The Wolf's Loathing

I was the first and last one on the base that Christmas. Everyone else had left.

The arctic winter was closing in and I had two days to complete my experiment and wrap everything up before the plane came back to get me. 

I was in no rush to get home. My work was basically my life and Christmas was to be a lonely holiday, as it always was. An bleak orphan season. An unwanted gift from no-one. No tree, no dinner, no family. Best not to even think about it.

Only my work gave me meaning.

My notes were written up save for the last phase. That November I had successfully tracked, caught and sedated a rare ice wolf cub, a female, which was in itself enough to secure me a further grant - these wolves were largely legend and to catch one was unheard of - but the real prize was to bring one back to the States for study and maybe even cross-breed it with a timber wolf.

This final two days was to get the cub ready for transport, take a flight to Quadead and then by truck finally to New York.

The animal was well. I gave it another shot for the journey and after a few hours I had the special cage finished for the cargo hold on the Cessna. 

The residual tasks were purely domestic. I was good at leaving. To switch the base power to sleep mode. To seal off the water supply. To check the that the labs and sample fridges were locked and finally to secure all the doors from the inside bar the side entrance to the airstrip, where I would leave.

It was during that last night that I began to have nightmares. 

I'd had bad dreams before, especially after my Sister died, lost in her lunacy, pining for the mother we never knew. 

It was the harshness of the moonlit snows which stirred it all up again - that dreadful hollowness - but these terrors were different, so much more realistic and truly truly frightening.

I'd had my appendix removed just a month before joining the team in the Base.

In my nightmares something was re-opening my surgery. Something with talons; in the dark with a single long, razor sharp claw was slowly re-cutting the incision. It was when the entity nuzzled the blood pouring from the suture and reached deep into my abdomen, pulling out my hugely swollen appendix and inserting something else, it's own pumping heart, that I began to scream.

Several times during the small hours I woke up screaming and in a cold sweat. The third time I was so shaken that I had to get up, check all the doors and once happy they were sealed, I made a cup of tea and got back into bed.

I was used to the abyssal nature of nights alone and as is the case with all dreams, even nightmares, only tatters of what I had experienced remained, but I still felt the threat of whatever had violated my wound. 

It was true that the procedure back in New York had been a problem. I had been late pulling together all the paperwork and permissions and I'd forgotten the rule about the damnable organ. Operated on in September, the doctor had told me in had been touch and go. My appendix was in fact septic and it was pure luck that probably saved my life. Had it burst, well, I'm glad it didn't. As a result of the infection, my wound, although clean and tidy, was still red and prominent when I got to the arctic in October. That had been two months ago and it still felt tight and uncomfortable now I was going. 

I promised to have the surgeon take another look at it once I was home for the Christmas break. I had had an ill feeling about my arctic assignment and I certainly didn't want to add to my anxieties as I faced the top of the year alone. Besides, I had other cuts of my own that needn't get neighbours.

It was time to leave. 

The plane landed and the pilot met me at the side entrance, where we placed the wolf casket safely on the trolley and pushed it gently over the mesh track to the cargo bay, where we stowed the young canine in the hold. I gave it one last shot for the journey. It moaned and stared at me, confused, before closing it's wild eyes again.

I sat down and buckled myself in. The pilot undertook his system checks and I stared out of the window into the frozen polar mist back in the direction of the base. 

I was sure I saw a light in the side corridor come on and then go off, before the door opened and something walked out heading towards the plane. The arctic fog was too strong to make out what it was but it revealed itself once it had walked along the wing and glared at me through the window.

It was a wolf.

An ice wolf, an adult female and the very stuff of myth and legend.

No human had ever seen an adult before. This was first contact.

I could see in its feral eyes a mixture of both sorrow and loathing. An unfathomable loathing burning in its pupils and aimed squarely at me. 

I knew then that this creature on the wing was the cub's mother and I was taking away it' daughter.

It bared it's huge teeth and I could feel the terrible hatred it bore me seeping like vapour through the glass. Yet there was something else too, a deeper connection. Was it affection I sensed buried in those eyes.

It then snarled loudly and all the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

You ready?

What? What? Do you not see what's on the wing? 

Huh! 

The pilot turned to look and it was obvious he could see nothing, except the thick icy fret closing in.

We've got to go now. OK?

Yes. Yes. OK.

I stuttered and the pilot checked that I was alright one final time before starting the engine and taking off.

I peered back as we rose and there, despite the mist, I saw a woman standing on the ice as clear as day.

Have you got anything to drink?

There's coffee in the flask.

Anything stronger?

Try the small cupboard. There's a bottle of Scotch.

Thanks.

I guzzled the glass of malt in the hope it would steady my nerves. It didn't but another shot numbed me enough to drift off for the rest of the flight.

We've landed. Quadead.

Oh! Right. Thank you. How was it?

Uneventful. We flew through the snow sprays fine. I was more worried about you. You were dreaming and talking or something in your sleep.

What was I saying?

It was hard to make out really but it sounded like you were speaking. No, not speaking, snarling. Like a wolf. It gave me quite a turn!

I got off the plane feeling shaken by my own apparition in the arctic and the news that the pilot had given me.

I tried desperately to remain calm and threw myself into organising the next leg of the transportation for the cub in the cage.

The sedative was still active and the casket securely housed in the faculty's truck, the driver and I set off downstate for New York City.

Fortunately the Department Head, my boss, had provided some packed food and coffee in the cab and by the time we got going I was hungry. Actually I felt ravenous, as if I hadn't eaten in days and I devoured the meat sandwiches in minutes. 

Whoah! Steady on! Save some for me!

The driver stared as I loudly munched.

Conscious that I was acting strange I apologised and re-packed the rest of the food for him.

Thanks.

No problem.

The trouble was I was still hungry. Insatiably so. 

I told the driver that I needed a pee, so we stopped in a secluded layby by a forest close to upper New York.

It was then that I jumped on the man and bit deeply into his soft neck.

I threw my head backwards, snarling and gnashing and ripped out his throat, which I consumed on the spot, hot blood pouring down my front. 

The wolf cub thrashed and threw itself around within the cage. 

I let it out and pointed to the dead driver's carcass steaming at the side of the truck.

Over the next half hour the cub and I devoured every last scrap of the man, tearing, ripping, chewing. At the end there were some bigger bones left like the skull, pelvis and the femur, which we scattered further in the forest.

We returned to the vehicle and I locked up the cub once more.

It was clear to me that I had changed. 

The nightmare had taken form. I was lupine, although I remained in my human shape throughout.

We reached my apartment near Central Park and I drove the truck to the basement garage. Dispensing with the cage, I carried the cub to the lift and to my door. It licked my face and I truly enjoyed it's affection.

The nightmare quality of the previous day faded and a more dream-like ecstasy took me over. For the first time in years I felt that I wasn't alone. 

That night I curled up by the fire next to the creature. It was Christmas Eve and outside we could hear carol singers belting out God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen on the street corner. 

Subtle fairy colours flashed in the windows opposite painting up the city night like mini northern lights and a feeling of complete peace swept over me as the canine nuzzled in search of milk.

It was at midnight, the breaking of Christmas Day, when it happened.

A sudden and excruciating pain ripped through my abdomen and I felt a dreadful pressure on my appendix suture from within. It swelled and I began to scream in agony.

I rolled around on the carpet, all the while the cub nosing my face and hands. It was excited.

With a terrible screech my stomach bloated massively and offering no resistance, my weak incision split wide open, bright gore spewing out everywhere.

At first there was stillness, but then I screamed and screamed as an object began to emerge from my wound. It was furry and matted in grue. A snout! A neck followed, a back, fore and hind legs and finally a long tale. 

