Tempus Fugit (997 words)

Before he finished the first circuit Terry’s hip was grinding with pain.  He had reached the far corner of the athletic ground, where the bushes grew densely below the railway embankment.  Then he heard a sigh; smelled a brief waft of something sweet.

Young’uns, smoking dope, probably feeling each other up.  Plenty of them around, kicking a ball about, showing off for a girlfriend on the sidelines.  Girls playing these days, too; he tried not to be obvious about looking.  A pretty arse could still brighten his day, but he didn’t fancy being beaten up for it.  

He wasn’t, refused to be, some Daily Mail knee-jerk old fool who thought all the young were villains; but he did get angry at the ones who just seemed to hang around, looking threatening, wasting time that they’d never have again.

On the second circuit he caught the scent again. He slowed without realising.  A throat-catching sweetness that made him think of religion, or mystery.  He wondered where that had come from.  He wasn’t even a lapsed Catholic; wouldn’t know what church incense smelled like if he sat on a censer. 

Sometimes he wished he was religious.  It had been a rotten week; an old friend had gone into a nursing home.  Terry was working up the courage for a visit, dreading the smell of baby powder over pee and the bemused and whimpering occupants. 

The third time around, he caught the same scent, and a sound; maybe a sob. 

This time, he stopped, pressing his hand to his hip, half-glad of the excuse.  “Who’s there?  Who’s messing about back there?” 

Whispers.  His spine chilled, but he walked forward into the green darkness, cursing himself for an old fool.

There were two of them, a boy and a girl. Both inhumanly beautiful, like the Taj-Mahal or the moon, gowned for a costume party.  “Who?”  Terry said.

“Hello,” said the girl.  She had silver bells on her gown, and in her voice. 

“Hello,” said the boy.  A golden voice, summer flowers, glades filled with light.

“Who are you?”  Terry managed.

“We’re…” they looked at each other, and back at Terry.  Their movements had a languid dreaminess.   “Visitors,” the boy said.  “From across the ferny brae.’” 
 
“Tell me, why do you run?” said the girl.  “We see you, running, but you just go around, then you go away.”

“To stay fit,” he said absently.  The phrase about the ferny brae reminded him of something.  He wasn’t afraid; they were frail-looking, small, and seemed half-asleep.

“Fit for what?” said the boy. 

Terry laughed, abrupt and bitter.  “Wish I knew.  Trying to hold old age off as long as I can.”

“But you’re already old,” the girl said.

“Yeah right.  I want to stay active, is all.  Not that it makes any difference.  Age is a bastard.  You’ll find out, if you stop smoking whatever you’re smoking long enough to live past fifty.”

“Smoking?”  They looked puzzled.

“Why is age a ‘bastard’?” said the boy.

“It hurts.  Everything stops working.  If you’re lucky you go out like a light, if not, you end up dribbling your days away, not knowing your own name.  Enjoy your youth while you can.  You youngsters seem to think it lasts forever, but it doesn’t.”

He realised the girl was crying, tears slipping like silver down her perfect pale skin.  “Hey, don’t,” he said.  “You got years yet.”

“Yes,” said the boy.  “We have years.  Endless years before us and behind us; and we cannot change.  We are as we are, and all that happens is that we thin, and fade.  We have no children to carry the future, only a past that lies on us like lead, crushing the sunlight, silencing laughter.”  

He got it, finally.  “You’re…what?  Fair folk?  Fey?”

The boy shrugged.  “If you will.”

 “And you don’t age?”
 
“No.  And there have been no children for so long…” the girl looked out at the field, where a young man with dreadlocks was shepherding eight or nine small children into a noisy game.  Her face showed almost no expression, but her ache echoed in Terry’s own chest.

“And you can’t die?”

The two of them linked hands.  “Only by iron, and it takes more courage than we have,” the boy said.

He brushed Terry’s cheek with a long, cool finger.  “You,” he said, “you are so beautiful, do you not know it?  It is your briefness makes you so.”

“You burn so bright and fierce,” the girl said.  “You blaze.” 

“Hah.”  Terry looked down at his hands, rivered with blue veins.  “Beautiful, eh?  Well, there’s a thing.”  He looked up at them.  “Can you make me young again?  Sprinkle me with fairy dust?”

“No,” said the girl.  “We could only make you last longer.”

“Don’t ask,” the boy said.  “Please.”

“Fairy gifts come with a price, don’t they?”  Terry said.

“Always.”

“Well then.”

Terry was never sure how long he spent there, talking.  Nor sure what was said.  Only that he left feeling touched with mystery, feeling winged with joy and drenched with a profound sorrow that was almost sweet.

#

He kept running as long as he could, though he never saw them again.  He visited his friend, and took an old book of fairy tales, and read them aloud, while the nurses gathered in the doorway, listening. 

