Short story – “Strike, Share and Subscribe”

Here’s a modern day parable on social media –

I.

I woke again that night to stare at the ceiling aware that in the darkness everything around you took such a mystical tone.  The clothes on the door became someone staring at me with malicious intentions.

My smart phone next to me flashed enticingly.  What a thing the smart phone was.  A friend, a tutor, a confidant, a mentor, a lover, a sexual sponge of electronic energy.  What more could someone ask for? It never bored you, it’s algorithms knew exactly what you wanted, it was always entertaining, and it was small enough to slip under your pillow or bed.  And if you had enough, then, well you could just switch it off. If you could bring yourself to doing that anyway. 

I scrolled through all my social media, Instagram and Facebook, my Whatsapp messages and outlook emails.  A birthday party here, fitness videos appearing one after another. Every video was 30 seconds in length but for me they lasted no more than 2 due to my attention span craving the next one.  

Ah, attentions spans. 

I could barely read anymore.  I’d pick up a book and my hand would crave the phone, a literal unconscious psychological desire to reach out and grab it.  My addiction had rendered me an adult infant.   I could wake in the morning brush my teeth and head out but the damned thing would be stuck to my hand like glue. 

It played the dual role of heartfelt friend and terrible enemy.

It exacerbated my loneliness, it filled my brain with waste and shit, made me crave things I knew I could never realistically achieve and weakened my spirit.  But it was some respite the mind numbing hurt of real life.

II.

The worst thing about the London Underground is the smell of shit.  It surrounds and stifles you in some tunnels.  It quite literally feels like you’re riding the bowels of Hell.  I imagined what it would feel like if I was to ever get stuck down here.  Dear me, the heat, the smell and claustrophobia would undoubtedly kill me. There was no signal here so the phone was out of bounds.  Instead I looked around to see what joys the public could hold for me.  It was just semi tattooed women and men in suits.  The  sentiment of abject misery which accompanied going to work in the morning was unified people from all walks of life.  The followers of God/Jehovah/Allah/Krishna may have spilt blood all over the land for centuries but they were all unified in the face of the tragedy of the morning commute.

I exited at Bank station from one of it’s numerous labyrinthine exits before making my way up to Cannon Street. The clouds had turned grey once more and a light drizzle made it’s way down as I crossed a road.  I was waiting in the elevator shaft when I pulled out my phone to watch a bunch of Whatsapp videos someone had sent to me.  It was a bunch of teenagers goading and finally stabbing a man to death on his bike not far from where I actually was.  The initial sound of the video was a shock as it was unmuted so everyone in the lift stared around me. It was embarrassing as one of the partners of the firm was also next to me. He smiled awkwardly at me but my filed me mentally under “potential red flags in the organisation”.

The man had been killed and the teenagers were laughing. 

I simply scrolled on. 

I took breakfast and ate in silence in the canteen.  I had the opportunity to sit with some colleagues but I chose an empty table to continue my scrolling.
Twitter showed me Muslims arguing with Christians in Hyde Park, it showed me bodybuilding videos, LGBT activists, climate change people masking taping themselves to an A road, why the latest video games was a woke trap for youngsters, why black America needed to rebel against the white man, why the white man needed to retake the streets from black neighbourhoods, why the average woman were threatened from the constant aggression from men, why men didn’t need to be with women anymore, children identifying as cats, oranges and pets but never children, it showed me wars, middle aged women yelling angrily at the camera, young men yelling angrily at the camera, it showed me everything I needed to know in order to understand the world better. 

What an amazing invention this smart phone was.  I never had to meet anyone, anytime, anywhere.  I could be holed up in my room, on a mattress strewn with dirty clothes or food and I could make my perfect judgments about individuals I had never ever met before. It made life so much easier.  This was the way it should be, of course, evolution had lead to this, and evolution only favoured the strongest genes so surely this world had to be correct.

I recall sitting with my uncle once during his visits and being somewhat appalled at their lethargy in life.  They needed none of these gadgets and seemed fulfilled.  They also had the curious ability to concentrate for hours at one task at hand. 

For hours? 

How was that possible?

I couldn’t wash dishes without being distracted by a sudden email or Whatsapp message onto my phone.  Soon enough my disgust for the elderly turned into quiet respect.  In their silent work ethic I found a quiet judgment of my own shortcomings. 

I sat at my desk and turned on my laptop and fired up Outlook, Onenote, Word, and several web browsers (in that order).   I arrived 15 minutes before my managers in order to show my punctiliousness. I made coffee at the same time, went to the loo and said hello to the facilities manager who sat around twenty metres away from me.

My work consisted of updating databases, sending emails and speaking to managers all day.   It was complex work interspersed with easy processes.  It was challenging to an extent.  But it was ultimately a distraction from my true desires. 

I’d sneak into the cubicles to scroll

Facebook, Reddit, Youtube

I’d sneak into a quiet room again

Instagram, news and websites

Another hour went by

This time Youtube, Twitter, Reddit

The addiction was cruel but I justified it to myself in that I was learning all the time.  I was a learning machine, this was surely the sign of a good employee.

We had an hour long team meeting in the afternoon, I found a quiet place to listen in.  I was scrolling the entire time on my phone on the side.

I saw a Middle aged woman ranting in a coffee shop before she got slapped in the face by a group of girls.  It made me angry.  I wanted to find that woman and throw coffee in her face when I got the chance. 

• David

Who did she think she was behaving like that? A Middle aged woman in a coffee shop.  Have some respect. 

• Ummm, David

She had no concept of behaving properly

• I think he’s on mute

• David, can you hear us?

Her fat, wide face, her sweaty nauseating appearance

-David, could you please go off mute

What a trashy idiot, I bet she treated her husband like crap, I bet she was hated in the office,

• David can you hear us?

I hope she dies in a car accident

Several messages popped up from the side of my screen awakening me from my reverie.

It suddenly dawned on me that I was being questioned.  I saw 6 faces staring at me, all waiting for me to offer my input.  I had no idea what they were asking

Quick, play it cool, pretend that you disconnected

• Erm, sorry, I couldn’t hear you, I think I’m getting bad Wifi in the office

Stone faces staring at me

Why was I thinking about the fat woman yelling in the coffee shop?  What use did it play in my working life? 

• David, we were asking about the external table reports?

What external table reports? What the fuck is he talking about?

I felt the sudden formation of cold sweat in my hair.  I always sweated when I was nervous.

I went into Bullshit mode

• “I need to have a look a the tables themselves to ensure we can actually extract the information that we need, and then cleanse the report to make it more usable for the product team.  I think it’s fairly straightforward and can be done, but just need to do some final testing”

Thank god I was so quick witted.  Phew.   

For a moment there was no reaction.  My boss opened up –

“erm, David, didn’t you say last week that you’d already done this and were waiting to complete the rest of the tables”. 

Nausea blinked in my stomach. When had I said this?

“I don’t think that’s what I said”

What a fucking idiot.  Telling your boss he’s a liar in front of everyone.

“Oh sorry, I think I had said that, but due to connection issues I couldn’t sort the tables out”

“but i thought you’d spoke to IT about it”

I felt the redness begin to appear in my face.  Wouldn’t he just shut up and move on, why was he drilling so much into this?

“I had but they had delays, you know IT”

Blame IT.  Always worked.

“But you said you spoke to them last week, I think we’ve had enough time to deal with this”. 

I was suddenly overcome with the urge to stab him in his measly throat. 

I mumbled a response before saying

“Perhaps we can take this offline”

A stone faced silence.  Eventually a capitulation.

“Ok, thanks David”

I went back to the toilet to calm my nerves, not before scrolling Facebook, Youtube, Instagram and twitter, BBC news, Amazon UK and the local weather reports.  There was zero need for this information.  The constant stream of videos worked wonders for my nerves.  It made me feel human again.

I took the transport home and got to my flat in time.  I ordered some chicken and chips from Uber eats before having raided the fridge for chocolates etc.

I browsed for 90 minutes absorbing a cacophony of videos and content.  I used TikTok for most of my news for the day flicking through it casually. Before I could read lengthy books from the library or Kindle but now I would just use apps to quickly scan over salient points.  Reading was a past endeavour. 

I stumbled across a video of an old man talking about his younger days on TikTok. 

I didn’t care much any more about major things anymore.  I knew as long as I was connected into the AI systems of social media then everything else meant little.  It would all melt into nothingness as long as my brain was distracted directly by the Matrix.  I’d watched that movie growing up and always felt that it was a sci-fi fantasy which couldn’t really occur during our time.  But the older I got the more I was sure that it would be a precursor to the truth.  In that moment on the phone, my thumb was in control of my destiny.  I didn’t have to think of my outside worries, I could channel all thought and energy onto what was on screen.  Everything I saw was controllable by myself.  My job and personal failing were irrelevant when watching insights into the lives of others. 

I ordered some food from Uber Eats and ate in the dining room. I watched some TV before going to bed.

I woke to my morning scroll, war in Ukraine footage, Love Island fights, a murder in North London, Right wingers alive and well in the USA, Earthquake in South Asia.  A murder in South London. Elections in India. A murder in West London. A lorry crashed killing 12 in Midwest America. 3 murders in East London. I dressed and had a quick look at my emails before leaving the door.

My heart sank

A 1-2-1 scheduled with my manager for the early morning.  What could it mean?  Impromptu meetings were never a good thing.  Ever.  I left and brought an egg croissant sandwich thing from Pret before heading of to the train station. I was too nervous to scroll on the train and anxiety which spiked the moment I got to the office.  I sat at my cubicle and tried to make chit chat with other colleagues before I disappeared to the loo.  I scrolled again and again and again to make the nerves go away. 

Eventually at 10:55AM I entered the room with Rob my manager.  We sat whilst he spoke.

III.
“David, I thought we’d have this meeting as I’m a little concerned about what we spoke about yesterday on the call.  You said that ….” my mind went somewhat blank at this point whilst he discussed the reasoning behind the meeting.  He felt I was failing to  achieve targets, he was concerned that I wasn’t fitting well into the company and the role.  He said that I had talent but needed to be more focused.

That’s when he dropped the bombshell

“I’ve also heard accounts that you spend a lot of time scrolling on social media when your at your desk.  Please be weary that you are being observed during these times.”

I felt a surge of embarrassed anger come through me.  I knew I’d been slacking and was lazy with my work but I still maintained a facade (I thought anyways) of being professional always at work. 

This sudden calling out at my shortcoming filled me with rage

“I’m normally at my desk and focusing, I’m not quite sure what you mean?”

“It’s just that I’ve been told that sometimes you are caught up on scrolling rather than working”

“Who told you that”

“It’s not really relevant, look it’s not a major issue, just curb it and we can be fine with it”

The anger refused to displace.  Who had grassed me up?

“For my own betterment, it would be useful to know who drew this issue out”

Rob was beginning to look slightly annoyed

“Like I said, it’s not a major issue and I don’t intend to make it so”

It was then when I acted in a way which I couldn’t fathom.  It felt like I was on automatic, my limbs were moving by their own accord with no comprehension.  There was no sudden increase in heart rate from my end which is what terrified me.  All I could think of was all the videos of fights I’d watched during my scrolls. 

I lifted the glass off the desk and smashed him right across the head. 

For a moment he looked at me in sheer shock.  Nothing happened for a split second.  Afterwards was when the blood began leaking from the side of his head like water down rocks.

A large spurt came flying out from his neck almost comically.  The table and laptop was drenched and the front of my shirt was soon covered in red.  I sat back, covered.  There we were, myself and my boss staring at each other, covered in blood.

Suffice to say, it was not a normal meeting.

IV.

I lay on my bed that night and tried to fathom what had occured during the day. What stunned me was how automatic it had all been.  It felt as though years of pent up aggression was suddenly released.  I had quickly replaced my shirt with a sweater in my bag before heading out of the office.    I quickly took my shirt off, stuffed it in my bag placed a sweater on I kept in my jacket normally and walked off.  No one seemed to suspect me it felt like. 

It was somewhat amazing and amusing how oblivious people seemed in offices. They seemed so preoccupied with whatever they were doing an it didn’t seem at all as interested in you as your mind made it out to be.  It was unusual.

I’d somehow evaded the police and any other law enforcement official.  I just kept my head down and made my way home without trying to draw too much attention to myself.  Again, this was surreal – I’d never been in this situation before, so I couldn’t imagine how I’d gotten myself here.  I’d never transgressed any criminal law even the most minor but I stil managed to evade authorities like it was no ones business. 

But I was sure I’d killed him.  I’d killed my boss.  It seemed like something so comical and surreal, something you’d witness in a comedy movie.  But no, here it was, I had actually in a fit of indescribable rage murdered my boss and I was on the run, the most unlikely of heroes. 

But had anyone even seen me?  That’s what the true question was.  I felt like I’d drifted easily past everyone on my way back here.  It seemed effortless to say the least.

