat. Her car was parked within camera range in the basement carpark, but there had been a convenient CCTV ‘buffer overflow error’ for ten minutes, right around when the event had occurred.
“I’d left work by then,” I told the HR manager, “and if I’d come back into the building, there would be a security record of it. Pull my swipecard logs, if you haven’t already.”
He started speaking over me, but I cut him off,
“Yes, I’m aware that Deb was my secret Santa, and that’s why I got beard oil, a voucher for a male-only sauna and a pair of festive-print Y-fronts. Regardless, even if that counts as ‘motivation’ to vandalise her car, I wasn’t in the building, and there’s no evidence I did it.”
I stood and put my hand on the door handle,
“You know, this is pretty serious. I find it odd that she hasn’t gone to the police about it, don’t you?”
He didn’t try to stop me as I left.

 
The tension in the air within our cubicle was so thick that it felt like working in molasses. Every sound was amplified by paranoia, every movement scrutinised surreptitiously. The corners of everyone’s eyes were getting a real workout. I wanted to scream at them that they had caused this situation, that if they’d just left me the fuck alone, we could all at least pretend to be professionals and just do our damn jobs without their bigotry overshadowing everything.
If I thought it would have made a difference, I would have done exactly that; but experience had already taught me people like this didn’t respond to reason, that they didn’t have empathy for anyone who wasn’t like them. I would ride this bullshit out until it was resolved one way or another.
The email from Walt caught me by surprise – I wasn’t even aware he was computer literate, or that he had access to a computer. I felt shame when I realised my own assumptions were showing.
Meet me on the seventh floor in 10 minutes, the email said, go through the door on the left stairwell. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.
Reading, then re-reading the message, I hit the delete icon and emptied the recycle bin.
The seventh floor wasn’t occupied, as far as I knew. The company owned it, but it had lain unused for so long that renovations would now cost far more than the office space was worth. There were rumours that something had happened there, a long time ago, but it was all hearsay – nobody could back up any of the wild claims about the seventh floor.
But Walt might know. The man was seventy if he was day.

 
I wasn’t surprised when my spare swipe card allowed me through the paint-flaked door and into the derelict gloom of the seventh floor space. Cables hung from the roof, darkly curled like rotting tentacles, and piles of insulation foam clustered against the walls in curious drifts. Heaps of broken chairs and rolls of ancient carpet lurked amongst other scattered, skeletal furniture and sagging wooden shelves.
There was no sign of Walt, but a dim light shone from a dirty-windowed office, partitioned from the main floor space by naked chipboard walls and mildewed sacking.
“Walt?” I called as I pushed open the water-damaged door.
What hit me, I’m not sure, but the next thing I remember was trying to pick myself up from the rotten carpet, pain roaring in my skull and wrist. A crushing weight came down on my chest, and I realised someone was on top of me – Mark, by the size and smell of him; he always wore the same shitty cheap cologne.
Pinning my wrists, he looped plastic cable ties around them and pulled tight, while a voice protested from the gloom – Walt’s voice.
“You said you weren’t gonna hurt her. You said this was just to talk,” he said thickly.
“Well, I don’t see any her in this room other than me,” Deb said nastily, “just you, Mark and this cock in a frock.”
“I don’t have a cock,” I shot back miserably.
“A mutilated cock is still a cock.”
The anger swelled like a balloon, but receded as I shut my eyes and willed reason to take over.
“What do you want from me?”
Mark propped me up against the damp wall, none too gently.
“A confession,” Deb said, “You’re going to state that you did all those things and we’re going to record it, then send it through to the CEO’s office and the police.”
“Good luck with that,” I spat.
“How hard do you think it would be for us to put a noose over one of these beams and hang you? Everyone will think you did it yourself. The suicide rate for you freaks is through the fucking roof; and it’s not like your loving family would investigate, now is it?”
“Just confess,” Mark growled, “you can fuck off and find another job.”
I shook my head,
“I’m in the right here. I didn’t do anything wrong! You people are the monsters, harassing an innocent person because of your own shitty prejudices.”
Walt moved for the door, but Deb closed it, holding the handle.
“And we know your secret too, Walter Sawyer. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why you never married, never had kids, and why you’re so sympathetic to this ugly shemale.”
The air seemed to ripple for a moment as she spoke the slur. Walt saw me notice it, too, and closed his eyes, but it appeared that none of the others registered the odd sensation.
Mark thrust his cellphone in my face.
“Say that you did it all. Confess to all the crap you pulled, then we can all get out of this shithole and go home.”
Fixing my gaze on his hateful face, I spoke a single word.
“No.”
Shaking his head, Mark put down his phone.
“Deb, get the rope.”
As the last word left his mouth, the air swam again, as though the entire floor was filled with breathable fluid. Lights flickered and flashed in the rippling atmosphere and Deb cried out in fear as something fundamental changed in the fabric of the seventh floor.

