THE GARGOYLE'S DISPLEASURE
My Restless Shufflings from the Rafters
Tuesday, July 15, 2025
Scrotes
As he soaped it's blue body his mind wandered to when his darling wife and he had got married in the 1970s. A simple but gorgeous affair for a few friends and family, they'd used the Robin as the wedding car.
It looked like a blue batmobile that day, with it's Just Married ribbons stretched across the bonnet and pepsi cans rattling at the rear as they drive up the street for the drive to Butlins.
Ada had looked fabulous, her long black hair and chiffon veil blowing in the breeze like wondrous sails, the canvas of their joyous new voyage, young and free with everything to live for in a world of promise and sunshine.
They'd gone on to many adventures in the Robin, a turquoise three-wheeled cruiser trundling across Britain and Europe, as far east as Romania, the two of them like astronauts in a capsule bound for happiness. People wind down their car windows at traffic lights, whistling at the amazing Reliant, the two occupants beaming with the sunlight of nomads, the wide smiles of being young and madly in love.
It was all so long ago now and norman didn't want to let darker thoughts crawl in, the darkest of thoughts from the very worst of times.
He circled his sponge over the Robin's long front lights and caught a glimpse of his face in the gleaming chrome trim.
God, he looked old! Older than he'd ever done and he seemed to be aging faster than ever these last few years. Aging like an applecore chucked behind the shed, drying up, the pips popping out, no longer living.
He was a dead man walking on the death row of his sentence, a long life of loneliness and grief, his grim companions since that dreadful day, nestling with the grimmest, which he kept locked away in the deepest hole.
The Reliant was all he had left of his glorious life together with Ada, a tangible portal to the beautiful past, where he so dearly wanted to be again. He mused if he drove fast enough down the street might he break the time barrier between him and his beloved.
It was then he noticed a group of youths stood in the road. They were young and mean-looking and gathered round something on the ground. It was a hedgehog curled into a ball. The youths were kicking it to one another like a football, it's spines making it jar and jolt on the asphalt. The ruffians looked so underfed he thought they might eat the poor creature!
His anger surged ike a hot tide. He'd always detested bullies. He walked to the end of his drive and shouted at them.
"You boys, leave that hedgehog alone, you'll injure it!"
The kids hadn't noticed the old man before but now they all turned to face him. They stared like hateful things and one stepped forward, the most dreadful-looking of them all: pale, sunken cheeks, thin lips and crater eyes.
"You fuckin' what you old bastard! It's none of your Fuckin' business so keep your fuckin nose out!"
"Leave the hedgehog alone!" He said loudly and firmly.
"This old cunt must be deaf boys!" He said to his gang.
They all turned and stared at Norman, a stare of combined malevolence that made the hairs on the back of his stand up.
The scrawny leader moved closer and the other boys followed until they were all stood on the pavement directly in front of Norman's drive, where he was washing his car.
The gang leader was standing almost next to the Robin.
He slowly traced his finger along the chrome finned rear lamp.
"So, this is your old banger is it old man?"
"Funny looking pile 'o' shite ain't it! It's missing a fuckin front wheel!"
He howled at his own wit and swiveled to hear his troops laughing loudly too.
"Keep your hands off the car!" Norman warned.
"I think you're forgetting the word please you grouchy old fucker!"
"Say Please!"
The youth took hold of the radio aerial and began to slowly bend it
"Bend my aerial and you will regret it for the rest of your life!"
"Ooh! Fuck! Hear that boys! We'll regret it! Jeepers, we're just quaking in our fuckin boots aren't we!"
Once again, he howled with laughter and his goons followed suit
"What the fucks a warty old twat like you going to do, eh!"
"Fuckin' nothin' that's what cos you're a crusty old wanker who can't fart without shittin'!"
"And what's so special about this heap of crap anyway? You shag the old lady senseless in the back? That's it, it's your three-wheeler shag cupboard ain't it!"
"Shut your mouth you disrespectful streak of piss!"
Ah. Smelling blood, the leader persisted.
"And where is the old bitch anyway? Get her out here and we'll show her a fuckin' good time in the back won't we boys!"
"Yeah!" They all agreed, pressing nearer to Norman, "a fuckin good time!"
"She'll be so full o' jizz you'll have to wash her out with that fanny sponge you're holding fella!"
He prodded Norman in the chest.
"And just maybe when we're done we'll shove that maingy fuckin hedgehog right up her cunt so you can never fuck the old witch again!"
Norman grabbed the youth's finger hard. Noticing the nail was strangely filthy with what looked like earth, he began to bend it backwards.
"Ah, ah!"
The leader contorted in pain and began to stagger backwards, Norman holding fast.
"Get off my car, get off my property and stop disrespecting my wife!"
With one further push, the youth's soily finger nearly broke but returned to position, the agonised youth caressing it as it throbbed beyond belief.
One of the others spoke solemnly.
"You shouldn't have done that mister."
The whole gang repeated it.
"You shouldn't have done that!"
The leader staggered backwards, straightened up and rejoined his mates.
They stared once more at Norman in an vacant kind of way, a couple of them drooling.
Turning, the leader kicked the retreating hedgehog towards Norman. It flew through the air and they didn't see him expertly catch it with his right hand, releasing it into his back garden.
"All the best little blood!" He whispered in its ear.
