THE GARGOYLE'S DISPLEASURE
My Restless Shufflings from the Rafters
Saturday, May 10, 2025
The Thing on the Caravan
The man inside reluctantly put down his novel and opened the door. He stared into darkness. There was no one there. He stepped outside into the night and couldn't see anyone.
All he heard was a barn owl screaming blue murder somewhere on the land and sensed a faint whiff of moist soil fading in the growing dark.
Slightly unnerved he resumed his reading on the caravan couch and sipped his glass of sherry.
The knock came again, only this time louder, harder and wet.
The man nearly jumped out of his skin and he threw his book across the coach.
"Christ! Who the Hell are you and what do you want at this God-damn hour?" He shouted as he flung open the door.
Nothing.
There was nobody to be seen.
Just that strange odour of watered earth lingering in the air.
"Bollocks!" he cursed, "Fuckin' weirdos everywhere you go! No peace anywhere! Probably one of those tree-hugging keepers stoned after closing. Yep, a scrotey long-haired zoo-keeper goofing off!"
The man had never liked the zoo opening near his static caravan. The two things just didn't go together. An oxymoron in the Dales. One good. One weird.
"A fuckin' zoo in the country! I ask you! It's for townies. It should be in town!" he'd protested to the council bin-men when it opened. They just stared back at the man, shrugging, the huge wheelie bins on their backs making them sidle like hermit crabs in the morning's icy cold.
That was weeks ago and the zoo had since had problems. He'd read it in the local rag. Staffing, sloppy conditions, even some escapes for God's sake!
The man slept reluctantly and fitfully that night. Despite several more nightcaps, the sherry hadn't settled him after the rapping on his door. There'll be no peace this holiday he feared.
A loud thud violently woke him. He checked his watch. It was 3am.
He could hear something. Something was on the roof of the caravan. He craned his neck to focus but all he could detect was a faint damp crunching sound like a bag of frozen peas being squashed.
Must be a fox or an owl having their midnight snack he decided.
It was when something slowly slid down the side of the van and knocked on his door again that he changed his mind.
"Oh for fucks sake! What is it?" He bellowed, the dread in his voice now peering through.
With a shaking hand he tentatively reached for the handle and gradually opened up.
Again there was nobody out there. Just some odd glistening gloop on the step, which trailed under the van.
"Obviously a sparrowhawk with a fish supper! Of course! It hit the door when it crash-landed with a trout or a carp wriggling in it's claws! Yes, that's it. Fresh fish guts!"
The man clambered back under his quilt and pulled the cover right up to his chin. He left the bedside light on and felt better for it, but sleep came stubbornly and his dreams were torn and ragged.
It was around 6am when he thought he heard the caravan door creak open. He'd forgotten to lock up. He held his duvet tight, so tight that his knuckles turned a pearly white.
A hideous squelching came from the van's front room, a sound which began to move steadily through the kitchen and along the back corridor until it was directly outside the man's bedroom door.
He shuddered with fear. Shivering beneath his quilt there was no way the man could move to check.
He froze solid when something rapped loudly on the door.
Paralysed with terror, his loosening mind oddly obsessing about the strange liquidy nature of the knocking, he saw his door begin to nudge open.
A distinct slurping noise got louder and an earthy, almost sickly smell entered the man's nostrils, as if a cellar door had been hastily prized open.
It was when he saw what was entering the bedroom that he began to scream for his life.
It was a awful blood-curdling scream that grew louder and louder.
Something dreadful crawled eagerly onto his bed and the man now wished he hadn't left the light on.
His final scream was violently muffled by a wet muddy proboscis, which filled the man's straining mouth with thick nauseating, acidic slime.
Soon his entire head was engulfed in viscous burning fluid and the man could actually feel the skin sliding off his whole face and the muscle below being hungrily eaten.
The man howled a silent laugh as he conjured a twisted vision of a jellied eel eating him up and as his skull cracked open he knew instinctively where the rasping mouthlets were hungrily heading.
It was an hour or so later that a witness, on her way to the zoo, was cycling by and thought she heard a very loud gurgling and slurping noise coming from the caravan behind the hedge.
At least that's what she told the Dales Police later that day. Loud gulping and wet munching. And as she turned she thought she saw a huge purple mass as it disappeared down a man-hole to the sewers.
"A horrible sticky thing , massive it was!"
"Yes, yes, I'm sure Officer! As big as a dog!
"It was a terrible gigantic slug with a man's face hanging from it's mouth! That's what I saw!"
Wednesday, March 5, 2025
The Last Chapter
As a youngster I read a book so terrifying I had to leave the last chapter unread.
Tuesday, December 24, 2024
Hoovered
Cecil waited till his upstairs neighbours had gone out to Midnight Mass.
