PRISTINE

Pristine had always had great soil.

Fine black deep soil that you could dig your hands into and feel like you were milling flour.

It was famous in the region and people knew that crops grown there would always be lush.

As lush as crops could be and prize winners they were too.

Yep, the residents of Pristine were rightly proud of their fertile till and the thick veg jumping out of it.

It had always been so and so it was that summer of '84, the summer the reporter came. Satz.

Satz worked for the regional paper, City Light and she specialised in local interest stories for the metropoles who wanted to read about the provinces.

Technically Pristine was so far away from the city to be almost non-existent in the region but the reputation of its award-winning harvest had even reached the sweatshop of the urban hacks.

And so it landed on Satz's desk.

"What's this?" she said, looking up at her weary boss McGruder.

"Its a story. Its local. Its interesting. Its local interest. So its yours, so go report!" he reasoned dripping coffee down his considerable paunch.

"Pristine? Where the hell is Pristine?"

"Its on the edge of the county, about fifty miles away. They're sweeping up all the local horticultural prizes round there. Its quite the leguminous sensation if you like that sort of thing. And some of our readers do, so go report it Satz!" he ordered as he wandered back to his office.

"Pristine. Sounds perfectly tedious!" she mumbled reaching for a map.

There it was. On the edge of the sheet. Almost in the neighbouring region. A tiny speck in a sea of nothing. Despite being the local interest reporter Satz hated going out of the City and its suburbs. Pristine may as well have been in Greenland!

She went home and threw some stuff in a bag. Her camera, films, notepads, pens, pencils and tape recorder. Adding a few essential clothes and toilet things, she grabbed her typewriter and slammed the door shut.

"A couple of days Satz. Three at the most. That's all it'll take to get the story including travelling by car. You'll love it, you know you will. All that country air!" McGruder had chuckled as she left the office earlier that morning.

She planned to get there late afternoon and find a room for the night. She could grab some food somewhere and start asking a few questions. The next day she would try to meet the local dignitaries among the local growers. The cabbage patch kings. She laughed at her own joke and thought it might make a good headline and jotted it down.

The drive was as lifeless as she'd feared. No sooner had she left the confines of the beguiling urban sprawl her heart wilted as the endless quilts of maize and wheat stretched out before her. It all looked the same, one crop after another, the same mundane fields jostling each other for the title of most boring cereal in the world.

Now and then she passed a cyclist, a dog-walker, a priest tending a small chapel turning to wave at her and a dead fox splattered at the side of the road eyeing her with dead retinas as she flew by.

A light lit on her dash. She needed petrol.

"Damn and blast!"

Satz pulled into a local garage about ten miles from where she wanted to be.

"Shall I fill her up Miss?" asked the garage owner, a crooked withered old man, who looked as if he'd lived a hundred years in the same twenty square yards of oil and fumes. A swarm of plump flies hung around a large fetid bone thrown down for a decrepit mutt sleeping in the late afternoon sun. The flies billowed and turned like starlings as they harried the comatose dog and bone.

"Yes please."

"Where you heading?" he inquired shoving the nozzle deep in the hole.

"Pristine."

The old man stopped pumping and looked at her.

"Pristine. Now what would you want over there?" he asked restarting the counter.

"I'm a City Reporter. I've come to write about Pristine's supposedly amazing crops."

"City Reporter eh. My advice would be to report on the city and leave the fine residents of Pristine to talk about their crops with each other and not with a nice young lady like you! A funny bunch they are. Secretive. Always up at night. I see 'em with my binoculars in the moonlight clapping. Nope, I've never been to Pristine and I sure as dammit won't ever be going to that godforsaken hamlet."

Satz looked stunned but made a mental note of what he'd said. There were some great quotes in there.

The old attendant finished pumping and scratched his scabby head. He coughed and bent double, hawking up a huge gob of phlegm flecked with blood. It landed on the gravel between him and Satz like an spilt oyster. In its centre was a fat squirming fly on its back.

"Sorry Miss, I'm not so well at the mo. It's these damn flies I think. They get everywhere. Don't mind me and my opinions either. Don't mean to scare you. That'll be a straight twenty please."

Satz shivered and paid the old fella. Driving off she thought he couldn't have long for this world. Poor sod. He looked so terribly ill. And what did he mean about Pristine. Always up at night he'd said.

The last five miles were suddenly different. The landscape changed. It was lusher. Thicker. The crops were markedly taller and sturdier. There was an abundance in the fields that was staggering.

Satz had to stop the car to look.

She walked over to the edge of a maize crop by the road and held up a corn cob. It was as heavy as a baby; weighty, succulent looking and bulging with yellow corn. She just wanted to boil it and butter it and eat it there and then.

"My God," she exclaimed, "McGruder was right. Its a regular garden of Eden out here!"

As far as the eye could see were imposing ranks of fat yields, like corn, wheat and barley, the fruit bending with the weight of the heads like rows of soldiers stooped in prayer. Strange dark clouds flitted over them in the distance. Were they birds?

Beneath the crops' shoots was a fine black till of obvious quality, a perfect sable loam from which all this glory sprang.