The enormous white, blood-spattered wolf stood erect before my desecrated body lying limp on the floor. It painted and turned to face the cub. 

The animals licked each other's faces and lowed, their tales wagging and ears pricked up. 

I could feel the soft wet tongue of the cub's caresses.

But how?

I was clearly torn apart and quite dead.

But then the truth dawned on me. 

I was the enormous wolf.

The transformation was complete and my old self was lying in a pile by my paws.

The urge to leave and feel the night's wild air on my back overcame me. I was always good at leaving and signalling for the cub to follow, we both entered the freedom of the December darkness and bounded to the canopy of Central Park.

The journey North would take weeks, but changing from human to wolf and back, when we needed, allowed us to feed on a variety of flesh, although it was the growing scent of seal meat and innuit that drew us ever northward to the distant frozen planes of the vast arctic ice sheet.

Here, on the endless unspoilt snows at the top of the world, our lives would finally be fulfilled, alongside our ancient Mother, who was waiting for us, her cubs, whom she howled for that cold Christmas under a heart-blood moon.

We were her children.

My Sister and I.

To Those That Fly

 We wait on webbing for those that fly,

Sat day after night in the whim they'll try

To zoom and scitter across the silk,

Dodging our forelegs that lunge and heave,

Our bellies complaining as they flutter and  leave,

Only to see them alter their path, suffer our wrath, be patiently milked and endlessly die.

Veronika! The Kanker of Kalkar

 To be unloved by your progeny is to dampen life’s full glow, as she, a performing husk, plied her everyday with the ennui of the misbegotten.

Her two children had simply left her, whole and nothing.

Vanished both.

Her herbs, pastries, pies and salves no longer ushered welfare to her consumers. The flint of her baked concoctions had grown blunt and her heart wasn’t in it, this new dim existence without her kin.

She was broken and obsolete.

Complaints were new to her, harsh unjust  admonishments for the failing of fields crops and distempered stock far and wide. 

 Things went wrong, so many dreadful things and they wanted their money back and more, blaming her for all their ills, past and present, the baying folk of Kalkar that yelled her name in anger as she hid behind her door.

Veronika!

You've hexed us! You will regret it! 

But it is true. A loveless mother may as well remain cursed in bed, a cancer of faith and allow the sinews of anatomy to wain and wither and waste.

In time the baying stilled and in the sad bankruptcy of her inertia a truce of sorts is born. As long as she herself vanishes too, the mob will forget. Forget her and her erroneous magik. Forget she ever was and let her leave this world.

Forget she ever was,

As her beloved children had!

She prays. Beseeches that she wilts and joins her fading shadow in the oblivion of darkness that sits atop her house like a crow. A house of tears, her grief her new religion, weeping without end now that she is simply dead of spirit, eking out her hours towards an abyss of numbness.

And thus she subsisted like an insect for twelve long months, barely human, eating weeds and drinking rain, a wraith in her own days, haunting herself within the graveyard of her regrets.

Without her offspring she was but a worm nosing dead earth.

It was September when the knock on the door rang through the rooms like a foreign tongue. What could that sound incur? What was its purpose?

It came again, two knocks.

Could it be my lost beloveds? Could it?

The old crone's heart sprang back to life.

Two pies.

What's this? A charity from the folk at last? Some mercy for old Veronika?

She bit into them and grimaced. A gritty taste of soot, of cinders.

Two burnt hearts and black boiled eggs inside. 

Ech!

Ravenous pigs and scrawny hens no doubt.

Veronika returned to bed, sick to her stomach, mouthing.

They still blame me for their famine, after all this time!

It was true. Downward spiralled the settlement of Kalkar, it's denizens destitute and starving. The bleakest times had ensued twelve months prior and in their emaciated state, but one name held all blame for their calamity.

Veronika and whomever she had loved.

Veronika! 

It became a byword for their hate.

 Any kindness they once proffered had long dissipated with the ill winds of hunger and thirst ravaging the homes and the countryside. 

The beets and salsifies turned black. The water ran yellow. The maggots got fat and flies became the twitching curtains of despair in those desolate days.

And so not only was Veronika bereft with the teeming void left by her loveless spawn, but also her profound and crushing isolation from her fellows. 

How had it come to this?

Once a beloved mother and respected white witch.

Now a pariah, a stain, an outcast.

And then came the messages tied to dead lambs, crashing through her windows.

Be gone Witch!

Leave us Bitch!

Take Your Leave Sorceress or we will take your Life!

Out! Out! Accursed Vixen!

These missifs of loathing weighed heavily on Veronika, now the merest thin shadow of the once proud women she was.

Gone were the days of holding her children's hands.

Gone were the nods, the greetings and the gratitude of the burgh. 

Gone. Forever.

It was Walpurgis Night when the townsfolk delivered her one last message.

An enormous rotting, stinking pile of putrid turnips and rancid tats  barrowed by each resident still able and heaped in front of Veronika's front door until it reached the very top.

As a final act each of them pissed upon the pile and left.

When Veronkia opened her door the entire mound of putrefaction spilled into her kitchen like a King's tide of utter decay. It plunged over her and she was knocked cold and buried.

Some time later she awoke and with immense effort pushed aside the detritus and stood, her ragged clothes drenched with ooze and matter.

It was then she noticed an unusual form.

Unblemished like the rest, she picked it up and stared.

Yes.

It was a mandrake root.

The basis of being.

She could entice it to grow and together they could .....

Veronika felt the first pinches of excitement in years. They scratched at her stilled heart and relit it's furnace of old. 

She would care for the Mandrake as if it were her child.

And so she did and the man root increased.

With tender care and Witch's milk from her awakened breast, the tuber was invigorated and grew into a figure just as tall as her, a gnarled being of flesh and peel as black as charcoal as if it was cast from the spitting pits of Hell itself.

My Mandrake!

Veronika spoke softly to the effigy. She embraced and caressed and loved it like a Mother and a Wife, corm and woman intertwined until they countenanced as one dreadful tattered soul.

Prying eyes could see them too. Sickened citizens. The rumours spread among them of this new sacrilege.

A further scribble from Kalkar's folk came aflame through the window.

Go now Foul Harlot! Take thy Cunt-Root! Or you will both Burn! As your two children did for those pies! 

Veronika screamed! Shrieked! Wailed till her throat bled dry.

My bairns! My babies! My little ones! Afire! Aflame! Vanquished by the mob in my name! Baked in a pie! 

They shall pay, all of them! We shall suck the very life from their veins my love root and gather their begging faces in a brace!

This was the fulcrum of all her hatred, the pivot of the malignance, as it shifted towards her rise and the kanker of Kalkar spreading.

No more threats, no more dead lambs, no more names or flames. The atrocity was enough. They had murdered her innocent children.

We shall endure no more!

Come, take my hand and walk with me through this place, for it shall be no more.

Veronika and the Mandrake entered the village, where the folk were waiting with waving fork and fire, slowly encircling them.

As the crescendo of loathing tipped into killing, the sorceress and the root leapt upon the mob, whirling creatures of teeth and talon, rending, splitting, tearing and shredding every last denizen of the village that was once Kalkar.

When the maelstrom of death had abated and the spray of blood mist settled, the victorious Veronika and her Mandrake sat amid the innards of their foes and feasted on sweetmeats and thick hot crimson, its ferrous tang hanging heavy in the air, blistering like red dew on her hair.

The Mandrake lay down and bathed in the nourishing gore, whilst the triumphant crone collected the loosened face-skins of all those that had secretly murdered her son and daughter.

Hanging them from her waist-string she beckoned to her friend to stand.

