The Tower on the Hill

Like every other day the young man sat upstairs in the double decker number 485 to get to and from his work in the City. His wintry mood fitted the cold interior of the bus and it's sleepy dour passengers.

He drew a sad face on the icy window. His breath was freezing.

It was nearly the end of March but still very cold, yet inevitably the mornings were beginning to lighten and as on every other day that month he stared out of the frosted window at the tower.

He could see it in the distance on the slope of a field as it rose from the horizon. The stone tower stood erect, a single column like a chimney, but with a conical roof and a door at the bottom and a window at the top. 

It appeared every day just after passing Rawsons trailer yard on the opposite side, sometimes clear and sometimes darkened, depending on his mood he guessed. He felt as if he's been aware of its presence his entire life, tall and proud in some distant memory, like a brazen finger insulting the mind.

The young man had no idea how far away the tower was. He was hopeless with distances but guessed about a mile or two away across the farmland. There seemed to be no roads leading to it and it was a fair distance from a ruined farmhouse, as if constructed as far away from it as possible but still within view.

A copse of trees stood half way, still and brooding.

As to the tower's height, the young man had even less idea, but he surmised it was quite tall given how far away it was and how big it seemed.

In all his countless trips to the office where he clerked undisturbed he'd never seen a soul going in or out of the tower.

Not until today.

Walking towards its door was a small bright figure ambling along. Skipping in fact, before pausing and ...... entering!

It was over in a second. The bus had moved beyond the point of view. The young man had seen enough, however, to know that someone had actually gone inside the strange construction.

His senses told him it had been a girl. A young girl, who seemed vaguely familiar and he spent the rest of the bus journey musing as to who she could be and why she was there.

Concentration was difficult that day and not much work was done in the endless ledger. The young man's supervisor put it down to a hangover. At his age the supervisor had often gone out on the lash with his mates. Yet the dreamy face of the youngster did seem odd, as if in a world of his own.

"He's off with the fairies that one," thought the supervisor and left him to it; the ledgers were more or less complete for the day anyway. He turned down the heater as a sudden burst of late March sun poured down Starkey Street and through the office windows. It had been a tiresomely long winter and everyone in the world craved the sun.

When the working day was over the young man clocked out and grabbed his scarf and on leaving, turned and said goodnight to his supervisor and the staff who were just getting up to leave.

He couldn't wait to get on the 485 and pass the tower again and perhaps see the mysterious figure once more.

It was early evening and the rising sun was trying to chase away the dawdling armies of frost and sleet. As such, dusk had set in and when the field of the tower approached it was already twilight through the bus window. 

The young man peered through the grubby glass and focused intently on the slope. 

He could not believe his eyes. 

The figure was there again, this time coming out of the tower's doorway and skipping along the horizon where the sun broke through. Suddenly, she stopped, stood still in a ray of light and began to wave.

The young man gawped and looked around the top deck to see if anyone was waving back but they weren't. He was convinced the figure was facing the bus and as it passed from sight he became even more convinced, rather frighteningly, it was waving at him.

At the very last second before the bus turned a corner towards Wragby, the young man gave a wave in return, a half-hearted effort but it was all he could muster through his confusion. 

The figure couldn't possibly have seen him from that distance. He struggled to make out any features himself but he could clearly see a waving hand. He was also certain the figure was a young girl. A young girl who had gone in and out of the stone tower and waved to him on a bus a mile away!

Impossible but there it was.

He hardly slept that night and his dreams were fitful and wild. He woke early, grimaced at how chilly he was and made tea and toast, but his stomach was plagued with butterflies. He felt poorly. A bad cold no doubt and at 7am he called in sick.

Lying on the couch he watched the news. Late winter snow flurries at home, wars in Russia,  tensions in America, bombing in Palestine, it was always the same. He couldn't concentrate and took some paracetamol.

He dozed for an hour and woke up in a cold sweat sneezing. He knew he would never be straight unless he went there. He just had to go to the tower and see the girl. 

As if summoned, he got dressed up warm, made a flask of sweet tea, packed some digestives, took some more tablets and headed off for the 485 sniffling.

He didn't sit on the top deck. He wanted the stop for the field and sat downstairs so he could alight quickly.

He set off walking along Dark Lane and eventually found a gate into the field. He entered and immediately felt a chill, as if a cold familiar hand had brushed down his spine. There was frost and the grass was hoary. He reached a wood at the foot of the slope, which prevented him from seeing further up but he knew that the tower lay beyond it about half a mile to a mile away.

Passing through the trees he daydreamed. He fancied that the March wind was humming a sad farewell to him among the still-bare branches. He stopped at a small beck and squinted through the twisted canopy at the sun desperately trying to break through. He began to feel ill again.

A crow cawed above him and the young man trudged out of the woodland into a clearing where masses of cut timber was stacked high, far too high to see over. Next to him an ichneumon probed deep into a hole in a log, then flew away towards the barren sky. He felt an increasing sense of loss, which he simply couldn't explain.

The young man was tired and sat heavily on a trunk. He drank a cup of hot tea and ate two biscuits before carrying on. After a few minutes he was clear of the stacks and could see the top of the hill.

There it was. The tower. It seemed altogether more massive now, teetering on the brink of the field, a colossal column of ancient cut stone reaching to the heavens or so it seemed to the young man. It was at once frightening and welcoming.

He craned his neck to take in the magnitude of the structure. The huge timber door was clearly visible as was the window near its peak.

He felt queasy as he lumbered up the slope, his progress hampered by fetid tussocks of grey grass. An occasional starving crow would land nearby and peck at his splitting shoes. The air seemed thick, as if used up and the sky wavered like a dark ocean breaking on the lea,.

He loosened his shirt buttons and dropped his rucksack. The flask of hot tea smashed as it landed. He was sweating more with each arduous step toward the infernal tower, a gargantuan stone spike piercing the ground as if nailing the very Earth to its core.

