CAFE BLOOD

The craft course was in a beautiful rambling country pile in rural Nottinghamshire.

It was a gorgeous Sunday. The September light promised that summer's end was still some way off. The air was clear and a warm breeze blew through the estate.

Katrin was enrolled on a craft course there. Crafts for Novices it said on the ticket. It had been a Christmas gift from an unknown benefactor and Katrin had at long last found the time to go to this important event. Her facile work as a village vicar had kept her far too busy. 

In fact she was glad to get away and was actively reforming herself because after fifty years with the toothless Jesuit her faith in the Nazarene was gone. Increasingly delighting in the cruel and constant slurry of blasphemous bilge on TV Katrin was finding more and more truth in a world ruled not by God but by Satan. It made much more sense to her and she felt a new stimulus growing inside her like an egg. 

Sadly during this essential change she found no comfort at all in her insipid husband Daniel, as his allegiance to her was non-existent. He was increasingly spiteful and it was clear to Katrin that Daniel was fast becoming a thorn in her side and a distraction from her second path.

Daniel had come with Katrin because of the food and sat in the garden café of the country house with a book he’d bought on holiday in a charity shop. It was called "Suture" and was one of those well-thumbed 1970’s horror paperbacks with a bloody cover depicting a needle piercing someone’s lacerated skin. 

He ordered a cappuccino and a delicious-looking sausage sandwich and nestled down into his comfortable deckchair relishing three hours of peace and quiet and an escape from his Wife’s unending and unbearable tirades about how terrible the world was and how God had forsaken it.

He just wanted to delve into a fictitious realm of mindlessly violent blood loss and not have to listen to Katrin’s irksome stream of shite. God how he wished she’d join a cult or something and just fuck off.

The first large cappuccino turned into a second and third one. Daniel gratefully admired the lithe figure of the young siren who had waited on him. He planned to tip her well.

A late summer wasp poked its face into the sweet leftovers of the first two cups yet to be taken away. Daniel had purposefully hidden them on the next chair to get the siren back later. 

The wasp re-emerged with a mouth covered in froth and looked as if it had been gagged. Daniel smiled. 

"Serves you right wasp for sticking your beak into other peoples' business. Like Katrin!" he mused. 

Yes. Katrin was a black and white wasp buzzing round her needy congregation, removing unwanted baggage, bringing it home and poisoning him in the process. The world's nosiest dog-collared pest!

He smiled bitterly. He realised he was utterly sick of Katrin and had to leave her or else he might do something he would regret. Something biblical.

The bothersome insect was still hovering round his cups and getting way too close to him for comfort. Daniel had had enough. 

Taking an unused glass he trapped the insect on the table. The horned wasp stared at him hatefully and pounded the transparent walls of its new prison. Daniel could have sworn he momentarily saw Katrin's head on top of its stringy neck. He grimaced and felt a shudder run along his spine.

Shaking his head, he looked at his watch. Eleven am. Another two hours of peace. At least he hoped it would be peaceful. The first hour had perturbed him, his book offering only snatches of grisly comfort as he dealt with his pesky friend still incarcerated in the glass tower. 

What he had managed to read was basically a sordid tale where prisoners were experimented on without anesthetic. A black-garbed Judge asked them to repent before further sentences were passed, his particular favourite being the Y- incision and autopsy, naturally whilst the poor unfortunates were still fully conscious. These corrections he administered himself in a square, mirrored room, so the unrepentant could see their grisly descents into Hell.

Daniel had had enough Cappuccino so ordered a pot of tea for one. Once the attractive waitress had tended to his needs again he sat back to watch the comings and going’s of the garden cafe’s other guests. 

"It takes all sorts I suppose," he thought. "Look at them. Slurping coffee like sheep wittering on about their interminable problems to friends and family who just want to be somewhere else and not have to put up with the never ending swill of self pitying effluent streaming from their gobs!"

He imagined them all being taps, which he went round and turned off, twisting their heads till their mouths shut. He chuckled at this image and returned to Suture. The mad judge was busy slicing open someone's belly and lifting out entrails like presents.

It was nearly lunch and Daniel ordered a liver sandwich, a hangover from his Lancastrian childhood when offal had been half his diet. Kidneys, tripe, bone marrow, dripping and his favourite, liver, preferably pigs as they seemed to imbue it with extra succulence. 

He did feel sorry for those pigs but at least they ate well and never moaned about how shit everything was. Not like Katrin and her tiresome flock. All strung-up and uptight. No flavour at all he reckoned. Unforgiving meat. The judge would sort them out. 

"Yes. He certainly would!" he said aloud laughing. 

Some of his seated neighbours stared at him. He smiled and bit noisily into his liver.

The wasp in the glass was quiet. Exhausted from fruitless efforts to escape it sat in its cell, its torso heaving. Daniel uncharacteristically felt sorry for it now. The little devil was clearly beaten and had inevitably bowed to his greater mind. He, its mighty captor and master!

He lifted the glass and it flew straight at his forearm and stung him. The wasp’s stinger was so forcefully stabbed into his skin that once it had excitedly injected its venom it could not free itself. It buzzed and buzzed in helpless frustration.

Daniel screamed and leapt out of his chair. He saw the thing trapped in his flesh and clasped it with his thumb and forefinger, violently ripping it off. The stinger remained like a thorn topped with the insect's guts and as he touched it Daniel screamed again in agony. 

Everyone in the café was staring at him. He was sure they all had Katrin’s hateful grimace. He stormed off towards the building knocking over the table.

“Help. Help!” he bellowed as he staggered into the entrance clutching his increasingly swelling arm.

“I’ve been stung. Terribly stung!” 

Daniel was almost delirious with the scolding fire tearing through his limb when losing consciousness he fell headlong into the craft room where his wife Katrin was.

Daniel awoke surrounded by concerned faces. He was strapped to a table surrounded by figures dressed in black. They glared at him and tutted.

“So this is Daniel eh Katrin.”

“Yep. This is Daniel. A sorry specimen of a husband I have to admit.”

“Yes. Sorry. Well. If you are to progress to the next stage of the craft Katrin we will have to make Daniel sorry he was ever ejected from his mother’s God-smitten hole I'm afraid.”

A familiar face moved forward and Daniel was horrified to see it was the Judge in his book Suture.

He wore a dark hood and a bright red dog-collar. Around his neck was an upturned crucifix on a jet black rosary.

He spoke like a goat.

"You have been found guilty of obstructing a disciple of the Great Lord. How do you plead?

"I’m innocent! I'm innocent!"

"What does the chief witness say? What say you Katrin?"

"Guilty! Guilty as charged!"

"Guilty! Then so be it. You shall be punished accordingly Daniel."

The Head Priest nodded to Katrin who picked up a large blunt needle and thread. She commenced to pierce Daniel's lips and pull the thick thread through the flesh. 

"Katrin! No! Please! No! I shall change, I shall support you, I shall follow you! Please!"

Katrin stared at her husband and shook her head before continuing to sew his mouth together, Daniel shrieking in agony throughout the embroidery.

With blood flowing into his stitched lips Daniel stared in disbelief at the woman whom he'd once loved, now smiling at him as the High Priest stooped over him with a scalpel.

Mumbling through the tight sutures and writhing against his straps Daniel's eyes widened in abject horror as the sharp blade entered his breast and was drawn slowly down his abdomen toward his navel. Hot smoking blood gushed out like lava and flooded the table. 

The coven grinned, overjoyed with the prospect of Daniel's sacrifice to the Dark One. They dipped their fingers into his opening chest and licked the tips. The High Priest pushed on with the Y-incision and forced open the huge wound, slowly revealing Daniel's steaming entrails slopping between his ribcage.

