The weather was fine but cold that April, the snowy sunlight washing over the new homes and the neighbouring wood like soft bandages.
The estate, The Margins, was built on and named after the site of an old secretive Victorian reform school and it's vast grounds. A thick back wall, massive brick fireplace and tall chimney from the kitchen had been saved by the architects in the name of local heritage and left standing near to their house, where a blue plaque was erected.
It explained that after a hundred years of educating the local poor's wayward girls, the last Headmaster had mysteriously disappeared and the school had then been abandoned. Local legend speaks of it being haunted by lost residents desirous of the Head.
Slug, an unpleasant nickname given her by her Dad, liked that old lonely wall and huge deep fireplace and dreamt of lighting a fire in it one night to watch the shadows run off.
She loved the new swing in the garden too and went back and forth on it as much as she could.
Somehow she could see further than she ever could and she liked that, a sunlit future over the cloudy horizon, beyond the town cemetery, beyond the dead, old and fresh alike, who lay in rows like loaves of bread.
She was four years old, going on five and reception class was just one summer away. She often wondered if the other children would like her. The twin who was left behind.
It would be good to be in school and not listen to the arguments Dad had with Mum when he came home for lunch sometimes. It had got so much worse after her twin brother had died. They couldn't live in the old house anymore so moved.
Even at the top of the new garden, where the woods whispered rumours through the leaves, she could hear Dad's angry voice booming at her Mum.
The new house was no different to the last, which made Slug sad and she wished more than anything she could change things and make her little brother come back and make her Dad be kind to Mum all of the time and not just a tiny bit of it on Valentine's day or her Birthday.
Love was in hiding here. They were a dead family really. Alive, but not. All stillborn.
Slug paced around the fence like a zoo cat, her hands stuffed in her jeans' pockets. She stared up at the old school chimney. Jackdaws were hopping on the rim, eyeing up the darkness within and cackling like witches sharing today's joke.
Slug often wondered what the old Victorian school had been like. She guessed it was a strict, sad and serious place, where she'd have to keep her nose clean and be wary at all times. That was OK. She knew how to do that, to stay in the deep shadows.
Their lawn had been freshly laid when the house was finished. All the lawns on The Margins were freshly done. All the homes were new. They'd been built on the old vacant school grounds on the edge of town to give more young families somewhere to put down roots firmly into the hard-working, God-fearing Victorian earth beneath them, where the wayward girls had been roundly civilised and readied for Heaven.
Slug's Dad often said he worked himself to the bone to pay for the house and it would be a lot of hard graft, on his part, to keep up with the mortgage. As long as he kept his head down at work and they were nice to him at home, then everyone would sleep at night.
Slug knew how to keep her head down. She also knew she'd entered the world at a massive cost. Her brother's mortgage. It had made her a quiet, morose little girl, who seldom spoke, except to her Mum, whom she loved dearly and drank sweet cocoa with her and under a sheet, lit by torches, they whispered how much they loved each other and would do forever.
The Margins housing project was about two thirds complete. One hundred new homes. A team of excavators and JCBs were busily digging up plots on the far side, but you couldn't see them from Slug's house near the woods.
Slug's family were the first to move in by a mile. Her Dad had greased someone's palm and for a long time they were the only ones on the new estate of one hundred detached dwellings.
The showhome at the other end had an agent stop by now and then to show prospective buyers round, but generally the family were alone in a vast field of empty rooms.
A tiny bit of the time her family got on, but usually from teatime onwards it was hell. Slug's Dad had a temper, a really bad one.
Mum protected Slug but she took all the blows. Dad's outbursts were getting much worse and Mum now lived in constant fear he was going to beat her to death in front of Slug. The two of them prayed so hard on their hands and knees the new start would change him soon, but God must have been kidnapped that Spring.
Slug waited for Dad to leave for work before she stirred. It was strange to be the only ones on the estate. With Mum at home, Slug spent hours on her own, either in her room watching fantasy movies or now it was warmer she'd go in the garden. It was bliss whilst her Dad was at work doing his 'super stressful' job, as he always shouted. Her Mum made absolutely sure that nothing was out of place in the house for when he got home and his tea was always on the table.