Terry died, in the end, swift and clean, collapsed on his kitchen floor while he made tea.

The trains continued to rumble along the embankment, and in the bushes, the scent of somewhere else still hung.  Two pairs of eyes watched the playing children grow, and the children after.  Eventually the athletic ground was dug up and boxy houses grew where the bushes had been.  One morning, the driver of the 8.15 froze in his seat, thinking he’d seen two figures on the line, standing with their hands linked, but when the train reached them they blew away like smoke, and the iron wheels pounded on, into the future.

Red Rock West (1000 words)

Red tracked the fugitive up into the foothills. The runaway had brushed out his hefty footprints and got in amongst a crowd of hoodoos, so it was tricky picking him out. Red slid from his mule’s saddle holding a rope, dropped a noose over a rocky pillar and tied the other end round his wrist. Then he waited for the sun to go down.

“One barrel I took,” said the troll, when it woke up, “for my brother’s century party.”

“Uh huh. I s’pose your poor sick granmama was there too,” said Red.

“I’ve been in service to Birchbane for ten years, never seen him drink a drop. Didn’t think he’d miss it, the joyless old turd.”

“You broke the law. Picked a bad time for it too, with the new Baron wanting to make his mark. Come quietly, and you’ll most likely get a few years hard labour. Unless you can pay the absolution fine.”

“Haven’t got any money.” The troll fumbled at the loop around his neck. “What’s to stop me taking this off and leaving you out here with a broken leg?”

Red shrugged. “Try it. That’s elf-made. Long as I live, it’ll do what I want. I hear trolls can last a while without breathing.” He patted his mule. “Old Obstinate can drag you til you come round.”

They plodded over the star-lit scrubland. “We’re going west,” said the troll. “Birchbane’s place is east.”

“The Baron wants all prisoners taken to him for sentencing by Longest Day,”  said Red.

“Through the Badlands?”

“I’m getting paid forty gold to go through. Are you going to try and scare me with some old tall tales?”

They travelled on in silence until sunrise turned the troll to stone.

#

Red had heard the water in the Badlands was salty and stunk like rotten eggs. They stopped at a rickety trading post on the border that was open day and night. Red went in, the troll shuffling after him at the end of the rope.

The slick-haired clerk told Red, “All the fresh water your mule can carry for twenty silver.”

“Uh huh. And you’ll throw in the other mule I could buy for that?” said Red.

“Lot of demand here, sir. Pushes up the prices. You’ll be getting a big reward when you hand over that ugly rock you got there.”

Red gripped the rope, but the troll didn’t move. “I’ll take that water now.”

“New Baron’s coming down hard,” said the clerk, filling a canteen. “Heard they caught a rock that stole a cart and broke it into a bunch of pebbles.”

The troll still didn’t move, but Red could feel him shaking through the rope.

#

They passed through bare hills like striped jelly moulds, by dead pools reflecting the stars, over cracked plains covered in salt that glittered and crunched like frost. The troll didn’t say much, just looked around. Red was glad of his shade to sleep in when the sun hammered down.

“A couple more nights, I reckon,” said Red as they took a break to eat.  “You’ve given me no trouble. I’ll put in a good word for you with the Baron.”

The troll shrugged. “I think my sentence has been decided. I’m glad I took the best barrel, and my brother got to drink it.”

Red sucked from a canteen. “We’re getting low on water, that bastard sold me short. I think I see grass over there, reeds maybe. Could be fresh water.”

“I wouldn’t...” the troll said.

“What?”

“Never mind. The sun’s coming up soon.”

“Bring the mule,” said Red. Obstinate had other ideas. He dug in his hooves, rolled his eyes and made a racket.  The troll slung all the canteens over his shoulders and they went on foot.

There was a big pond, a few silky ripples spreading on it. Red bent to taste the water. It was sweet and cool after the warm, leathery-tasting stuff they’d been drinking. There were more lazy ripples and then something whipped out the pond like a riled snake, and wrapped itself around Red’s ankle. He jerked back, trying to prise it off, as suckers sunk into his skin. Another tentacle lashed around his leg. Red struggled for the knife on his belt, was yanked and dragged, cool water closing over his head. He thrashed around, trying to pull free, but there was nothing to brace against. His chest burned with the need for air.

There was a tug at his wrist, then a wrench. The elf rope. Red grabbed onto it with both hands. The beast still gripped his ankles and legs, but the pull on the rope was unstoppable. It dragged them both to the surface, Red glimpsing dinner plate eyes and a razor-eged beak. The beast let go and Red skimmed over the pond at the end of the rope, gouged a trough through the reeds and on through the sandy soil. Then the sun came up.
 
The troll was frozen in a flat out run, rope in hand. Red stood in his shade, shook dirt and stones out of uncomfortable places and thought.

