Baron Dunkel's Son

My Father had inherited Dunkel Hall from my Grandmother, Baroness Dunkel, the renowned seer.

I never cared for it, the Hall; a dishevelled crumbling shadowy edifice worrying the eponymous tiny hamlet in the lee of the massive Finster Hills. I always dreaded coming back to it's unlit corridors cloaked in dark fortunes and the place where my beloved mother died.

In short, I detested my Baronial home, its rain-soaked towers gagged with thick choking gothic unease and the atrocious memory of my mother's death.

I kept my distance from it and the vast county of Finsterland, where my family had ruled for centuries, albeit in relative peace and prosperity, where the Dunkels and their subjects, mostly farming folk, were free from the ubiquitous burgeoning unrest sweeping the world and always retired to quiet bedlam with bellies full.

I had been gone a long thirty years, sent away as a child to board school in far Mainz by my father.

Thirty years was indeed long and against my better judgement, to avoid forever the awful humour round that baleful pile that so forcibly kept me away, I now felt oddly summoned to urgently return to Dunkel Hall that Christmas.

Notwithstanding malicious civil feuds breaking out across the nations, exacerbated by a virulent pest, together killing hundreds of thousands, my new life in a modern city was, or certainly had been, entirely to my satisfaction, in which I had procured a handsome position in a bank as a Baron's son and adequate and airy lodgings by the Park. 

And so it was on the occasion of my Father's 80th birthday, after three decades absentia, that I found myself sat on the gloomy steam train from Frankfurt, that ironclad wonder of the age, upon which I was heading home to Dunkel after so long away.

It was a freezing late December Sunday as I left the grand financial metropole caressing the River Mainz, the locomotive's billowing smoke and steam coughing into the frigid blue sky like the thick incense I remember my Grandmother burning incessantly as she read her beloved Tarot to me, often hiding a singular card beneath the table as she foretold the household's doom. 

I handed my ticket to the ancient conductor, at which he peered over his glasses and spoke.

"You travelling to Dunkel Sir?"

"Yes"

"Ah. There's been a very heavy snowfall in those parts. On Finster's slopes. It'll be real hard going once you alight."

"Very kind of you to tell me Conductor. I shall take extra care. In any case, my Father's carriage shall be waiting for me".

"Your Father? I see. Would that be Baron Dunkel?"

"It would. Do you know my Father Sir?"

"I met him once. On this very train. He was travelling with his daughter. A lovely girl".

"His daughter? My Father doesn't have a daughter. I, Sir, am his only issue, of that I'm certain!"

"Ah, well, it's none of my business Sir. He said she was his daughter."

"When was this?"

"Oh, I should say about a year gone. I remember, as he said he'd turned seventy nine that very month and wished to do right by his companion before he reached eighty.  It was at this time of Christmastide and I recall he gave me a most generous monetary gift."

"His companion being ...."

"Yes, his daughter. Awful quiet she was. Pale too. I remember her scratching her hands, which were dreadfully wartsome, her nose was blistered and she appeared malnourished. I thought she might have been ill. Your father wore a large sword as well, which seemed odd, together with the black horse in the animal car, but then again, given the times, perhaps not".

"The times? You're referring to the tensions across the globe I take it?"

"Aye, so many dead already, the Generals stifled by corruption and the pox ravaging herds everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of cows slaughtered and burnt. A disaster for the farmers, all bankrupt, the farms lying empty. Starvation looms across the world."

"Yes. Of course, I felt the impending disaster in Frankfurt too; trouble at every corner and empty shelves in the shops. But there's no struggle in Finsterland I believe."

"That's correct Sir. Not a single outburst of violence or plague as yet. Very, very fortuitous for the farms thereabouts, but also ........ very strange too, Sir". The conductor stared at me for a second and turned away.

"Yes indeed", I whispered as he walked off.

The conductor busied himself elsewhere in the carriages and left me alone. Through the window I could see fires burning in the distance, the ravages of militant skirmishes and the acrid smoke of hundreds of charred cattle fingering it's way into my car, a truly egregious smell and I was glad to cross the border into my home county of the Finster.

For the next two hours I dozed fitfully until at last we reached my stop

"Here we are Sir, Dunkel."

"Thankyou."

I stepped off the train with my case, the steam clouding in the darkness of the tiny station like an apparition.

"Give my regards to your Father and ..hmm, his daughter".

I nodded to the conductor and shuffled up the snowy ramp, to where, indeed, a horse and carriage, where waiting for me.

Dripping candles burnt at either side of the driver's seat, affording the horse and vehicle an eerie funereal glow. 

"Young Baron?" Inquired the elderly coachman.

"Yes. Thank you"

"I'm Krendel, you may remember me. There's an awful nip in the air Sir, it'll be the end of you. Here, let me take your luggage and warm yourself in the cab. There's a flask of brandy and a glass inside"

I gladly drank a shot and braced myself for the rendezvous with my estranged Father, a half hour's ride away through thick snow. Three decades was a lifetime to have been absent from my family home, but the phantoms of the past, those despicable hurts, came slowly and inexorably crawling back.

My beloved mother had died in the Hall's stable in a most heinous fashion, inexplicably kicked fatally by her favourite horse, normally of placid demeanour, but on that tragic morning a malicious beast, which pummelled and mangled her body beyond recognition.

