G.R. Yeates's Blog, page 4

Monday Reveals for Halloween, Christmas & the New Year

This Halloween, a tale of corporate horror inspired by the style of the 60s Beats will be released. A Naked Lunch for the new millenium entitled This Darkness Mine.

 

This Christmas, there will be an extra chill in the air from a story of high school horror, abuse and vengeance. The darkest, scariest and most personal work that I have ever written.

 

And in the New Year, my first Fantasy novel When Darkness Dawns will be released and here is your first glimpse of the world of Seythe…

More news to come soon…

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Sample Sunday: Shadows Closing In

The following is an excerpt from the Collected Diaries of Kenneth L. Wainwright – much-loved star of the Oh, Hello films who made his name on Dennis Woodcock’s radio comedies. He was found dead on 15th April 1988 at his London home aged 62. His mother, Sheila Wainwright, was also found dead at the time and a suicide pact between the two was suspected though never confirmed in the national press.

He appeared in twenty-six Oh, Hello films and on radio he was a regular winner of Wait A Minute and, in earlier years, contributed a range of voices and characters to Boris Yeoville’s Beyond Me and its successor, Beggar’s Belief. He was a chat show regular for over twenty years and was given his own television show to present in later life between stints in repertory theatre.

Monday, 11 April

Oh, how drear it has all become, reely.

The Mater continues to be the most crushing bore. Her geriatric decrepitude wears away my patience as much as it wears away her remaining sense into senility. The soiled sheets. Those horrid yellow and brown stains. The forgetfulness. The repetitive child-like neediness. Oh, it is all so crushingly dull and withering waste of one’s life-hours.

I wish I were done with this life. I wish I were through. This is it, the utter end. It reely has to be. After so many years, so much now conspires into torture. My stomach’s lining gnaws at me when I disturb it with food. Walks are an agony as the bowels act up and the bum does its dirty work. My bones, my kidneys, my liver, everything seems to curse me with cramps and intolerable aches.

Oh, how I wish to be dead. Post, nothing. News, nothing but the same old cycles of violence and drab melodrama as I remember it always being since I was a boy. Nothing ever changes, not really. I am sure in the future that when such things as genocide occur, they will be considered mercy killings by those who are left to live on afterwards in whatever dreadful world we, the people, create for ourselves.

Shut up in this box all day, these walls I never could bring myself to decorate, this floor I never dared to disturb with carpet. It makes it all so much easier to keep clean you see, leaving out the modern accoutrements, leaving the packing plastic on the cooker and so on. Oh, but this space lacks so much of life, of laughter. This clinical morgue I have made for myself, a dead man who walks to shops then home again and so on and so on. I feel a bleeding going on inside me, every step is a step nearer the grave, nudging me closer. A little piece of death itself bides its time in my gut, a loose black tooth slyly tucked away.

One last thing from the shops for the Mater, always the way, always the bloody way.

 

Tuesday, 12 April

Walk in the park with Paul today. Still looking as delicious as ever. Grey skies. Quite tolerable. Conversation around the usual subjects, went something like this.

“Oh, do slow down, will you?”

“What’s wrong with you now then, Ken?”

“Don’t be so bloody smart. Hurts me doesn’t it? With my insides, the state they’re in, I can’t stand all this running about.”

“Running? We’re barely bloody walking, mate.”

“Oh, do shut up, will you? Christ, what a dross, what a life, I’ve had enough of this world. Enough, enough, I say.”

“Dramatic as ever. You just need to find yourself a good fella to bunk up with.”

“Oh, I wish, no. That’s what they all say but no. Death is the only lover I’ve got waiting for me. Waiting my whole life for me, he has been.”

“Don’t talk such morbid rot, mate. What about me, eh? Your friends? You still want to see us, don’cha?”

“Yes, I do, but you just don’t understand the pain, Paul. It’s been with me, one form or another, me whole life and I just don’t know what to do any more. It’s really gripping me. And there’s nothing the doctors say they can do to take it away. It’s down to me. No-one else. And I seen ‘em coming after me.”

“Seen who?”

“Shadows, they’re closing in on me. Horrid spidery things with these long, long legs. I think they’re legs, they might be arms. And they’ve got these fingers, no flesh on them, and these horrid black fingernails that they use to tap-tap and scratch-scratch at my windows with.”

“You need to see a doctor, Ken. A good head doctor if you’re seeing things like that. Come on, Barney. Good boy.”

“Care more about the bloody dog than you do me.”

“Oh, do shut up, Ken.”

Paul led Barney away, leaving me standing alone in the dirty white embrace of the winter fog. It was my first time telling another soul about those damned shadows. I’ve not even told the Mater about them. In her state, it probably wouldn’t matter one way or the other but, oh, how I had hoped Paul would be receptive. I don’t know what these things are that I see, crawling about in my room at night. I turn the light on and have a fiddle about just so as not to see them there. When the light goes off, they come back. Evil things. Not sure what I am to do, apart from prepare for tomorrow night’s show.

Best dust off the old mask and costume, eh?

 

Wednesday 13 April

Where is it all happening, eh? Why was I never invited, not now, not ever?