That night, Red said, “All you had to do was stand still. That elf rope’s got no power when I’m dead. Two minutes, you’d have been stone and that beast couldn’t’ve touched you.”

“I thought about it,” said the troll.

Red sighed. “I got to bring you in. I can’t go back on my word.”

#

The Baron was short and looked like he had a temper to match. His guards hustled the troll away.

“I may have more work for you,” the Baron said to Red.  “Getting rid of the ... criminal element.”

“I serve the law,” said Red as he collected his gold.

The trial was short and pointless. Red said what he could, but the troll was sentenced to shattering.

“Unless,” said the Baron, laughing, “anyone sees fit to pay the troll’s absolution. It’s fifty gold.”

“Uh huh.” said Red. “That’d be me.”

[End]

A while back, I wailed to my boyfriend "It's my turn to write the Friday Flash. What should I write?" He set me the challenge of writing a story that included beer, World of Warcraft and a squid. I didn't use it right away, but it sat there fermenting in the back-brain and this is what came out. Of course, if it was true to WoW, Red would have killed the troll and stolen its trousers, but that would have made for a very short story, even for flash.

I could feel someone standing there.

I wasn’t used to being disturbed.  I like this café because, for central London, it’s not that crowded. It’s also comfortingly cavelike, there are plenty of other women, and the sirens are muffled. 

“Do you mind?”

Something about the voice, or the emphasis, suggested she was foreign.  Probably why she’d chosen to sit at my table when there were still empty ones.  But I’d already made that non-committal hand gesture that says, sure, there’s no-one else in the seat,  sit there if you must, but don’t expect any kind of interaction, OK? 

I waited for the zone of interference caused by her presence to fade, but it got worse.  I could feel her looking at me, getting ready to speak.

Obviously the book wasn’t enough.  Damn.  Should have had the laptop out, it’s a much more effective barrier.  I bent my head lower, glared at the page, but of course I couldn’t concentrate.  When she finally spoke it was almost a relief. 

“I would like to ask you something.”

Oh, no, not a god-botherer.  Please.  Not today.  I looked up, bared-teeth smile ready to fend her off, but there was none of that shiny earnest look they get.  She had her head tilted a little, and nothing but polite interest on her face.  A neat, pale, not terribly noticeable sort of face, although her eyes were a little, I don’t know.  You don’t stare into a stranger’s eyes so I’m not sure what made them different.

“Mmm?”

“I am studying this place.”

Ah, a student.  Definitely foreign.  Well, OK then, if it didn’t take too long.  “All right,” I said. 

“When I sit down;” she paused, the head-tilt altered slightly, then she went on, “when I sat down, you were uncomfortable.  May I ask why?”

I was suddenly embarrassed.  Such an obvious question, but I never thought about it.  It’s the way you are, in a public place.  Isn’t it?  “Well, I don’t know you.  I thought…um…”

“Please.  I am studying behaviour.  I would be most grateful if you would explain to me.”

“You’re a sociology student?”

“I am,” pause, head-tilt, “an anthropologist.”

“Oh.”  I thought anthropologists just studied Amazonian tribes and stuff, but presumably there weren’t that many Amazonian tribes left, maybe nowadays they had to do normal people.  Then I thought how patronising and generally obnoxious that thought was.  Damn. 

I felt I should apologise for something but instead I said, “Um, OK.  Well, I suppose, I’m wary of getting into a conversation with someone I don’t know.”

I expected her to take out a notebook or some nifty little electronic gadget, but she didn’t.  “What is it you fear?”

“That they’ll be boring.  Sorry.”

“You fear boredom.”

“Yes.  I only get an hour for lunch, and I don’t want to have to listen to someone going on.”

“What else do you fear?”

“They might ask me for money.”

“You object to being…touched up?  No.  A soft touch?  Is that right?”

“Well, yes, it’s annoying.  I mean, some of them are genuine, but I hate being hassled when I’m having a quiet coffee.  And I’m worried that they might get nasty if I say no.”

“Nasty.”

“Yes, you know, yell.  Go for me with a knife.” 

“Are there other fears?”

“They might come on to me.  I mean, not usually, with women, but, you know.”

“A sexual approach?”

“Yeah.”

“Why is this worrying?”

“In case they don’t want to take no for an answer.  Make a scene.  Or turn out to be a psycho and follow me home or something.” 

This was becoming a little disturbing.  How paranoid was I, for goodness’ sake?

“Interesting.”  Head tilt.  “You have had these experiences?”

“Well, I’ve had people ask me for money.”

“Did you refuse?”

I could feel myself blushing.  “Yes.”

“And what happened?”

“Nothing.  They went away.”

Head tilt.  “Sexual approaches?”

“Well, maybe.  I wasn’t actually sure.”