My Father had run into the vile building, where he smote the giant mare such a terrible blow with the huge Baronial blade that he cleaved the animal clean in half, it's two sides opening like a gored book. My Father then cursed the scene with unworldly incantations and scattered foul-smelling liquid from a phial across the creature and my mother. Still muttering strange utterances, he finished his raging by thrusting his sword deep into the stable's  crimson earth, directly through my mother's skull, upon which a baleful growl erupted as if some fell leviathan had been spurned. 

Although I never entered the hateful stable again, I sensed that the sword through my mother's skull remained there, erect and terrible, until the day I left. The only thing in the universe I wished not to die, if I could jolt the gears of heaven and smite the angels to undo it I would.

Upon reaching Dunkel Hall I was suddenly aware of otherworldly shadows scurrying in the darkness, which, as my spirit waned, I fancied them to be imps, sprites and boggarts here to welcome me back to my own personal Hell.

I felt no love for my Father nor any semblance of affection normally associated between Father and Son. My parental bond lay impaled and bloodied in the decrepit shed. 

And so it was that when finally meeting my Baron Father in the vestibule, no warmth nor emotion ensued between us, save a strange reaction my Father displayed at my return.

"It is upon us Klaus!" He said solemnly and grasped my shoulders tightly.

"I have returned to see you Father, nothing more. After thirty long years, I want for nothing else but to see you".

"Thirty years! Is it really that long. No matter, it is time now. It feels but a single day has passed since that terrible morning in the horse shed. I have been so numbingly alone since that day and so dreadfully exhausted by my constant vigil since".

My Father looked broken, a husk of his once regal self, a shadow in his own terrible Hall. Yet a flicker of something else, something otherworldly ignited in his eyes as he stared at me.

"Come, Klaus, let us remove from this dank  threshold and warm ourselves by the study's fire, a glass of schnapps perhaps".

I followed my Father's shambling figure draped in his tattered greatcoat until we entered the toasted air of the study, where a large open fire blazed in the grate, projecting fantastical swirls and flicks of light around the mahogany walls.

Krendel, the familial butler and coachman for nearly a century, furnished us with two glasses of weinbrandt and a tray of small crackers, caviar and tartar with diced onions.

I had not realised just how ravenous I had become, having abstained from food all day on the long train journey across the South.

A second tray of entrees was supplied, after which I sat back and enjoyed the fiery tang of the brandy and the orange warmth of the blaze, a pleasant but albeit fleeting sense of arrival coming over me. 

"So, how is the City Klaus? I trust you have prospered among its vaults of gold and the corrosive violence of our time has not harmed you?"

"I have Father and now enjoy, at the age of forty, a generous stipend from the mercantile bank and a kindly life for now in Frankfurt, despite the growing mayhem of civil disobedience".

"I am glad to hear it I am, after such awfulness in your tender years, that tragic accident, that mad horse, the loss of your mother at such a fragile age. I remain truly sorry. I hope you have escaped further anguish my Son. Tell me, do you still suffer from uncontrollable bouts of murderous fury, to which you were born?"

"Sorry Father, I don't understand. I have never suffered from such a malady. It is you I recall raging in the house, battling my Grandmother's claim of looming armageddon."

"Ah, you do not remember do you. It is to be expected in such a young mind that wanted so much to shut down. I forget that I sent you away almost immediately. It was you who stormed into the stable that hateful day and rent the berserk horse in two, alas too late, your helpless Mother dead. You raged  and in your grief, impaled your mother's head with the family blade, growling all the while like a devil."

"Me?"

"Yes, you my son. I arranged schooling in Frankfurt to avoid any scandal and to keep you safe until the time was right for you to return to take your rightful place at my side as the time approaches."

"I'm sorry Father, I don't know what your talking about. My rightful place? I have returned simply for Christmastide. I do not plan to stay beyond that."

"You will. Once you meet your sister. You will."

"My sister?"

"Yes, Klaus, you have an older sister. Monika. Also sent away at an early age like you, before you were born. But now she is also returned to her home, rested and restored, to become what she must."

Despite some foreknowledge of this from the conductor, in which in all honesty I had placed very little stock, my head reeled from my Father's revelations. For thirty years I had believed that it was he who dealt the fatal blow to my Mother and that I, Klaus Dunkel, was his only child. The two firm pillars of my existence came crashing down and left me bereft of sense or feeling.

At this juncture, Monika, my unknown sibling, glided into the study and hugged me.

"Brother, it is truly a joy to meet you after these decades of secrecy. I cannot wait to ride with you by our Father's side in glorious splendour!"

It was too much. How can it be that my life was such a brazen lie. I staggered and swooned, whereupon my newly appointed Sister caught me and helped me to my bed upstairs.

I slept fitfully dreaming of artillery and carnage; amidst the tumult I visited my Mother's skull pinned to the ground and grasped the hilt of the sword, whereupon my Mother spoke:

"Do not be afraid my Son, I may have lost my way, gone too soon and replaced by Krendel, but I shall ride with you in spirit as you cut a swathe in the fields of limbs and lead the four to the dusk of Time!"

I awoke, sat upright and shuddering, sodden from feverish perspiration.

I looked out of my window and saw fires and shelling exploding in the distance, the moonlight illuminating the clouds of smoke like collosal and terrible titans. The civil battles were raging and the gunfire was so much closer as the pox now drove even Finsterland's ordinary subjects to madness and murder. It seemed like it would erupt into monumental catastrophe any minute.

Outside in the Hall's yard I could see figures in the darkness busying themselves around the old stables in the shadows beyond the moon's grasp: my Father, Monika and Krendel. I was certain I could see them on horseback, the three beasts' breath billowing in the frosted dark as a fourth riderless horse reared. The night seemed to envelope it like a curse. 