Satz bent down and rubbed some in her fingers. It felt crumbly like cheese and had a unique earthy smell, full of vigour and zest. There was a hint also of something she just couldn't put a name to. A sweet but rank ferrous sub-song clung to it, this soil of champions.

She was unexpectedly intrigued by this story of miraculous plenty and drove into the township with all her journalist's senses tingling.

A small roadside sign in the shape of a tractor read 'Welcome to Pristine. Don't be a Stranger".

Cute she thought.

Satz drove round a bit and found a room at the Pristine Guest House. She was also unusually hungry. Starving in fact and set out to find somewhere to enjoy a first evening meal.

Strolling down the high street as the sun was setting she noticed just how deserted it was. There was nobody about, not a soul.

Now ravenous she noticed a sign for a restaurant down a shadowy side street. The sign read The Last Lick. An odd name Satz thought but as long as it was open she wasn't fussed.

It was and she sat at a table in the window. She was the only guest. She snatched the menu from its stand as pangs of hunger began to pound at her belly.

Last Lick Special: Harvest Soup, Succulent Pristine Vegetable Medley Bathed in our Local Red Sauce, Best Yield Pud, coffee.

"I'll take that!" Satz said to the old waitress pointing to the special, savouring the menu's promise that you'll eat till the last lick. By now she was groaning with a uncontrollable need for food.

When the waitress returned with a steaming tray of produce, Satz was sat gripping her knife and fork with her mouth wide open. She began eating before the tray was fully on the table and trying to get a drowning fly out of the bowl she accidentally flicked some soup onto the waitress's sleeve. Satz stared at her and without thinking licked it off, flay and all.

"Delicious! The soup! It's so delicious!" Satz explained with pale hot fluid dribbling from her mouth, the fly crawling down her tongue. The waitress just smiled. With her arms folded she simply watched Satz trough the meal like a country pig, mixing starter, main, sweet and coffee together in one huge sloppy binge.

"Its so goooood!" exclaimed Satz, her mouth stuffed with veg. "What on earth do you put in the soil to make such fantastic flavours?"

"Oh, this and that. Its mostly good ploughed earth full of manure, compost, chicken eggshells and one very special ingredient" replied the old waitress.

Satz ate, asked for seconds and the old crone brought out another tray and then carried on watching. She could have been a hundred years old judging by the wrinkles on her tanned skin. Perhaps more. She stood and had time to apply some thick red lipstick to her ancient lips whilst she waited.

Satz looked up.

"What's the special ingredient? For God's sake tell me!"

The waitress gave her a huge smile of perfectly white teeth and slowly replied.

"Strangers!"

She laughed loudly and outside the restaurant the residents of Pristine had gathered and were all laughing loudly too.

Satz stared in horror at the old hag and was violently sick and puked in a bucket held out by the waitress.

The old woman looked inside the bucket in admiration.

"Oh, excellent chunder. That'll do nicely on my turnip patch! Any more?"

A maggot crawled out of her nose.

Satz spewed the last of her guts up and staring at the howling waitress keeled over from her chair, overfed, engorged and gagging on delicious food that she'd never swallow now.

Lying on the floor her distended belly stuck out like a baby and she died choking on her Pristine meal, her eyes wide with terror.

The waitress licked her lips as the rest of the residents piled into the room.

"Well done! She's an excellent catch!" guffawed the Mayor of the town as she patted the waitresses's back.

"Right, we need to get the stranger in the ground by morning everyone. You know what to do!" she instructed.

Satz's body was lifted into the kitchen were she was butchered on a mortuary table into six main cuts: head, torso, arms and legs. The blood was collected in a huge steel jug by the Mayor singing while she dipped her finger in the red grue and tasted it eagerly.

"Puuuuuurfect!" she meowed, like a cat, to which the assembled company bayed with laughter.

The six crimson cuts were then shouldered by bearers who humped them, whistling merrily, to the mincers at the edge of the main field.

The mincers hefted the severed parts into six mincing machines attached to tractors spread out equally across the edge. The Mayor divided the blood between the six, pouring it into the wide maw of each machine.

"Start the tractors!" she shouted.

"Mince!"

On this command the machines began their grisly work slowly shredding Satz into a thick scarlet tartare, which was strewn across the black field as darkness buried the light completely. The rear harrows tilled the meat finely into the soil.

The gathered throng clapped vigorously and when the tractors returned they all went to the restaurant to celebrate.

By morning nothing was left of Satz except a tinge of wetness on the dark tilth. Flies swooped over the land in frenzied swarms and stooped to lay their eggs.

A single glob of Satz's blood, a clot, had hit the township's sign, but it would dry quickly in the morning sun as the township waited for another stray.

As per normal the sign greeted passers-by with its customary 'Welcome to Pristine. Don't be a Stranger.' An ambulance pulled up next to it. Inside was the old fuel attendant. Dead.

The driver found himself suddenly hungry. Starving in fact.

A single full bluebottle dropped on his sweating head and rubbed its legs together slowly. The Mayor's smiling face was reflected many times in its big split eyes.

THE HISTORY OF PIXIE

Pixie arrived in the world on Golgotha ejected from an injured earth: a small thin blue waif older than sin; a slim emerald of sunlight streaked with darkness.