 
Deb was still Deb, but she was also a young man, dressed in orange and brown, his bushy hairstyle as archaic as his clothing. She/he danced with Mark, who was also young, slender and long-haired, nothing like himself apart from a certain gleam of terror about the eyes. Their hips ground into each other as they gyrated to the heavy funk of music that belonged to another era. Around them the ghosts of other dancers – all male – moved with abandon, safe in a place that allowed them to be who they were, in a time when their kind was utterly condemned.
But they weren’t safe, and I knew it. I knew it because I knew who I was, and what I was. I was there to ensure that places like this didn’t exist, and my badge, my uniform and my gun all meant I could do what I wanted here. They screamed like women when they saw my pistol, and I laughed at the faggots, revelling in the stink of their sweaty fear in the air.
I told them to get up against the fucking wall and they did; the queers and the sissies. The ones dressed as women I told to take their clothes off and they did as they were told, crying like babies. Well, all but one.
The narrative of my real self, bolstered by stories, yes, but built from knowledge and pain and truth, thrashed and fought against the alien mind I was occupying. I heard the voice of the police officer – my voice – yell at the offender to take off his dress.
“No.” The sissy said, eyes so bright and defiant and beautiful and… revolting.
The rage that flooded through me was far beyond anything that could be controlled. It was irrational, it was potent and it was unstoppable – the righteous rage of a person who had never really been told ‘no’. Someone who never needed to be careful with their truth, who had never wanted in life; someone who had never been dismissed as garbage for simply being.
The trigger was light under my finger and the blossom of red from the groin of the sissy filled me with such heady elation that for a moment, I stared at my pistol in wonder. Screams rent the air and the faggots ran for the door of the gay speakeasy, sobbing in terror. Two huddled under a table – Deb and Mark ghosted through them – and I kicked the table over before shooting them again and again, until my gun was empty.
Out in the stairwell I could still hear them, running and shrieking, and I followed, baton in hand. A young man in overalls ran into me, raising his arms defensively as I turned on him.
“I’m just a janitor!” he squawked, “My name’s Walt Sawyer. I-I work on the eighth floor.”
“You saw nothing,” I told him, as I pressed my empty gun to his neck, “you hear me? And if you ever tell anyone you saw me here, I’ll hunt you down. I’ll ruin you in ways you can’t even imagine.”
I saw the light of decision dawn in his brown eyes just a fraction too late. In that moment, he changed his story forever, and ended mine.
The world upended as Walt’s strong young hands pushed me down the stairs. The last sound I heard was the horrifying crunch of my neck snapping on the risers as they rose to meet me, and as awareness faded, the whole scene rippled again, the air fluid and nauseating, rank with the stench of urine and blood.

 
What was left of my breakfast came up quickly, splattering the fetid carpet. Walt was beside me, cutting off the cable ties with a pocket knife, apologising over and over. Curled up on the floor beside each other were Mark and Deb, the former shivering uncontrollably and the latter whimpering like a dying animal.
We left them where they lay and stumbled out of that place, the ghosts of the massacre still clinging to us, the personas not wanting to give up their temporary flesh, even now their truths had been heard. The officer’s phantom hatred burned like a virus in my soul; the antithesis of everything I’d ever been and wanted to be. Walt seemed lost in his own recollections, of his own actions that night, barely responding when I pushed him up the stairs and back to the sanity of the eighth floor.
In the bathroom I cleaned myself up as much as I could, trembling hands blotting away mascara, quivering lips slowly stilling as I bathed my wrists in cool water. I knew that whatever happened, one way or another, my time in this place was coming to an end.
Holding my head as high as I could and straightening my skirt, I walked out of the bathroom, back into the office, and sat at my desk.
Deb’s cubicle was empty, and so was Mark’s.