Here shall you take root my love and become a vast sprawling tree, casting deep shadow upon all that was once Kalkar, here in the slicks of its smitten.

I curse it all in the name of my children and me!

Veronika!

And so the Mandrake fixed itself to the congealing spot and from it's livid bark begot limbs and churned ever upwards until at last it was gargantuan and upon each branch Veronika hung a villager's flaccid face, so that they might forever glimpse the place of their agonized slaughter. 

The witch looked up at them and smiled at her spoils. She gathered their hearts for the oven.

With her dripping sack, she turned and whispered gently.

I will make a victory pie for you my loves, just for me and you, my beautiful son and daughter!

Unhallow

In the dying sludge of All Hallows Eve, when the unruly graveyard beyond returned to sleep,

I took the begrudging midnight air one final time and thought of her, my dead sorceress,

Whence there it appeared, bled from her tortuous hell, that eerie crimson beast I had feared so much,

It grew groaning before me, the bloody corpulence I had come to dread,

Between the rending trees it coalesced from fiery death into red and hateful eyes that,

Were testament to my dark madness, my last damnation in the yawning mouth of the feast, as she cast me within the ink-black gridlock of her fatal final spell.

🩸

One Dark Hallow's Eve

It happened in October.

The worst Halloween weather in years. It was a raging storm, blowing a gale.

You couldn't stand up.

Trick or treating was out.

No way could could kids and parents have  braved that tempest.

It was shocking and after a bigger build up in the shops than last year, it put a dampener on the first All Hallows Eve of the brand new Nineteen Seventies.

Axel cursed under his Wolfman mask and cape.

Fuckin rain, bastard wind! It's fucked it right up!

He reached for another bottle of Watneys pale ale, having already downed a good four already and it had only just gone 6pm.

Shelley, or Shell as she liked to be called, was worried. The portents were there. Temper, beer, disappointment. It could very well lead to unpleasantness. Axel had used his hands often before now to make himself feel better about his shite life. His fists were known to Shell. He'd never touched their little girl, Sailor, but given enough ale and anger there was always a first time.

For fucks sake! No-ones coming. It's a waste of time! Why did I bother buying sweets for the little twats! That could have gone on the bookies! 

Axel fumed.

Another three beers, another step closer to ignition. 

Shell and Sailor, dressed for the occasion as A Witch and a devil, cowered in the TV room, staring at the bowls of monkey nuts and Quality Street for the kids that had promised to visit this far out on the edge of town, where the streetlights stopped. 

Sailor stared at the fury outside, the rain lashing the night like a prison guard. She glanced at her Dad, now drunk and stood in the open doorway cursing the darkness, cursing the deluge and cursing his shit family.

He turned, hands clenched.

I could be at the pub but no! Fuckin stay in you said, fuckin join in you said, it'll be fuckin fun with Sailor and me you said! Well it's a fuckin disaster and after a day graftin' at the scrapyard it's not what I fuckin expected! Do you hear me Shell! Do you fuckin hear me! 

The inevitable conflagration of alcohol and self-loathing exploded and a hail of the wolfman's merciless fists sent Shelley flying over the kidney table, flinging nuts, chocolates and her pointed hat in all directions.

Shell didn't move after that.

Glaring at Sailor pressed up against the corner, the drunk roared.

Pick that crap up you little cunt! Do it fuckin now!

His daughter, sensing a new and dreadful rise in her father's violence, did what she was told and putting down her plastic devil fork, placed the strewn confectionary back in the bowls.

At least someone fuckin does what I say in this piss-poor shithole of a house. 

Axel swayed and headed to the outside loo, belching as he went. The heavens crashed around him.

With any luck he'd break his neck slipping down the soaking steps or drink the Izal in the bog.

Sailor went to her Mum and kissed her head.

Oh Mum, Mum, he's got worse.

Shelley opened her puffed eyes and nodded.

I know honey pie. I know. Did he touch you?

No. But I think he will next time.

Mum and daughter sat together on the settee, comforting each other with tears and cuddles that dreadful night, Shelley's green eye-shadow mixing with the blood on her lips like a cauldron's broth. 

We've got to do something Mum. He's going to kill you at this rate!

Sailor was visibly fearful for her Mum's safety and clutched her bruised hands.

Shelley pecked her on the nose, smiled, her black-sticked lips pulped and pained. She got up for a rolly at the back door.

She stared out into the angry sky, roaring and tearing like a black bear, the trees flailing in the gusts like hungry ghosts.

It felt good on her tender face, the wild air, fresh and cold, blown in from beyond their world. From Heaven hopefully she mused.

Shell took one last drag and tip-toed down the stone steps into the wind-swept open rear. More of a long yard than a garden, it backed onto woodland owned by the Coal Board, where pines planted for Christmas stood shaking like widows eyeing the pit a half-mile away. 

Against the tumult, she carefully peered into the outdoor loo and saw wolfman slumped on the thing asleep, his cloak draped round the seat. He would be there all night with any luck, Armitage Shanked and her and Sailor might just get a glimpse of what it's like to feel safe again for a few wee hours.

Grabbing a bunch of kindling from the shed, she slowly made her way back through the howling air to the house, blew a kiss at Sailor and with a scrunched up Daily Express lit the open grate.

Damn, there's no coal. Can you get us a shovel full Sail but do it quietly and watch the weather. It's dreadful out there. 

Sure Mum.

Sailor eventually got to the coal store and gently nudged a bundle together.  The nuggets formed a dark peak on the hand shovel like an ancient pyramid. 

As the youngster stood up she heard a groan coming from the woodland edge. A sort of moan like a cow lowing in pain beneath the Christmas trees.

But there weren't any cows in the yard. 

It was sort of human noise.

A trick or treater maybe, messing with her?

The girl decided it wasn't. There was something real about it.

Sailor quickly and stealthily peeked into the privvy, but her Dad was still fast on, a slumbering beast among the spiders, thank God.

So who was it at the bottom, where the darkness thickened?

Another groan. Then another.

Sailor put the coal down, braced herself against the ferocious wind and slowly approached the sound.

Suddenly a withered hand reached out from the pitch-black shadow.

This was followed by a wild mass of thrashing grey hair straddling a face so weathered and uncanny that it made Sailor gasp.

It was joined by the rest of the body, a wiry, soil-splattered figure painfully crawling along the ground like a dying newt, it's bony fingers grasping the grey grate-ash chucked everywhere by her impatient Dad. 

It was a man before her.

A very old man. 

Naked save for drying leaves stuck to his face and various nooks of his leathery form.

Who are you?

Sailor whispered the question, obliterated by the storm, and considered just running off and yelling Mum all the way.

Something made her stay. 

She gawped at this secret being emerging from the Christmas trees. 

Are you Santa Claus. You're much too early if you are!

The old leafy man grunted and pointed to his mouth.

You're hungry! Is that it?

The figure nodded.

Sailor, being a kindly child, decided there and then, that he must be a local winter tramp down on his luck. 

Feeling sorry for him, she helped the elderly oddball gent up the yard through the tempestuous blasts towards the beckoning glow of the back window. 

As they stumbled past the outdoor loo she held her finger to her lips.

Shhhhhh!

The tramp figure mouthed the sound, as if it was his first ever encounter with the word.

Reaching the house, Sailor sat the man down at the kitchen table and went to fetch Mum. They were both drenched. 

The bare light bulb sputtered above, as if failing in the rage.

Oh my God! What the fudge Sail? Who the hell is he?

Shelley gawped at the emaciated character in front of her. He looked to be a hundred years old and was encrusted with wet earth and pine needles. His cheeks and hair seemed to have leaves and moss adhered to them, but they appeared to be actually sprouting from his flesh, as they did on other parts.