They were in the theatre tonight, the shadows, I’m sure of it, in the aisles and in the seats. Such a low turn-out for the last night that I couldn’t help but notice them. Not enough bodies available to shield from me the sight of those awful crematory shapes drifting dustily about the place. Made me gabble like an idiot during a straight performance. Ad-libbing like mad I was. Oh, the shame. Felt so suicidally depressed afterwards that I didn’t bother to stay for the ticking off I would have received from the director – obnoxious little shit he is. Made it home safe through the streets. The utter shambles of the production needed only a little push to bring it crashing down and that push came from me. Though, looking back on it, I feel a certain triumph like Nero playing his fiddle whilst Rome was burning down around him. Only laughs of the night were mine and mine alone. That’s something I suppose. Thank god I won’t have to go back to that rubbish bin of a theatre with its dull-as-dishwater cast and dumb-as-a-diddlysquit crew. The Mater woke up screaming and shouting about black things that were cold as ice to the touch. Ignored her. Now going to bed for my second fiddle-play of the evening.

 

Thursday 14 April

Oh, how I miss those times in Tangiers. I wish I’d made more of them. Looking back over one’s life, one sees it laid out and wonders at what might have been had a different detour been taken, a left turn at this junction, straight on ahead when there was a pause for thought either here or there. The villas were exquisite and so were the boys in the Medina; beautiful skin, brown as a nut. I could do with a bit of that now. A good nut or two. Oh, I’m so awful, reely.

But there was never a truly successful visit now I think of it. The orgies and intimacies were for the others, the young bucks, not for me, no. Some are born to enjoy life and all its fruits, it seems to me, whilst there are those of us who are left to gnaw upon the unsatisfying roots for what little nourishment we can find. I fled to Tangiers every time out of a sense of panic at the inner despair growing within me. I had been motionless for too long and being so created a desperate need for motion of any kind. Even the motion of a younger body that I had paid ten dirhum for the company of.

They seep through the cracks in life to stain me with memory and crawl over the walls. Yes, maybe that is it, that is where these shadow-things have come from. Lithe as they are, slender too, could they be the lonely ghosts of those antient orgies I attended? The big A must have made it as far as Morocco and some of the ones I fiddled with there. Are they here to haunt me?

Then, of course, there were my forays to The Spartan Club in Victoria. Always needed a few stiff ones before I went looking for a few stiff ones. Ho-ho-ho. Oh, the cheap old jokes, the lavatorial gags, how wasteful my way with words has become over the years. Bawling and shouting. Mutual masturbation in the bogs with some young sod I’d then ask home who would serve me a curt “No, thank you, dear,” and then leave me to sob alone. Can you pass on the Big A like that? I’ve no idea. Are they all back to haunt me then, now that I am a lizardly touch-me-not in my dying days?

Is that it, you bastards?

 

Friday 15 April

Life has become all innuendo and this is what makes it totally unacceptable to me, reely. They, we, the people, the audience, do not want characters. Cliché, stereotype, trope, caricature, everything camped-up and overdone until no-one knows who is wearing a mask or costume and who is not, that is what we want. What we are. An endless parade of the drab, the drear and the commonplace dressed up in rags pretending to be finery until we all drop down dead and the dust and the darkness that’s left hold dominion over all and nothing.

Oh, what an utter insult to existence it is, all those years I spent making those Oh, Hello films; twenty-six of the beastly things, and I never saw the truth of what I was becoming. Life imitates art far more than art imitates life wrote the Bard of Reading Gaol, but what about the complete horror of when art imitates life so poorly to the point where the difference is lost upon us and we can never return to the former way of being? When we no longer know where the performance begins and ends? When we continue to excavate ourselves, serving up the ‘body-fat’ of our lives to others until there is nothing left but some dusty shadows with nothing better to do than creep and crawl about the walls, seats and aisles of the drab old theatre we have made of this world?

Yes, you see, I understand it now. I’ve got it. Well, don’t you give it to me then – that would have been the punch-line, of a sort, back in the old days of witless verbiage.

I put Mater to sleep earlier tonight. I had enough barbiturate poison saved for the both of us, you see. Now that I know these shadow-things are not a madness I’ve picked up from her, I feel better about it – feeding my pills to her and then pressing the pillow down over her face for good measure. A kinder death than I gave to Dad – that carbon tetrachloride made a right mess of him. He still deserved worse though. I guess that makes this entry my confession to that nonsense after all these years then. Oh well, as I’m going now, it doesn’t matter. Not really. I killed the old bastard and I’m glad I did so. I know now there’s no Heaven or Hell for me to go to. No judgement to come down on me from on High.

I am no longer to be an object of Crass Ridicule.

They are letting me finish this entry before they make their way in and then their way into me. How I long for them to pull me apart, to split my seams, these shadows. How strangely appropriate that one so depreciative of tactility and loathing of contact with others should be taken apart by such creatures. The mask is to go, at last. The costume is to come off. And I am to be one of their number to drift and drift about out there forever. Oh, those fingers, so long and lithesome, so very lovely. How I ache for them. How I need for them to touch me. Oh, I no longer need this blasted pen or these dashed, clumsy words. I am done with life. I am through. This is it. The end.

There is no bloody point.

END

Copyright © G.R. Yeates 2012

Author’s note: This short story is a tribute to the late actor and comedian, Kenneth Williams, who died on 15th April 1988. As a work of fiction, it is not intended by the author to be a work of serious commentary on the actor or his life.

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Sample Sunday: Mr Fingers

Joanne saw him standing there, on the other side of the street, and did not believe what she was seeing at first. The baggy suit with its black-white stripes, the long, long arms dangling on either side and the painted-on smile that was like a black mirror of the night’s crescent moon. Her stomach churned and, on impulse, she shut the curtains, the rattling of the rails matching with the shaking of the bones in her hands. In darkness, she stood with her fingers still gripping the flower-adorned curtains, wanting to throw them back open and stare across the road at him. At the clown who was not there, never had been there. This was a leftover from a dream, something undigested, a crumb, a blot, a fragment floating free within her tired psyche.