He crawled the final length, retching and gagging; his hands and trousers thick with cloying mud from the dank pasture no animal could ever tolerate. His icy nose began to bleed, the crimson fluid mixing with the dormant soil in a palette of dreadful colours he wished he'd never seen. He was sick and lilting snowdrops thickened with his blood. He felt as if he was dying.

With one last terrible push he reached the top and knelt before the tower, wholly insignificant beneath it's dizzying sun-tipped heights. 

"What do you want from me! For God's sake! Please!" he screamed at the stones, a sense of Deja-Vu making his head spin.

He sobbed and wiped his bloody face on his sleeve before attempting to stand. 

He was assisted in getting up by a young woman of inestimable beauty. Holding his hand and elbow she gently raised him and stood before him smiling.

She was the very essence of light itself, shining like a walking flare, hopping, skipping and burning up the oxygen around her like a rocket. Beyond her, huge hares leapt over each other and celandines raced towards her bare feet in a yellow surf.

"Come", she said softly in a sickly-sweet voice, "you must be exhausted after your journey. Come and lie down for a while".

The young girl carefully guided the young man through the tower door and up a spiral staircase made of stone to the very top. Here she opened a wooden door leading into a small bedroom where the window at the tower's peak looked out onto the land below.

"Here" she whispered, "rest your tired body".

The young man was helped into a large four poster bed. His body had shrunk to half its normal size and he was racked with an indescribable pain, as if his very self was being squeezed into a bottle, his bones crunching and melting like a glacier hitting the sea.

The young woman tucked the bedclothes up below his chin and lightly kissed his face, now entirely withered and thawed, his eyes closed.

She turned and licked her frosted lips and was filled with ambition, a gamboling desire to handle the wet business of birth in all its bloody glory.

As she locked the tower door she looked up at the window one final time, already uncertain who was up there.

Barrelling down the slope she forgot about the tower completely and danced all the way to the waiting fields, where she ripped the year's first born lamb from its Mother's womb and smeared her grinning face. With a sunny bloodied smile she waved at the passing 485.

And so the Winter was imprisoned in the tower once again and the Spring released for yet another year.

The Dry Grimoire

Frank Sinn was a collector. He collected the worst of humanity, it's grisliest side, the detritus of depravity and the spoils of degradation.

Shunning the modern world and it's irrelevant chattels, Frank Sinn collected the Satanic; it's deadliest artefacts and most heinous of texts. He sniffed out Darkness and willingly scratched it's underbelly, grabbing whatever emerged in his gluttonous hands.

Sinn left behind him broken families, ruined lives and bankrupt souls. His quest for the demonic knew no bounds and he would have defiled his own kin to get nearer to Him.

He believed the answer to his place in Hell lay in the sceptic scrawl of grimoires, the dreadful tomes of Hades inked by the most terrible of underlings.

Sinn had them all except for one. The bloodiest volume of all, the foul Trockenes Heft, the dry Grimoire, it's fetid vellum penned with the blood of virgins and nuns, their open veins filling the quills of ravenous ogres as they feverishly scribed the manual of damnation, the most important words ever to be uttered from Lucifer's massive burning maw, drying the pages to an unreadable crisp as they went. 

It is said that the Fallen One himself sealed the book shut, his pointed claw, the lock's very key, snapping off and tumbling into the irksome tumult of Men's bloody history before he could find it again and for millennia thought lost forever from man and Beast.

Yet, after years of painstaking sleuthing and arcane skullduggery, incredibly a mysterious relic came to Sinn's attention and through some murderous and nefarious deed in the dead of night, he had stolen what he thought was the key to the Trockenes Heft from a young and penniless fool, who had offered to sell this thing to him via the web. Meeting in an alley and witnessing the gloating in Sinn's eyes, the youthful seller perilously held out for more, much much more. 

Lust and deceit are the shrapnel of greed, both qualities dear friends of the thuggish Sinn. With the object now dripping red from his own hand, the collector envisioned that magnificent book-clasp bound shut from all but the most evil of men. Men like Sinn, who had cut and slit a path of gore in that alleyway, and many more, to now himself possess that uniquely powerful key, the claw of Satan himself.

'With this rare and beautiful defiler I can open the doors of death itself, then rightfully enter the ranks of the uppermost fiends and stand at last beside the Beast, a place I have surely earned: where surely I belong. All I need now is the grimoire'.

Knowing much of avarice and unquenchable desire, Sinn sensed the book was out there in the shadows, owned by a man much like himself, a seeker of the foulest of truths, an acolyte of the Fallen One, but a man without the key.

Sinn placed a simple message in blood in the dank toilets of a bar devoted to the Night and it's denizens. 

'I have the key. You have the book. It's time we met.'

He waited a week before returning late in the night. 

The reply was thus, smeared in thick red gore:

'You will find me in the city's abattoir this midnight.'

Sinn wasted no time and drove to the slaughterhouse. He checked his phone and entered on the stroke of twelve.

'Hello!'

Sinn yelled into the vastness, it's cloying odour of innards and meat a sweet bouquet to his twisted sensibilities. He liked this place.

A short stocky man stepped out of the darkness, his hirsute and muscular forearms thick with blood and his apron drenched scarlet. On his large round head he wore a fraying skullcap and in his hand an old cleaver glinting in the jaundiced light of the moon.

'You have the book?' Sinn asked.

The butcher nodded.

'You have the key?' he asked in return.

Sinn nodded too.

The butcher placed his cleaver on the ground and dragged a living piglet into view.

He spoke commandingly.

'Then let us, the chosen pair, agree to bring things together and drink the drink to He who would welcome our pact, the ancient cupping of fresh hot swine blood'.

The cleaver glistened as it fell and swiftly severed the animal's tight neck, it's steaming life-fluid filling two tall goblets with fresh crimson liquid.

Handing one to Sinn, the short bloody man raised his own and spoke again:

"A toast to the Deceiver, a toast to the Lord of Lies".

Gleefully Sinn downed the hot ferrous fluid and smiled with reddened teeth.

