C.M. Rosens's Blog, page 29

Asexual Pagham-on-Sea Pride

Here’s the start of a series of posts of some characters and their flags for Pride Month! Starting with main characters. Ricky’s not a poster boy for aroaces/aces/acespecs and we deserve some better rep than him, but then again, if a feral cannibal lad who’s also an eldritch horror fantasising about bodily transformation into an agender Thing made up of tentacles and eyes is the rep you want, feel free to adopt him.

EDIT: I’m not sure he IS aroace and he doesn’t read that way to some aroace people so I’m making some amendments. If anything, you can read him as ace definitely, but he just isn’t interested in making those discoveries about himself for himself, so it’s not really possible to assign a definitive label. That’s also kind of the point: he reads differently to different readers, I’ve noticed.

He could well be aroaceflux (the featured flag!) in that he occupies some part of both spectrums, but this changes depending on the levels of sentimentality he feels for a person, or something aesthetic that he likes. The aesthetic interest only comes after he realises he likes them as a person, which is a shade of demiromantic, perhaps. This has happened exactly twice in his life. So perhaps more grey. When you start breaking down the conditions for attraction and the number of times it has happened and what sort of attraction it is, a handy general label is easier than a ton of microlabels, or perhaps one microlabel that I haven’t found yet (none of them fit me, either).

I don’t use the term queer to describe myself a lot. I have the feeling Ricky wouldn’t either – ironically, it’s both too nebulous and open to misunderstanding, but also just doesn’t suit him. It aligns him with a community he isn’t part of and doesn’t want to connect with. He doesn’t want to be part of anything. He wants a very few people around him to be surrogate or actual family (with all the intensity of feeling that has) and then to be left entirely alone. His primary identities are his role (Soothsayer) and his family affiliation (Porter) in that order. And he has very negative and conflicting stuff going on with the latter identity.

Ricky struggles to see himself as a person a lot of the time, and attraction is complicated for him and 95% of the time is totally non-existent in terms of sexual or romantic attraction. He also has no aesthetic preferences except for things he finds comforting (he prefers Carrie to be soft and warm because growing up he was never allowed to have something comforting, and so he still prefers when she performs that function).

This association is now attached to her, since he burned his taxidermy toy that provided that comfort for him, and is starting to entwine with her as a person performing that role, which is very confusing for him. His feelings for her after a year of sleeping in her bed and living with her are now much closer to romantic ones, and read that way, so perhaps he’s actually greyromantic (but the attraction shows up under the same conditions as demiromantic people, just far less often) and asexual or greysexual.

This is before we get into the fact he’s canonically had aesthetic attraction to a cis woman’s eyes, but it isn’t romantic attraction [Cousin Layla]; he’s had some kind of deep bonding experience with a cis woman that he wanted to bond with in some way that wasn’t clear to himself at the time [Carrie]; he’s had experimental sex with a cis guy [Wes] when they were both teenagers, but it’s unclear whether there were any romantic feelings there or if he had deep platonic feelings that were hurt because he thought Wes was only in it for the drugs; and his feelings for the house/its agender avatar who can present any way it wants to and doesn’t even need to look human.

That last one might even put him in the Objectum Sexual camp: he’s loved that building since he was five years old. However, he does also have attraction occasionally to people, and he isn’t attracted to buildings in general, only to one particular house.

OS people talk about the inherent animism of the objects of their attraction, and in Ricky’s case, his object of affection does have sentience, and they communicate privately and telepathically in a similar way to how some OS people describe feeling the vibes of buildings, cars, bridges, etc. I did actually read a few interviews with OS people [the Expressions page of the linked website] for THE CROWS to try and get that feeling across, but more for the POV of the house itself.

I actually wonder whether pomosexual isn’t just better because he consciously doesn’t want to think about it, or talk about it, and rejects the usual definitions and labels for himself while acknowledging they are there, but Ricky also isn’t interested in postmodernism and so who even knows.

ORIGINAL POST BELOW:

Aro-ace flag – https://lgbtqia.fandom.com/wiki/Aromantic_asexual

RICKY PORTER doesn’t use labels or talk about his orientation, so I was wondering if mainly because he doesn’t have access to the vocabulary/terminology and doesn’t have a reason to discuss it. In the books, he explicitly isn’t interested in sex or a romantic relationship with his neighbour, and tells her so, even though their bond becomes increasingly intimate in other ways. Ricky also reminds her he’s not interested in romantic/sexual intimacy when she says he can sleep in her bed, which is something that ends up as a feature of their relationship as it progresses. At one point he wakes up with an erection and tells her, “Don’t think that’s for you, it just does that sometimes.” And that’s that on that.

When we meet Ricky in THE CROWS, he kills a lot of people for ritual reasons and this is his first proper platonic relationship, but it’s very clearly deeper than “just friends” on an emotional level, but it’s also not romantic. It is too intimate to be pseudo-siblings, and there’s an indication that he might be greyromantic or greysexual, or grey-demi, and that the relationship might shift in the future given time and a deeper bond forming between them. There’s also no guarantee that this will be the case, and no previous relationships to base this on except one (M/M, experimental, drug-fuelled and sexual, short-term and didn’t end well) when he was 17. This is learned about in THIRTEENTH.

The aroaceflux flag created by aroflagarchive on Tumblr – aroflagarchive: “Aromantic Flag Archive“. aroflagarchive.tumblr.com. (Archived version). (Archived on January 24, 2021).

Later, Ricky makes it clear he thinks that teenage experiment was transactional and insincere, which isn’t how Wes remembers it. Ricky was extremely passive in this experiment regardless of who initiated things, because he realised fairly quickly that he wasn’t that bothered about having sex, although he’s had moments of libido and attraction as a younger teen. He’s at best sex-neutral (under certain circumstances, with certain people) and mainly sex-averse. Even he has no idea about the specific parameters of his attraction, what it is about people he likes, and whether he’ll experience any attraction in future that he might want to act on.

This is why Ricky doesn’t identify as anything, or even bother to find out what labels might work for him. He doesn’t discuss his sex-life (or lack of), he doesn’t justify it, and he doesn’t really care what people think about it. Aroaceflux might be more accurate, but the ‘flux’ is very rare, and it’s never very clear.

The books are character-driven with a loose cosmic horror plot, and his arc follows his central relationship which is best described as queerplatonic, [in the sense that it queers the platonic, that is, is a relationship that cannot be accurately defined with hetero/allonormative terms], and the relationships he gains with his family and other people.

Queerplatonic Relationship – Taimi.com

Gothic/Horror Families

While I’m writing THE DAY WE ATE GRANDAD, I’m also having fun with re-watching/re-reading Horror and Gothic families (blood family + found family!) I’m a big Rob Zombie fan so a lot of them are from his films, but I love the moments of banter and bits where we get to see the relationship dynamics and how that plays out. I also absolutely hate a lot of these guys.

Horror Families I Can’t Stop Thinking About

THE ADDAMS FAMILY

The quintessential Gothic family for me. I have loved them and their parties since I was a kid, just – fully enraptured. I’ve always wanted to write something like that. I love the benign nature of them, but also the underlying darkness that they do think serial killers are their kind of people, and they have parties for their criminally insane friends who just like to dance. And sure, Granny likes to put curses on people and Morticia has a torture kink, and it’s still the most wholesome thing when you put it all together. That’s just deeply engrained in me as the ideal [fictional, Gothic/horror] family: like, yes, I would like a lot of this, please.

THE SINCLAIRS

The demonic vampire family at the heart of BROIL (2020) have some interesting eldritch elements, an act of dinner party cannibalism, and some intriguing worldbuilding. I got confused with the characters the first time I watched it, but there’s no romance and the whole thing is about as fucked up as you can get. The whole premise is that the clan are divided about offing the patriarch, and one faction intends to do so using a chef who moonlights as an assassin.

I think I can use this film as a comp for my stuff, as it has that whole weird cult/demented family politics/cannibalism vibe.

THE GALLOWAYS

SLASHER S04: FLESH AND BLOOD is set on a private island where a toxic, dysfunctional family destroy each other for the patriarch’s approval and are in turn stalked and brutally murdered by a masked figure known as The Gentleman. The dynamics of this brood of bastards are really twisted and upsetting, and I didn’t like the “East European orphan” trope at all, but apart from that, the dynamics really vibed with the way my eldritch clan sought Beverley Wend’s approval and how willing they are to turn on each other to survive.

THE FIREFLYS

I did not expect to like HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES and I was too scared to watch it for ages, but as I got a bit more desensitised to body horror and gore, I thought I would give it a go. I found some things in the trilogy that are now stuck in my head.

I love the dynamic between Baby and Ma, the interactions between Otis and Grandad, and then in THE DEVIL’S REJECTS the relationship dynamics between Baby, Captain Spaulding, and Otis. 3 FROM HELL was another interesting sibling dynamic with the half-brothers (??) bickering and how they handled Baby (not) coping with things in prison.

CARNIVAL WORKERS IN “31”

Another Rob Zombie film, “31” was crowdfunded online and I liked the relationships between the main characters (Charly, Venus, Panda, Levon and Roscoe) and how that played out while they tried to survive a death-maze. It’s completely bonkers and a really gory exploitation film, and it made me laugh so much in places just because that’s my go-to reaction when i don’t know what the fuck I’m looking at. So when I tell you “this really made me laugh” . . . yeah.

ANNABELLE & NORMAN

The siblings in TWO HEADS CREEK (2019) are not incestuous, but they are twins, and on the search for their biological mother in creepy small town Australia, where everyone looks like they’ve stepped out of STRICTLY BALLROOM. Obviously, everyone in town is a cannibal because human flesh is so good it’s like crack. The twins have a dysfunctional sibling dynamic which is really fun to watch unfold, and the way they have to work together in adversity and decide what is really important to them is something I really love watching develop.

THE LE DOMAS FAMILY

The Le Domas family in READY OR NOT (2019) sold their souls to the Devil (in the form of their mysterious benefactor, Mr Le Bail), and the central premise is summed up in a line one of the sons says (paraphrased) : You’ll do pretty much anything as long as your family say it’s okay.

In this case, they have to hunt Grace down and kill her in a ritual before sunrise, and if they fail, they all die. The lengths they will go to in order to survive – and keep their legacy intact – have taken a toll on the younger gen, with Daniel an alcoholic and Emilie a heavy drug user. I liked the concept of the film, and the way the relatives all react to Grace as the newcomer, but also the idea that Grace pulled “the bad card” from the box because she’s too good for Alex, and would endanger the family’s deal by breaking toxic cycles instead of perpetuating them. Grace is forced to be as ruthless as they all are in order to survive, so the end is pretty bleak regardless of outcome.