Pixie chewed her lip. She witnessed good and evil on that hot nailing hill and could not tell the difference.

She crouched behind the cross, a shadow on the future.

Wary of tomorrows she stole a drop of blood from beneath the tongue of the magpie pecking the wounds and squeezed a tear from a robin soothing the scalp.

She hid them beneath her wings.

As the dying sun set on this world she fled the execution. Looking back she saw night descend like a brute and a red wisp rise.

Pixie entered eons in search of fate, a newborn puck from an ancient race which had ruled the dawn forest and owned the sun's first day before Man had stood erect and cursed the land.

But they'd vanished and she was very annoyed.

She knew not where her destiny lay but had an inkling that with clenched fists she would wrestle it from the glint, the twinkle, the sinking of some unknown tomorrow. She would bathe in its splashdown. Yes.

She sought herself. A maggot in her flesh.

Pixie flew, landed, crawled and screamed a song of surging primal oaks and water slapping on the blasted shores of creation. Her blue hands weaved cradles of  anguish as she whirled and wheeled across pointless ages, her saxifrage cap soaking up her sweat under the sun's searing corona, her pointed ears piercing its petals like horns. She was a chameleon of time and place; the slang behind the platitudes; the eel in the piss.

She pushed through the legs of Charlemagne; she loped with the wolves of the Serengeti; she blew dust in the shot eye of the dying Harald and whispered in the poet's ear, "Xanadu!".

She skated on the rims of volcanoes; ran down the running mountain screes; she belly-slid along turquoise glaciers: whooshed down the curves of Mammoth tusks and dived in the dizzying drop of the Angel Falls grabbing lizards from the cliff.

But where were her damn kin?

She flew through the black smoke of Popes blowing raspberries and much worse emissions spewing from wars. Singing Tipperary with ailing Tommy's, the world remained dogged by the good and evil she had been given at Golgotha.

Pixie sat on the head of a brush in Da Vinci's pot kicking paint. She stared past the smiling Lisa toward the ripening earth beyond where the future pulled faces.

She hummed and cussed and chucked her cap. She flew off like a dot leaving the funny page.

A dunnock hopped by.

"What's your name bird?"

"Dunstable. Dunstable Dunnock at your service young Sir. And what, may I ask, are you? For, I have never seen the like before!" replied the little bird cheerfully.

"I'm Pixie, bird. And yep. I'm alone, so don't rub it in!"

The dunnock stopped pecking and eyed the angry blue sprite ruefully.

"Do you know the nature of evil Pixie?" asked the bird.

"Not exactly bird .... but I have some under my wings. It makes me hot and mean," replied Pixie.

"Do you know the nature of Goodness?" asked the Dunnock.

"Why the questions bird? ..... I think its soft and tingling against my wings if you must know. Its getting on my wick!" she replied.

"Perhaps you can find others like yourself somewhere in between," mused Dunstable.

Preening his tartan wing he continued.

" I have seen children playing together and feeding my closest friends with smiles and seed. I have also seen my kin shot by cruel men and children ripped apart by pounding canons. This is the nature of the human world, the two live side by side, as they do in you. They are in eternal struggle with each other. I sense that your fate lies somewhere between them, between sins and love."

"Thanks bird, though I'm not sure what you're on about. Sins and love!" bellowed Pixie flying up into the blue, almost invisible as she stretched her wings. She closed her eyes for just a second and an aeroplane pilot caught a hint of her grimace as she bounced off his cockpit.

"Toerag!" she yelled.

"Ice?" he wondered.

Pixie read the fading word 'Enola .......' on the plane's fuselage as she somersaulted away through its contrail.

Wheeling back through the years Pixie came to rest over sharp spires one clear sunrise.

"I'm so damn tired of flying round these stupid apes!" She ranted.

She alighted in an open window and stood upon an old desk to pause for breath. A wizened old man was writing runes and scratched his chin as he struggled for a certain word.

Pixie squinted at the old man and his runic script and without being seen scribbled 'dork' in the ink with her big toe. Rising she smudged the d and wondered where middle earth was.

She careened through the dawn air and slurped the liquor hanging from catkins. She stole hazelnuts from a family of squirrels who said go to hell. Pixie added hell to her list and soared on the thermals above the trees. She felt at home in the wild: the forests, glades, hills and scarps and saw the dark ravens guarding the edifice.

Pixie planned to bug them but seeing their massive bristled beaks thought better of it but swaggered on their ledge nonetheless.

"Hey ravens. You seen anyone like me 'ave ya?" she asked kicking a twig off the edge.

"Be cautious imp. We are the Kings round here. Speak with respect or die in our nests" the huge birds cawed.

For the first time Pixie actually felt something like fear and said she was sorry, head bowed and ears lowered.

"We have heard of imps and urchins like you in the mad dens of Men, which they call supercities. Mother Nature is not welcome there. Their wild young are caged and men murder in the alleys, slick with blood, till there is nothing left but night carrion for us!" they warned, "The wild children may know of you."