Nothing to worry about, no, not really.

Drawing in a deep breath, steeling herself, Joanne threw back the curtains on the fading day and stared across the street at the empty space she knew should be there.

Only it was not there. He was there. There he was, a clown, smiling wide, waving his fingers at her. Slowly waving them, stroking them back and forth, stroking, stroking, hard then soft, soft then hard, she remembered too well how it felt, the touch of those thin fingers.

He was moving now, yes, he was, he was crossing the street, coming for her.

Joanne let out a small strangled sound before she ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time despite her age, remembering all of the times in dreams when she ran from him before. Then she was slamming shut the door of the bedroom behind her. Holding it shut, leaning hard against it, not daring to move a muscle, budge an inch. She pressed the soft shell of her ear against the door and listened.

Long seconds dragged by, she heard only the fine, rarefied static of silence. Then, there was a knock at the front door. A distinct and real sound echoing through the house, followed by another knock, then another. Then another sound, a sound she well-remembered from black-painted lips being pressed close to her ear. The soft sound of his laughter. There was nothing manic in him, as one might expect of such a creature, and that was what scared her the most as a child. The certainty in the sound he made, knowing he would get to her eventually.

Footfalls, she heard them on the carpet of the stairs, steadily climbing, coming closer. Listening intently to his approach, Joanne thought back to her first memories of him. In her cot, vague and shadowy, she had seen him standing in the corner of her nursery. A shape she took to be a big toy back then, like Bob-bob , her cuddly bear. Mum and Dad were amazed at how quiet and well-behaved she was, unlike other babies, as she lay staring off into the space where he stood in the corner. Black and white stripes, smiling mouth, fingers forever stirring at the air. It was only as she grew that she realised that only she could see him. She named him Mr Fingers because he never spoke, never made a sound except for that strange soft  laughter. How many years had he stood in the corner of that room, staring at the baby who grew into a young girl convinced he was a friend. Mum had told her stories about guardian angels when she was little, she had wondered if that was what he was – even though his smile and the perpetual motion of his fingers did not seem to have a trace of the holy about them.

She discovered the truth about her friend one Sunday afternoon.

They came back from church and the house was hushed. There was not a sound in the place so it seemed, like it was waiting, something trapped and aching, feeling its way towards being released. She went upstairs to her room to change for tea, leaving her parents to squabble as usual. She remembered their voices drifting after her like assiduous ghosts. Then she shut them out by closing the door of her bedroom and began to change her clothes. The soft laughter came out of the corner behind her, and she thought about how she had turned and seen what was there. Not a striped and smiling jester in his motley but a black wetness, streaming with old mould and sour damp, and the fingers, reaching out for her, all those fingers.

Her screams cut through the studied stuffiness of the house and there was a pounding on the stairs as her father came for her, banging his shoulder against the door until it cracked open. All of them thinking forever after about how a door with no lock could become stuck so tight in the jamb like that. Joanne was white as white and her eyes were staring at the bare corner she had always stared at as a baby. There was nothing there, there never had been. Dad stroked her face, her hair and put her small shaking body to bed, drawing the curtains to shut out the light. He closed the door.

Then, he sat down on the bed and stroked her face and hair again.

 

Years went by and Joanne grew older. She went to a good grammar school, a better university and taught art at a number of inner city schools in London where her soft accent and gentle bearing earned her as much resentment as it did admiration. She never forgot Mr Fingers. He was a subject she returned to time and again in sketches and paintings. Boyfriends often remarking on it as her other subjects were so much brighter, more joyous; the rural plains of Sussex and East Anglia, the changing flora of the seasons and the fauna that began to encroach on the city streets as London spread its boundaries of concrete and tarmac ever outward. Amongst these pleasantries, the men in her life would find an angular man, smeared and blotched by blacks and dirty white, his smile a slash of night-time shadow and his eyes staring blankly out, brimming over with nothingness. And those fingers, long like a scarecrow’s, seeming to move as they looked at them even when the paper was laid flat or held still. The men in her life would ask her questions that she could not answer, some would leave altogether after she asked them to do certain things to her. And sometimes, late at night, when she had one glass of red wine too many and had begun to grow grey, Joanne would take these dreadful daubs out of their drawers and talk to them, asking them the same questions, over and over and over again.

“Was it you? Did you do it? Did you scare all the men away from me? Was it you who did that?”

Then she would cry until the paint, ink or charcoal ran to ruin from her tears. She would screw them all up into a crackling ball and then stuff them into the bin. A few days later, she would find herself feverishly painting and drawing until she had remade the pictures over again.

Until Mr Fingers was back with her, where he belonged.

 

It all stopped when they buried Father. She remembered her face becoming as hot and red as the flames in the furnace into which his coffin was fed at the crematorium. Getting to her feet, swaying with a clear-headed sobriety she had not felt in too many of her long, painful, lonely years. She shouted out, with tears in her eyes, for all to hear and see.

“Burn you bastard, burn!”

And then, he was gone, and Mr Fingers went with him.

 

But ghosts are assiduous things, she thought as she heard the footfalls come to a stop on the other side of the bedroom door, and she felt her insides clenching tight at the sound of those fingers scratching and scraping their way over the woodwork. He was blind, always had been, not able to see what he was and what the things were that he did. That was how he was and had to be.

Poor Mr Fingers.