I scrolled through through everything available to me that night to block out the trauma.  The relentless pace of the imagery kept my thoughts elsewhere.  I barely heard anything and the visuals seemed to strike right through my eyes without registering anything. 

I woke up and showered as per normal.  Regardless of what I’d gone through the day before, I still felt obliged to get up, and show up to work.  The working system had become so deeply buried into my bloodstream that no shocking event or crime I’d committed seemed to divert my desire to turn up.   I took a new shirt out, dressed and made my way to the tube.

I entered the building.  There was nothing and no one available to stop me.  Not single person around. Every single thing seemed perfectly normal.  I entered the same elevator with the same partner next to me.  I crossed over to where I sat and I fired up my PC. 

Anxiety began gnawing at me.  Not a single person had pulled me out to talk to me nor did I even feel remotely worried. I fired up my laptop and tried to work.  But I couldn’t.  It was surreal beyond comprehension.  I got up and walked to the room where I’d murdered or attempted to murder my boss and I peered inside.

There he lay.  Facedown the table, dried blood surrounded him like some accursed moat.  I walked over, my heart racing.  With a shaking hand I placed two fingers over his neck in an attempt to take a reading. The blood now stained both my fingers. Nothing.  No heartbeat. 

I was startled by an ear piercing shriek behind me where a woman stood.  More people gathered around.  There was more screaming, yelling and general hubbub.  One woman fainted and had to be dragged out.  I walked past them before running out of the door quicker than you can possibly imagine.

I race down Cannon Street and then towards Bank station.  I suddenly felt energised, as though I’d broken out of the spell.  I took a right and sprinted until I reached the embankment and leaned against the wall.  The world streamed past me, a blurred vision of individuals and red buses.  I did what I always did and had been taught by the modern world.  I scrolled. 

I scrolled and scrolled in an attempt to hide out the pain.  The ignominy, the shame. It was a shame which started from youth. The shame of failing my university first year, of being outcasted from friends for issues not worth discussing, the shame of failing jobs which I kept quiet on my CV.  I had hidden it behind layers of deception. 

The screen was bloody as I scrolled until something knocked the air out of my stomach again. 

It was video footage of me smashing the glass into the side of my managers face.  After that I got up and stamped on his face.

But who?  Who’d made the footage?  I swiped upwards.  Again, footage of me on tikTok, hashtag #workplaceviolence.  Swipe up again, it was BBC news with the same footage.  Swiping upwards lead to nothing but an endless blur of videos all detailing the same horrifying footage.

The comments came flooding in

“LOL – we’ve all wanted to do that one time”

“fucking smashed him, literally”

“Broken glass = 30p, Life imprisonment – 25 years, Smashing a boss you hate with the side of the glass = priceless”

I swiped again, this time there were people filming reaction videos to me killing my boss.  Reaction videos?  Already?

The stomach churning realisation that I would slowly become the talk of the world began to dawn over me.   I carried on walking down the Embankment whilst trying to cogitate what my life was to become.  I began to notice everyone taking notice of me. Side glances, discussions between friends and then people stopping dead in their tracks to look at me.  Suddenly someone took his phone out to film me.

“it’s that fella who killed his boss”

“no fucking way”

“yes way, its him”

A small crowd of people began following me as I picked up my pace.  I sped up to a trot and soon enough a slow jog.   The small crowd became a larger one, phones in hand filing these moments of mine.  More people came down, more individuals.  People were taking selfies and videos.  I refreshed my web browser  and began scrolling again. 

A live feed of myself being chased by a crowd on Embankment.  Scroll again, more livestreams of myself.  I was being filmed by helicopters above.

Soon enough even traffic began to slow down soon.  Police cars appeared up ahead. 

I rant into a small stairwell off the bridge which overlooked the river Thames.  The waters took on a sudden undeniable beauty which had never appeared before.  The absence of beauty is one of the biggest shortcomings of life.

I looked up at the barrage of camera phones staring down at me their flashing lights blinking like the many heads of a hydra.

I knew there was only one way out of this mess.  I climbed the walls and threw myself into the freezing cold arms of the Thames. 

And what really disgusted me was that before I hit the freezing waters the only question my brain was asking was “I wonder how many likes this video will get”.

THE END

The bonfire of the humanities Part 1

This is the first part of a dystopian tale I’ve written. It might court some controversy but I thought I’d let my readers decide what they think for now. Leave comments (if you can be bothered).

1.

Zoe had been looking forward to the school trip for days. She’d been telling her mother, and any other adult who had the patience of listening to the excited commentary of an 11 year old, about what the trip had in store.

“It’s not every day class 6 gets to visit the London Anthropos Museum”. Mother had listened on with the feigned attention all parents when their children spoke with unbridled enthusiasm on a topic they themselves had little interest in.

“No dear, I bet they don’t. Remember to stay safe and follow all the instructions”. Mother had known about the Museum and it’s special types of exhibitions. She was naturally a bit nervous but she kept her reservations to her self. It didn’t pay to vocalise opinions nowadays.

It was when turning into the school that morning and seeing the children outside the school waiting in lines to walk to the tube station where the full scholastic importance of the event became apparent. Males and females from several age groups from young to early teens were ready to make the journey.

In their excitement, many of the kids had began immediately re-identifying. A few chose pigs and began walking on all fours snorting the ground and learnt how to roll their yes into back of their skulls until only whites remained. They found it relaxing and a great way of coping with the stresses of adolescent life. To an onlooker it looked deeply unsettling although this sentiment was of course never vocalised.

Children’s identifying patterns had become a normal part of school life now. At the drop of a hat they could identify with whatever object/inanimate/animate/thing/object/mammal/creature they wished to do so. Some of the kids identified as tables and would sit rigid in the corner of the room in some sort of childish play. Other kids identified as llamas or gorillas or creatures from movies. It was fun watching them do so. The teachers didn’t (or perhaps couldn’t) bat an eyelid at their funny exercises.

It took a turn for the sinister of course following the class 4C incident where a bunch of children decided to identify, with some novelty, as concentration camp soldiers. They had been watching Youtube videos during history lesson which spurred their unusual fantasies. They felt it was a good way of relieving stress and channelling their internal anger in a productive way. The teachers, of course, agreed. Obviously the tragic outcome of the three pupil deaths (all three from immolation, not inhalation as some people mistakenly thought) and one still recovering from the burns was a shock to the school system. They had been excluded but managed to avoid criminal prosecution on the grounds that they had been underage and were merely exercising their state enacted right to identify. The horror of the event was shocking and some parents had been driven to depression and near suicide but the school was coming to terms with the event now. They even saw it as a compelling learning exercise future school initiatives could take not from. It was discussed at the local PTA meeting to much aplomb and mutual backslapping.

“Right now class, we want to get to the museum in as orderly and easy fashion as possible. Please stay with your chosen teachers, and stick close by them”

The kids began walking noisily along the London pavements to the nearest tube station.

2.

Zoe found the journey to the museum exciting. She didn’t get the chance often to travel on the tube so being able to do so was a great proposition. The noise on the Central line absolutely horrifying though. It felt like some mechanical monster screeching in pain, a pain temporarily alleviated by entering a new station. Instead she made do by looking at some of the adverts scrawled across the trains.

There were lots of social media adverts out there. Many were mental health initiatives, meditations or loan adverts. This was interspersed by the standard government adverts informing young people to remain vigilant about anti-cultural sentiments being expressed in the home. There were posters of parents arguing behind closed doors with children’s ears pressed against the door. “Always hear, always here” with a picture of the anti-culture police ready to help anyone who may be suspicious.

They alighted near the nearest station to the museum and made their way there.

London had changed a lot over the years Zoe had been told.

Green Park, where they had exited , was one of her favourite places in London.  The greenery and hustle and bustle filled her with joy.  There were new statues being erected around around the area.   A lot of monuments and statues had been torn down has it reflected badly on the country’s past.  Zoe knew there had been a lot of bad things done by the country and that it was important that these things didn’t exist anymore.  They lived in a better society now. Society – that was a word she had learnt early on class and was the most used word in the classroom according to national statistics.  It meant everyone working together happily.

Now there were lots of statues of people from all backgrounds and lives (as it should be).  People like Winston Churchill were also up.  She knew Winston as a great man who came from Africa and helped change the UK for the better. He was considered one of the greatest black men in society. It didn’t matter though as we were all the same around the world regardless of race and religion.  Zoe had been watching the news with her mum when the unveiling of the statue appeared on the news.  Zoe’s mum looked angry for a moment “He never looked like that” she frowned before straightening her face after she caught her daughter staring at her.  She was afraid that Zoe had heard. Zoe knew why she was afraid.

That very same evening something very odd happened on their floor. Her neighbour, Mr Charlie was a kind Polish man who always said hello whenever she left the room. He always wore a old crumply T shirt and his pockets were full of sweets which he’d share with her. He’d also fixed the tap in her home a few times and went everywhere with a smile. That evening Zoe and her mum was awoken by an awful racket. She heard screaming outside her flat door and both her and her mum were standing where mum placed her palm over Zoe’s mouth. 

She could hear a great deal of commotion, things being kicked around and Mr
Charlie’s muffled noises.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it” he kept saying. Zoe
realised quick enough that it was an encounter with the culture Police.  She could hear their voices, not totally clearly, but still audible.  “Charles Nowak … under arrest… culture… society”. An audible gasp and cry came from Mr Charlie’s wife who also lived with him.  

Mr Charlie’s voice was louder and exasperated, he was crying this time
round.

“I didn’t mean any offense, all I said was that he was British, he wasn’t African.  I wasn’t being racist, it’s the truth.”.  Zoe knew who he was talking about – it was the statue of Mr Churchill, the same one that her mum had talked about. 

Soon she could hear the group of people walking across the outside hallway,
Mr Charlie was crying and sobbing. 

“I was being truthful, please don’t do this to me, I’m so sorry”.  He seemed to break finally and he screamed

“You CAN’T CHANGE THE FUCKING TRU…” Zoe could tell he was being hurt which meant he stopped talking. She was also shocked to hear the F word being expressed by an adult.

At that point she felt the sudden stop of boots outside her doorway.  For a moment her mouth was in her mouth.  At that point mummy picked up Zoe and she tiptoed back to the bedroom and any and all walking sounds disappeared from outside the door.

It was a frightening episode and the following day the other neighbours speculated on what could have happened.  Mr Charlie’s apartment was cordoned off in police tape and the inside was a mess.  The neighbours appeared disturbed but it was quite evident – Mr Charlie had said something he shouldn’t have said and he’d been taken away for a very long time.

The whole episode upset Zoe a lot, but thankfully the beautiful
sights of London were distracting her right now. What it did leave her feeling was that you had to be very careful what she or mummy said.  Otherwise you would could be sent away for a long time. 

 

Short story – “Nature is the strangest beast”

I’ve been finding it harder and harder to write fiction due to familial pressures. When I do get a chance I enjoy the process very much so.

The below is a darkly ambient tale I wrote based on the great outdoors. It continues on the horror thread from some of my previous writings.

(Apologies for any grammar/spelling mistakes or continuation issues, do offer feedback or comments if you so desire).

I’d been fascinated by the great outdoors for a long time. 

It was quite obvious that the appeal of working the corporate office life was wearing off now.  Years of sitting in chairs had rendered my back fragile and weak.  I’d stare at my hands at times, marvelling at how soft and effeminate they looked when compared to other people the same age as me who worked more manual jobs.  Masculinity in the modern age was a fragile thing but not quite as weak as my core muscles according to my Instagram feed.

Some of the guys in the office did Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or other rougher sports as Mixed martial arts was booming now.  I was quite envious of their physiques which were apparent from even beneath their shirts and suits.  I was that curious mould of skinny fat which most teenage girls would have probably envied. 

It wasn’t that I didn’t try with exercise or anything.  I played squash a couple of times a week and went for a weekly work run during my lunch break.  I remember the first time I went and the twinge of shame I felt at being outdone by some of the 45 year old women I was up against.  It was the intensity on their faces which surprised me.  It also alerted me to the passion existing beneath the veneer of even the most docile.

The venom would rise in me at the placid demeanours of my office workers afterwards in the office.  I think I was angry at their hidden competitiveness. I appreciated aggression which was a bit more apparent and not hidden beneath layers of duplicitous character.  Perhaps this was the Irish in me seething.  Maybe this was why they were always getting promoted over me.

I caught dinner with Sandra that night at Liverpool Street station at a Wasabi restaurant. She bit into her sushi whilst I wolfed my katsu curry down with diet coke.  We ate like zombies with the occasional conversation before we made our own way home to watch Netflix and chill. The chill part meant sleeping of course.