Pixie curtsied and flew off yelling "Fleabags!" when far enough away. Stupid old coots she thought. Cities. Blood. Cages. Bollocks.

She sheered wings through the solar breeze and soared above towering huts of rusted steel and glass, forced skywards from the earth like decaying inkcaps.

"The supercity" whispered Pixie.

Packs of thin unclothed children scrambled toward her as she paused on their sills high in the gas clouds, whilst deafening aid rockets zoomed to Mars and trucks landed on the rooves filled with rotting meat, which men stuffed down mincers for the kids. Everywhere was the thrum of rusted motors and the stench of corruption.

Pixie's simian face smiled but her lips trembled. Her good side ached and she was overwhelmed with sympathy. She waved back at the prisoners as they ran across shit-stained rooms to see her take off and thought she saw herself, a ragged stray, reflected in their punched-in eyes. Could these wretches be her kin, the sad guttersnipes beaten and locked up at the top of the world?

She desperately wanted to help them but these cloud-scratching towers were damned fortresses where lives were trashed and childhood seeped away in the bloodied waste running through the streets. Red Kites arced in the puking fumes and picked at the carrion of the perished.

"It makes me so sad to think of you", she mouthed through the last glazing she passed. "Bastards!"

Pixie felt her torn heart break and wished she had company more than ever as night came down like smog over the city. Alone and desolate she slept fitfully in the filthy down of a tower nest as a scheming Cuckoo came ever closer toward her, issuing its two-note lies like a mermaid.

The cuckoos suddenly became a clamour and Pixie was wrenched from her sleep.

"What the .....," she yawned as shrill alarms yelled like grieving skuas allover the globe.

Pixie followed the din and in the vast white dome of government shaking men were muttering codes of doom like gibbering wigs as Pixie entered a war room. She sensed the embittered heart of the Chief and saw his reddened finger teetering on the switch of a last terrible oblivion.

Somewhere between sins and love.

Pixie whispered in the President's ear ....

"You fat fuck!"

He whirled round to see the turquoise sprite flying round his office waving a white flag.

She zoomed out of the window into the daylight, a neon missile of the third kind leaving the old man to consider his encounter.

Somewhere a David Bowie song was playing on a videomat.

"Sailors fighting in the dance halls, oh man, looks at those spacemen go ......"

He swigged some scotch and pressed.

Pixie sneaked into a new movie plex on the rich side of the city and watched a holo-D screening of the old flick Star Wars. She saw human couples fumbling in the darkness and fans dressed as huge bear monkeys long- growling at the screen..

She nestled down in the Gods with some chucked popcorn and shouted "Shut the fuck up" at the bears.

For some reason she kipped and dreamt of the rebellion far away. Her ears pricked up when she heard Yoda whisper:

"There is another."

Pixie felt a current of charge tingle through her small body and oscillate her wings. She felt sure, like Skywalker, that there was another like her in the city.

"Oh my God," she wailed and whizzed round the cinema like a balloon above the fans.

Pixie flew here, flew there, flew everywhere and asked every living thing whether they'd seen a pixie like her.

The answer was always no. Always get away, we've no idea, no we haven't so get lost imp.

There was no sign.

But then she heard the workmen cursing the gremlin.

"Jesus wept, we've got that god damned gremlin back. The rocket doors just won't fuckin open," yelled the gaffer, "If we don't get it open and stop the timer the thing will fly. That bastard missile will take the whole colony out."

The gremlin.

It rang a bell with Pixie.

She followed the men and came to a secret building dug into the mountain.

On the vast double doors it read "SILO".

Between Sins and Love thought Pixie. She was close. Her destiny lay behind those doors.

Invisible to the guards, the handles were jammed with a huge wooden cross.

Pixie had seen crosses like it before and knew the wisp of Golgotha had followed her here, to this point, to this exact spot.

She entered the silo through the air vent and landed on a giant concrete floor.

Gremlin was waiting.

"So you made it Pixie!" he yelled, a small red goblin with bow legs, clutching a remote control.

"Who are you?" she asked standing before him.

"I am your reflection. Your opposite. I am your doom and your people's captor. I have followed you since the crosses on the hill and luckily for me I found this place first."

"And were are my people?"

"They were hiding here, like cowards, away from the bombs. I have told them to get inside the biggest missile for safety. They were happy to oblige. I shall launch it tonight and kill them all. The day of the goblin is here Pixie. Blue imps are history," he chortled.

"You red bastard," cursed Pixie as she leapt furiously onto the laughing hob.

"I've pissed in your milk blue boy!" ranted Gremlin.

They grappled in the shadow of the massive missile as Pixie's folk looked on in horror from the timer window, hundreds of them locked inside the warhead set to target Martian City.

Pixie beat Gremlin with her wings repeatedly. The good. The bad. It all rubbed off on him. Gremlin staggered and stared through confused eyes.

He pressed the remote.

SWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!

The silo roof yawned and the missile launched on a heading straight for Mars. Pixie raced and grabbed the tailfin as it escaped the hatch. She grabbed Gremlin too.

"You'd better defuse this thing you tosser or else you're a gonner too!" whispered Pixie to the squirming red. He crawled to the timer.