He had come back before and she never was sure why. During her last year before retiring from teaching at the school, there had been one night where she was alone in the art room. It was winter and darkness had fallen early. The shadows seemed to have more weight than usual as she remembered, pressing them up against the glass of the windows, flowing over them like paint, ink and charcoal. The children had been painting Christmas pictures; jolly and bright were the smudged and smeared renditions of Santa Claus, his elves, Rudolph and the other reindeer laid out on the desks before her. The happiness of the little ones seemed to linger in the air that day, like soft laughter.

And when she went around the room to collect them up, she did not see it at first because of how the reds, the yellows, the greens and the bright blues all stood out so. But then, when she placed them on her desk, she saw what should not have been there in any vision of Christmas cheer. Standing in a space, to the side, out of the way, there was a figure and he was there in every picture made by fumbling paint-scabbed fingers that day. Mr Fingers, black and white, long and lean, eyes staring, mouth smiling, fingers softly stirring.

She felt them brushing into the spaces between her ribs, tickling her.

Only for a moment, then they were no longer there.

Breathing heavy and hard, Joanne stuffed the pictures into a desk drawer. Knowing she could not bin or burn them, they were the children’s, not hers. She stood there shaking, her eyes closed, knuckles pressing down hard on the desk for a long time before she packed up and went home.

When she was home, she went upstairs, drew the curtains, laid down in the dark fully-dressed but for her shoes. And she imagined that she felt long, lithesome fingers between her toes, tracing their tips down the soles of her feet, exploring them, pale and soft foreign landscapes. It was a long time before she was able to go to sleep. And, after that night, he went away again and she thought this time it was for good.

 

But ghosts are assiduous things and here he is again, she thought, scratching and scraping at my old bedroom door.

Poor Mr Fingers, no-one loves him, no-one needs him, won’t you please let him in, just one last time? This would be the end.

And Joanne was no longer leaning against the door. It was opening. It was closing. She was no longer alone in the bedroom. He was there, bringing a scent of old mould, a mineral bitterness and a sour sulphide smell that ripened in the air. The curtains were drawn. She had already done that. She laid down on the bed. There was only one thing left to do now.

Let him stroke her face and hair.

END

Copyright © G.R. Yeates 2012

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Sample Sunday: The Tell-Tale Eye

It was late at night and I was crossing over the roads and byways of town to the hostel where I had taken to whiling away the days, weeks and months of my life. Actually, can it have been years now? Possibly. When you fall by Life’s wayside and become a derelict thing that few to none care for, an understanding of time and space and how they interrelate can be one of the first things to go. When there is nothing to look forward to, there is nothing to then be much concerned about and this extends to the passage of days and nights and however many there are remaining in one’s life.

I had made it to the flyover, a grey and gloomy barrier between myself and the empty industrial estate upon the other side of which my hostel resided for god-alone-knows what reason. It was there and then that I experienced a peculiar sensation. I felt as if I were being watched and shivered despite the warmth of the night. The feeling of being tacitly observed scraped and scratched its way across the nape of my neck like unwashed, untrimmed fingernails. I felt my chest tightening and my lungs struggling to catch a breath. Across the road from me was a building. One of many that inhabit the landscape of concrete, tarmac, sodium amber light and darkness that had come to be my home ever since I took up residence within the hostel.

There was a plate of damaged glass hanging askew in one of the building’s long-rusted window frames. And it looked at me, like a black and staring eye, the hum, hiss and rush of the traffic on the nearby flyover dissolving away into silence as it did. Though I could feel my nerves drawing tight as strings under my skin and my throat tensing to let loose a scream, I instead stared back defiantly at that rectangle of colourless and dismal space. As I did, I caught a sense of shadow there, a notion of movement, in much the same way one might perceive the momentary twitching of an eye in its damp socket. Reason told me there was nothing there, that it was merely a ghost of moonlight disturbing the glass, but even as I turned to make my way to the hostel that was not my home, I remained unsatisfied.

 

I am sure I was fine to look upon not so long ago in my life, and so was my hair. But now, these days, I look into the mirror and I see eyes that are withdrawn and red looking out through a scraggy shambles of ragged lengths and dishwater grey whiskers. Insomnia has become a way of life and my medication works less well than it once did though I do not tell them so at the hostel. So, perhaps, I am mad and that dark space of glass did not at look out at me as I thought it did.

My days seem to be spent in waiting. Waiting for the tones of evening to show themselves, to stretch, lengthen and unfold from the cracks and crevices that join together this grey and broken world of ours.Could it be my own mind that so disordered these shades and shadows, giving them some strange semblance of life?

Rebecca was my nurse at the hostel and, on occasion, she joined me when I walked and wandered abroad. They said it’s good for me, to get out in the fresh air though the air of this city could hardly be called ‘fresh’. The taste of carbon monoxide taints every breath. And so it was Rebecca who listened to me, observed how unsettled I was and then joined me on the following day, late afternoon, when I went back across the empty industrial estate, passing under the rumbling flyover and came back to that building with its window that I thought to be like a black and staring eye.

She protested when I broke the ancient chain fastening shut its weathered doors. She coughed and moaned bitterly at the rich foetor that escaped from the interior when I drew those doors wide open and went inside. Despite her protests, coughs and moans, she followed me within and even took my hand in hers as we ascended stairs reeking of urine and stale faeces.

The walls, ceiling and doors of the first floor corridor we came to were peeling and pale, revealing mortuary colours and desolate hues beneath their flaking paintwork. In my head, I counted as best I could from one door to the next, taking us towards the one I sought, pausing to try the loose black bulbs of the handles. All they did was rattle uselessly in my hands. I could feel each one grinding whilst not giving and Rebecca’s voice was becoming more strident as I persisted in my ridiculous quest to find something that could not be there. I heard her footfalls coming close to me and felt her small, soft fingers tightly entwining with mine as I tried the next door’s handle. And it was then that there was an opening click and a crusted lock gave.