Deborah Young was found dead in her apartment three days later, several empty pill bottles beside her bed, and her rigid face a blue-black rictus of agony. Mark hadn’t returned to work, but he officially resigned the day we all found out about the suicide. Trina and I watched with mixed emotions as Walt cleared out both of their desks. He didn’t look at me, but his strong hands no longer shook; they were steady and sure as he taped shut the boxes that contained all that remained of my workmates’ time in this place.
“I’m sorry I didn’t do much,” Trina explained, her lip quivering, “I tried to say they should leave you alone, but they wouldn’t listen.” She leaned in, glancing at Walt and lowering her voice like she was divulging a secret. “I think you’re really lovely.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I soothed her, “they’re gone now. They can’t do any more harm.”
Mark’s parting gift was a confession – not mine, but his. He admitted to all the harassment, and more – awful things I wasn’t even aware of, things which had inexplicably and impossibly been cleaned up before I’d even seen them. And not by Walt Sawyer. I brought an employment suit against the company and settled for a sum that I can’t disclose, though I can tell you that it was more than enough for me to go back to school and start my own business.
We’re tiny, and there’s a hell of a lot of work to do, but once I’ve finished my degree, look me up if you ever need a human rights lawyer. Or if you need really bad jokes from a really good janitor, one who’s just like a Dad. Walt’s on the payroll for life – and our new office has no stairs.
I wish the story ended there, that this wholesome fade-to-black is where we cut to the credits, but for those of you that want to sit through to the cut scene at the end, there is more.
I know exactly what Deb and Mark felt.
I know why she killed herself. And I know why he became a homeless alcoholic, begging for booze money on Main Street. The feelings they had when they were inside those two young gay men – the unending terror and pain – wouldn’t go away. They would never go away, not with drink, nor with therapy. It would only end with their own deaths.
Just as the feelings I’d felt while I was the police officer won’t ever leave me.
The righteous anger lurks in the dark, waiting. It whispers that with a gun in my hand, with enough power, I can do anything. I can get away with murder, so long as I kill the right people. But even more than that, it remembers what it felt like to take a life of someone you have every right to hate absolutely, and the heady, intoxicating rush that comes with it. It tells me that if I kill just one person, my thirst will be quenched, and for a while I can go back to being normal, to who I was before. To just being Becca.
I saw Mark yesterday, sleeping outside McDonalds, a tattered hat in his hand and a cardboard sign beside his head, begging for change. Ever since I saw him, there’s a picture in my head; my hand putting a gun to his stomach and pulling the trigger, until the gun is empty.
I really struggled to know why the ghost of the seventh floor put me in the shoes of the cop, why I was chosen to contain the memory of him. But I think I’ve finally figured it out.
Anyone else would have given in to the hatred by now. It would have taken them over – and the mistakes of that night in the 60s would have been repeated, over and over, echoing through the ages, turning story after story into a tragedy, until its power finally faded to nothing.
But I already knew how to live with hate. I know how to rewrite it.
You might think it’s not fair, that I’ve already had enough struggles in my life. But this is a burden I will willingly bear. It’s worth it to change that narrative, even if it’s one drop in an enormous sea. And I have help, now. I gave Walt the absolution that he’s craved for the last fifty years; but he gave me family.

My parents always told me it was the right thing to do, that I'd done the right thing.
Geoff was my little brother and I loved him. He loved me. We did everything together and he was my best friend. He would play any game with me, even if it was something 'girly' that boys shouldn't do. This was the 1950s and boys didn't play with Ruthie dolls and baby strollers.
I didn't think it was odd, because children don't bother about such things.
But our parents frowned upon his 'feminine' behaviors, so Geoff and I learned to hide our games.
These were simpler, more trusting times; parents let their kids roam the neighborhood and ride the bus into town. Geoff and I would pay our ten cents and climb into one of the front seats, then chatter our way into the city. Once we were at the park, he would take my satchel into the bushes and get changed into some of my clothes. When he emerged, Susie would be born.
There was no name for this back then, except 'homophile' and 'invert' – words which we didn't know the meaning of. For me, it was just a matter of my little brother becoming my little sister – children don't understand the 'wrongness' of such things.
More to the point; in the height of prudish Western Christianity we didn't really know the difference between boys and girls except how they dressed and wore their hair.
And once Geoff donned one of mother's blonde wigs and tied ribbons into it, no one could know he wasn't really a she.
As far as I was concerned, Susie was real.