The idea of a family (like the Galloways in SLASHER S04) tainting everything they touch and dragging other people down to their level is a theme I like to play with and enjoy seeing worked out in various ways.

VILMER (apparently a SAWYER FAMILY member)

There are a lot of things going on with Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Next Generation BUT I actually loved/hated Matthew McConaughey’s character Vilmer, and the whole twisted dynamic he pulled together. I don’t remember anyone else in this film except Darla, who’s his girlfriend, and obviously Leatherface is in it as one of his brothers or something, and then there’s Renee Zellweger as the Final Girl.

I really liked the original film, I appreciated what it was trying to do I think, and I know the director wanted more people to pick up on the dark comedy elements of it which I think were definitely there, but I haven’t watched the second one yet to see how those came through more in the sequel. In my head, the soundtrack for the entire sequence where Sarah Hardesty is running screaming from Leatherface is Is This The Way to Amarillo by Tony Christie and now I cannot watch that without singing “Sha la la la la la la BRRRBRRRRR” out loud which is why I’m only invited to remote film nights now.

The abusive patriarchal bullshit in that family is really interesting to me and the whole thing about slaughterhouses/consumer capitalism > cannibalism / death of the American Dream / corruption/decay of society, all that, just love it. The ableism and everything else, hate it. But I still think the whole family dynamic through the mess of sequels and plots and reboots is worth a look, which all gets taken out of the newest one (2022).

Other dynamics/vibes that I think show up in my work:

CRIMSON PEAKWHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWSCALL GIRL OF CTHULHUTHE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSETHE LODGERSHANNIBAL RISINGSACRIFICEGRIMMSUPERNATURAL

Who Loves Eldritch Dramedy?

If you love the idea of British Eldritch family drama, or you’ve ever just wanted to know what eldritch entities get up to behind closed doors, my Pagham-on-Sea series is for you.

I’m releasing the 3rd novel soon – THE DAY WE ATE GRANDAD – so I’ve decided to put out the first 2 books as an eBook box set. Currently you can grab it in epub/mobi/pdf format from my Ko-Fi shop, and the link for eBook stores is right here! Click through to your store of choice.

Normally £3.99 each (£7.98 together) – the box set is only £6.99!

PLUS it has the 2 extra illustrations that the eBook of THE CROWS is missing (but are featured in the paperback and the hardback versions).

The Town Map by Dewi Hargreaves is still only featured in the Anniversary Hardback edition of THE CROWS.

Cover Design by Rebecca F. Kenney

I LOVE THIS COVER – it captures the vibes of THIRTEENTH (the symbols, the moth metaphor) and THE CROWS (the deer skull, the folk horror vibe) so let’s look at what to expect if you’re brand new to Pagham-on-Sea.

THE CROWS (Gothic Horror kitchen sink dramedy)

A struggling woman destined to die on a fate-appointed date and a lonely eldritch cannibal who can see the future love the same sentient house so much they bring it to life – but with only 33 days of Carrie’s life left to go, is their twisted, growing friendship going to save her, or doom her?

Comps:Tropes:With:PYGMALIONHaunted/Sentient House as Love InterestAro-Ace MC (also an eldritch horror)HELLRAISEROnly One BedBi/Pan side charactersTHE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSEKiller/Intended Victim to twisted intimate friendshipAnxiety/Depression/PTSDSTEPHEN KING’S ROSE REDA novel you can play Gothic Horror Bingo withunDx male disordered eatingTHIRTEENTH (Eldritch Family dramedy & bubblegum body horror)

An angry teen destined to transform into a ravenous eldritch god loses her protector and must survive her family of eldritch horrors who want her dead before she can transform, but her only potential allies are her insanity-inducing playboy brother who takes too many experimental drugs, and their eldritch cannibal cousin who murdered her protector in the first place. As her transformation nears, the three of them have to deal with their own fears, trauma and mistrust, or no one is coming out alive.

Comps:Tropes:With:WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWSGrumpy Killer Mentors Angry Homicidal Teen (no-one is happy about it)Pan Polyam MCGRIMMChosen One comes of age (to devour her own family)Family traumaHANNIBAL RISINGClassic Weird Fiction Parody Bingo (landscapes, indescribable horrors)Established Queerplatonic partnersTRAINSPOTTINGFamily Day Out watching a live snuff film Heavy drug user POV character (cocaine & fictional experimental hallucinogens)THE DAY WE ATE GRANDAD (coming soon: cosmic horror family drama)

A numerous inbred family of eldritch abominations are being systematically hunted and devoured by one of their new gods, who inhabits a traumatised 18-year-old girl. When some of the survivors form apocalyptic death cult to bring the original progenitor of the family through into this world, the new gods – not keen on total annihilation and ‘encouraged’ by a mythical nemesis – must join forces to stop it.

Comps:Tropes:With:Clive Barker’s NIGHTBREEDEstranged family to Chosen FamilyFamily bereavement, grief, lossWELSH & ROMAN MYTH Overcoming toxic behaviour spirals to [try to] save the dayDepression/suicide ideation/binge-drinking & self-medicationCALL OF CTHULHUI’d Do Anything For [non-romantic] LoveMessy & murderous queer charactersIN THE MOUTH OF MADNESSShowing My True Face Will Destroy You (and here it is, enjoy)Radicalisation and extremism, apocalyptic death cult recruitmentbuy the box set 1&2 direct from meBuy From Ebook Stores

#MonstrousMay Day 13: Monstrous Fish

Graphic and Prompt Credit: Johannes T. EvansThe Monster Fish of Bomere Pool, Shropshire

There’s an amazing folktale from Shropshire, about a gigantic fish that acquired the sword (and sword belt) of Wild Eadric, an Anglo-Saxon lord who fought against the Normans during the conquest of the 11thC.

There are variations of the tale that seem to place it later, with the Anglo-Saxon terms replaced by more modern ones that reflect the age in which the tale was handed down, so in the versions I’ve read he’s “the squire of Condover” or something, which obviously isn’t an Anglo-Saxon designation.

Anyway, the story goes that Wild Eadric is having a day of fishing at Bomere Pool and hooks a gigantic fish. This thing is an absolute monster and he and his friends manage to get it to the shore after a lot of effort.

They then have a heated debate about the size of the thing, and Wild Eadric unfastens his sowrd belt and reckons it will fit around the fish. So he … fastens the belt (with his sword sheathed in the scabbard hanging from it) around the middle of the fish and it fits!

The fish, however, is like, oh I do not think so boys, and uses the sword to free itself from the nets, so now we have this absolutely enormous fish wielding an actual sword with its fins (I guess) and that’s obviously not normal.

Anyway, this fish sheaths the sword, dives back into the pool, and is gone. And that’s the absolutely true story of how Wild Eadric lost his sword to a fish that one time.

There’s more to this, naturally, because we can’t just leave it there with this gigantic fish wearing a sword belt swimming around the pool. The lore is that the fish will give up the sword eventually, but only to the true heir of Condover hall. Presumably, not a jumped-up Norman. Wild Eadric was defrauded out of his inheritance (hard to see how that could have happened, since he’s the kind of guy who just hands his whole sword belt to a monster fish, colour me shocked) and thus the fish will only return the sword to its rightful owner.

You can read the tale here.

You can stay at Condover Hall and try your luck with the fish – it’s now a JCA activity centre, suitable for kids and families.

Short Story: Broken Glass #MonstrousMay Day 12: Zombies

Graphic and Prompt Credit: Johannes T. EvansBroken Glass ~ an undead romance

A first draft of this was up on Wattpad previously – it first went up in 2013. I’ve revised it for this month.
CWs: death, entrapment, suicide of POV characters, the undead eating corpses, the dead are amnesiacs.

THE LATE JACOB NOVAK

If you take your own life in a place brimming with geomagic, that is, where secret agricultural cults released some ancient fertility power into the soil that really shouldn’t be there, you shouldn’t be too surprised to wake up as a zombie. Jacob Novak, guitarist, addict and introvert backroom philosopher, was not the mindlessly ravenous kind despite the wanton murder of his own braincells while he was still living. 

No one was entirely sure what made the difference, but it made the pathologist’s day a little easier.

When the body rose from the morgue table, right on schedule as far as the morgue staff were concerned, he was confused and bewildered, believing at first the pills hadn’t worked. Yet he felt different. Somehow, there was something about him which defied explanation. His mind was clear. That was a first. Unclouded by the weight of worry and past mistakes, unburdened by life, and above all – he was clean.

I must be dead, the body thought. I must be dead, or this is heaven…

But heaven looked a little soulless and clinical, and he wasn’t sure that it was supposed to. Perhaps this was where all lost souls ended up. He swung his legs off the metallic edge, testing the flooring under his feet. There was a tag on his toe; he took this off, hearing his spine click as he bent over, but he felt nothing. His blood was sluggish and still in his veins, and he suddenly realised that he wasn’t actually breathing. In a sudden panic, he tried to inhale. It was an effort, but his chest inflated. The air stayed there, as if unsure of what to do. No oxygen was getting to his blood or his limbs. This was physically impossible. Bits of him were going to start dropping off. He breathed out, physically pushing his diaphragm in with his fist. His flesh felt different, of an odd consistency, rubbery to the touch but not painful.

A floppy haired pulsing body with a bright smile and scrubs gave him a cheery wave from across the room, one hand on a length of metal pipe. “Hello there! Welcome to the morgue. How are you feeling?”

The body looked around, a little dazed. His muscles still almost worked, but he wasn’t sure how that was possible. He attempted to speak, drawing air into his lungs for it to vibrate passed his vocal chords. “Whhhhhherrrrrrrrrrrrrre aaaaaaaaaaammmm hhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii?”

“The morgue, on Filibut Street,” the pulsing body said, loosening his grip on the pipe. If a Riser could speak, they probably weren’t going to start trouble.”Would you please step into my office? Some find that a hot water bottle helps.”

The body wasn’t sure that anything would really help, but he nodded anyway. His head jerked up and down oddly, as if he had forgotten how.

“I’m Jasper,” the pulsing body said, leading the way through the double doors, “But most people call me Jazz. I’ve got your clothes in here, is that ok?”

Again, the body nodded. Nodding was easier on his throat. He caught a glimpse of himself in the reinforced glass of the small round window in the top of the door, and a dead face looked back. 