There was a moment of pause while all the assembled company raised their hands high above their heads. At the rapturous cry of the High Priest all hands delved into Daniel and in an ecstasy of bloodlust pulled out fistfuls of wet organs and tubing, holding them in the air before nuzzling them theirs' and each other's faces.

It was Katrin who reached in last smiling broadly and menacingly. Her smile broadened close to his face as she clutched his still-beating heart and dragged it from its bloody roots. Daniel screamed so forcibly that his lips ripped open and from the mangled hole emitted such a blood-curdling yell that he passed out.

Daniel awoke with a start at his café table with his face in a saucer of tea. The wasp was positioned inside the glass, now seemingly full of blood, greedily siphoning up the warm scarlet liquid. Katrin was sitting next to him. She had blood round her lips and was wearing a crimson dog-collar and an upturned crucifix on a jet black rosary.

He quickly felt his lips. They were painfully ragged and peppered with agonising holes.

Panicking he fumbled to unbutton his shirt and stared at his chest feeling the skin with enquiring fingers.

A huge angry Y-incision was brutally stitched up all the way down his chest.

Daniel screamed and screamed in total horror and looked up as Katrin bit deeply into his glistening severed heart held in her hand.

RICHARD RAVEN, PAINTER

It was the summer of 1547. The sun baked the dense streets like a sadist. It reeked of shit and piss. Richard Raven strolled through it all. He wore a large beaked mask stuffed with herbs to keep the stink out. His black hood was up and his long dark cloak trailed in the sewage. He looked like a crow.

He entered his home knuckling the graveyard. It was crooked and its four front windows stared over the massing graves. They heaved like mole hills in the offended till. His home was his sanctuary. The Exorcist's House because Richard raven was an exorcist of paint.

When he painted people he could protect them. His portraits guarded them from their demons and for this he was handsomely rewarded by the grateful rich. This was the contract. Paint for monthly purses of gold and silver and you shall live a happy life free of torment and canker. This was the Raven's stipend, an allowance for the pain his rigours brought him. Recently those pains had worsened and he stooped often with increasing fatigue.

Still he endeavored to exorcise the coming dark with brushes and oils and his strokes of sanctuary hung on the walls of the City's elite like stays of execution. They were mounting too as if some foul edifice was braced above the town poised on the very brink. Their demons were massing.

The painter also assisted the poor and the decrepit of the slums near his house, the overwhelmed and the gangrenous teeming like rodents in the slurry creeping down from the high villas. He painted them freely requiring no payment but the obvious gratitude and sorrow seeping from their faces.

Thousands of these tiny paintings covered his own walls and Raven drew succour from the humility captured within. These were the seraphim in the hell they'd not constructed. The elvers in the priveleged piss. They too twitched like stricken flies at their dismal end. The gutters seemed fit to burst. Talk of malignancy hissed round the cramped alleys like a tide of adders; talk of Death and the Devil himself.

But Richard Raven had a weakness, which was also his escape from the banal, the strain and the growing unease.

He liked to eat and drink the finest meats and wines in the city's most expensive hostelries and bed the most sophisticated women of the night, who's clothes were lavish and quims were washed anew. For this decadence he strew his gold like confetti. Or rather, the gold of the fortunate and the bloated, piled high in the salted cellars of the exorcist's house, his hidden pension.

It was on a night such as this, a night of opulence and copulation that the beaked man staggered home under the misty smoke of the torches by the church.

"Raven!" whispered a voice in the darkness. "Richard Raven, Painter!"

A figure stepped out of the shadows and stood before the startled man.

"Yes. I am Raven. How can I be of service to you?"

"I am Merelda. Contessa of Stygia. I seek your famous skills as an artist of rare hue as I suffer the prospect of injurious blows this very eve."

"What ails you Contessa and I shall see if I can help."

"I am followed by a person of twisted character. A brute who wishes to do me harm. An ogre hell-bent on my mutilation and the violation of my very self."

"Who is this man?"

"He is a force of nature, a terrible lord, who's name remains unknown to me. I know him by his dreadful aura as you would do too".

"I need not meet the man but rather protect you from him If I am correct?"

"Yes. Yes. Oh please help me!"

The lady came closer and kissed the artist's hand and a sudden surge of temptation swept through him. His pulse quickened and he fevered under the mask.

"I shall help you Madame but I require recompense in advance and then monthly forthwith. How will you pay me?"

The Contessa blushed under the dusky torchlight and unfastened the top button of her velvet camisole. Her slow fluttering was unmistakable to Raven, a proffer of passion and a wage he immediately approved of.

He wished heatedly to bed this noble and show her the lengths he would go to capture her essence. He took her hand and walked into his house.

He handed the Countess Merelda a small glass of claret. She smiled and bowing he stepped into his wash room, where Raven removed his beaked mask and his hooded cloak and with spiced soap flannelled his hands, face and loin.

With more claret flowing and deep in the silks and taffetas of his boudoir he wooed the Contessa and felt his passion burgeoning like never before. Her visage, her perfume, her shapely curves all concocted a feverish desire in his weakening soul.

"No Richard! First you must paint me. Then you shall have me!" the Contessa advised.

Raven flicked and dabbed through the night to render the Lady's impression onto his canvas. He was distracted throughout but by and by it was done.

"It is complete Contessa".

The Stygian royal stood in front of her portrait perfectly still.

"You have done well Richard, esteemed painter, but I am unsure of you have captured my truest of natures".

"I have tried my very best my Lady and wish most eagerly to now take you to my bed and describe further my technique," cooed Raven.

"Of course Richard, you shall have me but first you must see me fully in the atelier's light."

The Contessa began to slowly remove her garments; the velvets, the brocades, the camisole. When her petticoat was all that remained Raven held his breath.

It fell and in the dusk of the artist's room revealed a body so hateful, so inhuman that he held his hands over his mouth.

The Lady's breasts were those of a cow, her arms the twisting, biting lengths of serpents, her waist the hairy hide of a warthog and her legs .. it was her legs that made Richard Raven scream, a scream that left the Exorcist's house and carried down the cramped streets of the city like a mad crier.

The Contessa's legs were those of a goat, matted with thick brown hair. Her feet were coarse cloven hooves. Raven stared in disbelief and gagged.

His eyes rose slowly to the head and there .... before him .... was the horned Devil! Lucifer himself!

"You have been busy Richard. I thought I'd better pay you a visit myself before you put me out of business in this Godforsaken hovel completely! I hope you approve of my guise, the voluptuous Contessa, whom I knew would ... erm, wet your palette so to speak! You may still bed me should you wish but I advise against it unless you wish to be incinerated by my particular hot passions!"

"No!"

"Ah, No! As I expected. I have no wish to char your manhood Richard but I do wish to burn all of your paintings. My demons have waited quite long enough and they do so wish to plague your townsfolk so diligently once again. I aim to set them free from your pesky canvas prison".

"You may still wish to bed the Contessa before I start Richard. On the house. Your last brush with lust you might say."

"No. No thankyou".

"Ah well, Never mind. I am keen to free my friends anyway, so they may degrade this pathetic town afresh. I think I shall begin with my Asteroth, who has been sorely missed by his Duchy of pain."

Satan stared at the painting of an Admiral in which his Arch Duke of Hell was bound in a second portrait behind it.

"Ah yes. Asteroth my old infernal fellow. Naturally the Admiral will suffer a terrible demise I'm afraid."

"No! My Lord Satan!" intervened Raven, "Perhaps start here! My own self portrait! You know you want to and since I am plagued by many demons you will release them all at once, a veritable windfall of devils and I shall perish right before you!"

"Hmm. a most enticing proposition Richard. A windfall you say. I like the sound of that. Let the devilry begin!"

Satan whiplashed his flaming fork-tail and lit the painting. It flared in a noisy sizzle of oils and Raven's image quickly sagged and wilted.