It was morning when he woke in his apartment. He was sat in his favourite armchair, the fire blazing and an empty plate, wine bottle and glass were on the side table, evidence of a meal the night before but one he struggled to recall at all.

Sinn felt sluggish and thick-headed. It must have been a heavy dinner. Perhaps too many chops with bread and gravy and too much claret. 

He had dreamt it all. And how he had dreamt. The book, he remembered. It had all been a glorious dream, but sadly, infuriatingly, nothing more.

He attempted to stand but his body seemed cumbersome, as if pinned to the chair. He sat back down and stared at the hellish flames. 

'Good morning!'

A semi-familiar voice rang out from the deep shadows cast by Sinn's velvet curtains. 

Sinn looked round agitatedly.

A figure arose from the armchair in the deepest dark.

'It is I, Mr. Sinn!'

Sinn stared in disbelief at a short stocky man covered in blood. The same man from his dream. He held a wet cleaver in his hand and a long needle and thick thread caked in gore. 

The butcher!

'Yes, the butcher Mr. Sinn. I am he, here in your fine apartment. I brought you home, where I enjoyed a pleasant meal of kidneys I found, breads and wine, whilst admiring your impressive collection of trinkets and what-nots all dedicated to ..... Well, Me!'

Sinn blinked and the butcher stood. He was taller now and removed his cap to reveal short sharp horns. His body was blood-red, his wet skin steaming by the fire and his tufty cloven feet clicking as he moved on the laminate floor.

'Yes, Mr. Sinn. I am the one you seek. The Master of Misrule, the Snake of Derision, the Lord of Evil. I am Satan.'

Sinn gasped. He was agog. This was the moment he'd waited for all his life. His vast collection had brought him to this point and now before him the true God had visited, assuredly to invite him to stand at his side in the infernal halls of Hell.

He tried to stand but couldn't. He was so damn heavy this morning.

'No need to stand Mr. Sinn. Remain seated. After all you're full up. Full as a gun. Stuffed to the rafters with no room to spare. You are literally bursting at the seams. Let me show you my friend.'

Satan bent down and undid Sinn's heavilly-stained shirt. Sinn stared down at his belly, grossly distended and moving in the firelight. In the centre was a long angry incision all the way down to his groin. It's reddened, ragged edges had been roughly stitched together with thick twine. Juices seeped out all along the cut.

Sinn looked at Satan imploringly.

'Oh, yes, why are you like that. Of course, I'll tell you. I have been searching for my claw for centuries. Without it I cannot read my old book and prepare for the final battle with that pathetic Nazarene. You found it for me, my claw, Mr. Sinn. My book, the Trockenes Heft, scribed by my furious ogres in the land of the Hun, requires blood to re-awaken. It must be soaked in a willing disciple's blood for one whole arc of night. The disciple will unfortunately be no more once I retrieve my satiated tome, but we all have to make sacrifices don't we Mr. Sinn.'

The bemused Sinn gasped in horror as Satan took the claw from his inside coat-pocket and re-attached it to his finger. He stooped and inserted the talon straight into Sinn's navel and proceeded with a brutal upward cut and violently sliced through the course twine stitching.

Sinn screamed as his belly was rented apart and his rib cage sprang open like a cupboard, revealing the bulging Trockenes Heft stuffed carelessly within. Glistening red and pulsating, it began to move down and out as Sinn's slick entrails slid from his midriff onto the floor. The book was carried fat and quenched straight to the hooves of the Beast, who picked it up with a loving grin.

'Why thank you Mr. Sinn. I've always appreciated the more able amateur collectors in my flock. I think you've been the best. And what a fabulous decanter you made too, willing and wide open for business.'

The Devil snickered.

'Too bad you're of no more use to me. And certainly not that other fellow, whose days are numbered!' He chuckled.

Turning with his writhing grimoire the Dark One clicked his now complete clawed fingers and Frank Sinn burst into flames and he and his collection was never seen again by any living soul.

Our Bloodied Ruins

Like every year since, we spend the summer in the tree.

We read books perched on the huge branch jutting out from the ancient oak at the rim of the field. The sheep beneath our feet stare past us. They chew. We read. I think we all want to swap.

From our perch we can see the Nuns' Causeway where we'd walked as a family in '75, retracing their steps to the hilltop village. We could see our caravan, our car and our Father's failed attempt to chop logs for the campfire.

We could see the Benedictine Priory by the Swale, wrecked by Henry's brutish reformation, their fallen convent at the end of the fence yet somehow remained, pinned down by the terrible sin that befell it. Oh, had it but been forgiven ages ago and not left to fester. Yet I think we understood it's stoic indifference to the tide of time whispering through the valley, soothing it's past agonies at the hands of the wielding King.

Beyond our branch, the endless slopes of the hills shoulder the horizon like titans and the clouds slip by like frightened crowds.

We read everything that July and enjoyed lazy days in the caravan, a hide-away of sorts from our troubled life back home.

Crows wheeled like sorcerers as greater forces gathered in the valley till the very day itself. Lambs lay among the tussocks round the ruin staring into heaven like putti. If there was an evil aura evolving then those Lambs felt nothing. Their lonely cries were for the here and now, the hot frothing teats of their tired mothers hiding from the raving sun.

We hardly ever come down from the tree these days, except to make imaginary sandwiches and tea, which we take back to the big bough. A small wooden crate which we'd nailed onto the trunk back in the day houses our copious reading, our very own tree library from that holiday long gone.

I liked to read the poetry this year. Larkin, Hughes, Plath. The moderns. Mable is much older than me and prefers gothic fayre. Percy and Mary Shelley. She said she would have loved to have been there that night they took to opium and penned their darkest bulwarks borne of dreams.

Back then we discussed what we were reading like this, often late into the night, as the chill of the Yorkshire hills descended like an unwelcome gurgling fiend forcing us to seek the solace of inside.