So I really am dead, he thought. 

There was a disturbance within the glass – he thought he saw, just for a moment, another face appear transparently behind his own. Yet there was no one behind him, and no one on the other side of the door. The face, a small female face, flickered for a second, and then disappeared. 

THE LATE SALLY MCGUIRE

Sally’s parents had found her before she had time to Rise, and delivered her in two pieces to the funeral home, her head cleanly separated from her body. Just in case. 

Sally had watched them do what had to be done from the antique mirror in her bedroom. The mirror had a history unknown to Sally, who had only thought the frame was pretty. She hadn’t known how to tame it, or what to ask it, and without the proper words and the proper time, the mirror grew hungry, as it always did. When the mirror grew hungry, it started to show more than simple reflections. 

Sally didn’t know what was real anymore. Even now she was dead. The mirror had sucked away everything, and left her trapped in the world of the back-to-front. She stumbled from mirror to mirror, polished glass to polished glass, always looking out at the reversed world beyond. Her mirror-world was limitless, at least in theory. Still, she wished that someone would look into her eyes and see more than their own reflection.

There were other things in the mirror-half-life world, other things in the shadows and swirling in the misted reflections of reality, and others like her – but they frightened her with their dark black auras of unforgiving pain, and she often fled from them. It was lonely, being dead.

The morgue and the hospital were two places with reflective surfaces which drew her back to them, but the hospital was where the darker things stalked the distorted hallways, and the morgue was much quieter. Not a lot of souls were released in the morgue. It was practically deserted. So Sally returned there, often, and watched the blue bodies on their slabs being dissected and probed, and some of them getting up and walking away, and some of them being beaten off others, and then, one of them looked straight back.

Sally pulled away from the round window, falling back into the grey corridor behind her. If she had a heart, it would be hammering.

Someone had seen her.

Sally forced herself up and streaked through the corridor to the next curved door, appearing in the side of a stainless steel electric kettle in Jazz’s office.

THE MORTICIAN’S OFFICE

The body sat in the offered chair, trying out his muscle movements. Everything was different now that he was dead. All of his memories had sparked out, erased by the death of his neuro-pathways, and whatever had reanimated him had not restored them. Everything he had remembered at the moment of reanimation was fading away the way a dream does, dissipating into the fresh moments of this new life like a nightmare dissolves after the first minute of waking.

He could not remember why he had died.

He looked at Jazz. “Whhhherrrrrre hhhaaaaaaaammmmmm hhhiiiiiii?” he managed, using his lungs like bellows. He may have asked this already, but he was in a different room now. Time and space were connected. He had moved beyond the first answer and needed another.

“The morgue,” Jazz informed him again, putting on his brisk professional voice. “Your name was Jacob Novak, but I suppose you can call yourself anything you like now. Most people change their names when they’re like this, since they can’t remember their past life at all and it’s a bit of an effort to pronounce complicated words at the start. You’re not fully animated yet – that will take time. I would advise you head over to the crematorium and see if there’s an extra shift going. You can eat what you like when the coffins come down to you and burn the rest, and the relatives are none the wiser because they’re just getting ashes back anyway.” He reached in his drawer for the crematorium’s glossy business card. “Here you go. Ask for Raven. He’s in charge. There’s a nice little community over there.”

The body’s arm lifted jerkily to take the card, and it nearly slipped between his fingers. The black and silver edges glinted, and as he looked around the neat little office his eyes caught the face again peeping at him in the side of the tall kettle. “Gllllaaaasssss,” he whispered.

“What’s that? Glass?” Jazz thought it over. “Is that what you want to be called?”

“Glllllaaaaasssssss,” the body repeated. He liked the sound of that.

[Glass, swooned Sally McGuire in her little kettle. He sees me in the glass.]

THE CREMATORIUM

The newly-christened Glass shambled around to the back of the crematorium. It was a pleasant little spot about a mile from the town centre, a modernised red brick building surrounded by beautiful, well-tended gardens and next door to the golf club.

The sun warmed his pasty dead skin, but his lack of circulation (bar whatever reanimating force was coursing through him and making his new existence possible) meant that he didn’t feel the benefit of its rays. The light irritated his decaying corneas, and he realised that he needed to feed again.

Passing the rose bushes by, their thirsty roots clutched around the fertilising goodness of the cremated dead, Glass shambled around to the heavy STAFF ONLY side entrance, and on towards the Promised Land of snacks.

The metal fire door was propped open a crack by a heavy lead weight. This was probably illegal. The sign on the door [FIRE DOOR – KEEP SHUT] was being flagrantly ignored, so Glass ignored it too. He managed to shoulder it open further until he managed to make it through, snagging the shirt Jazz had handed him on the metal handle on his way in.

Glass managed a grunt. It was darker in here, and for a moment his eyes, robbed of their life, could not adjust. Glass stood still, arms outstretched into the impenetrable gloom to feel his way forwards, but after a few awkward steps the shapes began to make sense.

Details gradually sharpened as something told his pupils to dilate, and they grudgingly obliged. It turned out not to be as dark as all that.

It was odd, Glass thought, synapses crackling into momentary action. All of this was odd.

He struggled once more to recall some aspect of his pre-morgue existence, but all that was well and truly lost.

Moving down the corridor a little further, he came to an open door which led into the furnace room for the crematorium’s first furnace. There were four altogether, the corridor which Glass had fumbled along lapping the underbelly of the airy and tasteful chapels of rest above and leading to the four fiery chambers of the crematorium’s throbbing heart.

There were a few services a day this time of year: heat waves took almost as many as cold snaps, and fortunately Pagham-on-Sea attracted a steadily-replenished stream of pensioners who dreamed of spending their twilight years walking on the beach.

One such pensioner, a retired primary school teacher from Leeds, was on her way down the shaft as Glass came in. The furnace was ready to receive her, but Mrs Mabel Williams was not destined for the roasting her will had stipulated. As soon as her coffin reached the conveyor, Mrs Williams’s polished box was broken open by three crematorium staff and the body carefully removed. A few limbs were sawn off rather deftly by one healthier-looking employee, and replaced in the coffin. It rolled off into the metal-melting maw of the first furnace, while the staff proceeded to take their lunch break.

Glass shambled over eagerly, but the healthier-looking body – still pasty and a little blue – stuck out a hand. “Whoa whoa whoa. You’re the guy Jazz sent round?”

Glass attempted a nod.

The body was similarly unimpressed. “Ok. We’ve got an opening on furnace three. Greasy tit Meat lit hisself on fire.”

Meat. Meat. Greasy meat….

Glass turned to the door. “Whhhhhheeeeerrrre…?”

“Follow the corridor, second door you come to.” The man watched the newest riser shamble off obediently and cursed his own wretched afterlife. He turned back to the workers of furnace one and snarled. “Ok, break’s done. We got another in half an hour. Get raking.”

As the others got back to work, he pulled a finger from his shirt pocket and leaned against the wall, and began to gnaw.

THE GHOST OF SALLY MCGUIRE

Sally saw a distorted figure in the polished side of an urn, a crowd of crow-black mourners in a coppery garden where all the colours had been bronzed away.

She flitted from the curvature of the rim to the lens of somebody’s glasses, and then, hurrying down her endless grey corridor, found a polished coffin handle to peep out of.

There he was.

She had blushed with pleasure (at least, if she could have she would have) when the first word of his afterlife had been ‘Glass’. It may as well have been her name. She had inspired him. Sally had never inspired anyone before.

He was gnawing on something, she didn’t know what. He came up to the coffin, growing larger and larger until she could see nothing else but his great shape. Then he bent down and an eye peered into her small window, and Sally squeaked. The little sound hit the musty confines of the corridor and was deadened to a muffled yelp. The coffin handle got wrenched off in the ghoul’s hand, and Sally’s view was obscured by the soft white palm. Then the handle slipped into a pocket, and Sally could see nothing more.

Marking the windows was hard. She had her nails, which for some reason made marks here on her side of the corridor, and she could steam up the windows and press her hand against the surface to make a lasting print. She wasn’t sure how this worked. It defied logic. Nevertheless, it cheered her up to think that she could make a tangible contribution to her environment simply by existing in it. Perhaps if she had felt that in life, she wouldn’t have ended up here.

The problem was, if she did ever mark a window, she wasn’t the only one who could spot the mark.

Sally had spent a long time trying to avoid the other shadowy things that shared this multifaceted mirror world, the forms that shifted down the corridors and… hunted her. Not all – and only if they noticed her – but like a nightmare she could never wake from, Sally knew instinctively that some were tracking her with malicious intent. She didn’t know why. All she knew was that staying still or marking windows was a risk – and there was nowhere to hide. There were only doors, and blind corners. What she needed was the next window.

While Sally was deciding what best to do, she stood very still with her nose pressed to the window glass, examining the thread count of the pocket folded against it. It was the longest time she had ever stayed in one place, but it was worth it.

When the handle emerged again, he spoke to her.

SPECTRAL SURGERY AT MILL STREET

Miss Charlotte looked up from her desk. “The doctor will see you now,” she said to the final patient in the waiting room.

Glass came in with a shaving mirror in his hand. After a month of good clean crematorium living, he could pass as a pulsing body in a certain light.

“What can I do for you?” Dr Monday asked from behind the mouth of his mask.

Glass, his speech much better and his enforced breath more controlled, was nervous. “I am Glass,” he said, rocking from side to side. “Have mirror. Look.” He held up the round shaving mirror and showed the doctor.

There seemed to be a shadowy face inside. 

“Is that… is that a… person in there?”

Glass nodded vigorously.

Dr Monday began to understand. “You… you are here to register her as a patient?”

Glass handed the shaving mirror over. “She doesn’t like. In there.”

Dr Monday took the mirror in his gloved hands. “I see. And – I take it that you and she…”

Glass nodded. “She want body. To be it. Not eat it.”

Dr Monday sighed. “This is a rather delicate procedure. We’re running a rather high electricity bill as it is, so I’m afraid that this will not be totally subsidised by the UHC.”

The Underground Health Care was funded by a means-tested tax, but there was a limit to what this could cover. Spectral Surgery was one of those specialisms that required an additional top-up fee.

Glass held up his wallet. “Money.”

“Very good,” Dr Monday said, behind his mask. He pressed a button on his desk. “Alex, run over to the morgue and see if Jasper can spare us a corpse.”