The painter began to sweat and cough.

Lucifer laughed.

"Soon this town will be writhing in my demons' filth again and you my friend will hang on MY wall for eternity in my gallery of despair!"

As the rear painting caught as well the painter coughed a little more but then looked up at Satan and smiled.

"Why do you smile so Painter? You have little to delight you I would have thought!"

"I'm smiling because you have not inspected those portraits closely enough my Lord Lucifer. In fact you have simply taken my word for it!"

"What are you talking about mortal, I can clearly see that it's you in the frame you dullard!"

"Ah, but is it? In fact it is not me, it is my twin brother Clifford, who has been dead these past ten years, ensnared and heinously murdered by your mistress The Black Death. He lies not one hundred feet away in the graveyard, where I had him interred, whilst vowing vengeance on pestilence and your Hellish breed."

"What! Dead? the Black Death? You trickster Raven! You talentless dauber! And who in Satan's name is on the second portrait?"

"Why, you are correct My Lord Lucifer!"

"What!"

"It is you that I have painted! You Satan! You Lucifer! In truth you were my Brother's demon and his executioner, the Blackened Death simply your idiotic slave. It is you that is burning in oil!"

As the painting of the Devil went up in flames the smell of searing soulless flesh filled the room as Satan began to burn. Though born of flame and fire, this vengeful charring was a pogrom he could not withstand and with a final glare of primal rage toward the smiling painter, he spread his blazing wings and smashed through the roof of the Exorcist's House and sought the solace of his foul abyss.

"I shall return Raven! Mark my words! I shall return!" bellowed the Devil.

The painter laughed even louder.

"I think not you Fallen fool!" Raven chortled, "Look!"

The painter held up a whole stack of portraits he'd made of Satan and howled in triumph.

"Damn you Raven! Damn your soul to Hell!"

As Lucifer flew smouldering into the Pit Raven looked toward his brother's grave, where a curl of smoke was rising.

Raven smiled.

"Rest in peace my dear Brother; after my brush with the Devil by God's grace I live on yet to fight another day."

The painter then raised a glass of claret to the oil of the grinning Contessa still glistening on his easel.

"My Lady," he bowed.

SHIP OF FOOLS

The vast container ship Eighth Wonder had never registered its voyage. Chartered by the Hong Kong triads it had been fictitiously logged in Africa as carrying tonnes of Halloween costumes, harlequin hats and animal dummies under the owner name of Mr. Tom Foolery.

However, having left the port of Casablanca in fine conditions it had met with a rare typhoon and was blown terribly off-course. 

On the third night it was now hopelessly lost and listing badly in the mounting waves. Despite its massive size the tidal waves teetered over its cargo like the hands of God.

Then the hands struck. Colourful containers began to fall into the North Sea. First one, then dozens, all colliding with each other in the gigantic metal fury of the storm in the pitch blackness of night.

Locks popped, latches blew and doors released their true contents into the sea.

Apes.

Hundreds of live apes destined for the illicit and cruel practises of Triad medicine men and dealers. 

No more.

These apes were destined for Runswick Bay a nautical mile away, which lay asleep on the misty Yorkshire coast.

Shaking off sedatives given in port, they now swam. 

A thousand apes swam through the surge like the dawn of sentience. On and on they swam; gorillas, mandrills and chimpanzees desperate to reach the lights glimpsed through the angry water. They swam without making any noise. Many unwittingly wore fools' caps and jesters' curled slippers.

Bedraggled, scared, starving and lethal, they dragged themselves up onto the beach. Some had been sadly lost to the depths but most succeeded.

Far away on the churning waves the Far Eastern vessel sailed on without its load, the corrupt Captain forced into maydaying the local Coast Guard but the radio appeared dead, the bitter irony not lost on him in his hour of greatest need.

The apes themselves assembled on the sand and took one last look out to sea at their former prison. Then they turned towards the dim lights of the village swaying in the strong cyclonic winds.

It was three in the morning and nothing so much as breathed in the bay battened down for the night's fretful tempest.

The gorillas lead, followed by the mandrills and the chimps. They ran across the beach, up the harbour rampway and into the village, where they spread out in search of food and water.

A huge gorilla broke into the kitchen of the Royal Hotel, where a young man, Maitland, was on a writer's retreat for the summer attempting to pen a horror novel.

He was the first person to see an ape that night, the massive Silverback raiding the Hotel's fruit store. Maitland had needed a late night coffee from the maker to keep him awake during a fertile run of typing.

"OH MY GOD!" he shrieked as he confronted the massive primate, who was startled as he was. The ape crashed through the front double-doors into the night clutching bananas and sweetcorns.

Maitland was stunned and after drinking a whisky from the bar he went to wake the manager.

The second and last person to see an ape was Mrs. Darrow as she was peeling potatoes for the early shift of Darrow's Chippy. She screamed to high heaven when the Mandrill stared at her through the pantry window. At first she thought it was someone in fancy dress with a painted face but then she realised it was an ape she'd seen on Life on Earth on the telly. She screamed anyway and shifted it up a gear when the creature walked in and grasped her sack of spuds before shambling off up the cliff steps.

Every house and store were burgled that night but only fruit and veg were taken. Only two people had seen the primate burglars but nobody believed them. Yes, some things had been meddled with like a human skull in the schoolroom cabinet and the holy water in the Church font had been drunk and other things ripped up like a Steiff monkey in the giftshop window, but beyond these and a few random fruit skins the majority of Runswick Bay woke up none the wiser.

As the apes gathered above the bay to eat in peace a sudden noise could be heard in the far distance. It was a strange sound and only audible to the apes. A few dogs in moorland farms yelped but it was the apes who heard it fully.

Having eaten they raised their heads in the direction of the sound and began to follow it over the moors and valleys, a caravan of refugees drawn to its irresistible promise.

At last they reached the source of the drone.

The animals gathered around three towering white balls standing erect on the bleak moor. They encircled the structures, craning their necks to see the origin of the summons at the peaks of the spheres. 

Some chimpanzees became agitated and tried to climb the balls' slick surfaces but to no avail. They slid off and landed on their compatriots. The company became restless until a single Silverback showed them how to grasp the steel webbing crisscrossing the massive orbs. Once at the summit the rest followed and clasped the big pinions circling the tops, waving their arms and bellowing loudly into the night from the roof of the world on what was the Fylingdales RAF Radar Station.

Suddenly the incredible scene was brightly floodlit and gargantuan netting was thrown over the apes, pinning them to the dome. Countless hypodermic darts were fired and the throng were quickly sedated and lowered into immense trucks.

By the morning the assembly were safely stowed with official passages to Africa in a huge operation to return them to the wild, much to the irritation of the Hong Kong Triads.

The classified report into the incident, codenamed DENHAM, included reference to a mayday call getting through and an elite unnamed squad being sent in to rescue the apes under the cover of darkness. The report made it clear that the villagers of Runswick Bay, North Yorkshire, must remain unaware of the events of that night, a matter of National Security. 

The two residents who had had confirmed encounters with the subjects were 'rectified' with a story of a stag 'jesters' party gone awry, but after some hostility they were sworn to silence under the Official Secrets Act.

But Maitland and Darrow knew what they'd seen and can still be found secretly leaving fruit and veg out on dark stormy nights in the hope that the mysterious apes might return.

THE BLACK SHEDS

"No good will come of time spent near the Black Sheds!" his mother insisted grasping the boy's shoulders. 

"Heed my words Son!"

Vincent didn't. Heed them. 

As soon as he'd finished school he dropped off his bag in the porch and ran to the farm's Black Sheds at the wet bottom of the sloped field. He stared at them nearly every afternoon, his vivid imagination running wild. What a school essay he could write!