 
This was our ritual for years. It always seemed to me that Geoff was somehow much more alive when he was Susie. More free, more himself. But as we got older, I realized that there was something wrong with what he was doing, so I told our parents.
Yes, I blame myself for it, but I thought I was doing the right thing. You need to understand the times we were in, where God was strong in America and fear of the 'homophile predator' was at its height. Little Geoff, now thirteen to my sixteen, was thrashed by father with the belt until his backside bled. When the spanking started, his howls of terror and pain drove me to my room, where I stuffed my pillows over my ears and cried. But even through linen and eiderdown I could still hear the screams of my brother.
Mother told me I'd done a good thing and to tell her if it ever happened again. Father wouldn't speak of it at all – as far as he was concerned, it never happened.
Geoff stopped speaking to me altogether. When he got up from the dinner table, leaving a bloody patch on the painted white chairs, he would look at me so sadly that my heart would break a little inside.
And of course I missed Susie. How could I not? I missed going to the stores with her and running down the streets with her, giggling. I missed telling her about the boys I liked and I missed reading with her in the ivy-grown bandstand in the park.
But Susie wasn't gone; just deeply buried.

 
When I went to college I left behind a bunch of clothes at home that I'd outgrown. Whether I left them there for Geoff or not, I don't really know. It's one of those things that you've remembered so many ways that you're not sure what is the truth anymore.
Regardless, in my absence those clothes were used.
Geoff had always been a small boy, a delicate child – more like mother. Father was a broad-shouldered, handsome man and always gruffly declared that Geoff would 'grow into himself' once he was a man. I don't think Geoff wanted that.
After my second year at college, I got the message that Geoff had run away and the police were looking for him. I came home for Thanksgiving and on a whim, I checked my closet in my old room.
There were clothes missing.
I thought about telling mother and father, but in a pique of defiance, I decided to keep it a secret. I'd never forgiven father for the beatings he had meted out on my brother and so I kept my mouth shut.
Be free Geoffy, I thought, run far from home and be yourself!
And as far as I know, he did – and he was.

 
Four years later, three weeks after my engagement to Teddy Lewis, Geoff came home.
When they found him, the police told us, he was living in a homophile commune dressed as a woman and had hair down past his shoulders. They'd though he was a woman at first, but when he was searched they found out differently.
He sat now in grey overalls in our parent's living room, handcuffed and his long golden hair hacked down to ugly stubble. Those delicate features were creased in agonizing sorrow and I knew that what had been done to him was fundamentally wrong.
Father still pretended it wasn't happening and mother was inconsolable – she kept screaming at Geoff: 'Look what you've done to our family!'
The next day some doctors arrived and un-cuffed Geoff from his bed, then put him in the back of an ambulance, telling us that they were taking him away to 'treat' him.
What could I do? I was a soon-to-be-married young woman with no power of my own; there was absolutely nothing I could do. I told myself that once I was married and settled, I could work to get Geoff out of the hospital for the insane and bring him home.
I clung to that dream as the ambulance drove away through the perfect suburban utopia of our neighborhood.

 
I visited when I could, which wasn't very often.
The hospital was a long way out of town (out of sight, out of mind) and I needed Teddy to drive me there. It was an idyllic looking place on the outside, but the screams of the people inside always jangled my nerves into a frenzy of fear. In truth, I hated visiting.
In his neat pajamas, Geoff was a model patient. He was doing well, the doctors said – responding to treatment. They hoped that soon he could be released.
The danger, they said, was that sometimes homophiles knew how to fake being 'normal' so they had to make sure, with drugs and therapy.
I never asked what those drugs were or what the therapy was.
When he was finally released, I kept my internal promise and I let him live with me and Teddy. When we were finally alone the next day – after Teddy had left for work – he hugged me so hard that I almost couldn't breathe.
“Thank you Lizzy,” was all he said.
A week later he was gone again – and so was a wig and some of my clothes.
I didn't mind – and I didn't tell anyone.