I’d met Sandra at an earlier work placement at a god-awful law firm I worked at for a few years back.  We’d been in some contact over the years but by a big coincidence ended up working at the same big corporation years later.   We’d been together for a few months now after she’d moved in.  

On paper life should have been good.  I was 28 years old.  I had a good job at a good company and a pretty girlfriend to boot.  The fact that she worked gave me another kick higher in the social ladder.  It made me more desirable to women, I knew for certain, in the office which gave me another boost. 

Yes, indeed life was good.  As good as life can be in the 21^st Century.  There was that gnawing hole of emptiness inside me which grew with every unanswerable question.

What the fuck was I doing with my life?

Is this that it was all about?

What about my dreams of being a Hollywood actor?

This one stung the most as I spent most of my time imagining I was an extra in a movie whether it was De Niro in the end of Heat or Daniel Day Lewis stewing his male anger in There Will Be Blood.  Yes I knew that I was the stereotypical quarter life crisis individual who over-analysed anything in his unique way. 

Indeed life was as good as it got in modern day London.

Good until Sandra was killed of course.

And it wasn’t even a decent “killed”.  A one you could tell your friends and girls after a second date.  She was killed by a drunk driver whilst walking home from her nans.  Or she was killed by a superbug in a hospital.  Or even she was killed by a bus whilst walking out onto a busy main road. All of them carried a sense of sudden tragedy which would get a sympathetic look from the opposite sex and a warm embrace.   

No, she was murdered in a London road.  In broad daylight.  By a man with an axe. 

It’s a cliché to say that I remember it like it was yesterday.  But it’s true.  You never ever forget hearing about the death of a loved one. Its sort of seared forever into your brain in a very savage way.  I was even sent down to identify the body.  Her parents came down from Wiltshire and stayed a horrible week with us.  My sister also came down for a few days and I spoke to my parents for some time.  They didn’t visit in person.  They were old school Catholic and looked down at me cohabiting with someone who hadn’t taken the sacraments. 

Well fuck them then I told my sister. Well in my head I did.  I wouldn’t dare say it to their faces or to my sister.  She’d as good as quit speaking to me if I ever did even during times as rough as these.

The police were sympathetic knowing the media circus I would face.  The murder had been caught on camera phone from a distance.  She was walking across Waterloo station during the rush hour when a man came running up to her with axe in hand.  He’d apparently been following her for some time before launching the weapon straight across the top of her chest.  He dug it out before thrusting it again and again. 

She wasn’t quite decapitated but she might as well been.  Her head was tilted horrible to the side and the cartilage and tendons of her neck rippled.  The screaming was sudden.  Someone had managed to film the entire event, a teenage charity worker who needed PTSD counselling afterwards. 

Naturally, they thought it was a typical terror attack at first.  It wasn’t caused by any person of swarthy complexion nor were the rantings of AllahuAkbar heard resonating through the streets of London.   It was caused by a calm person.  Someone who didn’t seem to have any extremist bent whatsoever. 

The police were kind and sent a liaison support officer to tend to me.  I received grief counselling which helped to an extent.  But when the visions and dreams began coming, well there was little the counsellor and trained psychologists could do or say to assist me.

It was always a woman.

A tall woman. 

She was always taller than the regular person.  In the office, soon after, she’d appear walking by wearing regular office clothes. 

Or in the park during my regular meditative walks.  She’d be the tourist or the woman behind the tree smiling her mouth stretching grotesquely.

It was never out and out horror I’d experience but an overall queasiness.  More of a subtle why than anything else.

But I had little to worry about in terms of office judgment as I was granted sick leave.  The HR woman and my manager were sympathetic to my plight.  Our meetings were held via remote Zoom calls to save any embarrassing in office emotions but my mental state was pretty clear just from my appearance.  A rough beard had taken over and my hair was longer and unkempt.  I’d stopped taking so much care in my suits and ties.  I’d zone out in client meetings and would be at a loss with a distinct lack of meeting notes to chase up on.   

It was as though the brutal killing of my girlfriend simply exaceberated the intense sense of loneliness I’d been experiencing my entire life at work. Her death was the icing on the cake.

Seeing the event on national television, of course, just added fuel to the fire.  Whether on Youtube adverts or the evening news I was being exposed to the same dead and cock-eyed eyes staring in shock from a body on a cold pavement. 

I was 4 weeks at home receiving the regular check ups with the grief counsellor, a hairy man in his thirties with a kind demeanour appeared.  Sort of like Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Magnolia. 

“how are things today?”.  There was always something quite reassuring about the most disgustingly banal of openings.

“I’m fine”.  What other reply is there between men?

We talked for sometime about my development for some time.  It was the same questions but my behaviour and answers were being tracked.  If any cause for concern was to appear then this information would be fed back no doubt.   

It was then when he revealed his trump card.

“Well, you’ll be glad to hear that there’s a new initiative being promoted in terms of improving the mental health of individuals”.

He pulled out a leaflet and gave it to me.

“It’s a farm, a few miles out from here.  It’s been scientifically proven that open air and fields helps with psychological recovery”

Psychological recovery?  I could understand the case for men who were getting memories of sex abuse, women dealing with an alcoholic husband or a gambling addiction which had drained the family bank account.

But having your girlfriend axed to death in the middle of a road.  What recovery was there from that? Could there really be anything to heal that wound?

I barely responded.    The counsellor took his notes and left.

I fingered that leaflet before I slept that night with images of green fields and cows taking over me.    It looked so appealing and hypnotic.  I fell asleep that night dreamlessly.

2.

The stench of manure was subtle and strangely exhilarating.  I’d been digging into it for around 20 minutes now and my back was aching, hot pain running up and down it.   The digging and removal soon took on its own natural rhythm and soon enough I had built up a decent sweat.  The deaf-mute boy next to me was looked up occasionally to check on me before he continued with his own digging.  He was like a machine and barely took any breaks.  I, being somewhat competitive, also made sure I wasn’t hamstrung by anything as annoying as a break.  About 10 minutes on I had the desire to drink water which I explained to the deaf-mute through hand movements.  He did what he always did when speaking to me.  He looked at my face for a few seconds before mouthing in his mute tone the extent of his comprehension.   

I walked back to the outdoor tap near the entry gates of the farm.  This involved passing by the cow and sheep pen.  The natural smell of the place had began to seep through my skin and clothes.

Working the fields, the stables and the long walks reinvigorated something deep and rich inside me.  It felt like I’d been cocooned for the past few years in and I was now awakening from my hibernation.  It felt… enlightening.  It felt like I was able to breathe again.  Little did I know how much I had been suffocating for the past few years.  I took a sip of the cold water from the tap and enjoyed feeling my thirst being quenched. 

This was the third week I’d been here.  I’d been coming in twice a week as per the therapists orders.   I felt a twinge of mild excitement and begrudging hate coming in.  On the first day I left feeling like a schoolboy on the first day of school.  The benefit of public transport enabled an attractive journey in.  It calmed my mind leaving the hustle and bustle of urban life as we entered greener terrain of trees and hills.  The bus stopped immediately outside the farm.  I didn’t know what to expect but was greeted by a round and happy looking man around in his early 20’s.  He told me to place my bag in a large container like room.  Coming out was when I could take in the full splendour of the view.  Standing looking down in the summer day the green field appeared like a huge green delight.  There were slightly old looking swings and slides and cows grazing.  On the right side there was a muddy path which stretched out into the distance.  Beyond where the cows grazed it was quite apparent how much more field there was.  

I went for a walk down the field and the muddied path.  Large forbidding hills ran down my right hand side.  I had no wellington boots so the walk was difficult and uneven.  Coming to it’s end there was a rusty gate behind which were intimidating looking dogs.   I was hesitant to open the gate and as I approached the dogs came to attention and began barking viciously.  I took this as a signal to leave.  I was going to before I noticed a flash of muddied blonde hair in the stable beyond where the dogs were.   A woman in in her early 40’s appeared. An attractive lady, haggard looking but still comely.

“Don’t worry, they won’t bite” She seemed sincere

“thanks, but I’ll give it a miss” came my response back.

I felt a burn of excitement in begin in the pit of my stomach before it turned downwards.  I walked away somewhat optimistic.

Back at the camp I came face to face with Ben, the main farmer in charge.  His outwardly friendly demeanour hid a tougher character, he shook my hand somewhat forcefully and asked if I was well.  I responded accordingly.  He took me for a quick tour of the animal pen and stables.  I was impressed by the gentleness of his manner with them.  He was neither harsh or particularly rough.  He was truly like a father tending to his children.  He gave me a small box with feed in it to distribute to the animals but I found myself awkwardly being able to assist.  I let him continue instead. 

Cleaning the stables was where I found my forte it seemed.  I found something reassuringly simple but satisfying about cleaning them out.   I loved the digging and the ache afterwards.  There was something purely exhausting about it and sitting down afterwards I felt that I genuinely deserved the rest.  I’d sometimes catch sight of the Farmer walking around the area, but he seemed very much absorbed in his work. 

We drank tea later at a makeshift table he had set up and had bourbon biscuits, my favourite.  Evening was soon coming and I decided to take my leave.

It was a good day. 

3.

The Farmer had seven children in total.  Five boys and two girls.  Most of the boys came down to help on the farm in some capacity on a daily basis.  They ran their own trade however, using dogs to clear off travellers from camping sites.  They were big, strong boys, not scared of a good scuffle.  Like the father, warm but tough.

I was sitting with the Farmer eating sandwiches out in the fields.  He asked about my family situation.  I disclosed little.  I asked about his own and the farm in general. He was more open than me, going into some detail about son’s jobs and the extent of their study.  I appreciated this honesty about this.  Conversation turned to people surrounding the farm.

“They don’t like us”

“why?”

“they think we’re odd”

They were Irish travellers who came down occasionally to give them trouble.  They held fights in their own backyards too and tried to intimidate the farmer and his family too.  They had had a few scraps with them. The woman in the back who I’d seen was said to have been part of their family too.

I asked him a few more questions about the farm and its workings and his history too.  The truth was I was more interested in hearing about the attractive lady I’d seen earlier.  Later that day I made my way back towards the back end of the farm with the intention of seeing her again. 

It had been raining heavily the night before so the trek there was muddier and more of a slog than before.  The cows were still gazing on the fields along with some of the other animals.  They always looked melancholic to me.  To my right the sun was beginning to dip, sending out its cast of rays in its final demise.  The gates I’d come across before appeared before me where I had last seen the woman.  I could see her now again working with the horses and animals in their pens.  She gazed at me for quite a few seconds this time round before going back to feeding the horses.  I walked past the gates and a few dogs which were chained up and snapping at the end of the leash. I walked towards the horse pen.  She was both absorbed in her work whilst keeping an eye on me. I mustered up the courage to speak to her eventually, it wasn’t a bold muster.  I had a weird charm.

“Some horses you have here” came my expert opinion on horses.

“yes, they are quite a breed”

“how long have you been working with them”

“horse? my whole life”

I pretended to look knowledgeable of animals whilst not trying to hide my obvious attraction to her.  The horse had the dual look of pity and stupidity which I found oddly magnetic.

She carried on casually working.  The way she moved around the horse was with an ease I could barely ever manage with anything as powerful as a horse. Her hands were strong yet still managed to attract me.  I was in awe of some weird workings which were beyond my comprehension I suppose.  She stroked its back and it’s mane before moving to it’s head.  Her hands cupping its hind whilst she caressed it’s incredibly strong body. 

I moved a backward step.  One thing lead to another and we made love on the haystack.  All the while, and when I climaxed , I imagined it was Sara’s face which was all I could muster in my imagination.

4.

My daily routine became rigid yet enjoyable.  Every day appearing at the same time and being the helping hand.  The deaf-mute with me as I went along using my physical capabilities to push, screw and lift everywhere.  The father watched me from the side whilst he went about his own duties.  He thought I didn’t notice his careful observations of me from the side, but my mental health issues had sharpened my skills of unconscious observations around me. I knew there would always be an invisible bullseye on me due to my breakdown and there was little I could do to change peoples opinions of this.

I continued my relations with the horse woman over time.  It would always begin in the same way – a pre-ordained conversation before she slowly took my hand over to the side of the barn where we continued our illicit romance.  I mean there was little illicit about it but it felt somehow wrong and unprofessional dare I say to be doing this under the guise of the farmers watch.  There was a feeling of betrayal going on here somewhere. A betrayal I couldn’t quite put my finger on.  And it wasn’t that she was married elsewhere whilst I continued with what I was doing.  It felt like I was betraying something deeper that this. 

One day the farmer asked me if I could stay back later on the evening.  We needed some things to be moved out of the portacabins and he needed a hand with getting this done.  His boys weren’t free that day.

I ran it past my counseller and if it could fit in well with my contractual duties.  He agreed that this shouldn’t be a problem and that it was fine for me to do this. 