Finishing up Norman retired inside to eat a TV dinner in front of the box. The evening News was on talking about cancer and his mind wandered back to his Ada. She had died after a long battle with the monstrous disease. It took away the love of his life and crushed his soul forever. He became only half a human, skulking in the shadows like a fox, retreating from the world he wished would burn. His life since then was a rudderless shamble and his demons fought hard to ascend.
He kept a lock of Ada's hair on the mantle piece in a wooden box, which they'd bought together at Castle Bran in the Carpathian hills. They'd been the happiest of days, an endless summer of high pastures and sweeping meadows, where they ran through the tall fescues, collapsing by burbling mountain streams to make passionate love.
Only at the end of that Carpathian summer did the days shorten and the nights exude the mountains' darkness. It was on the night they packed their tent that Ada was bitten by a large dog that had emerged from the forest.
It was a deep bite and the local village nurse looked at the pair sceptically, reluctant to dress the wound and continually tutting and making the sign of the cross.
Ada had had it re-dressed in England but by then the bite had all but disappeared. Ada had seemed younger after that, stronger. Bigger even. Her appetite for meat had grown too and it was in the months that followed when Sheep began to be mauled on the lonely moors above the town.
But cancer got her in the end, the monster in us all.
"Ada!" He sighed.
The fizzing snow of the dead screen brought him out of his drowse and he crawled on all fours up the stairs to bed.
Early next morning his world collapsed again.
It was still semi-dark outside but he could see on the drive his beloved Robin Reliant had been smashed to smithereens. Great ragged chunks of blue fibre-glass were strewn around the drive and huge wooden posts ripped from his fence had been rammed through the windscreen like stakes.
The car was wrecked.
So was Norman. He collapsed to his knees and sobbed. So sad for the car, so sad for himself, sobbed for Ada and their beautiful love.
His tears fizzed in his eyeballs and as his sobbing abated a new emotion took hold. Rage.
The man balled his fists and ground his teeth. Fury surged inside him like a maelstrom. He banged the rug over and over until he calmed.
Norman needed to talk to his wife. He walked the mile to her grave in the local but semi-abandoned churchyard. Chatting by her graveside would ease his soul and he would tell her the terrible news about their beloved car.
When he arrived at the church gates it was dusk but he could still see a group of figures hunched over his wife's grave. They were shouting and gnashing, squabbling and drooling.
The grave was torn apart, the coffin broken, the headstone defiled with shit.
Where's the old fucker's wife's body? They shrieked like a pack of starving hyenas, their clothes ragged and soiled, their faces flecked with spittle and earth. One of them was chewing on a ragged hand from the next grave, itself desecrated and upturned.
Norman recognized the boys from the day before, the nasty scrawny scrotes who had confronted him on his drive. The very same whom he knew for certain had smashed up his robin. Their robin.
He stared at them dribbling into the coffin and hard as it was to believe in this day and age, he instinctively knew what they were, a foulness from legend, a canker from myth: grave-feeders.
They were ghouls.
Ghouls robbing Ada's grave.
His fury boiled and he gripped the iron gate tightly.
"There is no body you fuckin filthy scrotes. My wife was cremated."
The ghoulish troop jerked round and gawped at the old giffer stood by the trees.
So, you came looking for us eh old man? What, was it the nice gift we left you on the drive? The leader of the pack hissed.
Norman came out of the shadow of the yew and balling his fists he roared like a lion, his rage erupting in a geyser of purest hate.
The ghouls , suddenly off-guard, stepped back. Even the leader looked non-plussed.
Norman strode to the graveside, still bellowing and stooped to retrieve an urn tucked in the recess beneath the headstone. The urn was engraved with the name Ada.
"You fuckin' stupid cretins are in for a treat. When I've done you'll be sorry you were ever fuckin born!"
Norman unscrewed the urn and placed it on the headstone. He took a penknife from his pocket and made a deep cut in his palm. It bled.
He squeezed copious blood onto the urns ashes and swirled it round until if formed a frothy grey and red broth.
Smiling broadly at the mesmerized ghouls, Norman spoke.
"You ought to be running now boys. You see, my Ada ......"
He downed the gloop slowly, savouring it's poignancy, the ashen essence of his beloved wife. The earthy liquor sloped along his gullet and dripped into his stomach. Big grey drops of ash, bone and hair hit his acid bag and with each splash he jerked.
The mutation convulsed through his old body: his bones cracked apart, skin ballooned and matted with thick fur. His teeth lengthened and nails grew into sharp talons.
Snarling, he rose from the graveside, a massive seven-foot gnashing beast.
He smiled and through huge fangs growled:
".... Yes, my darling Ada, she was a werewolf boys, a really fuckin' big one and she's as hungry as... Well, you're going to find out for yourselves!"
The troop of ghouls yelped in disbelief. Even their leader lost his swagger and quickly turned tail. They scurried through the headstones like scared conies.
No-longer-Norman would teach these heathens a final terrible lesson.
Uncontrollable fury pulsed through him as he remembered how they had wrecked his Robin, ransacked his memories and defiled his Ada's resting place.
He was going to truly enjoy eating their scratty brains and shitting out their ragged souls.
He leapt into the night and the dreadful screaming lasted for hours.
There were indeed worse things in Hell than ghouls!
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.