On bad days little Slug imagined they were all ghosts from the Margins, the old Victorian school their home was built on; that they actually haunted their own lives and that the devil stopped by every day to hang up his coat and sit down for tea.
On a good day Slug felt as if her Mum and her were brave pioneers, like the families who signed up for atomic test area housing in those American deserts you saw in movies. White Sands, Area 51. All that. She supposed there must really be people actually living there in those empty rooms, slowly dying in the nuclear air.
The best times that April were during the day in the shy warm sunshine. There really was no-one else around. No cars. No postman. No Milkman. No other children. Nobody. Yes, but best of all, no vicious Dad.
Just long serene vernal days where Slug and her sweet Mum lived in a saccharin world of swings, hot chocolate and dairylea cheese sandwiches.
Night times in the safety of her bed were good too, when nature filled it's night and the melancholy woodland wind whipped round the eaves. When owls hooted in the high oaks and foxes howled as they stepped out of the shadows and prowled the perimeter. Creepy bats even flapped by and sometimes crawled into the roof space. Slug could here them taking up residence in the loft and thought they were getting things ready for someone nasty like Satan. Her Mum knew about the bats, but her Dad hadn't heard them so they both kept quiet.
It was one sunny afternoon at the start of May when Slug noticed two bats fluttering above a small lump in the lawn and a fox sat next to it staring down drooling .
The bats were leaping up and down and clawing at the bump like the harpies she'd seen in Jason and the Argonauts. She knew the garden was built on top of bricks and rubble. She'd seen it on their walk round with the estate agent the previous winter, so guessed the lump was a brick, which had twisted its way to the surface like a secret.
But why the fox and the bats should be interested in a brick she couldn't fathom at all.
Slug wandered over and, overcoming her fear of the animals, she joined them.
She got on her knees and tore away the grass and was amazed and frightened in equal measure by what pushed it's way out.
It was a hand.
It was a pale, bony and very cold hand. It reeked too.
It grabbed her.
The bats whirled upwards and the fox leapt over the fence.
A cold wind had suddenly appeared from nowhere and the sun vanished behind a torn dark veil.
As Slug backed away still holding the hand she couldn't help but pull the rest out.
It was a woman.
A woman holding a baby.
She emerged from the loose rubble and topsoil like a hermit crab and sat on the lawn, her head down, the baby in her arms.
Slug gawped in disbelief.
How could a woman and a baby be living under the turf?
The woman raised her head.
Slug took another step back.
The woman had long black hair and wore a long red tattered dress smeared with dirt and mould. The baby wore ripped black swaddling.
But the thing that frightened Slug the most were their faces.
They didn't have any!
Just large mouths slit across paper-thin skin wound tightly round their sharp cheek bones like drums.
The little girl gulped and said...
"Hello"
"H-Hello," replied the woman in an soily croak, her slit mouth peeling open.
"I'm S-Slug, pleased to meet you!"
"I-I'm Finito and I'm pleased to meet you too"
"What are doing in our garden Finito?"
"I was a-asleep with my child Miss. Slug"
"Asleep?"
"Yes"
"Buy why sleep in the soil and not in a bed?"
"We were in a bed, sort of, a wooden bed, a box"
"Where's the box now?"
"Oh, that's rotted away"
"So why have you both woken up?"
"To eat"
"To eat?"
"Yes to eat. We haven't eaten for a long time"
"What do you eat? Worms?"
"Oh, we've eaten all of those. At least those round here. No, we need something more substantial to get us through the next ten years"
"Like what?"
"Well, meat"
"What kind of meat?"
"Grown-up meat that's gone bad"
"What's that?"
"Hmmm. Let's just say we eat a lot of it in one meal. Oh, my baby gets my milk too"
"Oh"
"Yes. Well, perhaps we ought to stand up and make your acquaintance properly"
The bedraggled soil-woman in the red garb stood up.
Slug stared up at her. She was so very tall. Much taller than her Mum or Dad. And thin too. Like a skeleton inside those crimson rags.
"What do you do when you're not asleep?" Enquired the girl.
"I'm a school scullery maid. Or I was"
"What's that?"