I came into work later that day having lunched at a local café.  I had a jacket potato with some meditarranean filling.  It was lovely.  Taking the bus that day I began notice the dilapidation of the farm when it first began, something that had never drawn to me when I had first come.  There parts of the fenced gates missing with small horses spilling out who looked emaciated and ill.  There was a look of pure decay in the same fields.  There were strong dark patches and rough grass which was sunburnt and decayed.  The dilipadation of the horsewoman’s living area became distinct to me. 

It disturbed me. 

5.

Getting in later I saw the farmer fixing the water pipe near the wall.  He had a look of uncharacteristic annoyance on his face.  I said hello to which he barely replied before I went about my normal daily duties.

When evening came we both took our time to clear out the portacabins.  The was quite a bit of heavy lifting and emptying to the small rough asphalt near us.  That’s where he also kept his stone machinery and quarrying equipment.  We had small breaks in between, ones which I really needed.  The farmer looked distant though.  His mind was obviously somewhere else.  Again, this was something I tried to ignore but it undoubtedly unsettled the atmosphere a little. 

The sun set resembling a funeral pyre.  The final gleams of twilight shone out bathing the farm and it’s structures in a sad light.  We continued to move things. 

Once we were done we sat together in a courtyard between some of the buildings and drank tea.  The weather was warm enough.

-It’s warmer than I expected

-I know

A pause

-It not normally like this, but it seems better than usual

Our conversation continued in this manner whilst we took joy in the mundane more than anything. The conversation soon turned to other things.

The farmer was distant, there was quite obviously other things on his mind.

-The woman with the horses

-Yes, I said

He looked for a moment with his eyes glazing over temporarly.

-Don’t go near her again.

-Why not?

He stood back up and walked back to the fabricated building.

The sun was fully down now.  I sat drinking the tea, sipping away. Dipping the biscuits.  One of them broke and fell in.

The door was open to the unit the farmer had walked in to. I’m not sure what it was, but I could feel something calling me into it. I stood and walked towards the open door and felt for a moment I was walking into a wormhole into another dimension.  When I got in a thought came to mind

“In all my dreams before my helpless sight,”

His face was contorted and his legs stiffened out.  The rope he’d used was the same rope they used to tie the goats together on the alternate fild.  The end of it was attached to one of the beams on the ceiling.  One of his eyes bulged out spastically whilst the other one stared right at me. 

I walked right back out and finished my tea.

I spent a few more hours in a state of delusion and panic waiting in that courtyard.  Time seemed to stop and start with the erattic nature of water coming from a faulty tap.  I ran for a moment into the fields after the delayed nature of the horror took over me.  I went to the woman with the horses.  When I entered I saw the same grisly sight staring right back at me.  She was hanging, from a roof beam, with a rope around her neck. And the I stared the more the figure transmogrified into something else, something more wretched then I could imagine. The heft of her weight dissipated until all that remained was the skeletal remains of a twig like thing with absurdly long thinning hair. The eyes bulged horridly. The thin woman hung from that rope and stared down at me.

I screamed, and in that singular moment I fell backwards and down, my eyes staring straight into a sky now blanketed by an immensity of stars. It was an immensity of stars I had never ever noticed before.

6.

Robert had worked as a counsellor for several years. He’d left school at 16 and worked odd jobs before moving to London for two years as a bar man, a construction worker before becoming a team manager at a car rental company.  He’d gotten married fairly young divorced withing 2 years before moving back up north to train as a psychological counsellor.  It was his life experiences which had given him a sense of empathy for others in a similar position.

He’d worked liars, thieves, anti social personality disorder sufferers, before moving to the bigger issues.  People who simply were not capable of operating properly in society. 

He’d come across David, well, like the rest of the UK had when following the tragic murder of his spouse a young man at the end of they day who’d suffered an egregious loss. 

The farm initiative had been an alternative to regular thearpies.  The great outdoors, being at one with nature, all that usual stuff.  He’d taken a liking to patient X when they had first met.  A masculine bond.  He tried to look past the obvious obstacles, what such as the fact that he had beheaded his own spouse whilst suffering a terrible blackout.  He couldn’t understand at all what had occurred and had invented this internal story that someone else had done it.  The psychologists report had clearly made him out to be totally out of touch with reality and delusional. 

His rantings about the thin woman, with elongated limbs and a muffled face had chilled him somewhat, but he saw them for what it was – the mental inventions of a sick man.  Society was sick nowadays anyways, if it wasn’t social media, generative AI or endless scrolling which was troubling most people then it was witnessing horrifying war footage on your phone.  It was enough to disturb anyone in today’s world.

But the farm incident.  Well there was no coming back from that one.  He’d seemed incredibly placid at first and welcoming.  He gelled really well the family (for which the council had done background checks) and took to his tasks well.  Robert did his circuits around the place and watched him from a safe distance. 

The night in question was a total clusterfuck no doubt.  There should have been no change to the schedule, no evening farming placement.  He’d gone of his own accord of course and had proceeded to kill the farmer and the woman in the background stable.  There was even talk he’d been in a sexual relationship with her.  How worse could this get.

Robert wasn’t sure if he’d lose his job over this. He couldn’t have known what was happening – it was beyond his remit.  They had increased his dosage adequately and he should have been under control.  It didn’t make sense that he would do this again.  He’d held regular visits with David to find out how his time had been on the farm and checked in with the farmer.  All seemed progressive.  But to imagine a young man being capable of doing this made no sense at all.  Here was the same person who’d butchered his spouse and convinced himself that he had played no part in her death and some outside force had done it.

The trial came and went and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. 

One day, Robert received an envelope, opening it up he found something which made his blood turn cold. 

A drawing of a stick thin woman. 

THE END

The House near the Black Ocean

He stood at the beach staring out into the ocean. It was neither black nor blue nor any other typical colour we can associate with such sights. It just stood there, drifting up and down side to side. The waves crashed with such force it felt they were mimicking a vast automobile tragedy.

He looked down at his watch and back up again, Would it have been pretentious to suggest that the restlessness of the waters duplicated his own personal disquiet?

He walked with such a slow brooding pace that from a distance he looked like an ancient philosopher or nobleman pondering either kingdom, life or both.

He turned away, the slow turn of anguish stretching his skin, the sand sprays flicking contemptuously into his eyes.  On this barren beach his spectre like visage imbues his existence with a malevolent glow. If he possessed a halo it would be as black as tar and just as viscous.

But look closely, not into his eyes. The eyes are a cliché. If they are windows to the soul then skin is the canvas of life.

Stare at the grooves around his eyes, the puffy eyes, drink or tear sodden. The sag around the cheekbones, lines around a grimacing mouth which once was the source of pleasure.  Is that the smell of alcohol or industrial liquid?

The wind pushes harshly, the sound of cold hell against icy waters.  They crash with pain against slime covered rocks.

Our man watches. It would be uncouth to speak. But uncouthness has defined his life.  Or so we are told. Disgrace comes in many forms and is such a universal experience but it’s only the sufferer who feels it’s sting on such a personal level.  Universality means nothing in the face of shames, it’s personal excoriation reddens both the face and the spirit, no relation with another’s pain can soften its hurt.

He reaches a hand into his pocket.  If this was a Western, surely this would be a handgun, the lack of opposing flesh and bone surely means a duel with the invisible. But no, behold, it’s cigarettes. He manages to light it, spark in the sky. He draws in. He breathes out. He draws in. He breathes out.

He continues his walk. He finds no shells or pebbles or dead fish. He finds the top of an old cricket bat. Empty bags of plastic. No corpses or cadavers.

If you were to turn to his left along him, you would see his home resting above the black brown speckled cliffs. It stands with a solitude which suggests bricks made from melancholy.  He walks back upwards, with a slow rugged gait we associate with either the forlorn or those close to death.  He looks back over his shoulder occasionally, as though contemplating a following apparition.

And the water keeps crashing.

He moved into the house ignoring the smell of ancient debris as he had become used to its sharp odours.  Upstairs, where is bed was, he would climb in and stare at the cracks of the ceiling.  The plaster was peeling heavily, leaving the dust to settle further down onto the ground. Out of the stained blackness of one window he saw the waters further down like some ancient memory which refused to let go.

Their tireless crashing soothed his heart, their tireless crashing cleansed his mind.  The atmosphere was bleak, greyed out, an absence of colour. He walked down to the living room and sat in his seat, his white vest now stained grey.

He pushes his main finger against an old cigarette on his table, crushing the nib until it grounds deep into the table.  With his small finger he makes circular patterns, in round clockwise motions, leaving a trail of swirls, his new artwork joining the rest of the patterned ashes on his desk.

When the sun sets, it casts a sad light across his front room, it bathes everything for a moment, in a fiery glow which lingers spectacularly before fading out.

He had found her on the beach some days before, half dressed, clothes in tags, having been swept in from the crushing tides.  He had gazed at her for some time before bundling her up and taking her indoors. His strength had rendered the task easy and as he walked in to his home, her body swept across his strong but wiry shoulders, he felt like groom bringing in his bride.

She lay naked topless for days on that uneasy bed of his for three days, her mouth sucking in between desperate breaths, a desire for life.  He watched from the side, her long filthy hair, her slim tall body capturing sun rays deep into her flesh.

He watched, the cigarette swirls emanating into the air in swirls of light patterns.

And on the third day she awoke for a brief moment if for anything as though roused by God to taste the world for a moment before slipping back into her purgatory.

He spent days walking up and down the beach again, keeping a mental rescued note on the house above the black rocks.  He picked up pebbles, bringing them back to the home and laying them on the living room floor creating a totem of sorts.  He fried fish caught in small marshes nearby, gutting them and removing the bones.  He tried to feed her, but her mouth wouldn’t open.  It was a soft mouth, sensual even when hidden behind the arc of pain and mud which had come to define her existence.

At night the skies would swirl and he would watch, again from her bedside.  She would stir and he would watch, not doing much but living in what this moment had to bring.

He kept old books on his shelf, about the war, and he would read, the pages falling apart at the seams as he tried to make sense of this human tragedy which the pages could only whisper of.  In that darkened room, with nothing but natural light hidden within he could feel the strange arc of time mingling with the scent of the woman.

In his dreams he saw nothing but the house so his days were as ethereal as the night.

Then the day came when she finally opened her eyes, both delicate, the eyeballs glistening like fish which leap towards the moon. He sat besides her, his hand over her eyes, thinking of stroking the forehead. She stared upwards, until some streams appeared from her eyes, sinking down past her cheeks forming small funnels on either side of the bed. He took his finger letting the tears seep into the end of his main finger, rubbing his thumb against it the same way he rubbed the ashes from the table.

And she closed her great eyes again, satiated temporarily of this world obviously too immense for her to take in.

She would open her eyes increasingly over the next few days, more at a time, each moment lasting longer, a few minutes more than the previous one.

He would watch from next to her, sometimes taking note of the time, sometimes absorbed in the smoke filling the air from his cigarette.  Her clothes seemed like an old muddied uniform falling of her body now, once clung to her light flesh but now peeling slowly away.  He kept watch he sliced an apple and fed it to her, but she spat it out in an angry fit.

And then one night, she arose, like a zombie, back straight whilst legs stretched out in front of her. She cracked her long back in place whilst her hair fell to her sides so she resembled some ancient witch or hag from a fairy-tale. He walked over to her naturally and grabbed her hair from behind, part playfully and part serious, himself unsure of how he wanted to come across. And when she moved her head away, with a look of sensual enjoyment he considered for a moment to enjoy her body before he was moved by the notion that it was inappropriate to do so right now.  Instead, he walked outside, as though the coldness of the waters would cool the sudden fury immolating his loins.

Now it was her turn to watch him, from the safety of the home, staring down into the darkness of the beach. Beneath her once clean vest she felt a hardening of a nipple, slowly swelling with a redness congruent to a swelling in between her legs, and a sudden moistness which couldn’t be mistaken for the oceans sprays.

And when the great moon appeared over the ocean he stared far into the distance unremembering the remembered pain.  Even with this bare-naked eye of his he could see the carved structures on the moon staring down at him through the moonlight and the ether. And it brought upon him another memory of a time gone, a time which tingled his scars, a time which nudged his exquisite pain back to life.

But she, well she remained not as part of any remembrance, but firmly transfixed in what the here and now had to offer. She was an iceberg, she was an accompaniment to the moon, her own chariot in the race of what existence had now to offer her. Being alone with her in this room made him feel admittedly awkward, as though there was no real and valid reason for their beings to have been brought together in such a cataclysmic way.  And the old pain stirred cutting into him once more.  Oh what a broken knife it was which clung to the soul of his skin!

If he could, he would take her body and dance across the room!

To old adagios and compositions, to old polyrhythmically assortments of classical music, let the cello collide with the atoms of existence!

But his cowardice stopped him from doing so.

And then a few days later, there was little need to do anything.