"Neither good nor evil will have their day today," bellowed Pixie as they left Earth's atmosphere, a burning cylinder of magic and make-believe bound for a new world.

Pixie saluted the ejected timer as it tumbled away. This was her destiny after all.

She was sure she could hear Bowie singing Is There Life on Mars somewhere in the distance.

WURM

Ritter was a happy boy.

He lived a charming life in the forest of Bohemia.

He would spend days and days running and skipping through the trees, the dells and the rivulets that made up the wood on the edge of the world.

"Don't go beyond the forest!" shouted his Mother as he set off on another adventure.

"I won't" he replied as he skipped past the cottage garden and into the sunny glade near the stream.

The boy would saunter along winding paths and old fence lines meandering through the tall oaks like snakes and ladders.

He would pick wood anemones and sorrels for his Mother and sing madrigals he'd learnt from his Father as they sat together by the hearth on winter nights.

Occasionally he would stop to eat a sandwich from his bundle and drink some elderflower all made by his Mother that morning.

The sun would shine through the canopy and the warm light would dance and pose around the forest floor. Ritter would follow the bobbing sunlight as it made its way through the trees.

It was on one such day that the boy, shuffling along humming and hopping in the dapples, came to the edge of the forest.

He had never been this far before and felt the yawning distance between his home and where he stood.

 "Don't go beyond the forest!"

His Mother's warning echoed through the watching trees.

Ritter sat down at the edge and ate a sandwich.

It was then that he heard a haunting plaintive sound like the sad whispers of a golden harp.

He stood and felt an urgent desire to find the source of the lament and breaking his Mother's cardinal rule, left the forest.

He walked out onto a vast undulating board of gently rolling wolds, which when entered, had a charming effect like the welcome he felt in his father's arms.

The boy walked on summoned by the aching notes drifting across the low hills.

He clasped his food bundle and looked back once towards the dark boundary of the woods and went on into the new land.

On he went until he came to a small grassy hill.

The haunting melody seemed to emanate from here soothing the very air and the ground around it.

Ritter stared at the mound and thought he saw part of it open up slightly.

It had and what's more in the opening was a large .... eye!

Ritter was flabbergasted and was about to turn and run home when he heard the plaintive song again. It was so sad, so moving. He sat down to listen to it properly now that he was here.

In his reverie he thought he saw another eye open up at the base of the hill. Now two large eyes with red pupils were staring at him in a sort of sorrowful way.

"Are you the eyes under the hill?" asked the boy.

"I am," said the hill, "and there is more of me."

"Then do not be afraid Mister Hill. Come out into the sunshine", replied Ritter cheerfully.

"I am not afraid young Sir. I am stiff and find it hard to move, but I shall try now that you are here", explained the hill.

At this the eyes closed as if some huge edifice was straining to rise and the boy could see spiral rents appearing in the grass around the mound. 

The spiral tears grew bigger and after much creaking and groaning a colossal grassy creature was standing in front of the boy, a shower of soil and roots falling from him like snow.

"You are so big Mister Hill!" said Ritter as he craned his neck to see the creature's head in the bright sky.

"I am," it agreed "I am as tall as a castle, if not taller."

"I have never seen a castle I'm afraid. I live in the forest and there are no castles there, just my parent's house and my den," explained the boy.

"I once lived in the forest too, many years ago," replied the creature now stretching in the sunshine and shaking off some mice and voles that had nestled in his creases.

"But how could you have lived in the forest Mister Hill? You are so big and the gaps between the trees are so small!" asked Ritter.

"I was once a boy like you young Sir. I had a home and I lived with my dear parents far away on the other side of the woods, where the brook babbles and the robins sing. My name was Wurm,"

"But you aren't a boy at all. Your'e a .....," remarked Ritter.

" ...... dragon. Yes. I am a huge dragon with wings and four legs and a vast toothy mouth," agreed Wurm as it began to walk round the boy, grass still covering its massive form.

"But why did you change from being a boy Mister Dragon, I mean Wurm?"

"Like you young Sir I once wandered far from home, with some food from my dearest Mother wrapped in a cloth. I wandered and sauntered through the tall tress until there were no trees left and the forest ceased."

Wurm went on, licking some dead leaves from his claw.

"It was then that I heard the most sorrowful music I had ever experienced in all the world. Even the sad winter robins could not produce such a sound as this. I stepped out of the forest and the notes lead me to a grass-topped mound, where like you, I sat and listened to the sad song."

"But what happened to you Wurm? Why aren't you a boy now?" inquired Ritter feeding grass to a dizzy vole.

"I met the dragon under the hill and the dragon explained how he had once been a boy and strayed out of the trees and met a dragon under the hill ..... and so it goes back into the mists of time to the beginning of the world," explained the Wurm.

"So you ..... became the dragon?" asked Ritter with the first nibbles of fear in his voice.

"Yes," replied Wurm, "As you will too."

"But I don't want to become a dragon under the hill Wurm, I don't. My parents will be worried sick and I need to go home," implored the boy.

"I'm afraid you can't young Sir for it is the way of the hill that you must now take my place under its roots and keep some of the world's sadness locked away. You will be a Sorrow Dragon like me and sleep deeply in your bed of herbs singing your own sad song as you dream forever," explained Wurm.