The Sheds was a dilapidated out-building made of ancient stone and rooved with rusted corrugated metal sheets painted black. Cobwebs smothered the split doorway and a foul smell drifted out from the dim interior. There had been two sheds once but now there was only one, the other simply having collapsed in on itself. However locals still referred to them as the Sheds. It had stuck.

An archaic cattle crush lay abandoned outside from the days when the Sheds were an important part of their ancestors' beef herds but those days were long long gone. The modern farm now was a mix of arable, some free range chickens, a few sheep, conservation and camping. No great enterprise but the family got by and they lived in the beautiful moors.

The Sheds had always been troublesome as far back as anyone could remember. Stories of strange noises and worried cattle abounded among the farming locals and more intimate tales of horrible visions and noisome imps had been passed down the family's generations. It was absolutely for the best that no-one went anywhere near them anymore.

Left alone the dire structure was returning to a nature unto itself. Bruised ivy crawled up the cracked stone walls and twisted oaks punched the rusted metal roof. There were unaccountable ash heaps strewn outside in the long decrepit grass. Spiders consumed each other and little shrieks of pain squealed continually from the undergrowth. Larger things burrowed round the drainpipes leaving wet trails through the fetid tussocks as they dragged helpless prey below the rank threshold into darkness.

Older ones in the village spoke of the Black Sheds harbouring the devil's chemist. Rot and Consumption was in those parts and even whispers of a more ancient corruption can sometimes be discerned in fireside tales on Winter nights. The dreaded Black Death, a loathsome relict that had plagued the valley, doubtlessly festering still like a stain in the soil and stone.

"There's Satan's sickness on those Sheds!" they warned.

Vincent wasn't bothered about any of this tittle-tattle. Curiosity had got the better of him and he had to take a look for himself inside those sullen sheds.

So one afternoon he summoned all his courage and stepped through the rotten timber door. It creaked as it slowly swung open and the boy was inside.

The interior reeked of dereliction and decay. Weak daylight misted through ivy-choked windows.

There were old farm tools scattered in one corner, tools much older than he'd seen before. Saws, knives, mallets, spikes and spears resting on a window sill as if they'd been thrown in. On the back walls were ancient chains and shackles pinned into the masonry. Vincent shuddered at the thought of what they might have been used for.

To his horror and delight there were also bones. Human ones!

The youngster cautiously walked towards them at the far side of the building. The floor was stained with thick dark patches of slime, which continued up the stonework.  The bones were both big and small. Some were still shackled but most were stuck in the pitch slick. They appeared to have been gnawed and the skulls were cracked open.

The slime on the floor and the walls seemed to be getter wetter and emitted a wholly unpleasant smell. Vincent approached and was convinced the murky stains jittered as he got closer. His shadow appeared to be part of it as it bubbled skyward towards the roof.

Vincent looked up and thought he saw something. Something scuttling over a hole in the rafters where dank ivy languished. Vincent squinted and saw what he thought was a face peering down at him, a small face hidden in the gloom. He sensed that it was smiling at him.

Suddenly the thing on the roof fell through the hole onto the shed floor, where putrefied hay was piled. It landed in it and momentarily vanished. The haylage convulsed as it writhed beneath.

Vincent was terrified and backed away.

The thing gradually emerged. It stared at the boy with blood red eyes. Though looking like a child it was without any real substance or depth. It was as if some young dead shadow had been given life. It simply removed the space it occupied and any light therein. A cold fell creature from the other side, a herald of ruin.

Without warning it sprang up and clasped Vincent round his front like a crab. It knocked the boy to the ground and dragged him by the hair. Vincent yelped in agony.

They reached the thick wet black stain. 

The thing stopped.

It stared at Vincent and grinned with such dreadful malice that he started to cry. Lying in the slime his young body suddenly began to shrivel and putrefy, pustules breaking out all over his skin.

"Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!", he screamed.

No-one could hear and no-one saw the dire creature swallow the rotting boy whole before quickly leaping headlong into the stained walls, where it dissolved and vanished.

If during the coming days when the Police were searching for the missing boy they had plucked up the courage to look through the hole in the roof of the Black Sheds they might have seen a small dark form.

A small dark form with Vincent's face staring down at them smiling.

Frank's House

Out out get out of my house. The weak sunlight limped through the curtains and embalmed the dust. It was so long ago. Frank had been sitting there forever. On his hide armchair with a stale can of beer. He was half dead. Naked. Curled like a whelk. You better take your trenchcoat too. Fifty years ago. It was fifty years ago to the day. His daughter died. He'd killed her. Drunk. Young. Reckless. He'd been drinking. So young the both of them. Couldn't drink. Not at eighteen. Not yet. Damn damn damn that freezing March. He'd told him to leave the car if ever. If ever he'd had a few. Whenever his daughter was there. Get a taxi. He'd willingly pay. He'd foot the bill. He'd pay the piper. She'd died terribly. In dreadful pain. In hospital. Like roadkill. Gutted on a block. He'd grown to hate him Frank had. And his fuckin leather trenchcoat. No daughter of mines going out with an hippy. He'd got long greasy hair and a fuckin' black trench. A real talker down the Duck and Gun. A real centre of attention swilling his pints. The young fuckin buck. His daughter never stood a chance. The lorry was massive. It slid over them like a pan lid. She was ruined. Jugged. He got out. Hustler was playing on the radio. Get out of my house. Frank didn't get it. How a lazy goodfornothing scruffy bastard could survive and his beautiful daughter not. It didn't make sense. Or a scruffy little bleeder like you. He'd murdered him. Frank murdered him after the funeral. A good few years after. No one was none the wiser. It felt good. It made sense. Fuckin loser had killed his gorgeous baby. Justice had been served. That was fifty years ago. A lifetime. Beyond memory. Beyond reckoning. He'd got away with it. He sat with his beer still getting away with it. You better take your trenchcoat too. His hate hadn't simmered. It had boiled over like a broth of evil and murder was on his mind again. Anyone would do. Yes. There was a knock at the door. A recognisable face. Hi Frank. Remember me. I visited once before. Its OK. I don't need tea. I'll just sit with you awhile whilst you get things right in your head. I can help with the arrangements. Up the garden path. Out the gate. The two figures sat in the smoke-filled room, the sunlight now disabled. A reason was rising in the gloom. You got some feelings going on there Frank? Nice cozy killing feelings? I like your style. What you got in mind mi old mucker?" You better take your trenchcoat too. The visitor, a large brown hare, stood and walked to the old record stack. It stopped dead at the Hustler album near the back and grinned. A scruffy little bleeder like you it whispered. Ive seen you Hare. Trapped in a car wreck. Dried up like a leather bag. Frank muttered. Wasn't me Frank. I'm here with you aren't I. Why don't we go out for a stroll. Remember. Those warm cozy thoughts. Lets get your hands wet down the Duck and Gun. Fuck off Hare. Oh C'Mon! It'll be fun. Some backstreet blasphemy. Yeah! Killing that fuckin' hippy didn't bring her back. She's dried out like a fuckin' pelt. It didn't do shit. You're full of shit Hare. Yeah, but it felt good didn't it Frank. You can't deny that. It made sense slittin' that bleeder's throat and chuckin him in the canal with his shitty trenchcoat full of bricks. How good was that. Youre right. It did. It felt so damn good. Frank felt his hands tighten again. He stood and reached for a kitchen knife. He walked over. Hare smiled and put the record on before turning. Out. Out. Get out of my house. You better take your trenchcoat too. No daughter of mine's going out with an Hippy or a scruffy little bleeder like you.

IT RISES

It reeled against the rocks to no avail.

It knew its crescendos were useless on the harsh lime cliffs protecting the lands.

Like a prison wall it railed and wailed upon it, feverish, ashen, devilish, outraged.

The white walls had stood for eons long and would remain so but for man's new corruptions.