They came, a whole army of men in rags and torches.  Again, it would be cliched to say that their anger burned brighter in their eyes than the torches they carried with them, but as there always has been, a frenzy existed in the mob absent from the individual.  They came whilst they slept at night.  And in true heroic fashion he managed to drag her out to escape the danger, onto the pebbles a hundred yards away from the home.  He returned back, ready to accept his fate.  He let the torches burn the home, touching wood they fizzled at first before regaining its sinister strength.  The fire tore through the home, the faces of the firestarters dancing like black shadows behind the orange red flames.  The men, whose clothes now resembled black and brown rags, yelled through the destruction as though yelling was an accelerant which would cause it to leap to more worldly death.

And the Man burned to a crisp, asphyxiated by the deadly smoke, his fat and nerves melted into the wooden panels beneath layers of stifled screams and muffled sobs.

And she, well she lay outside basking in the glow of the flames staring at the remains of the House near the Black Ocean.

THE END

Short Story – The Mistress of No Man’s land

I was listening to a horror podcast recently where they invited users to call in to talk about strange and real life creepy things which have occurred during times of war when a user called in to tell the supremely eerie tale of an occurrence in a trench during the First World War.  I wrote the following tale, re-imagining what the experience must have been like for the individuals involved.

Its  a brutal tale replete with violence and imagery, so be warned.

It was during the smokeless remains of that morning, it was either a Monday or Tuesday, heaven knows the day when I saw the sun appear through the clouds.  I hadn’t seen the sun in its naked glory for what seemed like a lifetime, instead forced to witness its shadows past the outline of those dark clouds like one sees wisps of steam off the head off a sweltering horse in barn.

I watched for a moment, without a sense of grandeur or melancholy, without passivity or happiness at that desolate ancient blazing emperor in the sky.  Instead – my mind was overcome with thoughts of bones and rotting rats.  I scratched the back of my leg, a coarse wound which refused to close, some of the dead skin caught in my finger nails.

I suckled on its and stared at it like a mother would stare at her newborn. It resembled a broken, fossilised ember, perhaps something one would find on a beach or a darkened hill where sunlight refused to leave its mark from fear.

I could still remember the corpsman face in the crater whilst he tended to my wound.  His face, hidden behind the black filth of the battlefield still possessed a sense of humanity.  A shell exploded 10 yards baptizing us in soil and ground.  We lost seven men that day.  All Seven from Gods Own country, three from the East Riding and the rest from Doncaster and Barnsley.

The Doncaster lad had his face torn clean off, the corpsman who found him swore his face was stuck to the ground like industrial glue.  It took his full strength to yank him back up.  All the while he could sense German snipers scoping the ground, the fear of a bullet touching his spine like an icicle.

“Hun bastards had aims like Christ himself reloaded their bullets.” were his own words.

He told me that he’d found an entire ditch full of limbs, black with thick blood.  “Blood appears quite black in the moonlight you know?”

He’d returned to the trench after this failed rescue covered in sweat.  We took the poor c–t into the underground quarters where our officer questioned him for about twenty minutes.  He came out with a dumbfounded look which bordered on grief, before he sat down and lit a roll up which looked more like an impotent penis than a piss proud cigarette. He stared over the trench and into the sky, wordless, the odd sigh under his breath.

We found the corpsman hung in the sleeping quarters that night.  Suicide, surprisingly, was a rarity out here but I can’t forget the ridiculousness of his face, contorted and irregular like a child pulling a face in the wind.

A few days later I dreamt of gouging my eyes out.  Thankfully I woke up to find them in their right place.

Word came around that we would be going over the top soon an event which came three days later.

We shelled the fuck out of them during the day.  Our trenches shook gently, the soil and dust falling from the parapet to the ground.  I placed my hand on it and watched it vibrate whilst I looked to my left.  A line of solemn men caked in grime.  Emotions were hidden behind an unfathomable exterior.

I had shook like a baby the first time, dry retching the entire morning.  By now my nerves had been shot to bits and remoulded like Adam from clay so I could withstand even the most severe of attacks. The whistle blew and we took our stand.  My legs were shaking frantically as I took the next step and flung my already exhausted body over.

Even in this delirious state I could make my objective – the enemy trench out in the distance over the craters and shells appearing like a dust covered mirage.  I moved forwards, speeding, falling over, getting back up moving at angles, crawling, scavenging and dragging with my fingernails as fast as was feasible.  Around me the whizzing and screams of the battlefield took over with the familiar sounds of men being torn apart about by bullets and bombs.  I cowered beneath a crater as fatigue took over, the initial adrenaline rush wearing off.  The heat of the environment was palpable and I was unable to tell whether it was either the smell of burning or a psychosomatic sensation created under the stress of the situation.

A man jumped into the crater with me, his shocked face pressed hard against the ground as he fired his weapon over the edge.  A shower of blood exploded from his forehead and was thrown hard against my face as though an angry painter had splattered his brush against a canvas.  I moved forwards clamoring over the craters edge.  Most of our lads were pinned to the ground, squirming like dying earthworms shielding themselves against the wind.

We inched our way towards the trench flanking our way past the heavy gun nest which had become the specific cause of our death during this assault.  The soldier pulling the trigger looked like he was from a work of science fiction clad in a strange uniform.  Watching from an angle I could see the panic in his body – his body jerking with every bullet he spat out. Bizarrely, he looked like a child out of place in a man’s world.

Someone had laid down a series of smoke grenades which brought up a collective shield of smoke.  We used it to slip inside the side of the trench, crawling beneath the tightly fixed barbed wire which torn the flesh of back as I pulled myself through.  Moving forwards the cries of its inhabitants screeched through the air.    The Germans were panicking, were leaving their guns, turning their attentions to their sudden invaders.  I was attacked by a soldier and a scuffle ensued, I stabbed him repeatedly in the stomach and sides and at one point my bayonet jammed between his ribs. It took my full energy to pull it out which left me utterly enervated.  I crushed his windpipe with the heel of my boot pushing so hard his eyes almost popped out of his pitiful skull.

Laying on my back I closed my eyes hard for a second listening to the din around me.  I heard the enemies screaming, some for surrender, some even for their mothers. Sitting up, I spat the vomit from my mouth and recovered to take potshots from my rifle at whoever else stood in the trench.   By that time our men had occupied most of the place and were taking a bitter revenge in executing whoever refused to die.  For some, they derived enjoyment from slamming their helmets into their faces whilst for others it was performed with the stoic somberness of men shoveling coal.

Within a few hours the place was ours.  There was little time to wait or sleep as we took turns in digging ourselves in, strangers making home in a strange land.

Trenches were forbidding environments, death traps which I had made my home over the past two years.  As well as being a place of home and sanctuary it was also a place of sudden, violent and awkward death.  The memories of a flamethrower attack from a few months back were seared into my consciousness.  It was indicative of the sheer inhuman degeneration of the huns that they spent human resources in creating the flammenwerfer.   I could remember scurrying away like a panic stricken rat whilst the long tongue of orange fury burned my friends alive.  Their dance of death and songs of pain in the pits of the trench whilst coated in bright orange fire was something I don’t think I can ever forget.  I was in too much shock to cry for the next few days but eventually when my body gave me the courage to do so I blubbered so hard I had to bite my pillow to stop myself from disintegrating into tears.

The following two weeks passed as normal.  We fought two major attacks, one involving mustard gas and the other a regular assault.  A lot of our men were been blinded by the gas attack, I was only saved by my quick reflexes and dexterity in putting my mask on in time.  I tried to sooth the pain of some of those afflicted before we managed to send them back home.  I read the bible to one of them which had a soothing effect on him albeit some days he did nothing but cry until his grime covered bandages were almost disintegrating from the tears.

During the night, where we completed most of our daily soldierly duties of fixing the trench, repairing barbwire and being on watch for enemy attacks, I would slyly pass my time by staring above into the darkness of the sky.  I imagined myself as far as possible from this place and instead travelling through the abyss of the cosmos.  The stars were burning bonfires, places of sanctuary for sailors who lived out there.  It was a fantasy I so desperately to be part of.  I never thought that such a degenerative existence was possible in a world which was meant to be civilized and modern. It felt like yesterday I was walking about town, enjoying the sunlight, watching the automobiles pass before picnicking with friends in sweet smelling parks. I remember the women the most.

We often heard the Germans singing during the night times in their own harsh tones.  Their music, although indecipherable to me, possessed a melancholia and sadness which needed no translation. During those moments I could easily imagine myself comrades with them in their own trench, sharing a cigarette or indulging in fruitless conversations of home and girls who would be waiting for us.  It was ironic that I knew that they were, fundamentally, no different from the rest of us, but I had still taken it upon myself to eradicate them of their existence in the same way they had sworn a national oath of killing me. Alas, as the old stoics and ancients would say “such is life” and I tried not to indulge in too much in the philosophy of life and death.  Having a conscience wasn’t great when you had to pull the trigger.

I slept during the daytime hours, writing my letters home to mother and Evie.  My desire for Evie had been long in the early years, my letters just stopping short of my desire for earthly pleasures.  We all knew all of the letters were intercepted and altered so the full picture of the war wasn’t made available to everyone at home as this certainly wasn’t the marching band and town hall singing version they had believed it would be.  I managed a couple of fumbles down the undergarments behind the curtain of my sleeping post in thoughts of her, cleaning my climax with a clean garment or a sock.

It was exactly eighteen days after taking over the trench when I became witness to the most bizarre occurrence of my life and the purpose of this lengthy account.  It had started, as always occurred during these events like any other day at the front.  I had breakfasted, and “stood to” throughout the day to enemy attacks.  The day passed with little to mention.  It was only as the sun began to set where the first oddity transpired.  There was a smell in the air which seemed entirely out of place.  It appeared and changed in odour over a matter of a few moments.  It started off ammoniac, the sickening odor of fresh eggwhites which had remained too long in a bowl before turning into the smell of burning hair or flesh.  I had turned to O’Brien, a private near me who said he couldn’t smell anything.  It was an odour so unmistakable to me that I was convinced that he was either mad or a liar to not have noticed it.  Although it had disappeared entirely in the space of ten minutes I could have sworn on the bible that it had existed and had a sensory effect on me.

I turned to the rest of my duties for that night, but I could feel an awkward tremble of fear throughout my body which felt unusually novel to me.  I knew the feeling. It was the feeling of foreboding.  I turned to my side, the rest of my men seemed utterly oblivious, as though symptomless of this virus of fear which had infected me.  I tried to calm my nerves by completing my duties methodically which included fixing the barb wire and general repairs in and around my area.

It must have been after One O’clock after midnight when I had taken the watch post.  I stared through the periscope out past no man’s land to witness no enemy movement.  I was there for around half an hour, taking brief breaks to rest my eyes when I became consciously aware of the same smell arriving again.  My stomach churned on instinct, the smell so specifically repulsive that it seemed to tap into a specific nerve in my gastronomical system.  It was then when I caught the swirling of dark materials high in the sky around no man’s land to near the enemies position.  The black swirl melded together, coming closer and closer, a tornado of black gossamer smoke, like candy floss spinning faster and faster together. I stood utterly perplexed as to me this was now visible  without the need of the periscope.

I turned around to the men, but they had all seemed to have disappeared or seemed out of reach.

The black swirls came closer and closer together, forming a gigantic structure, a form whose appearance was lost on me. It was then when it dawned on me to look through the strengthened sight of the periscope. What I saw left my mouth utterly dry.

The blackened swirls had come together to form the image of something which now resembled something describable.  It was an abnormally tall person, a giant if you will and more to the point an anorexic giant in possession of thin almost insectoid legs.  It moved across the battlefield towards the Hun trench with a jerky and stomach churning speed.  Their distressed sounds of fear and panic were now audible.  Their screams were not the screams of anger or focused fury, but of sheer unparalleled terror.  Bullets were fired upon the thing but they seemed to do no harm.  I moved the periscope towards the head of the abomination but it seemed blurry, as though the periscope refused to sharpen its vision at the sight of the image.

I saw it raise its gigantic leg before slamming it down into the enemy emplacement.  It moved methodically along the long trench, attacking the Germans, skewering them with its hideous limbs.  With every lifted leg I could see the body of a dead soldier slowly sliding off, impaled like the limbs torn off by a preying mantis.  By this time my men had become aware of the sounds and had sent a flare up which illuminated the battlefield.

It continued its utter destruction through the entire trench tearing apart it’s resistors with the ease of a schoolboy picking apart a daffodil.  The bullets seemed to disappear into its body, not deflecting but absorbing all the lead the huns could muster.  Its murder spree continued, unabated for another ten to fifteen minutes.  The sounds of human screams drew softer as time went on until there was silence with nothing but the sound of the wind over No Man’s land.