Spiders now ruled the caravan. Large house creatures residing in webs like bandages stretched across the mouldy furniture. Mable and me dont mind. We had no idea what they ate. Probably each other. Dog eat dog among the filaments. Sometimes we find dried husks still clinging on, the juices of existence long gone and only the papery skin left behind, as if life had simply drained away into the stream on the valley floor like ours.

The bath often holds a desperate spider. We lie down together with it and try to lift it out but simply can't, it's beady eyes pleading with us, it seems, to try one more time. If we blow hard enough the air would actually swirl and catch the spider like a sweet wrapper and fly out of the tub to freedom. Mable and me howl with laughter, pretending to turn on the taps and bathe like we once had in the splendour of our lives.

When Summer fades and the first whispers of Autumn tell their tale of change and something far worse on the way, we stroll together through the convent's carcass holding hands and wonder what the nuns were like hundreds of years before us. Now dead, infused in the stones, we hum evensong as we saunter among their degraded pews, rosaries rattling like bones on our threadbare shoes.

Somewhere in the dereliction, a thrush hammers a snail to smithereens, the mollusc's silent scream lighting up our ears as it's house is ransacked and it's eaten alive.

A little like us that summer break so long ago, the caravan holiday in the Dales that should bring us back together as a family. The bruises gone, the bottles emptied in the sink. Solemn vows. No more drink.

Promises promises promises.

It split us up. Forever.

I see so clearly my father drunk, reaching for his camping axe and more deranged by his liquored demons than before, trudging like a Golem towards us standing by the tree.

We see the unstoppable fury in his eyes, more hateful than ever and we drop our books.

No Father. No! I beg. 

Buts it's no use. This pet of Hell isn't listening to us. My Dad's curse comes to roost and darker voices rule.

As he raises the blade high above his head I shriek and cower, Mable hurling herself towards his soured bulk but to no avail.

As the sheep stare in the field and the Jackdaws chortle, the axe descends repeatedly in an arcing spatter of madness and gore.

The job done, my Father's devil pats his shaking shoulders, ecstatic with the outcome, having this time finally given us up in ragged pieces to his fiends to feast on, the bloody ruins of my poor mother Mable and me beneath the big bough of our beloved oak.

A HIGH PRICE

Cecil had tried everything. Tripe, sweetbreads, kidneys, heart, even wazzles. Money was no object.

He was chewing on a dried pig's ear meant for his Doberman he was that desperate.

He just loved scoffing offal and organs. Animal of course, although he had often wondered about cannibals. What on earth did human flesh taste like?

He thought nothing more of it until one day he saw an ad at the back of his monthly Finance magazine that caught his attention.

The Rarest of all Flesh. Available Now. High Price. Tweet us.

The rarest? What could that be? Japanese beef? Maybe a Cephalopod? Curiosity got the better of Cecil so he tweeted.

The response was thus.

Once in a Lifetime Opportunity to eat the World's rarest flesh. Secret location. Discretion essential. The Price will be High. Message if you're game.

Cecil was game indeed and messaged them.

The response read:

Location will be forwarded. Tell no one or else your invite will be invalid. Remember, once in a lifetime.

The address arrived and Cecil set off in his Bentley. He told not a soul.

The place was dingy. A brutalist box of a building surrounded by rubbish but the car park was full of prestige cars. He knocked.

A young lady let him in. She smiled like a siren.

"Leave all belongings here in this box. Wallet, jewellery, rings, iPhone, Rolex and clothes. Not your underwear."

"My clothes?"

"Yes. You will need them afterwards. It can get messy"

Cecil did as he was told. The rarest of all flesh uppermost in his mind.

"What is it we are eating exactly?"

The young lady blew a large pink gum bubble in his direction and asked him to follow.

They entered a small room. There was a seat, which extended from the tiled wall. 

A young man told him to sit.

"Do I pay now?"

"No, you pay later."

There was a whirring sound, as if a small motor had started up. From the opposite tiled wall a large box began to emerge and rotate in a semi-circle like the hand of a clock. Slowly it made its way to where Cecil was sat and stopped directly in front of him.

On top of the tiled box was a domed silver dinner cover, like the ones served at royal banquets.

What in the world could it be?

Cecil was excited and picked up the knife and fork in front of the cover. There was a large dessert spoon too.

The young man and woman from earlier walked back in. They were dressed in rubbery aprons and face gear like they wore in slaughterhouses.

"Oh what is it?" Cecil blurted out clapping his cutlery, hardly containing his growing excitement.

The young man lifted the cover. Beneath it was a man's head. He blinked and stared at Cecil and the two young people.

The young woman drew a samurai sword and swung swiftly and expertly. Swoosh!

The crown of the man's head was cut clean through. The young man lifted it off.

The head blinked again.

"Enjoy." said the young people.

She pointed to the exposed brain, still pulsating with instincts and thoughts.

Cecil stared at the blinking head and grabbed the spoon. He scooped out a first helping and tasted it.

"Christ, that's delicious! Who would have thought!"

In a ravenous frenzy Cecil devoured the head's entire contents. Brains, membranes, nerves, jelly, fat and all.

When he'd finished he threw the large spoon into the empty skull with a clatter.

The head blinked one last time and the eyes shut.

"Absolutely fucking wonderful! I could eat another one! Before I do I need to check the bill. What's the high price you mentioned?"

"Your life, of course, Cecil. Your life!" howled his hosts.

The two young people strapped Cecil to his chair and a large tiled box appeared from his own wall, revolving half a circle until it met him and slid over his seated body leaving his head outside it. The two young people fastened the open box-side shut and stepped aside.

"What in God's name are you doing? Just let me out and I'll pay double. I promise not to say a word to anyone."

"Oh we know that Cecil. You won't say another word. Ever!"

They both chuckled and together they placed the silver Dinner cover over his head before the box seat turned and arced through the wall into the room next door.

A man was seated in his underpants with a knife and fork gripped firmly in his hands.

"I can't wait to see what it is!" he smiled widely.