It must be a trick of the dodgy light. That's it. It our damn dumb bulb.

Shell comforted herself with this thought and heeded Sailor's efforts to put some food in front of the stranger.

Maybe it was a Halloween prank, a joke at their expense. Rent-a-ghost. 

Still, whatever it was, they fed him at least.

A pork pie, an apple, a handful of Quality Street, some bonfire toffee and a boiled egg.

He ate voraciously, devouring everything, including the eggshell. 

He downed the half-bottle of milk in noisy slurps and the white liquid ran from the mossy corners of his mouth into the foliage clinging to his chin. 

Tasty?

Tasty! he parroted. 

Then he emitted a loud burp and stared at the two females in the room before him, the bonny witch and the devil girl.

They thought they saw gratitude settling in his eyes but it may have been something else. 

Something greener.

At that moment and to the two girls' complete terror, Axel, rain-soaked and livid, lurched through the doorway, grasping the frame to steady himself. He was still wearing the Wolfman mask and cape, now dripping wet.

The stranger instinctively gripped the table.

Wolf-Axel glared with malice at the old man.

Who the fuck are you?

The loamy one twitched.

The semi-drunk husband took several unsteady steps towards his wife, pointing at the newcomer.

Who, who is that ancient old fucker?

I dunno love, we're just giving him something to eat! 

You fuckin what! It's Halloween, not fuckin' Christmas you dozy slag! That's my fuckin food you're giving him!

With uncanny aim and speed, Axel lunged and slapped Shelley hard across the face.

She winced, clutching her head and then guarded Sailor from anything that might follow.

Leave Mum alone Dad! Please!

Axel kicked Sailor squarely in the chest, knocking her and Shelley flying into the full maiden. 

Tangled up in clean clothes, they accidentally nudged the mirror, which fell off the wall and cracked, but not before they caught a glimpse of the woodland stranger's reflection, no longer the innocuous green man before them, but a smoking, seething, malevolent woodland goblin.

The girls gasped. They looked at Axel and then at the visitor, doubt fermenting in their eyes all the while.

Axel growled at them. 

Halloween Bitches!

The raging wolf then turned to face the unwelcome oddity, who had now risen and leapt up onto the table, standing fully in the remaining food.

What you looking at you fuckin maingy cunt, coming into my house, scoffin' my grub, stark bollock naked! I've seen more muscle in a pan o' piss! I'm going to fuckin kill ya!

The stranger leapt towards him.

Jumping too, Axel grabbed hold of the face of leaves, trying to rip them off, but they were stuck fast and confusingly part of the man's body. Momentarily flustered, the furious husband then hooked his fingers into the stranger's mouth and prized it wide open with all his beer-addled strength.

The strange man looked into Axel's burning eyes and then bit down hard, severing three of Axel's fingers at the knuckle from both hands. 

He began to chew.

And swallowed.

Tasty!

Axel held his devastated hands up to his face, blood spurting from the fresh stumps, spattering his werewolf mask. 

He screamed in agony, the pain unbearable.

The brutal guest grabbed hold of Axel's left hand and frenziedly sucked the open knuckles, slurping the hot grue like Blue Nun.

He smacked his lips, blood dribbling through the humus of his chin and pushed his reeling victim out of the back door and through the snicket to the front. 

Before Axel had chance to stagger into the street, the vicious woodlander found two rusting fondue forks thrown next to the bins alongside a cracked, cheese-encrusted bowl.

The sprite mercilessly rammed the forks into Axel's ears, straight through the eardrums and deep into the brain, pink cranial fluid streaming from the wounds down his cape.

Axel staggered into the street where passing monsters applauded his realistic costume. 

He fell to the ground frothing at the mouth.

The entity clicked it's tongue, swivelled, gnashed and sprinted back onto the kitchen, as the mother and daughter were just standing up. 

The thing roared before them like a possessed hedge ape, as if Hell had usurped the forest and spewed out this vile corruption. 

The creature suddenly clasped its member and pissed all over the room, hot steaming urine covering everything in a disgusting slick.

It stopped as abruptly and without any warning grabbed Shelley and Sailor, both utterly frozen with fear.

The stranger carried them off, shrieking and writhing under his long arms, out through the back door, down the yard and into the deep hopeless black of the coal pit pine forest, all the while the mad storm whirling round them like a demon that darkest of All Hallows Eves.

Nooooooooooo! Pleeeeaaaaaaase! 

They both screamed till their lungs burst.

And then they were gone.

Mother, daughter and the Green Man. 

Forever.

The Ghouls Are Coming, They're Already Here *

I watched them tear apart the girl with the posh voice in front of me on the train.

Dismembered, distributed and devoured. 

I was offered a bone, which, feigning interest, I slavvered all over.

There was no room for gentleness in this world full of ghouls. 

No room for normality, no space for what once had been.

Everything was meat.

They'd started with the dead. 

Then moved onto the living. Animals, then insects and finally people.

It had spread like a hurricane. Cannibalism. A hurricane of teeth. Insatiable. Starving. Hell-bent.

It was the collapse of nations that sparked the rot. Crops failed, livestock died, food as we knew it disappeared in the searing years that followed.

There appeared to have been no choice. Eat or be eaten. Eat your neighbour. Eat them all and move to the next house before they woke up.

That had been a decade ago and ghouls ruled the earth now. Nearly 99% saturation and meat was running out. Ghouls were starving again and in some unfortunate twist of fate they refused to feed on each other.

Once bitten you either fought or got fed on. Fighters became ghouls. The fed were dead.

It was a stark choice but living was living and ghouls were alive. 

But there was another way:

To stay human.

I, Officer Gottschalk, all normal male, had learned years ago to blend in, keep my eyes red, slobber in public and gnaw on the odd arm and hand that I was offered.

I worked for SAPIEN, the last defence against total ghouldom, protecting the only fragile human community left in Northern England.

It was hidden in the abandoned hangers of the derelict Fylingdales Radar Rocket Base, outside Whitby, in the remote North Yorkshire moors.

No-one needed moss and moor anymore. Certainly not ghouls. Mosses were useful for burning and heating the hangers in winter and when dried they made excellent bedding until the bugs moved in from the indoor mushroom fields, which provided the only diet for the humans. 

They were fungivores by necessity now. That's all they could grow and it could all collapse in a mass of blood and shite if a ghoul got in.

SAPIEN was on its knees in reality too. 

A rag-tag band of frightened operatives barely holding onto their sanity, never mind a clandestine society scattered precariously in rocket bases across the globe.

Worldwide, they lost a base to the ghouls about once a day.

Time, and people, were running out.

It was a shit-show of meat and desperation and the monsters were winning.

My own particular job in all this was off-world. Sort of.

That is, it was my role and only mine, to stop the ghouls getting near the single rocket located in the North, the Fylingdales spaceship, snug in its silo,  the so-called Bramstar in honour of Whitby's famous literary son from centuries ago.

The Bramstar was one of hundreds of rocket ships strewn around the planet in the derelict bases, where the last bastion of humanity was clinging on in the hope of passage to either the Moon or Mars, where people had colonised a hundred years earlier before the rout of the ghouls.

It was the only dream of the remnants.

The sole vision of salvation which forced them to go on each and every hopeless day in the hangars.

The hope of the stars. 

Only the MoD minefield round Fylingdales kept the monsters out. That and the remoteness of this god forsaken enclave in the desolate hills, where Dracula once roamed in the fairy tales of old.

But the fairy tale of fiends was becoming real. 