I cried out as one as it swung inwards. Because I knew, without setting foot in there, without crossing that threshold thick with mildew and mould, that this was the abandoned space patiently waiting behind that glaring glass eye. Though there was nothing in there to see, it was then that my nerves failed. I could feel it as one feels warmth or cold or the absence of either. It was in there, in that black space, a part of it. My body became a numb thing, unmoving and unspeaking. And it was because I was so paralysed that I was unable to do a thing to stop Rebecca from crossing the threshold.

I remember it so clearly now, watching her walk into that interior, seeing her soften, growing wan, waxing and then waning until she became nothing more than a ghost of moonlight slowly fading away into a verminous dark. She turned around to face me, her fair mouth open to scream though all it could let out was a rich and familiar foetor. Her fingers became weathered, unwashed and untrimmed. They were reaching out to me, grasping as her withdrawing eyes pleaded. And still I withdrew, still I retreated from her because I could see what was in her eyes, shining there, old and black like damaged glass. And how the tears that then fell left behind something bitter – traces of a rust from long ago.

END

Copyright © G.R. Yeates 2012

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Saturday Share: Peter Hollens & Lindsey Stirling

Today I’m just sharing what I think are some superb covers of the music from Skyrim, A Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings by the very talented Peter Hollens and Lindsey Stirling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSLPH9d-jsI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQiNVk_u0po

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oNpmSAvpGQ

You can find out more about them and their other work here:

http://peterhollens.com

http://lindseystirlingviolin.com

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The Writer and The Ride

What do you remember about the first stories you read and loved when you were, maybe, eleven or twelve years old?

This is something I’ve been thinking about recently as I’ve come to a creative crossroads. The last one I reached was in 2006 when I decided to move on from pursuing a music career to a writing one – and, judging by the signs over the last eighteen months, I made the right decision back then. But there is another decision I have made this year, that being to move on from the horror genre. And the root-cause of that decision comes back to the question I ask above.

Do you remember discovering your childhood favourites for the first time and how it felt reading those stories? Without analysis, without searching for subtext, when we were simply sitting back and enjoying the Ride. There was exhilaration and excitement in those books, the words were magic, the characters were our best friends and we never wanted the story to come to an end. I think that’s something we forget sometimes as we grow older and become too concerned with ‘being taken seriously’.

I’ve been looking at my bookshelves recently and realising the books that took me on that Ride aren’t there so much anymore. There’s a lot of literature there but there aren’t many books. By this, I mean to say there is literature there that I admire and love but the pleasure I take in it is not the same as it was when books were books and the point and purpose of a book was just to take me on that Ride.

And I have come to realise that I miss the Ride. I really do.

I miss it because it is what makes a great story and, to my mind, always has been. It’s not something that can be dissected and analysed by a literary critic. It’s just there, in the story, and it makes you hungry to turn the pages and to come back for more. And I have been feeling like the Ride has gotten away from me, or that I disembarked at some point without realising it.

H.P. Lovecraft wrote “I’m farther from doing what I want to do than I was twenty years ago” in 1936 and whilst the span of time that has passed for me has not been as great as twenty years, I feel a great deal of empathy with this statement at the moment. This is not to say I am not proud of my work to date or the achievements I’ve made. I certainly am and I look forward to releasing The Thing Behind the Door, This Darkness Mine and Night Residue later this year for my readers’ enjoyment. In these three titles, I believe is some of my best writing to date.

But this has not changed the fact that for me, as this year has gone on and grown old, I have felt a growing sense that there is something missing, that I wish to recapture when I sit down to write, and I can come up with no better name for it than the Ride. It has made me realise that I need to do something different which is why, after experimenting with a couple of genres, I will be moving onto the Fantasy genre and have been developing the character, Khale the Wanderer. Right now, as I plot and plan the series that this character will feature in, I feel like I’m back on board the Ride after standing still for far too long.

I hope you will join me in 2013 because that is when the Ride begins anew.

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Sample Sunday Preview: The Dolls in the Window

This story is a preview from my upcoming collection of flash fiction, Night Residue.

She lived across the street from the shop on the corner for many years, since childhood, in fact. And, during that time, the shop on the corner stood quite still and quite empty. The possibility, the threat, of some strange internal movement was always upon it though, seeming to emanate from behind the windows patched with broken boards and the wasted white of its painted brick walls. The dolls could be seen through the window on the first floor – there was a second window, but it had long ago been destroyed by a vandal-flung stone and was now covered by rotten patches of tarpaulin.

The dolls always drew her eye; she always found them, whenever she was gazing out of her bedroom window from across the street at the shop on the corner.

The dolls, they were unquiet things – mannequins with weathered faces hanging loose and askew, displaying a profound decay that was not of the flesh but that gnawed away from some dark, inside place. They were pale, they were lank, and she could see the ugliness underneath where the plastic, wood, fibreglass or whatever it was they were made from had collapsed in on itself. If the light was right, it seemed to glisten, the stuff inside them, glisten and appear to breathe.

That was when she always looked away.

The shop on the corner had stood alone and uninhabited for longer than her mother could remember, perhaps since her childhood in fact. No-one she asked could remember the owner but they could remember that he was there, at some point. The words that once made up the proprietor’s name were little more than smudges and smears on the old wood over the shop-front. There was nothing left of the shop, what it once was, what it once had been, except for the dolls in the window with their quiet painted eyes, and their strangely glistening soft insides.