Cecil just gawped when the lid was lifted off his head.

"Oh My!" said the seated man and after the swoosh he tucked right in.

The Pool

The family sunbathed like lions in the parching heat.

Bowls of aromatic spices scented the balmy air around the patio. Strings of beads shivered in the perfumed breeze.

The blue water of the family's pool slapped gently against the mosaic, whilst damselflies quivered nervously through the grove.

'Pass me some figs please Father'.

Father, squinting at the blinding mid-day sun, picked up a sprig of plump fruits from a marble platter and reached over to his daughter.

In one swift movement his hand was severed at the wrist, hot crimson completely showering the girl.

Father stared in disbelief at his grisly stump, his life force spurting in jets from divided vessels across his face and flecking the faded fresco beside him.

His daughter picked up his gushing hand, still holding the figs and wailed till her lungs burst.

Mother ran to her husband to comfort him, warm fluid covering her as she held his mutilated limb. It dripped loudly into the pool, clouding the surface like red goats milk.

A fleeting swoosh was heard before Mother herself was cruelly lifted into the air. She stared down at her white robe, where a razor-sharp silver spearhead came out below her sternum, twisting as it exited.

Dislodged just as quick in a gut-entangled heap, she began to scream uncontrollably, as her entrails slid out steaming hot, her venting blood coursing down them from her gored chest. It poured along her legs in a river of scarlet, slicking thickly around a wooden cross by the poolside.

The daughter held her head and shook it from side to side, her desolate eyes wide open with shock and terror.

She moaned noisily, repeating 'No, No, No!' over and over, swaying as her mind plummeted into madness.

Her soft leather waistband gave absolutely no resistance as a thick cutting sword scythed through her in a single devastating arc.

As her dumbstruck parents paused their own fatal agonies, they watched their daughter cut in half, her upper torso sliding into the water, bobbing over and arms outstretched in a cruel parody of their deep beliefs.

They both blinked through veils of blood, weakening lips uttering a final prayer
as their hearts broke.

As terrible wounds swept them inexorably towards their deaths, they caught a momentary glimpse of running helmeted men retreating into the olive trees beyond, their bloodied weaponry glinting in the Tyrrhennian sun.

Global Warning

Ravaged by hate, the green folds buckled where the warheads hit, dry-stone lines exploding like strokes. It was a super heated June when they came. Pylons melted to the ground, attack jets screaming in the valleys, flicked like flies by Christ Knows What. Sheep sizzled. Burning wigs by trees. Forests flamed like solar flares. Women sank in lava, their children oozed. Men fused in tractor cabs, ploughs floated on fluid fields. Searing, the missiles nailed the piling clouds, towering lungs of alien fire rising so the Cities knew their fates before they came.

A Whiff of Enamel

Offcut was a tinker bot on the Planet Swarf.

Like all robots on Swarf he served a feudal master.

Offcut's master was called Lord Grilla, a bellicose bot who ravaged the neighbouring lands like a greased dragon in its insatiable thirst for oil.

Like all worker droids Offcut had a single task. His job was to sniff out the carboniferous scent of the oil slicks buried beneath the detritus of the Swarf wars.

For the first thousand years Offcut had performed his duties with obedient zeal and aplomb. Grilla had been pleased with this olfactory droid who always managed to find the hidden slicks.

'You are my divining rod, my oil dowser Off cut!' praised Grilla through its steel mouth.

Offcut had found so much oil that the tanker droids had been at full capacity for the last millenium. The drums were piled high in Grilla's desert kingdom like church spires for a fossil god, a god that had powered the fatuous warring of Swarf's Barons.

When Offcut located a new slick, he would take a sample of the oil with his cup hand, raise his wired arm and sound the alarm in triumph.

Grilla wood lurch over the surface of mangled machines, his excitement forged in a furnace of greed and a corrupted obsession to possess every last drop of oil on Swarf.

Behind the giant leader the extractors came, gathering in their thousands, file after file of diligent syphons. Beyond their serried ranks stood the legions of tanker droids towering in the solar glare like rockets.

As Royal diviner Offcut had the privilege of pouring the sample of oil into Grilla's intake, sending the robot Lord into a frenzy of avarice. He then leapt, as he always did, into the waiting slick and windmilled his metal arms through the thick black liquid.

Once fully bathed Grilla would beckon his batteried concubines to join him, whereupon a flotilla of ironclad maids paddled across and gently daubed the fluid all over their Lord's ancient gears and servos, Grilla's pleasure sensors very nearly overloading.

Offcut had witnessed this ritual for a thousand years. 

His crystal eye remained alert but lately something was growing inside him, which he did not recognise.

Somewhere in his circuits a cable had frayed he surmised. 

A stop in the repair shop would sort it out. But the glitch persisted and although he didn't know it Offcut felt the fizzy beginnings of boredom.

In his musty repair station the sniffer bot began to search for a loose connection. He poked and probed but didn't find anything wrong. 

With nothing better to do Offcut reached for the spool of solder with his pincer so he could strengthen his nasal cabling. Taking it down from the top shelf he suddenly glimpsed a row of old tins swathed in a thick layer of dust.

'I don't remember those!' he clicked and put them on his work bench.

Offcut stared at the tins. 

His vision program, much weaker than his nose, could only just discern through the dust the word on the side of each of them.

He was perplexed. Where had they come from.

Curiosity taking over, the little droid flipped the lid from the first tin. Immediately a vapour rose from the inside and Offcut, with his amplified rhino-sensors, inhaled deeply.

The sensation that greeted him was like nothing he had experienced before. This was a new and alien aroma unlike anything the bot had ever smelled. It was beautiful, enchanting and endearing in equal measure and Offcut was entranced.

He opened the second can and to his delight it held an even more intoxicating scent than the first. Taking it in he imagined hot steamy rainforests of lithium trees and wide barometer seas of mercury glinting in starlight. He blinked his one eye.

Quivering with excitement the small droid released the third and final lid. 

