PARIAH AND OTHER STORIES
Sixteen stories of the strange and disturbing, ghostly tales of tanks, cellars and haunted graveyards, accounts of houses best left unvisited and people destined for terrible fates.
And Where Will She Go and What Shall She Do?
So, we like to go to graveyards at night and get drunk, do a bit of drugs, play with a Ouija board on a grave, party a little, try to summon ghosts, talk about death and think about dying, discuss demonic possession and generally flaunt our youth, vitality and desirability to the resident dead. The more isolated and darker and haunted the place the better.
A Fine Cellar
It had been a most satisfactory dinner. Followed by stimulating conversation with my friend and host and a little tasting of wine. He kept a good cellar, did Jules Fanshawe. A fine cellar in fact.
Self Isolation
“That one says ‘Go back where you came from!’ Are you sure we ought to stay on this road?
Mark steered around the clumsily-painted sign set in the middle of the lane. It wasn’t the first they had passed. “It’s probably old,” he told her, “Left over from lockdown. It’s nothing.”
Pariah
Inches from his head shrapnel lashed the metal like storm-swept rain stinging the rattling windows of childhood memory, but inside the tank all was warmth, cigarette smoke and the muggy condensation of hours of exhaled breath. The five of them had been sitting there, locked down, for half a day: cooking, eating, smoking, sweating, sleeping, peeing in an empty shellcase when they needed to, and throwing it out in lulls between bombardments.
Sally's in the Well
The unmistakeable scent of elderflower.
Unmissable too, even here, where the fields are bordered by a dry streambed peppered with reeking wild garlic – just as it is to the eye, normally lost in the jumble of nettles, brambles, cow parsley and hawthorn, but suddenly leaping out, its shiningly white heads of blossom everywhere lighting the hedgerows like a thousand vivid splashes of paint.
The Whither Man
“Sir? I’m sorry to bother you. I know it’s late and you’re busy, only…” For a second he looked like he’d back out of even the few inches he’d ventured into the Deputy Chief Constable’s office, but then he blurted it out. “…I think something bad has happened to one of our policemen.”
We the People
The door screams with rust and age. I stop trying to open it and put my ear to the gap, ready to flee deep into the earth if anyone has heard. But the only sound is mice scampering between the rails. It’s best not to think about the fact that they will probably supply my next meal.
Field Trip
This is me and Karl in our teens, at college in 1979.
And this is us last year.
Not so different, even after twenty years. I don’t know what we’ll look like in another two decades; completely middle aged, I suppose. Perhaps we’ll have travelled the axis from cynical idealists to idealistic cynics.
Visiting Hours
There’s something about a hospital at night.
The ambulance crawls through the dense, yellow-tinged fog. There is no traffic, but occasionally it stops and rings its bell all the same, as a warning to any pedestrian unlucky enough to have to be out on a Sunday evening as filthy as this one. Even now, a year after the Clean Air Act, London’s sulphurous smog remains; the atmosphere unable to spit out 200 hundred years’ worth of coal fires and factory chimneys.
Identity Crisis
Dale Toombes, Waffen SS sturmgrenadier, Iron Cross, first class.
Saturdays and Sundays only.
Dale Toombes. Member of Gruppe Totenkopf, Southern England-based battle re-enactment group. One of twelve like-minded males who enjoy dressing up as warriors of the master race every weekend.
Dale is five foot eight inches tall.
Dale is, shall we say, not hugely blessed in the pants department.
Stone, Paper, Scissors
Rowena was thinking about changing her name. What about Angharad, she wondered? Did that convey a flame-haired Titianesque spirit of otherness?
Or how about Maya: dark and mysterious, silently knowing of the secrets of lost races?
Hidden Depths
Curate Bartholomew Auberon was considered a fine fellow. Robust in body and views. Ambitious. Tall, well-limbed, finely bewhiskered, in voice orotund, in age somewhere around thirty years.
A capable horseman, he discomforted no one by attempting to ride to hounds. Handy with a gun, he sought no invitation to one of Lord Boniface’s shoots. His Lordship’s guests were free to enjoy the stirrup cup and hipflask without the jollity-dampening sight of a dog collar among them.
Horror the Haunted
The gleamingly black luxury four wheel drive with the smoked windows stops fifty yards from the station. The car is huge, made bigger by its eye-catchingly safari style additions with their whiff of danger and treading where others dare not: the roof platform with ladder and extendible awning, the spotlights, jerricans (in matching gloss black paintjob) and spare all-terrain tyres.
A Face In Wax
Stories attach themselves to ruined houses, but in the case of Hythehope Hall they did not need to. The facts themselves were too terrible to leave room for invention.
Tree Bourne
So, we’re goths. We love a good tree almost as much as we love a good graveyard.
This one’s a delight, a thousand-year-old yew in a churchyard that’s equally old and gnarled: stone and bark together, weathered, greened and lichened by a millennium or more of history. Simply beautiful.
Black Shadow
There have only ever been two motorcycles made for gentlemen: Brough Superiors and Vincents. Two marques which produced visions of perfection. Symphonies of steel and speed, elegance and engineering.
In the 1920s and 30s you could buy a good sports car for less than a handmade Brough, would cost you. TE Lawrence had eight in a row and died on one. Probably happily.
Then, in 1948, lightning struck twice. In tired, bankrupt, everything-rationed Britain another work of art was born, the Vincent Black Shadow. It was the world’s finest and fastest production motorcycle. The most beautiful, too.
And my mate Alex had to have one.