The defenses were weakening as the ghouls grew smarter. In their ravenous state they spread out from the towns and cities and the cannibals of old Whitby were sniffing at the fencing round Fylingdales.

They could smell blood. 

Excellent blood.

I knew it wouldn't be long before a few wily creatures would find a path through the mines to the hidden cache of people shivering in the engine sheds.

I rang Cape Kennedy, the Stateside co-ordinating HQ for all world launches.

They're getting closer. They're nearly here. We need to fucking launch!

I was exasperated. 

And scared.

A SAPIEN plan has been formalized Gottsshalk. We all launch Midnight tomorrow, Sunday. Just 24 hours! Get ready and for God's sake, Hang on!

Easy for you to say. I can see the bastards climbing the wires in the distance. Only the old mines will stop them. Let's hope they still work!

I signed off and spread the word. 

Take the bare minimum, get to the big silo and prepare for a night launch in 24 short hours!

Outside on the moors the screaming and gnashing of the crazed ghouls could be heard as they navigated the redundant minefield. 

Fetid bodies exploded, their mushing torsos leaving a way through the wasteland to the base in the distance.

The silo clock ticked.

Time seemed to be trapped in sludge but gradually midnight approached.

I gave the order to board. 

The pilots went first, straight to the top, the people then filed in and sat staring at the circle of stars above through the silo.

I had to wait to check the engines were safe and alight last of all.

With the coast clear I entered my security booth to guard the precious rocket fuel, where I sat, pistol in hand.

The flight of the Bramstar went smoothly and like a celestial train we made good time to the Moon Base colony, a vast settlement of around ten million souls.

As the rocket fired it's retros to land, there was a knock on my sealed door.

Thinking it was the pilot come to thank me for guarding the tanks, I opened up. 

A drooling beast fell through the hatch straight on to me, growling and snapping. 

How the fuck!

I had no idea how this ghoul had breached my security but there was no time to waste. It was determined to consume me there and then. 

I fired my gun but not before the bastard fiend bit deep into my arm.

Damn! You fucking freak!

Blood seeped from my forearm but the creature fared worse. 

I had shot it straight through its bestial brain. 

Pushing open the outer door I fell out clutching my wound. The dead beast dropped out next to me with a wet thud.

It was then I heard the screaming.

Screaming like I'd never experienced, as if an entire town was being torn apart. 

And indeed it was.

With total horror I stared within the giant dome of the lunar base and witnessed the complete carnage inside.

A band of ghouls were working there way through the crowds who had gathered at the space port. 

Relatives, friends, curious folk. Thousands of them. 

The monsters were devouring the vanguard, eating some entirely and wounding others to swell their hideous number. 

The effect of the bite was almost instantaneous, taking just a few minutes.

As I stood, my mouth agape, at the unfolding bloodbath in the dome, it's glass and steel skin blathered with hot fresh bubbling crimson, I heard a snarling sound right where I was stood.

It was only when I started sprinting towards to  humans in the base that I realized that I too was now a gnashing, ravenous ghoul, whose only thought was to maim and devour.

It was the last human thought I ever had.

* Title inspired by Andy Milligan's film

The Plume

 Holding hands, the brother and sister, within the darkening Priory grounds, they first sensed the plume as they were dressing.

It arrived softly, it's ashen fingers spidering their still naked parts, caressing like a tender shroud, a mellifluous veil.

But then it hardened, the smoke gripped their limbs and widening welts forced open their skin, large angry pustules oozing thick red and black matter.

They both screamed but the dense woodland on the estate's edge was too remote for anyone else to hear, their illicit tryst secret from all but they.

Their time was up. No homilies. Just nothing.

Only the evil made it through the morning, immune to the toxic nimbus of the plume.

They shambled and ran towards it's source in the far plains beyond the hills, chattering like hyenas in the grass.

Thousands, millions, the wicked ones wandered across the spurs until at last the plains came clear before them, a limitless flatland of decaying flora, the cacti weeping blood as they withered.

Here the plume was gargantuan.

An endless tower of necrosis besieging the sky and defiling the sun, who's sacred beams faltered as would cherubs in Hell.

The terrible assembly gathered and looked on.

They fell to their knees and bowed without stopping, their necks fracturing in the mad devotion for their god.

Before them lay a corpse.

A carcass.

A body of such enormity on its side, as if a range of hills erupted from the earth, their dark crimson bluffs of steaming putrescence decaying before their eyes.

The scarlet giant was rotting. 

It's dereliction the plume of past malignancies burgeoning in the heavens above the massed sinners.

They too began to decompose, laughing as they readied for entry into Hades, the homeland of the twisted and the blood-soaked dream they'd longed for all their baleful lives.

For here was their deity reducing and rendered.

It's plume had brought them. 

Surely this was their passage, the glorious transit of the damned and villainous.

But it was not.

For Death itself had intervened. No End of Days, no darkest rapture.

The Earth was dying and so it's idols.

This was the last orbit, the globe full ceasing. 

This was it's final afternoon.

It's requiem. It's pall.

And thus, beneath the poisoned squall, before the giggling hordes lay prone the well-spring of lies, the killing joke, the Lord of Flies.

His left eye open,

Here was the Beast.

The Fallen One.

Here was Lucifer.

And like everyone else, he was dead. 

The Kid's Got Talent

The ad popped up on screen.

He saw it and rubbing his smiling face button he smiled.

Horrors in Your Home Inc. We Build Horror Locations in Your House! Film Sets, Props, Icons, Modern and Classic. Testimonials available. Visit our site. It's Beastly!

He was intrigued. 

Things had been really tedious for some years.

This just might liven things up a bit.

For his guests. 

If he played his cards right it could be a real hoot for horror movie buffs like they all were.

So best get organized.

It was nearly October 31st.

He sat down at his laptop and having fun, he checked everything he wanted on the 'Horrors' drop down menu from flicks old and new with a few add-ons and party food chucked in:

A pet cemetery. One grave open. Old Gravedigger needed.

An attic full of snuff videos. One running and screening with terrified projectionist.

A bedroom window teeming with flies. Optional tormented priest requested.

A steaming wall in the cellar. A half-mad actress required to repeatedly scream 'these are the Gates of Hell'.

A Bates Motel neon sign outside. Optional flickering and knife-wielding Son dressed as Mother maniac requested.

A dark office with a metal filing cabinet. Bespoke files and Panicked Snoop required.

All to happen on Halloween. 9pm.

The watershed! He smiled at that!

The full order was placed and after paying the thousand dollars he sat back feeling great and began to draw a sketch of a very hairy face. It was one of a hundred he'd already done that week.

The kids got talent! 

He kept saying it over and over in a New York accent and chuckled before cooking up a rabbit.

Next he sent out invites to his five friends.

It was going to be legendary.

Halloween came and a team from Horrors in the Home Inc. Turned up in good time to get everything ready as per the customer's specific requirements. For a relatively new business it was the biggest Halloween job they'd got so wanted to pull out all the stops for their top customer.

All was set. The actors were all in place throughout the house and garden. It was quarter to nine.

The guests could be seen walking past the house and up the drive. Five of them all wearing masks and gloves. Various other Halloween truck or treaters loped by and shouted their admiration for the costumes.

The five sort of trundled through the door and gathered in the front room.

They nodded at the house owner and all of them looked through the window.

The was a full moon.

The Horrors in Your Home supervisor came into the room and stopped dead. The guests looked so damn real with their fur and talons. Only the customer wasn't in costume.

You've done a great job pal. Are all the actors in position? 

Yes. Just as you wanted. 

Brilliant.

The customer gave each of his five guests a location card for each 'house horror' where they were to visit. Basement, attic, garden etc.