It was midnight on Christmas Eve when I stepped outside into the freezing yard, the air stinking of gunpowder and cordite, the sky bruised by canons and shelling, as if Gehenna itself had opened it's gates.

And then I realised, it had.

Waiting for me at the snow-caked steps were the three horse riders. The mares: massive, winged, fire-strewn, snorting: the enormous figures brandished colossal swords, their helmets aflame above eyes blazing like the pyres of Hades. 

Rearing up, the central rider spoke with a voice that shook the very earth and boomed like thunder above the encroaching militias and the guns.

"The end is truly nigh, for we are three of the chosen Horsemen: Krendel Conquest, your Sister Famine and I am War."

My Father War raised his lordly blade up high, whereupon in chorus the fell beings three beckoned to me and roared: 

"We bid you join us and make us four, oh Mighty Death, Lord of Destruction, the Desolate One!"

"It is nigh!"

At once my city clothes fell away in flames sizzling on the icy ground. I grew in stature, my sinewy arms lengthening like vines, my face stretching on its contorting hooded skull and I was garbed in an ancient black sail and armed with a scythe forged for a titan.

It was thus that I alighted a huge dark steed, it's nostrils flaring with the fires of Hell as we, the four Horsemen, rode yelling into the desperate carnage of all-out global war and insanity.

And so it was that I became the Great Leveller and together with the three, as was foretold, we destroyed the living and brought all existence to a deafening close and ceased the gyres of the Earth until nothing in this world remained but the ...

Final Apocalypse.

Lip Service

Carly heard it on Duk Duk first. She was a dedicated Duk Duk fan and especially of Sharlene's show, Body Rob.

Body Rob was one of those modern Gen Z beauty specials, where Sharlene gave her avid followers all the top tips, new trends and hot goss about having a glamorous body.

Yes, Sharlene was influential and her spot attracted thousands of watchers, both girls and boys, all hoping for that one secret that will propel them into a world full of gorgeous people with drop dead bodies. Sharlene did it all with aplomb, conviction and the odd bit of comedy thrown into the vanity bag too.

But there were rules: her sponsors had insisted on full exposure, not just lip service, with just a few clear red lines to protect them from the nutters, to save face and save all their precious skins should it all go tits up.

Sharlene, on account of these top sponsors, stuck to these edicts fastidiously. She promoted her sponsorships without fail and stayed well clear of the more outlandish styling methods surfacing now on the crazier vlogs like botox baths, acid enemas, eyeball washing and re-bleeding. 

No, a bit of exclusive nail varnish, a smattering of prestigious Hollywood mascara, a soupçon of the very finest foundation and the latest hip hair styles on the choicest Manhattan streets were what Sharlene offered: these were the reliable, safe and reassuringly dear bread and butter of Body Rob, in which ' You too Can have that Face and Body!'.

Carly lapped it up and sat entranced on her phone as Sharlene heralded ever-newer paths to corporeal perfection and facial nirvana.

It was Carly's face she was especially concerned about. No amount of the dearest concoctions could satisfy her, no thickness of the most expensive filler could make her feel that she'd reached that glorious zenith she felt Sharlene was instructing her to attain. 

A particular irritant was her bulbous mouth. Carly had spent a small fortune on her pearly whites in an attempt to emulate the rarified dentistry seen on Body Rob.  Sharlene had an angelic mouth forged in Heaven itself, her magnificent teeth the crisp silky curtains to a marvellous world of rude health within.

Carly wanted the same.

It was the morning of April 1st when the show first aired the idea on Duk Duk. Sharlene, sat in her usual position, behind a table piled high with fresh products for immaculate beings sent from her sponsors.

She picked up a pair of boxed scissors sent in by newcomer Jess Ter Fashions.

"Well body robbers, what have we here? I'll unwrap them and read you the blurb ....

"Lip Snippers! the Precise Tool for thinning your grin and routing your pout. When your mouth goes south use Lip Snippers!"

"So, there you are followers, I'll certainly be trying this myself tonight and I can't wait to show you the results on tomorrow's Body Rob. I've got just one more pair of the Jess Ster Lip Snippers to give away today and once it's gone, it's gone. First come, first served!"

And that was it, the gorgeous Sharlene, with a big wide smile, gave a little wink to the camera and moved onto some new paper socks from Micky Take Solutions.

Carly was visibly moved.

 This was it! 

Those new scissors were the answer she'd been waiting for and she was certain that Sharlene meant that wink to be for her, a personal nod to her number one fan to get in straight away and claim those fabulous snippers.

Bingo!

She got them! 

Carly was indeed first to call and the utensils arrived by courier that afternoon with compliments from Sharlene herself and today's show sponsor Jess Ter.

That evening Carly stood in front of her bathroom mirror with her minty new product in her hand. She'd read the instructions several times over and was now totally ready to reveal so very much more of her beautiful teeth, just like Sharlene would be doing too.

Having applied a generous rubbing of numbing agent she'd had in the cupboard and tentatively holding out her top lip, Carly began to cut it off. 

It was surprisingly easy with the large and ultra-sharp Lip Snippers and felt like she was cutting up a chunk of stewing steak.

The whole upper lip came away and she dropped it in the sink. Blood poured out of the curved wound in gushes and her teeth swam in hot ferrous gore.

She smiled widely with scarlet molars but wasn't finished yet.

