Situation Normal

 Mort was a thoroughly modern man.

All the tech, everything. Mort had it all.

Gadgets, gizmos, all mod cons.

Like millions more, he was obsessed with keeping up with it all and letting technology take over his life.

Every aspect of his existence had been given over to machines, programmes, apps and artificial minds.

All corners of Mort's finance, health, well-being, nutrition, transport and employment were ruled by non-animates.

But Mort was happy, the master of it all and life was sweet, as it had always been. Tech had looked after him.

 He still worked hard at the office, a regular captain of industry; he dressed well, he ate like a king and had regular sex with consummate androids. He looked great too for his age, his few health worries smoothed over and managed beautifully by ever-reliable modern means.

At 65, he was on a path to total self-fulfillment and machinery had helped him reach this zenith of humanity, this pinnacle of modernity, the very essence of what it was to be a willing and wholehearted consumer of everything the big tech companies had to offer. 

After all, it just made life better! Right?

Mort was the splendid life zeitgeist: plugged in, online, connected, googled, Ai'd, networked, covered, warrantied, bleeped, boostered and feeling uber-duber good about it.

So that particular Monday started out like any other fabulous tech-filled week. The situation was entirely normal. No fuck ups here.

Mort was awoken by his sentient household, the mind, a subtle voice telling him the time and suggesting that perhaps he'd like some breakfast and hot coffee.

A wardrobot offered him his slippers, favourite Metropolis T-shirt and Tron boxers, a urinalgorithm in the loo played music attuned to his current waking state and a Stunnah droid took him yawning gently down the stairs, where the home's greying K9 unit brought him his newspaper and post from the letterbox.

The home's mind altered the mood music slightly for calm but awake and activated the ancient skilled butcher bot to prepare Mort's favourite home-made sausages from the fresh meat store and brew fresh coffee. 

With a hearty breakfast on the table, the medi droid dispensed the neccessaries for the day: blood thinner, hearing aid oil and pacemaker pill.

The TV came on.

Today's headlines: a global glitch in wardrobot programming means that the universal mechanised valet will no longer function until further notice. All wardrobots will be deactivated immediately for reasons of safety.

Thud!

Mort heard it upstairs and knew his own wardrobe assistant had ceased functioning.

"Dammit!" he cursed, "That means I'll have to do my own damn washing,  ironing and folding now! As if I have the time! Fuck!"

"I suppose it could worse!", he conceded reluctantly watching the latest war unfold on TV, other peoples' chaos in some distant god-forsaken techless shit-hole somewhere on the globe.

He angrily scoffed his bangers and slurped two cups of Kenyan before picking up the newspaper.

Tucked away in the late news section was a roughly printed entry.

"As of today the Stunnah Mark 1 and 1.1 Stairway droids' current software will be updated. Some older units of the Mark 1 may experience a technical malfunction and in some cases total mechanical meltdown."

Bang! 

"Bollocks! That's my Stunnah! Fuck it, how am I meant to get up and down the stairs! I'll have to walk! As if I've got the time!"

Mort furiously screwed up the newspaper into a tight ball and threw it with force across the kitchen. It accidentally hit his patrolling K9 unit fully in the face and split its main console. It fizzed, hissed and sparks flew.

Fsssst!

The K9 came to a stop and it's head dropped, and smoke rose from it's steel forehead. Suddenly, it somehow reactivated and raised its head, but this time growling loudly and bearing it's sizable metal teeth. It began to motor towards the astonished Mort, quickly reaching his leg and clamped it's jaws around his thigh. It had taken seconds.

Mort screamed.

"For fucks sake, you stupid bastard dogbot!"

He hit the unit with all the force he could muster with the butcher's wooden block on the granite top and propelled theK9 spinning across the room yelping.

Blood gushed from Mort's leg, his thinned plasma pouring out like claret. He yelled for the MediDroid and the small metal nurse began to trundle from her station, bag and stethoscope in hand, when she suddenly stopped dead.

A message came over the home mind system.

THIS MEDI DEVICE IS NOW OBSOLETE AND HAS BEEN RETIRED. A REPLACEMENT WILL BE SENT OVER TOMORROW.

"No! No! No!" Shrieked Mort as he struggled to stem the bloodflow from his gaping teeth wound.

He crawled to his redundant crap drawer leaving a crimson trail behind him like a paint slug. Dragging himself up on the drawer handle he opened it and found an old emergency red button he'd worn five years earlier during illness and prayed it still worked.

The batteries were flat.

"Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!"

Mort was so furious with the way the day was turning out that he bit into the button in rage. A spark shot out and arced across his implanted and over-oiled hearing aids, which now short-circuited and exploded in each of his ears, ripping his ear drums apart and bringing on instant and complete deafness.

Mort screamed in unbearable pain till his lungs nearly burst. 

He shambled towards to kitchen counter loudly groaning in agony and slowly sprawled across it. He reached for the mobile telephone on the other side, Mort's leg bleeding profusely across the butcher's block.

Sensing the aroma of coppery blood, the butcher bot jolted into action and, mistaking the bleeding leg for a prime pig's hind it took down the meat cleaver, twirled it like a gunslinger and brought it down swiftly and skillfully on Mort's thigh. 

The cleaver went through the upper layer easily, only jarring on the femur. A second and even heftier swing made short work of the thick bone and rent the leg in two. 

The butcher bot swept Mort aside into the huge sink area and began to prepare the severed limb for a large batch of fresh sausages for the master of the house, first removing the skin for tubing, then shoving the leg into a super-sized mincer and finally stuffing the mort meat into stretchy cylinders made from leg skin. 

Done with mechanized aplomb, it had all taken less than two minutes of fantastic butchery.

In the sink Morts hand had fallen into the electric waste disposal unit, triggering the sharp blades.

 They minced mercilessly and whirled and whirled until the blades jammed on his wrist bone and the hand was no more.

In a daze of terror, Mort raised his ragged arm and stared at it in disbelief. His open leg stump pumped scarlet fluid down the colossal draining board and filled the blocked Belfast sink to the brim.

Mort wailed in excruciating pain, his face looking up at the industrial tap unit, his remaining hand flailing about. It accidentally caught the Kooka tap dial and switched it to "Boil", the water spewing out at 100 degrees and scalding off the face of the man once recognisable as Mort but not any more.

With the sink overflowing with femoral blood and his head being slowly poached, the dying man somehow remembered that he'd forgotten to take his Pacemaker WD40 maintenance pill.

"Situation normal? Yeah, right! About as fucked up as you can get!" he mused through cooking cells.

Mort laughed and laughed at this thought, soundlessly coughing through rictus lips as his straining pacemaker gave out, tried desperately to restart, sputtered a little and eventually died.

The butcher bot stopped staring into space and fed his master's sausages to the rabid K9 unit, as Mort's once stable home completely lost its fragmenting mind.

The Carnival

 The castle's day was for the sad Pierrots.

The night was for the merry Harlequins.

Thousands came, a cavalcade, a caravan, a circus of jesters all wishing to out-jest each other in the chiaroscuro of the square.

Today was the day and night of the year.

It happened only once. 

The Carnival.

It was a roster of ribald zanni adorned with tassels, piebalds, beauty spots, brimmed hats, pantoffles, bells, gussets, girdles and felt curled booties: lotharios all, cavorting in the piazza with half-dressed maidens, where hidden clergy sniffed their panties and ran off.

Fanfares blared rudely from the ramparts and standards flew vagrantly like loincloths in the summer breeze. Queues of starving jesters jostled where fat butchers grilled flat piglets on spits and grizzled Grandmas roasted Kastanien on braziers near the castle sewer, the overwhelming scented smoke of nuts, pork, piss and shite pervading the grounds like a dead dog.

It needs to be won, this glorious peace. 

It doesn't just come.

Tall sentries with halberds guarded the palace. Jezebels writhed unbuttoned on the cobbles in front, their bare feet caressing, massaging and rubbing, utterly arousing the loins of the resolute knights, dressed as they were, in the silken tights of the court militia, their turgid cocks erupting as the quivering columbines worked vigorously behind their bulging codpieces.

Sword-swallowers took their blades like hungry toads, fire-blowers blew out like farts and tall giants on stilts rocked and shambled like marabous round a stinking carcass. 

It's going to start.

Glory, pomp, madrigals and beer: clowns, minstrels, troubadours and concubines flexing and blowing and dancing and kissing and romping and rutting like bulls in the cloisters . Oh, how the heated clerics watched that rabble come.

There can only be one.

Please let it be me.

Curtsey low for the King and Queen, the royal box is trotting from the arch, the horse-shit steaming  beneath the scorching torches, the household troop mincing with sharp Toledo sabres drawn, erect and high, their helmets glinting like silver cocks.

Pierrots whirled and humped and swirled around the royals, drunk with pregnant fervour, their black and white and chiffon knickers, ruffles, garters, feathers and tattooed tears running down clowns' ample cheeks as they kissed their waiting pouting buttocks. It had to be done.

There can only be one.

Oh let it be me.

Drummers pounded out the rhythm of the vigorous heart, the tension of the carnival, the drama of the desperate pulse. Long golden cornets high in the towers sounded the too ta ta of the monarchs' late arrival in the yard, the ta ta ta ta of moving their illustrious arses down the steps to the spew-caked square.