"Oh no, Wurm, please! I beg you, I do not wish to become a Sorrow Dragon and keep sadness locked away. I want to go home to my Mother and Father and hug them again and again!" cried the anguished boy now standing below the giant dragon's head.

"But if you do not become a Sorrow Dragon then I shall stay a dragon forever and ever, for it must be the first child who strays that can release me. That child is you I'm afraid," soothed the Dragon stroking the boy's brow gently with a huge blue claw.

"I do not want you to stay a dragon forever Wurm but I do not want to be a dragon either. Please, please do not make me one for I shall miss my parents terribly and it will break their hearts that I am gone", sobbed Ritter.

"It is ever thus young Sir. I implored the very same but it was to no avail. Sorrow Dragon's are as much a part of nature as streams and mountains and the sadness they keep would overwhelm the world if it wasn't stored away in the hills. There are many of us scattered around the vale and I am the one at the edge of the forest. You must become a dragon and I must be freed as you yourself will be freed in time," explained Wurm sat down on the grass on his vast blue haunches.

The forlorn boy sobbed with such ferocity that his shoulders wracked and his body shook with a sadness he had never known, a sadness born of his parents' distant breaking hearts and his own yearning arms and he knew that must lock such sorrow away from the world lest it overwhelm it just as Wurm had said.

"How do I release you?" he asked the dragon looking up into its sad eyes.

"Firstly, I must say your name."

Then say it.

"Ritter."

"Now, you must lie like an an unborn child in the bowl in the ground where I once lay."

The boy slowly led down in the soil and stared up at the sorrowful dragon.

"And now last of all I must shed a tear over you."

The boy nodded and lay down his head and snuggled into the earth as its heart broke.

The dragon, sobbing, lowered his vast head over the boy and released an enormous tear that splashed over his curled body and soaked the soil around him.

"Goodbye Ritter." said the dragon.

"Goodbye Wurm." sobbed the boy.

The dragon immediately changed back into a young boy and he ran once more into the forest of his past.

At the edge he stopped and looked back to where Ritter was lying.

All he could see was a grassy mound.

As Wurm turned he thought he could hear the first notes of Ritter's sorrowful song filling the sunlit wolds.

NIGHT SCHOOL

Maleva was new in town.

She had moved in a hurry from the last town with her Mum.

Moving around meant she never really got a chance to finish off her schooling.

Now 17, she could go to evening classes or night school as it was known in this town.

The first time she went was that typical social mess: awkward introductions and nervous expectations.

The subject she needed was English Lit and she had chosen a course in Gothic Writings as it interested her and she thought it would be fun.

Her tutor was called Mr. Strange and he was. Strange. But also sweet enough to make her feel welcome. He asked if she had managed to get hold of the three books being studied and Maleva said she had. She had them in her bag: Frankenstein, Dracula and The Werewolf of Paris.

It was a small group. The Chic Lit course was much bigger.

Everyone made their introductions as part of the ritual breaking the ice. There was Elsa, a young bright girl who looked like she'd been in a car accident as she was terribly scarred on her neck and wrists; there was Binford, a jerky young guy, who just couldn't wait to start reading the books; Geraldine, Cornelia and Dorothy, three bratty sisters who just stared at everyone else - obvious rich kids - and then there was Maleva.

The first class went without obvious event. Everyone had their favourite books and Mr. Strange hoped they had a nice week until the next night school. He hadn't noticed the tension in the air when each of the books was introduced. The students really did have their favourites. They all walked off from the school into the dark.

The following week Binford and Elsa didn't show. There'd been no message sent to Mr.Strange and the class felt too small without them. Besides, the three girls were sniggering behind their copies of Dracula.

Maleva stared at them.

"What's your problem newbie?" said Cornelia.

"Nothing. I was just wondering what was so funny," replied Maleva smiling.

"None of your fucking business newbie," replied Dorothy viciously.

If Mr. Strange heard this exchange he showed no reaction to it and after a reading gradually brought the class to an end.

Maleva noticed him speaking with the three girls as she was leaving. The tutor had his head curiously bowed as if he was cowering.

It was a dark cold cloudless night outside and the stars were out in full and shining brightly casting a wan light on those below.

"Hey newbie, keep your fucking big fat nose out of our business, in class or out of it. Get it!"  snarled Geraldine as the three girls met Maleva at the corner.

"Yeah, you nosey bitch. We'll laugh all we want to. Those other retards Binford and Elsa were nosey like you and who knows were they are now!" whispered Cornelia.

All three of them began to chuckle again at this.

Mr. Strange turned the corner just then and joined the group.

"Everything all okay girls?" he enquired.

"Maleva the newbie here is asking an awful lot of questions Mr. Strange," explained Dorothy moving closer to the girl.

"Its a small town Maleva and its best not to make any waves I'm afraid," warned the tutor.

Maleva was alarmed at Mr. Strange's obvious collusion with the girls and her hackles were up now. 