Pinching her bottom lip with her fingers she snipped it away in a single piece too, again, letting it fall into the blood-soaked sink.

Carly put down the scissors and admired her handiwork. 

Where once her lips had been was now a huge bleeding ragged hole, her teeth and gums completely exposed. 

She smiled again and her new lipless slit stretched open across her visible jaw.

"Beautiful!" She whispered, "Truly Gorgeous!"

The next day, after drinking a pint of numbing fluid and wiping away a mass of coagulated blood from her new mouth-hole, she waited patiently for today's Body Rob show. She was shaking with anticipation over how Sharlene would look.

The show began and Carly's earlier anticipation very quickly turned to bewilderment.

Sharlene looked the same! 

Full lips, normal mouth, nothing cut away!

" You haven't done it like you said you would!"

Carly shot up off the bed and stormed round her room sweeping away all the Body Rob products from her dressing table top.

She was incensed!

How could Sharlene lie like that!

Cleaning her teeth of a thick layer of dried-up blood, she washed her red gash mouth, got dressed and headed out.

To Sharlene's house, where she filmed her show.

Carly found her outside chain-smoking several cigarettes by the door.

Carly stared at the fag butts on the ground and confused looked up at her idol.

Sharlene jolted and when she saw Carly's terrible parody of a mouth she screamed.

"You liar Sharlene! I trusted you! I always have! But you haven't used the Lip Snippers like you said you would! How could you do that to me, you're biggest fan!"

Sharlene gathered herself and backed inside her kitchen, where she secretly reached for a weapon of any kind.

"You stupid fuckin cow, it was a joke! The Lip Snippers were an April's Fool! C'mon, you must have known that for fucks sake! Or are you a complete fuckin' moron!" Mocked Sharlene, trying not to look at the atrocity that was Carly's dreadful mouth.

Carly stuttered.

"I didn't know that Sharlene! I didn't know it was a joke! I believe what comes out of your mouth. I always have but not anymore. Your mouth isn't to be trusted is it really. Your fans need to know that underneath all that phoney glamour you're really just a big-mouthed liar and I'm going to show them!"

"You fuckin' what! You're a total fuckin' nutjob! You should have taken more of your butt-ugly face off, then I wouldn't have to look at it!"

"Ah, now that's a good idea Sharlene. Let's get you up to your studio for part 2 of the show. It's going to be a live special, a practical demonstration of using Jess Ters Lip Snippers for the complete treatment!"

Injected with a sedative and pushed upstairs at scissor-point by an increasingly excited and violent Carly,  Sharlene sat terrified in front of the camera for the second half of her show.

Wholly incapacitated with the drug, Sharlene was motionless as Carly proceeded to cut away her entire face, which she dropped onto the table liked a popped balloon.

"Blootiful!" Blurted Carly to the live audience and howling insanely walked out of the house.

With blood seeping in gouts from her flayed features, Sharlene began to laugh uncontrollably too, with her new lipless maw, as her sponsors' show rules came into her head.

Her entire jaw visible through the gaping mess, Sharlene slowly mouthed them over and over to the camera until she stopped mouthing anything at all.

"Ha ha ha ha ha!"

"Give us full exposure and not just lip service Sharlene."

"Those red lines will save face and save our skins!"

"Ha ha ha ha ha!"

"Not just lip service!"

The End

It blew in from the North. 

An Arctic wind.

No-one really noticed.

But this was it.

The End.

In the pristine frozen wastes it had been awoken, a calculus of doom, a formula of nothing, an unending sum of collapse.

For Millennia it has slept, locked in the ice, trapped deep in the strata, a sediment of entropy sewn into the veins between epochs, the interstitial marshall, the tyrant from the crevasse, the mad berg.

No particular thing stirred it into life. It was just time that's all. Enough clocks had stopped for a reappearance. A comeback of sorts. Like Elvis the Destroyer. This time there'd been films too. A nervous prescience. Comets, storms, earthquakes, floods, even numbers and raptures about God.

But it wasn't Hollywood. No big neon sign here. Simply an undoing, an arresting, a stoppage of all that was alive, an erasure done without cameras or crowds or opening nights. A finish.

This was the end once again. A stutter in time, a spring clean, a full wash, a big scrub. Like last time. And the time before.

For all life on Earth.

It's here.

Extinction.

I Sit in the Tree and Wait

I've been sat in your tree all week. I've been before. I went away last time. This Christmas I need to stay I think. 

You're so busy too. It's confusing. You're so incredibly alive. I expect with Christmas on the way you would be. The birth of Jesus. A God no less. Wow. Maybe that's it. Hanging on like a shining star in spite of what the medics say 

Yep, so active. I can see you in the loft through the dormer. It's that big box of Christmas decorations you lugged up there last year. Oh dear! Time to get it down again. Up and down the creaky ladder. A cycle of gracious work. An eternal determined toil. A bit like mine really. 

What about the tree? Ah yes, you buy a real one don't you. I remember. I would too. It's that resinous piney smell. Hypnotic. The very essence of the season. An ancient perfume wafting back in time, an echo of the wild wood when your world was younger and so was I.

It's dark now and I see the kids arrive from school. They throw their satchels on the settee. Jumping, cheering, laughing like you all do when your overjoyed. It must be their last day at school. Schools out! Oh! what a day. You all cuddle and you you can't let go.

Hot chocolate and ginger biscuits now and some music. It's getting better already. The full fathom of family life, it's glorious infectious reach. I for one am hooked.