A petty thief, he knew that Christmas Eve would be a real score in the Bailey house this year now he'd heard they'd won the pools!
Five minutes is all he needed to find one or two new plum pieces under the tree: a diamond ring perhaps or a plump pearl necklace. He could spot them a mile off, even wrapped.
So confident was Cecil that he'd popped up whilst getting ready for bed, leaving just his buttoned shirt and Y-Fronts on. He tiptoed onto the next floor and quickly picked the lock.
Once inside it was dark, save for the flashing tree lights in the apartment's bay window. Cecil's face was momentarily strobed as he crept into the living room like a cemetery cat.
Christmas presents were piled high beneath the fir and on the two armchairs at either side. Some paper, tape and scissors lay on the floor, as did a box of fairy lights. At the side of the bay window was a step ladder and a hoover. The Baileys were still wrapping and cleaning up for the family's arrival tomorrow he guessed.
"Well I'm cleaning up too!" chuckled the thief to himself and began to silently sort through the gifts like a reverse Santa.
Bingo!
Cecil found a small box and a bigger flat one, both wrapped with beautiful stiff paper and lavishly labelled.
"To my Darling Wife with a Great Big Kiss!" He scoffed.
"What a fuckin' hen-pecked wanker!"
Cecil opened up the gifts to reveal an enormous brooch encrusted with red emeralds, together with a gorgeous opal ring. He slid them both beneath his vest.
"Tasty!" He chortled.
Turning, he noticed something glinting in the corner of his eye and looked up. At the top of the tree was a golden fairy sparkling in the light, which appeared to be embossed with sapphires and rubies.
Cecil couldn't believe his eyes.
"Jesus, they've really splashed out on that pools win. Yes, Siree. That fairy's got my fuckin' name allover it!"
He grabbed the step ladder, opened it up and climbed to the top of the large wide tree, where he reached over for the glorious fairy. Removing it from the top branch, Cecil faltered on the ladder.
'Oh shit!"
He fell down the whole ladder and landed with a sickening sound on the hoover's hard curved handle sticking up.
Crunch!
"Fuuuuuuuuuck!" screamed the thief.
Pushing aside his flimsy Y-fronts the unyielding metal handle inserted itself fully into the mouth of his bare rectum.
The thief was about to shriek loudly in unfathomable pain when he remembered where he was.
Umphf! He clamped his hands over his mouth and screamed and balled silently, shaking his head violently with tears flowing down his face.
Sobbing wildly, he tried to wriggle free from the hard protrusion but was stuck fast.
Suddenly his sweating anus began to slide down the hoover's handle, the solid curved shaft forcing its way upwards between his legs.
Cecil howled in agonising pain. The handle pushed aside his squeezed bowel, forcing itself upwards and came to rest at the boned crown of his pelvis.
He screamed in agony, a tearing pain was beyond anything he had ever known. His insides had been pressed like forcemeat, his organs vandalised: crying, he knew he could not free himself now. He was totally impaled like a glove puppet.
Whimpering terribly, he thrashed his feet violently as searing pain wracked his body.
Suddenly Cecil's shoe caught the on-switch and the hoover lit up at the front. It began to move forward with it's powerful rollers. His thrashing feet and arms propelled it even faster and the hoover leapt across the room, blood now streaming down the handle shaft like raspberry sauce.
The vacuum cleaner hit the sideboard squarely with a raucous bang and the family's snake-tank toppled over. Its lid fell away onto the floor.
Cecil and the hoover tipped forwards and his face landed in the open side of the tank. The man's jaws were wide open in a scream of excruciating pain.
Startled from sleep, the python jerked and slipped into the man's open mouth without so much as a sound.
Cecil gagged convulsively as it's head drove past his tonsils and down into his food pipe.
He heaved and squirmed but it was no use. His alimentary canal began to distend as the enormous snake surged onwards in search of an exit.
The pressure on his ribcage was devastating and his sternum started to crack, gradually splitting completely, his chest and shirt tearing open and the two wings of his ribs flying apart with a sickening crunch.
The snake was now visible inside Cecil's open chest as it's length ploughed downwards. With a final flick of its massive tail it flipped Cecil and the hoover to an upright position again.
It was at this moment that the home's family returned from midnight mass.
They opened the door to the front room to see Cecil impaled on the hoover handle, his ribs spread eagled with the tail of the python just slipping out of sight as it's head found the opening it needed to escape: Cecil's anus, already housing the handle.
The snake pushed forward with grotesque force and the entire rectum tore apart of the now-completely dead man, his wet hot innards spiralling out onto the floor and just as quickly being sucked back up into the guzzling vacuum cleaner as it slowly trundled towards the door.
The traumatised family screamed in horror as their python's blood-soaked head emerged from their neighbour's arse, it's body slipping out completely onto his pile of entrails, illuminated by the oncoming hoover light, the snake then sliding away, dragging a blue intestine between their legs and out through the door.