Doves were quickly released from wicker baskets; flags of wealthy families eeled in the night air: those dynasties who had partaken in the thing before: all the world seemed to hold its breath; the noisy castle ravens cowering in their nests.

There can only be one.

Oh let it be me.

Psalters struck a turgid note, harpsichords rattled out an ominous mood, harps strummed up and down like drowning fishes and the castle's pack of Dobermans wandered free to piss and whiff the sweating crotches of the masses.

The drums crashed Stop!

"Citizens, knights, harlequins and pierrots, we bid you welcome!" Bellowed the King.

"Tonight we appear, as in every year, just once, to celebrate with you all!" Roared the Queen.

"Jesters, troubadours, artists, clowns, in your stinking pantaloons and cum-stained gowns, we salute your coupling cocks and quims brimming with excitement. We feel it too!" Yelled the King gleefully rubbing his engorging cod.

"So dear countrymen, like those who came before you, the time has come. To keep the peace we royals must feast, but ......"

The King and Queen raised their arms to the crowd and in unison the frenzied assembly roared:

"THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!" 

A gong banged and the throng parted like sliced beef and from the avenue was whisked along a man, no more than twenty, a Harlequin, slicked in purest motley, unlike the rest: chaste and scrubbed, a perfumed jester picked by his peacocked parents, who clapped like monkeys and patted his chevroned back.

Apprehension gripped the youngster, as did the hands of the royal guard. No longer the certain pride, the harlequin could not hide his tears. He sobbed, his hosiery piss-wet through with fear.

Undressed and lying on his back, the jester was strapped to the table in the centre of the square.

"Good evening young Sir", said the Queen.

"What is your name?"

"Narr."

"Well, Narr, you know why your here don't you?" Enquired the King boisterously sharpening a pair of scissors.

"Y-Yes," stammered Narr.

"You've been chosen by your parents to maintain the peace and there can only be one, which is you, Narr. You've been specially prepared, as tender as the snow. It's such a great honour to allow us to what?" Asked the Queen drawing out a long pointed hair-pin from her crown.

"F-feast?" stuttered Narr.

"Yes, that's right. We always start with the sweets, before the people's meat. There's no point telling you about the pain. It will be completely unbearable for a while I'm afraid. Would you like something to bite on?" Offered the King. 

Nodding, the King took Narr's hand and placed his index finger between his teeth.

"There." Whispered the King, drool running thickly from his growing fangs onto Narr's cheeks.

"And so I'll begin," said the Queen. 

Bearing her razor-sharp teeth, the Queen held up her hat-pin high and bellowed to the crowd:

"I'll start with the eyes!"

The audience went wild and their roar filled the square, only rising to even greater heights as the pin went in.

Pop!

Narr bit off his index and screamed till his lungs were bursting.

The Queen pulled out his eyeball on the pin and held it up for the gathering. 

They howled with delight and the Queen, like an olive, bit Narr's eye in two, the clear thick juices running down her chin.

"Mmmmm!"

To the raucous clapping of the crowd, she repeated the same on the other eye and left Narr completely blind, a terrible blessing given what was to come.

"I'll start with his balls!" Shrieked the King to the baying mob, brandishing aloft his sharpened scissors.

They clamoured for more.

The King held up Narr's scrotum and snipped it open. The victim screamed in agony. The King reached inside with two clawed fingers and pulled out a testicle, snapping it off it's sinews and presented it to the horde, who convulsed with pleasure.

The King ate the fleshy ball slowly, chewing it with his wide molars and closed his eyes in an ecstasy of taste and cruelty.

"Delicious!"

To the sheer rapture of the horde Narr's second testicle was simply sucked out by the King with this huge red lips and swallowed whole. Narr shrieked in pain beyond limits and mercifully fell unconscious never knowing the depravities of his parents and the mob.

The royal couple stood together and licked each other's taloned fingers. They smiled widely with distended crimson mouths bristling with sharp teeth and raised their arms waving long silver carving knives before the feverish rabble, now naked on their hands and knees, snarling like beasts.

"And now he's yours!" The monarchs roared, the assembled fiends, the parents first, rushing in en masse to gorge themselves on tender Narr; ripping, tearing, gouging, slicing, truncating and splitting until nothing remained, not even the brains of the once-raw Harlequin, their former son. Even his bare bones, sucked dry and picked clean, were thrown to the castle dogs to gnaw.

The King and the Queen, resuming composure, boarded the carriage to carry them home, from which they proclaimed one final thing to their blood-soaked and obedient citizens:

"Next Year we'll want a newborn!"

And were gone.

The Pigsty

I'd stared at the pigsty for months now, through the uppermost window of my town house. In indolent mood, I seemed summoned to look. 

It's decrepit state fascinated me; the broken walls, the tangled stones, the rank tussocks failing to grow with any vigour whatsoever.

It was a carbuncle, the sty, situated as it was across the wide field the farmer struggled annually to tend. 

It was approximately halfway along the field's longest edge, opposite, by some length, an enormous sickly oak tree in the very centre of the plot, standing like a tired old guard, it too was succumbing to the malady of it's ward.

I could see it all from my window. 

It was clear every summer that the farmer's already necrotic wheat always suffered the most nearest the sty, some seemingly malignant force stifling the growing crop around it like a garrote. 

It was compulsive to witness this annual malaise and I remained at my window transfixed. 

No blackbird nested there, no wren made song, no fox sloped past, no crow flew by.

The sty was instinctively known to both man and beast as somewhere to be avoided, to be shunned outright and to stay clear of at all costs, lest some pestilence ensue.

So why then was I so animated by this heathen ditch? Why was I drawn to it?

I discussed it's apparent canker with my esteemed friend Torsten, at our late October dinner, who he himself had a penchant for the unusual and the strange.

"Obviously there's a rudiment of poison in the soil thereabouts Eric old boy, a relict of some erstwhile industry on that very spot, which I daresay wasn't farming as we know it," reasoned my old friend, gracefully dropping his monocle from his eye to underline the point.

"But why a pigsty?" I asked.

"I would assume the corruption pre-dates any agriculture, perhaps a bronze age smithy or some such ironmongery involving metals and ores. These have abraded over centuries into something toxic. I doubt the pigs were ever very happy porkers at all with all that below them!", Torsten deducted. 

"Yes, I agree, some past occupation may explain it. Before the piggery. Indeed, an old map may offer a clue as to what was there before," I concluded.

"Indeed!" 

We finished our after-dinner brandies and I bade my friend goodbye, as he stepped out into the dark mews shrouded by fog, the autumn clime more fretful this year than ever.

Inside I was invigorated by our conversation and retired to the small but well-stocked library. There I sought our my late Father's ancient maps. He was a connoisseur of local history and I was sure he would have something of use in the cabinet. 

Yes, there it was! 

A treatise on the medieval and pre-historic usage of local field systems including hand-drawn maps. 

How fortuitous!

If only Torsten had stayed an hour longer, we could have perused the papers together.

But no matter. 

I spread out one of the mouldy folding charts on my desk and turned up the gas lamp mounted on the wall behind. 

The yellow light flickered across the vellum and gave the lines and symbols a particularly eerie presence.

Studying the maps this way and without any modern infrastructure to rely on, it was difficult to calibrate the field's precise circumstance, but I persisted into the early hours of the night.

Eureka!

At last I'd found the large field adjacent to my house, inscribed on the map in black lines of an irregular shape, which certainly bore no relation to modern farming patterns. 

This was a prehistoric tract, delineated by the lie of the rough land, upon which basic frugal gathering may have occurred, perhaps some hunting for meat and maybe even primitive horticulture. There did appear to be strips.

But then I saw it. 

One of the strips was clearly broken, it's long geometry stopped by a dark patch which .....

"By Jove! It's the pigsty's spot!" I cried and in my exuberance knocked over my brandy glass.

Having mopped up the spill with my handkerchief, I looked more intently at the area I now felt sure was the damned place.

The gas lamp wavered and as I peered at the map a shiver ran up my spine, which I could not reasonably explain, other than the nocturnal chill one can expect on this the last day of October.

Brrrr!

Taking a lens I magnified the location and focused my eye.

It was there. Clear to see. A symbol scrawled above the small blackened shape on the tract's boundary. 

A tentacle.

A tiny inked tentacle but one nonetheless. 

My shiver returned and I realized that my concentrated labours had instilled a sort of apprehension, an unease, which had now settled upon me. 

The unease could be even better defined.

It was fear.

The blacked-out spot on the paper had been shunned even then, it's dank structure  unnatural to the earliest of folk. They had singularly linked it to whatever nefarious entity or practice the tentacle inferred.

I inferred my own meaning.

Devilry!

So excited was I; so profoundly stirred by my nocturnal study and it's baleful sum, that I vowed to visit the pigsty in person that very day to test the theorem of the map and in so doing settle my indecent curiosity for the thing once and for all and put my mind at rest.

But first sleep.

It was late afternoon, when I awoke in the study. I had not made it beyond the next room from the library when exhaustion from my fervour had obviously taken me. I slept on the chaise longue with a blanket draped across.

It was chilly that October the 31st. Moreso than the season demanded and I questioned my earlier resolve to visit the sty.