Sometimes ghosts stop by but not today. They're travellers who knew the place or the people. Curious and mesmerized, I'm glad they can't see me. They're still linked to life a little and that's not my business. Life. That's the other lot, the creators, our industrious mirrors, the flip.

You pop outside for the metal tree-stand in the shed and brush off those pesky cobwebs. Your breath testifies in the cold. 

"Help me decorate the tree soon kids! Dads on his way home with one from the farm".

I would too, really, decorate the tree, if I could, but that's your job I'm afraid. Once given life to create a world; to guide the disparate bright lights together and make a happy whole. And what a great job you've done. One that'll last I think. I hope.

Dad's home. I see him drag the fir from the car and take it over the threshold like a bride. The marriage of myth and a modern family. A really pleasant moment and I'm glad to be here.

Trees up, garlands are on, more mythical beings conjured: the fairy lights, the angel on top, the primeval forest spirit dressed in red, sons of Gods. All old. But not as old as me, nor as certain. They may fade but I won't.

The worst bit is having to touch you. It's mandatory. It's how it works. For all of us everywhere. It's the same. Touching you is crucial to make things happen. I know, I know, it's a bit gross but that's the rules. Wars are the worst. Plagues too. They're messy and sad. So many at once. 

For me though, families like yours are even worse, especially the sudden dispatch where there's love in the home. I sense the grief, the loss, the outpouring of pain like a rip in time. It's dreadful to be honest, but once I'm sent in it's irrefutable. All the love in the cosmos couldn't stop it.

I personally try to avoid too many seeing it happen. We're all different. Have our own house style. I really try to keep it away from the kids if I can. Usually it's a sorrowful act that spreads in intensity round the living and kids don't understand. How can they. For the chosen themselves, when it finally comes, the decision, when I touch them, it's quick, a fast full stop, a date stamp.

I see you coming out of the house for a cigarette. You stand right in front of me, in front of the tree where I'm sat. My legs are swinging just above your head. I could touch you now and get it done here in the garden with nobody around except you and me. We have some leeway though, a few minutes, and when necessary, sometimes hours either side, so doctors can work or those you love can gather or farewells whispered and mouthed and tender promises vowed.  But I don't want you out here alone in the cold. It's not the cigarettes either. You've other problems that can't be solved. Your husband knows but not the children, which is a shame, it will be such a shock to them, but even if they never comprehend, I understand.

I see your husband in the kitchen making tea. The kids are upstairs. This is it. The moment. I get down from the tree and follow you in. You both hug in the mellow light and wish each other a merry Christmas.

You smile.

It's time. I have to I'm afraid. 

I reach out and touch your hand, whisper 'don't be afraid' in your ear, watch you fall, bow my head and quickly leave.

Ladybirds

It was bright weather. Tons of Light. Shining rays. Odd for the season of goodwill. Global warming. A phantom winter.

The shadow behind the sun never left though. She could feel it in her shattered bones. She did every year. The slow awakening of Jack Frost in his sweaty over-stuffed featherbed. Creaking, stretching, yawning, slippy Jack. For months a heap of buttons, now he's back like the clown that you were scared of as kid with the rock hard snowballs, the icy trips, your Grandma's broken hip and much much worse.

Brrrrr was his work song. She'd sing too. But something else; a hymn. For Advent. He's got more dreadful work to do. Terrible clowning up and down. She's just got to get through today again.

Humming Nat King Cole she put on her tattered dressing gown and pretended to cook some sausages and eggs and ate like a hedge-wren, the broken shells placed in the little composting bin by the sink.

It was right to return stuff to the ground. She knew. To give back what nature made. It felt correct and she wondered what it would be like to be inside an egg. To be something else. To believe in what was to come. Oh God, to be reborn, yes! 

They'd been so like Larkin's arrows and she thought of him. A wreck in the garden compost heap beneath the turkey carcass. She'd put him in that Christmas. That's how she remembered it anyway. Things got mixed up. A new beginning after so much pain. Too much for anyone. The slow dissolution, the glacial decay: the gift to her broken man twenty years past. Her beautiful moraine.

Not really feeling part of the world anymore she held up her wedding ring and peered through the golden circle at the life beyond this day, the 24th. Everything was done. The decorations hung but she'd no idea when she'd managed that, their box of annual hope shoved behind the couch, open and empty like a coffin, in the bottom the fairy left behind.

Outside a blackbird pecked furiously at an old apple she had thrown out the day before. She liked feeding the blackbirds, their furious belief that all's well and always will be, driving their sable beauty like FBI sedans.  Their best life as the telly adverts said. Just eat and be happy. The Simple corvid creed. No need for grief.

Washing up she heard a rattle in the mailbox. Just junk no doubt but maybe check. Your next best life might be waiting. A Christmas card from Jesus Or news that he'd come back and so could she.

On her way gliding down the old cobwebbed hall she stopped.

What was that on the far wall?

In the corner by the door. A blob. A blob of sorts.

She approached and stared up into the corner at the curious thing. It was certainly a blob, a little pile, more of a small heap. A heaplet she thought.

But what of?

She got a torch from his old work bag and craned her neck. 

"Well I never, Ladybirds! How wonderful!"

She took down an encyclopedia and flicked to L. 

Ladybirds like to overwinter in homes but it can be too warm and bright. Consider moving them outside somewhere safe and dry. 

"Oh!"

She stared and stared at the tiny gorgeous mound of lives and giggled when the top bug moved in it's sleep, annoying the spotty one underneath. 