"Besides, its our town and we don't need no rookie bitches like you and that Elsa spoiling our fun. Isn't that right Mr. Strange," gnashed Geraldine exposing unusually long dog teeth as she spoke.

"That's right. Its an orderly place Maleva and as long as everyone follows the rules we'll all get along. You might say its a well-bled town. Every donation secures the peace and I help keep the donations flowing. Elsa and Binford were most accommodating but they struggled and that was a shame. The girls had to take more than was necessary I'm afraid. We hope you won't struggle Maleva," reasoned Strange as he began to grab her hands.

"I wouldn't do that Sir if I was you," warned Maleva menacingly.

"Why not, Your'e just some punk bitch from trashville. Do it Strange, we're hungry!" hissed Dorothy.

"I'm a .... werewolf!" explained Maleva, "Things could get very ugly for you!"

"You fuckin what! A werewolf! So fuckin what if you are! There's no full-moon tonight. You've got your fuckin periods mixed up slag. You can't harm us, we're the Brides of Dracula himself!" shrieked the three girls together as they began to levitate.

Strange loosened his grip a little at the unnerving news.

"I'm not a lunar werewolf," continued Maleva, "I'm an astral one."

Strange loosened his grip completely even though he didn't know what that meant.

"What the fuck is an astral werewolf you piece of shit? You're just stalling 'cos you know your'e ass is ours. Get her sisters!" cried Cornelia.

"An astral werewolf is one that changes not by moonlight .... but by star-light. And the stars are full tonight ladies!" explained Maleva as the Brides approached drooling and clawing.

They stopped and Strange stopped too.

Maleva transformed into a huge snarling howling shirt-tearing wolf girl in seconds and ripped all three Brides and the tutor to shreds in the darkness of the street corner next to the Night School.

The she-wolf ate and drank until her gut was distended. There wasn't a scrap left when she'd finished.

Maleva turned back and picked up her book off the floor, the Werewolf of Paris.

She chucked Dracula in the bin and walked off smiling under the pale glow of the starry night.

"I like this town," she thought to herself and wandered home.

THE KING OF THE SLUGS WILL GET YA!

Schlimm was a horrible kid.

From the off he was soured; a punch thrown in a skin bag.

Like all young psychopaths he was cruel to other kids and animals.

Especially animals.

Schlimm had burnt, torn, stamped, crushed, ripped, pulled, gauged and skewered his way through the animal kingdom of his local town.

He was a biocidal maniac, an apocalypse in the verges and borders.

Schlimm had tortured larger animals like cats and dogs but he preferred to practise on smaller fayre to get full satisfaction.

Insects were his real area of expertise.

He'd started by pulling the legs off spiders. His young mate back then said the spiders would get him. Shut it you soft bastard or I'll pull your fuckin legs off he threatened.

He liked reducing those spiders. Creating useless torsos; He moved onto ripping the wings off flies and smiling as they ran across his desk flightless and scared. Next came cutting up worms with scissors and relishing the jerking of every severed slice.

He then discovered the cleaning cupboard.

"What are doing with my vim boy?" his Mother would shout.

"Nothing Mum, just cleaning my desk!" he'd lie.

"You've not got any creepy crawlies up there have you again? Be nice or the King of the slugs will get ya Schlimm!" Mum warned thinking that her son was simply interested in ant farms and wormeries for perfectly normal reasons.

But his reasons were far from normal and his delight in causing distress to insects knew no limits.

His pies-de-resistance was what he did to snails.

He'd got the idea from his Grandad gardening.

"What you doing Grandad?" he said hovering like a stuck moth.

"Setting a beer trap" replied the old man "to kill snails. They're eating my damn begonias!"

The thought of snails drowning in drink fascinated Schlimm and he hit on an idea that sent frissons of pleasure up and down his spine.

"The king of the slugs will get ya Gramps!" he shouted to his Grandad as he left the garden.

The idea was simple enough. He'd set up a stack of beer traps using glasses. A pyramid it said. He'd seen it in one of his Mum's glossies. A champagne fountain or something. It was the summer holidays too. Time to celebrate!

But it wouldn't be champagne he used.  Too dear. For toffs that. It'd be coke, Coca cola. Lots and lots of the burpy stuff. Yes, He'd pour and pour until each glass was full an' overflowing.

There'd be a snail in each one. A soft pearl.

He did it that night in the shed and went to bed more satisfied than he'd ever been before. The snails had fizzed and bubbled like chickens in little ovens. It was great! One got away but what the hell. Slimeball!

He must have melted two hundred snails and slugs that summer before the snails ran out in the area. He'd dissolved them all in coke. It's the real thing after all. He'd killed the lot. 

Drawn to the sickly gloop in the final glass he put it to his lips and ...... drank!

He left the shed licking his lips and eventually went back to school at summer's end. Year eleven.

He'd been thinking about girls at night in his room, his hands covered in slime. He was horny. Horny and uncontrollably evil.

Maybe it was time to move up the ladder. Bump off bigger stuff than dogs. Like a girl maybe! Yes!

She was standing by the lockers like an anemone staring at him. A young lady of shining marble. A girl with glossy long hair. A girl he could drip feed coca cola to alright. And worse!

"You new?" Schlimm asked.