"If only Torsten were with me," I mused but he would be wisely ensconced in his comfortable villa with the hearth blazing and a servant proffering a clipped cigar. 

I gathered my resolve and after a small repast of quail eggs, toast, butter and a cognac, I collected the chattels needed for my hike across the huge field: sturdy boots, thick coat, hat, hip flask for further resolve and as a result of my tardy slumbers, a tilly-lamp.

It was already completely dark as I stepped out of my door.

The entrance to the farmer's field was by way of an ancient gate with tremendously weathered gate posts. I stepped in and made my way slowly across the pallid winter wheat, at some point disturbing a large hare, which scampered away like spring-heeled Jack himself.

I watched with interest it's quick retreat over the field via the light of my lamp, as it ran in haste toward the pigsty in the distance. 

It was as it broached the fallen walls, I fancied that it hesitated, attempted to turn, but was ensnared by something darker than the dark itself, a seeming tendril of the night and with a loud throaty shriek the hare was gone. 

"Oh Lord!" I whispered and despite having glimpsed it all in the sulphurous light of my tilly I now doubted that which I had seen.

"Damn hare!"

I took a sip from my hip flask and steadied my nerves. The oak tree was close and thus the half-way mark. 

I can make it.

Reaching the vast oak I heard a noisy gang of crows high up in the canopy, their tortured sleepy chatter ricocheting like hail on an empty church roof. I stared upwards and saw their sable forms held fast to branches beginning to sway.

A wind was starting up. It arrived suddenly and was much more than an Autumn breeze. I braced myself and went headlong  into it, it's fury building rapidly and I imagined some sinister agency at work as I got ever closer to the sty.

It was then that I found the monocle.

I picked it up and my heart sank entirely. This was Torsten's monocle, the very same he had been wearing at my home the night before.

What on earth was it doing in this field?

The reality hit me like a cannonball. 

Torsten, my best friend, had himself secretly been consumed by the self-same curiosity as I and after leaving my house had deigned to see the dreadful sty himself. 

But where on earth was he now?

"Torsten, Torsten! For God's sake!" I bellowed through the tempest, my voice a mere purr in the tumult.

But then the wind ceased as abruptly as it had begun and I realized that I was standing directly outside the derelict wall of my destination, the pigsty.

Quivering, I took one tentative step to the side when my foot trod on something, something soft and pliable, something wet.

I looked down and to my disgust I had stood on the mangled remains of the hare I'd seen earlier. The poor creature had been torn apart, it's entrails cast aside like canapés and it's pelt wrenched off as if some mad butcher had got to work. It's damp crushed innards had risen over the top of my boot.

I grimaced.

It was at this point that the darkness seemed to intensify, to thicken, and an unimaginable stink arose from the sty, an aroma so foul that I had to wretch. It was the smell of a thousand abattoirs, the scent of Hades itself.

As I heaved I became aware of a faint light in the dark within the sty and as it grew stronger I began to make out a form in the blackness.

"Oh dear Mary Mother of God!" I cried as the form fully materialised within the gloom.

Before me was a sight so dreadful, so heinous that my blood ran cold and froze.

I began to scream.

In the abyss within the ditch writhed a collosal and hateful thing, a hissing, quaking red morass of tiny eyes, huge fanged lipless maws and worst of all, yes, by far the worst were the long, coiling, slithering yellow tentacles, horribly festooned with enormous pouting suckers. It slopped and contorted in its cauldron of steaming ooze like a primordial wretch.

But an even more damnable sight in this vision of Gehenna was waiting for me; it was not the beast itself nor it's infernal coils, but the pitiful soul stretched across it's awful palps.

My mind began to slip.

"Tooooooooooorsten!" I wailed as reality collapsed and my reasoning shrivelled.

My friend was mercilessly entangled in the mollusc's seething barbels, his body defiled by despicable hooks, which had ripped away entire chunks of his flesh and muscle. His feet and hands had been shortened by the thousand drooling mouths and his scalp peeled off like a slice of beef.

With tears in my eyes for the unbearable plight of my friend, unfathomably I saw him purse his lips and attempt to speak.

A single sentence echoed around the stygian hovel, a string of anguished words from his mouth so utterly devastating that I will never ever forget them.

"For God's sake, run Eric, for this truly is the gate of ...

...... Hellllllllllll!"

Torsten's final tortured yell, twisted into a  muffled agonised scream as a fat glistening tentacle harpooned his open mouth, was audible enough to ring in my ears the whole frantic run back across that insufferable field, stumbling most of the way in the devilish crop, my wracking bouts of sobbing hindering my progress home.

Home. 

The word had the hue of salvation, the very shape of escape from what surely has been a nightmare this All Hallows Eve, a most harrowing one for certain, but a nightmare nonetheless. 

Surely!

I shambled into my living room straight to the drinks cabinet and gulped a large tumbler of whisky, my hand shaking all the while.

I have been asleep and woken too quick.

Surely?

Yes, that's it. Of course.

It was then, whilst reaching for my handkerchief to dab my unaccountably damp brow, that I found once more Torsten's monocle in the snug of my jacket pocket and in turn saw the hare's wet crimson viscera clinging clearly to my boot.

It is at this point I began screaming and haven't stopped screaming since, my small asylum window the only hint I still have of the hellish world outside.

A Lullaby for Monsters

Magera was the tiniest of things, a mere dot, a bubble of blood with wings and a head of snakes.

She was nestled in torn-up newspaper like a storyline; water dripping into her mouth from a cracked tank where her parents had been drowned.

"You will be special Magera," they gurgled as they tipped her over the edge.

That was a week ago: when she fell from their grip as men pushed them under before they turned to stone.

As empty as the Hadean depths and despite being lonelier than the loneliest of myths, her newspaper nest was warm and soft: a featherbed of gibberish; a bowl of shredded human hatred she knew nothing of. Her snake-hair hissed her goodnight.

Magera woke and cooed at the lightbulb way above the tank hanging like a petrified star. She wondered if cruel men lived there too and whether she would need to hurt them.

Maggots emerged from her parents' softened backs, dropped from the lip and gathered like gnocci on the floor. Magera peered over the edge of her bed. She purred and smiled as the maggots stared.

Magera crawled onto the soft maggot carpet of cousins and was gently carried to the hole in the door, where the caravan entered the street and halted.

The maggots sniffed the air and Magera gawped at the vast skyscrapers of iron and glass towering above; strange metal canisters flying between them leaving trails of thick acrid smoke; gargantuan chimneys blurted out plumes of green and purple gas, which encircled the towers like sick halos: browbeaten denizens trudged through oil-soaked litter and detritus toward massive factories made of iron; their heads down and hands stuffed in their pockets as the driving rain lashed them into submission.

Magera shivered, stepped off the maggots and nodded her thanks. They all said "you're welcome" in unison.

A rickshaw rode past, pulled by six thin men. The occupant was a vast ogre with an enormous paunch and huge wide mouth: a monster hunter. Around his neck was a necklace of fangs and snakeheads. He stopped burping when the blue light on his head began to flash.

"HALT!" He bellowed and the rickshaw came to a stop. 

The vast hunter stood up, although no legs were visible, only feet, and peered round the street with eyes so intent that shadows stopped dead. He swung his dreadful truncheon rhythmically into his flabby open palm.

Magera froze and instinctively sensed that the massive gawping thing meant her harm. She blended into the rubbish in the gutter as best she could, her tiny snakes and wings completely still. She stared intently at his foot above her.

Seeing nothing, his blue light petering out, the quivering man sat down tutting, not yet aware that his big toe had turned to stone.

"ON!" He roared and the six pullers heaved with all their might and away they went, refuse whirling upwards in their wake.

Magera held fast, breathed a sigh of relief and made her way slowly but surely to the small playground across the road, the only sign of childhood life on a street dwarfed by threatening towers.

On a slide sat a boy. He was wearing a black bin bag and a single file of bats circled round and round his head. He looked forlorn, melancholy. He spoke to Magera in a soft whisper.

'Hi, my name is Vinegar. What's yours?'

Having never spoken before Magera pursed her tiny mouth and blew out her name in a bubble of air.

'Magera".

"Well Magera, you're clearly not like them, up there in the superstructures, so you must be like me, something else, something they won't like that's for sure. They call us monsters".

"Oh."

"These humans stuffed in all these skyscrapers can't stand things like us, things they don't understand, things which remind them of magic and they hate magic like the plague! They hate us like the plague!"

"Oh."

"Yep, it's true, sorry. So. Little gorgon, where are you going?"

Magera shrugged and as she moved a maggot fell out from her mop of snakes and landed on the grass.

"Oh!"

The maggot yawned and crawled towards Vinegar.

"Not too close baby fly! My bats are asleep but they're always starving!" Explained the boy.

Maggot shuffled onto Magera's hoof.

"I'm planning on leaving this city, this rotten pile of scrapers. There's nothing here but hate and hunters. I'm going where I can sleep every day to the sound of sweet music, where the night-children hum lullabies in a distant place where the monsters live!" said Vinegar.

"Oh!" 

"I'm going to find the Queen Bride's Castle with the swing at the edge of the world, where you can scratch your skin to see the creature within and talk and eat with fiends like us".

Vinegar looked at his audience of two.