"Oh my God! They're so beautiful!" She whispered.

"Like fairy lights!"

Her mind raced.

She really didn't want to move them but felt that maybe she had to after all 'cos after all her house really was warm and bright and after all they deserved to be outside where nature lived but Jack  mustn't know, oh no, don't tell Jack, he'll roll over them like a glacier on wheels after all They've been through.

She resigned herself To a transplant and taking a deep breath began to pick them off the wall with old cocktail Sticks from the packet he'd bought that last Christmas.

"C'mon my tiny sausages!" She cooed as the bugs reluctantly shuffled onto the tips; creaking, stretching, yawning all the way.

She remembered he'd Asked for tooth picks in the Corner shop. For After the turkey dinner; Roasties, bread sauce, cranberries.

We don't have any tooth picks mister sorry but we do sell cocktail sticks. 

They'd laughed all the way home and she remembered he'd lit a fire and they both curled up that Sunday before Christmas as snug as bug in a fireman's rug.

She placed the Cranberries carefully on her face One by one on her eyebrows. It was soft and safe and And out of the way and It Wouldn't take long he'd said. I'll bring My saw ANd well cut down a little Fir. A tiny one.

Yes, she'd take them to the old dark woods, where they can sleep and dream and believe their best life is coming.

She drove his ancient red Beetle, still a sweet wreck, along freezing streets, where no-one paid her any heed. She was invisible. 

The clouds sailed by like ghosts searching for heaven and she tried not to blink in case sHe lost her passengers.

She pulled up at a traffic light and stared at the young girl in the new red VW next to her, her first time driving with her husband sat besidE, a little nervous with his Saw On his lap. She smiled as did she and was sure she saw her freckles move like ladybirds.

The haunted sky filled Up with tears full of faces and they drove off.

The old fir wood was Colder than town and bandaged up in mist. The humus floor steamed like compost and the needles scrunched under her bare feet like Tooth picks. It was always Christmas Dinner here.

"We need a Memorable tree little bugs, where you can go to sleep and imagine Spring, your best ever Spring next year."

The fir she chose by the forest road was thick and crusty. She saw the huge rent ripped from the bark, the paint still visible, nodded and knelt down.

"This will do My darling."

She blinked and all the little bugs fell into her hands like fairy lights.

She sobbed and the last few bugs leapt into her tears and landed on top of the others in her palm. She spoke to them softly.

"we just wanted a little tree you see and I drove out here with him that Christmas Eve, never having really driven in the winter but he said I'd do fine and I believed in him and everything to follow but Jack Frost got the wheel and sped us up on the ice like racing on a glacier, his clown suit buttons popping off and we crashed. Oh God, We crashed and I was at the wheel not Jack at all. I just couldn't stop you see, my darling, as We were squashed like bugS against this Tree that Christmas eve when we both so believed in our best lives yet to come. 

The firemen got you out And laid You On thE Tooth picks Like baby Jesus That Christmas Night, their warm breath fanning you, a future yet to be.

But it wasn't

To be. They couldn't get me out. 

You lasted longer but I was already gone.

And I'm so dreadfully dreadfully sorry.

She Gently placed the ladybirds next to each other on the bark like teeth And Curled up by the fir At his feet.

She slept and all her ladybIrdS and more descended and enveloped her whole body and joined her in her dreams, where they freed her from the wreckage and the firemen, heads down, sang Christmas hymns as she flew to the clouds, a ladybird, racing to get to heaven.

To wait for her beautiful man once again like every Christmas Eve.

Operation Wolfpack

Joe 'Red' Digger had seen most things. As a time-served officer around the rocket base he'd tackled some pretty wild shit over the years. 

Drunken pilot brawls, affairs, domestics, spoilt kid fights, amorous politicians in too deep, burglary, car theft, extortion and even homicide.

But that dark night, when the moon reigned in a cloudless sky, what went down in that alleyway was something new.

Something grotesque.

He needed a drink. A stiff drink and maybe more than one. A whole goddam bottle might just do it. He was off duty so who gives a damn.

The bar was rammed with late night revellers looking for a good time after the working week. Let's face it, unless you're in NASA, work round here ain't what it's cracked up to be and a skinful on a Friday night is what the good doctor ordered here around the base, especially now the space programme was winding down. Times were tough and the rockets were staying home. It was the final flight that week, delivering the first supplies to the brand new space colony on the lunar surface. Women, children, men, astronauts all, a thousand of them, their beating hearts pulsing together, chancing a heroic but precarious life under a glass dome, a dome which had cost a trillion and paid for by super-rich tycoons. Then it was up to them, the colonists, to bring fresh new blood to the moon and eventually spill out onto Mars.

With the last mission leaving soon, people were increasingly tetchy round town, the future as unwelcome as a sheep in wolf's clothing.

The cops like Joe Digger were one of the targets for all the frustration and anger welling up like poison in the place.

Officer Digger or just Red, as he was known at the station, was no rocket scientist, but he was a keen scholar of human nature and what he'd seen tonight was in no way natural.

It was an abomination.

His right hand was shaking, which he steadied with the other and got hold of the glass. The liquor tasted bitter but was having the desired effect of taking the grislier edges off his memory. A little more and he might just be able to face going back outside and walking home. He was off duty and wanted to drink.

He stared at his tumbler of gold and tried to make sense of it all.