"A kitchen girl"
"Oh. Where?"
"A school"
"Like a school for children?"
"Yes"
"Where is it? In the ground too?"
"Why, yes, in a way, it is. I was the maid at Margins School for Wayward Girls, right here next to your garden. As a matter of fact your garden was part of its grounds, where a small chapel stood"
A centipede crawled across the woman's chin. An eye opened from nowhere and she licked it with her tongue and grabbed it between her rotten teeth.
"Ugh!" Grimaced Slug.
Finito opened her other invisible eye and fed the bug to her eager infant.
"Has your baby got a name?"
"No. I didn't get chance to name her"
"Why not!"
"We were killed"
"K-killed! What, like you died?"
"Yes. We were murdered"
"I don't know what means sorry. I'm only four you see"
"Well, a very bad man - the headmaster - gave us something horrible to drink, because he didn't want anyone to know about my baby - his baby too - and then we were dead. He buried us at night before the other girls could see"
"Where?"
"Right here, where we are standing in your garden, but back then it was behind the chapel under the big woodpile"
"Why did he give you something horrible to drink?"
"Because he was married and didn't want this baby and he didn't want to see us any more"
"Oh. So he was evil? Like Lucifer?"
"Yes, he turned out to be an evil man with an awfully bad temper, who then murdered me and my baby with rat poison"
"That's terrible. I'm so sorry"
Both Finito's hidden eyes opened and she smiled.
"No need to be sorry Miss. Slug. It's not your fault"
"Oh. OK. My Dad's got a really bad temper. He hits my Mum because my twin brother went to heaven. He hates me!"
Finito and her little one sat down and so did Slug, who told her all about her little brother with whom she grew inside her Mum and how he said goodbye to her as she left and Dad's awful moods and narks and grumps and punches and how her Mum fears for her life every day.
The two ghouls listened intently and chewed on passing bugs.
"Where will you sleep tonight?"
"Inside the big fireplace in the dark"
"I'll bring you some bacon"
"Thank you Slug. Raw is best"
The new friends parted for the evening and after another tense tea Slug managed to pluck up the courage to sneak out with a packet of rashers. She couldn't see the mother and baby in the black alcove, so left it on the hearth and ran home.
In the morning she visited them in the inglenook.
"Do all dead people come back like you?" Asked Slug, sat down, picking the first of the narcissi.
"No. Only those who've been murdered come back like us, as ghouls. Normal people who pass on have a choice. They can either go straight to heaven, like your little brother or stay awhile as a ghost"
"Why do you come back as ghouls?"
"To get some extra life but also to make sure we're not just hidden away like garbage and forgotten"
"Oh"
"How long can we be friends Finito?"
"This spring and summer and then we have to go to sleep again for another ten years I'm afraid"
"Ten years. That's such a long kip. I'll be .. er .. really old when you come back. We might not even live here then. And My Mum ... She may be ....." thought Slug, her small voice getting more concerned.
Finito held her baby up high, it's wafer-thin skin ruffling in her bony hands. It smiled, it's two black front teeth, one top, one bottom, glistening with saliva.
"My darling baby and I will slumber like angels and dream of Heaven and you will be on your merry way to the rest of your life Miss. Slug".
And so the Spring passed lazily into Summer.
Finito and her child ate dead animals they found on night-time forages in the woods. Sometimes they crawled to the cemetery nearby.
As a treat Slug brought them pieces of offal she snaffled from the freezer and they would sit and talk about all kinds of things.
They had grown fond of each other that Spring and Summer, the three of them against the world in that lonely empty housing estate called The Margins.
It was late August when Slug's Dad decided he'd have a barbecue.
He said he deserved some decent meat between his gnashers. The thick sausages were doing nicely and a few chops too, but he was starving and wanted more. Some black pudding and offal would go down a treat with a few more cold beers.
He went to the freezer for the big mixed grill pack he'd bought earlier in the Spring. It was the meat Slug had been giving the ghouls.
"Where's the fucking mixed grill?" He bellowed from the kitchen.
His wife jumped and dropped the salsa bowl, squashed tomatoes spilling out on the floor like gore.