“But in any case, you were disturbed by the possibility?”

“Um, sort of.  But nothing happened.  He just went back to his newspaper.”

 “Thank you,” she said.  “That is very helpful.”

“So what are you writing about?”  I said, wondering if I’d turn up as some sort of case-study, “Subject A,” pinned in words like a beetle under glass.

“Societies on the verge of…” head tilt, “disintegration. Certain behaviours, certain responses, are indicative.  Generalised paranoia.  Fear that even those who appear to conform to the societal norms are concealing violent intentions.”

“That’s a bit strong, isn’t it?”

“Strong?”

Weird how she could cope with these complicated terms but the simple ones threw her.  “Yes.  A bit extreme.  I mean, it’s just normal caution.”

“For a society in this stage, yes.”

“This stage?”  I said.

“Thank you, you have been most helpful.”  She got up, and I realised it wasn’t just her eyes.  There was something odd about the way she moved, too – not as though she was disabled, but as though she were just put together slightly differently. 

“What do you mean, this stage?”

“I must go now,” she said, and headed for the door.  The oddity of her movements was slightly more obvious from the back. 

I got up, grabbing my coat.  “Wait!  What stage?”

People were looking up from their newspapers, a swift glance, and back again.  Don’t get involved with the potentially crazy person.

She paused, hand on the door, tilted her head.  “Goodbye,” she said, and the door closed.

“Wait!”  I yelled.  “What stage?  Who are you?” And I ran out into the street, but I couldn’t see her anywhere, only a lot of people giving me a wide berth and carefully not looking at me as I stood there, yelling, with my coat trailing in the road. 

20 Minute Megan (417 words)

The power for the gateway went out for twenty minutes. It should never have been able to happen, there were backup systems in place but budget cuts and privatisation of the London gateway network and transitional difficulties and changes of management and blah. Someone in TransTech was reluctantly seen off with a golden boot up the arse.

All Megan remembered was the star buckles on her red shoes twinkling as she ran for the gateway, late for school as always, running as always, always wanting to be faster. Her mum waving, then shouting as the indicator lights on the gateway slid to zero. A blink of black, then she was outside her school in Tokyo as usual, running as usual. She was famous for a while, the girl who was lost in the portal system, nowhere for twenty minutes. 

She still ran everywhere the gates could take her. But now sometimes she liked to stand still and look, to compose her view. She became an explorer and a talented imagist. 

When she was awake, all she remembered of the twenty minutes was that blink of black. But in her dreams, her feet still twinkled in stardust. 
                               #
Cambrax had settled long ago in a grassy spot with a big sky. The young ‘uns liked to trundle from place to place, but Cambrax reckoned standing still was the way to see things. He was so old that the stone was coming on him, but he didn’t mind. He breathed once a year, he drank a little rain and he sat firm in the ground. He was still enough that he could sense the magma sloshing about far below his feet, and hear the echoes between the stars. Everything he saw and heard was engraved on his quartz brain.

One day when he was stilled and his spark had gone back to the magma, they’d chip his brain out of his head and put it with the other Archives. And if you sang the right note, and looked the right way you’d see what he’d seen, the ordinary, the strange and the impossible. Like the comet that had blinked into the night sky, run a short arc, and blinked into blackness again. But you wouldn’t feel its love of speed like he had. It had blazed through Cambrax's veins. He still stayed on his grassy spot, but now sometimes he rumbled around on his axis. He liked to get some fresh scenery and a different angle on the sky. 

Ghostwritten (999 words)

At the launch party, gossip moved to Clarice Meadows, the author considered single-handedly responsible for reviving the moribund horror genre. 

“She’s a hack,” George Fordyce said.

“I read one of her stories,” said the author whose party it was.  “Not my sort of thing, but it definitely had something.  She’s had some good reviews.” 

“From grubby little populists desperate to look ‘down with the kids’.” George gulped his wine.

“ ‘Down with the kids?’ George, if you can’t keep up with the current slang, please don’t try.”

“I was trying to make a point.”

“Look, I need to talk to some people.  I’ll see you later.”

George glared after her.  Of course, she’d been published, now, hadn’t she?  Soon she’d be like Meadows, churning out pap for the masses, while a writer like George, a serious literary writer, was left out in the cold.

He went home, stuffing a bottle of wine in his shoulder bag.

A parcel was jammed in his letterbox.  George wrestled it out, and tore up the rejection letter. Hacks and grubbers, the lot of them.  He didn’t pander, didn’t give readers nice little fictional lollipops, he took them by the scruff and forced them to stare into the blinding light of his unique vision.

At least he would, if he could get any readers. 

He opened the bottle, and thumbed the remote.

“And next on Booklist, we’ll be talking to publishing phenomenon Clarice Meadows…”

George stared disbelievingly at the TV. 