Finding a body that had died of natural causes in Pagham-on-Sea was rare, but today it appeared they were in luck. A homeless runaway had been brought in, blue and cold, from the subway. It was hard to tell whether some young vampire teens had ganged up on her in the night or if the punctures on her arms were track marks from her needles.

She was unclaimed, and undamaged apart from that.

Dr Monday pronounced her adequate.

The process of extraction was by far the most complicated, but finally a love-struck Sally was drawn through the glass of the shaving mirror into a full length dressing mirror set up for the purpose. This was some kind of cul-de-sac in the mirror world – once in, she couldn’t get out. This panicked her. If it went wrong now, she would have to stay in the dressing mirror for as long as it took to get it to work, if it ever did work. After a month of jumping from reflective surface to reflective surface, mirror to mirror, glass to glass, she felt trapped and afraid. Knowing she could not get out far outweighed the knowledge that the other things in the corridors could not get in.

It was a tricky operation.

Dr Monday’s assistant was poised with paraphernalia, passing bits of this and pieces of that, keeping the room a consistent temperature, priming the rather out-dated machine – the Werner 6.7.

The Werner crackled into choking life, and, as Sally was pulled from the mirror into the empty fleshy shell, the spark ignited something within the newly inhabited brain and, after an hour and a quarter of intense concentration, the operation was complete.

Glass was allowed to look in through the window at the top of the door.

The body, now inhabited by the ghost-girl that had once been Sally McGuire, sat up. She couldn’t remember her old life, or the life of the body she was now inside. She could remember him, though. She could remember him.

There was no breath in her body, so she had to force it into her lungs. In. Then out. It made a rasping noise over her voice box, and the sound was alien to her. She felt things again. New things. Old things. Cold things.

She swung her legs over the edge of the table, forcing her borrowed muscles to remember what to do. Breath came in, and breath went out. Her knees bent, and straightened. Her feet hit the floor. There were others in the room, but they didn’t bother her. She wanted to find him. Afterlife had made her rather single-minded.

“Can you talk to us?” Dr Monday inquired, adopting his rather forced but well-meaning bedside manner. “Can you tell us your name?”

Breath went in. Hands raised. Look at them. Odd. Flexing. Curling. Odd. Touch. Breath went out.

Breath went in.

She turned to look at the mirror. The dressing mirror was smashed. Glinting shards scattered the floor beneath it, and what was left around the jagged hole in the centre was fractured and crazed.

Breath went out.

“Brrrrrrrrooooooooooooookkhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeennnn.”

Dr Monday’s skin-mask creased into a badly-fitting frown. “Broken?”

Breath went in.

“Brrrrrrrrrrooooooookkhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeen.”

Dr Monday nodded and chuckled. “Broken and Glass.”

And so it stuck.

BROKEN GLASS AND GRAVE

The moon was high when the two ghouls settled on a grave in the cemetery. Broken was still a few feeds away from returning to full functioning order, so Glass was the one wielding the shovel.

It was their first date.

The grave had been chosen rather arbitrarily, and Broken had almost forgotten all about her mirror world now. She had even forgotten the past month with Glass, but the bond remained embedded. it was more than a memory – it was a permanent attachment.

Glass hit the coffin with a dull thud, and broke it open. The body was oozing and gooey, and it smelled just right.

They paid no attention to the lettering on the tombstone, but tucked in to their feast. Broken found it delicious.

The two ghouls nibbled their way along the same ropy length of intestine and met in the middle, shy and coy, like Lady and the Tramp.

The moon lit up their midnight feast, setting the scene and colouring it with a wistful mist of romance, and the silvered letters revealed that tonight, dinner was courtesy of SALLY MCGUIRE – BELOVED DAUGHTER. Whoever that was.

#MonstrousMay Day 11: Monster in the Dark

Graphic and Prompt Credit: Johannes T. EvansMonster in the Dark

For this one, I’m going to advertise my short story THE SOUND OF DARKNESS, which you can buy in eBook on its own in various formats, or as part of the F IS FOR FEAR anthology in paperback, eBook and audiobook. It’s reproduced for free below, but if you’d like to review it on Goodreads, that would be great.

Add to/Review on Goodreads here.

You can grab a copy directly from me via my Ko-Fi shop!

I’ve read a version of the story aloud on my podcast for free. Listen here.

The Sound of Darkness (from F is for Fear)

C.M. Rosens

Murat Yildiz stood in the doorway to the living room, his living room in his own damn flat, the flat he had been renting for two years now, and could not go in. The bulb had blown the night before, and he’d forgotten to change it.

There was nothing in there except his own furniture, his own things. A deeper rectangle of flatter, reflective black on the back wall was nothing sinister, no mirrored black hole leading to abyssal realms, just his mounted plasma TV screen that would cast its own light if only he could turn it on from the narrow hall. It reflected his own squared shoulders back at him, a vaguely outlined shadow-man grown into his adolescent fat and heavier-set frame, a stocky veteran of random scrawny aggressors on match days and Saturday nights. Here he was, stuck on the edge of his own living room laminate like a child.

The bulk of the second-hand sofa was nothing more than that, hiding nothing behind it but cushions and a rug. He could make out the chairs and the glossy rags of old magazines Cheryl left scattered about the place.

Murat clicked the switch out of habit, but it didn’t do any good. Of course not. He strained his ears. There was nothing there, nothing to hear. He should close the door, forget about it, go into the bedroom instead, but he didn’t like to think about the living room being a box of darkness so near to where he slept. Cheryl complained about sleeping with the lamp on, even though he turned the dimmer all the way down when she stayed over, but even with her beside him he couldn’t bring himself to turn it off. Murat still kept up his childhood habit and drifted off to sleep as he had always done, with his eyes glued to the straight line of light under the bedroom door until his eyelids grew too heavy.

He swallowed, forcing himself to look away from the gloom and focus on the door handle. He should close up the darkness and walk away, leave it to the morning sun to lance through the blinds and beat the dark back into sulky corners. 

Murat made to shut the door, safe in the corridor of sixty-watt illumination, but something stopped him. His faltering hand fell back to his side. He realised what it was. The room was not only dark: it was silent. Not the silence of a brightly lit room, or even the silence of a mood-lit one, but a different kind of silence altogether.

It was a sound, or rather an absence, that he had never truly heard before.

From the recesses of his memory came the half-forgotten face of thirteen-year-old Tommy Danage, wide-eyed and pale.

Have you ever listened to it?

A shiver ran up Murat’s spine, exactly the same as back then, and for a moment he was nearly returned to that night.

Listened to what? thirteen-year-old Murat had asked.

And Tommy Danage, never rattled by anything, had looked as if he was about to wet himself. He’d leaned in, looking at the sunset as if the sky might betray them, and whispered,

The dark.

Now in his thirties, Murat could still say, hand on heart, that he never had. The hum of electric formed the background note of Murat’s early life. Its buzz permeated his first memories. Light flooded those memories, too: banks of soft nightlight-glow holding back the shadows, the harder orange wedge beneath the partly open door. Light chased him down corridors, humming along wires, yellow, neon, halogen, glaring loudly. All his life, it haunted him. There was something concrete about light, its shafts and slithers, sharp-edged and neat, always in hard, straight lines except when thwarted by shadow. Light flooded the paths, the car parks, the stairwells. Light chased his shadow, his proud companion in the playground, and paled it, reduced it, drove it back to cling around his feet. Murat was drawn to shadow the way some were drawn to venomous snakes. In the Estate, shadows were forbidden fruit. Not the juicy kind. The kind that killed you.

It was in the darkness.

It was the darkness.

It made shadows thicker, quieter. It watched from beyond the edges of light, where the bristling forest of cameras couldn’t see, and it was patient. They talked about it like that, like it was real, like it was alive. At first, young Murat thought they were talking about the dark itself: some of the adults probably were. But not all. Some talked about it in ways that made no sense, as if there was something else, something in the dark as well as of it.

Sometimes, after his dad died because his heart hurt so much it stopped, and Murat had to wear dark clothes for the first time, Murat crept out of bed and through the pool of nightlight-green illuminating the carpet to peep out into the night. His mum said dying was like going to sleep for a really, really long time, but you also got to go and live in the stars and look down on the people you left behind. Murat’s heart still hurt for his dad, but he was afraid that if it hurt too much it would stop, too, so after the funeral he took the black jacket and matching trousers out of his cupboard and stuffed them deep into the kitchen bin in case dark colours attracted the darkness to come and take you away to the stars.

The night sky was hardly ever clear enough to see the moon, let alone the constellations. Tangerine-bellied clouds blocked them out, obscuring the twinkling eyes of the dead. Light pollution, said Aunty Connie, who wore tiny polar bear earrings and smelled like flowers. It’s not natural.

Little Murat tip-toed to his window one night when he couldn’t sleep and wondered who else was looking down on him, how many bright eyes were up there peppering the sky. He was glad they couldn’t see him. A dusky blanket of burnt marmalade reflected the streetlight fug back down into the concrete and glass. The square below Peregrine House was fully lit, ringed around with CCTV. Teenagers on bikes with rainbow lights in the spokes did tricks and gathered in the centre, in full view of the buildings, reflective gear shining. They joked and laughed, music playing, but they stayed in the well-lit spaces. Murat wanted to join them, but he was too small. They seemed small, too, as small as him, smaller, matchstick figures, toys of whirring colours. The hum of energy buzzed in the air.

When Murat was seven-and-a-half, Casey Richards went into the dark and never came out again. Adult Murat couldn’t remember Casey Richards. Whenever he pictured Casey, he could only imagine a mirror of himself at that age, the face obscured as if by a sunbeam glancing off a window.

He recalled the arrival of new lights, red and blue, blinking in the frosty morning, and no one saying exactly what had happened but everyone muttering and passing things along, over his head. The flats becoming an echo-chamber for the glum murmur of rumour. Casey’s name became a fable, a playground mystery, only half-remembered. Someone said Casey had chased after a ball and no one could find him. When the sun came up, there he was, the light peeling back the darkness like a duvet to reveal him on the ground. They said it looked like he was sleeping. They never found his ball.

When Murat was eleven-and-three-quarters, the old man from downstairs died in his sleep. Murat’s mother said she’d come in to clean as usual and found him in the chair with his TV off, the lightbulb blown, fuses tripped by a power surge. The flats were old, and so was the wiring.

Murat heard his mother on the phone to her sister, relaying the moment she found him and the shock, the terrible shock, repeated over and over, but it was the little phrase, “He died in the dark, Connie… he died in the dark, all on his own,” that stuck in Murat’s mind. He hovered in the hall between his bedroom and the kitchen as his mum poured out her story, thinking about Casey and the missing ball, the dark corners of the Estate, the teenagers who never strayed into the shadows.