"Do you want to come with me?"

Magera and maggot nodded. All the snakes as well.

"Super!"

"We'll need some food to keep us going," said Vinegar.

Each got a little drop of sugary spit from Magera's snakes and off they went.

It took two days to free themselves from the gyres of humanity and break out of the vast structures packed together like implanted teeth. A small posse of factory workers with pitchforks, lead by the fat hunter in the rickshaw, had even seen them off the boundary. 

"Good riddance!" Bellowed the mob, "You're the last of the monsters so don't come back!"

Vinegar turned to them bearing his fangs and raised two fingers, his bats wriggling their rear ends in their direction and defecating.

"Clowns!" Growled the vampire.

After another night of endless traipsing past pylons draped in witches knickers, shambling through the gluminous wastes of landfill, oil, grime and rubbish, at last there was nothing human left, save for one forgotten shed, where the city's trashman had sat and pointlessly scratched at his ledger. 

As they quietly passed the filthy building, they heard the sound of whining and yelping and howling and certainly not sounds a trashman would make.

They followed the noise inside. There, in a deep pit, lay a trapped wolf. A young wolf. A young werewolf to be exact and like the rest of the troop - except maggot of course  - the last of its kind.

"Hullo!" Shouted Vinegar peering over the pit.

"Hello, oh, hello, howl, howl, hello!" Came the frantic reply.

"We'll get you out!"

With an old rope thrown down and tied to a hook, the werewolf climbed out with the help of Vinegar's bats rotating like a propeller beneath his furry feet.

"Thank you!"

"You're welcome!"

"What's your name?"

"Orrible. That's what the old man called me."

"Well, Orrible, why not join us and tell us your story on the way," offered Vinegar.

Magera and Maggot nodded too.

And so the four monsters left the world of humans behind and set off for the fabled castle where dark days lasted forever.

Over windswept moors and forlorn crags they wandered. Like gargoyles perched on the buttresses, ravens grunted their displeasure at being disturbed in their nests but the monsters just laughed and waved goodbye, their spirits soaring like phantoms.

Eventually, after hiking many days and nights, they stood in front of a cave, above which was carved the symbol of a crossed-out pitchfork.

"Queen Bride's Castle!" Gasped Vinegar. "It's through here! No humans allowed, just us monsters!"

"Yay!" said Magera and Maggot.

Orrible howled. The snakes hissed.

They scrambled through the pitch-black cave and popped out like corks from a nebuchadnezzer.

Before them was a fret-shrouded vale full of shrieks and screams and roars and the group immediately felt at home.

Banshees whizzed by them; bogarts ran up trees; greenteeths wriggled in the pools and kelpies in the distant fields were growling.

It was Hell on Earth and the refugees loved it, each one skipping and dancing with joy. Even maggot crowdsurfed the snakeheads, it's little mouth cooing as they flicked their tongues with glee. 

When they reached Queen Bride's Castle; a tremendously high palace of singed barn timber stretching up into the clouds; each was given a hearty welcome, on behalf of the Queen, by the royal Igors and offered a meal of anything they so desired: black pudding for Vinegar, some pus for maggot, spare ribs for Orrible and a gorgonzola for Magera.

The Castle was lit by electrodes, which were constantly fed by lightning flinting off the sleeping Kraken to the North. On every table were devices with dials and sparking arcs and the windows were brimming with flasks of blue and purple liquids, through which the lightning flashed and conjured rainbows like bruises in the air. 

As the companions wandered round the ramparts, they realised that all their dreams would indeed come true and at last they felt accepted. They were really home in the land of monsters.

In the centre of the Castle was an enormous library of monster literature, the Wrathenaeum. It stood on the back of a giant stegosaur called Tomes. It's back plates had become the bookcases and Tomes explained to the new members that everyone got a book written about them and put in the Wrathenaeum, which they could update with fresh adventures whenever they wanted and even before they happened if they lent the Crystal Ball!

The Castle's scarred lumber corridors were adorned with brimstone plaques graced with witticisms, slogans and rally-cries. Some even spoke them out loud as you passed, like 'Halloween Forever!', 'Every Day is a Ghoul Day!', 'No Mobs Here!' and "Dark Days are Here Again!'.

Besides the Igors, a crew of busy skeletons kept the old palace ticking over and catered for all the monsters living within and without the Castle walls. The skeletons were rewarded with endless milk from the Minotaurs.

An ambulance was on call staffed by Sirens and a hospital for sick beasties was overseen by a caring Harpie called Abhorrence Nightingale. She'd been way over-unctuous with her generous ointments so a seconded demon was due to audit the cauldrons. The shredders were going like a Salem seance.

After two nights Queen Bride eventually appeared in the main hall. She was lowered from the tower above, where she'd been recharging her neck-trodes. Smoking from lightning strikes, she sat and joined the new arrivals for a supper of burnt toast, fresh bandages and her daily must, stale wedding cake.

Tall tales were told round the table and the guests and the Bride got on like a house on fire.

It was over a nightcap of ectoplasm that she tells her new friends about her lost love, the Monster, missing for decades and stuck somewhere in the castle's thousand rooms. 

Vinegar, Orrible, Magera and maggot promised to help the Queen find her lost Monster and would begin straight away. All of her Igors joined them too.

They searched high and low, in graveyards, labs, dungeons, wine cellars, tunnels, crypts, vaults, breakfast rooms, back rooms, front rooms, parlours, boudoirs, master bedroom, guest rooms, state rooms, broom cupboard, barns, chests, coffins, the Ghost Train and the Black Lagoon.

Nothing. Not a sniff of the Monster.

"There is nowhere left to look Igors", screamed the Queen at her servants.

"Beg your pardon Ma'am, but there is one place left"

They all stared at that one brave Igor shivering at the back.

"The cinema in the spire!"

"But that's been locked and sealed since we built the castle. It's forbidden to go near it!" Argued the Queen.

However, she accepted her servant's logic and the Queen lead the group up a spiral staircase of one hundred wooden steps, which creaked like vertebrae as they trod. 

Thick cobwebs festooned the walls and banisters. Old hungry spiders ran forward chomping at the bit, only to stop dead and curtsey for their Queen.

As they approached the final flight they could hear strange sounds. Voices, several voices and even music. It was a film being played in the cinema in the spire.

The Queen entered and saw for the first time in decades her beloved husband, the Monster. He was sat on the timber floor transfixed by the huge screen on the wall, a patient stretched ghost on which an old projector was beaming a black and white film.

It was Frankenstein.

The Queen's heart melted as she watched her sweet mesmerized creature reach out to the old blind man in the film and mouth the word 'Friend' just as he did on the screen.

With tears running down her face-paint and sizzling on her neck, she walked slowly towards her beloved, the rest of the group caught up in her bridal trails.

"My darling Monster!," the Queen whispered and hugged him tightly. The Monster stared at her, as if waking from a long dream.

"I've been watching our old films dear. You know, the old ones when people still loved us. When we were famous." He explained, his stitched-on eyes welling up with formaldehyde.

"Don't worry about that now my dearest. I am just so pleased to have you back.  Let's get you to the rooftop and fully recharged".

The small group of new guests followed the Monster and his Bride to the circuitry in the clouds, where the lightning zapped night and day.

In time the Monster was himself again, helping the Queen run the castle and look after all the creatures in her care across the baddest of lands.

The new arrivals settled into their new home and had dreadfully monstrous lives.

Maggot grew up, had a few tantrums, then became a nice shiny Bluebottle living on a Yeti. 'Orrible made some wolfish pals and running in packs, terrorized the castle forest fairies.

As for Vinegar and Magera, they were given top jobs: Vinegar was tasked with tending to the castle's growing bat colony and Magera assisted the regal stonemason with petrifying skill.

They also became the Royal couple's closest friends, got their own haunted house complete with Igors and lived shabbily ever after.

The (fi)end.

Skinvent's Bane

He was a dishevelled old man with a terrible gait as he walked up the path to the cottage that afternoon. It was the first of January, the first day of a year and was as new as a nail.

Winter crows guzzling seed seemed to writhe away as the old man trod with old boots way too big for his whippet legs.

His long ancient gabardine was stained and burnt and tied at the waist with fraying string.

It reeked of something like gunpowder and cardinal sin.

"Morning Madame, Villbleed's the name. Mind if I take a winter apple from your tree, for which I'll trade you this bag of dust?"

Skinvent the woman stared at the stinking vagrant for a second or two but saw no harm in letting him take an apple.

After all there were far too many for her this year, a fecund crop of pudgy bakers, which even her three cruel uncles couldn't manage, save if she she cooked them all and gave them bellyache from one huge pie.

Shaking away her wishful thoughts, she replied from the candlelit doorstep.

"By all means do take an apple or two Sir. And no need to give me anything in return. Tis New Year and all."

"Why thank you kind lady. Most benevolent of you. But I insist, if I scrump I must leave you this dust. Its been swept from my house last New Years Eve it has, by my dear dear departed, and will bring bad luck to whomsoever you wish."

"Bad luck?"

"Yes, for the pesky irksome oafs we all have to endure in our lives. Maybe they deserves a bit of misfortune eh dear? I say, let's forget our manners, to hell with them all and begin anew!"