"I don't know. Let me have a look Honey!" she stammered
"It's not bastard there I tell you! Fuck me, I work every hour God sends to keep this roof over your heads and you can't even keep a tray of meat safe for me, you fucking useless cow!" He roared, approaching her menacingly with a long barbecue fork.
"I'm going to kill you!" He growled.
The frightened woman ran out into the garden, where Slug was sat at a small table eating a hot dog. She quickly stood up when she saw her Mum, who instinctively grabbed the little girl and stood in front of her.
"Stay back!" She screamed.
The husband, now enraged, stomped closer towards them, his face contorted with hatred, the fork waving about madly in the smoke.
"You, you two, you are the reason why I don't get ahead! You are the cause of all my fucking problems! You are both absolute wastes of fucking space and I'd be better off if you were fucking dead like my son!" He screamed and seemed to grow like an ogre.
In the corner of her eye, Slug saw Finito and her child slide out of the fireplace and walk towards them in the garden. She had never seen anyone stride so fast, a scarlet blur and in a second the ghouls were there. Only Slug could actually see them.
She was handed the baby, who was busily sniffing the grilled cuts.
The furious Dad stood in front of his wife and daughter hell-bent on ending them. He hit his wife slap across the face with the back of his hand and, grunting like a bear, raised the fork up high, his eyes consumed with loathing.
As the lethal implement descended Finito stepped forwards and grabbed the man's arm.
At first he couldn't understand what was stopping him, but then the ghoul revealed herself, holding tightly onto his wrist with her long skeletal fingers.
"I wouldn't do that if I was you Mister!" She warned through her facial slit.
"What the ...."
He tried to wrestle his hand free, momentarily non-plussed by the tall, stinking, sickly-looking woman clutching him, but his resolve returned and he snatched the hatchet from the woodpile near the barbecue and brought it down on Finito's head.
The murderous man stared at his victim panting. With the axe firmly wedged in her skull, the ghoul woman simply smiled, her rotted teeth flecked with his offal from the freezer.
She then slowly removed the fork from the man's hand and with sudden supernatural speed and power rammed it straight into his mouth and deep into the back of his throat.
The shocked and agonised husband staggered backwards clutching his face, blood spurting in gouts, covering the sausages and chops on the grill and sizzling like sauce.
The ghoul then wrenched the hatchet from her forehead and cursed him.
"It ends now, here, you brute! Enjoy your trip to Hell murderer!"
She swung the axe with such dreadful force that it decapitated the man in one swift motion, his head flying through the air with the prongs still sticking out of the back of his neck, spiralling like a satellite.
The baby ghoul caught the head easily and waited for the sign.
Finito nodded and the infant took a huge bite out of the man's cheek, hungrily devouring the soft wet flesh.
Slug and her Mum, speckled with red, were both in shock. Finito appeared before them.
"I couldn't let what happened to me and my child happen to you," she said to the woman, "not here, not again".
The woman fainted and lay in a heap on the lawn.
"She'll be okay later"
Slug handed back the baby, still grasping the half-eaten head of her Dad.
"Will you be alright?" The ghoul asked.
"Yes, thank you. Mum and me will probably go on holiday now Dad's gone"
"The winds are stirring Slug, Autumn draws near and our resting place is waiting in the chimney. I'm so very sorry, but we must leave you now"
"For ten years?"
"I'm afraid so, yes"
"Goodbye Slug"
"Goodbye"
Slug watched them go with her eyes filling up, as they left her behind.
Finito held her little one aloft and dragged the headless corpse by its arm over the fence and back to the inglenook, where both ghouls climbed to the top of the tall red brick stack. A small flock of sooty bats flapped their way out like chimney sweeps.
Finito pulled the man's body up high as well. She smiled at her baby ghoul staring at it.
"Yes, a feast for the soul my love, the vanquished head", she whispered.
He would do well to sate their ravenous hunger before the decades-long sleep in that darkling nest, with the bats sat chattering above their dreaming heads at the margins of night.
And as the years rolled by Slug never forgot her friends in the fireplace and always, without fail, left two rashers of bacon on the cobwebbed hearth, as the narcissi rose with the dawn of every Spring.