 

She grew up as all people do, and life went on with its dismays and disappointments through the years. The shop on the corner remained, always the same, always there as she began dating boys who thought they were men, and then men who behaved like little boys. She grew up and she grew tired, and, one day, her mother died and left her the house in her Will. Having lived through restless years in houses and apartments shared with friends and boyfriends (never fiancés), she moved back home. For want of a better term, she settled down. She was alone between the walls papered over with childhood memories, and carpeted by the trodden-in dust and dirt of the not-so-distant past. There was comfort there, cold but true, and she embraced it, never wanting to let it go.

Through the window of her bedroom at night, she could see across the street, those languorous shapes, like restless dreams, stirring though completely still in the shadows.

She watched them, and it was as if they were dancing in the glow of moonlight and the sodium glare of the streetlamps. The light, the dirt, the shadows, the grime, so many subtle ingredients weaving together at once, in that one place across the street, where no-one would think to look, where no-one could see.

No-one but her.

No-one but me, she thought.

 

They came into her dreams, or she came into theirs. She was never sure which it was at any point or time. All that mattered to her was that she was there and they were with her. The dolls in the window, making their slow waltzing motions, their creaking balletic shows of grace, partnered with shadows that had neither limbs, nor face. Music was not there, there was only the uneasy flow of their movements around her and the scratching sound of minute particles being disturbed. Their quiet eyes of cracked and peeling paint staring off into nooks where there was nothing, corners and crannies where all she could see was dust and more darkness. And that was how it went on, with the light from the moon and the lamps streaming in through the grubby glass, the dolls dancing and dancing around and around her, and those trace elements of the night embraced in their arms. Nothing came to take her by the hand. Leaving her there, all alone, without a partner, with nothing but dirt, grit and strange light, weighing heavy in her heart.

 

She awoke one day to find that it was just like every other day, and this is where the horror was, the nightmare, the lie. She understood that every other day was like every other day and always would be, no matter what. She got out of bed and went across to the window, knowing what she would see, there, across the street.

The window, the dolls, unchanged, as always.

Still there, still watching, still waiting.

All this time, she thought, all these years, only now do I know what it means, what I must do. And that night, alone, she began to work, knowing that it would take a long time, a very long time, that it would take forever, in fact, to do what must be done. To not look away when she thought that she saw them glisten and breathe in the window across the road during the day. And to dance as if with a partner in the dreams when the dreams came at night. Then, only then, would the darkness come to her and proffer a fingerless hand.

 

The house on the corner, opposite the shop with the dolls in the window, stood quite still and quite empty. The possibility, the threat, of some strange internal movement was always upon it though, something born of shadow, sadness and profound rot. The doll, she could be seen through the window on the first floor. Standing alone, poor thing, with her small weathered face hanging loose and askew, displaying a decay that was not of the flesh but deeper and darker than we could ever know. And, if the light is right, sometimes, at night, on a clear night, she seems to glisten softly, maybe move a little as if to dance, and then begin to breathe.

END

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Sample Sunday: Each Dawn, I Die

The Wanderer came out of the wastes. A bullock of a man clad in matted furs of white, brown and grey. Bitter winds blustered about his feet and whipped his dark trailing hair and lengthy beard until they were lashing like aged medusa coils. Despite the bite and sting of sand and ash, his eyes remained open, permafrost jewels staring ahead through the gusts of the growing storm. Out here, beyond the northern mountains and over the grassland plains, there was little in the way of shelter. That was why few came here and that was why the Wanderer was alone.

There was a shadow out there, breaking the line of the horizon. Angular enough for him recognise it as a creation of men rather than of nature. Whatever it might be, he would have to hide within it until this storm passed on. The tales of the winds that chased one another across the Western Wastes told of bodies discovered where the flesh and muscles had been torn clean away from the bone. Though whether that was down to mere winds or something else with flesh, muscles and bones of its own, the Wanderer did wonder. Still he did not mean to wait around here and find out the truth. Where there was shelter to be had, it should be taken. He strode towards the waiting shadow without further pause.

 

It was a necropolis of some kind, hewn from stones long-buried. It seemed ancient, the upright stones were crudely cut with sigils and signs that were little more than the scars a man might make by mindlessly battering at rocks with a piece of flint. And it was that sense that the stones were less engraved, more marked and scarred, that made his old stomach turn. His own scars, hidden underneath his furs, began to itch. He took in the many stones that were leaning precariously or altogether fallen, broken and wearing away into the dust. He walked amongst them and felt a chill that seemed to ebb into him from out of the ground itself.

I should not stop here, he thought, and turned about.

And there before him was a way into the burrows and catacombs beneath where the men who had raised these stones were doubtless interred. A slab of stone barred the way. It was laid across the opening between two uprights with a third set above as a mantel. The winds were becoming very fierce, biting through his furs and into his skin. He would have to be quick.

The Wanderer went up to the stone slab, flexed his fingers, put his full weight behind it and then he pushed hard. At first, nothing. He let out a roar, spat on the obstructing stone and pushed hard once more. This time, there was a deep grinding of stone. Then, there was a cracking, a sound of sundering and the stone slab crashed down the unlit steps into the depths below.

The Wanderer followed the echoes it left behind.

 

It was a long way down, or so it seemed in such utter darkness. Mulch and lichen crunched and crumbled underneath his footsteps as he descended. His keen eyes made out rusted sconces mounted on the walls to either side, set there to light the way for bearers of the dead. All were unlit and made into nests by spiders.