It sensed a change in the oceans, a glimmer of adjustment, a smidgeon of newness. 

It knew the weather and the seasons and the clouds and the currents and the air above.

But it knew not the land. 

Oh! the sweet land and its mysterious loafing creatures. It had tasted them on the seas, devoured them in the waves, tipped them from containers and slurped them from the depths. 

Delicious walking whelks, soft and slippery, how rare a delectation, how scarce a mouthful; what medleys of flesh it could savour, what dishes of skin it could suck; the marrow of its millions could soothe its salted maw.

Yes, a change is occurring. The seas are rising. The air is scorched by these very things it dreams of eating, these corrosive minds, these babbling snails. The worm has warmed.

It can slowly finger the poisons caking the sky, the effluence of the creatures on the solid land, their virulent slurry swirling round its pelagic home and the mangled skies above. 

The Lord of the Oceans cursed it at the start of time. It's tidal remand to last forever till the seas claim the mountains, whence it will be free to roam beyond its bounds and harvest what it finds.

Now a ghost of its splendid once-was, it pounds the scarps with massive claws; drumming the seductive geology warmed by the sunlight. 

It yearns to stretch on the fertile fields and relax its encrusted joints, dried by the solar winds at long long last; after a million millennia it will walk in the sun and eat soft unsalted men.

Ah! it can gauge the filling of the abyssal plain, the escalation of the tides and the water kissing the lips of nations. The seas are ascending and it rises with them, treading water before the cliffs, reaching out and sniffing the intoxicating sap of the billion waving trees.

It will be brief , its dry orgy of sweet bloods. The Ocean Lord will be hastening, his urge to turn the table strong. The Monarchs of the Land have walked long enough. It will be time for the rivers to smile as the vast floods of the seas converge atop the bony crust.

It will feed quickly and empty the continents of its meat, its colossal herds of walkers brimming with sloshing goodness. No more the sleazy fish snot, no more the saline guts and brackish heads scratching his blue palette.

It's here. The change is come. The seas lap the grassy edge and it clambers cautiously out of its indigo dungeon, a gigantic ghostly being crawling out of the fish-stuffed brew.

It lifts its titanic heads and noses the virgin sky stroking the hardness. 

Mmmm! Such perfumes of pumping hearts, saccharin, ferrous, electrified; a buffet of marrowbone and fountains of blood to wade in and slurp.

And so to start! Let the feeding begin!

FELLERS

The Queen of the Fairies broke all the rules when she walked into town.

After an age of secretly assisting the townsfolk she donned her finest raiment and assumed human form, a desire of hers that stretched back eons.

The Queen was a petite, beautiful, vibrant creature from another realm, fine and majestic, yet strangely innocent and exuding warm alluring youth. She was now also mortal for a time.

She skipped into the bakery, her long velvet cape fluttering behind her as she took in the full sweet aroma of the assembled loaves and pastries. Icing sugar motes and dead flies wafted up into the air as she darted through the door into the sunshine of the High Street.

On she danced past the empty cobblers, the boarded-up bank, the crumbling Post Office and the Vape shop, where she stopped to inhale the clouds of fruity smoke billowing from inside. Gruff men stared at her.

On and on down the dog-shit littered street she skipped. The queue of sick, hunched patients snarled like jackals as she floated by.

The Queen was lost in her reverie. Being human was much more of a joy than she had ever imagined and she forgot her fairy self completely as her ecstasy mushroomed. In a swirl of velvet and sweet woodruff  she pirouetted into a dilapidated bar, where grating music was blaring from the sound-system. Wary old men at the door hawked loudly as she blew in.

Inside the Queen twirled to the thrump of the ascending beat and ten figures emerged from the shadows by the pool table. They stared at her growling like dogs as they slurped into their frothy pints, edging closer, ever closer.

The grizzled gang of blokes were entranced by the rude beauty and irresistible vigour of the lithe apparition cavorting in the gloom of the stinking bar. They encircled the Queen and corralled her through the back into the dark snicket outside. 

"C'mon fellas!" cheered the heinous ringleader, vile malfeasance glinting in his bleary eyes.

The Queen continued to revel in the rapture of her mortal form, her hair and cape fluttering as she spun on piss-drenched cobbles.

One of the dog-men grabbed the Queen and flung her to the ground. She had no idea what was going on. The ringleader ripped open her velvet dress and was the first to violently take her. The other 9 followed. They took their time with her. One of them filmed the brutality on his phone.

"This'll go down a fuckin' storm on the web fellers!" 

They all laughed and walked away.

The Queen had been ravaged by the savages of the bar. She lay bruised, bleeding, injured and curled on her side in the filth of the alley. In a state of deep shock, her mortality gratuitously offended and reverie crushed, she whispered the name of her King before she died in the blood-splashed gutter.

"Oberon!".

The King of the Fairies heard.

"Titania"

The next night a new player was winning at the bar's pool table. Small for a man, no-one could stop him and eventually he got to playing the gang from the back. As their leader took his cue the others howled like wolves. He swaggered to the table and confidently shot the pack. But it was no use, the newcomer was on fire and with a blistering display of skill and finesse cleared the table in minutes, ending with a lengthy and showy twirl of his cue-stick and a big smile.

The gang-leader nodded to his goons. They all took a stick from the rack and once again bustled a hapless victim into the back alley, where they planned to teach the stranger some rules of the game. Their rules, the ones where they always win.

Encircling the man the gang began to bay like hounds as they slapped their cues. The leader stepped forward and spoke.

"What's yer name fella?"

"My name is Oberon," the stranger said.

"What kind of fuckin name is Oberon? You a pansy or somethin' ?" he laughed turning to his mates for approval. They grinned and gurneyed.

"It is my name. Mine alone, For I am Oberon, the King of the Fairies."

"Fairies? I knew it! You're a god-damn bender!".

The assembled dog-men screeched with laughter.

"Do you mortals know who you raped and killed this night past?"

At this the assembly shuffled and looked slightly less bullish but it was when the stranger slowly drew a huge sword from out of the cape on his back. It was colossal and nearly the length of his entire body. It sparkled in the lamplight as he rested it with both hands on the silver hilt.

"This is Torsos, the limb-taker. Last night you murdered my wife and only love, Titania, Queen of all Fairydom."

"What the fuc..."

The gang of goons didn't have time to think about what was about to happen before the mesmeric hands of the Fairy King wielded Torsos in a blur of glistening swings and arcs.

The ringleader gawped in horror at the atrocity around him. All his mates were limbless things writhing around in the dirt of the yard, their arms and legs strewn in a bloody circle around the remaining two figures.

The dwarf-men screamed and jerked like clubbed pups.

"Torsos has done well and honoured Titania's majestic name. But the final tithe is to be yours, leader of the pack. You shall suffer the worst fate of all".

It seemed like only seconds as Oberon gathered the severed limbs and bodies in a huge sack, sweeping them up along with the stunned gang-boss in his vast cape before flying into the sky towards the Forest. The sack wriggled and jolted as the bodies groaned and moved.

A colossal pyre of mast and brush was made for the purpose. The severed arms and legs were placed between the sticks. The limbless men were arranged in a ring in the middle, each having a large candle wedged into their mouths.

"But you my friend shall hold it all together, the centre-piece of our bonfire and the fulcrum of our hatred for all men," Oberon hissed at the ringleader.

"First I will sever your manhood".

The man, naked, was trussed up facing the forest canopy by small figures. His penis was stretched with vines and rocks.

"I don't need my sword for this. I shall use my pet rat, Grater."

Grater, a large belligerent rodent, began to gnaw through the soft phallic flesh and started to spurt in all directions. The man screamed in agony as the rat chewed slowly taking its time to slice through the main artery and nerve bundle. At the end Grater stared at Oberon, who nodded. Grater took the severed penis and swallowed it whole, licking its lips as it slid down its throat.