There she was.  A slight woman with a nervous half-smile.

Oh, the faux-timidity of that smile, the calculated softness of that voice, forcing the interviewer to lean in, as though he were really interested!  Perhaps he was, perhaps he had been taken in, but George wasn’t.  George knew.

He threatened her with the remote, sneering.  He could turn her off any time.  But he wanted to hear what sort of rubbish she talked.

“You’re not what people expect of a horror writer.  Why did you decide on this particular genre?”

She laughed.  “You mean I should wear black and have really long fingernails?”

“Something like that,” the interviewer said, laughing too, how chummy they were. Bile rose in George’s throat.

“I look terrible in black and gardening wrecks my nails.” Oh, this was good, she was trying to look serious.  “Horror was my first love.  I think it’s a way of finding patterns in the terrible things that happen to us.  But really, I feel as though the stories chose me.”  She shrugged.  “ ‘The tale, not he who tells it.’  Some stories have an energy of their own.  They want to be told.”

George spat.  Stories, indeed.  It was about style, about impact.  Stories were for kids.

“I’m not generally a horror fan, but I read Shadowfold, and I could not put it down.  When’s the next in the series coming out?”

“Not for a while!  I haven’t finished it yet.”

“But now,” the interviewer twinkled, “we’ve a special treat – an extract from the unpublished manuscript!”

She started reading, stuff about living eyes in a dead tree, and footsteps without feet. 

“Bollocks!”  George shrieked, leaping to his feet and aiming the remote at her.  He accidentally hit the volume control, her words boomed out like the Voice of God, and his neighbour thumped the wall.  He turned it up full, just to show them, then turned it off.  Eyes in trees, and stories that wanted to be told, indeed. 

Two days later, George was at another launch party for a Robert somebody.  He’d never read the book but the editor was supposed to be there.  He had already rejected George’s novel, but George wanted to talk to him face to face, convince him he could improve on the rubbish he was currently publishing. George’s temper hadn’t been improved by staring at an advert for one of the wretched Meadows woman’s books all the way on the tube. 

The editor wasn’t there.  Instead, there was a flurry at the door and no, it couldn’t be.

“Clarice!”  Robert whoever said, “I can’t believe you made it.” 

“Robert, I’m so pleased for you, you really deserve this.”

They hugged.  George felt like vomiting. 

He glared at Clarice Meadows’ back.  She ought to be able to feel his contempt, burning a hole in her spine, but no, she was chatting away, oblivious.

Later, after the idiots had smarmed over her, he watched her leave.

He followed. 

He only meant to tell her what he thought, but somehow, in the alley, thinking of the poster, the recognition, the money, that should be his…his temper got the better of him. 

And he got away with it. 

He didn’t think he had at first; there were footsteps behind him, and he’d waited, fear clogging his throat, for the shout, the hand on his shoulder, but when he turned, there was no-one there.

He waited for a guilt that never came.  He watched the reports of her weeping fans with chilly derision.  He’d rid the world of a creeping poison; and the experience would surely deepen and inform his own writing. 

But now he was having problems with his work.  Things were sneaking in, things that didn’t belong there.

Stupid, melodramatic things.

He found himself, in the middle of a scene where two people sat in a car park discussing the failure of their relationship, writing about footsteps. Footsteps with no feet. 

He was tired, that’s all.  Stressed.  It wasn’t surprising, with rejections still piling up.  She was dead, surely people should be turning back to real literature? 

He went back to the scene.  There were trees around the car park. 

Some of them were dead.

They had eyes in them.  Living eyes in dead, rotting wood. 

George yelped and hit delete.

And started again.

***

Eventually his neighbour found him, rigid and whimpering at his computer, staring at his hands as they typed words he loathed, words that he could never even sell. 

But words that insisted on being written.

The Screaming Abdabs (996 words)

I don’t want to get up in the night. That’s when the screaming abdabs crawl around on the carpet. If you see one, you end up in here. But the drugs They give me mess up my body, make me sleepy in the day and wide-awake at night when the abdabs and the woofs and the lurkers are in the carpets and the curtains and the walls.

Most of the time They tell us there aren’t any. But every now and again, one of Them will take one of us aside to tell what will really happen if the abdabs get you. You have to be at least two inches above the carpet so they can’t. I lowered a piece of string over the edge of the bed to check, and their snatching claws couldn’t reach higher than that.

But tonight the back door is going to be open. The nurse with the pink lipstick and the fake-nice smile is on duty, and she leaves it unlocked every Friday so her boyfriend can sneak in with pizza. They think we’re stupider than wet paper bags, but Skippity Lou has ears like a bat, and when we can, we pass messages.