The supervisor thought that was a neat idea and made a mental note to produce cards himself.

OK.

OK.

Hey, pal. You ever see the transformation scene in the Howling?

Er, yeah, sure. It's a classic. Even on a par with the one in American Werewolf in London.

One of the guests grunted.

Well, pal. I thought you might like to see it again.

Er, what?

Yeah, here, live. Just for you.

Er, OK.

The supervisor readied himself for what he thought was going to be an epic Halloween prank and shoved his hands in his pockets.

The customer smiled and stared at the full moon outside.

Immediately he began to change. His bones started to snap and crack and his body grew thick fur all over. His face elongated into a snout and his hands and feet developed massive razor-sharp claws.

The supervisor was in shock. He'd never seen anything so damn realistic in his life and automatically began to wonder how much this guy would want to join his company.

What did you think of that pal?

The customer, on all fours, stared at the supervisor, bared his huge fangs and snarled.

Amazing! So classic! How did you do it? With squibs and rubbers?

Not really. You see it was real. I really am a werewolf!

Get away! C'mon Sir, show me how it was done.

Oh, I'll show you alright!

At this, the enormous werewolf growled and leapt onto the hapless supervisor, whereupon he ripped him to shreds and devoured all his torn limbs in several large greedy gulps.

The rest of the party were all excited now and began frothing at the mouth. 

Happy Halloween guests! Come and meet me in my special office once you're done.

The customer nodded to his five. They each loped to their set location from where terrible screams could be heard, followed by wet loud tearing and violent munching.

The customer crawled stealthily to his own set, which held a nostalgic charm for him all of its own. It was from his favourite scene in his best movie and one in which he felt he'd excelled in every way. Even the Doc had thought so too.

Arriving in the moon-lit office set up just as he's specified, he glimpsed the actress rifling through the top files in the cabinet. Just as he'd instructed. He was very impressed.

As the actress pulled out the first folder and studied it, the customer placed his huge furred paw on the cabinet top and began to tap his dreadful claws, just as he'd done in his star turn.

Recognize me young lady?

The actress was startled by just how genuine the client's wolf suit was. 

She smiled.

Look at the file.

She stared at the name. Edward Quist. It seemed familiar and then she saw it. The name of the film.

The Howling! 

Ah, I see you know who I am.

Fabulous costume Sir!

Oh but it's not. Not a costume. Read the other film names out. On the other files.

An American Werewolf in London.

A huge wolf crept forward and grimaced, it's face fur matted with gore.

Werewolf of London.

An older wolf came out of the shadows and grinned, whilst still chewing sinews.

The Curse of the Werewolf.

A muscular beast stood up growling, a human arm in its paw.

The Legend of the Werewolf.

A young werewolf snarled, wiping the grue from it's mouth. 

The Wolf Man.

Slowly an enormous creature stepped out from behind the door and bared his formidable and dripping red teeth.

The rest of the wolves bowed.

You go first Lowrence.

No, please Eddie. It's your show. I Insist.

Well, thank you.

The client reared up in front of the now petrified actress and clawed her to pieces.

When he'd finished eating he offered the leftovers to his applauding guests.

David Kessler raised his talons.

The kids got talent!

They all laughed heartily and from the house could be heard a pack of wolves howling excitedly as the moon drifted in and out of crimson clouds.

It was Halloween.

No-one batted an eyelid.

The Doctor of Tears

Avenham Harris was a doctor of the eye.

An eminent oculist of the highest standing, a giant among the ophthalmologists peering into the pupils of the Capital.

A specialist of nasolacrinal systems and their hydrology, he was the foremost expert in diagnosing and treating conditions and predicaments of what the layman would call 

.... the tear ducts.

To his patients he was a god, a nimble-fingered olympian who could rid them of every conceivable agonising blockage and excruciating encrustation. 

His waiting list was legendary and King Edward himself had sought the doctor's solace with a regular royal drain.

This regal approval and his general aloofness made Harris's peers both respectful and resentful in equal measure.

Professionally Harris was a known quantity, known somewhat cruelly as the Ductor, but his private life was another matter entirely.

It was just that, entirely private and his colleagues along that most prestigious of medical postcodes had no idea as to what he did behind those sumptuous mahogany doors of his enviable address of No.1 Harley Street.

What they did know was that tragedy had struck Avenham Harris some years earlier. 1898 to be exact when, taking the air together, his own beloved wife Florentine had died suddenly and terribly one dreadful Autumn Sunday, when a brewer's drey ran amok in Knightsbridge brutally robbing her of her tender life and Avenham Harris's one true love. She had died in his arms, her skull crushed and her vision gone. Her final bleeding tears seering his mind shut as they fell down his cheek into his tortured mouth.

Since the accident Dr. Harris had withdrawn completely from the soirees and balls of  London Society Florentine had enjoyed so much and was never seen again outside of the walls of his pre-eminent practise. He chose to work industriously and grieve alone becoming a mere misted shadow of his former self.

His patients respectfully kept quiet about his deceased wife, their English reserve protecting them from any embarrassing discourse with the good doctor. Besides, he was far too diligent an oculist to veer from medical matters, so much so that he focused ever more on the hydrological cycle of the eye. The grainy sleep, the sludgy rheum, the crystalline discharge, the subtle fluids. 

But above all of these issues he coveted a singular secretion more than any other, namely, hemolacria, the uniquely rare tears of blood, the tears his darling wife Florentine had wept as she lay fatally wounded in his hands.

To Avenham Harris these were sacred tears, the very essence of grief and a beautiful life cut profoundly short. They were the red veils of Heaven and the iron footsteps of his Wife's path and the very waymarks to her grieving soul.

His too. 

His and her salvation lay in those crimson waters and he would do anything in his power to re-capture that terrible euphoria of tasting Florentine's tears of blood.

As he assiduously collected the watery deposits of his many patients in meticulously labelled glass phials, a rumour spread among them and eventually the medical circle too, that the esteemed Avenham Harris was displaying signs of odd behaviour and in the vernacular of the time, losing his marbles. 

Little did they know that the eye specialist had indeed developed strange occupations and the strangest of all was the body in his cellar.

The body of his dead wife Florentine.

Having duped the funeral director with a sack of sand in the coffin, Harris had secretly procured her corpse from the morgue almost immediately after the accident and hidden it deep below his practice in the Victorian basements. 

In God's name to what end his curious peers might enquire should they have known, but the answer would not have been pleasant for them to hear or indeed envisage, for Dr. Harris had been collecting Florentine's red tears ever since she had passed in his arms that fateful day in Knightsbridge. After tasting this holiest of waters, his compulsion began at the scene itself and taking a small empty bottle he had in his jacket he decanted his first divine volume from Florentine's tear ducts, which he consumed that evening sat by the fireside in her favourite seat and recited her most beloved prayer.

Inevitably as decomposition set in, the Doctor's clandestine milking began to suffer as the pipes and runnels of his Wife's broken skull started to harden and dessicate. Since he drank the fluid the same day, in the evening by the hearth, his supply was empty and he felt the first pangs of a new sorrow and the physical strictures of withdrawal from his necessary libation.

His lachryphagia was unquenchable.

Harris was beside himself with anguish and torment, his soul aching for continued reunion with his darling Florentine and his palette screaming for its ferrous rheumy nightcap.

With no expense spared the once-esteemed medic commissioned the services of restoration men to drain the tears of the mortuary's fresh incumbents, the more violent the end the better.

Chatter abounded about the wild look in the Doctor's eyes these days, his awkward siphoning of his patients' weeping as he explained, cruelly, that there was nothing he could do save store a sample for some future research.