But it wasn’t either of these two incidents that prevented a grown-up Murat from setting foot in the darkness of his own living room in Luton, in a perfectly ordinary building where no one bothered about the shadows, miles away from the Queen Mary Estate in Pagham-on-Sea. Not on their own, at any rate.

Murat figured the blame lay with Tommy Danage and that summer’s night in 1998.

***

1998. The year of Saving Private Ryan, My Heart Will Go On, and I Did Not Have Sexual Relations With That Woman. By the end of July, France had won the World Cup and David Beckham was not yet forgiven for being red-carded in England’s match against Argentina, leaving Murat devastated and temporarily idol-less. No one could fill that gap like Beckham. As if this wasn’t bad enough, he was grappling with his changing body, his dad’s fading memory, and trying to get on with Mick.

Mick, his mum’s whirlwind romance of two years ago who had moved in out of nowhere, hated everything he termed ‘superstitious crap’. Mick seemed to lump everything into this category, from Kumail’s brother’s kufi to Murat’s mum’s habit of leaving the lights on. He was the genial type for whom everything was some kind of joke, except when he turned that casual eye-twinkling banter on you, you were the only one not laughing. Murat liked Mick mostly, or tried to for his mum, but he had learned fast. He’d stopped asking about the dark corners and put a brave face on walking along the well-lit streets after dark.

Mick only called him Mat, or Matty, or Matty-boy. He’d been to Istanbul once, and all he said when Murat asked him what it was like there, where he still had a few uncles, was that all the taxi drivers were thieves. His mum never mentioned his dad anymore and Mick wanted him to change his surname if he and Murat’s mum got married. It was like his dad had never existed. Worse: Murat was getting used to not thinking about him.

He went by ‘Mat’ in school now, something the others had started calling him. It sat uncomfortably with the gap in his life where his dad’s family ought to have been, his disconnect from them leaving nothing but his name behind.

It was also the year he could finally boast of being best friends with Tommy Danage, who overshadowed everything and everyone around him by sheer force of personality.

Tommy was the first to get tramlines shaved into his head as soon as school finished for the summer, and he always wore branded everything. Knock-offs from the market, but they looked the part.

Tommy lived in a world where all possibilities were true at once; aliens, conspiracies, secret societies, every religion known to man and a few Murat was sure Tommy had just made up, yetis, the sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster. At thirteen, Tommy had oceans of belief, in the world, in people, in the future, in himself. Later life would suck all that out of him, and Murat had since lost touch with both the memories of the boy Tommy Danage had been and the sour, embittered man he turned into.

Murat wondered what Tommy saw in him; he hung around Tommy hoping that something would rub off, some spark of originality, a sliver of that magnetism, but didn’t know if it was working.

Somehow, in all that time, the question of the darkness had never come up.

They hung out in the daylight or in each other’s homes where the lights were always on.

Then, one evening in the summer holidays, the darkness came for them.

“Come over,” Tommy said, as he and Murat walked home from town late that evening. “Gemma’s boyfriend rented the sickest film and left it at our house, it doesn’t go back until Tuesday. It’s an eighteen.”

Murat nodded. He wasn’t allowed to watch anything rated above a twelve. “Cool.”

“We’ll be back before dark,” Tommy said, eyeing the sunset.

Murat shrugged, kicking a can into the road. “Don’t matter,” he said, sticking his chest out. He didn’t want Tommy to think he was scared.

Murat hadn’t said much about the dark to Tommy, but he assumed Tommy was too cool to be afraid. He pushed his gelled lick of hair out of his eye in an attempt at nonchalance.

“There’s nothing to be scared of. All that crap’s for kids.”

Tommy gave him a look that Murat would remember for years afterwards. His broad forehead creased up, big russet-brown eyes wide, small thin lips pursed. He stared at Murat as if their friendship was all a big mistake.

“Not!” Murat yelled, faking a joke of his own, chest cinching with panic. “Kidding!”

But Tommy was serious and unsmiling, staring at him with deep mistrust. “It’s not funny,” he said.

Murat shook his head, surprise kicking him into silence. Could it be? Tommy Danage, afraid of the dark? The kick in the chest was like Beckham’s red card all over again.

Tommy turned and carried on, picking up the pace. Murat blinked, watching him go, then hurried after him not knowing what else to do. That was how it was: when in doubt, follow Tommy Danage.

Queen Mary Estate, adjoining the newer, equally grim Jubilee Estate, was on the edge of town, kept separate by the trainline and Pagham-on-Sea Parkway, connected by an underpass. Between the underpass and the Estate was the towering purple-signed chain hotel, squat and square in its own car park with its back to the Estate’s high surrounding wall.

As for the Estate itself, they’d built it like a prison, CCTV bristling all around, floodlights lining the road on the approach. There were no gates, the wall breaking either side of the main road forking through, which Murat had always thought odd. It wasn’t until later that he realised the bank of bright light flooding the road was a kind of gate, a barrier between the shadows within those high redbrick walls, and the other kinds of shadows on the other side. Shadows seemed less deep in town, the dark sunless corners shallower somehow, almost peaceful. They drew him in, but he was never quite brave enough to stand in them.

It wasn’t like that in the Estate. The brightness of the lights lining the paths and flooding the concrete squares between the blocks of flats held back a darkness that felt solid, as if touching it would be like touching fabric. Casey had run into the dark corner between Glassman House and Jubilee Tower, and the kids with him said they’d heard a thud, a smack, then silence. He’d fallen, the adults said. But the kids knew better. Casey had run into something, and it had killed him and taken his ball.

Murat tried not to think about this as they traipsed back into the Estate, turning off the road. Tommy was moody, silent. His pace quickened.

“Are we going to yours?” Murat asked, hoping he hadn’t lost his best friend.

Tommy didn’t answer straight away. He hunched his shoulders, hands in the pockets of his tracksuit. He shrugged. “Sure.”

Murat wondered what was happening, whether he’d broken something. His throat itched to take the words back. “I was just joking,” he said, knowing he ought to leave it but unable to, poking it like a half-healed scab.

Tommy turned to Murat, his usual cheeky grin wiped clean off and his face drawn into a tight, pale mask. “Have you ever listened to it?” he asked, hoarse, as if someone – or something – might overhear.

Murat froze, his chubby wide stare reflected back at him in Tommy’s russet-brown eyes.

“Listened to what?”

Tommy swallowed, glancing up at the sunset colours washing across the summer sky.

“The dark.”

A shiver crawled up Murat’s spine. “What… what d’you mean?” He didn’t want to admit he still slept with the touch lamp by his bed on low, his lava lamp glowing on his windowsill, and the door cracked ajar so the light from the corridor could stop anything – he hesitated, tripping over the idea – anything… getting in that way. But he didn’t seriously believe there was anything there, he told himself. It was like Mick said. Superstitious crap.

He shook his head. “Have… have you?”

Tommy darted a look over his shoulder into the Estate, and hoicked Murat away from the wall by his elbow. He bent to Murat’s ear, nearly pushing him off the kerb into the road. “Went into my sister’s room once,” he whispered, breath stale with the illicit cigarette they’d shared on the walk home. “She was out. No lights on. Window was open.” He tugged Murat back as a car raced past and bundled him further down the pavement. “You ever do that? Just listen to the dark outside?”

Murat shook his head.

Tommy’s eyes were watering now, unblinking and wide. “It makes this sound. Like, a – really quiet sound. Like. There’s something there, something in the room with you. Like… a kind of breathing.” He channelled an almost-silent breath of air against Murat’s ear, and the hairs prickled up all over Murat’s arms and the nape of his neck. “I swear. On my mum’s life.”

Murat nodded, believing. In the moment, it was almost impossible not to believe Tommy Danage, no matter what he said. Later, he thought it was the breeze forcing itself through the window crack, the blood ringing in Tommy’s ears – and yet, no matter what he told himself Tommy heard or thought he heard, Murat never switched off the light to listen for himself.

They entered the Estate together, Murat’s pulse quickened by the thrill of Tommy’s tale and their re-forged camaraderie, heading for Peregrine House. The streetlights were already on although the sun wasn’t fully set, and Murat couldn’t recall anything being amiss as they passed the row of shops, bookended by the Chinese takeaway and the Blockbuster.

The Estate was a mish-mash of post-war flats, rows of garages, and parallel streets of council houses. Jubilee Estate adjoined it, more blocks of flats, council houses and amenities, and as bristling with lights and CCTV as its older neighbour. Both were contained by the high wall, which was the subject of frequent residential complaints by newcomers. After a few weeks, they stopped complaining. Not even Mick complained anymore. That bothered Murat.

Peregrine House was a pale, weather-streaked five-storied building from the 1960s, one of the first blocks of flats to be built on Queen Mary Estate, surrounded by several other blocks like it in a square, spindly trees planted at intervals along the street leading up to it. Murat didn’t like the trees. They were always sick and half dead, and now the leaves were an unhealthy, bitter yellow on the edges.

They came to the front entrance, brightly lit inside and out, cameras blinking at them as they jostled through the main door. The lift was dodgy and usually reeked of ammonia and Mr Carmichael, so they opted for the stairs.

Halfway up to the second floor they bumped into Kumail, Addy and Emmanuel, trading Pokémon cards. Emmanuel was sitting on the top step with his back to the stairwell, long black legs outstretched, knees grazed, in his knock-off Arsenal shirt and football shorts. Kumail was below, thick glasses slipping down his broad nose, his card album on his knees. Addy, gelled dirty-blond curtains quivering in symmetrical speech marks either side of his forehead, was dribbling his football in the stairwell behind them and bouncing it from foot to foot, arguing with Kumail about what his Venomoth was worth.

Murat wished he was as good at football as Addy and Emmanuel. He couldn’t kick a ball even halfway straight and was last to be picked for everything. At thirteen he’d never even heard of dyspraxia, and neither had anyone else: even if they had, Murat reasoned bitterly later on, it would just have been another synonym in their Games teacher’s vocabulary for ‘bloody useless’. He didn’t know much about Pokémon either, not as much as they all did, so he hung back out of habit as Tommy went first.

They greeted Tommy with the usual enthusiasm, but Murat hovered on the bottom step, hands in his pockets, until Emmanuel waved him up.

“Oi, Mat. Beat my high score.”