I’ve worked on this for weeks. I’ve taken the wooden trains from the playroom every day and made happy choo-choo noises and looked blank-eye doped until They accepted that the trains are mine. I’m short and skinny and I’ve only got little feet. I can balance, one foot on each train and skate over the carpet in my room to the safe lino of the hall. 

Nurse Fake-nice comes into my room a little before sunset. 

“Did you read your nice story?” she asks.

It’s not a story, it’s a guided meditation. There is one in the Book for every day of the year, after the list of Rules. We have to read one every night, and tomorrow they will shine lights and put wires on my head and ask what did you dream what did you see. But I just nod.

She picks up the trains from the windowsill. “You’re not a baby any more. I’ll tidy these away.”

I feel like screaming. Instead I smile. “But I like them.”

“We must learn not to be selfish,” she says. She turns the light off from the switch outside the door. The evening sun shines on the stupid bunnies in trousers smirking  at me from the plastic-covered picture on the other side of the room. I think and I think and it gets dark.

I saw Big Eric throw a chair at a window last week and it bounced off. Everything in here is bolted and strapped down. I let my eyes get wide and I can see the rounded black shapes of the furniture. I can climb on it, but there is only a bed, a cabinet, and a chair. Not enough to get me to the door. Maybe if I stood on the bed, I could swing and jump from the light. But if I fell short, I’d land on the carpet.

There’s nothing else in here, except the Book. But the Book is very thick. I could tie it to my feet with a strip from my nightie. I can’t rip the material even with my teeth, and there are no sharp corners  on the furniture to tear it on.

I crawl to the end of the bed, stand and jump. The bolted-down chair can’t teeter over or slide. It only makes a little whumpf as I land on it. I have to stretch on tiptoe and lean right over to tip the stupid smirking bunny picture off the wall. It thumps to the floor, and I wait, with my heart banging. After a few moments I take off my nightie, hook a bit on the nail head and pull and pull. Finally it rips, the sound zip-tearing the quiet. I put the nightie back on, jump to the bed, and tie the Book to my feet with the torn strip.

I am careful with my first jump, but still it makes noise. I must hurry. My second jump is awkward, and I have to windmill my arms to stay upright. The third takes me nearly to the door, and the light flicks on.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Fake-nice stands in the dorrway.

“I needed to pee.” We’re not allowed up at night, but if you wet the bed They bend over you to slap and pinch and punish, hiding it from the cameras. She’ll believe that I’d want to go.

“Get off the Book and back into bed.  And calm down or you’ll make yourself sick.”

“I can’t get off it. The abdabs will get me.”

“You’re too old for all that nonsense.”

“I really need to pee!”

“If you won’t calm down, we’ll have to help you,” she says. But she doesn’t move to strap me in or jab me with a needle or slap me. She’s still on the very edge of the safe slippy lino. She hasn’t put one toe into my room, where I can see a forest of tiny grasping claws waving above the carpet.

She’s afraid. But she told me to get off the Book. And if one of us dies in here, there’s always an awful fuss, and people get the sack. And I suddenly see, she’s afraid of me. I slowly untie the Book from my feet, and step down onto the carpet. It’s like dropping a stone in a pond, ripples spread out as the ab-dabs make room and turn face out around me. The lurkers slide along the walls,  the woofs boom from the curtains. When I move, they move with me.

Fake-nice’s face is all big round ‘O’s. She turns and runs. I suppose she’s going somewhere with no walls, or carpets or curtains. I have plenty of time to get the others. We skippity outside, hand in hand.

The path across the sea gleams gold, then red. Next should be silver – but the silver path never appears.
The sea once licked the cliffs twice a day; her magic rose with it.  There were pools, where limpets with their delicate striated shells clung, where anemones tossed tendrilled hair, and shrunk with the retreating tide to fat shiny jewels.  There, at low tide, magic hid.

Now the pools have dried, and she with them.  Once she danced the moon’s path; now she is a husk, an empty shell washed up on the shoreline; now, there is no moon.

Sunshine Underground (100 words, including title)

It has taken generations. Tunnelling up to the surface cost a tenth of our number; crushed by falling rock, snatched by beasts that slide in the dark, sickened by the Grey Wasting if they stayed too long at the top. The expedition beyond the far caverns to fetch the crystal spent more lives, and we polished away days and months.

Finally all of the lenses and mirrors are in place. We wait for the sun to rise,  for the touch of our god to reach us in exile. As we wait, we draw lots for the first sacrifice.

A Storm is Coming (996 words)

“I keep expecting someone to shout, “Unmask, Unmask!”  The woman in the red dress complained.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”  Her companion, a chunky, middle aged man, danced quite well, but the woman in red, whose name was Gwynneth, was beginning to realise he was a bore, at least by her rather exacting standards.  She didn’t want to be stuck with him all night.  “Edgar Allen Poe?  The Mask ofthe Red Death?”  He looked blank. 