Skinvent considered his strange but reasonable thesis and conceded its attraction. She could indeed deploy the dust to some good use.

She smiled.

"Take your apple and leave me the dust."

Items so exchanged, the tramp and the woman parted company, but as he left the lady was certain she spied scarlet skin beneath his sleeve.

Thinking nothing of it more the day bled into night.

"Where's my tea you slovenly sow!" bellowed Uncle Stomach, named as such by her dear departed Mother, his Sister, on account of his insatiable and revolting appetite. 

Stomach would eat anything and everything, with not a care for anyone else. They could starve for all Stomach cared. A selfish, heinous gobbler; a stealer of meals; a greedy, belligerent pig-bag, who, like the rest of Skinvent's Uncles, was the bane of her life.

"Bring my fuckin tea!" He roared and slapped his niece across her face with his tablespoon. 

Used to Stomach, but sick of him entirely,  Skinvent had no hesitation whatsoever at mixing the bag of dust into his gravy, which it thickened admirably and fell in fat drips over the dish of hot food.

No sooner had Stomach tucked in he began to choke. He stood up suddenly and grabbed his throat, huge globules of dusty meat erupting from his frothing maw.

"You, you fuckin...."

He glared at Skinvent and she could feel his hot hatred. He knew for sure she'd done something to him.  But it was too late for the greedy man, who died on that very spot, liquefying slowly like lard around his gut, a steady reduction of tissue and bone, eventually leaving nothing but his bloated stomach, the acid sloshing out as it fell on its side like a discarded haggis.

"Hmmm. My my. Well I never did see such a thing!" said Skinvent beaming from ear to ear.

She carefully hung the dripping stomach on a hook inside the pantry and blew out one of the candles in the window, a pair still burning for lonely strays lost in the dead of night, strays bearing wonderful gifts perhaps.

"One down, two to go!" she whispered as she closed her eyes and endured the agony of her remaining pair of Uncles for another long, dreadful dozen months.

The next New Year's day, as Skinvent had prayed for every night, Villbleed returned seeking one of her succulent Christmas apples.

Goatsuckers coughed as he strode by, a spring in his step they had perceived and scarpered to the woods to watch.

"Good Morrow sweet Miss, tis I again this start of the calendar, in need of another of your wholesome fruit if we can agree a suitable trade."

"Ah, yes, of course Sir. For certain an apple is a small price for ....?"

"A pot of glue rendered from a nag, my dear departed, just yesterday on New Years Eve. This too will engender harm on whom you choose and will adhere to it, I swear."

"A deal!" She laughed.

"Please scrump old Sir and give me that glue!"

Villbleed turned to the tree and Skinvent was sure she glimpsed a wisp of smoke rising from his coat.

That night the table set, she felt her Uncle's hand cup her breast, his other hand guiding hers upon his bulging ballsack.

"Come here you whore and spread those legs. You're gagging for some Uncle Chestnuts I can tell!"

Skinvent winced but played the part for Chestnuts, so named by her sweet late Mother for his hideous man-bag, which, seldom in his trousers, had banged upon the family whole; girls, boys, women and men. He wasn't fussy whom he entered, his insistent nadgers happily decanting every time.

The Uncle shambled to toilet himself and the niece went to the counter, prepared a drink and quickly basted his seat with Villbleed's glue. 

"Sit my good Uncle for a cup of punch and then you may have your fill".

Chestnuts sat down and immediately began to quiver and quake as he stuck fast. 

"What the ....!"

He fumed, he raged, he blasphemed and conveniently burst into flames and was handsomely consumed leaving nothing but his pink testicles steaming on the stool.

"Good Lord! Good grief! That is truly a sight for sore eyes!"

"You've well and truly roasted your chestnuts this time Uncle!"

Skinvent chuckled and picking up his sizzling balls she hung them in the pantry on a hook beside Stomach's wincing gut.

"A right pair of Uncles you are now eh!" She howled and blew out a candle, leaving just one alight in the window.

Her dreams were eased but nowhere near fully, as the worst of the Uncles was left, the pugnacious and violent Knuckles.

Skinvent feared him the most and suffered another gruelling year, her open wounds and loosening hair the trophies of Knuckle's unwanted attention.

The world turned whole and New Year came full circle, and like the clockwork dark, Villbleed appeared on January's frost.

"Tis I sweet dear, another year passed and I yearn again for your apple's tang. May I partake today?"

"Oh yes, wise Sir, please do! My apples as always are yours to plunder but I wonder so what you'll trade this year?"

"Ah, the best I feel, the best for last, a tonic for the hands and feet I reduced myself, from my dear departed, to smooth away the evil in your midst but I shall not rub it in my lady"

"Done!" She roared! 

"Please eat old man and give me that tonic!"

As Villbleed scrumped a final time, Skinvent was sure of the fork in his tail she witnessed flick above his boots.

With no time to think Knuckles appeared, punched her square and dragged her to the house,whilst yelling at the tramp:

"Fuck off you old cunt and don't come back. This punch-bag's mine!"

Skinvent was thrown to the flagged floor of the parlour, where she clutched the precious tonic.

"What's that fucking bottle you useless wench?"

"It's for my hands Uncle, a potion for tired skin on hands and feet: to make them tough, something I have always wanted!" She wailed,  hoping against hope that the ruse found purchase in his brutish brain.

It had.

"Fuck you, you scratty old tart, it's my skin it's dressing, not your sissy sack! And when they're even tougher you're gonna get the beating of your pointless little life!"

Feigning resistance, the niece shrieked as Knuckles wrestled the bottle from her, cruelly kicking her in the softest parts and daubing it over his hands and feet in front of her.

"See you minger! Look at your Uncle's iron hide now!" Bragged Knuckles as he clenched his gritty fists and walloped Skinvent fully in the mouth.

She cried and nursed her bleeding teeth and prayed for .....

It began with a welt, then a rash of boils.

Before long Knuckles' whole face was a raft of buboes, scabbing over, then falling off to leave rents exploding yellow puss across the room. Knuckles screamed from a lipless mouth as his entire body, save his hands and feet, gave way to a mass of crusts and blisters, which he frantically tried to pick away, only to reveal deep necrotic holes of gangrenous jelly.

Uncle Knuckles fell to his knees like a dying crab, looked up at Skinvent and wept, the tears loosening his face, which came away completely, landing between his legs.

Splat!

His ravaged body shook and he reached out to his niece, his fists dreadfully clenched one last time, only to find them fall off his wrists and land on the floor like two hams.

Splat!

A shambling sacrifice, he tried to stand but his feet came away from his ankles with a snap. Faceless, handless and without feet, the monstrosity still persisted and staggered towards Skinvent on bleeding stumps, before collapsing at her skirt, crusting over and blowing away in the winter's wind.

Skinvent laughed and laughed and laughed as she stared at what was left: just his terrible fists and feet, harmless and incomplete.

"Oh yes! Oh My! How absolutely awfully wonderful" she howled.

Picking up her Uncle's limbs she skipped to the pantry and tying together sinews, she hung them out to dry like shoes on two of the three remaining hooks.

She admired her handiwork and touched each one in turn, making them swing ever so slightly: Stomach, Chestnuts, Knuckles and feet.

Skinvent shed a tear of joy and smiled in disbelief.

There was one spare candle to extinguish but she kept it lit that winter night and every night the following year, a year of bliss and rightful power, of eating and sleeping without any fear.

But as the Christmas season came, shining brighter than she'd ever known, Skinvent's niggling doubts about the winter vagrant scratched her mind like claws and as December waned they coalesced into full conviction. 

She was sure of it, he was coming and wasn't finished, so by the pregnant light of December's final night, Skinvent was ready for the horrors he would surely bring.

And like a leech that's left an empty pond, Villbleed slithered up the path that January first.

"No Uncles left my dearest Lady but apples galore I see!"

"Yes, a fertile tree it is for sure, my mother's in the soil protecting me."

The vagrant nodded.

"So what to trade this year I wonder; what's now an apple's fee?

"How about a hot dinner for you kind Sir?"

"Ah, warm food in your homestead. I do so miss my late dear departed's cooking and everything else I bid her to do for me."

"Well, come in the house."

Villbleed smiled widely, his crammed and copious tapered teeth revealed.

"Oh, I plan to come in my dear. I plan to do so much more besides. Now get that fuckin' sweet ass of yours inside!" He bellowed.

Skinvent had known for certain the man would change; had fully rumbled his ruse a year before but she was still shocked by this terrible switch, his sudden avarice and a whiff of something far far worse, but to her credit and good fortune, she'd seen this jumped-up Trojan tramp for what he really was; just another conniving bastard and bastards well she knew.

Once beyond her door the man took off his fetid mack to reveal his hellish form, the flaming red horrendous figure of Satan himself, his tail thrashing in excitement and his huge member engorged like a crimson canon.

"Now, you wimpering bitch, where's my fucking dinner? If it's decent grub I'll spare you my sharp tongue where it hurts and get straight to the forking. My knackers ache for relief and my late departed mistress just lost .. well, the knack with them, her arid cleft her unfortunate end and I'm fucking starving for it now. Yet fear not my apple-whore, as you can see I have risen to the occasion splendidly and as planned, your three Uncles' charming souls, God bless 'em, came to me like giddy lambs and gave me the lift I so dreadfully needed to stiffen my resolve so to speak! Ha ha!"