As he went further and deeper, he slowed his steps, creeping on as quiet as he could. The light cast from the entrance way was little more than a pinprick, no bigger or brighter than a lone star in the heavens on a clear night. And even though his eyes were sharp, in this all-consuming penumbra, he was as near to blind as he had ever been in his life. With a swift hand, he reassured himself that his blade was still secured beneath his furs. If there was something other than himself and the sleeping dead abroad in this necropolis, he would strike it down.

It was then that he saw the light. A pale phosphorescence coming from not far below.

From where these steps must come to an end, he thought.

Keeping his breath steady, knowing he had no other way he could go, except to retreat into the howling embrace of a sandstorm, he came down to the last step and set his feet on unbroken ground. He looked around. The phosphorescence illuminated his surroundings brilliantly. Three roughly-cut tunnels ran away from him until they became dark and unlit once more. Reaching out to touch the shining stone of the walls, he saw the light was cast by a fungus grown thick in the cracks, scars and divots that were there. He could make out deeper hollows cut into the tunnel walls and the embalmed bones that they held. Here, a shattered helm. There, a rust-and-rot-pocked sword. The dead were sleeping, nothing here was stirring.

So he thought until he heard a wail that was not made by the winds of a sandstorm.

Swallowing hard, the Wanderer drew his blade out from amongst his furs and, with his free hand, he scraped handfuls of the shimmering mould from the walls and smeared them onto the metal so as to light his way. The sound had come from somewhere up ahead, deep within the unlit, farther darkness. Holding his sword angled, ready to strike, the Wanderer followed the sound into shadow.

 

Whereabouts he now stood under the shifting sands of the wastes above, the Wanderer did not know. But he did know that the chill he felt when he walked amongst the standing stones was now emanating from all around him, not just rising from the ground under his feet. He walked slow, his muscles tense, his heart fast and his breathing shallow. He could taste fear in the air as something sickly lying on his tongue. The toe of his boot struck something soft and meaty in the dark. It let out a cry, it was in the same tone as the wail he had followed.

The Wanderer stepped back and raised his sword, showing light to what lay at his booted feet. And he saw a man, what was left of him; a husk of blackening, corrupted meat that was slowly sloughing off its own withered bones. The man was dressed in the remains of scaled armour and his eyes were white globules sunk deep into his face. A tongue worked feverishly behind toothless, rotten gums, aching to speak.

The Wanderer, wary, leaned in to listen.

And the dying man told him his tale.

 

There were many more such men scattered along the length of the tunnel ahead. Soldiers, nobles, barons and even kings were there, reduced to rotten shades of what they once were. Lowing, moaning and howling, grasping at him with their fetid fingers, begging to tell their woes to the unsoiled Wanderer. He cast them off and turned them aside. The tale of the first of the dying was enough for him. Now he knew what waited for him in the dark down here.

A serpent’s smile crept across his ragged lips.

 

The hall was as he had expected when he came to it. Ruined and empty with a single long table of stone slabs dividing its centre. A crude facsimile of the Eating Hall of the Dead from old legend. Dust, cobwebs and the droppings of cemetery vermin were everywhere. He waited patiently at the nearest end of the table until the light came. It was a warm light, soft and soporific, seeping in from no place he could see. And before his eyes, the filth of the hall evaporated as if it had never been. Every inch of stone suddenly appeared polished and as smooth as once it had once been. And the table was laden with platters of spiced meat, poached fish, sweet fruits and numerous flagons of mead, ale and rice wine. The smell arising from the feast was luxurious and it made his mouth water. He reached out, plucked a ripe, red grape and popped it into his mouth. He bit through the thin skin into the cool, wet, sugary flesh beneath and smiled as he swallowed the morsel.

Delicious indeed.

 

It was some time later that she came into the hall. The Wanderer saluted her with a flagon, slopping mead down his arm and onto the floor. His belly was full to bursting. His mouth was stained and smeared from his hearty feasting; bones from chicken, pig and ox were scattered all around. He made to speak but instead emitted a drunken belch.

She moved on bare feet, making no sound, seeming to drift towards him as would a ghost. But she was no such thing. Her snow-white hair tumbled down over her samite robe and he could see that her figure was full, curved and ripe. Her eyes never wavered from his and they were coloured as the dawn, shifting often between shades of amber, violet and a clear cerulean. He felt her hands upon his furs, then she was prying beneath them, to his flesh, kneading on muscles that had not known so gentle and firm a touch in years.

She smiled at him and led him by the hand out through a doorway he had not seen before into a scented space of hanging silks and pillows that could only be her bed chamber. He imagined her continuing to smile as she turned her back on him to disrobe. He imagined she would be surprised if she saw the sober smile that he allowed to linger for a moment upon his own lips.

 

In the hours after, in that soft, exotic chamber, the Wanderer knew what it was to make love to a goddess and to be loved in turn by her. As with every man who had come here before him, he cried out as her nails raked his back, bit at his lips as she drew hot streams of his seed out with fingers, cunt, tongue and mouth until he was spent. Finally, he sighed as he lay back to drown into the soothing darkness of a dreamless sleep.

It was then, through half-lidded eyes, that he saw the change come upon her and the space in which they had fucked. He knew that the words of the dying man had been true. He watched beauty wither and recede away as summer turns to autumn and then autumn to winter. Hair rapidly thinning into torn, frayed strands. Skin mottling over and breasts shrinking in on themselves until they were sagging empty pockets of decay. Fine fingers and elegant toes that he had tasted were now little more than the straggling twigs of old, dead trees. But the eyes, they stayed the same, they never changed, those tempting eyes of dawn.