He handed Murat his phone, small black squares blinking on the tiny screen. Murat plonked himself awkwardly on the step below, conscious of taking up far more space on the stairs than his athletic classmate. He knew he couldn’t beat Emmanuel at anything. Inevitably, his snake ate itself and the game ended thirty points off Emmanuel’s top score. He handed it back and Emmanuel grinned. “I’ll beat it this time, you ready?”

Murat nodded, settling on the steps as the debates and card swapping continued around them.

This distracted them for some time, until the sun died and the shadows crept over the concrete, crawling up the stairs. Addy was the first to notice.

“Guys?”

Murat frowned as Addy punched his arm. “What?”

“Look.”

They hadn’t noticed the sun going down and the lights coming on, as they usually did. Except that, this evening, one of the lights was out.

The shadows thickened on the stairs below them, gathering, creeping. To Murat, focused on the phone game, they seemed to stretch out like the pixel-snake, progressing at right-angles over the hard lines of the stairs to gobble up the next target.

Emmanuel leapt up, Kumail scrambling backwards.

Murat pushed Emmanuel’s phone at him and tugged Tommy’s sleeve.

The light above them flickered.

This got Emmanuel’s attention. He knocked Kumail’s arm with the back of his hand.

Kumail’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”

Emmanuel pointed at the light. Kumail followed his finger and swallowed.

“That isn’t good,” Emmanuel said, voice tight.

Murat shifted, catching the collective unease.

“We got to go, yeah.” Kumail tucked his cards away and backed off into the brighter pool of light, album under one arm, as Tommy’s arguments faded. Addy bounced his football into his hands and stood frozen, clutching it into his chest.

Emmanuel’s Adam’s apple bobbed hard.

Murat backed up.

The light went out.

Tommy grabbed Murat’s t-shirt and yanked him, Emmanuel bounded past and raced Addy for the next set of stairs, and they scattered in the stairwell. Addy and Emmanuel tore off to their neighbouring flats, Kumail ploughing through the nearest fire door to his flat on that level. Tommy and Murat got to the lift, and Tommy jabbed the button with his elbow. Murat made to run up the next flight after Emmanuel and Addy, but Tommy held him back.

“Wait!”

The lights went out in the next stairwell. They could hear the pounding of their friends’ feet echoing back to them, but now they were trapped between one pool of darkness and another. Murat could see the dull glow of the dirty light fittings on either side, still lighting the stairs themselves as they spiralled upwards: the shadow patches between should not have been that deep. The shadows gathered, playing tricks on his eyes.

He and Tommy were back to back now.

“There’s nothing in the dark,” Murat whispered, but these were Mick’s words.

Tommy was shaking beside him. The remaining light above their heads began to strobe.

Murat wanted to believe Mick more than anything, but doubt spiked his belly with fear, pooling cold inside him. “There’s nothing in the dark. There’s nothing in the dark…”

“Shh!” Tommy elbowed him, shaking his head. “Listen…”

With a thrill of horror prickling up his spine, Murat strained to hear the sound the shadows made. His own pulse drowned it out.

The lift pinged behind them and the doors juddered open.

Murat and Tommy bundled in, safe under the bright glare, mirrors reflecting their pale, scared faces.

The light strobed twice in the stairwell they’d just left and blinked out. The shadows surged to connect, washing over the floor in front of them like a pool of dark water. Murat backed all the way up against the mirrors as the lift doors stayed stubbornly open. Tommy jabbed at the fifth-floor button over and over. They wouldn’t close. It would be shit in a zombie apocalypse. Murat wished like hell he hadn’t thought of that, trying not to imagine lumbering corpses drooling up the stairs in the dark, seeking brains, nothing to stop them as he and Tommy were trapped against the sticky mirrors with no weapons and nowhere to run…

The doors finally juddered shut.

The darkness fought the narrowing wedge of light, pressing greedily in.

Murat thought he saw something between the closing crack, something forming in the shadows, a shape looming out of the darkness and leering at him. Not a face. Not exactly. Not a human face.

The lift doors pinged at last, closed and solid, and they both sagged at the same time, safe in their small cage of light.

“Did you see that?” Murat whispered to Tommy, whose pink-tinged eyes were moist with terror.

“Shut up!” Tommy pressed his finger to his lips.

They listened.

The lift didn’t move.

Was that – something outside? A movement, a whisper, something pushing against the doors?

Murat itched to press the button again.

They held their breath, but the lift shuddered into life, familiar clanks of aging machinery reassuring them that they were safe.

“Mum says this lift’s a piece of shit,” Tommy said, attempting to recover. His voice trembled but there was a ring of defiance as he tossed out the s-word.

Hundreds of mirror-Murats and mirror-Tommys glanced uneasily around their enclosed cage, reflecting each other forever. Murat ran a sticky hand over the top of his short hair.

 The lift groaned, making it to the second floor.

Murat swallowed, stomach roiling. Had he seen something in the darkness? If Tommy hadn’t, he couldn’t have seen anything. It was like Mick said, people’s eyes were trained to see patterns, that was all. Patterns in the dark were just… dots in front of his eyes, just tricks, just tricks, just tricks. He didn’t realise he was whispering that under his breath until Tommy elbowed him.

“Shut it.”

Murat pursed his lips around his mantra, but it kept beating around his brain.

The lift eased up from the second floor, climbing to the third. It was taking forever.

“Why’s it so slow?” Tommy complained, shifting from one foot to the other, skinny frame vibrating with impatience.

Murat thought about what was below their feet: a lift shaft full of darkness, darkness sticking to the underside of the lift’s floor, being dragged up behind them… He swallowed hard and looked up instead, at the reassuring lightbulb glaring at them from above. The darkness was above them, too. Bearing down. Heavy.

The lift shuddered.

Murat flinched into Tommy and they both pressed against the streaked mirror at their backs. Third floor. Tommy looked at Murat and nodded. Nearly there.

The lift’s light blinked once.

The hairs on Murat’s neck stood up. He froze.

The light blinked twice.

The lift shivered.

“No,” Tommy managed, his voice a tiny croak. “No, no, no…”

Murat couldn’t move. He pressed against the mirror for reassurance, but it didn’t help.

There was nowhere to go.

The light blinked out.

Murat had never known darkness like it – it swarmed them, plunging them into total jet black, his eyes not accustomed. Tommy yelped like a wounded dog, grabbing his arms.

Murat hoped it was Tommy grabbing his arms.

He hoped those were Tommy’s hands.

The light came back on.

Something in the mirror flickered away, disintegrating in his peripheral vision. Murat snapped around to look, confronted with hundreds of reflections of his face, of Tommy’s crumpled anguish, slashes of his own red t-shirt and Tommy’s white tracksuit, and nothing more.

The light flickered.

Something shifted in the reflection. The twisting pattern of a shadow? Murat was prepared to swear on his dad’s grave that neither he nor Tommy had moved.

They hadn’t reached the fourth floor yet. The lift crawled, creaking an inch at a time, and Murat imagined the strain of the mechanism as it battled the darkness. Was this how the old man from downstairs had died, when the power surged and his TV went off? Was this how he had felt, trapped in his chair, the darkness surging in to claim him?

It was stupid, stupid, stupid. There was nothing there, nothing, nothing.

His chest tightened. Dots burst in front of his eyes.

The light blinked out.

They were plunged into darkness.

Something slid past Murat’s ringing ears.

A breath? No: a sigh.

Was it Tommy, his ragged pants in Murat’s face? Murat’s own breath, mingling with Tommy’s?

“What’s that?!” Tommy whimpered, and the light flickered back on.

“I didn’t see anything,” Murat hissed, half strangled. “I didn’t see…”

Tommy was crying, staring into the top corner of the lift. “Who’s there?”

Murat couldn’t look. He squinted at the mirrors, trying not to see what was reflected there, focusing on the brand logo on Tommy’s back, the empty space around them.

Fourth floor.

“It’s just us,” he promised, praying he was right. “It’s just us…”

Tommy shook his head. “There’s some¾”

The light went out.

The floor shook.

Tommy let go of Murat’s arms.

Murat stumbled into the mirror, his hand finding the sticky dribbles on its surface. He drew away and bumped into something else, a solid form, but Tommy was the other side of the lift, wasn’t he? The shape was there, then it wasn’t. What the hell was that?

It must be Tommy, please let it be Tommy…

Oh shit, Murat thought, childish stories shooting up to comfort him, we’re going to be in the stars with Dad.

The light came back on.

Tommy was on the floor.

Murat’s chest hurt. He took a gulp of air, forcing his legs to cooperate, and shakily lowered himself into a squat. “T…Tommy?”

The light flickered.

“Tommy?”

Stars burst in his vision. He forced himself to take a deeper breath, his own hammering pulse ringing in his ears. Tears blurred the white, limp form, and Murat was too scared to touch him in case he was cold, in case he was sleeping, in case he was in the stars.

He swallowed hard and forced himself to touch his best friend.

He wasn’t sure what to expect. Tommy’s shoulder was solid, bony, under the light jacket. Murat thought you could tell if a person was dead by the way they felt, but Tommy felt the same. Was that right? That didn’t seem right. You were supposed to lose something, weren’t you, when you died? He had imagined the body being hollow, almost, after death, lighter, not weighted with resistance. He tried to pull Tommy onto his back, not thinking about things like First Aid or if he swallowed his tongue. He would cringe later, looking back, but Tommy’s eyes were open and he was still crying, and not dead at all.

Tommy whimpered.

He looked up at Murat with wide eyes, moist with fear. His small, thin lips struggled to form his question, and when he spoke a shiver lanced through Murat turning his bladder to water.

“Did you hear it?”

Murat shook his head, fear clenching his stomach in a leaden fist, shaking all over, tears rolling down his cheeks. “Hear what?”

Tommy whined but didn’t reply.

The doors opened.

Murat grabbed his friend and hoisted him as hard as he could, Tommy finding his feet and whimpering, urine stain soaking through the front of his trousers and dripping miserably down his leg. The lights lined the corridor, leading to Tommy’s flat.

They stumbled out of the lift as the doors juddered shut behind them.

The corridor lights were misbehaving, dimming with an angry hum. That was all Murat could hear: the hum of electric as it fought against the dark.

“Did you hear it?” Tommy whispered, whole body shaking.

“Shut it,” Murat returned, nerves taut as a guitar string. Now in the corridor, there was nothing to hear but the comforting sound of the lights.

They made it halfway along, Tommy’s flat the one on the far end, before the lift pinged open again behind them. He heard the doors slide open.

Tommy couldn’t look, but Murat had to.