I explained to the watching men of what I could see during the event and one of them even took charge of the periscope and swore to seeing the sight of bodies being picked apart but at the hands of an invisible assailant.  My commanding officer watched with his bare naked eyes the sight of the hideous slaughter, but much like my colleague he couldn’t make out the dark murderess of those poor bastards for whom slaughter was their fate. I say murderess because there was something queasily feminine about its appearance or the effects of its presence on me, even though to the human eye its physicality deemed it sexless.

It was at that point I heard something which I have spent years trying to forget but which I believe will forever remain part of me.  It was the sound of female laughter.  It was, quite specifically the sound of an old lady laughing and laughing maniacally.  There was a strong undercurrent of sarcasm to her voice, perhaps the chilling laughter of one who regularly indulges in schadenfreude.  It lasted a few seconds, but those few seconds have cursed my soul longer than the sound of any shell or bullet ever have.

Again the sound was something oblivious to my men – they heard nothing but the sounds of the dying men.  I couldn’t wait for that night to be over and when it came, I slept the entire following day in a sleep so deep none of the other men could wake me nor could I care if my somnolence leads to martial punishment.

I was transferred from the front before the year’s end having taken shrapnel to my collar bone and arm.

I spent the rest of the war recuperating in an army hospital in Cornwall with other returning soldiers and veterans. We shared our stories at night when the lights went out with only the dark moors outside for company and the moonlight through the windows.  The others had stories of woe and terror but I kept this strange tale to myself, in fear that others deemed me mad which would have resulted in a longer stay in a psychiatric ward.   I would spend as much time as I could outside as the claustrophobia of the hospital would make my skin crawl.  The Cornish countryside possessed an omniscient beauty which I was truly thankful for but the gnarled tree branches outside would send the occasional chill through my body and I would ask the nurse to take me indoors as soon as sunset appeared on the horizon.

Respite would come from visits from my family. Mother and father were understandably upset to see me in the position I was in, but I was eternally grateful for their visits. It was the few moments of warmth I could think of.

I was in one of the large front rooms watching a table tennis games between two former artillery men (one of them an amputee) when I heard of the Wars end. The nurses gave us the news a day after the armistice was signed.  I went back to watching the game as soon as she delivered the “good” news.  For a moment, I had a flashback of the mud and latrines, but I had learned to deal with these unwanted thoughts through counseling and by learning to be in the present.

Life has moved on and I am the father to three girls now. Eve has been a good wife, accepting of her duties and her fate as a woman married to an injured man. We visit the beaches across the country, in the north the summer days are perfect for Bridlington and Scarborough. I try to avoid the dark caverns as their mysteries I find more disturbing than compelling. We make love often and there are few things in life more pleasurable than being in her arms at night.

I thank God for the company of women and daughters; there were no sacrifices from my brood when the world turned to hell again twenty years later.  I was too damaged and over the hill to partake in that.

But it’s that dark phantasm which never leaves me. I tried several times to explain to Evie but my mouth is unable to utter the words and I end the conversation awkwardly.  As the years have gone by I have convinced myself that I was delusional and that it never existed.  I have read some books on medicine afterwards and I am sure it was due to the terrible tension and stress of the battlefield which lead to these dark hallucinations.  Perhaps it was a mixture of the war and my own personal morbid subconscious which lead to the visions.

But, sometimes, when I tuck my girls in at night and turn to say goodbye at the doorway, I see the matted hair of my middle child splayed against the pillow and I am reminded albeit briefly of the tangled body of that infernal thing which stalked that trench all those years ago.

Shrieks of Syria Part III

Epilogue
Dr Mikhail Jackowbski, who had received post- medical doctoral qualifications in Wartime Psychiatric treatment and PTSD research from the University of Pensylvania Had the top secret files scattered across his desk.

“Use of LSD amongst Vietnam soldiers during pre Tet offensive phase” was scattered alongside a document called “Chemical substitutes used by soldiers on Easter Front”

The case he had come across recently was interesting.  An American soldier returning from Syria had complained of terrible visions, of strange animal like behaviour from his colleagues, and of bizarre images of lined up naked deskinned yet still alive.    He was found outside a well, having traversed the inside and had come out, half naked, only his sidearm pistol at hand.  Checks in the well had revealed nothing.  He was gibbering mad, and on approach his fellow soldiers had spoken of his superhuman strength and crazy bodily movements which stopped them from coming any closer.  They managed, somehow to put him back onto a truck and take him to the nearest FOB with advanced medical and psychiatric services.  There had been extensive interviewing of him.  The same usual gibberish as the other soldiers. Flesh like tunnels disappearing into the night, bodies in lines being used as some factory purposes and the eyes which stared at the top of their skulls as though they were searching and probing something hidden from sight.  They had also found a comatose Kurdish soldier in the bottom of the well.  They had dug him out and sent him packing for home, the Kurds having little interest or belief in the benefits of psychiatric treatments over the favoured method of religious devotion and mediation.

What he did know however was drug use in warfare.  LSD had been used in warfare since the end of the Second World War. Although expressing hatred against drugs and alcohol, Hitler had condoned or turned a blind eye to certain mind altering substances to be used by soldiers on the front lines including the horrors of the war enacted against the Soviet Union.   Psychoactive drugs had been used extensively in Vietnam; it was the only way the young soldiers could deal with the world of shit they had been thrown into.  Even the Afghans fighting the Taliban had smoked hashish to get through the war.  There had been amusing tales of soldiers high as kites laughing in the face of bullets being fired in their directions.  Taking the mind elsewhere, either through mental resolve or chemical substitution was the only way one could deal with the hell of warfare.  The army made regular checks but more than the usual amount of drugs were found with the soldiers at the frontline, almost as though they were letting them get away with it.  More disturbingly, he had discovered papers of planned use of LSD in the water supply for the soldiers, the US governments own way of self-medicating troops before they became a strain on the medical system.

LSD had been used in Syria as well, but the outcome had been different. The users had lapsed into extreme paranoia accompanied with medical ailments such as diarrhoea and on some occasion’s suicide.  But chillingly, they had all experienced the same visions and images.  Flesh tunnels, rows of dead bodies, and the strange look in the eyes.  They had tried to explain it as something within Syria.  Dreadful inhumanities raised something in the subconscious which chemical drugs would forcibly bring out. It was a difficult explanation, but what else could be said about this?

Yet as the doctor pondered, such a high level of complete reoccurrence was odd and disturbing to say the least.  Was it possible for so many soldiers to experience the exact same visions?  The flesh tunnels of bodies was what unnerved him the most.  Endless bodies of shredded bodies. What an utterly horrific sight.  He had kissed his crucifix following his first reading on one time, even considering a visit to a priest on another.

He closed the files, shifted his tie to a position of higher sartorial standard and he walked out catching a glimpse of his face in the mirror which for a moment stared back at him with a face of torment worse than the one he had read about in these damned files.

The End  

The Shrieks of Syria – Part II

It was then when the thoughts and dreams began to occur. The desert plains would merge into mysterious forces driving the day and the images became stronger sometimes forming apparitions from the sunlight onto the ground. He would dream, but the dreams were inconsequential. There was something in Syria, in the burnout cars, in the heat and the smell which was a nightmare so profound that human perception would change in order to perpetuate conscience existence without succumbing to insanity. There were always excursions and fire fights, more deaths and more killings. As the fighting dragged in a bloody atavistic remembrance he became his grandfather – a young GI in Vietnam. He had heard of horrors in the jungles there, bloody violence, and savage bloodshed where trees were stained with so much blood that the air would explode with bubbles of putrid bubbles of crimson. There children’s ears were cut off and kept as necklaces, women were raped with broken bottles, and cockroaches the size of fists would chew on decaying bodies but here they didn’t do shit like that. They were the good guys right? This war was clearer wasn’t it? These motherfuckers DESERVED death. But why was he so haunted and more to the point what was that which he saw in the shithole 50 clicks from here?

The fire fights rolled on. One occasion they burst into a crumbling apartment block, catching Asad’s men raping a woman. The man got up , fully aroused still in his hand a look of complete shock before he blew half his face off with his Remington shot gun, the blood sprayed over a framed picture of Mecca on the wall. The woman was sobbing hysterically whilst her son appeared from the kitchen and tried to pull her trousers up to cover her exposed womanhood. He took count, cleared the other rooms with his two men, killing two more fighters in the children play pen before leaving, their blood staining stuffed animals and an old karam board (a chessboard originating in the Indian subcontinent).  He didn’t even know what to say to the sobbing kid and mum, all he remembered were her pained cries as they held each other like arctic explorers huddling to keep warm.

On other occasion his team and he launched an attack on fighters outside a large tenement block on the market high street. They had Navy Seal sniper cover from some distance, some thirty year old veteran who could eviscerate an orange on a barstool from six hundred yards away. Every time he looked up over a burnt out car he could see a .50 cal round tearing the head of a soldier’s body clean off. One guy’s entire arm was cleaved off by a bullet fired by the phantom in a house half a kilometre away. They snaked their way past cars and walls adorned with political murals and additional artwork of brain and exploding bubbles of blood in front of them. He fired off quick squeezes of rounds aiming for the bodies of their targets, the largest mass of meat in a body, before moving forward again and again. He gave directions to his superiors who fed these details back to the sniper team and once the route was clear the phantom sniper disappeared like a reptile in the night leaving him and his team to clear the remainder of the building.

And so forth the days dragged on mini battle after mini battle, war raged in the compounds of the streets and the hot desert around him bodies trampled under his boots as the crumbling of humanity continued in its successful unstoppable decline in front of his eyes, and in the way this torment continued so did the torments in his mind. The daytime horrors became a canvas of Boschlike whisperings which seeped in to his dreams like unwelcome lava melting a children’s nursery. Now he dreamed of orgies of blood and meat in the stars, of roman gods fucking and killing in the atmosphere. He dreamed of children smashing their heads against each other outside mosques, he dreamt of millions of animals being raped by men with beards, laughing and gurgling, gurgling and crying. He dreamt until he pulled his hair and eyes out to stop this, all the whole dreaming he was doing this in real life. He would awake in a sweat so deep an outsider would think he had gone for a swim fully clothed.

And one day he dreamt of the most nefarious, mind boggling echoing cry of a man trapped in a stinking room somewhere, but it was a scream too real to be a dream and when his realised his eyes were open and the ceiling of his tent was staring back he came to the shocking realisation that it was very real.  He grabbed his modified M4 Assault Rifle and ran to the makeshift toilet area where he could hear the scream. Outside stood an Arab soldier, a look of sheet white terror in his face and when he entered with his gun drawn he saw quite a sight.  It was Rico, hanging by the neck from the ceiling from the strand of his own gun, his eyes upturned to some distant place above him and his tongue unnaturally long hanging out. His face was an image of haunted youth whilst beneath a whitish pool of bodily functions.
His heart stopped in his mouth and he realised that he shirt and face was drenched in sweat.

“Call the CO” he mustered to the Arab who had made the discovery who in turn responded with nothing but the blankness of a man so paralysed with fear his body was refusing to respond.

“Call the fucking CO now!” He mustered more courage before the Arab shuffled out before picking up his pace on the cold desert floor.

Rico had been delirious since the discovery in the farm and he couldn’t operate in the same capacity any more. He had started seeing the same visitors, men women and children besides themselves, locked in some strange demonic rapture, their eyes staring upwards. He’d began whispering to himself during dinner time, crouched over his food like small boy protecting his marbles, about Jesus and the whore of Babylon according to his tent mates. There were also occasions where he would do nothing and sit in his tent and stare in the corner in silence for hours on end.  His final decision here was simply the endgame of a lengthy descent into the abyss, an abyss blacker than anything they could muster.

The days continued and he became more irritated with time and space itself. He would experience delusions as before, wandering camels on the desert, silhouettes of strange beasts which would come and disappear as quickly as could be imagined.  Soon like abuse memories from childhood, it became second nature to him; it was something to be accepted and infiltrated the fabric of his life like the smell coming from a broken toilet in a plush restaurant. At night he tried to stay awake as long as he could, but they would always capture him, bullying him into petty submission, rendering him incapable of getting a strong grip over his wellbeing again. Then darker thoughts came through, dark and bestial, an itch in the side of his hard which could only be scratched with the barrel of his Remington. But that was the coward’s way out, and if there was one principle he had lived his life by it was to extinguish all notions of cowardice from existence. From the first punch he threw at the fat bully who had called his sister a wheelchair bound freak to arguing with the bank teller for his mother’s welfare check when they refused to process it, cowardice was a word not in his dictionary.