When the red vineyard of the district's dead did nothing for his compulsion, Avenham Harris turned to a more select and altogether more dangerous source, those shadowy figures who for a price procure rare and nefarious relics for the curiously wealthy of the Capital, the rich collectors of the arcane who ponder the Pit behind varnished desks.

Bring me the tears of a Stigmata.

Harris handed over the bag of cash and the bargain was set late one night in the darkness of his porch.

He waited and waited until at last the nocturnal purveyor knocked and gave the twitching Doctor a clear receptacle containing purportedly the devout grue from a believer's pious puncta.

Avenham Harris waved the man away and shambled into his unkempt parlour, the glass phial quivering in his hand. 

He devoured it's contents.

And felt nothing.

In pain, both physical and of the spiritual mind, he retreated to the cellars and begged his decaying love for some comfort, some sacrifice, some tears.

In that darkness, the gut of the building's reeking foundation, the assailed medic gave in to his distemper and fierce slaps of hopelessness punished his flailing mind.

I am indeed in Hell's dominion and I fear I am losing you Florentine my darling.

He wept and as his own sorrowful drops mixed with the entropy of his beloved his thoughts turned to darker regions still.

Yes.

If not there in Heaven then here.

But we will need a harbinger, a confluence, a carrier of souls.

That's it.

Once more the now maddening Doctor reached out to the dealer of relics and made a request of such enormity, such danger that the sum of a thousand pounds was required forthwith.

The following night the familiar knock and another decanter transfered.

I do not wish to see you again my good man.

Nor I Doctor. I shall be leaving London this very night. It's not safe here anymore after getting you .... That!

The manic Harris staggered to his wife, unwittingly knocking over an oil lamp, which set the ancient timbers alight. 

Oblivious to anything else, Harris tipped some of the dark bubbling liquid onto Florentine's still lips and then frantically into his own.

He slumped down by the gurney, where his spirit finally collapsed and he thought he glimpsed the rising flames of their dreadful destination.

Look Florentine, look, the fires! It's worked!

Together! 

We shall be in Hell together forever!

It's marvellous! Look! 

I gave him everything I owned, everything so we could drink the rarest of all the world's wept issues my darling, yes, the damnably bloody tears of .... 

Satan himself!

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Monsters Brawl

There were strict rules around monster brawls.

No mixed monsters.

Stick to your own.

Go up the table.

Everyone knew it.

Everyone stuck to it.

Everyone except Hearse.

Hearse was the killer king werewolf, the best of his beastly kind. The Topper most dog.

He was bored with moon-kind and thirsty for blood that wasn't wolf. 

What he craved was vintage vampire.

Victorian kingpin vampire blood.

God how he dreamt of it's iron theft, the vineyard of its myriad victims. It must taste like layer cake. A tart of bites. Oh God, Yes!

Hearse was obsessed but the monster code was clear. No mixed monster fights. No exceptions. 

Well fuck the rulebook! Gentlemen be damned!

He'd get some top vamp blood no matter what. He had to. Or he'd go insane with vein lust.

As luck would have it however, he overheard something that very night.

Something interesting. Something seductively juicy.

It was in the tavern, the Old Neck, where he was unknown to the mirror-shy clientele.

Dressed in a disguise of cloak and wide hat, Hearse sat by himself in the corner guarding his stout. It was a non-moon night so he could concentrate and enjoy himself.

His lupine ears pricked up.

"You 'eared about King Roma? He's been stood up again. No brawl means he loses pints.  It's that old fucker Globin who bailed. Roma's livid. He's ready to take on any other sucker to keep the crown. The gauntlet's been thrown! They've just to leave word with the landlady."

"There'll be bloody hell to pay for anyone who takes Roma on!"

"You're not fuckin' kiddin' mate!"

At this the two rickety old vamps finished their 'tomato juice' and sidled off into the depths of London's teeming night.

Hearse had heard everything. 

His sensitive features twitched with excitement and a nasty ruse formed in his furred brain.

Tightening up his black cloak and tipping his hat, Hearse went to the bar and taking a quill, he hurriedly scribbled a note.

It said:

Butchers Wharf.

Midnight tomorrow.

A contender.

Grunting, his face shadowed, he whispered.

Give this to Roma.

With a flourish Hearse left the Old Neck and threw the hated garb in the brazier outside the door, the burning wooden crucifixes the sign this was vampire turf.

Fuckin' suckers! Can't fuckin' stand 'em, but by God do I wanna drink their guts! And Roma, old King Brawler himself will do very nicely thank you!"

Hearse chuckled like a big dog and sloped off to his quarters behind the Elephant graveyard on the edge of town, where he lived with a girl ghoul called Carrion, who kept the place clean. She was company too on moonless days. Werewolves had a hard time making friends. He'd never eat Carrion either. She'd taste like shite.

But Hearse hadn't been alone in his curiosity in the Old Neck that night.

Another stranger was watching at the bar, minding his own business in the gloom of a broken gaslamp.

He'd seen Hearse writing his note. He'd read it's contents. He'd memorised them.

He would be there too. Butcher's Wharfe. 

Kronack. The Beast Hunter. The Monster Killer. Doing God's work and ridding the world of heathen devils for good.

Yes, he'd be there and kill two birds with one stone!

The following evening was a miserable slur of rain and smog from the Capital's chimneys. 

If monsters don't kill Londoners, the factories will, mused Hearse as he quickly made his way to the station, where the milk train would deliver him onto Butcher's Wharfe by the sickly Thames.

He had to hurry to board before the moon was full to its brim. He mustn't turn yet. 

He took a cheap seat and drew the window blind. Hunkering down, Hearse focused on saving his change until the last crucial minute on the Wharfe.

A carriage in front sat King Roma, intrigued by the challenge left at the bar and savouring the rising tide of fury swirling round his stolen blood. His finger bones cracked like pottery as his reverie crescendoed in a dream of welling gore.

In the car behind sat Kronack, his felt hat low over his scarred face, the gas declined to shadow. On his lap lay the weapons of his trade, his blessed spear and blade, the arsenal with which he would smite the two fell kings and deny them their spattered crowns.

As the Milk train rattled like a crate of blood, the enormous smoking temples of industry towered by the river's banks, their incessant spew of sulphurous plumes a vision of man's own monstrousness. From the innards of these factories puked soups of wastes and arsenics straight into the bubbling Thames, now but a thick slow eddy of death, as it crawled to the desperate sea.

As if being shuttled through Hades itself, the trio of strangers peeked behind the blinds to glimpse this stygian stream, oblivious to the fate that awaited them on the abandoned Butcher's Wharfe.

As the locomotive slowed it's steaming heart to stop, the conductor roared down the mostly empty string of carriages,

Butchers! Next stop Butchers!

The three disembarked into the Wharf's insipid darkness, each disappearing behind stacks of mouldy crates and rusting derricks.

From the farthest carriage a fourth alighted too, a tall, hooded and veiled woman wrapped in a long sable velvet cloak. 

She too slid into the blackness of the jetty and as she moved her hood writhed.

As midnight approached, Roma flexed his pallid digits and ran his ancient acrid tongue across his fangs.

He hissed in anticipation of a skirmish with his kind, a ruckus to keep his bloody crown, King Roma, Vampire Brawler. 

The pounding of twelve strikes echoed along the dying Thames from Big Ben up river and reverberated round the derelict docks like a death-knell.

It was time.

Time to step out onto the cobbled Wharf.

Roma strode into the moonlight, his terrible pulse beating deliciously quick.

He heard the loud growl first and then, as his challenger emerged, his dessicated heart sank. 

Snarling viciously at the bright moon, a hateful creature of legend crawled onto the stonework.  