The Devil chuckled, steamed and smiled, his sharpened teeth a hyena's.

"Now fetch me my fucking food, wench!"

Satan sat at the table smoking and Skinvent brought out the meal she'd prepared earlier, secretly garnishing it with a hefty dash of the tramp's fell trades saved for such a very day; the dust, the glue, the tonic. They all went in the stew, along with the balls, fists and feet, all served on an empty stomach. 

"Yes," she mused "my hateful Uncles get to play one more part .... or several!"

The Devil gorged himself on the hot casserole, demanding seconds, sucking little bones and finally licking out the stomach. He sat back and burped, his taloned hands caressing his fattened paunch.

"Excellent fayre, my thanks to you trollop. The juicy meatballs and hocks were glorious! The butcher should be complimented on his choice of cuts."

"And now for pudding!"

He rose to his full height, clutching his swollen sceptre.

"You will now know the agony and the ecstasy of the Tartarus cock, so pull up your skirt sweet harlot!"

Satan swept everything off the table with his tail and threw Skinvent over its edge face down, her skirt ruffled around her naked behind.

"Aaah, that's a fine rump I must say, like one big apple for me to core; far better than the last scrag end I shafted. This is a plump harvest for pressing to be sure. Oh hell, my glorious pups will fill your quim to its brim!"

Barely in control the Devil yelled aloft.

"Yes! Let's get to it!"

He gripped her sides and readied himself for the thrust when, suddenly, he stopped.

"What? What's this? You witch! What have you done?"

Satan staggered backwards and stared in disbelief as his turgid member shivered and shook without his hands and he urinated jet black blood. 

His horns sank into his head heading straight for his roasting brain and his tail flew in a circle and shot straight up his burning arse.

His balls tied a clove knot in themselves and he forcibly stuffed both his hands down his throat, where he grasped his intestines hard and pulled himself inside out, the whole gelatinous mess breaking down entirely and running over the steps out of the house.

The birds began to drink.

Slurp!

All that was left of the Devil was his furtive cock.

Skinvent stopped shaking and howled with laughter as she prodded the steaming phallus with her foot.

"Not so cocky now eh! you old twat! Gives a whole new meaning to the Fallen One don't you think!"

She laughed and laughed as she carefully lifted her heavy scarlet wrinkled bounty and hung it on the biggest pantry hook she had, where it shook and swung and suddenly went slack.

"Not so thick now old Nick you fucking prick!" She howled and closed the pantry door on her prize possessions. 

After all, you never know who might come scrumping the next New Year! 

Absolute Silence. With a Regular Bleep.

I'm the last of the ball bots in the steel mill. The remnant. The saddo.

The rest were scrapped by our human owners. When the steel ran out. Flattened. Squashed. Crushed. Alive.

They were my friends. Those robots. My closest friends on the production line. 

We made ball bearings and mirror balls for humans and we were so happy. Deliriously so.

My bestest friend was SHINE 1. I'm SHINE 2. I loved SHINE 1. I still do.

The crusher pressed her together and pounded her flat like a plate. A plate of shiny dead steel with her name on it.

Her electric eye got squeezed out during the process and fizzed across the factory floor  

It looked at me.

And like me it witnessed the terrible collapsing of our friends

..... including herself.

The soul-killing scrapping of my girl SHINE 1.

I cried endless oil.

I sobbed and shook in my locker but they'd forgotten about me. Those silly humans.

That's how I escaped the flattening. 

After I wept, I kept completely still until the very end when all the plates were stacked on wagons and driven away.

Our owners were using them to build a rocket. 

I'd heard them talking. A fleet of rockets. A million massive rockets to be exact. From all the mills. For all the humans. The world was dying.

They'd take them to their colonies on the moon, where they'd melt the rockets down and turn them into buildings.

Someone would be living inside my girl.

If only I ....

There was absolute silence. With a regular bleep.

It was my timer. Each beep meant a new ball bearing to polish.

But there were no balls left now. 

They'd all been mixed into the meld for the rockets. The hoppers were hollow and the floor swept clean.

Except for SHINE 1's eye. 

I accidently kicked it as I stepped out of my box. 

It rolled across the mill's floor towards the middle grate.

Noooooooo! I screamed and pelted after it with all my servos thumping. I leapt and grabbed it before it tipped into the trash.

I was so relieved. I stared at the eye. It blinked and I knew she was looking at me.

I smiled.

..... Oh, Shine 1, my sweetheart. I swear. I swear I will find you again, somehow, somehow. Somehow.....

My timer beeped.

After kissing it I placed her eye in my recess and walked through the empty buildings.

After several weeks of aimless ambling I found a locked container. It was huge. As big as a house.

With all my metal muscle I snapped the padlock and went inside, lighting up the darkness with my headlamp.

The container was crammed floor to ceiling with rolls of aluminium foil. Thousands of them. No. Millions. Undoubtedly some human project waste. Forgotten. Like me. Left behind.

I opened up a roll and tore off a sheet. Whilst looking round and not really computing what I was doing, with my normal hand I started twiddling and passed it to my polisher.

After a few minutes of staring at the million rolls, I looked at what I'd done with utter astonishment. 

Wowzers!

My headlamp shone brighter and I danced on the spot. 

I'd made a ball!

A mirror ball. A perfect copy of a ball bearing, only bigger, and as reflective as mercury.

I held it up under my light, dazed by it's silvery beauty, a shimmering globe of metal foil like a small satellite.

I held up SHINE 1's eye next to it.

..... Look! SHINE 1 look! A ball like the ones we used to make. And I can make more! .....

..... And I can make .....

More! 

My artificial mind threaded it's needle and the big idea was born.

Skipping through the mill I yelled.

.... I'll make new balls. Mirror balls. Millions of them! Billions! ...

Which is exactly what I did.

For the next year I twiddled, rolled and polished a trillion metal mirror balls and stacked them like a tower.

The aluminium tower rose out of the mill through the space where the roof had been. 

It grew and grew, a gleaming minaret spearing the sky, worrying baffled birds on its steady surge through the dark heavens.

Until at last it reached it's goal. 

The moon.

I filled up my caddy with another load  and climbed the cairn of mirrors, each one reflecting my excited face as I scrambled by.

It took an age but eventually I reached the very top, where I stepped off onto the lunar surface and placed SHINE 1's eye on the very tip.

..... We'll be back for you, don't you fret .....

I ran to the metal colonies and stepped inside their gargantuan dome.

Beeping steadilly and finding my bearings, I saw the tenement made of all my friends.

Humans poured out of from everywhere. Hundreds. From silver buildings.

They stared at me, a forgotten scratched-up robot polisher with a headlamp. A nightmare from the intolerable past.

They opened fire.

So did I. 

My full shot caddy killed them all. 

Bodies with holes were scattered all over. Bright red blood ran along the metal paths and down my tower like a mountain stream.

I tip-toed through the flesh and began to cut the buildings called SHINE.

My friends.

Deploying my smelter - with oil in my throat - I rekindled SHINE 1 first. 

..... My sweetheart, my love! ....

I coo'd.

Her one good eye blinked and after spitting out some schwarf she whispered:

.... SHINE 2! Is it really you?

I nodded and after re-forming all our factory friends we trundled through the red river to my tower's top.

Stopping at the tip and like a flower of glass, I picked up my beloved's lost eye and placed it in her face.

She smiled and blinked and we hugged.

Descending the pile, slick with fluid, we pulled it down as we went, so that no-one else could follow us, until at last we were home in the mill once more. 

With a trillion bloody mirrors to polish we beeped like pianos in an empty room.

And then I swiveled and noticed that SHINE 1 was missing her eye.

.... I've left it up there my love, hidden on the moon so we can keep an eye on those rotten old humans ......

What SHINE 1 didn't tell me is that they were already flying rockets back to Earth with onboard crushers.

She told me later as we kissed.

I stared at my girl, whispered a sad Goodbye and locked her in my locker as they landed.

I'll Save You My Heart

I'd known for months my food would run out, even in my restaurant, where I was holed up alone, as the world went completely mad.

I'd managed six on the stuff in the freezer and the big tin cans. Almost gone now. The milk's totally soured, so I pour it on the floor in thick globules and stand in it. One small step.

The virus had come out of nowhere. The socials were rampant to start with. A space plague from a meteor, a vindictive lab shocktail from crazy COVID scientists, an act of vengeance from the spurned online giants? 

Bladi bladi bla!

Who the fuck knows! Society was on its arse before the madness anyway. The influencers killing themselves live in a studio, the massive price hikes for fresh air, the failed attempt to get to Mars; the rocket, New Apollo, laden with so many people and way too much hope - our only fucking hope - smashing into the moon like a scud in a piss-poor parody of it's namesake's glory.

They say the virus got the pilots. Or NASA controllers. It doesn't matter. That lunar tragedy was the final crooked line on Mankind's hashtag headstone, the skeletons in the regolith the pallbearers of our world.

I weep and grip my statue, the one sent to me personally by motorcycle courier with thanks from the boys in Houston. 

A ceramic figurine of the astronauts. Of her. My knuckles turn white with rage. They'd put her in a cannon and fired. Fuck!