She lunged and bit down hard upon his throat, drawing in a deep draught of his blood. He lay there for long minutes, watching her through hooded eyes as she had a feast of her own. When she finally drew away, satiated for a moment, he let out a sigh and rose calmly to his feet. She recoiled with a gasp. Too used to easy and stupid prey over the centuries.

She had not disposed of his blade.

He sprang from the bleached nest that had been his true bed, shuddering at the slick feeling of treading upon the bloodied bones, flesh and faeces of those she had fed upon before. He drew the sword out of the pile she had made of his furs and belongings. She shook before him as he advanced, licking her thin lips clean of his blood, gurgling in her throat. Tears ran down her wasted cheeks as he turned and rested the shining edge of the blade against her neck.

“How can it be?” she asked, “I drained enough from you to bring a man to his knees, yet you walk as if you had not suffered a scratch.”

The Wanderer fingered the wound at his throat, feeling the broken skin there beginning to set itself back into place and the flesh beneath being remade. There would be a scar there soon, one amongst the many that criss-crossed his body. Smiling at the creature, he drew the blade away from her throat and displayed it, turning the blade from side to side. She saw how it now shone with a colour that was not colour, none she had ever seen before. It hurt her eyes and mind to look upon it. She knew it. She was old enough to remember. True sobs wracked her and she cowered away.

“That sword you carry is Baro Vane, the screaming sword, forged from the Colour that fell from out of Space. It is said to be borne by a man from whom Death’s blade turned aside. You are Khale. The one they call End-Bringer. Slayer of Worlds. The Butcher of Life itself.”

“I know my own legends,” said the Wanderer, “I spread most of them myself.”

“Spare me, Master. I did not know. I would not have fed on you if I had known who you were.”

The Wanderer approached her, knelt and took her trembling chin in his hand and raised her eyes until they met with his.

“You gave me food, drink and pleasure this night. Three things in which I have not been able to indulge for some time. Know that I thank you for it, Sister.”

He smiled and stood tall once more. Looking up at him, she began to form a smile, tears of fear began to shine instead with the light of gratitude. Her heart did not beat as fast as it had.

The Wanderer hacked off her head in one swift motion.

Her skull struck the floor with a dull, wet sound and her body fell. As he lowered the sword, the blade seemed to let out a sigh. He redressed himself, leaving the corpse to rot and become food for the rats. Returning to the hall, he found it was once more as it had been when he first entered. With her death, the magic haunting this place was now gone, undone.

As he ventured out through the tunnels, he was no longer harassed by the groping paws of the moaning dead. With her gone, they were no longer bound to the world of the living. As he passed their silent carcasses, the Wanderer wondered what it felt like. To be in such a state of death and life at the same time, rotting before your own eyes, helplessly watching her come out from that nest to gnaw on your bones and pick at the choicest remaining pieces of your flesh. Such pain, such horror, such suffering. It made the sword that he carried sing a low and sonorous song as he left behind the catacombs.

 

The storm was long past.

He ascended the steps of the necropolis and came out into the open air which he breathed in deeply. It was dawn and as the colours of the sunlight shone before his eyes, he thought of her and the dreadful transformation she could only keep at bay by feeding upon the flesh of the living. Drawing out the sword, Baro Vane, he raised it and, for a moment, saw her visage howling back at him from some space beyond and within the rune-scarred metal.

We were not so very different, he thought, you and I.

The Wanderer watched the sun rise, and he spoke a few words, a remembrance, for her.

“For each dawn, I die.”

END

Copyright © Greg James 2012

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“I see you’ve been doing the place up a bit. Hmm, I don’t like it.”

Thursday? Who blogs on a Thursday? Me, I do, because it’s been a while and it’s about time for an update.

First off, this is the official release schedule for the remainder of 2012:

The Last Post and The End of War are available now on Amazon.

The Thing Behind the Door will be released on Monday 29th October

This Darkness Mine will be released on Monday 19th November

Night Residue will be released on Monday 3rd December

So what comes after that? What’s in the works for 2013?

“Everything has to come to an end, sometime.”- L. Frank Baum

Change. Big change. As some of you will know, I have been experimenting with other genres this year to see if there are others I could break into and, more importantly, wanted to. I can now confirm that in 2013 I will be moving away from Horror to write an Epic Fantasy series. Some of the inspirations include Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock and Karl Edward Wagner.

“…(Robert E.) Howard takes great care to develop mood and atmosphere in his best stories, and in so doing makes the reader feel the dark, desperate undercurrent of his character’s schemes and struggles. It is in this that I feel closest to Howard, and it is something that his conscious imitators have never captured. …in Howard’s fiction the underlying black mood of pessimism is always there…” – Karl Edward Wagner

The titles for the books in the series will be: Darkness Dawns, Far Gone and Lost is the Night & Shadowhorn. The first story featuring the main character, Khale Fellhorn, will be available to read as a preview this Sunday.

The title of this introductory tale is Each Dawn, I Die.

There will be more to come regarding my new direction and new series shortly.

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Summer Splash Blog Hop: WINNERS!

 

The winners of my Blog Hop contest are:

First prize – a copy of Horror for Good goes to Andie Percival!

 

Second prize – Ann Giardina Magee gets the chance to give me a title to write a story around!

Third prize – Trianna Hyde gets the chance to have a character named after her in the forthcoming Vetala Cycle novel: From the Shadows, I hear Screams!

 

All three winners will be entered into the grand prize draw for two Kindle Fires, Amazon Gift Cards, Kindle Covers and a bunch of great books!

 

Thank you to everyone who entered!

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