Not a vampire at all but a werewolf. 

A wolfman of enormous proportions.

Hearse. The King Wolf warrior himself!

A mixed monster brawl!

Vampire verses Werewolf!

Sacrilegious!

Mutinous!

Roma was appalled, but quickly realized he had to fight in order to save face. And to survive!

Baring his terrifying canines, Roma took off his cape and shirt, hunched and readied for the blooding.

As the grimacing Kings circled each other, sizing strength and power, a third figure entered the glowing stage.

Greetings Creatures of the Night!

It is I, the Monster Killer, here to vanquish you both to Hell once and for all!

Roma purred. Another one!

Kronach! You human scum! It is you who will perish this night and join my legion of the vampiric dead!

Hearse roared too.

Kronack! Roma! It matters not how many there are! You shall all end up between my jaws and believe me when I say, I'm hungry!

The three mortal enemies faced each other.

An iota of time to bolster themselves before striking.

It would be the mother of brawls.

Roma lunged first, his long craven fingernails scraping Kronach's forehead, dark hot blood flinging across the flaking capstans.

The Killer winced, then pounced, his sabre slicing off the dark King's pointed ear and quivering cheek. It all fell into Hearse's open palm, who devoured it ravenously, sputum drooling as he smiled, before leaping into the fray, furiously raking the vampire's leathery back with massive razor-sharp talons. 

The blood King wailed and unleashed himself fully, hurtling through the gore-fogged air, landing on Hearse's shoulders, where he bit deep and hard into the werewolf's pulsing neck. 

The warrior wolf howled as the tensile fangs entered its flesh and began to feed. Hearse reached back and grabbed onto Roma's oily head with his gargantuan paws. Both tensed in a rictus of power.

Kronach seized the moment and expanding his telescoping spear of silver, ran full pelt at both beasts and pushed it's brutal tip first through Hearse and then through Roma, the long sharp shaft impaling both and exiting out of the other side.

The fiends reeled and shrieked in agony as they writhed on the blessed lance pinning them together, it's caustic sacristy dissolving their demonic flesh.

Kronach bellowed in triumph as his quarry visibly wilted upon his sacred weapon and he flicked bottled holy water across their hissing forms.

It was at this moment that the fourth passenger from the train glided past the dreadful fray, the mysterious hidden woman.

Who goes there! 

Kronach brandished his fearful sword.

Show yourself!

.... Now!

The being halted and exiting the wharfe's shadows, seemingly floated into the moonlit ring, where she stopped dead.

Reveal yourself woman! Believe me, you are in the wrong place! 

Kronach barked as the two flailing monsters, gnashing and spitting behind his back, freed themselves from the cursed pole and held it aloft.

Unperturbed, the secretive lady slowly pulled down her undulating hood and gently removed her veil.

It was then that the Monster Killer regretted ever asking, for he at once recognized her vile and fatal face. 

Holy Mother of God! 

Medusa! 

But how? You were imprisoned in the British Victorian Museum's store of ancient myths.

The question froze on Kronach's lips, his last ever thought, as his spear slid through his gut just as his body petrified on the spot completely. 

Hearse and Roma, gnashing their hideous teeth, leapt loping madly towards the woman creature, hell-bent on the interloper's cruel demise. 

As quickly as they crept they both choked. Their gutteral snarls stuck fast in their throats like the rest of their stiffening frames.

They turned entirely to stone at Medusa's feet, the monsters' drool setting solid as it fell.

The Gorgon looked upon her impromptu work dispassionately and pulling up her hood and veil returned on her passage of escape across the dark wharves towards the steamer, moored in the far distance, bound for her ancient homeland of Greece.

In the morning the few sleepy vagrants who frequented the old Butcher's dockland were amazed and frightened in equal measure by the sight of the new statue stood on the cobbled yard by the river.

A hateful but clever statue group, apparently hewn overnight in moonlight from solid stone, depicting a terrible epic battle between vampire, werewolf and hunter. 

A monsters brawl.

The Graveyard of the Rabbits

Breda had always been attuned to the land. 

It felt safe, the vigour of the loam, the crops' regiment, the hedgerow theatre.  It all made sense to her, a salve in the strictures of a limited life.

Breda was the only daughter of the minister. Her days were the calculus of mass and mission, assisting her father and mother in their service to the Lord. They were important people in the tight congregation of Hamfleet, a rural parish on the edge of the marshes.

Her own calling was to nature, to the natural world, the churn of the seasons and the energy stored like blood in the ancient soils around her.

Breda, when excused, would wander the holloways and hundreds outside their Hamfleet, exploring the fauna and wildlife she encountered, marking their identities in her notebook with pen and pencil, pondering the sorcery of science.

She would gain their measure, fathom their habits and record her rendezvous's meticulously on paper. 

It was on such a day that Breda came across an abandoned church on a well-hidden hill and certainly not one she had visited before.

It was derelict, a broken ruin of the divine, no longer serving it's followers, whoever they were. 

No discernible trace of the face of its religion could be found and Breda, taking notes and sketches, promised to ask her parents of this lonely chapel on the mound.

Even the gravestones were weathered and withered away, their incumbents remaining as invisible as the thoughts they were buried with, the clandestine boxed voices in the tilth of the hillside.

Yet, activity there was among these remains.

Small bones, and some larger, erupted from the yard, resting atop fine mounds of earth dug up by unseen hands.

Mixed within the humanity were animal skulls and fur, natural clues as to the new parishioners, the resident warren of grave rabbits, unearthing the interred bit by skeletal bit.

Knuckles, tarsels, eardrums and femur heads were scattered around the disturbed skirt of the chapel like the grim residue of some great battle in the hoary past.

These were the rudiments of the church- goers, dead and rising by the labours of springtails, their beliefs a mystery but death came regardless.

The rabbits were bring them forth to the fallow surface to see in a new day.

Breda was mesmerised by the chiaroscuro of rodents burrowing among the wrecks of the faithful like clergy tending it's flock.

Here was a bone-strewn interface, a bleached pane through which the murk of human existence could be peeked, the very gyroscope of creed and damnation before her.

She sat on an outcrop of freshly dug silt and skeletal remains. The mound sank ever so slightly and she felt oddly comfortable in it. 

Sunning her face she placed her palms on the old grass and felt something hard and brittle.

It was a rabbit's skull, perfectly intact and bleached china-white by the rays of the ever-watchful orb.

She held the skull in front of her face. 

It's deep sockets enthralled her, it's porcelain precision a wonder to behold. 

Somewhere in that hidden bowl behind had nestled a wild brain, which knew only the faith of the field, the credo of the graves.

She envied the rabbit's earthed conviction and imagined life in the communal warren, those furred souls romping among the human dead. Psychopomps in the burrows.

Breda lay back fully, sensed Hamfleet and her parents misting over and felt the soft till shifting beneath her. The friable grains of sacred soil rose and she slept contentedly in the warmth of the waning afternoon.

As the day fogged into evening the denizens of the graveyard gathered around the sleeping girl and watched as her form fell deeper into the ground like an egg cracked into flour.

They were excited, the rabbits. 

They burrowed and tunnelled and by nightfall Breda was gone, lost in the shallows among the old faithful ones.

Nothing remained of the girl.

Nothing at all until by turns, the busy husbandry of tooth and claw ejected the first of her bones from the secret ossuary beneath the church.

Her pallid skull, clean as alabaster in the moon's ancient glow, licked and caressed by the yard's residents, now sat around it in a circle chattering amongst themselves.

Next came her notebook, with sketches of death, which they stared at with great interest.

They waited and waited patiently for the rest to rise and join them.