He kept a pendant of loved ones too – his girlfriend and curiously his father too. His father had taught him how to fire a gun. The first shotgun he had was given to him as a 13 year old boy in his farmstead in Wyoming where would stay with his dad for a while away from the beaches of California he had grown up on.  The first time he picked it up he was amazed at how light it was. It was a lightness which betrayed its savage power, one pull of a trigger could shatter a wooden frame or a melon in half a second. The recoil had jutted his shoulder all the way back harshly, leaving it sore. Subsequent shots injured it more. Since then it had become his favourite weapon, something he would never leave base without, a close quarter’s weapon of war with a bludgeoning power so primal it was like a gift of violence taken straight from the days where man experienced a revolting satisfaction at smashing a goats head with a rock.

Sometimes the Arab rapists head would replay in his mind – his bizarre look of complete shock, the disintegration of his face, he blood everywhere in the room. But in there horrible dreams he saw him again but this time staring again, his face hideously dismantled but still in possession of two equally hideous eyes.  Once again they were eyes staring at something, something hidden from everyday sight, staring from the tops of the eye socket straining to see with the intensity of a dog at the end of its leash.
He felt a strange rumble in his bones that particular day. He felt the chills in his body, rattling from his head to his toes as he packed his gear, Kevlar vest, assault rifle and shotgun.  There was something ungodly about this day.  A sense of ungodliness which scented the future day’s events.  Intuition was a funny thing. You delved too much into it and you risked the rational part of your brain, leave it to one side however and you lost a part of your humanity. There was darkness in the day ahead greater than the lackadaisical manner in which his superior had discussed it in the briefing. Again, an outpost to the East, again more ISIS fighters defending a strategic place of importance, this time a well which provided fresh supplies of water to the surrounding men. They would be dropped in half a click to its West before breaking up into smaller groups to launch their attacks.

His heart and mouth were filling with anxiety as the chopper landed in the right destination. Again at night, Night vision goggles and weapons were prepped. Habib was again part of his smaller teams, he was with an Afro American called Lance and a white guy from the Midwest, both in their early twenties and both looked reasonable.

The stench as was the same in the farm yard appeared again through the wind. It was like a gust of wind from hell, a strong shit smell which was ominous to say the least. He glanced around to Habib. There was a look of strange anxiety in his eyes too. Normally the Kurds were brave and never showed any dead, sometimes laughing into battle. For them life was an endless battle of life and death, all warfare was to be an acceptable part of the experience. But now he looked like a brave child terror struck by the sea.

The closer they moved to the farmhouse the smell of shit became more and more overpowering. Suddenly, the other teams began opening fire. Tracer bullets came rushing through random dark places dotted around the farm towards it.  There was yelling and screaming before a rocket launcher came flying from the roof of the house towards these pockets.

He picked up his night vision single handed scope to see the enemies. A rocket launcher team on the roof, a machine gun post in the window below now firing indiscriminately in an arc of 90 degrees, an area he was not within and stragglers in the back. There were most likely other men inside. He moved in towards the side, his men covering the machine gunner from the side and he called Habib to follow him in whilst the other two would draw fire towards themselves. They both leapt in the side window and dealt with two fighters in the back, the assault rifle bullets tearing through them until they crashed backside first into dusty old bookshelves. He moved forwards to take out the machine gunner – a shotgun round smashed his back which sent splinters of pellets tearing through the front of his chest until he slumped forwards, over his gun like a broke doll on a quarry pit. Second team moved in and took care of the rocket launchers at the top with flashbangs and rifles.  They dragged their bodies to the front of the farm, taking their weapons and dumping them to the side.

That dreadful smell was overpowering now. It came from the back in the garden. He moved out with Habib, and he removed his goggles for a moment. Habib was sweating, the sweat pouring down the front of his face and he now looked delirious.

“Sir …. We must go… There is something here…. Something unexplainable here”

“What the fuck do you mean?” He was almost in a whisper.
“I don’t know.  Try to understand me….”
And in that moment the change came across again. His eyes turned white, and his breathing became intense. He doubled up to the ground, scraping whose finger nails into the dust.  He stared up towards the direction of the well sweat pouring down him like streams down the side of a waterfall.

The Kurd ran towards the well on all fours like a rabid dog, completely besides himself and he jumped straight in.

He followed behind him and peered down the well. It was here where time seemed to stop for him. The inside of the well was no well. Like the inside of some animal sphincter its insides was all muscle and tissue vibrating and moving like the medical probing of a throat or orifice. It pulsated and moved, like the images he had seen on television once of the gaseous clouds of Jupiter on fast forward.  He peered straight down into the blackness.  The Kurd had gone, disappeared from sight swallowed up completely by whatever hell this was.

The voices and the images kept hammering home into his head and now that he was near the apex of the abyss they began to scream and yell horrifically within his mind.  There was a final grip now, he was caught in a world beyond his imaginings.  He crawled over the side and began to traverse down the inside.  His hand caught each crevice of the wall and climbed down.  The sensation on his hands was repulsive.  Each time he placed his hand against the flesh wall his hand seemed to sink in a little.   It puckered his hands like giant lips, soft wet and gooey but not strong enough to damage or pull off his hands.  Reverberations seeped through the flesh wall, all the way down to the base of the orifice and it was half way down this ad hoc abseil when the truly horrific chanting began to take place.

A continuous large series of screams, followed by cries of laughter. The laughter was hysterical, like a hundred intoxicated children giggling in a nursery which merged suddenly into the unmistakable sounds of people grieving at a funeral.  It was beyond all comprehension and paralysis inducing.  However, here he had a job to do.  He mustered his courage and continued his descent downwards.  He was reaching the pit of the hole and jumped the remainder of the distance onto thankfully solid ground.

On hitting the ground the full extent of this problem became apparent to him. He entered a tunnel in front of him. It was here he was faced with a sight terrible beyond all human comprehension. Two long rows of bodies, like two lengthy bookshelves in an old library facing each other, the flesh and skin removed revealing their pumping organs beneath, all Syrian many women and children. He walked sickened and transfixed whilst an undercurrent of melancholia seeped through the air as he turned from side to side to witness them. Like a large mechanical automaton of flesh and bone these lines of meat were working in tandem towards some hidden purpose. There was no converter belt which they workers, no further intimate linking of wires towards some electronic equipment. Simply two long rows of humans hanging like carcasses in a butchers shop. The floor was stone and he walked onwards, his direction taking a natural life of its own as he walked into the distance in front until the Kurd, topless and serious appeared in front of him.

“In our times of torment we bowed to his will, and now we now deeper with every sacrifice of flesh made” his eyes were staring towards some place above as Rico had done, as the Arab had done, as all of the goddamned people he had seen in this shit for soul country had done.

“Who are you?” came his only response

“How can you not know? Are you a child?”

“What the fuck are you?”

He stood transfixed, until a terrible pain began to course through his body.  His limbs began to tear from his body, his arms and then his legs and soon his body was floating on streams of light.  There was no gushing of gallons of blood, nor terrible flesh like growth coming out.  Simply light. The bodies around him, those lines of complete horror remained, churning away until the darkness behind appeared from the darkness to reveal that same flesh like tissue he had witnessed in his crawl down the well.  He was soon surrounded in a cavern of complete brutal flesh, crying out as hard as he could, his arms disintegrating from his body, his tongue disintegrating from his mouth until no more screams could possibly be heard. And the Kurd stood, staring. Like some maniacal statue built from a Roman era of pain his eyes remained rigid in the direction which they faced, again at some invisible terror in the corner of the room staring upwards.

And behind this strange setting of flesh and blood, like symphony of death came the continuous crying and howling, crying and howling crying and then laughter of the long lines of pain which had lead him to his strange demise…

The Shrieks of Syria – Part I

This is the first part of war story, please take note of the below disclaimer.  Inspiration was taken from war stories I heard from soldiers fighting in the Middle East and from horror fiction.

CAUTION: the following story contains graphic descriptions of modern warfare and other scenes which some may find disturbing or offensive.

He’d been in Syria for four months before he began having the visions. They appeared at night and moments of darkness during the day, subliminal frames of untold horror which would flash and disappear. Soon the flashes increased in time and became like mental brands on cattle which lasted longer. It was of gaunt faces, staring upwards, screaming and laughing at the sky. Some frozen and drooling, staring at right angles, completely lean, their eyes sunk into upper cheek bones which resembled the peaks of valleys more than bodies.

They didn’t chill him much before. Why would they? In a world of massacres they were just images, haunting nonetheless but meaningless when compared to the millions of deaths he had seen around him. Children with broken backs lying on the floor, covered in ash and smoke littering the streets, their raped mothers next to them, broken bodies barely able to contain their life force. Their headscarves torn off at right angles and with some with blood running between their legs. He’s seen a hospital bombed by the Russians blown to smithereens – glass and brick scatters everywhere.  A woman and her new-born daughter, her umbilical cord still attached lay next to the wheel of a car a little boys arm next to a falafel store and torn shreds of clothes scattered everywhere.  Onetime, bizarrely he had found a torn pack of playing cards, a small piece lodged on top of a half-dressed girl with a monstrous cut across her forehead. Dead of course.

It would be a cliché to say this was Hell. Even Hell had different circles, the usurers and the warmongers occupied a certain level, with the grand master in the centre drooling and crying in isolation with only Judas for company. Here Hell appeared everywhere, all nine circles submerged into one, where the rapists shared beds with the murderers, where the thiefs slept with the heretics. Syria was all nine circles forced together like God himself had taken Hell and smashed it against the throne of his hallways like a child shattering a board game it simply couldn’t understand against his cot.

He’d seen action on his first day in Aleppo. ISIS fighters had a township 60 clicks to the East and were running it as a smaller base of operations. According to Intelligence there were rocket launchers and a small band of sub machine guns stashed in the same place. They would attack 1 hour before dawn, the enemy being wholly unprepared for the onslaught. They always got up before dawn for their morning prayers, usually 30 minutes beforehand. Many didn’t however – they were too lazy to fulfill their Islamic duties but liked to give the impression that they were.

They had a chopper on standby and the drive to the hard point was generally uneventful. They rode their trucks with a Kurdish solder Habib in the front seat. He’s woken up to see him reading the Koran at base on the day of this attack and had left him unbothered in his tent. He’s checked his assault rifle and grenades before and his spare water can and entered the truck. The mood was of fear balanced on a weak seesaw of optimism. Each soldier carried his own demons, usually hidden beneath a cold, expressionless facade.  The last thing you could ever want in this situation would be to a painitng of naked human frailty.  Here everything depended on appearances.  If you appeared weak and scared, there would be no confidence in your capabilities as a soldier.  And the interesting thing about weakness was that it was infectious.  Weakness caused panic, and panic spread quicker than a mutated dose of gonorrhoea.

Yellow light was streamed across the horizon as they approached the base. All in all the attack took 13 minutes excluding the pre check scouting. They moved in quick behind walls before the enemy opened fire on them. Night vision goggles helped as they fired in the compound. By the end he had 4 confirmed kills. The first guy he took out using his laser sight behind the wall and the second he wasn’t quite even sure. On closer inspection after the dust had settled the first guy had been shot in his head and some brain had landed somehow into his beard. The second guy, and this was more interesting, lay in the compound with his entire left leg missing and a massive blood loss near it. On closer inspection he was still moving in slow motion like a dying ant whose legs had been torn off and was now preparing begrudgingly for the afterlife.

His gaunt bearded face was in shock and his eyes wide open as he stared into the ceiling wanted to tell him something, his chest heaved spasmodically between every intake of spluttering, dying breath.  The Kurd told him to finish him, or he would do it himself. He picked up his M4 and fired two in his chest and one in the head before they took relevant intel from damaged laptops and headed back to base.

There were Korans in the base including other documents. They had explicit instructions not to deface or touch the Korans. Only the Muslim Kurds could do this in order to avoid a PR nightmare. “US soldiers caught destroying Korans in ISIS attacks” were the last thing the US government wanted to deal with in already what was a war which had already been filed in the cabinet named “Hellish war experience which don’t fucking end”.

It was on another combat mission where he had witnessed something which had terrified him and left a mark on his spiritual conscience.

On a compound further out than this, they had attacked a farming outpost where goats were kept. On killing all of the fighters within the compound and after dragging their bodies out to safer places in the front courtyard he noticed there was a dreadful smell emanating from the large wooden shed in the back. Death had been all around them in Syria since they had first come, but the smell from here was like something from the latrines of hell itself. He’s taken point with a 21 year old Puerto Rican – along with the Kurd followed them at the end.  They entered the shed and down stairs which lead into the granary basement below.

He turned to see the Puerto Rican, Rico something, with sweat pouring down his face.

“Sir, we can wait for the rest before we check this out” he spoke, trying to hide his rational fears.

“Just follow me Rico, we have to check it out. There could be more targets down there”

They moved down the stairs slowly, the Kurd at the back. The stench became worse with each step, yet their guns were firmly on point, expecting anything to happen. They walked down until they took a right in to the cellar. What they saw left the Kurd muttering nonsensically under his breath, whilst Rico’s breathing became almost an obstacle to hearing.