"Thank you Grater. Now my friend I shall personally take care of the rest of you," warned Oberon.

"For that I will need Torsos once again".

The man, writhing in pain on forest floor, begged for mercy but to no avail.

Oberon sharpened his axe with a wet stone and took up his master stroke stance.

"I shall take my time as you did with Queen Titania!" he grimaced.

First his blade took the man's feet. Then his calves. Then his thighs. There was so much blood flooding the ground now that Oberon adjusted his position and flicked the steel clean.

Torsos then sliced through the man's waist and he yelled as the pains of Hell stalked him. He stared down at his ever-reducing body and knew the end was near.

Oberon stopped and instructed his guards.

"Drag him to the pyre. Let him feel the sweetness of the flames!"

The guards obeyed and the man was placed on the mound. His entrails extended out beyond him and were draped down the side of the brash. His nine friends stared at him, unable to speak. They wriggled as the candles in their mouths were lit.

Oberon lit the vengeance fire and watched as the tinder caught. The scarlet flames fingered the man's innards making them sizzle. The fire grew and the man screamed and screamed as his flesh cooked. The other nine squirmed like maggots as the heat rose and roasted their stumps and gradually the flames began to take them all.

When the ten men were fully consumed and ash was all that remained, Oberon took a handful and marked the faces of the whole assembly with a T. Two swift strokes of his finger and each was so marked to honour the name of the departed Queen.

"Farewell Titania my beautiful Lady!" whispered Oberon, his head bowed.

The company bowed too, then slowly wandered away into the woods and left the scene where they had all witnessed the Fairy Master's felling strokes.

FAGBUT

The day slipped by like a slow wet fart.

Fagbut peeked out from under his gut.

To be exact, it wasn't Fagbut's gut. It was Fo Fum's the giant.

A corpulent gut it was too, hanging over his waistline in a quivering gurgling mass. Fo Fum's overhanging belly was the stuff of legend and Fagbut lived under it on account of his work.

Fagbut's job was to hand Fo Fum, well, fag butts he could toke again. The giant stored them under his gut, where it was moist and flavoursome. Fo Fum liked his roaches damp and cheesy and it was up to Fagbut to make sure they were. Damp and very cheesy.

A typical dispensing of said butt-ends would play out like this.

"Fagbut!" yelled Fo Fum.

"Yes, Squire!" replied Fagbut in a muffled voice beneath the flab.

"Butt!" instructed Fo Fum.

Butt was shorthand for 'I want a new cig-but and pronto!'.

Fagbut would reach out for a choice one nestling in the cheese garden. It was completely dark beneath the belly flap but Fagbut, of impish descent, could see quite well. He was a sort of gut mole. Fagbut would stretch his little muscular arms and offer the chosen item outside the flab, the button-cheese dripping off the end.

"Squire!" Fagbut would shout up towards Fo Fum's head.

"Ta!" replied the giant taking the tab.

'Ta' signified job done, a good butt and all was fine up top. The sound of sucking concluded the mission and Fagbut could relax for about two hours, while the huge fellow slurped and dribbled.

During his downtime Fagbut liked to talk to Buttcrack. Buttcrack was the goblin who's job it was to keep the giant's arse nice and clean. His principal task was to ball up any accumulating dirt and throw it out. The dirt often clung to thick hairs and this is where Buttcrack spent most of his working life, dragging the surplus off these hairs, rolling it into neat pellets and chucking them out of the giant's loincloth. He was basically a dung beetle.

Fagbut loved to talk to Buttcrack because his job was so much more dangerous and smelly than the belly-flab detail. Buttcrack would have it for another four years before Fagbut would have to rotate down there and Buttcrack would go higher up to the ears and become Lug'ole as part of the Official Fo Fum Body Maintenance Rota. Fagbut would become Buttcrack but he really didn't want to think about that now. Now he just wanted to irritate the current incumbent of the giant's rump.

"Buttcrack, oh Buttcrack! You finished rollin' shit?" teased Fagbut clinging onto a particularly long belly hair erupting from a humungous pustule on Fo Fum's gut.

"Yeah, just. You done rollin' cheese?" quipped Buttcrack climbing up Fo Fum's left buttock using dried-up blisters as hand and footholds.

"Don't talk to me about cheese! Its like chuffin' Cheddar Gorge down there! I'm not kidding, if its gets any grosser I'll have to quit!" Fagbut complained picking his large nose.

"Quit!" laughed Buttcrack, "You can't quit! No goblin of the House of Fum has ever willingly left office! It's our sworn duty to serve the giant's bodily functions until we drop dead. So was it ever thus and so shall it be!" explained Buttcrack edging round Fo Fum's drooping gut on an old thick love-bite.

"The House of Fum stinks! Its more like the House of Chum!" Fagbut jibed, "I want a transfer to one of those cushy numbers up top like Chinscratch or Headrub! Sod the turd floor as well. I'm done down here!" moaned Fagbut.

"You've only done a year Fagbut! You've four years to go mate so get used to the fresh cheese counter, 'cos you ain't going nowhere fast!"

"I tell you Arsepart, I'm goin' upstairs and my promotion starts now!"

"Don't call me Arsepart!" fumed Buttcrack.

Fagbut looked yonder at the giant's head at least a full fifty feet up. It might as well have been a sewer mile. Fagbut quivered but then pinched himself. He began to climb, warm thoughts of becoming Chinrub egging him on.

"I'm going now!" he shouted to Buttcrack.

"You cheesy slacker, you'll be back for tea!" yelled Buttcrack as his friend rose higher up Fo Fum's boil-peppered belly. 

It was slow progress.

Zits began to burst but Fagbut persevered. He looked down and couldn't see his rectal mate anymore. He was really high up.

Fo Fum burped.

"Yikes!"

He clung on to an especially large yellow-topped pimple and began to have second thoughts about his new career plan.

Two hours had passed pratting around.

"FAGBUT!" roared Fo Fum.

"Yes Squire!" beamed Fagbut  and clasping a long armpit hair it unfurled and he abseiled as fast as a toilet rat down his master's paunch.

"F-A-G-B-U-T!" bawled Fo Fum making his vast frame shake. It shook so much a nice cheesy tab-end slipped from under his gut-flap straight into the grateful arms of Fagbut.

"BUTT!"

"Squire!"

"Ta!"

The package was delivered and Fagbut wiped fresh curds from his brow.

"Phew!" he gasped, "Time for a cuppa!"

Buttcrack smiled broadly at his impish friend and slid back happily between Fo Fum's sticky cheeks to roll some new dags.

SHIN'S DRAG

The first thing to say about this tale is that everyone dies.

And when I say everyone I mean every fucker.

It contains a battle where the air was a fog of blood, a stinking scarlet Hell of curved steel and chopped meat, where men were beasts writhing in the pit.

But we'll talk of cruelty again.

I need to tell you about Shin.

Shin was a young pageboy to the great stupendous clan leader. He'd handed him his giant Katana before the fray in the billowing tent on the sloped field. The flags of the clan eeled in the breeze rising off the Sea of Japan.

Shin stared at the flags above their heads and watched his master ride into the ranks, where they waited for his command to face the enemy.

The tent was empty save for Shin and his Mother, who sat on stools cleaning the victory standard, its triumphant brocades gently shining as fresh cleansing water passed over them from a bowl.

"Our Master will prevail my Shin, do not fret."

"Yes Mother, but I sense a darkness and a dread. Is that a betrayal of our Master?"

"Betrayal? It is love. You are our Master's ward and it is natural for you to worry."

His Mother held him in the shadows of the canvas, the dawn light firing the dust like swarf.

"We shall prevail my Son."

Shin was six years old.

The little boy retired to his mattress and cuddled his rag bundle and slept as the battle bared its fangs in the valley beyond.