"Is that something else we're supposed to be worried about?"  He said.  "The Red Death?  I thought what with all this.." he waved at the shuttered windows, "we had enough problems."

"Never mind," Gwynneth said.  "But you never know, do you?  Everyone's been talking about climate change for years, but I don't think anyone expected this, either."

"I certainly didn't," he said, his tone indicating that his very lack of expectation should have prevented any of this from happening, if the world were properly organised.

Gwynneth excused herself to go find a drink.   

The bar staff had obviously decided to go for broke – they’d just loaded a table with everything in the cellar and scarpered, God knew where to; it wouldn’t be outside, at any rate. 

Gwynneth poured herself  a generous glass of a fairly decent merlot that the scavenging hordes had missed, and looked around for anyone interesting.  She had no idea how long she was goingto be stuck here, and with the television reception erratic  verging on nonexistent, and consisting mostly of weather reports, there was no point sitting in her room.  

She couldn’t see anyone she fancied talking to.  It was just her luck, she thought, to be caught at a hotel largely given over to a conference of timeshare salespeople. Several  had already tried to interest her in property in Greenland.  

The only other people seemed to be a stag-night, one of whose guests had tried to grope her but had been so drunk he had missed, and a small, morose group of car-salesmen, who were huddled in a corner drinking away the last of their wages and hoping to avoid being spotted by any of the other trapped guests.  She only knew they were car-salesmen because she had seen them arriving with another man, who in a moment of drunken fury, had jumped onto a table, told everyone what he did, and started ranting that it wasn’t his fault and why did everyone blame him, he was just trying to make a living?

The remaining hotel staff – there were still a few around at that point – had bundled him out, but she was pretty certain at least one of them had put the boot in, and she hadn’t seen the man since.  

Gwynneth wandered out of the badly decorated and rather chilly ballroom and down a side corridor, pushed open an anonymous white-painted door and found a set of worn-carpeted stairs.  For lack of anything better to do, she went up them.

The patchy paint and dull colours seemed to suggest that these were staff quarters.  Further along, she could hear a much livelier party than the one downstairs. 

No harm in trying, she thought.  She still had the rest of the merlot, it might act as a party-passport.  She glanced at a window as she passed; the flat middle-of-nowhere landscape was already darkening under its fuzzy orange haze of pollution.

The room was crammed with people in the hotel’s blue and lavender uniforms, and several in the white of porters, cleaning staff and cooks.   In the middle of the room, an iron staircase led up to a roof opening.  Several people were clustered around it, looking up.  

It was still open.  Gwynneth raised her eyebrows, and pushed her way through the crowd.  Despite the fact that it was obvious from her dress, no-one seemed to notice or care that she was a guest.

She drained her glass, paused for a moment, then shoved the corked bottle in her bag and climbed the narrow stairs onto the roof.  The sky looked ill and bruised.  Against it, she could see some kind of iron framework where a young man was perched, peering south.  People were yelling at him to come down.


“We’re shutting the hatch if you don’t,” someone shouted. 


“Just a minute,” he yelled back.  “I want to see if I can spot them.”

But the wind must have changed.  The first toad caught him on the back of the neck.  The few people still on the roof screamed and scrambled down the stairs as he flailed and lost his balance, tipped forward, and held on with one hand, legs kicking.  He just managed to catch a foothold when the rest of the stormfront came in, and toads began to pelt from the sky, splatting against the roof.

People were screaming to shut the hatch, shut the hatch.  “Oh for Christ’s sake,” Gwynneth said.  She pushed through the yelling, arguing mass and ran up to the top step, and held out her arms.  “Jump!  I’ll catch you!”  He looked at her panic-stricken and his foot slid from the railing.  She tried to catch his flailing legs but they were too high up.  “Come on!”

He dropped, right onto her, knocking her back down the steps into the room below.  A dozen people slammed the roof hatch shut, while more stamped on the few toads that had fallen through.  The noise of them hitting the roof was like wet thunder.

Gwynneth, winded, dragged herself out from under the young man.  A toad had landed in her cleavage.  She picked it out, and looked at it.  It looked back with bright, gold eyes.  All around people were screaming and killing them.  “Poor thing,” she said to the toad.  “It’s not your fault, is it?” 

She got up, took the wine out of her handbag, left it on a table, and carefully put the toad in instead.  Then she left the party, shutting the door behind her.

Demon Driven (998 words)

It’s carnival time in Dindrisk, has been for three days, will be for another ten. They know how to party here. I barge my way through a drunken crowd, a blur of masks, feathers and spangles, to the spaceliner’s dock. A young man fidgeting in an engineer’s uniform meets me at the top of the gangplank.

“Astromancer Pierce?”