On the wall above a table with farming equipment was a woman’s head in hijab nailed against the wall. Outstretched beneath where her arms should be were the two arms of a soldier, nailed horizontally and in the middle where her body should have been was the body of a goat.

“What the actual fuck?” He said louder than expected. Rico read the Lord’s Prayer behind him whilst the Kurd rambled in his Arabic language.   As predicted, back up had arrived as quickly as they had thought. They left with the convoy, never to speak about this again…

Short Story – The House of Laughter – Part III

The final (and short) part of the short story “The House of Laughter”.

Previous two parts can be found here –

Part I – https://rojaslionas.wordpress.com/2017/01/05/short-story-the-house-of-laughter-part-I

Part II – https://rojaslionas.wordpress.com/2017/01/07/short-story-the-house-of-laughter-part-II

It’s been two months since that hideous encounter.  I have blocked out everything, the door has been nailed shut, the windows boarded up and so have the pipes.  There is nothing which can enter.  I use the corner of the room as my toilet so the smell is hideous.  I left in the dead of night two weeks ago to Stephens home store where I broke in and stole some Vicks and room spray.

The Tall Woman sees me wherever I go, I can feel her prickly hands against my skin.  I know that I cannot go on for long like this so I have my one close friend nearby, my revolver with two bullets.

The past few weeks have been a drunken mess Jack Daniels my other friend.  At night I stare at a space between my wooden panels which I haven’t boarded up and laugh out loud.  I know it may sound maniacal to some but it is all I have left.  I will laugh in the face of the woman when she comes.  I will show her what true courage means.

I feel something wet against the seat and trousers.  I have soiled myself. My sense of shame left some time ago.  Crackle with laughter boy! Theres no shame in dying alone! It’s how we were born, hungry and wet and here my end is no different to millions of others!

My door handle is turning now, I can hear something scratching from outside trying to come in!  I raise my revolver.

The sound has disappeared.  It’s been like this for weeks, the sound comes and goes……

The old lady haunts me too, so does her grandchildren.  What a terrible life! Such sorrow, I saw kindness in her eyes, a glimmer of something good, but the world is a wretched place, the cosmos laughs and stabs and spits at us.

Scratching sound again.  It will go soon.

The Tall woman will never get me, she will feast on my bones before she ever gets me

The sound continues, why hasn’t it left.  Its louder, louder… the sound has gone.

What is that between the panels? Oh god it’s the roots, she is here…

The red eyes, the smile.  My revolver is loaded….

I will stand and laugh.

Stand and laugh

Stand and laugh!

 

 

Short story – The House of Laughter – Part II

The second part of the story I had posted a couple of days back.

Here is the link for Part I or it can be found in the short story section in the top right hand corner menu:

https://rojaslionas.wordpress.com/2017/01/05/short-story-the-house-of-laughter-part-i

Through the enveloping darkness a keyhole appeared in front of me.  The closer I travelled the more it altered.  It soon turned into walls, walls into a roof, and soon enough it became the place of residence I had travelled so long to get to.

From the outside the home was normal for these areas, strong with wooden posts and banisters holding up a roof which looked like had survived many battering over relentless seasons.

It was the back drop of the empty fields which from this distance looked like a dark and stagnant pond.  There were vast fields there, again largely empty of life notwithstanding a few emaciated cows which looked in the direction of my coming car like refugees staring at food trucks.  One of them seemed to have a sliver of tears running down its left cheek.

Along with back of the field stood a large row of trees, their appearance gave the impression that they were on guard.  I couldn’t tell if they were protecting me from something or the home from something else.

There was a swirl of indescribable air above them; a diaphanous crown of thorns.  They twisted in and out of the branches quite majestically if truth be told.  I stood outside observing for a moment before I made my way to the door.

I knocked and I heard the slow rambling movement of an elderly lady.  It opened up and I was face to face with the old lady I had travelled so many miles to meet.

Her entire appearance was a testament to grief.   The face, and body for that matter, were skeletal thing her high cheek bones pointing out hard to the world like a pair of guillotine blocks.  Her eyes were large and set wide apart on her face, a grisly appearance which indicated some sort of inbreeding.  The rest of her face was non-descript notwithstanding her upturned top lips which seemed like a pathetic former remembrance to snarling arrogance.

I greeted her and she stood at the doorway for a few seconds.  Peering behind her I made out the nondescript hallway, save a few pictures on the walls.

A sense of emptiness pervaded through that corridor, as though walking through it was like walking through a passage of time defined by torment.  A cold finger touched the base of my spine, the vibrations radiating upwards as the corridor became a hideously elongated thing, as though its design had been formulated by an architect hell bent on ruining my perception of place and time.  We walked slowly to the kitchen.

One of the pictures on the wall was of a young man and woman – an old black and white photo of a couple in wedding outfits.  The man, quite obviously from appearance, was the elderly ladies son and was in possession of a blank and vacant stare which at the time I put down to the usual stare one would have had when confronted by an unfamiliar photographer.  The more I stared at it though the more penetrative the stare became and I suddenly became aware of  many invisible eyes dotted around the wall, watching me with less than amiable intent.

I was lead to the sitting room where our conversation began to take place.

I asked her a few questions about her son on the night of the event.  Her face seemed distant when I questioned her, preoccupied by some invisible image or force through the window above the kitchen sink.

She took me into front living room where I was seated in a tall leather seat.  The room was sparsely furnished, again old photos on the wall, a bookshelf and an old coffee table. A television set which had the appearance of something which should have been discarded a long, long time ago.

I began questioning her about the husband and she responded with an honest account as possible, her voice raspy but quivering appropriately humane tones, tones which her appearance suggested she was incapable of feeling.  Again, her eyes possessed a deep vacant look, as she stared deeply into the distance somewhere, the same eyes I had seen on pictures of recovering soldiers from war.

“He was a good son. He always helped me and his dad in his shop. He was calm and had no desire to fight or for belligerence with anybody.   The changes in the last year. No one could understand it. It was like something had infected his brain, an injury… or something”

She took the water from the table and sipped, trickles falling down her chin where a few twisty hairs sprouted like gnarled chicken wire.

“It was the visions at first.  He would walk out to the back far into the fields. Sitting, cross legged under moonlight staring up at the sky. Motionless.  His wife swore she once found him found him, eyes rolled back just the whites of them showing. She said had found him another time and she swore his head had been twisted all the way round facing backwards so he could see her walking behind him.  “She stopped again during this point.”  The air in the room changed, the humidity of the room altering as though an invisible iceberg had entered.  The mother turned to her side and there I saw a sight which made my stomach churn.

There were two boys standing – quite obviously the man’s sons.  It was their physical appearances which had invoked such a strong reaction from myself.  They were both strangely tall and in possession of heads somewhat oval in shape, as though stretched out from either end. This feature was rendered normal when compared to what adorned the tops of their heads which stood out like unwanted accursed crowns.  It was a crown of deep scars, like deep fissures found on the moon’s surface; the remnants of some terrible injury suffered recently.
The mother looked back towards the wall and began to recount the next part of her tale

His behaviour had worsened overtime and he had become a blubbering laughing wreck at home. One night his wife, accustomed to these occurrences came to him in a particular desperation, trying to source the cause of his behaviour.  He was seated in the very seat I was in right now.  Instead, he chased her outside with an axe through the fields and when he found her, pinned her to the ground and proceeded to butcher her.  The coroner admitted to having winced and crossed himself frequently at the sight of the body on the cold slab of the mortuary table.  He described her as looking as though she had been mauled by a pack of wolves.  He had refused that a human being could have been capable of such mindless savagery.

After the killing he had dragged her remains, arms torso and head back to the home and began attacking his children. They had barricaded themselves in the store room but his chopping blade managed to tear through the door and buried themselves into their heads, by some stroke of god given luck it was not enough to take their lives.  They had informed the authorities before when the father had run outside, and they had appeared just as the father’s exertions were leading him to enter the storeroom in a matter of a few seconds.  The officer who had shot him professed to seeing a man babbling endlessly, speaking in tongues, an endless stream of curses against the Tall Woman.

“It was the Tall woman. He kept saying it was the tall woman who made him do it. It was the same woman he said he could feel whenever he worked the fields back there near the trees. He would blab around her in the house in his catatonic states, spit dribbling down his chin and face. The Tall Woman. Satan had made him his own” she turned around to the two sons who stood absolutely motionless next to the doorway. Their expressionless faces invited a bizarre intrigue. I looked to the one on the left and saw a thin veil of drool hanging from beneath his lip.

She stood suddenly her body frozen, staring once again at some crack in the wall.   After a few moments of pensive thought she turned to face me – “time for dinner”.

We dined in silence in the dining room together. It was a meal of warm soup with bread, a meal I had to admit was tastier than what I had previously thought would be.   I watched the two sons eat like mechanical manikins, consuming the soup with rhythm which suggested they were moving to the sound of  an instrument silent to the rest of us.  The scars on their foreheads moved irregularly to the clamping of their mouth muscles, flexing gruesomely like twisting fish writing outside of water.  One of them – the elder one – jerked his head in my direction suddenly, prompting an equally quick look away from me.  For a moment I felt terror under the arc of his penetrating gaze.  His senses seemed heightened and he stared at me for an uncomfortable amount of time taking, what seemed like, a certain sadistic joy in seeing me squirm.

After the meal I was lead upstairs to my spartan bedroom where I quickly retired for sleep.  The day’s events had crept up on me and drained me of energy, I was now a hostage to fatigue.  Visiting the bathroom I stared deep into the mirror.  I saw all of the features of a man, eyes, ears, mouth and nose but the longer I stared the more I was convinced that they belonged to someone else.  The room suddenly seemed smaller to me as though it was folding in wards attempting to catch me in the centre – the architect was toying with my life. I gripped the sink and stared deeper, my eyes so focussed that I began to see right through the physical image staring back.  I shut my eyes tight and opened them up and the claustrophobia disappeared like a burrowing rodent hiding temporarily from sight.

I got into my bed and closed my eyes.

I wish I had never closed my eyes at all.

The trees were enveloping me from behind as I tried to escape that blasted field. My physical capabilities were shot to bits.  I turned around and the treeline became a blur of images joined together, nothing made any sense.  I collapsed on the ground, sinking into the thick mud my arms and legs slowly seeping in.  The darkness of the clouds around the tops of the trees appeared over me – a crowd of bloodthirsty onlookers.

I turned around and it was then I felt a cold stab of ice pierce through my chest.

Against the trees I saw her.

I saw the tall silhouette of a creature so singularly horrific that every inch of my skin became a mass of writhing insects.  The thing blurred in and out altering size and shape turning from the long and elastic to the short and stub like, altering and changing in ways my senses couldn’t accept.  I was aghast at this despicable sight.  My insides began an insidious change as though my blood was congealing from fright an internal visceral response to the horror.  My heart race reached epic proportions.

I got up and tried to leave but the hideous jerkiness of the creature meant it moved forwards with unnatural speed, I was its target and from its movements I was convinced it would stop at nothing until I was within its grasp.

I cried out for help, but my voice was swallowed up by that great swirls of rotten, terrible clouds above me.

The thing jerked behind me again, now a mere matter of a few feet away from me I could see its mangled root like hands appearing from beneath its dark cloak.

I could sense the dream world beginning to fade, the sight of the wooden ceiling above me, the doors walls and flooring merging with the black green mud and grass of the fields.  The bed was beneath me, the sheets covered in damp fresh sweat.  I opened up my eyes fully, my mouth dry and begging for water.

It seemed as though the nightmare of that world hadn’t left me as I could make out three figures standing in the doorway staring at me with the somewhat sad inquisitive look of people watching an execution. It was the old woman and her two disabled grandchildren.  The hideous scars and drooling saliva apparent even through the darkness of the room.

“She sees you” came her voice, cracked and punctured like an old horse fed up with the world.

I jolted out of the bed, the much needed adrenaline of anxiety firing my body with energy, I grabbed my things and rushed past them.  They parted way showing a minor resistance to my departure.  As I reached the ground floor, I turned back upstairs to see them staring down at me, frozen in time, as though all they had ever done was stand and stare.  Bent double, as though galaxies worth of grief rested on their shoulders, humans privy to a horror so devastating there was no more room for any other emotion, misery writ large.  I felt nothing but pity in that moment, an intense sadness filled me at what their lives had become.

And creeping behind them, from the shadows of the bedroom I saw something which terrifies me to this day.  It was the hands of the tall woman appearing from the darkness, old mangled and like roots from those infernal trees resting on their shoulders and where the head naturally was, but invisible in the darkness, I sensed an equally malevolent smile.

I turned towards the door and ran to my automobile outside, the blackness of the skies a gentle respite from the swirling madness I had witnessed moments earlier and began to drive with absolutely no direction in mind.