If the first two bouquets had startled him with their groundbreaking beauty he was now transfixed by the mist rising from this last tin.

Cranking his olfactory scale up to the maximum Offcut breathed in the fog as fully and entirely as his receptors would allow. 

The result was an eruption of gorgeous hues and hope-filled horizons that overwhelmed the robot. 

Offcut fell over in a fugue of rapturous joy, his pincers twitching wildly in the motes of dust.

Righting himself the droid closed the three tins and sat for hours reflecting on what he'd found and what, if anything, he should do.

Suddenly he beeped loudly and had an idea. With all his creative programming whirring, Offcut removed the lids once more and reached for an old silver spoon.

Working through the night in a state of happy chatter and flashing lights the diminutive sniffer bot laboured at his bench.

When dawn broke through his corrugated hut slits Offcut was ready and held his creation high in his cupped hand.

He stared with pride and glee at the sparkling liquid he had concocted. It's scent was breathtakingly magical and Offcut felt sure that it would change the world.

'I must show my master!'

With his sample cup held aloft the invigorated bot trundled to Grilla's scrapyard palace between the towers of oil.

The robot chief was chastising his company of downtrodden bookkeepers all sat in a line of rusting desks. They were vigorously scribbling into oil-spattered ledgers, their shaky heads down for fear of being slapped by Grilla's huge brass palm.

'Master Master!' beeped Offcut. 'I have made something new for you, something glorious! Behold!'

Grilla lifted the sniffer droid in front of his grinding facial machinery.

'This better be good Offcut! I was busy counting my new barrels. You have disturbed me!'

'My apologies Sire, but you will think it worthy when you experience the result of my night's labouring.'

The little bot raised his cup hand towards his Lord's small but working nose and said 

'smell it!'

The metal giant inhaled and ... 

winced.

'What is it?'

'Ah, there is a copious dollop of thick treacle, a heaped spoon of wonderful smelling salts and a generous slug of liquid enamel.'

Offcut was pleased with his description.

He went on.

'I think it smells better than oil!'

'What did you say? What did you just say to me?' roared Lord Grilla.

Offcut froze as his colossal brass hand began to curl around him.

'Nothing smells better than oil you insolent dog. I fear you have outstayed your welcome droid! Your position as my Royal diviner is now up!'

'I'm so sorry Lord! I did not mean to offend you. I will...

... but it was too late for Offcut. Grilla's palm closed around him and there was a terrible crunch. 

Grilla crushed his little wiry frame until the lights in the little bot's intelligent eye almost went out.

The robot Baron placed Offcut's carcass on the ground in front of the scribbling bookkeepers, who looked pitifully at his wreck and scribbled even harder.

Grilla, who was now busy once again caressing his drums of oil, did not see his favourite golden concubine approach the body of Offcut.

She stared with confused orbs at the scrap that was once the faithful droid. 

She noticed his cupped hand still outstretched and she bent to breathe in the mysterious scent she could smell.

Offcut, in his dying moments, saw her eyes widen with joy and whispered gently to her

'Please take it.'

As she rolled away holding Offcut's unclipped cup hand close to, the once Royal diviner caught a final wondrous whiff of enamel and let his crystal eye slowly start to close for the very last time.

The Redundancy of Suns

Sat here on the barren sands overlooking the ocean I recollected my fateful voyage.


I had been sent from Earth to gather data on the vortex at the heart of our Galaxy.


The Black Hole, which I visited, was merciless. I became something else in that tubed night, although I knew not what.


As my ship recoiled from the mouth of the Hole I knew I was alive but different. I felt empty yet connected to this dreadful maelstrom.


It had been ten Earth years but a mere ten blips in the whirlpool of nothingness that I had been sent to explore a decade ago.


Everyone thought it was a suicide mission. I would never survive. At best I would send important data from the singularity and that was all. At worst I would vanish without achieving anything useful.


The smart money was on the latter but here I was careening out of the devil's arse at the speed of light. It spat me out like a pip and my ship hurtled across the Milky Way at velocities hitherto unknown.


My time in the Hole had hardened my constitution and I found myself easily withstanding the terrific G forces pounding my craft.


In time I entered the Solar System and before I knew it I was burning through the atmosphere of my home planet Earth once again.


Splashing down in the ocean my ship spewed up gargantuan clouds of water vapour that could be seen for hundreds of miles.


Before long there was a tap on my hatch. I opened the door and a beaming rescue pilot began to speak.


My mouth opened and something horrible happened, something so terrible that I can barely force myself to remember.


The entirety of the pilot began to liquefy and enter my mouth and nose in a stream of fluidised blood and skin. I could not stop it happening. I could feel all the information in his DNA siphoning into mine, all the data in his brain draining into my skull. It expanded.


The rest of the rescue mission went the same way. Blended and upended into my widening black maw, their sentience merging with my own expanding consciousness.


I felt my head. It had grown to three times the size. My gut too was distended. I looked like a walrus on the beach, my huge mouth dribbling blood and bile into the golden sands.


But my peace was shattered when a whole cohort of people came hurtling over the dunes, running wildly and falling as if some tractor beam was pulling them.


Like the others they stood before me screaming and turned to mush before sliding down my gullet and bloating my body and mind.


Thousands more arrived and as my form grew to enormous proportions like a quivering mouthed bag as big as a tower block I realised that somehow I was still connected to the black hole I had escaped from, it's umbilical pouting gut.


As millions souped in my throat I also came to realise that this process would not stop until the singularity, of which I was an extension, had devoured all information on Earth and therefore all its inhabitants, human or otherwise.


As I mushroomed across the land and towered above the cities, a bloated pulsing abacus, I sensed a dreadful harrowing second of lessening.


My entire family; wife, children, grandchildren and Grandparents, were also blitzed in the chambers of my hideous mass and their memories swept clean.


But I was no longer human.


That brief twinge of grief was the final flicker of my former self before the terrible certainty of physics consumed my mind and soul entirely.