Grease monkeys, cops and the odd crew member were out in the bars, making the most of the good times while they lasted. Red had been slowly ambling down the street on his way to the pool hall to meet up with Deek his Station buddy, when he'd heard a loud scream in the alley. 

Despite being a moonlit night, the cloud cover was thick and it was dark and there were no real lights down there, save for some dismal lamplight coming from a tenement window high up on the top floor.

Another scream and Red was riveted to the spot. It sounded like a woman in big trouble. He'd decided to go in and see what's what and maybe help, off duty or not.

"Who's there?" He yelled.

Silence.

"Everything OK?" He yelled again.

Nothing at first but then suddenly, out came the most terrifying scream of all, a scream so blood curdlingly chilling that Red felt goosebumps break out all the way up his forearms.

"Hello? Police!" He bawled, walking slowly into the black alleyway, his own personal snub-nose drawn.

It was a growl that came next; a hideous growl, as if some wild animal was holed up down there. 

"What the ...!" Gasped Red.

Then came terrible sounds of chewing and slurping as if something was feeding. Something very large.

The screams had given way to an agonised moaning and then as the bone-cracking started there were no more sounds from who Red was now sure was a woman.

Shuddering, he entered the darkest part of the alley, where no light existed with the moon hiding behind dense clouds.

His gun drawn, Red took small steady steps passed rank bins and crap piled up on both sides.

Behind one of the bigger piles he saw it.

Moonlight broke in and there it was, illuminated in the pallid rays, a hideous collosal snarling thing hunched over what was left of the poor woman, blood pouring out of massive wounds.

The creature turned to face Red, it's huge mouth bristling with blood-soaked fangs. It growled with such malevolence that the policeman froze to the spot fearing for his life.

His hands gripped his pistol and shaking uncontrollably he pointed it as straight as he could at the fell beast crouched before him. 

It was then that it stood. At it's full height it must have been at least 8 feet tall, powerfully muscled, the hands, feet and face covered in thick gore-matted fur. And what a dreadful face, the drooling mouth curled with insatiable malice, the small nose flaring and the scarlet eyes glaring with pure evil. It spat out a glob of tattered flesh and skirt and stooped, it's lethal-looking claws poised and an awful snarl growing louder in its throat.

Red knew instinctively the beast was going to pounce and he made the sign of the cross before pumping it with an entire round of bullets.

The beast didn't die but it was distracted enough by the shots to hesitate and as the moon vanished behind fat veins of cloud again, so too the creature suddenly disappeared down the alley, loping on all fours and clearing the wire fence at the end with ease and off into the night with a final frustrated growl.

Red was considering all this, the whisky clutched tightly in his quivering hand, but it was one particular thing that he just couldn't get out of his head, a fact that was as mind-numbingly astonishing as the vile fiend itself. 

It had been wearing an astronaut suit!

.... an astronaut suit from the Base, with the name Graff on the shoulder, a suit ripped and torn like bandages.

Deek walked into the bar looking for Red, who had by now missed the pool match. 

"So this is where you ended up eh!"

"Oh, hi Deek, yep, I must have forgot the time" 

"Jesus, Red, you look like you've seen a god-damm ghost!"

"Oh, no worries. I reckon I'm coming down with something, one of those winter bugs."

Red raised his whisky glass.

"Old Johnny Walker is helping a lot."

"God dammit, you're shaking my friend. C'mon, let's get you home. You've got the lurgy for sure!"

After a nightcap Deek went home himself and left Red tucked up in bed.

The moonlight pierced the blackness in his room like tattered veils and he fell into a fitful sleep, his nightmares terrible and tense as a despicable giant dog stalked him across the Base and up the gantry of a rocket, where the dog tore off its space suit and then it's pelt to reveal a man underneath. Graff. Chester Graff, the astronaut. Leaping into the air and clutching a screaming Red, they both fell from a great height into the shrieking sable night below, the man growling into Red's face "For your own sake copper, forget you ever saw me!"

Red woke up drenched in perspiration and clutched his sodden sheets tight.

"Jesus Christ! He's a fucking werewolf!" He yelled, sweat pouring off his brow.

The policeman was in work that day, hardly capable of doing a normal job but grateful it was mostly shuffling papers round his desk, mostly missing person cases.

He drank coffee after coffee from the corner percolator and kept staring out of the window throughout the day.

Near shift change, Deek came up to him.

"What you looking at partner?" Staring through the murky glass as well.

"Oh nothin'. Just wondering if it's another full moon tonight that's all. Makes 'em all crazy, right!"

"Sure does, those tricksy pale rays sends the perps wappy!"

"C'mon, let's finish up here and go down to Linda's and grab us a steak. Waddaya say Red?"

"Yeah, sure. Some food sounds good."

Linda's was packed with the usual crowd of hungry folks; cops off and on duty, office staff, NASA boffins and in the far corner the crew of the next mission including ....

Commander Chester Graff.

Red froze and tried not to gawp at the man from his dream.

Deek and Red, the two friends, sat down and picked up the beers they'd ordered and toasted their health.

Clinking his glass far harder than he'd meant to, Red's Coors slopped out onto the checked tablecloth.

"Best watch it Officer, you're going to drown your friend!"

Red looked up and to his horror saw Chester Graff stood right beside him.

Red shuddered.

"Why Officer, you're shaking! I'd say you've had one too many already!" Laughed Graff.

Linda came up with menus but Deek simply ordered two house steak specials.

"Howdya like 'em boys? Your steaks?"