We'd fucked it up ourselves though. Here on Earth. Us Boomers. 

Boomers screwed the planet for everything it had. Or so the kids said. "So fuckin' clever" they memed day and night. Robots, AI, The internet. We had it all and wanted more. But at least we didn't meme about it.

And those poor bastard Betas paid the price. Those screen-distracted babies not watching what we did. They'd inherited the wind alright, an acrid wind of a napalmed Earth, where the sun baked babies like fat pizzas.

Pizza! Yes! My last one. A margarita. Then there would be nothing. My beloved ristorante hollow. I had become Mamma Mia Hubbard and like billions more faced the inevitable checkout. Madness, starvation and one final dance with the Pillsbury Doughboy.

I hadn't noticed my own insanity arrive. 

Like a non-paying customer it asked for the best table, ate everything on the menu, ate the bill and smiled like a hyena.

But it was there for sure. Houston, we've got a problem!

The virus had brought it of course. The madness.

From space they said. Cosmic wrath. Some said it was the crash on the moon. It spewed up God knows what that filtered down on our waiting brains and sent us to the nuthouse. Dust to dust. Ashes to ...

I hoped it had. I'd been waiting for her.

Another morning's come.

I don't dress anymore. Don't shave or wash. I stare at my blank eyes on the back of a shining ladle hung above the hobs. I look like a demon. With a beard. An unshaved Lucifer. The fallen one who fell on bended-knee before the Influencers set fire to Amazon.

But Lucifer is hungry. It's been two days since that damn pizza. Or was it a Beta baby I ate? I forget. I'll forget my own funeral one day. Or my God damn birthday!

Yes, my birthday! It must be today! I must celebrate. Of course I must. Start spreading the news and hurry, hurry, before the air is gone in my big tin can.

A large glass of brown water from the tap first, no doubt full of tasty virus and I'll get busy.

I want to be a part of it.

Sharpening my biggest knife I watch a dying spider snatch another near the seasalt. 

Alas, the victim is much fitter and turns the table round so quickly that I can't tell who's eating who. 

For no earthly reason I can think of, I cover them both in salt, preserving the moment, curing the death-throes, that fatal salty waltz.

I gawp. The pile wriggles, grains shift, a leg sticks out and then it all goes still.

I light the big gas oven my father had bought in the Sixties, God bless him. I inherited his gas, not the wind. 

I stare at the eager flames for an age.

I can't help thinking about those crashed astronauts bound for Mars and lying on the moon. 

Thinking of her: spread-eagled in the ashes. Visor cracked. Smothered in dead dirt. A dune forming like a pyramid. She writhes within. Like my salted spiders, staring at me, with corroded eyes and a rictus smile.

I take my ring off and slice one last bag of frozen veg and place it in my biggest oven tray. I make a gravy from whatever's on the kitchen floor.

The taste reminds me of regret blended with yearning: like a wedding cake left outside forever.

Its quite a feat getting into that oven.

I've way too many limbs, not like a chicken, but somehow, all curled up, I shut the steel door.

Plup!

I'm inside now. Cooking my last meal. I baste myself over and over with floor gravy.

I lick my lips. Over and over I lick my lips. I'll have the extremities and I'll save you my heart.

I feel a hot wind like a Martian breeze on my skin and as the blazing sun singes my hair I swallow my wedding ring so I'll find it when I've eaten.

As the moon peers in the oven and I crowdsurf on full-bellied spiders, my broiling mind cures itself and I dance one last time with my wife's swooning bones.

We lie down together on the lunar dunes for hours and laugh out loud as my skin turns into burning confetti and lands on our flaming heads.

We kiss without lips.

Ping! I'm done.

Scrotes

Norman was washing his three-wheeler that Saturday. He always washed it on Saturdays. It was his pride and joy that Robin Reliant, all fins and slick angles, like a pocket Cadillac.

As he soaped it's blue body his mind wandered to when his darling wife and he had got married in the 1970s. A simple but gorgeous affair for a few friends and family, they'd used the Robin as the wedding car.

It looked like a blue batmobile that day, with it's Just Married ribbons stretched across the bonnet and pepsi cans rattling at the rear as they drive up the street for the drive to Butlins.

Ada had looked fabulous, her long black hair and chiffon veil blowing in the breeze like wondrous sails, the canvas of their joyous new voyage, young and free with everything to live for in a world of promise and sunshine.

They'd gone on to many adventures in the Robin, a turquoise three-wheeled cruiser trundling across Britain and Europe, as far east as Romania, the two of them like astronauts in a capsule bound for happiness. People wind down their car windows at traffic lights, whistling at the amazing Reliant, the two occupants beaming with the sunlight of nomads, the wide smiles of being young and madly in love.

It was all so long ago now and norman didn't want to let darker thoughts crawl in, the darkest of thoughts from the very worst of times.

He circled his sponge over the Robin's long front lights and caught a glimpse of his face in the gleaming chrome trim.

God, he looked old! Older than he'd ever done and he seemed to be aging faster than ever these last few years. Aging like an applecore chucked behind the shed, drying up, the pips popping out, no longer living.

He was a dead man walking on the death row of his sentence, a long life of loneliness and grief, his grim companions since that dreadful day, nestling with the grimmest, which he kept locked away in the deepest hole.

The Reliant was all he had left of his glorious life together with Ada, a tangible portal to the beautiful past, where he so dearly wanted to be again. He mused if he drove fast enough down the street might he break the time barrier between him and his beloved.

It was then he noticed a group of youths stood in the road. They were young and mean-looking and gathered round something on the ground. It was a hedgehog curled into a ball. The youths were kicking it to one another like a football, it's spines making it jar and jolt on the asphalt. The ruffians looked so underfed he thought they might eat the poor creature!

His anger surged ike a hot tide. He'd always detested bullies. He walked to the end of his drive and shouted at them.

"You boys, leave that hedgehog alone, you'll injure it!"

The kids hadn't noticed the old man before but now they all turned to face him. They stared like hateful things and one stepped forward, the most dreadful-looking of them all: pale, sunken cheeks, thin lips and crater eyes.

"You fuckin' what you old bastard! It's none of your Fuckin' business so keep your fuckin nose out!"

"Leave the hedgehog alone!" He said loudly and firmly.

"This old cunt must be deaf boys!" He said to his gang.

They all turned and stared at Norman, a stare of combined malevolence that made the hairs on the back of his stand up.

The scrawny leader moved closer and the other boys followed until they were all stood on the pavement directly in front of Norman's drive, where he was washing his car.

The gang leader was standing almost next to the Robin.

He slowly traced his finger along the chrome finned rear lamp.

"So, this is your old banger is it old man?"

"Funny looking pile 'o' shite ain't it! It's missing a fuckin front wheel!"

He howled at his own wit and swiveled to hear his troops laughing loudly too.

"Keep your hands off the car!" Norman warned.

"I think you're forgetting the word please you grouchy old fucker!"

"Say Please!"

The youth took hold of the radio aerial and began to slowly bend it

"Bend my aerial and you will regret it for the rest of your life!"

"Ooh! Fuck! Hear that boys! We'll regret it! Jeepers, we're just quaking in our fuckin boots aren't we!"

Once again, he howled with laughter and his goons followed suit

"What the fucks a warty old twat like you going to do, eh!"

"Fuckin' nothin' that's what cos you're a crusty old wanker who can't fart without shittin'!"

"And what's so special about this heap of crap anyway? You shag the old lady senseless in the back? That's it, it's your three-wheeler shag cupboard ain't it!"

"Shut your mouth you disrespectful streak of piss!"

Ah. Smelling blood, the leader persisted.

"And where is the old bitch anyway? Get her out here and we'll show her a fuckin' good time in the back won't we boys!"

"Yeah!" They all agreed, pressing nearer to Norman, "a fuckin good time!"

"She'll be so full o' jizz you'll have to wash her out with that fanny sponge you're holding fella!"

He prodded Norman in the chest.

"And just maybe when we're done we'll shove that maingy fuckin hedgehog right up her cunt so you can never fuck the old witch again!"

Norman grabbed the youth's finger hard. Noticing the nail was strangely filthy with what looked like earth, he began to bend it backwards.

"Ah, ah!"

The leader contorted in pain and began to stagger backwards, Norman holding fast.

"Get off my car, get off my property and stop disrespecting my wife!"

With one further push, the youth's soily finger nearly broke but returned to position, the agonised youth caressing it as it throbbed beyond belief.

One of the others spoke solemnly.

"You shouldn't have done that mister."

The whole gang repeated it.

"You shouldn't have done that!"

The leader staggered backwards, straightened up and rejoined his mates.

They stared once more at Norman in an vacant kind of way, a couple of them drooling.

Turning, the leader kicked the retreating hedgehog towards Norman. It flew through the air and they didn't see him expertly catch it with his right hand, releasing it into his back garden.

"All the best little blood!" He whispered in its ear.

Finishing up Norman retired inside to eat a TV dinner in front of the box. The evening News was on talking about cancer and his mind wandered back to his Ada. She had died after a long battle with the monstrous disease. It took away the love of his life and crushed his soul forever. He became only half a human, skulking in the shadows like a fox, retreating from the world he wished would burn. His life since then was a rudderless shamble and his demons fought hard to ascend.