When all the living were inside me I began to digest the Earth, splitting the atoms and eating its data. The ground around me dissolved, the swirling miasma of a powdering planet.


In time I tasted magma.


Hot chemistry took over as I encircled the core. Swallowed like a gobstopper, It's death the birth of my heavy iron heart.


With a rusted fist shaking in the hole at the centre of the Solar System I turned to face the redundant Sun.


Warming, I cranked the colossal shafts of time and ragged that glorious orb from it's sacred mooring.


Ransomed by Chance, its flaming calculus was now, like me, but a stream of integers unable to escape the beautiful futility of becoming nothing at all.


Pfft.

The Flickering Tilly

I purchased the tilly lamp from the old chandler on the quayside. A black cage shackling a kerosene flame, it lit my way that night as the fret rolled over the port like a mad posse.

After four gruelling weeks, from the western shore on a merciless sea, the harbour was strewn with the detritus of branded cowboys.

Like many others I had come in search of a destiny, a glorious claim to the dark hills, where the horses ran in herds of gold waiting to be tamed. 

But driving me on was a secret shame. I had run out from my past like blood from a bullet hole. I had shunned my God-given responsibilities and fled the devil feeding on my soul.

I kicked a dented water can out of the way. It spun across the dirt, a dervish in the dust, eventually pointing to a trail I'd not considered, where a hooker preened beneath a candle-lit window like a broken bird.

"Hi Mister, wanna show a gal a good time?"

"Thanks but no thanks Sister, I'm good tonight but here's a nickel for a light."

The haggard, ageing brunette held out her cigarette. I placed my lamp on the ground and I cupped my hand gently around it, touching her fingers. As my tobacco flared the red glow gave her face a saintly appearance like Mary Magdalene and I was overcome with remorse.

I tipped my Stetson.

"Night Sister."

I strode on with my lamp, my spurs clicking in the emptiness, as the night embraced the smoke from my nose and mouth like the endless sable sea I'd endured to reach this point. Here the Fates would decide if my demon would follow me.

The rigging of the spice sloops clinked in the distance, a wet sound in the dry mouth of darkness. I needed a drink and soon a saloon emerged from the gloom, where I downed a sour mash whisky, splashed my sweating neck and ate a soft tangerine.

As I exited through the swinging gate, picked up my lantern and crunched the grit with my boots, I heard the gate swing again. 

Turning I saw no-one. 

I stared a while longer.

"So that's the way its gonna be!" I whispered.

I clasped my colt and heard the ancient leather creak beneath my grip. I flipped the stud and resumed my walk to the far side of town, where I was to meet up with an old gaucho at his camp.

The wooden structures of the main street faded. A pack of black dogs loped past and with them the comfort of my fellow man. Even the saints receded into the safety of the town and I craved another whisky dampening my brittled lips.

The parched brush bade me in. I held my lamp high and measured up the dirt path's length to the site of the camp at the foot of the pitch-black hills.

A gigantic, scraggy turkey vulture flapped its wings as it roosted low in a withered dwarf, its face and neck red with the blood of the land. My tilly stammered and went out in its sordid gust.

"Damn death-rat, scram you old ghastly bastard!"

I kicked a cloud of dirt into the thing's face and it squawked like a sick child before rising into the air and leaving me be.

My cigarette had just enough left in it to relight my lamp and the safe yellow flame lit once more. As the scene returned I saw a horse pelting by the arroyo. On its back was a silhouetted figure bent low on the mane, charging the mare as if devil-bent on some vengeful errand in that skinless place.

I shivered, discarded my stub and trudged on along the arid crunching path between the mesquite scrub.

By my reckoning it was the dead of night when I reached the camp of the gaucho. It was silent for a horse tethered to a thorn shrub.  

There was a decent fire with a coffee pot dangling over it. It smelt good in the lifeless air. 

"Help yourself."

I heard the voice but couldn't see its owner. 

"Thankyou."

I took a tin cup from the chattels by the fire and poured the steaming brew into it. I sipped with gratitude, the steam rising round my hat.

"Sit," said the voice.

I sat on a flat rock and drank.

"Your arrival is timely."

"I have travelled many, many days to get here," I replied.

"My apologies, it was not you I was addressing."

I stopped drinking.

"It is the man sat next to you with whom I speak."

Without warning the fire was extinguished and the blackness of forever enveloped me.

I hefted my colt, turned my head and raised my lantern.

It flickered and sputtered as if being blown but before it could die I saw the face of the figure beside me.

"Son of a bitch!"

The demon had followed me across the sea! Across the desert! To this very arroyo. 

It had been with me the whole while!

"Damn you Demon!" I yelled in its dreadful countenance.

Smoke, sulphur and steam began to billow from it's gaping mouth, from where I heard the wounded cry of frightened child within its ghastly chamber.

At turns the demon's contorted face was Mary Magdalene's imploring me to stay the night, then that blood-drenched turkey vulture pecking at my gut-filled bullets and worst of all, the desperate wife and daughter I had cruelly discarded, staggering like dissolving phantoms in the unforgiving mountains of my cowardly past.

I pointed my gun, pulled the trigger and blew its fucking brains out.

Falling into a reddening hell, where burning horses bolted over slopes of bones, it was then and only then that I saw whom the demon really was.

It was I.

It had been all along.

And as the devils of eternity prized apart my dripping skull in the flickering glow of my tilly, it was upon that arroyo I slowly died.

The Bipedal Seed

I was born a corm. A rhizome. A child root in the humus. Slowly I xylemed. Surged, I rose on hyphae beyond the soil. I could feel the sun. Swimming the sap I emerged a stamens, then a sepal. Pulsating I fuelled on sweetness wherein I formed a fat seed, too fat to hang. I fell and spiralled to virgin land. There I lay. Anchoring. I split. I stood and walked towards the world. The bipedal seed. The sugars of humans fed me and my roots cabled. Engorged on humanity I towered, a sequoia of blood. My canopy hid the extinction. When nothing was left I was sated and spored and darkened the sky for eternity.