Saturday, December 7, 2024
One of Each Should Do It
As the lava cooled it fell away revealing a grey man with diamond eyes.
He stared around him at the ravaged landscape, the mountain's slopes a tarnished place, bombed and mined in a terrible battle.
Atomic tanks lay strewn around the valley floor, as if they were children's toys and the wrecks of nuclear jets straddled the earth like fallen angels broken on the rocks.
World War Four had raged for a decade until every state and every nation had ruined themselves in the bankruptcy of violence, their factories silent and empty, the weapons spent. The world was on the edge from this final war.
Dying, the land and the sea were poisoned beyond hope, a wasteland of split quarks and wild neutrinos killing everything that was left, human or otherwise, an unstoppable shroud of quantum death smothering the planet.
In a desperate attempt to flea the apocalypse the three faltering superpowers sent their elites into space in gargantuan ships, a facile, capitulatory act leaving their remnant peoples to die in the killing ooze.
Now those people staggered across the ravaged landscape in search of food and shelter: shelter from the fall-out and the imminent atomic freeze.
But there was nowhere to hide. Everywhere was gone. Everything was dead. Or dying. Better the sun expand and burn this miserable orb than endure the eternal dark of Hell on Earth that was coming.
The man with the diamond eyes looked around at the degradation. He stopped and picked up a handful of scree and squeezed. Bleeding he cast it aside and began to walk towards a house nestled below the giant mountain where he'd emerged.
Inside a family cowered around a failing hologram of their leader. He flailed his arms and explained how a new government would be established in Mars and rescue ships would be sent back for them and all the citizens.
They knew it was untrue but somehow watching the stuttering president sat in his rocket room was comforting, the real but hollow words descending to them in a rain of lies.
As the grey man entered they jumped up and gasped at him, his naked body still smoking from it's lava skin. His crystal eyes sparkled in the irradiated afternoon, like Christmas lights switched on in the city square so long ago.
"Where is the sea?" Asked the grey man with a dry voice not used before.
The family looked at each other.
"The sea? The sea is a thousand miles away on the coastal plane due East" Said the the mother pointing out of the window.
"Thank you" replied the man. "I am the Land".
He turned and set off walking the thousand miles to the eastern sea.
At the coast another figure emerged, this time from the ocean. A blue woman with liquid hair stepped out of the surf and padded on to the sand. Her feet made puddles in the prints.
Naked and coated in salt, she headed towards a beach shack, where a rusting VW bus was parked and a surfboard lay split on the thrift like a cracked coffin lid.
The salted woman walked in to the creaking hut to find an aging hippy sat in a low and tattered deck chair.
He was wearing century-old headphones plugged into a machine. His bearded face bobbed up and down rhythmically to the beat.
When he saw the woman he jolted and dragged the headgear off.
"Who the fuck are you lady?"
"I am the Sea"
"Well, you sure are a sight for sore eyes. You're the first person I've seen in months. Would you like some tea? It's boiled, so it shouldn't kill ya straight away."
"Where is the big mountain?"
"The, wha-, the big mountain? What, the really big one? That'd be thataway, West, but it's a damn long trek. It'd take weeks. What da ya wanna go there for? I could take you some of the way in ma bus if you want."
The blue woman turned and walked West leaving a trail of wet salt. The hippy thought he heard a thank you as if whispered through a puddle.
The blue woman met the grey man five hundred miles inland.
"It's been too long my love. A trillion lifetimes."
"Yes, but we are together again."
"There will be only we, as it was before."
"They have spoilt the world, the world we started."
"It is time to start again."
The two beings embraced warmly, the grey and the blue becoming one.
The woman then lay flat on the ground looking up at the man stood over her staring down at her smiling face. He smiled back and outstretched his arms.
"Forever Land" she mouthed through water.
"Forever Sea" he replied through stone.
Slowly the man grew and grew into a vast range of mountains surrounded by an enormous plane, together forming a gigantic island the size of a hemisphere. At it's centre a towering mist-capped peak with a diamond summit.
The woman's body and hair turned into blue seawater and gradually deepened and deepened to cover the world and everything on it, except for the newly formed land at its centre
One sea and one continent was all that was left. The rest, the rest of everything, swept away.
To heal again, the Earth required a new beginning, the ancient binary start.
One of each.
Tethys and Pangea.
Wednesday, December 4, 2024
The Signature
"Sign here Sir"
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
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.
Monday, October 28, 2024
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.
Tuesday, June 4, 2024
Our Bloodied Ruins
Monday, August 28, 2023
A HIGH PRICE
Cecil had tried everything. Tripe, sweetbreads, kidneys, heart, even wazzles. Money was no object.
Saturday, July 8, 2023
The Pool
'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.
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.