“That’s me.”

He’s probably expecting a corset, a lot of eyeliner and black leather. I did all that. Now I’m older and a little bit wider, and I stick to comfortable and easy to clean.

“I’m Bradford,” he says. “The Portal Engineer.” We jog along a plush corridor, all oval  windows and gold swirly bits, strung with carnival feathers and shiny beads.

“We picked up a new artist here two days ago,” he says. “The last one went, well, you know how they do, and we had to drop him off for, uh, a quiet rest. We can’t get another one until the carnival finishes, we’re supposed to take off tomorrow and it won’t work and...” Bradford swallows.

“You’ve got a Muse, right? With a sculpture kink?” I ask.

“Yes, but it doesn’t like the new artist.” He hustles me through a door into a more utilitarian space; industrial grey, tracked with cabling ducts.  “It ignores him, and it’s moving around. A lot.”

I can hear what he’s screaming in his head. “What if it gets out?”
 
“Muses are tricky,” I say. “Not big on ripping out guts, but they’re the definition of changeable.”

Bradford cranks open another hatch and we’re in the portal drive  room. Sage burns in the censers, the silver circle set into the floor is filled with the blue shimmer of magic, and with demon.

“The binding looks solid,” I say.

The place is littered with discarded beads and champagne corks. A skinny, clay-smeared bloke circles around a huge lump of a work, darting in to pinch on another piece.
 
The demon spins, stamps, points a talon at me. “I smell magic on you,” it says. It grins a zig-zag half-moon. “And Incubus. Ha!”

Talons are bad. A happy Muse usually takes human form, and is all big eyes and improbable breasts or chiselled cheekbones, whatever works. Unhappy demons won't bend space to move your ship. 

“Greetings to you too,” I say in its language. “Don’t you like what they’re feeding you?”

“So stale. I feed. I hunger.” The demon rocks rhythmically, waving its skinny arms.

“What is it you want?” I ask, not expecting much. Demon and human concepts don’t relate too well. Everything is energy to them.

“I crave. New flavour in the air, and then gone. I starve.”

“Uh huh.” I wander over to the sculptor. The work looks familiar, and when he looks me in the eye my instincts scream “fake”. But there are formalities to observe.

“Tell me about this piece,” I say. It takes a moment for the bullshit to kick in, and it’s all the wrong kind. He spiels about light and angles and sublimity. He doesn’t talk about how he saw it in his head, and what the work demanded. And his aura stinks.

“This guy’s a forger,” I tell Bradford.  “He’s just recycling somebody else’s work, even with the Muse there, so his energy is stale. You got any sculptors on the passenger list? One or two pieces should get you to Bratngash. You can hire a new artist there.”

“Do you think they’d want to do it?”

“For inspiration from a Muse? They’ll bite your hand off.”

#

The enthusiastic volunteer has hair dyed green and chews gum non-stop. She works with wire and  discarded carnival feathers and beads. I can see her ride that rollercoaster of  doubt and exaltation as the extraordinary piece takes shape. The Muse stamps and claps its hands as the sculptor pirouettes around her work. And it complains.

“Stale. So cruel to give delicousness and take it away. I starve. Give it back to me.”

“Give you back what?”

“This,” the demon stamps and waves its hands again. “What was here before.”

“What does it want?” asks Bradford. His eyes are red, and ringed with dark circles.

“I don’t think it knows. But I want a drink. And you need one.”

“I’m on duty.”

#

The bar is crowded. Drink is drunk, quite a lot of it. Bradford leans forward, leers, wobbles, rights himself and shouts over the music, “I heard your first job was with an Incubus.”

I look out over the dancefloor, where couples are doing their best to shag standing up and fully clothed, and I smile. My Incubus had been a – well - a demon on the dancefloor; all that eye contact, bodies almost touching, the pounding beat. He needed sex, but he loved to dance, and he taught me a thing or two.

“When exactly did your Muse start acting up?” I ask.

“First night of the carnival.”

A day before the forger came on board. “And you were partying in the portal room?”

“Look, I was off duty,” he says. “And all these passengers wanted to see the demon.”

“They danced around it, right?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So your Muse has changed its kink. It’s come over all terpsichorean.”

#

The demon perks up as soon as the bass beat kicks in. I clap my hands and twirl and suddenly there’s a man with angular cheekbones and snake hips in the circle. I undo the binding with a flick of my wrist, ignoring Bradford’s screams. Demons work better when they’re willing.

People use sex to describe the feeling of sharing with a demon, because it’s the closest common experience. But it’s a eureka moment, the flow, the surrender to spontaneous art. Your head and heart are wide open, you are relaxed and powerful and everything is just fine.

The demon might have to go back in its cage at Bratngash. But right now we’re dancing, and I could stand to lose a few pounds.