He pushed Tommy ahead of him and turned around.

The lift was a box of darkness, so dark that Murat couldn’t see their reflections in the mirrors. He remembered it like a solid block of shadow, thick and rippling. It spilled out of the doors into the corridor in a wave as the nearest light blinked out.

Murat pulled Tommy with him and ran, the shadows at their heels, and pounded on the door of Tommy’s flat until his mum opened the door.

Murat remembered Liz Danage as a skinny, scarecrow-woman, straw-coloured hair lying lank around her hard, angry features, always in baggy cardigans that hung loosely off her shoulders and baggy grey pyjama bottoms she had to tie tightly around her waist. She didn’t say a word. Not about their frantic garbled explanations, their terror, or about Tommy wetting himself, although Murat was sure she’d noticed. She let them into a flat smoky with candles, their dim flames casting odd shapes over the walls.

“Generator’s gone funny or the fuses or sumfink,” she said, and pointed Murat to the phone. “Call your mum. She’ll be going mad.”

Tommy ran into the bathroom with a large wind-up torch but didn’t lock the door.

Murat sat in candlelight and Liz Danage gave him a plate of beans on toast, and the shadows twisted around them in the strange warmth of the flames, and the darkness stalked through Peregrine House until he wasn’t sure what was real and what he had imagined. But he didn’t joke about the dark again, and he never entered a room with the lights off.

Alone in chilly, drizzling Luton, lightyears away from those terrified boys in the lift, Murat dragged himself out of his memories. He was a grown man. This was his flat. There was nothing in here to frighten him.

His hand shook as he lowered it from the switch, staring into the depths of his darkened living room. There was nothing to be afraid of. There was nothing there, he reasoned, nothing at all – and yet it was as if the room was full for the first time, full of something he couldn’t see. There were shapes within, rounded, bulky, shifting as he squinted, only to settle in the form of his own, well-worn furniture. But around them the shadows gathered, dim and nebulous and pregnant with something denied him. All darkness was the same, surely? And yet… and yet…

It was not like the darkness of the Estate he’d left behind, not like the swallowing corners and stealthy flight of what lurked there, if anything ever had. He was too old for all that, he told himself, too old for that now. Yet this was different somehow, safer, emptier, in a way he couldn’t name. He’d turned and faced the darkness that night, he reminded himself. Maybe this was the night he would step towards it.

For the first time in his life, legs quivering, Murat took a step into a room without the light on. He nearly bottled it, darting back as something swam by his peripheral vision, but there was nothing there, nothing to get him. A small moth, disturbed by the light in the hall, fluttered out and flung itself upwards at the light. Murat watched it battering itself against the hot bulb, scorching its own wings, in thrall to the light’s blazing tyranny. He closed his eyes and stilled his rapid breaths to quieten his racing heart. For a moment he thought he was going to be sick, his face prickled hot and cold, his stomach roiled with tension. Then he stepped back into the dark.

He balled up his fists in case something grabbed his arms or bumped into his back.

Seconds passed.

Nothing happened.

Little by little, Murat forced his bunched muscles to relax. He forced himself to breathe in a gentle rhythm and let the pressing shadows envelop him. They were only shadows after all, intangible, insubstantial, but engorged with some quality of their own, and a sound he had never heard before.

Murat closed his eyes, and, for the first time in his life, listened to the sound of darkness.

F is for Fear is available for Kindle, in paperback, and on Audible here.

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#MonstrousMay Day 10: Mermaids

Graphic and Prompt Credit: Johannes T. EvansCrustaceous Merfolk

A piece I wrote last year for Monstrous May… Reprise!

Under the stars on a summer night, a land shoal drunkenly scatters. One of the group makes his way to Unger Point, and rests where the tide laps at the edge of the shingle, on its way in. He lies down, not knowing the tide is coming in, and the water laps closer until it is around his ankles. 

With the rising water come the folk. 

    Usually, the folk have their fill of sand worms and picnic remains, but every so often there is a feast like this. They are quiet, emerging from the foam on jointed legs. On land, their shells are slick and shiny, and their skin reflects the inky navy of the night sky. Their burly claws encase tender, muscular flesh, made all the more succulent for sharks in deeper waters by feasts like these. 

    They mass when the feast is spotted. 

Some smaller of their kin have arrived first and are already peppering the body with their starred shapes, making tiny, high-pitched burbles to attract the others. The starfolk glisten in the night, phosphorescing, and the body seems to glimmer with diamonds. They have swarmed to the easiest places – the eyes, the soft lips, which had been parted in sleep, and so fill up the mouth cavity. Starfolk clamp down with their venomous bellies, and feed. The body is already swollen with the reaction from their bites. The enzymes break down the fat and flesh from the inside, and what bubbles into the mouth is sucked up by their pulsing, glowing fronds. Chubby cheeks and big, glazed orbs for eyes make them look cherubic, their bulbous heads unencumbered by cartilage or bone, blown up into the squishy mockery of human babies by a system of air and water sacs they use for propulsion. The puckered rosebud lips are for this purpose – the feeding happens underneath the starred limbs. 

    The shellfolk are much bigger and enjoy the results of the starfolk’s enzymes. They, in turn, break down the bones and allow access to the marrow, break through skin and allow the starfolk to feed within the wounds. There is enough for all. 

    The body has four limbs, tubular and jointed like the shellfolk do, but most of the feast is in the trunk of the torso. 

    The shellfolk break pieces off with their claws, shredding the meat as the internal organs break down and ooze into gel. The body twitches feebly – it was probably alive when the starfolk began, but cannot last much longer. The lungs wheeze and gurgle but this could be from the shaking of the body and pressure upon it now that the shellfolk are there. Starfolk drop off the parts the shellfolk are stripping, plopping onto the sand and scuttling back to swarm the dripping wounds. 

The shellfolk have eyes like sheep on retractable stalks, and they roll in their sockets, assessing the feast. Seal-heads with human features sniff out their prey. They discourse over food with clicks and whistles. They feed from two mouthparts – the ones that might pass for human in the face that could not, and the mandibles located in their chests, at the lip of the shells that fuse to their tough, seal-hide skin. Their skin ripples in reflection of the changing sky, a chameleonic wetsuit. 

Mastication takes place in the human-like mouthparts and the stomach, which is filled with grinders. The softer flesh is tasted, enjoyed. Bone and gristle, as well as less tasty morsels – a matter of personal preference – is delivered direct to the stomach through the lower mandibles for nourishment. 

The starfolk burble as the tide creeps over the body, now thoroughly dismembered and split apart. The patch of shingle where it lay is full of waving claws, jointed legs that scuttle and shift the pebbles, and tiny sparkling blobs that plop off into the water when sated, bobbing back out across the waves in myriads of bloated crystalline lights. 

There is little left. Some cracked bones picked clean. Some ribbons of intestine, shredded and lying on the stones like limp strips of bladderwrack. The sea will wash it away and fish will tuck in, and the shelled folk will submerge and scuttle back to deeper waters. 

Orkney & Shetland Folklore: Trows (#MonstrousMay Day 9: Trolls)

Graphic and Prompt Credit: Johannes T. EvansTrolls and Trows

Just a short little post today! Trolls are Scandinavian in origin, but in the British Isles they show up mainly where there was extensive Norse settlement, like the Orkney Isles, where they are called trows.

The trow is an ugly, mischievous creature that like in fairy folklore of Northern Europe, residing in the barrows and only ever coming out at night. The ugliness and the nocturnal aspects reflect the Norwegian troll folklore, and sometimes, like fairies, they can be invisible. They often visit houses at night. In the tales where they are invisible, sometimes only certain people can see them, and if that’s not you, then you can see them if you’re touching a person who can.

Trow rhymes with cow, and could be a corruption of Norwegian ‘troll’, or is actually related to the undead draugr, in Orkney dialect pronounced ‘drow’.

The trow and the spirits of the deadTerrible trows of Orkney (Mysterious Britain)Yule: a Midwinter festivalTrow encounters (and what to do!)Trow magicTrows and music

Trows also appear in the Shetland Isles, and you can read about the Shetland trow lore here. The tale of Mallie and the Trow is a Shetland tale. Adventure Shetland also has a video and article on the trows of the islands here.

The 16thC text, Jo Ben’s Descriptio Insularum Orchadiarum (Description of the Orkneys), is online here, use the side menu list to navigate. In his description of Stronsey, Jo Ben writes:

“Furthermore sea-monsters called Trowis very often go with the women living there…..This is a description of that monster. It is clad in seaweed, in its whole body it is like a foal, with curly hair, it has a member like that of a horse and large testicles.”

The Sea-Trow is a distinct type of trow with lots of folklore around them too.

FolkloreCLICK TO READ:

THE TORNESS TROWS
THE DEATH OF THE MAINLAND TROWS
THE MAIDEN LOVED BY TROWS
THE TROWS’ REVENGE
THE COLLAPSING KIRK
BROONIE KING OF THE TROWS
TROWS AND THE SANDWICK FARMER
TROWS AND THE NORWEGIAN BRIDE

Bad Omen Birds in British Folklore (#MonstrousMay Day 8: Monstrous Birds)

Graphic and Prompts Credit: Johannes T. Evans

I got stuck thinking about seagulls for this prompt. They are absolute monsters who will attack and steal your chips on any given day, like something out of a Hitchcock film. So I thought I would take a look at some Bad Birds for this prompt and THIS time not get side-tracked like I did with the dragons yesterday.

If you like some omens of death, I already have a post on Welsh death omens which includes a very particular kind of bird!

I haven’t put in a lot of Sussex folklore into the novels (yet) because Ricky tends to read omens a little more broadly, in a Romano-British/Etruscan kind of a way, mixed with some Germanic practices. Sussex is a melting pot of a county with dialect words and phrases borrowed/adapted from Old English, Old Welsh, Dutch and French, and the Pendles originally hailed from Lancashire as well, so the family itself has a mix of practices and cunning folk traditions from both counties. So the books themselves have a mix of all sorts of references and, like the characters and the town itself which is ‘Londonised’ and full of in-comers, the books have that sort of feel to them, rather than being straight folk horror (although my books are rarely ‘straight’ anything).

Here’s some British birdlore for you!

Birds Bringing Bad OmensWhimbrel: Photograph: Bill Coster/Alamy

The whimbrel (Numenius phaeopus) is thought to be unlucky. Unfortunately, it’s now endangered and very rare, and has all but disappeared from Rye Harbour and the estuary. It was added to the red list of conservation concern in 2009. Habitat loss is the primary cause.