"Yes. Just arrived in town," she replied in a silky, echoey, wet voice.

Schlimm was smitten and began planning her demise almost immediately. He would need the best plan ever. A plan that required many night's hard deliberation.

"You wanna come back to my parent's trailer?" she asked him one day after school. "We could go over cell division for tomorrow's exam."

Schlimm was thrown by this offer. He hadn't yet perfected his plan for her and here she was - asking him on a date!

He went along for ideas. Maybe something in her room might inspire him to give her the sticky end she deserved.

"We live in a trailer park just off the heath. You can ride on the back. I'm used to having something on it," she explained getting on her pushbike.

They arrived at a vast field full of caravans. In the middle was an enormous clubhouse. The vans and the house were all strangely domed and coloured a strange dull grey-silver-blue.

Schlimm knew he couldn't murder her just yet. Not on her home turf. He would have to wait. In the meantime he would plan the method of execution and felt excited just imagining her sloppy end.

"Let's go to the clubhouse. There's a big turn on," she explained dragging Schlimm along a trail, which was covered in an odd silver scum as if snot had been sprayed along it.

They walked in and the place was dark. There was an unpleasant odour and the space was filled with a sort of squelchy background noise. Schlimm imagined it to be the sound she would make as he did what he needed to her.

At the centre of the huge room he could make out the silhouette of a towering tiered structure in the gloom.

"The light's coming on or what?" he asked his new friend in an irritated tone.

Suddenly the switches were thrown and the place was flooded with light. Schlimm had to close his eyes for a second but when he opened them he saw a sight which he simply could not fathom.

Before him was a tower of huge champagne glasses all stacked up like a pyramid. Just like the one he'd made in the shed. But these glasses were massive, as big as doors and inside each one was a thing. A moving thing.

Schlimm stared at the things and tried to work out what the hell they were when the nearest one to him moved enough to look straight at him.

It was his Dad for God's sake! His Dad was stuffed into a giant glass, naked and trussed like a cherry on the end of a long stick and staring straight at him!

In a state of increasing shock he stared at the other cherries and realised with mind-crunching horror that they were all his family: his Mum, his sisters, his Grandparents and .... noooooooooooooooo!

..... at the very peak of the stack, in the top glass was a figure smaller than the rest, a figure small enough to be a ..... it was his baby brother!

Schlimm let out a blood-curdling scream all his mind reeled to maintain a grip on sanity. Even he could not comprehend the contraption before him, a pyramid of his relatives.

He continued to scream as all around him movement began in the shadows as things started to slither towards him.

His new girlfriend glared at him, mucus dribbling from her widening toothless mouth.

"How do you like our handiwork Schlimm? We call it the family tree. Its your family tree really. A champagne fountain made specially for us. We're sooooooooo thirsty" she said just as her back bent and a monstrous shell erupted from under her shirt.

"Yes, it'll be a family fountain to be proud of, for grand guzzling and one fit for a .....King!" the shell girl hissed through thickened lips as her eyes began to stalk.

The entire company of things turned with a slithering sound to face a colossal snail sliding towards Schlimm.

"You really shouldn't have dissolved my family .... boy" hissed the giant as he towered over him. "Its only fair that I ... dissolve yours!"

The boy was held fast by two snails as the King of their kind muscled its way up the wall and positioned itself above the uppermost glass. Clinging to the ceiling it began to rub and squeal and shudder and enormous quantities of thick slime started to pour into the glasses, filling one, then the others and then the others in a Niagara of snail saliva.

Schlimm saw with horror that each of his family members were bubbling and sizzling in the viscous stuff, writhing in agony and screaming silently into the gloop as the stuff filled their mouths and slowly began to dissolve them.

The boy was lost in a twisted world even he could never have conjured and he shrieked out at the top of his lungs "I'm soooooooooorry!"

"Too late murderer!" whispered the shell girl and Schlimm was dragged by strong probosces toward an opening at the base of the fountain where a long pipe dangled. On his back, he was held flat and the pipe was cruelly inserted into his mouth.

Schlimm now had a view of everything that was falling out of the glasses overflowing above him, gurgling down the flutes and pouring into a wide funnel at the bottom, a funnel to which was attached ..... the long pipe now stuffed in his mouth! The irony of it, his own lethal idea was going to kill him too.

When the slime entered Schlimm's throat he screamed once again. The acidic fluid burnt his insides and the pain was completely unbearable. His body began to convulse violently and when the first holes began to appear on his skin as the snail slime dissolved him he knew that death was near, a death he now craved as the agony of being liquefied was more than his sanity could withstand.

His final sight was of a wet scrum of snails and slugs gliding over the slime fountain above and slurping up all his melted family members. Within the glasses he could see a little hand twitching and his Gramp's set of false teeth swirling round the thick red and pink ooze as if they'd been through a blender.

A huge moist tentacle slapped upon his face and began to drink his cheek juices. The girl-snail still had her face and she smiled at Schlimm as she drank voraciously. 

"Not so fuckin' clever now are we you murderous human scum!" she drooled as the one that had got away gargled his bubbling scalp and brains.

The king of the slugs just got ya!