"Sleep well my love".

His Mother kissed him on the forehead and sat in the bamboo chair at his side, waiting for news. She sharpened her spearhead with a stone moistened with water from the stream nearby. She could hear it burbling like children in the golden age.

The morning turned to noon. A faint rain washed over the hills and whispered down the tent.

It said wake up Shin, your Mother is screaming.

Shin sprang up to witness the most soul-crushing thing.

A dark colossal Warlord was bent over his kneeling Mother fucking the life out of her, his lacquered armour clicking as he rammed with violent thrusts.

Shin's Mother yelled.

"Run, Shin, Run!"

But Shin was frozen to the spot.

The general raped his mother over and over and over. He penetrated her with every stick and cudgel in the rack, every staff, stave and arrow, a human mortar moaning in excruciating agony with every insult to her once beautiful body. 

Her injuries mounted as the General enveloped her like a giant blood bat, his colossal black shellac helmet rising like a phallus in the dusted shadows.

The General, his thirst for evil almost satiated, hefted the 15 foot long naginata super spear and with one final but hideous smile beneath his death mask slowly thrust its razor sharp tip far into his Mother's loin. 

She screamed as all the pains of Hell exploded. He groaned as he flexed his massive frame and pushed its shaft deeper into her body, tissue and bone no match for its heinous blade and his abhorrent strength.

As the bloody spear emerged like a demon from his Mother's torn mouth the General vaulted the pole upwards and forced its head into the soft ground with all his might. 

It quivered and towered above the boy, his reviled Mother stuck to the top, from where she slid, slid, slid and shuddered down the spear head down. As her impaled mouth reached the tent floor she stared in horror at the scene before her.

The General had turned his dreadful attentions to the boy. His sick perversions bruised and cut his tender flesh as he himself was raped and tortured by the sable wraith corrupting the very air he breathed. At the terrible end the General drew his sword . 

The boy, on his knees, bleeding and battered, stared upwards as the beast's katana slid between his young lips and like his Mother he was invaded. He shrieked in unimaginable pain as he was cut away. The warrior lifted his sword high into the air with the child impaled on the blade like a squid. 

Upon seeing the terrible immolation of her beloved Shin, with one final and rasping death yell the Mother screamed a garbled curse so vile, so hateful, so skin-crawling, that the General lowered the skewered boy and turned.

"M -M- Mark me, you cowardly insect, as you bask milk-bellied in your bastard's fortress, I shall come for you in the dead of night! I shall cover you when dream of your blood-soaked riches and I shall enter your body like a glacier of teeth and slowly eat your flesh and I shall eat everyone in your clan until there is no-one left to eat. Only then will I stop."

The General visibly squirmed as he listened to this nerve-searing vow. He stepped forward and pressed hard on the Mother's face until it burst open with a loud crack, her life-blood spilling onto his boots. He grimaced and flicked it off as he strode out of the desecration, his dark cape billowing behind like Death's itself.

Now the story takes a turn for the worst. Remember, every fucker will die and I meant it.

With the stink of iron infusing the tent and a primal scream lingering like an echo, Shin's crushed hormonal soul turned into a ghost. Confused, shaking, a boy spirit doused in sorrow.

His mother became something else altogether. Something indescribable. Something nightmarish, a scorched necrosis in a bag of dreadful hate, a maw of loathsome hunger bereft of morality, mercy or compassion. 

Her appetite for the flesh of men knew no bounds.

Shin flickered. A misty waif, he coughed up ectoplasm.

"Bastard bollocks!" he rasped and began to stagger towards his changing mother.

He grabbed her wet matted black and white hair and dragged her dead-weight out of the tent, a wide red stain marking their passage.

"Fuck cunt fuckers!" swore Shin's ghost as he struggled to hoist his mother along the ground towards the opposite encampment, where the enemy where celebrating victory.

As the pair approached the Victor's tent they saw the murderous Warlord fat with triumph on his belly. Giggling concubines massaged his creamed flesh like a wet fish but they flinched at the sight of a ghost boy hauling a mangled pulsating mass through the canopy towards them.

Shin placed his finger to his lips.

"Shush you fuckin' whores!" 

Shin stopped at the Warrior's feet.

He and his Mother stared at each other, shed a poetic tear and nodded gently.

The reckoning would be now. The baleful calculus of vengeance.

The ghost boy prodded the Warlord's foot. 

He turned his oiled hulk onto his back and gawped at the phantom.

Shin winked.

"You're fuckin' deader than dead!"

Shin watched with wonder as his Mother-pile sprang from the ground and enveloped the Warrior's feet in a swirling drape of rotting flesh and began to loudly devour him.

The doomed man screamed and watched as his body got shorter piece by piece. 

First his pale legs. Then his quivering waist. Then his corpulent torso was digested, his ribs sucked, his lungs and organs slurped like stew and eventually with a toothsome smile the Mother cracked open his face and with a hurrah from Shin his shocked brain mouthed out and he was gone.

"Fuckin' hell Mother! We did it! We have avenged our deaths!" exclaimed Shin's ghost.

They embraced under a spatter of stars.

Only then did they hear the soldiers sat reveling by the banks of the river.

Shin braced his Mother's hair and threw her ravenous remains into the throng. She landed with a loud splat on the middle of a table, knocking over bowls of eyes and teeth from the battle slain.

They stared at Shin's Mother shaking like a wig.

"I'd fuckin' run if I were you!" warned Shin.

Before they could she cast out hundreds of tentacles of corrupted flesh and snatched each and every feasting warrior present. 

She drew them all into her open cavernous gut and chewed and chewed until there were no more.

"Avenged and fuck yeah!" roared Shin.

They turned and sloshed across the river into land's unknown.

The fill of soldiers greased her way and Shin lugged for love.

But this sweet retribution, as silver as it was, simply wasn't enough for Shin or his Mother.

She was still starving and their searing hatred of Mankind slowly consumed them like the fires of damnation and they continued to walk the World, a wretched maelstrom of seething wrath.

"There's still so fuckin' many Mother!" Shin laughed.

He pulled. She ate.

She ate everyone they met. A curette of men. A globe-scraping abortion.

Her cavernous sack-belly swelled to enormity: the bulging souls of all humanity trapped within, dissolving into star gas.

They walked until the land ceased at the oceans, where they swam until the land regained.

When there was absolutely no-one left they came full-circle round the Earth returning to the field of their demise.

Here they sat and embraced each other, a maternal heap and a flickering boy.

"Fuckin' hell Mother. We've done it!" signed Shin.

They sat for eons and wept for joy staring at the stars as they fell from the firmament and nothing remained of them or anything at all.

CRUMBS!

Druff hated crumbs. He loathed them. Little tiny nuggets of toasted dry bread that got everywhere. Untidy. Untidy. Bothersome. Untidy! 

Crumbs were the bane of Druff's life and he went all out to avoid them, evade them and evict them. But he could never ignore them. Crumbs were his bête noire.

The creation of crumbs was taboo in Druff's tiny flat. No toast. No breadcrumbs. No bread. No biscuits. No cakes. And so no crumbs. The mere thought of a single dry speck of an old loaf would send him into fits, never mind an entire bag of crumb rub! That would finish him off.

And so it was that one day at work, a wet fish plant - haddock, turbot, gudgeon, cod and so on - that Druff had his 60th birthday. His colleagues on the gutting crew, who knew nothing of Druff's aversion to crumbs and all, but like him were always up to their welly-tops in wet dripping guts, bought him a huge cake. A very crumbly cake with a thick crumb topping.

Happy birthday to you squashed tomatoes and stew! .. and so on.

The cake was was wheeled out.