The whimbrel on its own is not so bad, but it is considered a bad omen when there’s a group of seven of them. It is attached to the tale of the Seven Whistlers, which was more prevalent in the Midlands as a bad omen for miners – hearing the Seven Whistlers at night meant that death was looming. It was also a story that crops up in the coalfields of Wales, I think!

In some versions of the tale they were the spirits of dead men who had been either miners (for mining communities) or fishermen (in fishing communities), and their cries warned their living comrades of impending danger. You can read more on this tale and listen to the cries of the whimbrel, the lapwing and the curlew here.

Here’s Sarah Deere-Jones’s song, The Seven Whistlers, where the whistlers are curlews rather than whimbrels:

The Seven Whistlers, written and performed by Sarah Deere-JonesThe Portsmouth News: House Sparrow ENGSUS00120121220114758

The house sparrow, one of the most commonly seen birds in the country, was once thought to be a death omen in Sussex and Kent.

In European folklore more generally, a sparrow flying into your house is a sign of impending death, and sailors got a sparrow tattoo in the hope one would catch their soul if they died at sea.

In Sussex and Kent, the superstition was that if a sparrow flew into your house, you had to kill it or your parents would die. In some variations, if you didn’t kill it, then you would die.

I played with this a bit in THE CROWS where a sparrow flies into the window of the nursing home and falls to the ground, twitching. I kind of wish I’d made a more direct reference to this folklore by having it fly through an open window, but I think that would have been too on the nose for how things turn out.

Magpie in flight

The magpie is an ominous bird too, and the subject of lots of variations on the magpie counting rhyme (one for sorrow etc).

There are a few Sussex superstitions about the magpie, and in particular when it appears on your left hand side (especially bad).

The following is from the 1878 Folk-Lore Record:

The popular belief is that one magpie seen on your left hand is a certain sign of coming woe. Perhaps it is the hope of averting by extreme civility the evil which the magpie is about to bring upon them that induces Sussex people of every class to take off their hats and bow to this bird whenever it suddenly appears on their left hand. Whenever I questioned my poorer neighbours about their evident dislike of it, they always answered that it was a bad bird, and knew more than it should do, and was always looking about and prying into other people’s affairs. There is a general belief that its perching on any beast is a bad omen for the animal ; and it has perhaps some truth in it : for before the farmer or the shepherd is aware of it, the magpie often smells out a lurking disease, and is known to attack and tear out the eyes of weakly sheep and lambs.

The Folk-Lore Record: Publications of the Folklore Society Vol. I, 1878 https://electricscotland.com/history/waifs/folklorerecord01.pdf

Here’s a gorgeously creepy version of the Magpie song sung by The Unthanks, which incorporates the folklore rhyme, the left vs right omen, and the idea that the magpie knows things it shouldn’t, bringing news and gossip to people.

The Unthanks singing the Magpie song with lyrics

Obviously crows and ravens have associations with death too, since they are carrion-feeders and were associated with battlefields and hanging around corpses.

The ballad ‘Twa Corbies’ is a Scottish Borders ballad (a version of the Three Ravens ballad) and I used it as the preface to my nonfiction book on a medieval murder case: MURDER DURING THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR: THE CURIOUS CASE OF WILLIAM DE CANTILUPE. The murder itself took place in Lincolnshire in 1375, but the ballad fits it so well.

I love the Steeleye Span version, but this is also phenomenal:

Ayreheart’s version of ‘Twa Corbies’ from the album BARLEY MOON

Here’s the Three Ravens ballad, which is the English folk ballad. “The Three Ravens” appeared in the song book “Melismata” compiled by Thomas Ravenscroft and published in 1611, but it is older than that. I didn’t use this one as I preferred the version where the lady took another husband, as that was what happened in the Cantilupe case.

The Black Country Three’s version of English folk ballad “Three Ravens”

I hope you enjoyed that brief little flutter around birdlore! Again, the Corpse Birds of Welsh folklore is something I’ve written about before and that post is here.

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Dragons and Dragon Folklore in the Midlands and East Anglia (#MonstrousMay Day 7)

Prompts & Graphic Credit: Johannes T. EvansThe MidlandsThe counties of the Midlands: Shropshire and Herefordshire were discussed in the post on Wales and the Welsh Borders. Dark red shows where the Midlands are in EnglandGuy of Warwick, a questing dragon hunter, features in a medieval romance. Travelled up north to kill a dragon in Northumbria, apparently (see the previous post on the North of England & Scotland!)
If you’re thinking about the Leicestershire wyvern, who pops up in city architecture in Leicester, that one’s a red herring. It’s in relation to the heraldic wyvern on Thomas of Lancaster’s arms (b. 1278).
Drakelow, Worcestershire gets its name from the Anglicised form of the Latin draco (drake), which implies that at one time there was a dragon legend attached to the area??
Winlatter rock, near Chesterfield in Derbyshire: a priest banished a dragon here with such force it left footprints in the rock and retired to the Blue John mines. You can also read about Sir Guy of Warwick, dragon hunter, saving the good people of Chesterfield from a bewitched, rampaging cow in Pete Castle’s book, Derbyshire Folk Tales (2011).

Honestly, not really finding a lot of dragon folklore in the Midlands (the Midlands are the batch of English counties in the middle of the country, divided into East and West, and roughly corresponding to where the old kingdom of Mercia was). Again, there’s probably a lot, but that’s a small sample of just the ones I found from a few of the counties.

I’m thinking that Mercia probably didn’t have too many dragon stories that survived, but in the Middle Ages you do have Sir Guy of Warwick mythologised as an itinerant dragon-killer. I don’t know whether this is because these areas were relatively stable in terms of political and economic power, and so the dragon tales lost their relevance and faded away into the landscape, leaving only place names behind.

Dragons also tend to live in bodies of water and in marshes and fens, or caves. Nottinghamshire is absolutely riddled with caves but has few dragon myths. This is probably because those caves were used by the inhabitants themselves as dwellings, so there was no room for a dragon in there as well. The Sneinton Dragon is an impressive street art sculpture by Nottingham-born artist Robert Stubley, but it depicts a dragon because that’s what the public wanted after consultation, not because it references a specific local legend.

Again I could be wrong and the Midlands might be brimming with local dragon legends I can’t find after a cursory search!

I looked up place-names with “drake” in them suggest that at one time there must have been a wider pool of dragon stories attached to the region (Source: , a county-by-county guide to the linguistic origins of England’s place-names – a project of the English Place-Name Society, founded 1923). Yet, even spread across these counties there are , and some relate to the family whose surname was Drake, not to a local dragon legend.

Derbyshire – 12 place-names

Leicestershire – 3 place-names

Nottinghamshire – 1 place-name

Rutland – 1 place-name

Shropshire – 9 place-names (covered in Wales and the Welsh borders post)

Staffordshire – 2 place-names

Warwickshire – 1 place-name

Worcestershire – 1 place-name

East AngliaModern indication of what “East Anglia” refers to: the ancient Kingdom of East Anglia was more Norfolk and Suffolk.

Suffolk has a few dragon stories including one St George legend variant!

The Bures dragon, slain in 1405 by Sir Richard Waldegrave. It has its very own chalk memorial! The dragon’s hide was arrow-resistant (oh no!) but it also didn’t really like being shot at, so it decided to leave the sheep alone and go after less well-armed prey and slunk off into the marsh. Note that the (modern) chalk art is pretty much a copy of the Red Dragon of Wales (just facing the other way). It was created in 2012 for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

The story appears in Henry de Blaneford’s Chronicle for 1405: ‘In these days there appeared lately an evil dragon of excessive length with a huge body, crested head, saw-like teeth and elongated tail in land near the town of Bures near Sudbury, which destroyed and killed a herd of sheep. The servants of Sir Richard Waldegrave who owns the land haunted by the dragon came forth to shoot it with arrows which sprang back from its ribs as if they were metal of hard stone and from the spines if its back with a jangling as if they were hitting bronze plates, and flew far away because its skin was impenetrable. Almost the whole county was summoned to slaughter it but when it saw that it was to be shot at again, it fled into the marsh, hid in the reeds and was seen no more.’

… This is interesting because of the Wormingford dragon, which wasn’t far away from Bures, also reported in the 15thC.
The Wormingford dragon, slain in the fifteenth century by EITHER Sir Bertram de Haye OR Sir George Marney, and caused the village to change its name to Wormingford, after the death of this great worm. This has a basis in truth: sources suggest it was actually an escaped crocodile from Richard I’s menagerie. Like THE HATCHING (2014), a British horror-comedy creature feature set in Somerset.

Are these two dragons actually the same crocodile, or more than one of them??
Little Cornard dragons – There is a legend that on 26 September 1449 a fight between two dragons took place on a meadow by the River Stour. One dragon was black and came from Kedington Hill, Suffolk, the other was red and came from Ballingdon Hill, Essex. After an hour’s fighting the red dragon won, and both went back to their hills. The site of the mythical battle is known locally as Sharpfight Meadow.

The parallel between this story and the Red Dragon of Wales is really striking, especially with the colour of its opponent changing from white to black. What’s also striking is that the local dragon was black and lost, while the red dragon was from the neighbouring county, and won.

Not sure what this is about, but the parallels with the Red Dragon and White Dragon are striking, and I’m wondering if this has any symbolic political resonance.
The Ludham Dragon, Norfolk – a monstrous creature that lurked in a subterranean labyrinth! Another version of the tale is here. This is potentially based on another menagerie escapee, as the Norfolk Chronicle has this report for September 28 1782:

‘On Monday the 16th, a snake of enormous size was destroyed at Ludham in this county by Jasper Andrews, of that place. It measured five feet eight inches long, was almost three feet in circumference, and had a very long snout: what was remarkable, there were two excrescences on the forepart of the head which very much resembled horns. ‘This creature seldom made its appearance in the daytime but kept concealed in subterranean retreats, several of which have been discovered in town: one near the tanning office, another in the premises of the Rev Mr Jeffery, and another in the lands occupied by Mr William Popple, at the hall. The skin of the above surprising reptile is now in the possession of Mr J(James) Garrett, a wealthy farmer in the neighbourhood.’

I can’t find too many more tales of dragons in this part of the world, and these are the most ‘famous’ ones, I guess!

Jaqueline Simpson’s book, British Dragons, has loads more info. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive post, more a whistle-stop tour! If you’re appreciating today’s mini-series, please leave me a tip if you can.