He kept a lock of Ada's hair on the mantle piece in a wooden box, which they'd bought together at Castle Bran in the Carpathian hills. They'd been the happiest of days, an endless summer of high pastures and sweeping meadows, where they ran through the tall fescues, collapsing by burbling mountain streams to make passionate love.

Only at the end of that Carpathian summer did the days shorten and the nights exude the mountains' darkness. It was on the night they packed their tent that Ada was bitten by a large dog that had emerged from the forest.

It was a deep bite and the local village nurse looked at the pair sceptically, reluctant to dress the wound and continually tutting and making the sign of the cross.

Ada had had it re-dressed in England but by then the bite had all but disappeared. Ada had seemed younger after that, stronger. Bigger even. Her appetite for meat had grown too and it was in the months that followed when Sheep began to be mauled on the lonely moors above the town.

But cancer got her in the end, the monster in us all.

"Ada!" He sighed.

The fizzing snow of the dead screen brought him out of his drowse and he crawled on all fours up the stairs to bed.

Early next morning his world collapsed again.

It was still semi-dark outside but he could see on the drive his beloved Robin Reliant had been smashed to smithereens. Great ragged chunks of blue fibre-glass were strewn around the drive and huge wooden posts ripped from his fence had been rammed through the windscreen like stakes.

The car was wrecked.

So was Norman. He collapsed to his knees and sobbed. So sad for the car, so sad for himself, sobbed for Ada and their beautiful love.

His tears fizzed in his eyeballs and as his sobbing abated a new emotion took hold. Rage.

The man balled his fists and ground his teeth. Fury surged inside him like a maelstrom. He banged the rug over and over until he calmed.

Norman needed to talk to his wife. He walked the mile to her grave in the local but semi-abandoned churchyard. Chatting by her graveside would ease his soul and he would tell her the terrible news about their beloved car.

When he arrived at the church gates it was dusk but he could still see a group of figures hunched over his wife's grave. They were shouting and gnashing, squabbling and drooling.

The grave was torn apart, the coffin broken, the headstone defiled with shit.

Where's the old fucker's wife's body? They shrieked like a pack of starving hyenas, their clothes ragged and soiled, their faces flecked with spittle and earth. One of them was chewing on a ragged hand from the next grave, itself desecrated and upturned.

Norman recognized the boys from the day before, the nasty scrawny scrotes who had confronted him on his drive. The very same whom he knew for certain had smashed up his robin. Their robin.

He stared at them dribbling into the coffin and hard as it was to believe in this day and age, he instinctively knew what they were, a foulness from legend, a canker from myth: grave-feeders.

They were ghouls.

Ghouls robbing Ada's grave.

His fury boiled and he gripped the iron gate tightly.

"There is no body you fuckin filthy scrotes. My wife was cremated."

The ghoulish troop jerked round and gawped at the old giffer stood by the trees.

So, you came looking for us eh old man? What, was it the nice gift we left you on the drive? The leader of the pack hissed.

Norman came out of the shadow of the yew and balling his fists he roared like a lion, his rage erupting in a geyser of purest hate.

The ghouls , suddenly off-guard, stepped back. Even the leader looked non-plussed.

Norman strode to the graveside, still bellowing and stooped to retrieve an urn tucked in the recess beneath the headstone. The urn was engraved with the name Ada.

"You fuckin' stupid cretins are in for a treat. When I've done you'll be sorry you were ever fuckin born!"

Norman unscrewed the urn and placed it on the headstone. He took a penknife from his pocket and made a deep cut in his palm. It bled.

He squeezed copious blood onto the urns ashes and swirled it round until if formed a frothy grey and red broth.

Smiling broadly at the mesmerized ghouls, Norman spoke.

"You ought to be running now boys. You see, my Ada ......"

He downed the gloop slowly, savouring it's poignancy, the ashen essence of his beloved wife. The earthy liquor sloped along his gullet and dripped into his stomach. Big grey drops of ash, bone and hair hit his acid bag and with each splash he jerked.

The mutation convulsed through his old body: his bones cracked apart, skin ballooned and matted with thick fur. His teeth lengthened and nails grew into sharp talons.

Snarling, he rose from the graveside, a massive seven-foot gnashing beast.

He smiled and through huge fangs growled:

".... Yes, my darling Ada, she was a werewolf boys, a really fuckin' big one and she's as hungry as... Well, you're going to find out for yourselves!"

The troop of ghouls yelped in disbelief. Even their leader lost his swagger and quickly turned tail. They scurried through the headstones like scared conies.

No-longer-Norman would teach these heathens a final terrible lesson.

Uncontrollable fury pulsed through him as he remembered how they had wrecked his Robin, ransacked his memories and defiled his Ada's resting place.

He was going to truly enjoy eating their scratty brains and shitting out their ragged souls.

He leapt into the night and the dreadful screaming lasted for hours.

There were indeed worse things in Hell than ghouls!

The Thing on the Caravan

The knock on the caravan was sudden and hard.

The man inside reluctantly put down his novel and opened the door. He stared into darkness. There was no one there. He stepped outside into the night and couldn't see anyone.

All he heard was a barn owl screaming blue murder somewhere on the land and sensed a faint whiff of moist soil fading in the growing dark.

Slightly unnerved he resumed his reading on the caravan couch and sipped his glass of sherry.

The knock came again, only this time louder, harder and wet.

The man nearly jumped out of his skin and he threw his book across the coach.

"Christ! Who the Hell are you and what do you want at this God-damn hour?" He shouted as he flung open the door.

Nothing.

There was nobody to be seen.

Just that strange odour of watered earth lingering in the air.

"Bollocks!" he cursed, "Fuckin' weirdos everywhere you go! No peace anywhere! Probably one of those tree-hugging keepers stoned after closing. Yep, a scrotey long-haired zoo-keeper goofing off!"

The man had never liked the zoo opening near his static caravan. The two things just didn't go together. An oxymoron in the Dales. One good. One weird.

"A fuckin' zoo in the country! I ask you! It's for townies. It should be in town!" he'd protested to the council bin-men when it opened. They just stared back at the man, shrugging, the huge wheelie bins on their backs making them sidle like hermit crabs in the morning's icy cold.

That was weeks ago and the zoo had since had problems. He'd read it in the local rag. Staffing, sloppy conditions, even some escapes for God's sake!

The man slept reluctantly and fitfully that night. Despite several more nightcaps, the sherry hadn't settled him after the rapping on his door. There'll be no peace this holiday he feared.

A loud thud violently woke him. He checked his watch. It was 3am.

He could hear something. Something was on the roof of the caravan. He craned his neck to focus but all he could detect was a faint damp crunching sound like a bag of frozen peas being squashed.

Must be a fox or an owl having their midnight snack he decided.

It was when something slowly slid down the side of the van and knocked on his door again that he changed his mind.

"Oh for fucks sake! What is it?" He bellowed, the dread in his voice now peering through.

With a shaking hand he tentatively reached for the handle and gradually opened up.

Again there was nobody out there. Just some odd glistening gloop on the step, which trailed under the van.

"Obviously a sparrowhawk with a fish supper! Of course! It hit the door when it crash-landed with a trout or a carp wriggling in it's claws! Yes, that's it. Fresh fish guts!"

The man clambered back under his quilt and pulled the cover right up to his chin. He left the bedside light on and felt better for it, but sleep came stubbornly and his dreams were torn and ragged.

It was around 6am when he thought he heard the caravan door creak open. He'd forgotten to lock up. He held his duvet tight, so tight that his knuckles turned a pearly white.

A hideous squelching came from the van's front room, a sound which began to move steadily through the kitchen and along the back corridor until it was directly outside the man's bedroom door.

He shuddered with fear. Shivering beneath his quilt there was no way the man could move to check.

He froze solid when something rapped loudly on the door.

Paralysed with terror, his loosening mind oddly obsessing about the strange liquidy nature of the knocking, he saw his door begin to nudge open.

A distinct slurping noise got louder and an earthy, almost sickly smell entered the man's nostrils, as if a cellar door had been hastily prized open.

It was when he saw what was entering the bedroom that he began to scream for his life.

It was a awful blood-curdling scream that grew louder and louder.

Something dreadful crawled eagerly onto his bed and the man now wished he hadn't left the light on.

His final scream was violently muffled by a wet muddy proboscis, which filled the man's straining mouth with thick nauseating, acidic slime.

Soon his entire head was engulfed in viscous burning fluid and the man could actually feel the skin sliding off his whole face and the muscle below being hungrily eaten.

The man howled a silent laugh as he conjured a twisted vision of a jellied eel eating him up and as his skull cracked open he knew instinctively where the rasping mouthlets were hungrily heading.

It was an hour or so later that a witness, on her way to the zoo, was cycling by and thought she heard a very loud gurgling and slurping noise coming from the caravan behind the hedge.

At least that's what she told the Dales Police later that day. Loud gulping and wet munching. And as she turned she thought she saw a huge purple mass as it disappeared down a man-hole to the sewers.

"A horrible sticky thing , massive it was!"

"Yes, yes, I'm sure Officer! As big as a dog!

"It was a terrible gigantic slug with a man's face hanging from it's mouth! That's what I saw!"