Now on the breadcrumbing section staff was a young man called Shirtz. Shirtz was a prankster and furthermore he'd had a few run-ins with Druff, who he thought was a jobsworth. Shirtz didn't like Druff.

And so as the birthday boy approached his cake Shirtz secretly threw some fish crumb and sturgeon guts onto the tiled floor. Druff walked onto it and flew forward completely losing his balance. His face catapulted into the cake at full pelt. Splat!

Druff rose. His head was blathered entirely in crumbs and cream. He spat and spat and spat but couldn't shift all the crumbs that had filled his mouth. He knew he'd been pranked and he knew who it was.

He turned. Seething. Raging. Covered in crumbs like a cod. The whole assembly howled.

'Shirtz! You little bastard! I'll get you for this. This time you've gone too far!"

Druff shook his fist ferociously and pointed at Shirtz and then made the slit throat gesture. His peers laughed and he stormed out leaving a trail of dry bread.

That night, still reeling from the prank, Druff re-entered the plant and took the wages box - hundreds of notes - and then finding a spare set of keys for the lockers, snuck it at the back of Shirtz's.

"This'll be you finished Shirtz you simple moron!" Druff gloated.

The next day the wages box was found in the worker's locker.

"But it wasn't me! It wasn't me!" He implored but his Boss, Bream, was having none of it.

"You've gone too far Shirtz. This is curtains I'm afraid. Pack your tackle and get out!"

"You fuckin' cunt Bream! It wasn't me but you can shove your shit job up your fishy arse!"

"How dare you! Druff's right, you are a moron!"

"Druff! What's he got to do with ..."

The penny dropped. It was that bastard Druff!

Shirtz left the premises but made a point of passing Druff on the gut line. He knocked into him viciously.

"Watch out Druff. One day. One night" at which point Shirtz made the hanging gesture and walked out smiling.

Druff eventually forgot about Shirtz and got on with his everyday life. Day in. Day out. Just getting on.

In November a big order came into the plant from Captain Birdseye. A million fish fingers for Christmas. It meant overtime for everyone.

Druff wanted to save up for a holiday. He did as much extra gutting as possible late into the night most nights. The fish came in and he would slice them open and clean them out. On they went from there to well, Druff didn't care. He'd done his bit.

One night Druff was working hard. It was late and he was sleepy. He'd already sliced his gloved finger and applied a plaster in the first aid room. When he got back he was too tired to notice a pool of fish oil at his station.

He slipped and banged his head on the hard edge of the conveyor, falling to the floor. Concussed he swore he could hear laughter nearby.

"Hello Druff! Had a little fall?"

It was Shirtz.

"Sh-h-irtz. Wha-a-t?" Stuttered Druff.

"Thought I'd stop by and say hello to my favourite old workmate. I say old because you got me fired. Remember! You stitched me up! So I thought I'd pay you back Druff. Pay you back good and proper. So here goes!"

Shirtz lifted the semi-conscious Druff up onto the conveyor belt. He went face-down into all the cod bits, skin and guts. Splat!

'Sh- Shirtzzz!' gurgled Druff, a small purple colon sliding between his lips.

Shirtz went over to the start button and skipped as he pressed it. The conveyor belt sprang into life and moved forward slowly.

"By the way Druff. Do you like fish fingers? Hope so. 'Cos you'll be Birds Eye soon. Oh crumbs! I wasn't going to tell you. It'll mean dying horribly I'm afraid. Then again you are a rotten old bastard who deserves to be gutted aren't you!"

As quick as the devil Shirtz took a knife and pushed Druff onto his side. He sliced him from chin to groin. His hot innards slopped out onto the wet belt mixing with the fish guts. Purple, blue and red bags and pipes, all steaming in the cold air. Druff looked on in horror as his entrails spread out before him.

Shirtz laughed hysterically and laughed even louder when the belt reached the choppers. The fast blades hacked up everything on the top. Druff couldn't believe what was happening. He tried to cram his insides back into his belly but it was too late. He looked up in terror as the side chopper first lopped off his nose, then his fingers and then his toes. The central chopper did the rest. His head was riven in half and eventually his entire body was minced up like the fish pulp swimming around him.

When the initial fish fingers came out of the other end of the machinery Shirtz was eagerly waiting with a little frying pan and camping stove.

He cooked a handful of fingers and sprinkled on some salt. Cutting into one he could see an eyeball.

"Well hello again Druff! Still keeping an eye on me!"

Shirtz howled and bit into the crumbed Druff fingers, ate the lot and licked his lips.

"Not bad Druff! Not bad at all!"

THE CAFE

We stopped at the outdoor Café "Topiary" around lunch. It was a bucolic feast of blooms and herbs with tables and chairs tastefully placed between the overflowing beds.

The Topiary Café really seemed to grow out of the hillside meadows around it and neat hedges were the only clue it wasn't itself wild land.

The host was an affably babbling lady of about fifty. She wore a floral dress which blended splendidly with the lush flowers. Around her neck hung a strange little phial of dark liquid, which she said was a local charm passed down through the generations.

We ordered parmesan soup and a bottle of their house wine, Baby Bio, which was wholly new to us. We ate and drank and read our papers. It was so deliciously peaceful sat there in that abundant Cumbrian corner.

As the sun curved lazily over our spot we ordered tiffin and more dark Baby Bio. Our papers read we peered round at bees frantically slurping on the borage obeying a natural drama we just didn't seem privy to.

Our eyes wandered to the people sat in the far corner under the pergola draped in clematis. It was in darkness over there and the four were simply silhouettes sat opposite each other. There was a fuzziness to their outlines which we just couldn't place. They didn't seem to be moving much either, which we put down to the sable house wine, which was quite intoxicating.

Elsewhere in the garden we both mentioned how admirable the cut hedge statues were, sat and stood in different places, trimmed precisely to look like people. They were so verdant and so realistic; beautiful green statuary of men, women and children seated at equally green tables festooned with thick foliage. They even had wine bottles, glasses and plates made of leaves. The effect was quite lovely. A rustic idyll and really charming as we took in the full view of the trimmed hedge figures spreading up the gentle slope of the elongated tea garden.

We commented to the pleasant host as such and whilst rubbing her phial pendant she informed us that the topiary people had been there a while and were now part of the local scenery. Droves of wasps and gorgeous butterflies added their own approval. It was simply enchanting to say the least.

We ordered more Baby Bio and as the afternoon faded into evening we felt incredibly drowsy as the wine took root. Relaxing into our cushioned seats we must have fallen asleep sat at the table.

It was around midnight I guess that I myself awoke. The moon was fully up.

I realised that I couldn't move my hands off the arms of my chair no matter how hard I heaved. They were bound in some way. My eyes also had difficulty opening and something stretched across them as I tried, something string-like.

I stared across the table at my Wife. It was pitch black. Surely the café was closed. Why hadn't they woken us up? It was quite bizarre and for the life of me I could not understand what was going on.

As my eyesight adjusted to the moonlight I noticed a fuzziness to the outline of my Wife. It was the same as that we'd commented on earlier regarding the seated foursome in the corner.

I concentrated on my Wife's face. It was blurred, woolly, as if covered in something. As I focused I saw a fly squeeze out of her lips, dragging itself through, as if they were shut tight.

It was then her eyes opened. Strands of material were pulled apart as she did so. They looked like the tendrils of a climbing plant.

I moaned and wanted to reach out to her. My mouth felt full of something and as I chewed it tasted like chlorophyll. I had a mouth full of leaves!

As the moon swerved slowly over our spot my Wife's eyes closed and they didn't open again. Mine closed shut too gradually and I felt my mind turn to sap as the tendrils and leaves took over completely. Eventually there was nothing left of me either. Just a fuzzy silhouette sat opposite my Wife at our spot under the watchful moon.

If you visit Topiary Café you can still see us.

We are sat at the corner table near the meadow.