The Bonfire by the Forest

Harold strutted round the corridors like he owned the joint.

An ex-rock star with one foot in the Styx, Harold demanded adulation.

"Get out of my fucking way you peasant" he bellowed at Ada.

"Yes, get out of his fucking way Ada!" echoed Cedric from behind Harold. 

Cedric was always behind Harold, a dweller of his shadow, a stunted brown-nose caressing his arse.

Ada moved out of the way, chess pieces dropping onto the lino.

"I'm sick to fuck of these munchkins! Me, a man with a plan, a man with a mission, a man in his prime!"

Harold almost beat his chest like a Silverback as he sat down for a game of Snakes and Ladders in the sun room.

Cedric always let him win. Somehow his beloved mentor never noticed how he rigged the play so that Harold never lost. 

His ego couldn't take losing and Cedric knew from bad experience what happened if he did. He had the scars to prove it, scars he fondled at night in bed, the striations of his love and endurance. 

But, that was years ago, when Harald had first arrived and Cedric had been madly in love with him.

"Once again you lose you gnarly runt Cedric! How I adore to see you climb those ladders every day. It reminds me of a vampire fleeing the sun. Are you a vampire Cedric? A parasite? A lowly worm?"

"No Harold, I am your friend, ready to serve you at any moment. You know that".

'Do I? I've seen you playing Cluedo with Ethel, clucking together like fucking hens in the shed. I've seen you this morning! What are you doing out there you dirty scumbag?"

"Playing Cluedo. We like to play Cluedo."

"What, Mrs. Plum did it with a chainsaw in the celler! You clowns! You're no detective Cedric, you're nothing, a nobody, you've no plan, no mission, you're going out on a gurney because you're thick as pigshit!"

"Whatever you say Harold, whatever you say."

"Besides, I went into the shed this morning after you left. She's a fine figure of a woman is Ethel. I can see why you like her Cedric. And I have to say I saw a lot of her this morning in that shed. That's why I bolted the door and fucked her brains out. You could say, I did it with my big lead pipe in the out-house you fuckwit!"

Cedric stared at Harold and stood up.

"I'll get lunch. Do you want water?"

Cedric shuffled away before Harold could answer. Had Cedric turned he would have seen Harold smiling widely, a hyena sat in his chair.

The Bi-Annual Committee of the Bonfire had it's office on the west wing. A small run-down shoebox with flaking plaster, it nevertheless housed the two staff who's job it was to oversee the event every two years on behalf of the committee. The key to it's success were suitable pairs coming forward to participate. Pairs with a strong sort of bond.

Cedric went into the office and nominated himself and Harold. 

"Is the absent party unaware of his nomination, as required by the rules?"

"Yes."

"Have you yourself reached the required level?"

"Yes"

"How would you summarise it for the record?"

"Oh, I absolutely and vehemently detest him with all my heart!"

Cedric filled out the form.

ENTERED!

The rubber stamp thumped the paper in red ink.

And so their names went forward and should Cedric and Harold be drawn then Cedric would find out the result the day before the event. Only one pair would be chosen by the committee.

Spring passed by  in the sprawling mansion and the skies grew warmer. Large glass doors were flung open and long white curtains billowed gently like dancers in the summer breeze.

Cedric continued to be Harold's familiar in the myriad halls. Harold continued to belittle him at every turn. The plague and it's victim entwined in a waltz of degradation.

Harold now sometimes asked Cedric to watch him as he met with Ethel and Ada in the shed on long hot afternoons, when the institution's guard dogs slept in the shade of the growing mound of brash.

Cedric's rancour enveloped him like a second skin. A cracked, scarred carapace; it's crusted cuts the ladders of loathing, it's red slits the snakes of hate. He stroked them constantly.

And so August came to the corridors and the event was here. The fire was the following day. A frisson of sheer excitement ran through the sprawling wings of the building.

Official word was passed to Cedric that he and Harold were indeed the chosen pair. Excited as he'd never been before Cedric nevertheless kept this secret to himself as instructed.

Cedric I need you to scrub my back!

Cedric I want you to make my bed!

Cedric I need you to chew my food!

Cedric I want you to wipe my arse!

The demands continued from Harold, who was so swept up in Cedric's humiliation that he didn't notice the huge bonfire being completed in the garden.

The night came and everyone in the asylum were asked to go outside, get a cup of hot tea and stand around the fire, which was now a burning tower of wood and timber thirty feet wide and fifty feet high. 

You could see it for miles just as it had been seen each year right back to a time a thousand years ago when Men had first believed in the god of the Forest and it's need for sacrifice.

All the thousand or so inmates shuffled round the fire in their off-white pyjamas holding chipped cups. The steam rose and swirled in the rising heat like a whisper.

Standing in the circle, Cedric and Harold were there too, shoulder to shoulder with everyone else. 

Harold passed his cup to Cedric and rolled a cigarette. Whilst he was engrossed in lighting up Cedric whispered something to the man next to him on his opposite shoulder.

Harald drew deeply on his rollie.

"I wonder who the poor fucker is this time!" Said Harald smiling and puffing out rings of smoke into Cedric's face.

Cedric, still holding both cups, looked at him and smiled back.

"It's you!" whispered the man next to Harold.

Harold looked at him stunned and dropped his cigarette. He stared at Cedric who was still smiling.

"You little bastard!"

Harold turned and attempted to run but scores of hands grabbed him and dragged him to the fire.

With Cedric leading and without any fuss the assembly threw Harald high into the flames.

"Noooooooooooo!" He wailed as the seething fire consumed him.

The inmates turned and began to shamble towards the doors back into the common room, where hot chocolate and digestives were waiting.

Cedric picked up Harold's fallen cigarette and took a final drag before stubbing it out.

As he closed the doors and looked out onto the garden he could just make out a tall grizzled hazy figure behind the smoke, watching from the edge of the black forest before it turned and re-entered it's dark kingdom.