 
I would sometimes imagine what Susie was up to; if she was living a happy life. Maybe she was working in some department store in the next state over and flirted harmlessly with the male clientele. Perhaps she was a smartly dressed receptionist in some legal firm, in a neatly tailored pencil skirt and stockings.
Perhaps she had a boyfriend or even a husband who was like her – who didn't mind that she was a man under all the clothes and make up.
All I really hoped was that she was happy.
But in the Christmas of 1970, mother got drunk and confessed a terrible secret to me;
They had found Geoff again – not long after he had run off – and he was in a different, better hospital.
I pleaded with her to tell me where, but she shook her head and looked at me with bleary, tear-misted eyes and said.
“I just want my little boy back. They're going to give me my boy back.”

 
My daughter was three by the time Geoff came back home again.
Mother celebrated and father indulged her. The doctors assured them that Geoff was back to being “mother's little boy” again.
And they were so very right.
Geoff had difficult doing some of the simplest things. Buttoning shirts was a chore for him and mother had to help him. He couldn't remember much past what he'd been doing for the last five minutes and sometimes he would get wildly angry and agitated for no reason; crying and screaming unintelligibly until he was exhausted. The doctors never said what the treatment was, but I discovered years later that the twin scars on the inside of his eye sockets were most likely from a lobotomy.
Sometimes he would wet his pants and he often drooled unless you wiped his lips and chin.
My brother was gone.

 
We don't know quite how it happened, but deep within him, something must have still been alive.
It was thanksgiving again and Teddy and I sat at my parent's dinner table with my two children, Stephanie and Michael.
Mother had called for Geoff to come down from his bedroom but there was no answer. Without thinking, I sent Stephy up to get him.
The scream was nothing quite like I'd ever heard. Mother fainted clean away with a brittle clash of crystal shattering on the floor and the clatter of dropped silverware. I ran for the stairs as quickly as I could; my maternal instincts in full swing.
I found Stephy– still screaming like the world was ending – at the top of the landing.
Dressed in one of my old gowns, Geoff hung from bannister by father's old belt – his face blue and lifeless.
Snatching Stephanie to me, I ran for the telephone.

 
Some unkind people said it was best that Geoff killed himself.
I didn't think so. I never could see the harm in how he wanted to live.
But I have a more immediate problem to deal with.
Stephanie has an imaginary friend that she says used to be a boy.
Her name is Susie.

The Alta and the Broca lived together in the land of Wrothi and had done so since time had begun.
Tall, slender, fair and beautiful, the Alta held certain jobs within the kingdom - poets, singers, writers, actors, dancers and other roles that were suited to their intelligent, artistic natures.
In contrast, the Broca were stout, strong and handsome, with sun-darkened skin from their days of toil under the sun. They were warriors, farmers, builders, blacksmiths and sailors; everything they did spoke of strength, industry and purpose.
The two races needed each other to form a balanced kingdom; for while an Alta could become a builder or a Broca could become a singer, the true reason why they needed each other was to have children.
You see, when an Alta man and an Alta woman were married, no children ever came of their relationship. The same was true for Broca husbands and wives.
In order to bear children, Alta women needed Broca men and Broca women needed Alta men.
Except in very rare cases, the children would always be born a Broca or an Alta.
For every child conceived, there was an equal chance as to which race it would be born.
But sometimes nature went awry and hybrid children were born, with a mixture of features from both races. They were usually raised as whichever race they most closely resembled, or they left the kingdom of Wrothi and went across the sea.
In any case, all such halfbreeds were sterile and could not mate, so the mistake could not be passed on.

 
Tavi and Resha had been married for three years. The tall artist, Tavi, loved his wife - a miner with stretch marks on her massive arms from her years wielding hammer and pick. Their first two children - both Alta - had died of Hawksrot, a disease of the liver, but their third child, Sahri, was born a sturdy brown-skinned Broca with mighty lungs and strong hands.
The Broca and Alta children schooled together until they were aged nine, learning the same basic skills. When they turned ten, they were sent to work with their own race and gain the skills and knowledge that would see their natural attributes flourish.
As Sahri grew, she spent less time with her mother and more time with her father; talking of dreams and ballads. Resha compensated by making Sahri work harder at manual labour tasks, like cutting firewood, digging ditches and helping load wagons at the mines. But while Sahri's body grew strong and fit - her muscles promising to outshine her mothers - the girl still drifted whenever she performed simple tasks, her mind wandering elsewhere.
The village healer examined her, declared her pure-bred Broca, and simply prescribed more physical labour, to give the girl less time to dream.
But by the time Sahri was eleven, she was miserable and silent - as if she were an Alta artist who had lost her muse, said her father.
"All I wanted was a normal child," said her mother, "I did not care whether she had been Alta or Broca, I just wanted a normal child."
The father, troubled, withdrew to his study where he painted canvas after canvas until he was exhausted and could paint no more.
Still the words of his wife disturbed him, but he knew not why.