"Officer ...," Graff looked at Red's badge, "Digger here would like his meat rare Linda, the bloodier the better I'd say, wouldn't you Officer Digger? You're lacking the right stuff! Iron probably. Take it from me, you needs lots of iron!"

Red just stared at Graff who was smiling widely, showing off perfect Commander teeth lined up like stiffs. He nodded at Deek and then walked back to his crew.

"Do you know that guy Red?" Whispered Deek.

"No. Do you?"

" We've shot pool a few times but I don't know him well," said Deek, fiddling with his knife and fork.

"Mighty strange him coming over though," he concluded as Linda's buxom daughter Betty arrived with the steaks.

"Need anything with these boys?" Said Betty wiping a tear from her eye.

"Why Betty, what's the matter?"

" Oh, Officer Deek, well, my sister Honey never came home last night. Me and Mama are worried sick!" explained Betty.

"Have you told the Police?"

"Yeah, tonight. It's been 24 hours now. We filed a Missing Persons".

"Well that's good. Our colleagues on the night shift will get right to it and that's for sure Betty," said Deek standing up, his hand over-zealously rubbing the waitress's back, where her bra-strap was under her uniform and a tiny drip of saliva forming on his lower lip.

Commander Graff and his crew got up to leave and walked past Betty, as she was staring at Deek.

"Couldn't help overhearing you young lady. I'm sure there's nothing to worry about and your Sister's hanging out somewhere. She's probably gone to watch our last flight and got a good spot on the bleachers.  Now if you'll excuse us, we've a rocket to steer so I bid you good night and see you when we get back."

Graff tipped his cap at the two cops, a wry grin on his face

"Officers."

Having finished up their bloody steaks they stepped out into the foggy night. It was as black as thick molasses round the Base.

"No full moon!" Exclaimed Red.

"No, there is Red, it's just covered up with all this Goddamn fog and test smoke," offered his partner.

"How do you know that? I can't see anything in this pea-souper!"

"Oh, I just feel it buddy. Born and bred up in hill country you get a sense for stuff like that," explained Red's partner.

"I need to tell you something Deek. I need to tell you something that's bugging the hell outta me."

"OK."

"And when I'm telling ya you need to promise me that you'll keep yer hillbilly trap shut and let me finish!"

"Oh,OK!"

Red described what he'd seen the night before and Deek kept schtumm until the end.

" And I'm telling you Deek, Graff's a fucking wolfman and he fuckin' well ate Honey right in front me last night!"

Deek was silent at first but then looked Red squarely in the eye.

"Fuck me Red, have you heard yourself! werewolves, astronauts, Honey slaughtered! It's bullshit and you know it!" Quipped Deek.

"Bullshit you reckon eh, well why don't we check out the alley and then you'll fuckin believe me .... Partner!" Riled Red.

They reached the alleyway in the car and there was no sign of any foul play, no trace of Honey or anything.

"I don't understand it, she was gutted right here. It should be slick with blood!" Roared Red kicking over a metal bin.

"What the ...?"

Red picked up a torn white suit thick with gore. It'd been shoved in with the rest of the trash: a tattered astronaut's suit with Graff stitched on the shoulder!

"You fuckin believe me now Deek!" Yelled Red holding up what was left of the clothing.

It was then he noticed the other shoulder badge. 

"What's this?"

He showed it his partner who was looking up and getting more agitated by the minute.

"It's the name of the final mission. Jesus Christ, don't you read your emails Red!"

"What, you telling me the final mission is called .....

..... Operation fuckin' Wolfpack!"

"Yeah, that's what it's called. So fuckin' what Red!"

"So fuckin what? Don't you get it! It's not just Graff who's one, the whole bastard crew are werewolves!"

Deek just stared.

"What time's the launch?"

"In an hour."

"An hour! For fucks sake! Deek we have got to get to that launchpad and stop that flight!"

"Why?"

"Because there's a Wolfpack flying up to the moon where a thousand fuckin' people are penned in like sheep! Kapish!"

"Kapish!"

They drove like bullets and reached the pad as T minus 30 minutes clicked on the counter and the crew bus careered toward them.

"What now Red! That fuckin' bus stuffed full of werewolves is coming straight at us!"

 "I've been thinking Deek, what if it's OK? What if they can't change up there? After all, they can't fuckin see it once they're stood on it. What if no there's no fuckin werewolfin' on the moon?"

Officer Digger stood there scratching his chin, whilst he thought about it further.

"But they do Red, they do change!" Replied his partner in an unusually snarly way from behind the patrol car; it's flashing crimson light making it hard for Red to see him.

"They turn into the biggest bastard werewolves that ever existed; fuckin' mega moon wolves!" Growled Deek.

"Deek! What the fuck!" Winced Red 

"And your right Red, you nosey cunt, there's an awful lot of sweet sweet honey up there just drippin' from that big fat hive!"

At that moment the full bright moon appeared within a break in the fog. Deek leapt over the bonnet gnashing loudly, a fully grown wolfman.

"Nooooooooooooooo!" Screamed Red.

"And then we'll just come back and eat the rest of the fuckin' world Officer Digger!"

Red spun round to face Commander Graff or his now massive wolf-self, as the Deek-wolf bit deeply into his soft neck.

"You really are red Red!" He laughed as thick hot blood gushed down his hungry throat.

The entire crew had now changed too and after devouring Red like rabid bears the Wolfpack howled at the full moon and it's colony, which come tomorrow, they'd be ravaging and really filling their bellies with tons of sweet sweet honey! 

Fuck yeah!

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.