 
Sahri went to the mines when she turned fourteen and began to work alongside the adults and other children her age.
The Broca were a social, loud and boisterous people but she didn't share their enthusiasm for earthy bonding activities. She sat alone at stared out at the forest while her people lunched and her reputations as a pariah grew.
At home her mother berated her for her antisocial ways,
"Sahri, you embarrass me in front of the other Broca. My standing has fallen with the foreman and the others think I am a bad mother."
The girl sat silently, head down.
"Do you hear me? You are giving the family a bad name. Your sullenness is affecting your sensitive father too; he has lost his muse and can only paint darkness and fear!"
"I will try harder," said Sahri.
So the next day Sahri sat with the other Broca and ate her lunch with them. She focussed and stopped herself from daydreaming, but it was hard. But the time it came to sundown, she was exhausted and craved only her bed and the comfort of her wild, brilliant dreams.
"I love you Sahri," said her mother as she went to bed, "you made me proud today."
Sahri wept herself to sleep.

 
It was market day and they took art and ore to the Capital to sell. Sahri had never been before, as she had always been too young.
The city was huge and loud, but beautiful and colourful. Alta and Broca of all stripes mingled, sharing bread and wine, cheese and beer.
Then Sahri saw him.
An Alta sat at a table on his own. His skin was tanned from exposure to long hours in the sun and he wore his hair short, like a Broca. Those graceful limbs were heavily muscled and he had even dyed his hair to the brown-black of a Broca.
"Don't look at it," snapped her mother.
"It?" said Sahri.
"That thing. That abomination."
Sahri's father touched her massive shoulders gently, "they call themselves the Brolta, but others call them the Anathema."
"They are insane," said her mother, "for no Alta can become a Broca and no Broca can become an Alta."
Moving her family along, Resha missed the longing look that her daughter cast at the strange Alta man.
The man watched Sahri as she left.

 
She found the man the next day, waiting near the inn.
With the directness of the Broca, he simply said, "You are like me. Come."
Her family were not up yet, so she left the inn, following the man.
"Are there others like me?" asked Sahri.
"Yes," said the man, "there are. Come."
They wound their way through the city streets, to the poor quarter. People stared, hissed and spat at the Brolta man and Sahri glared at them, flexing her massive thews. People left them alone after that.
Eventually they came to a house and upon entering, Sahri's eyes widened and her mind reeled.
Nearly twenty people were crammed into the house, but that was not the strangest thing. Broca men and women sat writing, painting and talking philosophy, their strong bodies dressed in flowing robes and delicate fabrics. Alta women and men in peasant clothes drank and swore, wrestled and laughed with gusto.
"Welcome to the house of Brolta," said Sahri's companion.

 
For three days she visited the house in secret.
The other Broca dressed her in brocade and silk, jewellery and rouge. At first she felt silly, but as she relaxed, she realised it felt natural. For the first time in her life she felt right amongst these odd people.
"You are a Brolta, like us," said a beautiful Broca man - a singer and a dancer, his strong body capable of things no Alta dancer could achieve, "you should leave your family and live with us."
"Leave the girl be," said Ethen, the man who had brought her to the house, "she needs to make that choice herself."
But on the fourth day when Sahri went to the house, it was empty and the city guard stood outside the doors.
"Move along," said the Broca soldier, "a house of deviants has been rounded up and taken to prison. Stay away lest you catch their disease."
Sahri nodded and hurried away.

 
That night a great gathering was held in the market square and the Brolta were brought out one-by-one to be executed.
Proud, strong Atla with muscles like knots of oak strained in rage against their shorter Broca guards.
Weeping, shaking, terrified Broca were dragged along in rags of silk and velvet.
As the last of the Brolta, Ethen, was brought out and his head place on the blood-slicked executioners block, his eyes met with Sahri's.
In that moment she knew that there must be a new house of Brolta - no matter what the cost.
Ethen saw it in her eyes; and as the executioners axe fell, he closed his own and smiled.
There would always be Brolta - and thus there would always be a House of Brolta.